Coridan's page

I think we're all missing the most important question here: Is it going to delay Kingmaker 2e?

Wild West and Steampunk go hand-in-hand though. They're both based on the late 1800s

My group is just finishing up the Cradle tonight, I'm glad I saw this post as forewarning for me to make some changes in Book 3

Am I missing something?

Hows does a group of 4 level six characters not die to the advanced Hound of Tindalos?

Positioning is the key. The hound is weakened if they can move it away from a corner, and it has to be a 90 degree or tighter corner. There's a number of places in the dungeon that doesn't have any. Including: D2, D11 D13, D14 (where the final fight takes place) and D15 (though the entrance could be argued to be either 45 degree or 315 degree). My party is gonna fight it tonight having cleared out the rest of the dungeon, my greater worry is that they aren't going in fully rested, but thankfully they had a rest between Droxolos and now.

More frustrating is that the whole damn section is a wild goose chase that has no actual bearing on the plot. This AP started off so strong but story-wise this book is absolutely awful. I had to really change Kosowana's goals and outcome to make him a threat that the PCs would want to do something about (he plans to use the Cradle to time travel so he can invent the formula before Gattlebee. The Brighites are concerned about the damage messing with the timeline can do, and the party is concerned about the damage he could do if he succeeds)

Oceanshieldwolf wrote:

My main takeaway is that even people who are vociferous about the behaviour of WotC are all too ready to forgive given enough concessions are made and “go back to playing beloved DnD” because this is all too stressful.

This is definitely the impression I got with some of the conversations I had about this on the D&D Reddit. There are a lot of people who are already to say this "doesn't matter", this "doesn't affect players/customers", that any opposition like the ORC "won't go anywhere", and that WOTC is "perfectly within their rights", this is "all going to fly", and "the complainers will get bored in a month and everything will go back to normal".

Reddit is absolutely rife with astroturfing, keep that in mind.

My friends and I only registered our LLC last week, were still working on our first book (hope to publish in the spring/early summer). Looking forward to joining on with Ramtown Games.

Quote:

(Contrary to what it says in the 1.2 draft, though, it's not technically true that "This means that Wizards is not placing any limitations at all on how you use that content." There is a limitation in that you're required to give them credit. But that's it.)

There are in fact additional terms and limitations in Clause 6 and 7, including a Conduct clause, which would mean that if that Rick and Morty D&D splat was published under OGL 1.2 they could revoke it now that they've found out Justin Roiland has been indicted for felonies.

The idea that the reason they're focused on deauthorising the OGL1.0a because they want to protect people from hateful content, yet still specifying that their license will only cover SRD5.1 and future releases not 3.0, 3.5 or Modern's SRD shows exactly what they are full of.

I just finished film school recently, and we had a class on audiences and reception. For my final I did one of these kinds of surveys about the various new Star Trek series. I had an open response field at the end of it, and it was by far the most valuable part of the survey. I could find the outliers in the survey response (in my case, people who genuinely loved the new series) and see their reasoning. It was also great for pulling quotes to put in my paper and up the word count ;)

I only had about 300 responses to go through, not thousands, so I get them not wanting to read 50 pages of feedback from each person's playtest, but the multiple choice bits are great for picking out the extreme opinions and seeing why those opinions are extreme. My suggestion whenever doing one of those responses is to give strong opinions in the multiple choice, dont just be "somewhat" satisfied or dissatisfied, go to the extremes.

They can make any concession they want, the only thing that is acceptable at this point is if they acknowledge the 1.0a OGL can not be revoked or "deauthorized"

Then it is a masterpiece. You just need to enter into it with the right expectations, and treat it like the pinnacle of Adversarial GM design it is.

I consider it dethroned by Slumbering Tsar

I find it very funny that they're acting like they want to support small publishers, but don't want the OGL to support big competitors. Wizards, please. Paizo WAS a small publisher until you screwed them over and the community flocked to them.

So is there some kind of threshold now where you can be a 3pp, but don't be too successful!?

Makes sense. I never thought about it before but Wizards of the Coast pivoting to "D&D as subscription games services" would be in keeping with what every other marketing guru has told various companies the wave of the future is these days -- in which case the books don't matter, just the subs.

I love that you have -

Pathfinder Adventure Path, Lost Omens, Rulebook Subscriber; Starfinder Superscriber

Next to your name. Just a reminder that you can run subscription services and still provide value.

I think accepting the idea of "corpos being corpos" is the path that leads us to Cyberpunk dystopian nightmare.

I expect we'll see a response from Paizo in the 13th, which is when I expect we'll see the final version release from WotC

Coridan wrote:

I think the Communications Workers of America should be speaking out about this too.

'Should' is someone's fantasy about an imaginary world.

Freelancers aren't organizing a boycott. CWA isn't speaking out. Why do you suppose that is?

Could be the fact that it's not even been a week, and that the RPG creators that they represent haven't pushed the issue with them yet (which would be Paizo's workers, since I don't know that they represent any other ttrpg developers) and it's probable that Paizo's workers are waiting on Paizo's official response first.

I think the Communications Workers of America should be speaking out about this too. It's one thing to say let's get all the customers to boycott WotC over this, but we should also be pushing for freelancers to refuse to work for them.

Every freelancer got their start plinking away and doing their own thing on the OGL. It's how the entirety of the RPG workforce came about over the past 20 years. None of them would have their gigs today without it, and closing it now hurts everyone trying to follow the same path.

Raynulf wrote:

I honestly don't think it needs to go that far. Paizo has already removed all proprietary names (Mordenkainen, Bigby etc) from Pathfinder 1 and 2, and it is debateable whether any attempt by WotC to claim they hold copyright on "Magic Missile" would actually fly.

Paizo couldn't have used "Mordenkainen" and "Bigby" if it wanted to; they weren't in the SRD. (The spell Bigby's crushing hand, for instance, was just crushing hand in the SRD.)

Raynulf wrote:

On created names: In an incredible sense of irony, I believe WotC do hold copyright on "Treant" - a word they invented to get around the copyright of "Ent" by the Tolkien estate. As copyright holds only within the given medium, this means that while Blizzard and others can merrily use the term, likely Paizo will need to rename them.

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you're confusing copyright and trademark there, which are two very different things. First of all, you can't copyright individual words; you can only copyright entire works. Secondly, when you trademark a term, you have to specify the medium or business it's going to be used for, but that's not true for copyright.

That being said, I very much doubt WotC has specific trademarks on individual monster names like "treant" and "xorn", but it doesn't have to; they're parts of a copyrighted work, and anything else using them could be argued to be part of a derivative work.

As for their use in computer games... for whatever reason, WotC has been much more lax about enforcing their proprietary rights to certain monsters in computer games than in other media. Heck, that was true of TSR back in the early days, too; the early Ultima CRPGs ripped off a whole passel of D&D monsters wholesale, some with some very minor name changes (carrion crawler -> carrion creeper, xorn -> zorn, mind flayer -> mind ripper); and the early Final Fantasy games used a lot of D&D monsters too, though the transliteration to Japanese and back to English somewhat...

The pixel remaster of FF1 still has Mind Flayers in it, but it's possible they got permission or it's a result of "you needed to bring this up 30 years ago"

DungeonmasterCal wrote:

This was just posted by a person named Noah Adams, "a licensed attorney with a focus on business, and intellectual property issues in the tabletop and digital gaming industries" on medium.com.

Let’s Take A Minute To Talk About D&D’s Open Gaming License (OGL).

This guy is not only an IP lawyer, he also specializes in tabletop gaming.

His conclusion is pretty stark.

The key point is that OGL 1.0a never says that it is irrevokeable. Therefor, Hasbro can revoke it at any time.

There are cascading effects, which are as dire as you might expect: once revoked, no one can produce or SELL anything based on that license.

So everything in the warehouse, and everything paid for but not yet delivered is illegal to sell. Eating those inventory costs will be deadly.

And, in the future, no one can produce any materials that use the 1.1 license without giving Hasbro an unlimited, royalty-free license to do whatever they like with your material.

My problem with his take is that he doesn't address precedents in Open Software Licensing cases, which is relevant as the OGL is based off of those licenses.

First, as amusing as that would be, it's almost certain that KotOR had a separate agreement with WotC, as at the time Wizards held the RPG license for Star Wars. I doubt their agreement had any reliance on the OGL.

Second, they're not trying to fine you for driving yesterday, but the fear is that they'll try to stop people from continuing to sell more copies of stuff previously published under the OGL.

A lot of people are panicking though over something that is really really gonna go poorly for WotC in court, and probably wasn't their actual intention. It was likely meant to be a poison pill clause like the GSL but phrased differently. Or someone with no concept of caselaw on open source licensing thought they could get away with it and is probably getting an education right now in between the leak and the official release (which is supposed to be on the 13th according to the leak)

I know there's this idea that big companies can throw lots of money and win a case, and in certain situations that's true, but this isn't really one of those situations.

Most likely it's whoever in charge of WotC wanting to impress their bosses in Hasbro. This happens a lot in game studios where a studio head will be in a meeting with the big boss (like EA) and the big boss starts singing the praises of one branch who brought in x money with microtransactions and live services, them goes to the other studio head "so what have you guys got coming up" and the guy who heads a studio known for epic single player RPGs then comes up with Anthem on the spot

Coridan wrote:

I absolutely believe they will try to fight it, and the first step would be an injunction against WotC to keep the 1.0 in place while the legal battle ensues. Precedent is entirely on their side.

Here's what Paizo has actually said about what they're going to do

Quote:

Paizo Inc., publisher of the Pathfinder RPG, one of D&D’s largest competitors, declined to comment on the changes for this article, stating that the rules update was a complicated and ongoing situation.

That's them declining to comment until A - Wizards actually announces what they intend to do (remember this is just a leak) and B - They have (several) meetings with their attorneys to discuss the situation. That's a statement of nothing at the moment.

Coridan wrote:

I really don't see Paizo doing that. Lisa and those who are still there from the magazine days I think still remember the fear when they lost those licenses and weren't sure what was going to happen next for all of them. I don't think they want the company to ever be dependant on Hasbro/WotC again.

So your belief is that they would accept the new version of the OGL rather than negotiate better terms?

Or is your belief that they will be the paladins leading the fight for retaining the old OGL, even as Hasbro cuts off all their income?

I absolutely believe they will try to fight it, and the first step would be an injunction against WotC to keep the 1.0 in place while the legal battle ensues. Precedent is entirely on their side.

Danbala wrote:

Their lawyer will tell them to pick one of the lanes above and then either seek a TRO/Pre Inj against the new license or a dec relief action to find that their product in non-infringing.

Or, their lawyer may help them negotiate a separate, individual licensing agreement with WOTC that only applies to Paizo.

I really don't see Paizo doing that. Lisa and those who are still there from the magazine days I think still remember the fear when they lost those licenses and weren't sure what was going to happen next for all of them. I don't think they want the company to ever be dependant on Hasbro/WotC again.

I suppose someone must stop by once a fortnight to chase out the goblins.

I thought the goblins were the staff?

Here’s a article by a IP lawyer

https://medium.com/@MyLawyerFriend/lets-take-a-minute-to-talk-about-d-d-s-o pen-gaming-license-ogl-581312d48e2f

TL DR the $750,000 threshold is gross revenue not profits. Profits is what you get when you subtract the costs of making and selling a product from the gross revenue

It seems to revoke the original OGL and it may be able to be challenged in court.

An interesting and well thought-out take, but possibly mistaken based on precedent. Using the term "non-revocable" in Open licenses wasn't common practice at the time the OGL was written because it was thought to be unnecessary. Later on, after some court cases involving Open source software (which found in favor of Perpetual being the same as non-revocable), open source licenses started updating to make it clear by including non-revocable and avoiding any confusion. The OGL 1.0 simply predates those precedents.

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4012/are-licenses-irrevocabl e-by-default

A non-exclusive copyright license (such as most FOSS licenses) can be revoked at any time only if there was no consideration involved. The United States Federal Circuit Court of Appeal took this on in Jacobsen v. Katzer in 2008 and ruled that there is consideration exchanged in the use of FOSS by a licensee. This indicates that an FOSS license that's silent on revocation is likely revocable only for violation of it's conditions.

I think trying to assert that lizardfolk haven't been coded as indigenous groups is incredibly... well, it just kind of gives the vibe like you haven't seen a lot of content featuring lizardfolk. I have to assume that because the alternative is to assume you're not acting in good faith here, so I don't think there's any point in debating this.

Anyways, if you agree that Pathfinder makes it too difficult to play a suboptimal build, then you must agree that the new swap mechanic is a good change, since it would at least mitigate the problems with playing a suboptimal ancestry/class combo.

I think across the various settings and games, every race has been used as stand-ins for one culture or another. It's really hard inventing a culture from scratch and when world building it's a nice shortcut to say "These people are similar to Aztecs/Italians/Persians/British culturally".

Regarding the change, I won't be implementing it at my tables because I think some of the most fun builds come from trying to adapt around those penalties. My favourite wizard of all time was a Gnoll transmuter in 1e who just buffed himself up and went in swinging. He didn't need an 18 INT, and if someone wants to be a Pixie barbarian I want that to be unusual, that's the fun of playing those builds.

I think the morality argument though is just absurd. Elves, Dwarves, Gnolls, Lizardfolk are different species. Cats can do some things better than dogs. Neanderthals would have had a different stat array to humans.

Coridan wrote:

I despise 5e, but one of my friend groups thinks it is far superior to PF2E and won't' give PF2E a try. So we still play 5E weekly. I'm in an online game to get my fix.

The whole friend group? Like every one of them?

There's one player who wants to try it, but he's also got a reputation as the "min-maxing number cruncher" so he's not really helping me convince the others and is only confirming their biases.

I despise 5e, but one of my friend groups thinks it is far superior to PF2E and won't' give PF2E a try. So we still play 5E weekly. I'm in an online game to get my fix.

Leon Aquilla wrote:

I miss Wesley's editorial touch. His name is on most of my favorite 1e splats, and his authorship is why I gave 5e's Theros a chance.

I'm gonna be hanging out with him (and James Sutter) tonight for our yearly holiday horror/scifi movie night, so I'll let him know folks miss him! :-)

Tell him to return to social media! He's disappeared from the internet it seems and is missed by fans.

Followed by Sky King's Tomb, a 1-10 AP with a dwarf focus to coincide with the upcoming Lost Omens: Highhelm book!

For Rock and Stone!

keftiu wrote:

The Land of the Linnorm Kings has never properly hosted an AP unto itself, and it's got me curious - what Viking-adjacent stories do people want to spend 3 or 6 books with?

Luis Loza named that as his top place where he'd like to see an adventure path set, other than Arcadia!

I feel like the no-brainer idea is Linnorm Kings, an AP where the PCs work their way up the hierarchy as they solve some nation-ending threat and eventually become Linnorm Kings themselves. But also... that's basically just the plot of Blood Lords :p

Could be better for a less good-aligned game so we can go raiding.

I gotta agree on Strength of Thousands having an engaging cast of characters, though I think it may work better if it decoupled from the traditional CRPG format: given the emphasis on nonviolent solutions and puzzle-solving, it might play better as something like an adventure game, or something like how Torment: Tides of Numenara handled things (I still need to play that past the prologue). Especially since one of the biggest set of gripes I hear regarding Owlcat's games is frustration at the segments that depend on solving puzzles. Making EVERYTHING in the game more like a puzzle might sharpen the puzzlemaking, resulting in better puzzles, or so the player is always in a puzzle-solving mindset, so the game doesn't grind to a halt when one appears.

Also, they'd NEED to get Kevin Michael Richardson in the voice cast. I've ALWAYS heard his voice mentally when I think of Old-Mage Jatembe, even back in 1e. :P

Strength of Thousands in the gameplay style of Disco Elysium would be perfection.

I want to go back to Darkmoon Vale, get Hitchcock, Pett, and Logue back :)

My group decided to hijack the airship and I just picked interesting passengers to already be going to Cloudreaver Keep. I'm also moving the crash to before the arrival at the Keep.

I may be the person Mikeawmids mentions above :)

Stick with it, Book 3 is awesome. :D

I rewrote "find people who will go willingly and pay their fare" to "hijack it cuz this is Outlaws of Alkenstar not Respected Citizens of Alkenstar"

I'd say Curse of the Crimson Throne hardcover. Not only is it one of the best APs (in my opinion the best), hardcover compilations means it's gotten a second pass from the developers/writers to clean up the kinda of little frustrating bits that sometimes end up in the regular schedule which makes it easier to run in general.

I'll echo Strength of Thousands as well, for the reasons listed above.

I will of course also step up to the plate for Outlaws of Alkenstar. The first Book has been Very Solid in terms of both it's story AND it's encounter balance. It starts out as an Revenge Story that eventually evolves into something more, and isn't afraid to play with all the tools the game has to offer (Chases, Victory Points, all that fun stuff). My group's been having a blast so far, and it very much feels like while SoT gets away from the faux-Euro in terms of it's cultural touchstones, OoA gets away from your standard fantasy and fully embraces the craziness of it's Steampunk roots.

The first book of Outlaws is fantastic. My group has just finished part 1 of the second book and are into part 2 and so far it's pretty bad. The first part is basically a repeat of the story from book 1 and the second part

I want to see an Iblydos Ancient Greece/Jason and the Argonauts kinda AP. Could be used for introducing 2E's Mythic rules.

I love Shackled City with some of the bolt-on additions people had come up with on the forums (notably in making the bad guys a bit more prevalent earlier)

I'd like to see Tarandon add in some of the 3pp APs (Slumbering Tsar, Zeitgeist, Wicked Way, Razor Coast). Wicked Way in particularly I think is a better AP than Hell's Vengeance. And also update for Outlaws and Frozen Flame.

I agree Age of Ashes is highly overrated, I thought it was meh at best.

So, the Bottleneck Bridge situation is kinda well known. I decided to move Gattlebee's house to the Capital District so they'd cross the river. However, besides the geography being incorrect, the bridge map is only 50 feet across and not covered in market stalls as the flavour text would suggest. I was curious if anyone knew of a map more fitting for the actual bridge as written.

I've seen there's an alternative map that moves it to an alleyway but I like the visuals of fighting on a massive bridge off the gaping chasm with the waterfall in the background.

Are there plans to go back and do the previous APs? I'd love this for Fists of the Ruby Phoenix!

I just wanted to put a shout out to Paizo and Foundry for putting this all together. I used to be a charter subscriber, and was even a GM for the launch of PFS at GenCon Indy 08. Around the time of the change from PF1 to 2, I went back to university and moved across the Atlantic. My friends and I as a result switched to more theater of the mind PbtA style games and Vampire since we didn't really like Roll20, but with the Foundry implementation we've reignited our passion for PF.

I really hope you guys go back and implement some of the other PF2 APs in Foundry the same way (particularly Agents of Edgewatch and Strength of Thousands!)

Coridan wrote:

Is that art of Loveless available somewhere as a separate image? I'm about to run Book 1 and that cover art is way cooler than the art in book 1

If you have the PDF of book 3 you can use Token Tool to save the separate image.

I was gonna wait until we get through book 1 before deciding to buy the others.

Is that art of Loveless available somewhere as a separate image? I'm about to run Book 1 and that cover art is way cooler than the art in book 1

Speaking of which, why did the U.S. fail to introduce metric properly? I've heard rumors about bin Laden's attack on New York invoking fervent patriotism nationwide having to do with its last straw, but surely that alone can't be the whole story...

http://askawiseman.com/metric/

Believe it or not, there's serious advantages to the Imperial system. It's a hell of a lot easier to eyeball certain measurements (for example, the foot is about the length of the average foot. The inch about a thumb's length, a yard is about a single walking pace). When precise measurements aren't required it's fantastic. Day to day life doesn't really require precise measurements, and anything that does you're going to use rulers/measuring tape/scales anyway so the system doesn't matter at that point.

Metric is great at converting, but really, you don't need to convert that often. I honestly don't remember how many feet are in a mile, but I know how long a mile is, and can visualize .5 miles easier than 2,640 feet.

The campaign traits, especially considering how tied they are to the first scene, could have at least been posted here for those who want to run it. My group is almost finished with book 1 at this point.

Likely the stuff announced is the stuff they're most excited about and probably not going to change. Alchemist is definitely going to be a core class, Goblin is definitely going to be a core race.

Amusingly enough I prefer 5e over prior editions/pathfinder. But I play more 2e than any other edition.

Pathfinder is... fatiguing I did love 3/.5 and pathfinder but now I get stricken with analysis paralysis every level up. There is simply too much stuff out there and in all honesty a good 70% of it is pretty worthless (at least to me).
Pathfinder has come to feel like you have to plan your character out from level 1 to the expected end with it's combination of gatekeeper feats, stringent requirements for options and sheer number of options, I like more organic growth.

New editions don't fix that problem, they only reset it. Like a hoarder who has people come in and clean their house but doesn't do anything to change their behavior.