Cpt_kirstov's page

I just...uh...ponied up, as they say.

A week ago I showed off a proof of concept of a Google Map of the Inner Sea.
I've since "started over and done it right", and it is now available for public perusal.

http://www.mapsofgolarion.com/

Maps of Golarion offers an unofficial interactive Google Map of the Inner Sea, with clickable markers, info windows with a blurb about the location, and additional links to the Pathfinder Wiki or matching products on paizo.com. It currently has about 60 locations defined based on the hardcoded values in the Community Use Inner Sea map. The first data milestone will be to fully mark out all those hardcoded values. After that, I'll be adding any and all other locations that have been mentioned (which will take a loOoOong time), as well as Adventure Path and Module "journeys". There are pie-in-the-sky plans for future functionality like on/off filters and custom user-uploaded locations for your own campaign setting.

It also works and was tested on an iPad, for game table use.

I will go into more detail after work, But I will give you a Hint. I hate the changes. This removes all the reasons I was willing to run such a long Module in the first place and if these rules go into affect It will at least kill Module play here.

My reasons I will explain later.

Edit: I do like the 12+ rules.

At this point, I do not believe there will be a designer/developer comment since the rules are "clearly" in the CRB.

But as indicated, it is not organized very well. I was really just going off of the pervasive opinions that you can't so it, and never really analyzed the "why." But now I know where to turn the next time, Jiggy, er um, a player ;-) gets it wrong.

Vic, I take my hat off to you. When we were given that mandate to come up with things that our customers would like to see, nobody else thought to make a thread like this.

And this, folks, is why he's an owner!

Wielding means "actively trying to use the item," and is normally only used in the context of weapons or weapon-like objects such as rods, wands, and so on.

Otherwise, it's just an item you're holding/carrying.

And if you're not holding/carrying/bearing it, you're probably wearing it, or it's stowed in a sheath or backpack.

And if you're not wielding, holding/carrying/bearing, or wearing the item, it's probably unattended.

If you're wielding a sword, you're trying to hit people with it.

If you're holding or carrying a sword, you just have it on your person, perhaps because your fighter buddy dropped it and you didn't want him to lose it.

You probably can't wear a sword.

If you're not wielding the sword, holding/carrying/bearing the sword, or wearing the sword, it's on the ground.

Will there be a pdf of this? :)

Hold tight, children... it's UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH TIME!

It's true that Paizo does not consider unsolicited manuscripts, and currently only publishes fiction from authors who've already been professionally published. Here's why:

First off, it isn't even an issue of pro versus amateur--it's a question of staffing. Paizo's still a small company. As it stands, I barely have time to read all the stories that I purchase from our top-tier authors, and once that's done I have to scrape together the time to read the story samples I've requested from other professional authors to see if they're a good fit for the line. If I opened the floodgates to unsolicited manuscripts, I'd be flooded in a few days, and those manuscripts would still remain unread--but I'd have given a bunch of good folks a false sense of hope. That's not cool.

Second, we actually don't accept unsolicited manuscripts from anyone. Every story you see in a Paizo product has gone through a long pitching and revision process to make sure that it meets our needs, doesn't conflict with upcoming projects, isn't too similar to other stories we've purchased, etc. Ask any of my authors, and they'll tell you about all the story ideas they had that stalled out on the drawing board. When authors write manuscripts without going through that process, they're almost guaranteed to have to make sweeping changes--and it's way more work for both author and editor to revise an existing book than to collaborate from the ground up.

Third--and this is where the truths really start to get uncomfortable--Mark's right that it's a big risk working with unestablished writers. Not only are they almost guaranteed to sell fewer books, they're also far less likely to know how to market themselves, to meet deadlines, or to know how to produce the kind of work I need. Writing is a hobby for a lot of folks, but since our grocery budget depends on authors being able to give us what we need under intense pressure, it's better for us to use folks that have already proven themselves. If we just published generic short stories or novels, it'd be easy to read an unsolicited novel and accept it if it was good and reject it if it was bad. But there are so many gears whirring in any media tie-in property (like Pathfinder, or Star Wars, or Halo, or Dr. Who) that any cog which isn't precisely fitted in advance is going to grind the whole machine to a halt.

Last but not least--it's not even safe for us to read unsolicited stuff. Most major authors refuse to read amateur authors' manuscripts for the same reason: because if they read the manuscript, then at any point in the future that fan may see something in one of that author's books that reminds him of his own work and slap the publisher with a lawsuit for copyright infringement or plagiarism. It happens all the time, and while authors are almost always exonerated--turns out that the crazy fan wasn't the only person to have the "what if the heroes rode dragons?" idea--legal battles are expensive and time consuming. So most authors save themselves from suspicion by throwing away all such manuscripts without reading the first word.

I'm not trying to beat down on you, dragonslie123, as you raise good questions. But in your specific example--the War of the Spider Queen books--all of those authors had been around the industry (and WotC) for quite some time, and had already proven themselves long before those books were published. And even then, WotC still put Salvatore's name on the top (that whole "established writer credibility" thing).

I would love to be in a world where publishing companies could afford to read everything, but it's just not feasible. And unfortunately, as someone who spent ten years gigging with various bands, I can tell you that the same is true of the music industry--just because you send a major label or radio station a demo doesn't mean they listen to it.

In both industries, it's all about starting at the bottom and working your way up, establishing your credibility and professionalism (and fan base), and hoping that eventually you'll be recognized for your skills. If there are any shortcuts, I haven't found them yet....

Mark perhaps you could just dorp he idea of a poor NPC's, IMO NPC's should have the same WBL or greater. My reasoing is this how can a super villian be a super villian or BBG if he is whimpier than
the PC's. This would also solve the probelm of haveing cool things appear on chronicle sheets.

IF GM's use BBG's and the 2ds to whip up on the players then it would be time for the Venture captains to step in and talk to the Killer GM
We have a Killer GM in my area [Painlord] You just have to be careful when you play on his table and be on your toes and you will survive unless you run into bad old plants.

This is something I've experimented with in the past and it's largely gone unnoticed or at least uncommented on. The problem with trying to do this consistently is that some skill DCs are hard-coded into the system, making scaling them harder, in that it requires the actual circumstances change in each subtier (thus eating more words from an already limited wordcount given two sets of statblocks). That said, I'm open to suggestions on how to make this work better or at least more smoothly.

PS - When looking at a subtier, we always assume the higher of the two numbers as the APL when determining DCs and CRs of enemies and such.

Can you kind, dear, sweet messageboard posters please point me to where there is awesome kobold art in the Paizo products?

What I'm aware of so far:

Crown of the Kobold King
Revenge of the Kobold King
Classic Monsters Revisited
Dungeons of Golarion (the high level kobold ranger)
Bestiary I

Any suggestions on where else to look?

Why is a non-randomized set more expensive to produce? Again, I am not one who has an issue of randomized packs, so I am not asking this because I have a problem with this, I am just curious why it would cost more.

I had assumed prepainted plastic minis are more expensive now in general, but I did not know set of predetermined minis would be more costly to produce.

At any given time there's a core market of minis collectors interested in a given line. For the moment, let's assume that for a successful line, that audience represents a large enough portion of the total number of purchasers that we don't really need to consider the non-core buyers for that line—that any sales to non-core buyers are just gravy.

Now let's go back a couple of years to Wizards' D&D Minis line—specifically, the time that they were releasing fixed "Hero's Handbook" mini sets alongside randomized "Monster Manual" boosters.

Members of that core audience would buy *cases* of each MM booster for each HH set they purchased. Depending on the customer, we're talking a multiple in the *dozens*—and the more dedicated the customer, the bigger the multiple.

Sure, the costs of sculpts and molds for the MM set would be about ten times larger than the cost of the HH set (because we're talking 40 sculpts vs. 4 sculpts), but the manufacturing costs (plastic, painting, etc.) for each individual mini would be very similar, so the total cost of goods for a single HH box would be, in my estimate, somewhat less than ten times the cost of goods for an MM box *if they were produced in the same volume*.

But, as I've pointed out, they wouldn't be produced in the same volume—the MM boxes could be produced in much higher volume, so the per-unit costs would be lower, and those sculpting costs get to be spread out over a much larger number of units, so it wouldn't surprise me if the actual cost to bring a single MM box to market were only slightly higher than the cost of bringing a single HH box to market.

So, if we're talking maybe a single-digit multiplier on costs, and a multiplier on units sold perhaps in the low double-digits, you can see that the MM minis line should be bringing in a *lot* more revenue than the HH line.

And then there's the fact that having 40 minis under the same SKU is far more manageable on the sales and distribution end than getting out the same number of minis by doing a bunch of different 4-figure boxes. It's far easier to get retailers to commit to restocking a line that requires fewer SKUs and can be merchandised in less space.

Finally, the HH line suffers from another issue that the MM line doesn't. Some of those HH boxes were less popular than others, but they were produced in similar amounts (I could be wrong, but I think they were always in evenly packed cases). That means that a retailer would have too many of one set, and not enough of another, so he couldn't reorder the ones that were moving without getting more of the slow sellers. This wasn't a problem for blind-boxed MM sets. (Once they put windows in the boxes so you could see the Huge figure in the otherwise random set, they actually *did* introduce this problem into the MM line.)