Etherdemon's page

Paizocon was a blast, even when Eric Mona TPK our party. Everyone at the tables where great! GM's, VC's all very friendly and corrected those little minor rules my "home" players and I have over looked this last year and a half with kindness and patience. To say the least can't wait until Paizocon 2013!

My only gripe was the refusal to allow myself and 4 other friends into the Grand Convocation. We did show up late in all fairness and as a result, we bought large amounts of alcahol and played we be goblins in our suite, which was a crazy blast. The gripe is simply this, when looking up what the GC is all about it sounded like an open forum of walking around talking to NPC's, mini event and general Grand Lodge fun with something at the end. In no way did it say “Be on time or you lose your chance to participate”. I think that was a pretty vital piece of info to leave out. That being said this leads me into what I would love to see next year.

Now having experienced Paizocon for the first time I have a much better idea on expectations. But I think I could have had those expectations minimized with just some "How to's" posted by Paizo.

Some ideas for Paizocon newbie’s:
1. What to do if your GM does not show. This happened to my friend and it was his lottery pick, had he known to go down to the banquet room he could have picked up a game there. It was only later on Saturday that this info came about.
2. For those events which require you to be on time should be posted as such. In every event I played, GC excluded, people were late to the gaming table, and this to me sets the precedence for ALL events.
3. Better lottery system. I was lucky to get one of my picks, but there were people who had none and some with 2 or 3. I've seen post by Paizo staff saying this is the most fair way of doing it, but I'm not seeing that and a lot of other people have posted the same opinion.
4. I think it would have been awesome to have an Autograph station with times posted. Nothing is better than buying the latest Ultimate...at a con and then having your favorite people sign it.

That is my two cents. Thanks to all Paizo staff for a great Con and look forward to all the new content on the horizon and for your dedication to a great system!

Two is definitely a good haul, Paizonians or no. After all, roughly 10 game-running Paizo staff * 2 games each = ~120 players tops, that's 1 in 4 or 5 probably.

Ether: I'm curious, which Open Events were your top picks and already taken? Perhaps private mail if you prefer.

I posted on the wrong one check the response below your post :)

Two is definitely a good haul, Paizonians or no. After all, roughly 10 game-running Paizo staff * 2 games each = ~120 players tops, that's 1 in 4 or 5 probably.

Ether: I'm curious, which Open Events were your top picks and already taken? Perhaps private mail if you prefer.

I would have bees supper happy just getting into Quest for Perfection, Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. Beacuse of my lotto pick on Firday 1-6, Grand Con and Banquest there is no way for me to run these. At best I can (or could have, not checked in the last hour) Part 1 on Saturday and Part 2 on Sunday. Like I posted before, I have no doubt I will have fun. I just think there is a better way of doing this and I except that as a personal opinion. One thought that I would like to see next year is instead of one ardous page that lists all events. Have seprate tabs for each day for each time. That way when a person has a time slot booked they are not forced to scroll through the whole list for the next time slot. Moving on I will be nicer on my posts, I'm all ranted out and I am now looking forward to a great weekend at PaizoCon.

I submitted lottery picks for almost every time slot from Friday morning until Sunday afternoon and uhh.. I got into uhh 2 things. Literally, 2 events. Is that normal? Talk about teh sux.

Good thing I'm flying cross country for this :(

Edit Oh and I didn't get into any games run by Paizo people.

Sigh.

Wow! You got two? Seriously you are one of the lucky few. I did the same as well as 5 others I know and we only got one each. In fact you may want to delete the post in case they take one away...JUSK KIDDING they wont do that. With 400 people going to the Con they wanted to make sure everyone got into at least one event. So congrats!!!

srd5090 wrote:

CRAP! I was signed up for James Jacob's event Friday morning and after the event fiasco I am no longer in the game and it's full. I'm actually missing a number of events from my schedule now.

-_-

Well at least I still my Rappan Athuk event...

Due to yesterday's technical difficulties, it was necessary to roll back to the initial lottery picks. Since signups after 2 pm were lost, we took the opportunity to fill the friday morning slots that were erroneously not filled with additional lottery picks.

Sorry to hear. But be thankful that you had the opportunity to sign up at the 2 PM time. Unfortunaltely (And I ranted about this yesterday) I got home logged in around 6:30 and all my top prefernce picks were already full. So at this point I am bagging trying to plan it out and will jsut show up and play it by ear, I have not doubt that I WILL have a blast but there will be this taint of disappointment that this is all geared to those who are able to be at home, take a day off, or access this at work and those who have to work are kind of shafted. But hey! At least the techical staff didn't have to work the weekend......

Today is actually a really good example of why we schedule these things at 2 p.m. Pacific time on weekdays: So the tech staff can be in the office to fix things just in case they go haywire.

As an Sr Network Engineer for 10 years and putting in more night and weekend that would be considered healthy I dare say that it would be a shame if your team is afraid to put in a little weekend work. :p (Just a friedly rub) At what point do I get to make a DC check against Diplomacy?

Etherdemon wrote:

Any other working professional having issues with how this is being handled? This is my first year to Pazio Con, bought tickets and banquet back in October. Talk about super excited!!! Spend hours going over the lotto events, just to find out it was all wasted and would have been better just to randomly click on events, and focus on getting a PFS character up in levels. Then they hold the open events and remaining sign up at 2PM PST! So those of us who have to work until 5, home at 6 has no chance of sign up vs those who can do it at work or already home. Why isn't this done on a Saturday? And I know what you are thinking, i'm typing this up at at 3 what WTF. Well I am hoping I don't get busted for doing this at work and felt it's worth taking the chance even though its stressing me out. VERY VERY VERY disappointed in this whole process. Close to selling ticket and banquet and boycotting Paizoco!!!!!

Etherdemon, the entire *point* of the lottery is to make it so that nobody has to sit at their computer at any particular time and go crazy trying to click some button—you get to express your interest in limited-seating events at your leisure during a window that's open for several days.

The events that opened for signup at 2PM are the ones with less limited seating, so if you're not there at 2PM, you're unlikely to miss out. Most of them will remain open for days, and you'd probably be able to get into many of them at any point between signup opening and signup closing.

If you have ideas for a procedure for booking things such as 6-person games with high-profile guests that's more fair to everyone than the lottery is, please let us know about it. Paizo and the rest of our community haven't been able to come up with anything better in the last four years...

Yes I understand the concept of the Lottery and my intent was not to put that to the question. It was the concept of having the Open Event and sign up for remaining lottery event at 2 PM in the middle of the week. I think it puts those who can not by or acces Paizo.com during working hours at a huge disadvantage, especially for the lottery events that did not get filled. In the brief moment I was able to scroll down the list of open events there were several that were already fully booked. It just would have bee nice if this was done on a weekend.

That being said. I want to add that as a 25 year plus player of D&D, AD&D and 2e, Pathfinder is an amazing system. 3e - 4e just...well...not what I was hoping for in a DD systm. I commend the Paizo staff and writer for their hard work and great product! In the year and half playing PF I still eagerly await our weekly play sessions. My appolagizes if my initil blog came off rude or demeaning. It was a sense of frustration on a bad lottery draw and a fear of not getting a chance at open sign up for any remaing lottery slots.

Etherdemon wrote:

So those of us who have to work until 5, home at 6 has no chance of sign up vs those who can do it at work or already home. Why isn't this done on a Saturday?

I think boycotting is a bit melodramatic, but Ether has a point.

Agreed. Just crazy frusted and just needed to vent. :) I am lucky that I have 5 other friends going and we can just grab an open table and do our own thing. I have been playing/DM'ing D&D for 28 years, it's not like I can't throw a quick campaign together.

Any other working professional having issues with how this is being handled? This is my first year to Pazio Con, bought tickets and banquet back in October. Talk about super excited!!! Spend hours going over the lotto events, just to find out it was all wasted and would have been better just to randomly click on events, and focus on getting a PFS character up in levels. Then they hold the open events and remaining sign up at 2PM PST! So those of us who have to work until 5, home at 6 has no chance of sign up vs those who can do it at work or already home. Why isn't this done on a Saturday? And I know what you are thinking, i'm typing this up at at 3 what WTF. Well I am hoping I don't get busted for doing this at work and felt it's worth taking the chance even though its stressing me out. VERY VERY VERY disappointed in this whole process. Close to selling ticket and banquet and boycotting Paizoco!!!!!

Another noob question - I will be bringing a new PFS character to the con. So I guess I'll be choosing 1st level sessions? Will my character be leveling up during the con? How can I plan on sessions to choose to accomodate this (e.g. not signing up for several 1st level sessions when my character is advancing)?

Most if not all session are tier 1-5. Broken out to Tier 1-2 and 4-5. Meaning level 1-2 and level 4-5. Each session gains 1 xp. For level 1 starting at 0 you will need 3 xp to raise to level 2. You can still gain xp for tier 1-2 play at level 2. If you only wanted to play PFS you could most likely play all tier 1-2 over the Con and level 2 and then some. Confused yet? If you have not done so yet downlaod the PFS Organized Play, it is free. It goes over how it all works pretty well.

My group just started playing PFS rules. At best we will have made it to 2nd level. For those events that require 4th, 8th, 12th level PFS characters will I be able to roll up a character for the event? Or would I be limited to playing my 2nd level PFS and a newly created 1st level PFS?

Great responses! It looks like the likely hood of us having a session together is limited if not unlikely which is ok. Probably my only concern is my son who is 15 may be a bit shy and I would hate to limit his experience, but then again I guess they need to leave the nest at some point. Regardless, we are all very excited to be at the Con.

We are starting up PFS characters this week, at best we will be 2nd' level when we show up but reading up on the rules it seems very interesting and putting aside out level 9's for a few months will be a nice break and get us back to the basics.

Looking forware to new people and more importantly, as the weekly GM, other's interpretation of the rules.

Cheers!

So I am sure this has been posted a 1d100 times, but I am going to ask anyways. So I and 5 others are headed to Paizocon. It is the first for all of us and one thing we are wanting is to sign up as a group for a table. We are a mixed group of vetern players and not so vetern, but we have all played together for over a year (almost weekly). We were hoping to find a GM who likes to RP and can lead a larger group. Any ideas, directions on how we go about this would be great!