Furdinand's page

These look awesome!

Those look great!

Very Cool!

Furdinand wrote:

I like Amiri.

Through no fault of its own, I'm not excited about the Hill Giant. I already got a variety of Hill Giants from DDM.

With all do respect, REALLY! You have the Archfiends Hill Giants which looks nothing like Hill Giant Barbarian and Chieftain from Wardrums. And that is it. And none are rock throwers. Finally we will have a rock throwing Hill Giant in PPM.

Like I often say, YMMV, and clearly yours does, but for me this is great and I can't wait to see what other giants will be in the set. The only thing that makes me sad is I will not have this bad boy for my RotR campaign.

Hill Giant Chieftain is a rock thrower.

I also prefer the aesthetics of those three Hill Giants, though this Hill Giant is closer to the pot bellied oaf that earlier editions of D&D portrayed. I also have an old Warhammer Giants that fits that description so I am more than covered in that department. My point is that as I've gotten older, game companies a tougher proposition selling me miniatures because I already have a lot of the basic monsters/player archetypes. Fortunately, there are third parties that sell singles so not every mini has to appeal to me personally.

I like Amiri.

Through no fault of its own, I'm not excited about the Hill Giant. I already got a variety of Hill Giants from DDM. What really interested my in Rise of the Runelords was all the unique creatures and characters it had compared to Heroes and Monsters. However, I do understand the business reasons for including a lot of popular monsters in the miniatures line and if I was a new player I would probably pick PFM over DDM.

To be honest, I don't really want it to be high end graphics. They just take to much focus and resources. I'd rather they make the game work well and not make it pretty. I'd be thrilled with UO graphics if it meant that everything else mentioned so far in the blogs were in the game.

Ryan,

The biggest thing I can think of would be for the big cities to keep records that reflect what you indicated two posts above that can be researched through in-game. Who was the first to carve out a barony in (hex 325)? What is the history of that settlement since (expansion 1: The Settling)? These are the kinds of records that should and would be kept.

Five or ten years from now when (settlment 325) has changed hands 357 times, it would be nice to dig around in the Halls of Records and find those persons' names - maybe we'll see them on the streets or in the deep wilderness carving out another settlement in (hex 767).

This should expand to cover the other elements mentioned as well. A shared experience game is all fine and dandy until you realize that there is no way for newer players to get ahold of that information. This would be a real shame.

What if instead of having the AI keep records, a player or players becomes a historian recording important events he researches and sells tomes/books? If it is really something of value then other players would support it with coin or by providing the historian information. If it isn't something a player would take up or that other players wouldn't support, it probably isn't important enough to code into a game.

I guess the question would be, how would Pathfinder the PnP game be different if it was designed for 2400 people at the dinner table instead of 4-6? You'd have to account for very divergent player tastes (dungeon crawl vs roleplaying vs empire building) and you would have to decentralize the game mastering or create something where players could act on their own.
I think the intent is to have the players explore the world and create the story instead of having players explore the world and experience the story.
There are so many interesting and ambitious ideas coming out of the dev blogs so far. The institutional imperative will try to push back against those ideas on its own, it doesn't need us to help.

The only pathfinder mini I've bought so far was the medusa and it arrived with the back half of the snake detached. Gluing piece back together or mailing them back in is a hassle I'm not really interested in.
I used to collect a lot of Heroclix, you had to be careful with them (compared to DDM) but few flat out broke. How do the Pathfinder minis compare?

A minor correction to the OP. There is a Medium Silver Dragon in the Underdark set of DDM.

There is also a medium Red Dragon, "Red Wyrmling". I can't remember what set. Against the Giants?

Maybe I'm weird or skittish, I'm actually relieved to see that the rewards aren't in-game, but are more concrete instead. At $50 I'd have only spent slightly more than a regular RPG book. A lot of the other levels look the same way.

The deal closer for me was the RPG wall in the video. It's cool to see so many editions of D&D and other games in Ryan's office. I think he gets "it".

I thought this game already had funding from Paizo.

I think the point of a sandbox is that the players set a lot of the rules. If the game is set up in such a way that players can impact other players' gameplay through things like bounties, destroying player buildings, or just plain refusing to deal with them then the game in practice will start to reflect the values of the community. If the community doesn't approve of a single group controlling all the dungeons and charging tolls then they can refuse to pay the tolls, refuse to trade with that group (the design seems to put a lot of importance on the player economy), or ambush them. If the community finds value in a player or group finding dungeons an will pay for it then it isn't griefing, it is division of labor.
The initial population of the game is supposed to be 2400? If a group that small produces enough players to lock out all the dungeons in an area without retaliation then I think that tells you what sort of community the game has attracted and I think the devs should be cautious about intervening in those situations.
One lock out at a time for a player seems logical. The stranger in the tavern doesn't usually offer the party an assortment of treasure maps to choose from. Alternatively, physical locks or maps that can be looted off players could work.