Green Left Eye's page

The only deities I can think of that passed it are Aroden (wizard?), Iomedae (paladin), and Cayden Cailean (probably fighter or rogue?).

Norborger overcame the Test of the Starstone, but he's also not a monk. And Razmir, of course, falsely claims that he did, but he's not a monk, either.

Wouldn't including the mount take up a lot fo space in the book and then the book will have less awesome stuff?

This supposes that mounts aren't awesome, which reinforces my point that Pathfinder isn't doing a very good job of selling the cavalier as a class.

I think problem is a bit of a stretch. Just because her mount isn't there, doesn't mean much. If you never see a spellcaster summoning an elemental, it doesn't mean that they can't or don't.

But the thing is, we DO see the other classes showing off their class features and specialties. We've got lots of art featuring Lem singing, Seelah turning undead, and Seoni blasting things. Summoning an elemental is one of the many, many things that a spellcaster can do, but mounted combat is a major part of the cavalier. A more apt comparison would be if there was an iconic elementalist, and we never saw said elementalist summoning an elemental. And, yeah, I'd think that was a bad choice, too.

I spent some time this morning thinking about the cavalier, and checking my books, I noticed something. I have two books that have pictures of Alain (the iconic cavalier) in them. He's featured three times in the Advanced Players Guide, and once in whichever Bestiary features the Ogre Spider (which he's featured fighting). Four pictures total, and he's riding his mount in exactly none of them.

A lot of the problem with selling people on the cavalier is that many of the class features are tied to the mount, and for a lot of people Pathfinder/D&D doesn't really feature much mounted combat. For better or worse, artwork goes a long way towards determining how players envision the game world, and when Pathfinder products feature the iconic mounted combat expert never engaging in mounted combat, it impacts how much use the cavalier class gets.

It's just a thought, and I might be wrong, but it would be nice to see some artwork of Alain doing what cavaliers do best.

What are the chances that we'll be getting a new set of GameMastery Face Cards in the near future? I really like that three sets that I have, but it's been a while since we've seen anything new on this front.

The words for how excited I am about the Denizen of Leng? I don't have any that don't completely understate it.

The only disappointing thing for me about the HM set was how generic most of the pieces were; I can't think of anything from that set that I didn't already have represented via my old D&D minis. This set is where things are starting to get interesting.

Also: Paizo, your mascot is a GOLEM. When are we gonna get a PAIZO GOLEM mini?

There will very definitely be more Face Cards in the future.

They will very definitely NOT be printed on the cardstock used for this set.

I don't suppose that anyone at Paizo would be willing to drop a hint as to when we might hope to see some of these future sets? I'm really looking forward to them.

I'd be happy with "monster cards" that contained just the artwork, similar to the NPC Portrait Cards that I use and love.

And here I was hoping that this was about a Pathfinder module based in the Game of Thrones. :(

No, if had been based on A Game of Thrones, the post title would have been "Winter is Very, Very, Very Slowly Coming, Assuming the Author Doesn't Die First".

I understand that the difference isn't much between the class skills and the cross-classed, but it seems a bit silly (to me) to think that something as instinctual as swimming wouldn't come fairly easy to all classes.

Swimming isn't nearly as instinctual as many people who learned to swim at an early age seem to think. As an example:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-08-07/the-louisiana-dro wning-why-many-blacks-cant-swim/

Does anyone else think that swim should be a class skill for every class? I mean, a cloistered cleric, or a studious wizard might not get out as much as the fleeing sorcerer, but that shouldn't mean your ranger buddy can't teach you the breast-stroke. Input?

Yes, it's just you. If the ranger buddy teaches the studious wizard the breaststroke, it can be easily represented by the wizard's player investing some skill points in Swim. This sort of thing is far easier in Pathfinder than it was in 3.5.

I like both oWoD and nWoD, but I have to give nWoD the edge, both in system and setting. The biggest challenge to me being able to run an oWoD game today, I think, would be that my social group is made up largely of people who would be at least a little bit uncomfortable with the jaw-dropping collection of ethnic and cultural stereotypes in some of the older oWoD settings.

The Italian vampires are tied to the Mafia.
The Egyptian vampires are twisted cultists.
The Arabian vampires are bloodthirsty assassins.
The "Gypsy" vampires are theiving charlatans.
The Native American werewolves are the very definition of noble savages.
The Nordic werewolves are Neo-Nazis berzerkers.
The Irish werewolves are drunken brawlers.
The feminist werewolves are man-castrating b&*+&es.
Also, WoD: Gypsies was just embarrassing.

I give White Wolf credit for making attempts to present a diverse portfolio of cultures, but man, some of those stereotypes got really ugly. That, and a lot of the anti-science themes that got thrown around in some of the games really had me turned off to the point where the change to nWoD was something I loved.

Having said that, they did learn their lessons and get better near the end of the oWoD. Orpheus and Demon were arguably the best games I had encountered up to that point.

I sometimes miss oWoD, but I know that if I ever want to play it, the books still work just as well as they did lo those many years ago. Hell, a couple of my friends are still playing it, so I know that a community of players exists. The urge hasn't been strong enough to get me to go back yet (largely because I'm having fun with my nWoD stuff, not to mention all of the other great game systems that I'm struggling to find time enough to play), but maybe someday.

I wanna go to Pen Island, myself.

I may be putting the cart before the horse here, but I'd be pleased as punch to see some of these on the next set of portrait cards (please, please, please let there be another set of portrait cards).

Ok, I've found about a billion lists of what spells will make your wizard a gawd and how to pick the most effective spells for a cleric, but as a DM, I'm really interested in how to get the most mileage from my adepts.

Assume that the adept in question is supporting a group of five warriors of the same level that he is. What are the best spells to select at each level? What are some tips and tricks that can make this fella shine?

There was a winged dog, I believe, included in Savage Species. You might want to check there.

Just checked. It's under the "Winged Creature" template. Savage Species, pages 137-138.

There was a winged dog, I believe, included in Savage Species. You might want to check there.

I've been impatiently waiting for this to come out ever since I got my grubby little hands on the Friends and Foes deck. I've instructed the owner of my FLGS to place an order ASAP. Keep up the good work, Paizo!

I've instructed my FLGS to order these as soon as they become available. Does anyone have any idea when that might be?

I should probably clarify here that I don't consider myself a hater. I LIKE Joss Whedon. I think he's a great writer. The reason that I'm familiar with his work on X-Men and Runaways is that I read damn near everything that he writes. I just find that when he writes characters created by other people, he tends to just ignore everything that's been developed in the character's history in order to tell a Joss Whedon story. Having said that, some of my favorite media has been things that feature characters that Joss has created himself. I'd be thrilled if he worked out a deal with Marvel to write a book with all his own characters; I'm less thrilled with the idea of his handling The Avengers.

Green Left Eye wrote:

Joss Whedon is good at writing his own characters. He's kind of rubbish at writing characters previously written by anyone else. See: His run on X-Men, or more painfully, his run on Runaways.

Perhaps you refer to Astonishing X-Men, also known as easily the best 25 consecutive issues of X-Men in a decade minimum?

Is someone in this storyline displaying a style of humor/wit that they've never displayed before? Is a tragically deceased love interest suddenly shockingly back from the dead? Will we spend a long time developing a love story for two characters only to have them tragically torn apart from one another at the end?

Well, no one can say it isn't a Joss Whedon script, I guess.

Making a list of things that you're guaranteed to see in any Joss Whedon storyline is becoming almost as easy as making a list of things that you'll find in any given Warren Ellis storyline.

Joss Whedon is good at writing his own characters. He's kind of rubbish at writing characters previously written by anyone else. See: His run on X-Men, or more painfully, his run on Runaways.

The problem is that every character that he writes needs to be "Joss Whedon clever". All the characters act as vehicles for Joss to impress us with his sparkling wit (which I acknowledge is genuinely funny), but they lose whatever voice that they might have had prior to his picking them up.

Also, the Avengers doesn't feature NEARLY enough waifish teenage girls for Joss to take a real interest in it.

My girlfriend works at the Marine Invertebrates Department of the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, and I can tell you from personal experience that even within the scientific community there is a lively and snark-filled debate as to what the proper plural form of "octopus" is.

If they didn't want us critiquing the game props and location they should have found some OK looking women to play the game.

Right. One can not forget the high standards of physical attractiveness for which gamers are universally renowned. Every other day, we have to shoo away the supermodels who prowl outside the FLGS hoping to pick up some hot gamer tail.

For a community made up largely of pudgy neckbeards, a lot of gamers have some very interesting ideas regarding what constitutes an attractive female.

(Hoo boy. At one time, I resolved to steer clear of controversial topics, and here I am blasting my own religion. Ah well, at least I haven't written about politics or the edition wars yet.)

I want to make clear that, although my comment might be interpretted as a little bit lulzy, I didn't intend it to in any way convey disrespect for Judaism. Although I'm not Jewish myself, I have a great deal of admiration for the Jewish people, and what limited familiarity I have with the Tanakh is the result of my recognition that it is a fascinating work (of course, parts of it are a lot more fascinating than others).

Also, it's totally not my place or anyone else's to decide for a father what is or is not appropriate for his children. Parents have to reach their own conclusion regarding that sort of thing, and I completely respect the decision that you've reached regarding Golarion; there is some stuff in the setting that isn't appropriate for kids. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. My own parents were caught up in the anti-D&D craze of the 80s, and although I was strictly forbidden from playing, I had my first game at the age of twelve and have been playing ever since.

As an Orthodox Jew, I'm in a society that's very uptight about these things.

Interesting then, that these guidelines would have barred large portions of the Tanakh, which contains a number of themes on par with anything in Golarion.

There are, I think, a couple of factors at play here.

The first, and I think probably the most important, is the secondary-use capacity of the module. The primary use of the module is, of course, the adventure, but what do you do when the adventure is over? Either you find a different group with whom to use it (something that I try not to do, as I've spent years pruning my group down to just the players that I find most tolerable), or it sits on your shelf collecting dust. If the game also comes with a couple of neat monsters, though, you can go back to it time and again, particularly if the monsters scale well.

Second, stupid monsters aren't a bug, they're a feature. Stupid monsters have been with us since the earliest games of D&D. Gelatinous Cube. Rust Monster. Owlbear. These are the names of some of the stupidest monsters ever designed, and we love them like we love our own families.

I just want to throw in here that anyone who isn't listening to the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast really should be. It's really accessible, even to people unfamiliar with Lovecraft, and it does a good job of covering the material. Also, Trail of Cthulhu game designer Ken Hite is a guest on several episodes, and he's fantastic.

I am REALLY looking forward to getting my hands on these. I love my Friends & Foes set, but I need MORE CARDS. Does anyone know if Paizo is planning on doing any further sets after this? I certainly hope so, and will buy any that that decide to produce.

I tend to go to bat for unloved monsters, if only because so many of the iconic D&D monsters came out of early developers' habits of throwing all sorts of stupid ideas out into the world and seeing what stuck. There's nothing about the beholder or the owlbear that isn't hilariously bad at first glance, but these monsters have become a part of the game's shared heritage. I think that the current gaming community does itself a disservice when it dismisses initially foolish-looking monsters without giving them a fair shake.

Speaking only for myself, I miss the arrowhawk. Low-level fliers with ranged attacks are few and far between in the Bestiary, mephits aside (and that's a really generous definition of "ranged attacks" in their case). The delver was a poor design with some bad flavor, definitely, but I do have to say that it works well as a bare-bones concept that could probably be salvaged with a new look and better fluff. Speaking of decent monster ideas that never recovered from their artwork, the dissolver isn't all that bad a monster if you can get over how gawds-awful stupid it looks.

Show a hated monster a little love, and you might just find that it pays off in spades. Whatever else one might say about the destrachan, it at least filled a role that wasn't already being filled better by another monster. If you ever want to contemplate a truly useless monster, ask yourself why the Bestiary needed to contain the shadow, spectre and wraith, when it could have just as easily duplicated them by giving the ghost some alternate power templates.

I haven't played any of the APs (I'm more of a core books kind of guy), but for whatever my opinion is worth, here it is...

The theme that the forces of good must sometimes ally with a lesser evil in order to defeat a greater one is neither new nor unique to Pathfinder. It's one of the oldest stories around, and it resonates deeply with us because it is familiar to both our fiction and our real lives.

Could Frodo destroy the One Ring if not for the assistance of the murdering cannibal Gollum?
Could Buffy defeat Angelus without the help of bloodthirsty psychopath Spike?
Could the Allies have defeated the mass-murdering Axis powers if not for the massive contributions of the mass-murdering Soviets?

Sometimes in life you have to hold your nose and say "I don't like you, you represent everything that I oppose and one day I'll probably have to take you down, but there are bigger problems at hand right now."