Jess Door's page

I test as INTJ. Most friends insist I'm INTP. Dunno why that is.

Jess Door wrote:

Ahh, been a busy couple of weeks, but i still live.

I heard through the grapevine that the zombie has stopped dropping hints about moving to Texas and has openly admitted he is coming now? Is this correct?

Indeed. If all goes well (or at least not apocalyptic), I shall be an official dweller in Houstonland by the first week of July. A quick turn around time, with lots to get accomplished between now and then, but I figure sanity is way overrated anyway.......

you wouldn't be allowed to keep any sanity once you were on Houston anyway, so no worries. Just hope your intro to the city is less intense than mine. Thank you so much, Ike.

Ahh, been a busy couple of weeks, but i still live.

I heard through the grapevine that the zombie has stopped dropping hints about moving to Texas and has openly admitted he is coming now? Is this correct?

This avatar should be exclusive to me, really. It pretty much looks just like me. And I could totally be an archvillain.

There's no "this is awesome" flag because I don't know exactly what we'd do with it. If we had more staff I guess we could review posts flagged as awesome and then feature them somehow on a curated front page like a magazine or newspaper or something. (Or I guess we could make it completely automated but that seems a poor choice of machinery to hand over to a community of gamers.)

Aw, c'mon. What could go wrong?

I know! Let FAWTL manage it!!!!!!

Female dm's aren't real. They're mythical creatures like unicorns or the Dutch. :-)

While not a unicorn, I am a female GM and Dutch. :P

I've read that this requires the states to provide software that will handle the tax calculations, given the buyer's address, for the business on a state by state basis, and that each state must provide a single remittance address for all the taxes collected for that state to make the burden on the retailers a little smaller.

road systems designed by an anthropomorphic platypus that's high on crack.

You're not giving crack smoking platypi enough credit, there.

I already asked her out once. She declined saying she already planned to hang out with friends.

And we've chatted like normal after that for the most part. I haven't had the guts to ask her phone number yet, but now I feel like I'm just being messed with. Either she can't take a damned hint (unlikely) or she's just not wanting to say no to my face. Of course, the third option is what you are saying and that her thoughts are an unfathomable system not too far from a Lovecraftian horror.

Whatever, I'm kind of frustrated but that's fixed by me going more cynical so I won't be as disappointed next time this kind of crap happens.
Because really, the less you expect from other people, the less likely it is that they will disappoint you. I'll probably die alone, but I sure as hell plan to die happy!

I'd ask her outright at that point. It didn't go well when I tried, but at least, eventually, I found out for sure.

my favorite color is blue

that's just silly. Everyone knows that green is by far the better color!

Poor car!

I think the two above posts by ciretose and master_marshmallow go too far to each extreme.

It's understandable the party has a hole they want filled. I think it's reasonable to ask the new party member to create a character that fills it. I think it's reasonable for the DM to set down what they do and do not allow. I think it's usually reasonable, after a set of instructions are followed, for the DM to look at a mechanically powerful character and re-evaluate those rules to deal with a mathematically proficient player.

Once that re-evaluation has happened, the GM, as the experienced person here, needs to take charge of the situation as the GM and as the more experienced player by being very specific with expectations, and walking though character creation with the character. Expectations have to be very carefully and exhaustively defined, or character generation has to happen in his presence to allow a collaborative instead of adversarial relationship to develop. I think the laid back involvement of the GM, interspesed with terse "I don't like that, it's not allowed" commands leaves the player, especially a new player, leaderless, without a clear guide, confused, and eventually, necessarily resentful of the abritrariness of it all.

the GM needs to do this in a manner that encourages as much new player buy in and enjoyment as possible, without infringing on the fun and enjoyment of the rest of the group - including himself. If his players have never been interested in some of the peripheral splat books and the GM doesn't want to deal with learning it and runnin it,that's fair - he might not have known to disallow that stuff, because it's never been an issue before. Collaborative and interactive character creation would have headed this all off. And as the new player, the OP would have no reason to know that the rules he was following from the GM might not be complete, or that following those rules may not have been enough to stave off difficulties. He's completely new to tabletop, he needs a lot of leeway, here.

I think this sounds like a GM failure - but one that's not horrible or revealing of any deep personal flaws, and one that's easily rectified!

Well today sucks! I hit a deer. I'm ok but my car is probably totaled. One month after I put a new front and back bumper on the car and had it repainted. :S

Dude! Sucks! :(

It's all those Houston drivers. They all suck at driving.

Except me.

Yes, for completely different reasons.

It isn't about you. You have joined a group that was happy before you got there and if you keep this up will be even happier when you leave.

You don't come in as the new person and dictate. You come in and watch and learn from them, and then decide if it is worth sticking around or not.

I think there should be a little more give and take than that, however. Sure, the rest of the group doesn't want to turn their game on its head to welcome in the new guy, but the new guy shouldn't play a character he doesn't want to play, wondering when his next spell is going to be diallowed and be put down in the front of the group. The group owes this guy a clear set of rules, rather than "Now that you've chosen this, which follows the guidelines I gave you, I'm going to change my mind." The group should also allow him to try to fulfill the role the party needs filled with alternative classes. I'm going to be my party's main healer, and I"m playing a paladin. She's all about Charisma, Lay on Hands, Mercies, and leadership (diplomacy AND intimidate - what do you want? She's a Viking!), and when she's not smiting is only a mediocre fighter.

I think compromise on both sides is required here. If the group is dictating the new player's class, giving the player some resonable leeway in massaging the class to fit what he wants to do is only polite.

I second the suggestion of talking first with the GM. Talk about how you feel about things, and ask for a sit down character creation time with the rest of the party. Then you can work out a backstory with other party members' buy in, and talk about what parts of the game you're most likely to want to experience with your character - this will help them understand and sympathize with where you're coming from, instead of just labelling everything you do a min-max munchkin optimizer choice.

Good luck!

Lord Twig wrote:

You mentioned a combat heavy game, so I suggested Ranger. In a more balanced game, then Rogue is fine. I know they do fine in my games.

I like your suggestion. Switch hitter gives me both ranged and melee capability. As a ranger, I can still sneak to scout, just lose being the face (which is minimal utility in this game) and lose trap disarming (which is probably also of minimal utility). But I gain versatility in combat, which since its combat oriented is probably key.

I mostly just wanted to make sure that there wasn't something that I was overlooking majorly, and it doesn't really appear to be so. Thanks for the advice!

One thing I would like to encourage you to remember, along with getting along with the group, you have to get along with your character.

If you're looking at multiple options, err in favor of what you'll enjoy more. It'll help your team mates too, because you'll enjoy yourself more and be more involved in the game. :)

I had a job that required a drug test with hair. They cut a pretty big chunk off, too!

Gary Teter wrote:

Handy hints for when your todo list becomes overwhelming:

Create a spreadsheet with all your different main tasks. Mine has 36 items on it, mostly because I've elided a few dozen.

Assign each task a 1–10 ranking.

Haha! There's not just a single ranking scale. Use several. I'm using six. ("how does this item affect customer service", "will this item directly impact sales", "was this item promised to anyone?", "does this item have a looming deadline?" etc.)

Give each item a 1–10 ranking for each of the six different scales. Be accurate!

For bonus points, create an application that presents two items and a ranking scale at random, allowing you to vote for which item should be ranked higher on that particular scale. This will only involve 36 factorial times six times mumble votes. Trust me: building this tool will be more fun than anything on your list. You should go do that now.

Assign each scale a scaling factor for the scale so the scores ranked on that scale can be properly compared to all the other scales for the rankings of the items for which you are attempting to scale the cliffs of and now I've lost the beginning of this sentence. Pretty sure it involved scales.

Sort the list by cumulative score.

Tada! You now know the precise relative importance of each and every item you are currently ignoring in favor of posting here.

What? No integration? No differentiation? No FFT's? No fun.

No touch screen UI? Laziness! Laziness and sloth!

Well, all I can say is that the adult woman who couldn't understand arithmatic with negative numbers when presented with the example of temperature immediately understood it when I presented her with the example of debits and credits.

I couldn't even follow the examples in that text book with temperature. It made no real world sense to me at all. While it's valuable to have multiple ways to explain a mathematical concept using real world examples, I think temperature is much less useful than debits and credits to explain arithmatic using negative numbers. I also think it's more likely to help people useful life skills.

Ah, glad to know that - it makes that a little more sensible to me. But if you're pumping Intimidate, even going so far as to use feats, are you going to use it more? ARe you going to take dazzling display or anything else? Feats are a very precious resource for you. I would personally think that taking Power Attack would be more useful, as you can use the extra damage you're dealing to encourage enemies to focus on you rather than your allies.

Wands are good, for sure! Very cost effective! At lower levels I find survivability greatly enhanced by having the spell available as well, however. If you've already got a wand, that will work wonders out of combat - in combat is a little more difficult, but you're pumping AC to mitigate that as much as possible.

I wouldn't multiclass. Bane is at level 5, and it's pretty awesome - I wouldn't put that off if I could help it.

A spell suggestion? I would change out Ear Piercing Scream for Divine Favor. While it's nice when the save is failed, your save is quite low, and the damage you deal with your weapon vastly overwhelms the damage from the spell. Divine Favor is a self only buff that lasts for 10 rounds, and grants +1 luck bonus to attack and damage per 3 caster levels. Given that PFS only goes to level 12, this spell keeps getting better pretty much your whole career.

You have calculated your intimidate incorrectly. INtimidating prowess doesn't let you ignore your -3 charisma mod. It just adds your strength mod to that. The total at 1st level for you is:

+1 (rank) -3 (charisma mod) +3 (strength mod) +2 (wisdom mod) +3 (class skill) = 6

I personally wouldn't think getting to a 6 is worth the feat - I would switch out Intimidating Prowess for heavy armor proficiency or power attack (I would switch it for power attack and go full offensive at first - Divine Favor always at least negates that negative to attack from power attack, and keeps your offensive power up there.

Also, for PFS, I pretty much always choose to know Cure Light Wounds if it's available to my character. YMMV.

He's nothing but a low-down, double-dealing, backstabbing, larcenous perverted worm! Hanging's too good for him. Burning's too good for him! He should be torn into little bitsy pieces and buried alive!

Query: How can one be torn to little bitsy pieces and yet be buried alive?

Yeah, I'm much more concerned about the long term nerfing this player's done to his character through that wisdom score than anything. He's going to need an item to evenbe able to cast 4th level spells. I simply...can't...conceive of playing that character.

Because a lot of people don't understand that -$10 is a real amount of money. Even accountants don't use that formulation, which is why a ten dollar debt is written as ($10), often in a different colored ink.

Everyone understands that -5 is just as valid a temperature as 0 or 25. Making that connection, that debts are negative money and losses are negative gains, is one of the big things that needs to be taught. Can you think of another situation other than temperature where you see actual negative numbers in common practice?

Okay, seriously, is there any way you can think of that makes sense to introduce multiplication or division with negative temperatures?

One?

I can't. I can't at all.

Sure, accountants use notation ($10) <-- red, or whatever, but it's very simple, conceptually, to understand that that equals -$10. The math is indistinguishable because it's the same thing. I can't think of any adult that deals with money on a real basis who can't understand that owing $10 can be thought of as negative $10. If I run into someone who can't understand that concept pretty much upon its introduction to them, I wonder if they have no concept of money at all, or have serious other developmental handicaps. And that very simple concept leads to a very easy to understand, instantly graspable way to talk about not only addition and subtraction of negative numbers, but multiplication and division.

In fact, maybe it's the weird disconnect I can barely conceive of that subtraction is somehow different from or simpler than adding a negative that is the issue. Maybe a better introduction that it's just a difference in notation would make things click better for people.

nick pater wrote:

Watching the clip of mr paterson I feel he has a point if you are confused and think rpg are evil then why take the chance.

No, he doesn't have a point. If you are confused and think RPGs are evil, it's probably time to figure out why you're confused about something, and start the process of un-confusing yourself.

"I don't understand it, so I'll just ignore it," is one of the absolute worst guiding philosophies you can have.

If you're not sure if something is inappropriate, avoiding it in case it is inappropriate for you is a valid option. It may not be your preferred option, but it's an option.

I'm a Christian, and obviously have no issue with RPGs. But if I have a friend who does, I will not tell them they should participate. If they are convinced (obviously, I believe wrongly so) that it is inappropriate, then pressuring them to participate is wrong. Having a conversation and asking for the chance to explain why I don't think it's an issue isn't off the table, though.

There are a couple of passages that touch on how to deal with different understandings of what is and isn't right and wrong (Romans 14:13-23; I Corinthians 8:1-13), and how to handle being considerate of people, even if you don't agree with their understanding of things.

I have an aunt with no exposure to RPGs except the bad press. If it comes up in conversation, I won't lie about it (my mom wants me to, in order to avoid difficult conversation), but I won't go out of my way to bring it up, either.

There is some danger in role playing games - it's an intense hobby in many ways, and if there's someone already struggling with mental issues, I think RPGs are more likely than Pinochle to cause that person difficulties. There are issues of age appropriateness and difficult or triggering situations in an RPG that most other hobbies don't have to consider much, if at all.

Meh. This is getting booklike. There's my take on it, anyway.

Paul Watson wrote:

And now you know, even if you didn't really want to.

And knowing is half the battle!

G.I. JOE!!!!!

thejeff wrote:

There's a big difference.
Robertson's version is a more classic donation funding scheme. He needs to keep the paranoia and fear up to keep the sense of persecution and group identity that keeps the donations flowing.
The Westboro clan's scheme is to draw attacks, physical or otherwise, and make money suing the attackers.

The philosophies are largely irrelevant.

Are you saying the main difference is *how* these people go about scheming money from others?

Pretty much. I view the one as taking a small group of people, consistently reinforcing their paranoia in order to convince them to let go of more money.

The other goes out of its way to be as offensive as possible to people outside it's following in order to leverage the court system to take money away from those that don't follow.

Looked at that way, the Westboro people are much smarter. They have a bigger pool to draw from, there are an infinite number of way to seriously offend people into doing somethng that lets you sue them, and they've got the weight of the judicial system to enforce their new source of income. It's despicable...but a very sustainable business model.

:(

The only way to win is not to play.

I love math, so I took out a book on calculus and started reading in junior high school. I didn't understand it very well, but I wanted to. so I might be an outlier here.

But I get really frustrated when I've taught other people math, how the books present things.

My mom had a coworker who was going for a degree after work. She was terrified of math. she was taking an algebra course and needed help.

This woman was the head of the kitchen for a nursing home. She regularly planned meals for large numbers of people. She was instinctively doing algebra all the time to handle the changing number of people that wanted meal A vs. meal B.

But when she ran into algebra in the textbook for her online course, she couldn't see the real world applicaiton.

One session we were going tackle positive and negative numbers. Addition, subtracktion, multiplication and division of negative and positive numbers.

For some absolutely stupid and unfathomable reason, the book decided to use temperature to explain this. I suppose it is possible that someone might use negative and positive numbers with additon and subtraction in relation to temperature, but really, there's no way to conceptualize a real world usage for multiplication and division.

She was an adult, living day to day in the real world. I used money as a much better conceptual tool for this lesson. if you owe 5 people $10, that's 5 x -10 = -50 ($50 you owe). If a friend pays for a car rental that 4 of you then use, if you all agree to pay an equal share and car rental cost $160, then how much do you owe? (-160/4)

why the heck would the book be adding negative temperature, or whatever? Who does that? Stupid!

I know people whined and complained in school about story problems, but that's really something I think every calss should address up front:

"Here's a real world issue. HEre's the numbers. Can you find the answer to this question? Guess what - by the end of the Chapter / Semester / year, you will be able to answer this real world question using the math you've learned here today."

How hard is, that, really?!?

Roberta Yang wrote:

blackbloodtroll wrote:

Thog is a Rogue?

Thog is a half-orc who blindly charges forward and smashes things in the face with a giant stick.

Obviously if you're not building your rogue to be Thog then you are bad at roleplaying and deserve to suck at everything forever.

Is this or the statement before in any way related to what i said?

It's more a joking continuation of other threads woven into this tapestry of a topic.

Grilled cheese was had. Happiness ensued.

Breathe. It's really not worth the aneurism.

Lamontius wrote:

I would, but the body of the unarmed woman your character stabbed to death is blocking the doorway.

Does it make me a bad person for laughing at that?

Absolutely.

Kajehase wrote:

And now for another big question: Margarine or butter?

I honestly can't taste a difference. Margarine is usually cheaper though so that's usually what the family has in the fridge.

I use it so infrequently though - pretty much exclusively for mashed potatoes (which very rarely are a thing that happens in my house) and grilled cheese sandwiches - that it really doesn't matter all that much.

That's the second time grilled cheese has been mentioned in my presence in as many days.

That's it. Tonight's dinner is grilled cheese.

But what about tabasco?

or you could just build your rogue better, too, or talk to the bard player and figure out what you're doing wrong and what he/she is doing right, beyond pinning it on simply your choice of class

Hahaha!

Lamontius, you're such a joker.

Hahah...talk to the other player, he says.

::wipes eyes::

You kill me.

Jess Door wrote:

"But, I didn't realize the child needed both food and water!"

Worse is the common attitude, more or less, that "no one cares if children need water or poison or whatever, because a good DM will make sure he/she is lactating and therefore render all these dietary suggestions moot -- therefore they're all good suggestions!"

Me proposing a new rule as a hobby enthusiast, and not taking things into consideration and thus throwing the entire system out of whack is understandable. This isn't my bread and butter (just my cake, maybe? (mmmmm....cake.....)), after all. But yeah, the continuing trend of fixing the irrelevence of the rogue by adding archetypes to other classes that make the rogue almost a walking joke...that's not one mistake, that's piling mistake on top of mistake, expecting it to become massive enough that it collapses into a black hole of fail, and you can fall through the event horizon and when you reach the singularity you emerge in some other universe and find out the rogue is cool again.

Or something.

Mostly, I just think black holes are cool.

Jess Door wrote:

I don't think so either, but don't you think that makes it worse?

No more than i think neglect is more malicious than abuse.

I dunno, to me it's more like:

"dex fighters shouldn't be too relevent in combat vs. dex fighters should be as relevent in combat"

is equivalent to

"Judicious spanking is good discipline vs. spanking is always child abuse"

while

"oops, we rendered the rogue class irrelevent"

is equivalent to

"But, I didn't realize the child needed both food and water!"

My brother and I were stuck in a traffic jam from hell, trying to get across the Potomac. We're behind this one car for 20 minutes. All of a sudden, my brother says "Hey, where'd she come from?" Yup, there's a woman in the passenger seat, suddenly. We look at each other, and we both start laughing. And then, you guessed it, the window rolls down, and there's the cigarette!

That's one way to make the time go by in a traffic jam! We laughed about that one for a good few miles.

Roberta Yang wrote:

I'm not seeing the problem here. You built poorly, and poor builds should be punished and gruelingly unfun because ~player skill~. Now you have become a better player and will be playing the character types Pathfinder says you should be saying, so all is well. If anything, you should be thanking Pathfinder for this ingenious design and apologizing for your failure to understand that dex-rogues are for silly children.

I wouldn't be that cynical. I don't think it was an intentional choice by the design team at Paizo to have the class in the current state it is.

I don't think so either, but don't you think that makes it worse?

Aberzombie wrote:

On the positive side - if I do make it to the game tonight, we've leveled up to 5th. That means my wizard finally gets a couple of 3rd level spells. I picked two conjuration spells - Pellet Blast and Mad Monkeys.

Of the two, I'm most eager to try out Mad Monkeys. I'm guessing this probably does not surprise.

Plan:

Create Pit
Mad Monkeys
?
Profit!

O.o That was a weird post to get TOP.

evidently ? = get naked!!!

On the positive side - if I do make it to the game tonight, we've leveled up to 5th. That means my wizard finally gets a couple of 3rd level spells. I picked two conjuration spells - Pellet Blast and Mad Monkeys.

Of the two, I'm most eager to try out Mad Monkeys. I'm guessing this probably does not surprise.

Plan:

314.159% of stats can be used to demonstrate that I am awesome. So is my inquisitor. :D

Heck, I find the inquisitor more fun and it fits most of my desire for roguishness better than bards - mostly because they're selfish about their buffs, as a true rogue would be!

Now, I assume you're looking for melee builds because you don't want to spend a ton of feats on archery (since it's basically just part of archery...). But if you're willing to spend them, I do have a viable rogue archer build. You dip Oracle 1 level for the Waves mystery and take Water Sight revelation. You can now see in fog and mist. Throw up an Obscuring Mist spell. Against anyone not adjacent to you (and you can 5 ft step back on your turn), you have total concealment and thus they cannot see you. Then you full attack sneak attack. Or they run away, in which case... you're a dude with a bow and a ton of archery feats and the other guy is moving away from you... you still win, just slower.

I'm not sure it would work well for PFS, though...

Even though this use is FAR less powerful than the intended use ("I'm-a gonna cast save or dies from within this cloud while you can't even find me."), at best I imagine a lot of PFS DM's may find this "cheesy." At worst, you'll likely have to spend time every time you game pointing out the rules and showing that it works.

But there you are. The only way I've found to make Rogue combat viable. Don't forget to pack some smoke sticks to use as power components so fire spells can't burn the mist away.

I found this as well, and used it because I also like the idea of a sniper. I went the route of deafness so i can cast silently at no cost, and took enough levels of oracle to get Silence. She's a caster killer more than anything, but yeah, I get negative reactions to her. ::shrug:: She's a one trick pony, and a DM could easily kill her because of that lack of depth, but it's fun, especially when they realize it's awfully one dimensional and stop whining about how cheesy it is.

Hump Day! Week is half over.

...

Kinda.

I'm on call Saturday.

sad panda.

Snarf.

Hey, look what we found in our front yard tonight!

We found over 5' of body skin (no head or tail) and it's 6" in diameter. Yes, we called animal control.

O.o

Electricity is some sort of weird magic which is totally unpredictable. I stay far away from it whenever possible.

I had a deathtrap of a car that, everytime you drove at any speed over a puddle or slush, the water would wash up under the car, and short out the battery. I would lose lights, power steering, all electricity.

O.o

This all reminds me, there was some minor electical work I need to get done on the house. We've finally got light when I get home from work...I can shut the house off and fix it.

*sigh* the money pit...there's always something.

Nen(Persian), "ancient waters".

Troy(Irish), "water".
VARUNESH(Indian),“lord of water”.
ANMAR(Arabian),“clean water”.

Hmmm, I like these but can't decide.

Mizu (Japanese) "water"

Nen(Persian), "ancient waters".

Troy(Irish), "water".
VARUNESH(Indian),“lord of water”.
ANMAR(Arabian),“clean water”.

Hmmm, I like these but can't decide.

Mizu (Japanese)

You interested in a Cormyr setting? ;)

Dunno!