KnightErrantJR's page

Yeah, that's the crux of the whole bit here. No one is saying that if someone directly violates Pharasma's tenants(i.e. creating or controlling undead in a manner not used to destroy other undead) that they would loose their abilities. The discussion has been, how is a power or effect having the name "undead" in it automatically antithetical to following Pharasma.

This thread seems to been derailed way beyond the realm of PFS and into the larger world of Golarion itself. Seems like a move to a different forums would be beneficial, as I think this falls more under the purview of James Jacobs than M&M, despite having potential PFS ramifications.

I respectfully disagree. This has to do with the rules as applied to PFS, not the setting. No one needs roleplaying tips. This is about how a GM will react to a character brought to his table using a rule that is applied to that character.

I don't have any issue with the Dhampir cleric of Pharasma. I do have a tangential rules question though.

Normally: "A cleric who chooses a subdomain must have access to both the domain and its subdomain from her deity (see Table: Deities of the Pathfinder Campaign Setting)."

A quick reading of separatist seems to me like it gives your cleric access to domain not on your list. As far as I can tell this doesn't include access to any subdomains at all.

Am I reading this right, or have I made a mistake somewhere?

I would be inclined to include subdomains, since the entire point of the archetype is to allow access to something that isn't on your deity's normal list.

That having been said, if it is specifically intended to not include subdomains, that is something that should also be spelled out, and not left for individual GMs to have to interpret.

Well, again, that's up to the GM. Plus it has more to do with the AP in question than the general Pathfinder RPG rules.

Right, you can take more than one archetype, but you have to decide on your archetypes when you make the character to begin with, even if you don't swap out any abilities at 1st level.

That has nothing to do with multi-classing into the same class more than once.

Hah, I found the reference about Absalom and hand signs. There was a feat in the original (3.5) campaign setting hardcover that talked about natives of Absalom using hand signs.

However, this wasn't so much a distinct language as a feat that made you good at teaching your companions a unique set of hand signs that gave them a competence bonus on your bluff checks to communicate hidden messages.

Every so often this comes up, and I remember it, but I don't think that feat or the tendency of people from Absalom to make up hand signs for the people that are "with them" has come up in any other products referencing Absalom. I could be wrong, but it seems like I always have to go back to the original campaign setting to find the reference.

No class inherently has any legal standing in any campaign.

An inquisitor is a class. That class is suppose to sniff out enemies of the faith if they are hiding or before they attack the faith. They are simply the sneakier, more proactive side of a cleric or paladin.

Any legal standing an inquisitor has would have to do with the actual campaign.

An inquisitor of Asmodeus in a campaign set in Cheliax would mean that character probably has a lot of pull with the local authorities, but it's still the GMs call.

An inquisitor of Erastil from Andoran in that same campaign that is trying to make sure if events in Cheliax are likely to harm is treasured homeland is probably going to have zero standing in the same campaign, and probably doesn't want to advertise his presence if he can help it, again, subject to how the GM wants to run it.

So it's not a matter of anything inherent in the class, it's a matter of the GMs campaign and how much pull the inquisitor's faith has in the setting, as well as if the PCs inquisitor is in favorable standing with his own faith.

The only reason I can think of, that someone would choose to create this character concept, is because they think its cool to flaunt RAW vs. canon in GM's and Developer's faces. Otherwise, you could create a separatist Pharasman cleric without having to go straight towards what she is Fanatical against.

Except the person in question has explained why he wanted to do this, and provided background information. If, after reading his reasoning, you would still conclude what you have, you must assume that he is being duplicitous in his stated intentions. Why?

Beyond that, why is this legal choice subject to such debate? Again, I'm not arguing that if someone created undead, or attempted such, Pharasma wouldn't yank her spells from the cleric. There are mechanics for that laid out under cleric and the atonement spell.

Would you make a dwarf proficient with a scimitar explain why, despite his cultural bias towards axes and hammers, he's taking a scimitar as his weapon of choice?

Maybe it bothers some people that a dwarf would use a scimitar, and it intrudes on their fun at the table. Do you want to take up table time with the dwarf justifying his weapon choice, because if not, clearly he's doing something to take advantage of the rules somewhere down the line, because its not normal in Golarion canon for a dwarf to run around with a scimitar.

Sure I can. It doesn't create undead. It doesn't control undead. I see no problem with it. She wouldn't grant it to her normal clergy, no. The problem being, the archetype, again, which is legal, is to create borderline heretical clerics.

There is zero point in the archetype being legal if possible applications of it can be ruled as invalid based on a GM judgement call.

In Prince of Wolves they mention Pathfinders having a hand sign language, but I don't know if that has ever been mentioned in any of the setting's game sourcebooks.

Getting back on topic, how is using the abilities of the undead domain automatically violating Pharasma's dogma?

We have a clear line. No creating undead. No controlling undead to do anything other than destroying other undead.

If the domain is not used for anything under the above, what is the problem?

To use another, in game, analogy, let's say in order to hide from a priest of Urgathoa, someone in the party casts an illusion to make them all look undead.

Is this promoting undeath? Does the cleric of Pharasma in the party have to refuse to be part of the illusion? Will they loose their spells immediately if they accept the disguise?

The ability, again, is suppose to create characters that might be pretty close to being called heretics, without breaking the inviolate line of sins against the god's dogma.

There seems to be two options here. One is that someone goes through and says what, even with the archetype in question, is and isn't acceptable, or the archetype isn't allowed in PFS. Otherwise, why worry about what someone else does with their character?

It just seems like a lot of people invest a lot of their own personal stake in what is fun for them on if everyone else at the table is having their kind of fun, which seems to be rather intrusive for the other people.

I really think this discussion would be much more constructive if we refrained from trying to use real world religions as examples when we are talking about game rules in a fictional setting that deal with a god granting spells.

The . . . ahem . . . drop dead point in Pharasma's religion is creating undead, or controlling them to do anything other than destroy other undead.

This is a matter of following the god's actual dogma to not loose spells.

However, the character in question is not looking to create undead. Giving his companions the seeming abilities of the undead is not creating undead. None of them actually become undead.

Would this make traditional Pharasmists feel squicky? Probably so.

Again . . . isn't that the point of the archetype in the first place?

Which brings me back to the original point. If you are going to expect GMs to micromanage the One True Vision when something is perfectly within the Rules as Written, then isn't it better to just disallow something in the first place.

And if you want it allowed, know that it will be used as intended, as written in the description of the ability, to make characters that push boundaries.

There are so many things I've seen in Pathfinder Society that I, as a GM, never thought to question, because if it's legal in the rules, and that's how the player wants to run the character, then I'll run the adventure, and we're all good.

It is strange to me that at one point it seemed that Pathfinder Society was to highlight the campaign setting, but now we seem to expect people to be well versed in the One True Vision of the setting to know when something is legal by RAW, but not by the consensus roleplaying opinion.

If this is going to be such a roleplaying hassle, why is it legal? You could have a true neutral cleric of Urgathoa with the healing domain, legally, with this. Should that be banned too?

How do you know that somewhere, out there, in the great beyond, some other god isn't pulling the cleric's strings and making him think he's getting his powers from Pharasma? It's not like it's going to come up in an organized play campaign, because nothing is tailored specifically for the PCs at the table.

I'm not even arguing that this particular example should or shouldn't be allowed, I'm saying that the class feature is pretty much tailored for creating heretics. It says so right in the text.

If it boils down to assuming everyone will agree on what kind of heretical behavior is "too far," then perhaps the ability shouldn't be allowed in the first place. If it is allowed, given the nature of organized play, you should expect some strange combination of clerical abilities.

Okay, it's official. I actually want to run another Pathfinder campaign, and I want it to be this one. Don't have time to do so yet, but I wanted to see another adventure or two before we get going anyway.

Really impressed.

I was intrigued enough to pick this up. I haven't read it in depth, but it looks great. It might even tempt me back into running Pathfinder at some point in the future.

I still want to reserve a bit of enthusiasm until I can really pick this apart with a good read through.

I'm not sold on the Focus and Foible thing, but I love the traits being based on the character's crime.

Pathfinder has taught me that Hero Points only excel at one thing: failing TWO Saving Throws.

And that's why you save up two of them to cheat death . . . ;)

This is the AP that kind of broke me of running Pathfinder. There is lots of promise in the overall story, and the Sixfold Trial is one of the finest commercial adventures I've ever run. It was great.

The problem is, there are several parts of the AP that just don't quite connect the right way.

I'll try to list my biggest problems with the AP, and why I just really ceased to have fun with the whole adventure path by the end of book 4.

There are lots of things that could have been done to fix this.

Mother of Flies and the Infernal Syndrome being switched would be good.

Having more encounters that had to do with a developing gang war and how it was making the city less safe would have been good. At least one of these kinds of encounters should have been happening per adventure, with lots of hints that the Council was suddenly more aggressive and trying to subsume smaller operators at the cost of the citizen's safety.

Having more of the "wander around to get XP" encounters fleshed out and connected to the story would be good.

Having fewer nuisance encounters would be good.

Having Fame Points be useful to help the PCs through out the AP instead of being a mechanic that only gets used at the end to do what the PCs might be able to do anyway might be nice.

Having the PCs perhaps being able to rebind the pit fiend or have the contract mean something other than "get into the room without fighting yet another outsider" would have been good.

Explaining why Mammmon's plan and the rampaging devils under Liebdaga were actually serving law with all of their destabilizing random destruction would have been good as well.

In fact, the more I think about it, this whole thing would have made much more sense if the secret shame of the family was a demonic blooded teifling taking over the Council and summoning a demon prince to thumb its nose at Asmodeus in his own territory.

I just burned out on the plot dead ends, holes, and disconnects. Plus getting all set to run encounters that were either cake walks or were resolved with bad will saves, or with the provided "I win" button against undead.

Lots of promise, my players really wanted to run around Cheliax after all of the build up in campaign material, but in the end, it felt like the AP was a casualty of putting out the RPG.

Last Thursday I learned that killing 30 town guards with a cloudkill spell instead of rescuing orphans from a burning building is bad.

Last Friday I learned that if the first roll of the game is a 20 on a knowledge check, you will never, ever roll well on a stealth check for the rest of the session, even if you are at +18.

I had a chance to play in a bySwarm game introducing the setting at Winter War run by Mike Bohlmann, and I had a lot of fun.

Setting aside that Mike is a fun GM to be in a session with, the setting looks different and interesting with some interesting twists that still work with the high fantasy vibe in the game, but doesn't mimic the usual.

Looking forward to seeing the products when they come out.

I hope Gabe doesn't start out at high level. If 4E becomes problematic past level 12, the same will be true of Pathfinder. You get some really whacky stuff in this game as you level up that it takes an experienced DM with a strong understanding of the rules to deal with. It will help that his players won't be very experienced, but might not completely negate how powerful high level Pathfinder characters are.

Some of the more recent posts on the site have indicated that Gabe has been discussing things with other gamers and has found that high level, across the board, can be problematic.

I don't want to speak for anyone, but I believe Maddigan's comment was not about the content of blood, but the difference in focus when it comes to scenes of conflict . . . i.e. some opponents in anime might get taken out in droves within a few seconds while the hero heads for the big bad guy, in cut scenes that show the minions flying through the air, whereas most of us picture the landing at Normandy as a slow, deliberate slog towards the objective, with people being shot and screaming in pain and falling down in slow motion.

I think the comment was about focus and pacing rather than gore.

There is a difference between realism for the sake of a time sink, and realism for the sake of authenticity.

SWG was a sandbox. You did not have to spend hours crafting a blaster. SWG had a very effective economy and functional craft system of any game, arguably still surpassing Eve Online. You had a large avenue of options in how you acquired your blaster.

You prefer blowing up death stars, that is your preference. Some never fired a blaster in their lives but enjoyed the same space that you did. You both relied upon eachother and fed eachothers experiences. Modern games have such an emphasis on playing to the action heroes that social aspects of MMORPGs and non combatant roles are obliterated. Such roles RELY on reliance(?). I never had any trouble using dancers in cantinas (that sounds rude), or acquiring gear from crafters and that stretches out into my other sandbox experiences too. I enjoy playing both instant thrill roles, and social roles; the latter requires a certain amount of difficulty in specific tasks, equal to what you'd expect to be made difficult in regards to 'killing things'. Your simply arguing that this aspect of sandbox games should be dumbed down for your own benefit. You can happily argue this point but it can never be accepted as a truth as we simply differ. I want nothing more than a game which allows such playstyles to co-exist.

If you need an example of an unorganic system where one playstyle is catered to and the other ignored: World of Warcraft. You rely on nobody. The world is not an organic system, the players do not function as the circulatory system. Perhaps they once might have when the game was difficult and required an able guild, but this was still a micro-organism than that of anything substantial to the game world.

Thriving communities are what have kept older games running to this day despite total neglect from their developers; they don't age the way content does. For this area of the game we need crafting, politics, roleplay, in depth trade skills such as...

My point, regarding Star Wars Galaxies, is that if someone comes to the game because they are a Star Wars fan, which seems to be the point, then they get to the game and find out that a large portion of the game is about playing Uncle Owen, it might be disappointing. Yes, you could choose your focus, but that didn't stop the first mission my Twi'lek scout was assigned from being to kill Corellian butterflies so that so guy could use them for something . . . and they still kicked my ass.

You may not go into a Star Wars game thinking you are going to be Luke, but you sure as hell at least want to be Wedge.

That doesn't mean that a certain percentage of players liked the persistent world elements of Star Wars Galaxies, but it never became the big guns MMO that it could have because a lot of Star Wars fans, when they saw the intensive complexity of the game, and didn't see a lot of swashbuckling space opera, didn't want to give it a whirl.

What I am saying, regarding Pathfinder Online is, if this is inspired by how well Kingmaker went over, look at how Kingmaker did it, and figure out how to translate that into a long term MMO instead of a pen and paper version of the campaign.

Kingmaker actually goes quite the opposite route than ultra-realism at times, because building phases and resource gathering/management is done fairly abstractly. I agree, cater to more than one playstyle, because Kingmaker allowed for players to roam around killing monsters, micromanaging the building of a Kingdom, and playing political games.

However, what I'm seeing in a lot of places is "don't make this like WoW because I don't like WoW," and "I've always wanted to live in Golarion, so make me a fantasy world simulator," and I don't think those goals are exactly what the game should be about. Heck, some people actually like Pathfinder and WoW, so perhaps the game shouldn't totally alienate them.

Doesn't mean the game should be a clone of WoW, just that having a guiding principle of "make is as un WoW like as possible" might be counter productive.

Disclaimer: I'm probably not the best person to be discussing this. I've kind of moved on from Pathfinder. If anyone cares about the reasons, or wishes to put things in context, I've called it out here, but I do still play in my friend's Pathfinder campaign:

Anyway, here is my take on MMORPG concept, and people wanting to have a world simulator. I've been in this boat a few times. I've even been on the side of making things super detailed and deliberate before to simulate living in a given world.

I wanted that in Star Wars Galaxies and I even wanted it, to a lesser degree, in DC Universe Online. Star Wars Galaxies probably did it more effectively than any other MMORPG I've played, and when I got what I asked for, I hated it. Turns that that, while I wanted to live the Star Wars universe, the reason I wanted to live in the Star Wars universe was that people jumped around having lightsaber battles and flying starships and getting into dogfights and fire fights.

Spending hours in a cantina watching dancers to rebuild some status bar that I'm sure why I need to rebuild, or working hours upon hours to build a halfway decent blaster or a hovel to live in oddly didn't quite match up with defending Echo base from AT-ATs or blowing up the Death Star.

Despite this lesson, I fell into this mindset again when I was playtesting DC Universe Online. I was very put out that my character had to have equipment to boost his stats. Sure some heroes need that kind of stuff, but I wanted to play a magical blasting sorcerer, and one that didn't need upgraded gauntlets or boots or belts or what have you.

I've recently gone back to playing DCUO now that its free to play, and honestly, it plays fast and combat is like comic book fights, which is what they should be like. It's appropriate for the genre, and the upgraded equipment tends to “run in the background” and give you a more immediate reward than just XP awards would grant. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it is a better handle on the superhero genre than I originally gave it credit for, because I wanted it, when I was playtesting, to be a DC Universe world simulator, except that isn't really what I wanted. I wanted to feel like my character was doing what I read characters in the comics doing.

What I'm saying is not that there should be no changes to the MMORPG paradigm, but what I am saying is that “make it more real” and “make really fiddly time consuming sub-systems” isn't really innovative. It's been done before, and while I know some people loved Star Wars Galxies, for example, it never really got the penetration that the property should have generated.

I think it's probably best to, instead of trying to imagine you are living in Golarion, try to picture how to capture the feel of what the inspiration material is. Look at Kingmaker, think about what works, and try to figure out how to capture that in a MMORPG. Once you get the feel of the game right, everything else is a matter of tweaks, bumping the investment to reward ratio.

I'll drop back into lurker mode now, but everyone have fun and play nice.

Did this book cover any Legion of Super-Heroes members or their villians.

Several Legion members plus the Fatal Five, off the top of my head. And if you count the Great Darkness Saga, you've got Darkseid in there as well. ;)

Are the original 7 heroes/villains appearing in the new book? If so, I could skip the core and just use my M&M 3e book to save money then. I was interested, but didn't want to spring for what was essentially the same book.

Yes, the original characters presented in the Hero's Handbook will be in Heroes and Villains, and in fact they have a few tweaks based on some of the comments on the forums about what may or may not have been included in their stat blocks.

The only downside to what you want to do is that you'll be waiting until Volume Two for people that fall after "K" in the alphabet.

Grant Morrison is.......brainstorming......even as we speak.

Ah, is that it? I thought I heard bong water bubbling.

Except maybe they can destroy the new universe Crisis style in a few years.

Then they can Hypertime in some of the "old" Jim Lee designed characters a few years after that . . . it's like an endless cycle!

I am growing to hate immediate actions, more and more, and Paizo has introduced quite a few of them these days.

It's not that I, as a GM, want my players to die, or not to get bonuses, or what have you, but when I'm juggling X number of bad guys and trying to think like the guy I'm portraying, and remembering all the rules and the scenario I'm running, the last thing I want to do is to hear, in the middle of what I'm doing . . . "wait, before you can do that, this happens."

Not only does it disrupt the overall flow of initiative, and not only does it interrupt my GM concentration, it also gives the impression of the guy that has the immediate actions as having multiple actions compared to everyone else in the party, especially if they say, move, ready an action, use their action when readied, and then use their immediate action.

It's a pain, and I thought with it being a known issue it would have been avoided a bit more than it was.

I believe that Superman is the only one that is getting a major reboot in this. If I remember correctly Grant Morrison was given leave to completely redo the origin and history of the character. Of course none of this was motivated by the lawsuits or DC's potential loss of any parts of the Superman mythos in the coming years. This was a completely spontaneous creative decision....yeah.

It's hard telling, because DC is becoming more and more evasive about what is and isn't changing. In fact, the more people don't seem to want a reboot, the more DC is putting out disclaimers saying that maybe they oversold the whole "Brand New DCU" concept.

If the Tim/Cassie/Conner/Bart Titans are just now getting together, it's a pretty major shift in things, and even if the story is set in the past, Wonder Girl as some kind of shadowy figure and the weird mutant Witchblade girl are new, and bumps Arrowette and Secret out of the whole equation.

Johns and Lee talking about giving the Justice League a "cool" origin is another point of concern. And do they mean this Justice League, or the whole concept of the League? If it's the whole League, having Cyborg as one of the "big seven" pretty radically alters his history with his fellow Titans.

And of course there is the fact that the Red Hood and the Outlaws blurb really makes it sound like Starfire is a new arrival and Roy's history goes straight from Green Arrow's sidekick to the current book.

My fear is that we will never really get an answer as to what is or isn't the baseline, and it will shift, and if something is contradictory, we'll get new Hypertime. Which means there is no point to all of this.

Secret Six is brilliant, and its cancellation has made me very upset. Absolutely probably my favorite book DC published. (Toss up between that and Birds of Prey really, but the new volume of BoP took awhile to get going strong)

I'll be willing to bet good money that King Shark and Deadshot were much more entertaining in Secret Six than in the upcoming Suicide Squad. And I really wanted a new Suicide Squad book before the reboot news hit.

I just didn't want it to steal Deadshot back.

Birds of Prey took a while to get going because Gail and multiple hurdles, including rebuilding the book after it was dismantled in the previous run due to DC trying to make Barbara Batgirl again, and because Black Canary's status on JLA and with Green Arrow was in flux as well.

I don't envy her trying to pull things back together, but I was fairly sure she had her momentum back when we got the Penguin dream sequence.

Which begs the question why not do what Marvel did. Create a alternative universe like the Ultimates one and keep the regular universe untouched. That way if someone likes one yet hates the other you do not lose a fan.

Especially odd since they have been hyping their "Earth One" books for quite a while now, and apparently Superman: Earth One did fairly well (even though I wasn't a fan of the book myself).

No, I'm pretty sure Harley's psychotic. But as you say, with a sweet and girlish side. :)

Harley has always been kind of disconnected from the full depth of depravity that Joker is capable of. She's "bad," but in a weird, "innocent" way.

This Harley doesn't really look like she has any kind of "innocent" manner about her.

The first Arkham Asylum costume for Harley (the nurse costume) still has a degree of whimsy to it, even if its not traditional. And when you look at her, you know its Harley.

While I'm not a fan of the Arkham City outfit, you can still look at the facepaint, impression of a domino mask, and pigtails, and figure out who the character is.

If I didn't know that was suppose to be Harley, I'd have no clue.

And why the Hell did they need to change King Shark from a great white to a hammerhead? In a perfect world, an anthropomorphic shark is an anthropomorphic shark, but it just seems like a change for changes sake, as I don't see one species as better for a walking shark villain than another.

For anyone that's curious, Cassandra, Stephanie, and Barbara all get the Batgirl treatment in the Batgirl write up. While a lot of comments on the M&M boards mentioned other versions of various characters getting only a "sidebar," that sidebar in most cases still includes a separate stat block. For example, Wally gets his own separate stat block in the Flash entry, even though the main entry is on Barry.

And there's another question..how does this reboot affect the licences,like M&M or DCU online?

Looking through the PDF, all of the characters seem to be based on the current version of the characters. Of course, that makes sense since most of the work on this was done last year.

From what it sounds like, most of the actual writing of Volume Two and probably a good chunk of the DCU book are done as well, and the GR guys have said that the reboot should have minimal impact on the RPG.

Honestly, it wouldn't make much sense to have a DCU book that references the "new" universe if all of the characters are written assuming the "old" universe.

Plus the RPG was originally to commemorate the 75th anniversary. Last year.

If someone from SOE could promise me the DCU presented in DCUO would stay pretty much as it is, I'd probably return to the fold despite my frustration with the game just previous to launch (I have a friend that's been trying to convince me that the game is improved over my beta testing experience).

And apparently Tim Drake, as Robin, is appearing in the Arkham City video game when it comes out, and his Red Robin costume will be another skin usable for the character.

Ok, here's the link.

So I kind of misspoke, the quote from the article is:
"You won’t be seeing Donna Troy yet in the new DCU, nor the Stephanie and Cassandra Batgirls. They haven’t been killed off though, just benched."

So to be precise with "my" characters being removed form publication or unrecgnizable (Garth is still dead, Roy and Kory have apparently been rebooted, Raven, Joey and Gar MIA, Hank and Dawn under Liefield's pens) and the next gen even worse off (Apparently Steph doesn't rate as a 'real' Robin, Rose, Tori, Cass mia, Cassie and Kon-El being rebooted into unrecognizability) I just don't see any reason to read. Vic alone isn't enough for me to read Justice League.

You know, while I'm still not thrilled with all of this, this coming out and reading through many of the entries comforts my comic book loving soul:

DC Adventures Heroes and Villains Volume One

Spell resistance.

"Hm, he fails to resist your spell, but then he manages to resist your spell."

Give something the ability to save twice and take the best effect, make them immune to some spells that are thematically appropriate, or just give them a bonus to saves in general.

It's a clunky throwback mechanic.

I wonder how many people here realize the average age of wow players is arround 30. A 2005 study put it at 28, and if it followed the general paterns of the rest of the video game industry, it has gone up some since then.

The problem is that I'm betting that, despite the average age, you still have a larger percentage of younger players involved in MMOs than you do in traditional RPGs.

No disrespect intended, but having a reboot to refresh the company with DiDio, Johns, and Lee as the guiding forces is sort of like having a surgeon perform his own vasectomy. Sure, it might just be painful, but it could damage more than you intended to, and you won't see it until its too late.

To actually answer the question, I've been around a while, so a few games jump out at me as having the crown over the years.

When it first came out the original World of Darkness games were a bit overhyped. I know plenty of people that played it and it was very popular. Its nothing about the game system or the setting, it was the wave of "this is real roleplaying" that seemed to accompany the game. I think a lot of it had to do with a backlash against the worst days of 2nd edition, but it felt a wee bit elitist and actually kept me away for a while.

Shadowrun always struck me as strange, because they hype really played up the cyberpunk "any fight could be your last" nature of the game, but it always left we wondering what the point of the "elves, dwarves, orks, and dragons have come back" side of thing was, except to maybe get the system more attention back when there were a lot of cyberpunk games around.

The d20 system was overhyped as well. While the open game license was, indeed, revolutionary, the idea that you could use d20 for every kind of game really didn't work, and led to lots of d20 based games that really would have been much better with their own streamlined systems that made more sense for the genre.

And I have to agree with Pathfinder, with the following explanation. The setting and adventure paths have been great, but where they hype machine really kicks into overdrive is with the rules offerings. From the beginning Pathfinder has never been that great with the fine tuning of its rules, and 3.5 was pretty clunky to begin with. Its not that the system doesn't have it charm, but for a setting with strong storytelling elements, constant rules infusions really just is distracting.

Wow. So this is the official "let's take a steaming dump all over someones favorite RPG thread?" Because, yeah I dont see the purpose of this thread otherwise.

And before any of you ask "then what am I doing here?" I figure if people who can't stand Pathfinder can come in and crap on people's cornflakes you should be just fine with me doing the same.

My personal answer? There IS no overrated RPG. Each one is someone's favorite and as long as people are having fun with what they're using to run their games why should we give a rats behind? If we're tired of hearing what a great RPG so and so is, then stay away from the forums that push those games. One of the reasons why I dont hang around EnWorld or RPG.Net anymore is because of the pure HATE ON that they have for games that I like.

Honestly, no one in this thread so far has taken any vicious shots at anything other than FATAL, which is kind of like telling Hitler jokes. Its hard for people to get offended.

In fact, I think its kind of useful to see why people think certain games were overhyped, so as long as people don't get too wound up taking shots at the games they think are overhyped, and especially if they give their reasons, I think this thread can actually be quite instructive.

Did I ever say Wonder Woman was easy to write? :) She's not. But she's not THAT hard either; too many people have tried too hard, in my opinion. Amazon. Ideal of feminine strength (read William Moulton Marston's thoughts on the matter, be wary of the subtle bondage references ;)). Strong. Fast. Kind. Wise. This may not be easy material but it is more than doable. The reason why stuff like JMS and David E Kelley's recent attempts is that they tried too hard to break the mold when I'm not sure they even knew what the mold was.

Wonder Woman has been made of clay since the mid 40s so if people still have a problem with that then that's a whole other thing. :) (Mind, I like her original origin better, of just being one of many awesome Amazons with natural strength, and that she's just the best of the best, but that origin was actually relatively short lived (though I think they used it for the Lynda Carter show)).

Honestly, the worst thing about Wonder Woman is that DC consistently overreacts to fluctuations on the book. Gail Simone's run started out really well, and the run was marked by Wonder Woman acting like one of the big three super heroes at DC, fighting the Fourth Reich and Grodd's Gorilla Knights and converting them, fighting against and then for the Khunds, one of DC notable alien races.

Simone treated her like someone that's up there in power with Superman, and it did well. On top of that, she did some neat nostalgia stories with some of DC's fantasy characters like the Stalker.

Now her sales did drop off by about 50% towards the end of Simone's run, but its not that there wasn't a good "take" on Wonder Woman or that she needed to be rebooted. There were several factors involved.

1. In general, comic book sales dropped off. Wonder Woman is a great character, but people are a lot less likely to drop their umpteen Batman, Superman, or Green Lantern books than Wonder Woman if they are pairing back their buying habits.

2. Blackest Night hit. Blackest Night had its biggest cross overs into the Green Lantern books, and Wonder Woman was only involved briefly towards the end. While I generally hate constant major crossovers, it does seem odd to me that when you want to sell a book, you have most of the tie in with a series of books that's already selling well (the GL books).

3. As much as I loved Simone's run, I can't fully defend her for the whole "Olympian" storyline, which had to do with Zeus being kidnapped by aliens, going somewhat insane, and killing a Polynesian deity to create a race of male "Amazons." Despite that, that story line had pretty much wrapped up, and I'm fairly certain the weirdness of that story wasn't going to be the status quo from that point on.

Now, even if DC had decided that Simone needed to go from the book (even with the drop off in sales, she was selling comparably to other DC monthies that DC didn't panic over), why bring in JMS to throw her into an alternate history where she is younger with fewer powers, while Amazons are being hunted and are in hiding across the globe, and shifting Wonder Woman into a vengeful sword wielding commando that spends the first few issues of her new run fighting gun toting thugs instead of DC mainstay bad guys to show that she belongs right up there along side Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, and such?

And I'm still wondering how the Hell poor Donna Troy is going to fit into all of this.

For what it's worth, my warning flag went up with the Adventurer's Armory, and this pretty much is the full on red flag for me.

Also, I think that if you killed someone in Marvel Super Heroes, your Karma would be reset to zero instantly! :-O (Wolverine-type superheroes had slightly different rules.)

Even worse, if you were on a team with said character, the whole team's Karma went poof!

I guess the X-Men didn't have a lot of Karma back in the day. Kinda makes sense why Scott used to be so uptight about Wolvie's tactics . . . ;)

I'd love to see someone put together a timeline of what Peter Parker does in a month.

That's the real reason Joe didn't want Spider-Man married anymore. Freeing up more time for Peter to keep up with Wolverine on various teams. ;)

I'm wondering, how much of our nerdrage is about how the feat works and how much of it is about how this feat ZOMGBBQWTF throws the metagame upside down.

Actually, you have hit upon something. The "metagame" is part of the assumed comfort zone of people playing the game. You know that no matter what new rules come out, X stays the same and Y never does something out of the ordinary.

There may be new ways to accomplish the old assumptions, and shortcuts to get to different abilities, but it all follows a familiar pattern.

Once you throw that on its ear, and challenge the "metagame," you are talking about moving out of the normal comfort zone for the game. If you move out of the comfort zone for the game, you undermine the incentive to stick with a given system.

The more you undermine the "metagame," the more you make it more attractive to adopt a new system rather than tinker with a system that has a shifting base.

I think its just something to keep in mind.

So good ol' pal Sir Knight... are we witnessing the tipping over of Paizo to the dark side already? :)

Well . . . I've not see a lot in the campaign setting side of things to disturb me, its the fact that the shift to producing more rules is not a comforting harbinger of things to come.

Especially not when a lot of mistakes and just problematic rules are evident this quickly.

I really did not intend for this to turn into a Piazo bashing session, rather a discussion of the feat. I like the game, I like the APG and I like a lot of the stuff in UM. I just don't like this feat. Hey know what? I don't have to use it as written *shrugs*.

I understand what you are saying, but I also would like to point out that several people that have concerns also like Paizo. I'm a fan of a lot of what they have done. However, when you become so big a fan that you excuse mistakes routinely, it doesn't help you, as a fan, or the company that you hope to support.

I guess I gotta go and burn all my RPG books because each of them contains at least a few errors.

Like Core Rulebook with Paladin smite.

Or APG with Selective Spell.

Or ... you know, every WotC book out there.

Heh, I see what you did there. "Paizo makes some mistakes, but they are better than WOTC."

Wait, how did WOTC get that way? It couldn't possibly be from fans that defend mistakes, even as they begin to increase from release to release? You know, so that the message to the company was that it was more important to get a book out with more stuff in it than to make sure the stuff worked?

Unfortunate. While I'm sure the TV show wasn't going to be awesome, to shut it down before production is a step backwards, IMO. With all the public outcry the TV series has recieved, the overall suckage of the comic itself has been ignored.

Well, and this is just my opinion, part of the the suckage of the comics has to do with the fact that DC is in love with Hollywood types writing their books, so they throw a good, solid comics writer like Gail Simone off the book to let JMS to some experimental alternate reality new paradigm for the character.

(But I still don't know where Gail was going with the Olympian storyline)