MillerHero's page

What convinced me to submit was all of Clark Peterson's threads about why you should submit.

Woo hoo! It worked!

Steve, thanks for saying that.

I hope you felt it was worthwhile to submit an item to the contest.

I liked this one. There's some very creative ideas here, and I think the feedback so far has shown a certain failure of imagination in understanding how this organization could be used in-game.

The search for malenti is the justification given - but yes, this group is deliberately designed to be carrying out a massive, ridiculous overkill, in the name of that more-reasonable search. This might be the consequence of being led astray by their leader; it's also a natural reaction that can be teased out of typical fear and apprehension in the face of an insidious threat. That's the core conflict which this organization represents - it's what happens when you give paranoia free reign.

How do you use this in-game? You've got oh-so-many options.

• The PCs are travelling. But somebody on the ship is in disguise. BAM, the Interceptors are on the job, and just like that, the PCs need to fight them off while trying to figure out who on the ship is duping them - and if they can afford to let that person be exposed.
  
• The PCs want to travel, but people are so afraid of the Interceptors, everybody starts worrying about potential travellers in disguise. The harbor becomes a frenzy of suspicion, interrogation, and accusations - long before the Interceptors are anywhere in sight.
  
• Somebody in disguise (a spy, a wrongly-accused man, a drag queen) needs the PCs help to get past the Interceptors undetected.
  
• The PCs are tracking somebody on the run. Somebody who's disguised himself well. Hey, you know who might have run into him, and be able to tell the PCs where to look next? Do you know they probably know about pretty much every traveller in the area ever? Do you know that they probably know their most hidden secrets?
  
• The PCs have discovered that something is awry among the Interceptors... but they can't figure out what without infiltrating them. Oh, wait a minute, that's not going to be so easy, is it?
  

Yeah, this isn't a rock-'em-sock-'em villainous organization. But it's an original concept, and it stirs up conflict relating to something most PCs touch upon quite frequently - lies, disguise, deceit. This organization lets a game spotlight that type of element - bring it out into the open and do interesting things with it. And they're plenty problematic enough to be antagonists when called upon (and yeah, the malenti leader in charge helps in that regard...)

Steve, you've got me in your corner with this. It looks like most of the criticism is saying people have trouble seeing how to use your work in-game. Now, that's a valid criticism, and you could have done more to highlight just how this group might come into conflict with adventurers. But I also think some people missed what, to me, look like potential for awesome hooks and scenes - and as long as I'm here to help, I'll be happy to provide some refreshing examples.

Congratulations Steve! Best of luck going forward.

There are four ways to acquire items in Pathfinder Society.

For the first three options presented, your character must spend the appropriate amount of gold:

• Always Available Items (detailed in Chapter 5 of the Guide to Pathfinder Society Organized Play) - Note: this includes non-magical gear from the Additional Resources.

• Items not blacked out or lined out on any of your character's accumulated Chronicle sheets

• Items whose total price does not exceed the Maximum Item Cost corresponding to your Fame Score as depicted in Table 5-3: Fame and Item Purchases - Note: this includes magical gear from the Additional Resources.

The final way to acquire items does not use gold, but rather prestige.

• An item worth 150 gp or less for 1 prestige point (PP) or an item worth 750 gp or less for 2 PPs according to Table 5–4: Generic Prestige Awards

Examples:

• +1 adamantine fullplate w/armor spikes can be purchased as soon as you have 17,550 gp regardless of your Fame score or chronicle sheets
  math:

  1500 base price
  50 armor spikes
  15,000 heavy armor adamantine
  1000 for +1 magic
  
  
• +2 padded armor (4155 gp) can only be purchased from a chronicle sheet or from your faction once you have achieved a fame score of 18 or higher.
  math:

  5 base price
  150 masterwork
  4000 for +2 magic
  Note that you would still need 18 fame even if you were upgrading your +1 padded armor to +2 padded armor.

• A potion of cure light wounds 50 gp (CL 1) could be
  A) purchased outright because 1st level potions are on the always available list in Chapter 5 or
  B) be gotten for free from your faction by spending 1 PP

• A potion of fly 750 gp (CL 5) could be
  A) purchased if it shows up on your chronicle sheet,
  B) purchased from your faction once you have 9 fame, or
  C) gotten for free from your faction by spending 2 PP

In the Inner Sea, it's our current year plus 2700.
In the Dragon Empires, it's our current year plus 5200.

Have you ever met a jerk GM or played under one? I just ran into one a few days ago and he was to start grooming me to be a GM. I'm just glad that it wasn't at my usual gaming store.

I know I don't have to tell you guys this but it's an honor to GM for people and all GMs should be humble.

I've got a character with two claw attacks (draconic bloodline sorcerer) and the produce flame spell-like ability (pyromaniac gnome racial trait). I'm trying to figure out if there's a good way for me to use my produce flame as a melee touch in conjunction with my claw attacks. Seems to me if you're hitting something with your claws while one claw also have the (produced) flame, you should be able to hit for claw damage as well as fire damage. There's a few ways I could see this working out, and I'd love to get your thoughts on what you think is the most reasonable:

1) Make normal attacks (against regular AC) with the claws and produce(d) flame. If successful, one claw (designated beforehand) deals its natural damage plus fire damage, and the other claw deals its natural damage.

2) Make attacks with the claws and flame. If the flame-applied claw hits regular AC, it deals natural damage plus fire damage. If the claw misses regular AC but hits touch-attack AC, deal just fire damage. The second claw deals damage as normal if it hits regular AC.

3) Make attacks with flame and one claw. Flame replaces the first claw attack and hits against touch-attack AC. Other claw attack hits as normal.

Thoughts? Any other ways you think this should be applied?

Why don't we sell PDFs through game stores?

Here's the real problem: the economics of subscriptions through retail just don't make sense, for us or for them.

Before I explain that, let me go through some other issues.

Every PDF that we distribute goes through our watermarker; that's not negotiable. First, security of our electronic products is very important to us, and second, it allows us to ensure that people who buy things from us will be able to redownload them at their leisure if they need to—even if their FLGS has gone out of business. It also allows us to notify purchasers if those files are ever updated, or of any other perks that might come with buying a particular PDF. We will not distribute PDFs via unsecured media (like CD-ROMs), or through middlemen, because they can't provide the same level of security *or* service.

What this means is that any potential retail sale of one of our PDFs would have to go through our system. The customer would need to have an account with us, and we'd communicate directly with them when downloads became available. (That right there will be a problem for some retailers—some view us as their competition, and wouldn't dream of sending their customers to our site, for any reason, ever.) But this actually solves a lot of problems—among other things, it helps ensure that subscriptions have *actual* subscribers (as opposed to the retailers giving out PDFs whether there's a subscription or not). And it allows us to provide "Subscriber" tags for those customers on our messageboards.

The retailer would also have to have an account with us, and we'd have to verify that they're a real retailer. We'd need to design a new a system for letting them purchase subscriptions and tie them to people who may or may not already exist in our system (which also means we have to deal with potential customer privacy issues). None of these are simple things—each is way more complicated than most of you would ever suspect... but for the purposes of continuing this discussion, let's say it's all handled.

Ok, so now it comes time to ship a new subscription product. In some order, the following things have to happen: the product is paid for by the customer; the product is picked up from the retailer by the customer; the PDF is made available to the customer. There are a couple of ways to handle this, but I suspect that most retail subscribers would want to have access to the PDF at pretty much the same time as paizo.com subscribers, and that generally happens about two weeks before the retailer even has the book. That means that the first of those actions to happen would be issuing the PDF.

But wait! What if the customer never buys the book? We've already given him a free PDF. Worse yet, what if he hasn't bought a book in months, and the retailer hasn't told us? Maybe we've given him *lots* of free PDFs. Well, the way to prevent this is to ensure that payment is collected before the PDF is issued. And, due to the previously mentioned timing issue, that means that Paizo has to collect the payment—otherwise, you're waiting until someone notifies you that you need to pay the retailer, and then you have to pay, and then we have to find out that you paid, and then we can give you the PDF. (And you'll still have to visit the retailer in couple of weeks when your book shows up.) So, fine—payment will be through Paizo.

But that means that we need to pay the retailer some portion of the amount we collected. (We also have to verify that the retailer actually ordered at least one copy of the book for every subscription he has sold, which is a whole other complicated issue that we'll also assume is handled for the purposes of this discussion.) So, let's look at what a retailer typically expects, based on a normal Pathfinder Adventure Path volume (because that's the line that would probably do best for retail subscriptions).

A given AP volume has a cover price of $19.99; let's call it an even $20 for simple math. We sell to distribution at 60% off cover price, or $8. Retailers normally buy from their distributor at about 50% off cover price, so they generally pay the distributor $10, and make $10 when they sell that copy. To sum up: for a normal retail sale of an AP volume, Paizo gets $8, the distributor gets $2, and the store gets $10.

Now, paizo.com subscribers pay $13.99 (let's call it $14) for an AP volume. How shall we split that up? Remember that we make $8 on a normal retail sale, and the retailer makes $10.

If we let the retailer take the cut he's used to, that leaves us $4—half of what we would normally make for a retail sale, and that doesn't even factor in the credit card processing fee that was added to the equation. We're probably not even covering our cost-of-goods with the remaining $3-and-change.

If we instead take the $8 we normally make on retail sales—which is still $4 less than we make on a regular subscription sale—that only leaves $4 for the retailer, and that might not cover *his* expenses. And even it it does, how many retailers would think taking $4 instead of $10 is a good tradeoff?

(The answer is the ones who believe that if they don't, you'll buy from us instead, so they're really making $4 instead of $0—but those retailers probably are going to feel a bit held hostage, and so they may not be especially happy to see you every month, and they also won't be terribly happy about "having to" participate with us.)

But even if that split *were* enough to entice a few retailers into participating, does it make sense for us to do it? We've said before that subscriptions are our bread-and-butter—they ensure that month-to-month, worst case, we're still covering our operating expenses. And they do that *because* they make us a higher profit margin per sale than the same product through retailers. Basically, everybody who cancels their subscription to buy at retail reduces that margin, and we can afford for that to happen a little bit—but if it were to happen a lot, or worse yet, be *encouraged* through a retailer subscription plan, we'd be losing our safety net.

But even if we could work out the economics, the problems don't even end there.

What if the retailer for whatever reason can't provide the level of service that you should be getting? What if he doesn't even have a book for you? You paid us, so we're ultimately responsible for that—yet we have no control over it.

And this isn't even a worst-case scenario, because there's an entire part of the process I haven't even touched on yet, and it lies completely out of our control: delivery of the printed product. You've got your PDF, and a couple of weeks later, the retailer gets your copy of the book. Now, he has to let you know the book is in. (We don't have access to their inventories or their shipment manifests, so we can't tell you.) Some retailers may be organized enough to handle that flawlessly, every time. Others will not be, and it *will* generate calls to our customer service line that we can't really help with much—at least not until we're pretty sure that the retailer for whatever reason can't or won't help you, and then we'll have to solve your problem at our cost, and only after you've endured more frustration than any of us would like. By this point, everybody has lost.

And what if a particular retailer has a *lot* of problems, and it becomes clear that he just can't *handle* subscriptions, and we have to cut him off? Then we have to go to his subscribers and tell them that if they want to keep their subs, they'll need to do it completely with us, and pay for shipping, and so on... and that won't be a fun day for anyone. (Especially if said retailer then starts telling people how Paizo stole his customers.)

The bottom line is that the notion of supporting the local retailer is great, but I just don't think retail subscriptions are the way to do it—I think that there's no winning scenario that makes sense to everyone there. We want our interactions with retailers to involve higher rewards and less risk of problems—things that will be more clearly "win-wins." Things like Pathfinder Society, and Free RPG Day promotions, and other retailer-oriented projects in the works that we're not talking about just yet. That's where we need to focus our efforts for now.

Hello all, GMing a game coming up where there is a mob that has both dr5/ and immunity: magic. Having a rough time where alchemist bombs lie in relationship to this monsters defenses.

That is an awesome weapon.

When I entered my GM session, I must have accidentally clicked twice as it double registered. Is there a way to delete sessions?

Not sure where to post this so the feedback is seen but all six of the classes do not appear to have guidelines listed for the starting gold. This needs to be fixed in the final printing of the APG... Hopefully someone at Paizo reads this...

I'm interested in a listing of the Mod NPCs with their descriptions, if that is available. I don't have access to all of the mods but would like to be able to flesh out my campaign.

ok so I have a +1 heavy spiked mithral shield with the bashing enchantment on it, now bashing says

"A bashing shield deals damage as if it were a weapon of two size categories larger"

and spikes say

"These spikes turn a shield into a martial piercing weapon and increase the damage dealt by a shield bash as if the shield were designed for a creature one size category larger than you"

now a heavy shield normally does 1d4, add bashing thats 1d8, and spikes add more more size category so that 2d6 damage

now me and one of the GM's I play with are having a slight disagreement on damage, he is saying i could attack with the spikes for 1d6 P dmg, or the shield for 1d8 B dmg, since the spikes arent affected by the bashing enchantment. However I feel from a logical stand point the enchantment on the shield just makes you bash with more force the spike just make the bash dig into the victim further, doing the total 2d6 damage.

So what are you guys takes on this?

Thinking about playing a LN gnome cleric of Asmodues with Fire Domain, using the Theologian Archtype and taking the Pyromaniac racial alternative.

Pryomaniac is treated as one level higher when casting fire descriptor spells or granted powers of the Fire Domain.

Theologian has Focused Domain which treats all level-dependent effects of the granted powers as if you were two cleric level higher.

Well Pyromaniac is a Racial Alternative Trait. Theoloigian is a new cleric Archtype but it doesn't specify what kind of bonus it is. Domain bonus maybe?

I love how responsive the staff is.
I also love that they actually seem to care about our opinions and often factor them into decisions for the campaign as a whole.

You folks DO realize that in order to REPORT your GM-credit chronicle sheets, you have to assign them at the time you report the module?

I am in favor of a 6 player limit, from both sides of the screen.

Saturday, October 22nd
12:30pm #3-01: The Frostfur Captives (Tier 1-5)
12:30pm #3-02: Sewer Dragons of Absalom (Tier 3-7)
6:30pm #3-05: Tide of Twilight (Tier 1-5)
6:30pm #3-06: Song of the Sea Witch (Tier 3-7)

This is a free event, and seating is limited. We'd like to accommodate as many players as possible, but because we have no idea what kind of a turn out to expect, we’d greatly appreciate contact with us if you’re interested in joining. We’re trying to determine how many sessions and tables are going to be needed/available, so we have enough space for everyone interested in playing.

Store email: info(at)aboveboardgames.net
Store phone: (803)792-4786
Coordinator email: cat.clarkin(at)gmail.com

We also regularly update our Pathfinder Society Fort Mill Facebook page with scenarios we'll be running on Wednesdays.

Above Board Games is located at 985 Market Street, Suite 103, Fort Mill, SC 29708(in Baxter Village). We're also close to Charlotte, NC, just off of I-77.

Thanks, and we look forward to meeting some new Pathfinders!

Kudos to you! That was a great way to turn a failure of an encounter into something everyone would remember!

As a side note, I've found a nice way to role-play the goblins:

Congratulations to Mike and all the new VC's!

Kyle and Nani - I hope to see you at SCARAB Gaming Convention in January. You're not huge Falcons fanatics like Mike is I hope! If so then I may have to root for them to not make it into the playoffs.

How about giving the Magus two weapon fighting only with conjured weapons like Flame Blade. Granted flame blade isn't on their list at this moment but it would give them more melee combat potential allowing more melee damage from a dex based magus.

Taking splash weapon mastery from the adventurer's armory next level might help a bit, it would allow him to adjust where the missed bomb goes so as to help not hit party members. also remember splash dmg allows for a reflex save for half...

Yeah - I am aware of the half damage thing, but I think at this point the rest of the party is saying "Stop! WTF?!?! We are in combat, use a different weapon until its safe!" and the alchemist is hurling away...

Using this weapon in this way makes the bane weapon too powerful, unbalancing the rule.

Yes, we've used the +1 rule every other level, but not more then 5 to one stat.

Pathos wrote:

The +2 every 4 may be a bit overkill. Especially if you have some serious Min/Maxing power gamers.

That's a potential +21 points to a single stat (10 advancement + 6 item + 5 Tome).

Maybe if the +2 had to be split between two different abilities.

Perhaps the word would be scrawled on a piece of parchment?

In Raleigh we generally have 3-5 tables on Thursday night & 1-2 on Monday evenings.

Spectral hand would be a good way to deliver touch spells without the danger. even though he took necromancy as an opp school at 7 um has the feat that allows you to get rid of the penalty for one school. There is also the reach spell metamagic.

Of course anyone can create any name for their Society PC.

And absolutely you can't tell a Player he or she can't sit at the table just because of the PC's name.

But how do we handle it when we get the "inappropriate" names?

What do you do when a PC named Mordenkainen sits at the table?
Khelbun The Blackstaff?
Obama The Wise?
Conan The Clumsy?
Richard Pett?
Tar Baphon?

Those are more outrageous than I think are realistic but I don't think it would be too surprising if someone made a PC named Vheod Runechild.
Or Rel.
Or Baylee Arnvold.
Or Aahz.

Honestly, I kinda want to create a Society PC named Tanis.

We have a barbarian at my local PFS named Raistlin... I just had to laugh at that.

Of course, we also have a character names "Herpaderp" and "Iron Man"... both are Synthesis Summoners, too.

How do you feel, If you are the Gm, and you are running a game, and during one of your descriptions, you see one of your players texting at the gaming table?

How about if you are a player, and you see another player texting at the table?

Is it rude to do this?

The +1 AC from dodge now applies to all opponents. It now actually gives you a straight +1 to AC, instead of +1 versus one target. A small change to the feat, but I think it makes it more worthwhile.

7 Kuthona 4707 AR

I cried last night, though I’m not sure if even Shayliss saw me. I’ve seen good friends killed in the last months, but this was something different. The day began with a monstrous surge in the skull river that flooded half the town. As we raced back to help, we saw Tabitha, a little girl who had been running errands for us in town, crushed to death in the coils of a giant river snake. It was heartbreaking, but we barely had time to get her schoolmates up onto the roof of a nearby house before we were attacked by a local legend-- Black Maga, the monster long rumored to dwell out of sight in the Storval Deep. We managed to keep it away from the frightened townfolk until the current carried it on into Claybottom lake. Until we can find some way to defeat it, I don’t expect there to be much fishing in the lake. It grabbed onto Eli, and he might not have escaped if he hadn’t cleverly activated his boat token and let the boat take his place in the monster’s grasp. I hope I can do some research and find a weakness we can exploit before we have to face it again.

Once the immediate danger had passed, I announced to the town that anyone whose home had been damaged was welcome to take what they could carry and travel with us to fort Rannick. Quite a few more people volunteered than I expected, from looking at the extent of the flooding, and we worked our way up the muddy trail to the fort and spent the night there. Eli, Thana, Pocco, Nizari and I are leaving in the morning for Skull crossing to see what’s happened to the dam.

RAW doesn't give any restrictions.

No reason he can't, then.

I guess it depends on whether you will allow him to sell the scrolls for full price, rather than the 1/2 of total that usually happens.

Plus, I would also see the temple taking a bigger cut than 10%, rather than letting the cleric profit off the divine blessings of Abadar. Probably would average his net gain out to 1/2 of total in the end.

Also, now he isn't adventuring, which basically makes the character an NPC. Would you want to take it over as the GM?

[Edited: Misread that it's another players character, not yours.]

OK, my next question is, how much does it cost to build a Pathfinder Lodge in one of your cities, and what would such a building's effects be for Economy, Loyalty, Stability, and Unrest?

Hi there, it's not listed, but will the 'Sable Company Marine' Ranger archetype be allowed? I'm EDT as well.