OpinionOrSatire's page

Since it is still not possible to select anything but GenCon pickup, can we have a proxy pick it up for us?

Alternately, can we CHANGE our delivery options AFTER the deadline?

Elfteiroh wrote:

In the special preorder section, the only shipping option I seem to have is the Convention Pickup... How do I set it so I get it shipped to me? I can't go to GenCon... :(

Sorry about that! It looks like that was likely related to a bug the tech team has been fixing. It should be working better now. Let me know if you have any problems when you try again.

I am experiencing this same bug 4 weeks later. Not encouraging. With only 6 hours left it looks like I'll be stuck with pdf-only.

48. Gourmand. You become afflicted with Pica. Whenever you are stressed, you must eat something with no nutritional value.

47. Neon Chameleon. Your skin, clothing and possessions change pigment based on the surrounding environment. However, instead of matching those colors you contrast them with their chromatic opposite, i.e. red/green, blue/orange, yellow/purple.

Just my thoughts...

I'm not sure why Jeff and I are being asked to play specific characters.

5+6+6+7+6+5 = 35.
35/6 = 5.87
Add 1 for a full party (Season 0-3) = 6.87, rounds to 7 --> choice

8+6+6+7+7+5 = 39 == 7.5, either high or choice, depending on rounding

That said, I'm not advocating playing up with this mix. Might work, might not. How much risk do you want?

1) paladin = melee (or rarely ranged), limited spells, limited healing
might involve a mount, which is more melee.
2) Dawnflower Dervish = melee + spells, some healing
3) brawler+styles = melee
4) pregen = ?
5) monk = melee
6) ftr/gun/mnk = ranged?

Arcane, sneak and skills are absent in this mix... pending the pregen selection. Magic in general is also a bit scarce.

In general, Pal 8 should provide more benefit than Ftr 5.

With this mix, Alc 6 might provide more benefit than Mnk 7. At the very least it tends to fill the "anti-swarm" role. :P

The *only* advantage I see in playing my monk is that it has a relatively high AC and CMD and the archetypical builds for the other mixes mentioned tend to be rather more mobile or evasive than defensive. Specifics will tell the tale.

Does this scenario have any recommended factions? I haven't seen any mentioned anywhere...yet.

If not, does this mean that Season 5 Tier 7-11 scenarios will follow a slightly different paradigm than the lower tiers have so far, or does this fall under the category of "one does not constitute a pattern"? :P

TIA!

well we can go with three, it is legal. Once Our Cleric gets his stuff up we can start. With the animal companion you should be alright

I have a PC I'd like to run through this, but I should probably wait until after I've played Eyes or Ruby Phoenix. She's Bard 10 / Pal 2, and a skill & knowledge monkey, so Academy suits her philosophically.

If you are looking for real time nonlinear games, you should check out Pathfinder Society Online Collective.

I am aware of PSOC, but I'm not looking for 1-shots or short-terms. I'm looking for continuity, real-time, online. There doesn't appear to be a forum for that.

PbP? Check.
1-shots? Check.
Face-to-face? Check.
What I'm seeking? Apparently not. Yet?

Assuming you are looking a way to find live games you will want to check out the following section of the Forums.

http://paizo.com/paizo/messageboards/community/gaming/connection

Hope this helps.

JDragon

Thank you.

I had already looked there for tabletop play and never thought to search if it was being used for online, real time games.

The current forum structure doesn't really support casual questions, or anything other than actual play or recruitment for it, so I hope I'm in the right place.

Searched a fair bit and it seems like this entire forum is about play-by-post. Is that by design or circumstance? Does anything else every get proposed?

Also, given that this subforum seems to be exclusively for "Looking For Group/Players" posts, where would a "Looking For Game" post go?

TIA!

/n

I guess that makes 3 of us in a relatively short period of time — well, short compared to the scarcity of LFG/LFP posts for our location! Are you 2 still looking?

I'm trying to transition from online play back to real tabletops. I'm not fussy about content but I'd LOVE to play an adventure path. Continuity is good!

Hooked up with TAG, but all I've seen so far is PFS, which is kind of the opposite of continuity. Fun, but not quite the same.

Dreamer, Rodrigues, as far as I'm concerned...

* Age is just a number

* Mixed company is preferred. IMHO, it keeps the game from being too 'locker room', i.e. it tends to discourage bathroom humour and testosterone-filled, kill-first-Speak-With-Dead-later, I-got-your-diplomacy-right-here-but-I-call-it-Intimidate play styles. :P

* I strongly favour true teamwork over the "group of soloists" paradigm. I also prefer thinking and/or planning over pure spontaneity and visceral reaction, at least when the option to choose is available.

* Experience is nice but not hyper-important. An open mind, a willingness to learn and flexibility are far more important than experience. "Experience" can mean "knowledgeable" but often means "stubborn, with lots of ingrained misconceptions".

Good luck in your searches if you haven't found comfortable communities yet.

/n

All I have to say is "yay!"

Tosa Katun (dead) Killed by an Atamahuta

Habasuta Hatsue (Dead) killed by an atamahuta
Hirabashi Jiro (dead) killed by an atamahuta

Are any of those PCs?

Sigh. Abstraction call be really, really, silly. A Fine rider on a Tiny mount gets a +1 height bonus against a Colossal, unmounted target.

OK. I see now why I was confused. I missed the whole "minimal PvE" idea. This will probably not be a game for me. Has there ever been a game for me? I've never heard of one. Will there ever be a game for me? Probably not.

So, I guess I have to decide whether I want to support something that has no intention of supporting my play style. (I'm not asking for feedback — this is something I'm going to have to work out on my own.)

All I have left, really, is intellectual curiosity. Right now, I'm most curious as to how an alignment system and bounties are supposed to accomplish anything.

Bounties are marginally effective IRL. Ideally, they lead to the death or capture of a (suspected) criminal. The capture may or may not last depending on the era we're talking about, legal wrangling, and levels of actual guilt. Either way, the criminal activity stops for a while.

In game, all that happens is that the nasty person/people that initiated some unwanted/unprovoked PvP 'fun' get some more PvP fun as 3rd parties attempt to collect a bounty. At best, their character dies the temporary death of an MMO, and then it's back to the business of killing everything that moves. So, all you are really doing is providing the antisocial player with the entertainment they wanted in the first place — PvP combat. The victim is still aggrieved and the perpetrator has never been happier. So I ask you, will this act as a disincentive for further bad behaviour, or is it going to actually promote it as the so-called punishment may very well be perceived as a reward? The victim is no less likely to be victimized again later, whether by the same player/PC or a different one that figured out the same path to their own personal fulfillment. Where exactly is the punishment?

Oh, right. The victim gets punished. First they suffered an unprovoked attack and had X resource/item/coin stolen from them and Y amount of time being unable to play while they await their resurrection. Then, their only redress is to pay a bounty out of pocket to entertain the bad guys for a while. So, the attacker is richer and the victim is poorer twice over.

The notion of bounties in perpetuity is silly. How exactly is anyone going to pay for that? And when sending 'challenging and meaningful player interactions' to the criminal is the best you can do, there's really no point in bothering at all. This is essentially a protection racket. Commit a few assaults to ensure people see you as a menace and forever more you'll have all your future entertainment paid for by your victims.

I imagine that the designers have thought of this and simply haven't shared their ideas on how they expect to implement the system in a way that will have meaningful outcomes. I'm just waiting to be enlightened.

As far as alignments go, there's a slew of problems to deal with.

Take a gander at the Landrush listings. Read the various proposals and then compare their self-descriptions with their proposed alignments. More often than not, there's a significant gap between the actions and behaviours they want to foster and the alignment they think that fits under. This will either mean that a huge swath of the community will need to make a reality check due to their alignment misconceptions, or the game designers will try to NOT alienate the lion's share of subscribers and instead embrace "the customer is always right". In other words, a rude awakening for players or the game kowtowing to the popular interpretations instead.

Lets deal with the concept of alignment consequences. So, a member of a LG town start behaving badly and drifts to LN. In PF, alignment drift only had meaningful consequences if you were a member of an alignment restricted class (paladin, druid, barbarian & monk) or clergy whose divine casting was contingent on your alignment being within a step or two of some deity. With no classes in PFO, what are the consequences of alignment drift?

So far, all I've read is that you might have to leave a town / nation / guild and join another one. That's a meaningful consequence? Really?

It reminds me of an old joke called "Why Worry?" The final bit of it is "Either you go to Heaven or you go to Hell. If you go to Heaven, there's nothing to worry about. If you go to Hell, you'll be so damned busy shaking hands with people you used to know that you won't have time to worry!" By referencing this old saw I mean that the only obvious consequences or implications of having to change organizations are social. This change only means something negative to the person dealing with them if finding a new place to live/play will be difficult, making new friends will be difficult, and/or, most importantly, that it won't be happening to large groups of people. Why's that? Well, if everyone you've been playing with drifts from LN to CE, the alignment shift is utter meaningless and the social consequences are mainly absent. You're still going to be able to play with the same people.

I guess the real question is, what happens when "Joe" drifts badly? Will Joe's friends send Joe off into the wilderness and forget him until he finds his way back from alignment 'hell' and can rejoin the community? "It's a shame what happened to Joe." Or will they say, "Dang it, I want to play with Joe!" and in a desire to maintain group unity, decide that it would be far easier to force their own PCs into the same negative drift than wait for Joe to be able to finesse his PC back from the brink?

If this whole discussion smacks of social engineering to you, that would be because it is! Welcome to the world of a game designer. You designa and implement affordances for things you want to happen and you remove affordances from — and build disincentives for — things you don't want people to do.

(Affordance is a term used in environmental psychology and interface design. An affordance is an attribute that enables something to be used in a particular way. For example, beverage cans and bottles are designed to afford being held firmly and comfortably in one hand and to be relatively stable. It might be cheaper to manufacture them wider but then they couldn't be help comfortably. It might be cheaper to make them narrower but then they would be much to easy to knock over. An example of an unforeseen affordance is milk crates. They were designed to be ideally suited for transporting bags and cartons of milk. The handholds were comfortable, the weight of a full crate was manageable, they were stackable and efficiently used storage space. Unfortunately for dairies, grocers and convenience store owners, they were also exactly the right size to store vinyl records. This unforeseen affordance meant that teens and college students everywhere were stealing milk crates to build 'modular shelving' for their record collections. Given the relative scarcity of vinyl these days the problem is quite minor now but wasn't a generation ago.)

Anyway, I've some thinking to do, and hopefully some explanations / elaborations from designers to read.

As I mentioned, I'm in a Crowdforger Guild pledge and an early one at that. That means I'll be playing from the very first Early Enrollment period, NOT once things are mature. It also means I'll be in a guild from Day 1 and will not be free to join other guilds.

So far, I obviously find the more negative responses discouraging. Unfortunately, the more positive responses, given the circumstances of my planned membership, the devil in the details of the positive responses and my hopes/expectations of what a fun game should/could/would be, are also discouraging.

Never leaving town does not sound like fun. I can do that IRL for free. I don't like the cultural notion that if you don't PvP you aren't considered (or can't be) an adventurer. So far, it seems that nearly all of the people in my pledge have no interest in PvP either. If we're ALL trapped in a town, we can never accomplish anything! Besides, progressing solely as a townsman crafter sounds impossible and unrewarding. In order to contract the gathering of resources you'd have to pay MORE than the game NPCs would. So, not only would I be denied access to the lion's share of game content, I would be given an effective glass ceiling by having to overpay for everything. And given the general adversarial philosophy of both the designers and many/most of the proposed guilds/kingdoms I can expect to stand around town unable to do anything for hours or days while waiting for someone to be WILLING to sell me something I can use since they'd rather sell it to someone who isn't a glorified NPC.

Uninvited 'ganking' a few times a week is a few times a week too many for me. I take absolutely no pleasure in attacking other players and I probably feel the same way about unprovoked attacks on one of my PCs as I would about unprovoked attacks on me IRL. I don't see why the game design has to embrace one game style to the virtual exclusion of the other. Why is walking outside of your own little town designed to be 'sufficient provocation' for attacks? Why are games designed to allow or promote players gravitating towards behaviour that would not be tolerated IRL? Personally, I wouldn't even be interested in retaliatory strikes any more than I'd think I'd be interested in taking up mugging, murder on contract killing IRL, which is to say not at all. If the only mechanism to discourage ganking is the risk of retaliation, either personally or via contracts, than my best guess is that it'd be open season 24-7-365 for me and probably my whole guild. The mass murderers out there would quickly learn which players/PCs were 'consequence free' and hunt them without mercy. So, I can only assume that the true purpose of MMOs is for people to 'exercise' their demons in the virtual world instead of trying the more difficult and rewarding task of 'exorcising' them IRL.

Yes, I consider many of these players/PCs mass murderers. The original intent of PvP was the excuse/argument that AI monsters weren't challenging enough. AI has advanced tremendously in the 1 to 2 DECADES since these games first appeared. The reason is far less valid now than it was then. Further, if the targets aren't remotely interested in the contest, possibly to the extent that they don't even defend themselves, where's the sport or challenge in that? All that remains is the taking of pleasure from causing pain to others and spreading chaos and misery. Hence, mass murderers.

To me, the whole point of AI monsters is to provide sufficient targets/opposition/challenge that people don't have to attack one another. It should never be necessary to attack other players.

I don't understand why MMOs have to embrace tribalism to the extent that there is no alternative to open hostility, except for the less than 1% of the population I personally know. Why do people call MMOs social gaming when they are seemingly designed to focus on antisocial behaviour?

I guess I'll wait a while to see if I can get a more official answer and/or explanation, but at the moment I am losing faith and rapidly.

The more I read, the more I read about PvP being a major focus of PFO.

PvP is why I have steadfastly refused to invest in and play everything else that otherwise would have interested me. I had enormous hope that Pathfinder Online would be different since it is spawning from a tabletop RPG that seems to promote teamwork and co-operation (see PFS) that this philosophy would translate into the MMO.

So here's my question. If you are steadfastly opposed to ALL forms of PvP, is there going to be a place for you in the Pathfinder Online game? From what I've read so far, the answer seems to be a glaring "no".

The few other games I trialed or investigated in the past that *claimed* to have a place for anti-PvP players really didn't. By that I mean that if you wanted to truly partake of the game, you *HAD* to invest significant time in PvP. They all had one or more features that severely limited the functionality of the game if you completely avoided PvP. Varying from game to game, you either couldn't complete key quests, reach higher levels of power/achievement, access key resources/items, join guilds, own property, or whatever esoterica that made game X a different or unique experience. In some cases, areas that were non-PvP could only be accessed by passing through a PvP area. In other words, for those that refuse to engage in these hostilities those areas were completely inaccessible.

At the moment, I am am member of Crowdforger Guild level pledge for the current Kickstarter. I know I will have no trouble at all finding a replacement for me if I were to back out, but I'd rather stay, pay and play a game I *want* to be a part of than back out from a game I wouldn't ever want to play.

Thanks in advance!

Jiggy wrote:

Not telling us which two factions are ailing, eh?

No. That'd be stacking the deck.

Isn't the deck already stacked?

Nearly every GM I've encountered (and a majority of players too) seem to interpret that ANY time you play a pregen OF ANY LEVEL, you MUST play for the Grand Lodge. In fact, it became an argument at the last table in which I participated because the player of a rare Grand Lodge PC was angry that the player of a pregen was allowed to use the faction of his highest lower level PC (i.e. the logical one to soonest receive and activate the Chronicle Sheet), and that meant he wasn't going to have automatic, secretive help in acheiving his faction mission — one for which his character was decidedly ill-suited. This significant majority of PFS members I have encountered doesn't care whether the PC that will get the Chronicle is already defined and of a different faction, or whether the pregen is a standard L1, L4 or L7, or even whether it is one from the NPC Codex. They believe that it's Grand Lodge or don't play! So, for these GMs (and maybe it should be ALL GMs?) any time we take one for the team and play a pregen for party balance, or play at a tier or subtier for which we have no active character we boost the stats for the Grand Lodge!

It has been my experience that the vast majority of the Grand Lodge prestige is coming from this and not real PCs. Sure, other communities may have a different data to noise ratio, but the fact remains that the Grand Lodge is the ONLY faction that has ANY noise!

In deciding the winners and losers of "FACTION CONTRACTION 2013 (TM)" (:P), will this data skew be something that can be eliminated based on data already collected in session reporting, or is the Grand Lodge basically immune due to this rule (whether applied and interpretted correctly or not) due to the inability to remove the skew?

TIA!

3 of my active PCs have faction traits. If they get hit by the contraction they will not only lose flavour, they will lose effectiveness and there cannot be any compensation for it.

My Ulfen/Tien bard, whose family has been traders across the Crown of the World for generations, will simply not fit anywhere other than the Lantern Lodge. Further, she makes use of the Storyteller trait EVERY adventure and there's nothing remotely comparable for a character with "the Sage" in her name. There is no second-best faction for her.

My Andoran pyromaniac alchemist has both the Freed Slave and Hunter's Eye traits. Freed Slave will persist, but Hunter's Eye is irreplaceable. When faced with long range combats where bomb use will never make sense, having access to a longbow is important, particulalrly when you are a small PC. There is no second-best faction for him.

My Osirion archer will lose Tomb Raider. Not much else grants a perception boost, though he can live quite well without Dungeoneering as a class-skill. He's already taken Additional Traits, so finding a decent kluge replacement will be nearly impossible. There is no second-best faction for him.

Claiming that it is "entirely a player's choice" to retire a PC that loses his/her faction is callous, mean-spirited and enirely self-serving. That attitude says "it's not our problem, it's your problem." It's a responsibility-free attitude, though perhaps that is to be expected given that we live in an age of increasingly broken societal norms where the pervasive POV is that "everyone else is to blame for everything, except of course ME".

Further, announcing this in December and saying there's about a month to make a difference says that you've already decided. The holiday season means that at the very least a significant minority of people fall into family commitments and required overtime at work to make season-end dealines and the shopping season. Very few people will have the time to match their desire to influence this outcome. Personally, I have only been able to play ONE of the Y4 scenarios and I do not anticipate getting the opportunity to play any others before year's end since I expect to see none offered where I can access them in the chosen timeframe.

All said, I am unimpressed with the decision and even moreso with the implementation thus far.

I can't seem to find a clear and concise explanation of how L1 retraining and the use of pre-generated characters affects prestige. (My google-fu is not what I wish it was.)

If you play a pre-gen and randomly pick a faction to play for (or get assigned one by the GM, generally the Grand Lodge) when you apply that Chronicle Sheet to a *new* PFS PC, what happens to that prestige? Is it hard coded as the faction you played? Do you just assume it to be prestige for the faction you ultimately select? Can you request that the prestige be ported over to the PCs true faction? Does it matter if that selection happens before or after reaching L2 and moving past the retraining threshold?

Also, if you play a new PC once or twice as one race/class/faction and retrain it to something completely different, is there a way to make use of that prestige or is it wasted deadweight in spite of the freedom to completely redefine your character?

Thanks in advance for clearing this up for me.

(I had a hard time deciding whether this belonged here in customer service or under Paizo products. Customer service won out. If you disagree, feel free to move it to another forum.)

I like the idea of subscription services and the discounts they offer. The subscription service that would interest me most is one for just PDFs. Sure I can buy a hard copy and get the PDF for free, but my bookshelves are already bursting at the seems and sagging in the middle. At this stage of my gaming career I'd rather go as paperless as possible.

If there was a PDF subscription service I don't know how I could possibly keep myself from buying in. Just something to think about, I guess.

Oren Satov

It seems to me that what most of you are saying boils down to this:

Paladin = Jedi ...... Anti-paladin = Sith

Another step towards the grand unification theory of gaming.

South Korea might outclass North Korea militarily, but they are completely outnumbered. North Korea has one of the world's largest militaries. Joining the army is pretty much the only 'upwardly mobile' career move for the North Korean masses. At least they don't have to worry about malnutrition or starving to death.