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Papa-DRB's page
Pathfinder Adventure Path Charter Subscriber; Tales Subscriber. Pathfinder Society Member. 1,274 posts (1,503 including aliases). No reviews. No lists. 1 wishlist. 9 aliases.
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The point buy you give players is probably the LEAST disruptive to game balance of the following three:
Player experience
Number of players
Ability score point buy
If your players are relatively new to the game, you probably won't need to do ANY adjustment to an Adventure Path if you have 5 players and a 25 point buy.
If your players are experienced gamers, though... you'll probably want to do something along the following lines:
• Add more "mooks" to fights so that the monsters aren't as outnumbered.
• Use the Advanced simple template a LOT, especially on significant monsters.
• Try to push the players into making longer adventure days so that they'll need to spread their resources thinner—more wandering monsters and danger at camptime, essentially.
• Maximize the hp of some monsters, especially "boss" monsters. Giving them max hp doesn't really increase their power level that much but DOES keep them on screen a little longer.
And stay mobile. Watch how the PCs are doing, and adjust as you go.
For those interested in a slightly stricter definition of "average party", previously the devs have described it as such:
- all four of the traditional party roles are covered in some fashion, though this is taken liberally (for example, a Paladin can count as "healer" and an Alchemist can count as "rogue")
- approximately 20% of all "character build choices" will be used to support backstory/flavor/RP or are otherwise "wasted" from a power point of view. "Choices" includes ability scores, feats, skill points, rage powers, rogue tricks, etc.
- characters will not be able to rest whenever they want to. There will always be some risk involved in setting up camp, getting back to town, etc. The party is never able to nova with confidence that there is nothing else coming at them that day.
- characters will not find all of the loot in the book (approx 75%, but heavily varies). The majority of a character's equipped gear at any point in time will come from treasure hoards and not from custom purchases or item crafting. Less than half of the GP-value of carried gear will be from purchases/crafting.
- in battle, characters will not metagame to gain an advantage. This means they will have to roll Knowledge(X) to know the weakness of monsters they fight, rather than simply know from system mastery that (for example) trolls require fire or acid to kill. It also means they will not engage in "excessive" tabletalk to figure out the optimum strategy to kill an opponent.
And, of course, given these are broad generalizations, they are voided often. But it helps establish a baseline to build against. If your players are better (or worse) than any of the above, you may consider tweaking point-buy or other variables to account for such.
After our first session, it was clear to me that I needed to do something about the management and execution of the PC's day and night activities. Prior to the groups polarizing and the 'party' forming, it can feel very disconnected for some players as they wait for their turn to resolve each day and night action.
Step 1:
Create an Attitude Sheet for each player. This will come into play on Influence Actions. I also wrote down each players Saves, in order to secretly manage Rum Ration Results, Sea Sickness and Disease.
Step 2:
Create a Player Action Card for each PC. I hand them out to the players. Each cycle, they select day and night actions and this became an avenue to share any secret information with me without arising suspicion.
Step 3:
Create Task Cards for quick reference and job assignments. I made three list cards: Swabs, Riggers, Cooks. I started with the 6 base tasks for each and fleshed them out to a list of 12 (giving the d12 some lovin').
TURN OF EVENTS:
1) Wake up. Pass out Action Cards.
2) Resolve story/encounter (if applicable).
3) Assign Jobs.
4) Review Day Actions and sort.
5) Roll PC task success/fail.
6) Deal Punishment (if applicable).
7) Resolve Day Influences & Sneaks.
8) Review Night Actions and sort.
9) Roll PC task success/fail.
10) Resolve Night Influences & Sneaks.
11) Resolve Steal.
12) Sleep.
I implemented this in our last session to very satisfactory results.
Cheers!
Since some folks were asking about it in another thread, and some enterprising folks actually did a forum search, I figured I should probably update the download URL to something that isn't broken. ;)
Link: Paizo Dark Theme
Note, if you go straight to Paizo.com you won't see a change. It's only after you enter the store, forums, campaigns, etc. that it will take place. I'd love to just have it do everything at paizo.com, but that ends up botching the PRD. (If someone can figure out a better workaround for that, please let me know.)
Enjoy!
Edit: Added screenshots for those of you who want to see what it looks like.
Awesome, thanks!
I hate being wonky:)
Here is a re-post of info from another forum:
1. Extracted the images the PDF using SomePDF Image Extractor
2. Using an image editing program (GIMP in my case), I selected an area on the map image from the book that lined up along the grid and then cropped the image to that selection. I ended up with an image that is exactly x squares wide and y squares tall, no partial squares along the edges of my new image.
3. Again using the editing program, I rescaled the image using inches as my measurement instead of pixels. So if my image was 30 squares wide by 20 squares tall, I'd scale it to 30 inches wide and 20 inches tall. Voila, I now have an image where the squares are 1 inch.
4. I then use PosterRazor to create a multi-page PDF of my new image, as I can only print to standard 8x11 paper.
Its that simple; it takes longer to cut out and tape the sections together than it does to make the image. I've found that rescaling the image doesn't lose that much resolution, and PosterRazor makes a much better battlemats than the raster programs I used to use. Also, all of the software I used in the process is free/open source, so it didn't cost me a dime except for ink and paper.
I've been running my players through this AP, and so far it has been a blast!
For the custom treasure, I used a dragon / elemental theme:
For the Ranger:
+1 Seeking Darkwood Composite Longbow (STR 1)
A Sky Dragon is carved on it, and it has the name "Gentle Breeze."
For the Druid:
+1 Mithral Scimitar
A Sea Dragon is engraved upon it, and it has the name "Sterling River."
For the Barbarian:
+1 Cold Iron Dwarven Waraxe
A Forest Dragon is engraved on it, and its name is "Roaring Mountain."
For the Wizard:
+1 Spell Storing Darkwood Quarterstaff
A Underworld Dragon is carved on it. Its name is "Radient Flame."
All are designed in the style of Tien Xia, and match the Imperial Dragon on the Warding Box. Each player gets a weapon worth around 4500 gp.
Destiny!
Eben TheQuiet wrote: If that were the intended interpretation of the rules, why wouldn't they have included the level delay in the rules block as they did with every other archetype class feature level delay in the book? Because the different sections were written by different people, who often used slightly different phrasing for similar intended effect. Of the APG class mods, I wrote barbarians, bards, druids, fighters, and sorcerers over the span of several months. Others wrote other classes.
Everyone's text isn't going to match exactly, and unfortunately sometimes in the constant revising process of writing up rules text sometimes you misstate a thing (take, for instance, Selective Spell, in which I thought I had stated it applied only to instantaneous spells... but I didn't, and has since been errata'ed). Also, the way you write things may change over the evolution of your writing of a piece. For instance, why didn't I just use the same phrasing for animal shamans as I did for, say, plains druid or mountain druid.
Unfortunately, I have no idea. Most likely I wrote the animal shamans section at a separate time from having written the other druid section, and when I blended them I didn't notice I had phrased things differently in one section (terrain druids) than the other (animal shamans).
Hopefully inconsistencies can be eliminated in writing. On the hopefully rare occasions they aren't, hopefully they're caught during editing and development. On the now rare to the rare power occasions they aren't caught in either, stuff will slip through that ends up ambiguous or unclear.
That's the real mea culpa - mistakes happen, and in a book so densely packed with very specific rules text, a word or phrase missing means a lot more to that individual subunit of the text than in the middle of running prose.
Eben TheQuiet wrote: The only answer to that question is that they missed it - which, again, I don't believe is the case. It is the case.
Eben TheQuiet wrote: If it comes out in an errata that that was the case, then I'll eat my words, but for the time being, both RAW and RAI support my interpretation. RAW in this case, due to my ambiguous and unclear writing, is an arguable point.
RAI, however, is, was, and always has been entirely clear: animal shaman druids DO NOT GET ANY WILD SHAPE until 6th level, period, end of story. That is the Rule As Intended.
Really, animal shamans get so many extras that delayed wild shape is just about the only drawback. If they were to get wild shape at the same time as other druids, it would be pretty much all-win, and that was something I and the other authors strove hard to avoid in the APG - new class options that were clearly superior to core; more specialized, sure; neat tricks that core can't do, absolutely; but across the board better? No way.
My RAI as the author of that part of the rules, however, is not official errata and may get you nowhere with a strict RAW situation like PFS, until such time as official errata are released.
How I should have phrased the text (or if I were writing the errata) ought to have been (referring to APG, p. 102 (bear shaman, wild shape)):
"Wild Shape (Su): At 6th level, a bear shaman's wild shape ability functions at her druid level -2... "
should be
"Wild Shape (Su): At 6th level, a bear shaman gains the wild shape ability, which functions at her druid level -2... "
Ditto for all the other animal shamans.
Again, I am not the official errata-giver, but the RAI is absolutely plain and simple.
Eben TheQuiet wrote: I will grant you that in that one aspect the druid gets worse at wildshaping. That their durations for wildshaping into shapes that aren't their focus are shorter. But again, this seems like an intentional change made that is supported not only by the theme of the class, but also by the way the rules are written. Only because I phrased the text poorly.
I had thought saying "6th level: Wild Shape..." would be sufficient implication that 6th level was when you got wild shape; I was surprised when folks took it differently, though that meaning can be inferred.
Maybe I thought the idea that your wild shape would start at 4th level, get better at 5th, then get worse at 6th would be nonsensical, which would prevent anyone from reading it that way.
My apologies if the above sounds annoyed, but it feels like this issue has been brought up and answered numerous times in other threads. I readily cop to the crime of leaving the ambiguity in the text, but I hope this note at least clears up the RAI.
If you're playing PFS or some other RAW, you'll need to take it up with your local chapter or table GM to see how they are ruling the RAW, since it can be argued either way.
Jak the Looney Alchemist wrote: I don't care. I'm not trying for an official answer. Any dm worth his salt will make a ruling and move on since it really is a very small factor. I was pointing out that the answer was not so clear cut and really needs elaboration, hence I stated that I was not trying to convince anyone. For some reason I feel compelled to challenge bold declarative statements that lack logical rational even if it is functionally meaningless to me.
Yes I do need a hobby. I know. I'll buy skyrim soon I promise.
Skyrim is awesome. But really, make sure to get it for PC. It's way better.
And grab the mods you like from skyrimnexus. There are some mods to the interface that drastically improve the gameplay on PC, and there's ThuumMic, which is awesome.
Finally, if you dont like plot-protected NPCs, there's two mods which in conjunction make it so all characters can be attacked and killed.
Lisa Stevens wrote: I always thought that it was:
"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women."
I understand when people get older it ends up involving things like "Hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper."
Klebert L. Hall wrote: Lisa Stevens wrote:
3. They can't sell items that are worth more than the maximum city value of the city that the item resides in.
What do you then do about the phenomenally expensive Major items that permanently clog the slots in your cities? Max city base value in Kingmaker defaults to 16,000gp, and even if it didn't it's trivial to randomly generate items so expensive that increasing BV high enough to sell them for BPs seems... unlikely.
-Kle. First off, I removed the 16,000 gp limit. It just seemed unnecessary since I changed the system. Yes, more expensive items do clog slots every so often. It just gives the characters an impetus to build up the city value. Also, there can occasionally be a random event where a big spender comes in from out of town and buys one of the expensive items, putting the build points into the coffers. My players view it as a challenge and not a hinderance. It seems to work for us.
-Lisa
In my campaign, I actually wanted to make the magic item economy to be less of a factor, so I am using the following rules and it seems to work very well for my needs.
1. We keep track of the actual gp value of items sold and when it reaches 4,000 gp, we turn that into 1 bp.
2. We sell items by the city and the players can sell 1 item per district they have in that city. They have to sell items in that particular city.
3. They can't sell items that are worth more than the maximum city value of the city that the item resides in.
4. Any item that is worth 1/10th the maximum city value or less is called an "auto sell" and that money is put directly into the gp totals I mention in #1 above.
This has led to a steady supply of bp from magic item sales, but the biggest way to get bp is still the Economy roll, which is what I wanted.
It has also encouraged the players to build up the city values in order to have a big enough economy to sell more expensive items.
-Lisa
I have completed Ignore Script (Version 3) that is compatible with Paizo's new page structure.
In order to use this script, you must be running Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.
Mozilla Firefox (Notes)
If you have Firefox, you will need to install the Greasemonkey Plug-In before you will be able to use the script.
Google Chrome (Notes)
If you have Chrome, you must configure it to allow the ignore list to be stored on your computer.
[Wrench Icon] -> Preferences (menu item) -> Under the Hood (sidebar) -> Privacy (section) -> Content Settings (button) -> Cookies (section)
This must be set to "Allow local data to be set (recommended)" or you need to click the "Manage Exceptions..." button to make an exception for paizo.com
Installation
Both Firefox and Chrome use the same ignore script. Click the link to the script and you should be prompted to install it.
paizo_ignore_v3.user.js
Usage
On the messageboards, where you typically see "Flag | List | Reply" you will now see "Ignore | Flag | List | Reply". If you click "Ignore", the person will be added to your personal ignore list. On future page loads, their posts will be automatically removed.
If you decide you would like to stop ignoring somebody, scroll down to the very bottom of the page and you will see something like this:
Ignored: DeathQuaker | KenderKin | TriOmegaZero |
Click on the name you wish to remove from the list. On future page loads, their posts will no longer be removed.
General Notes
Unlike previous versions, the posts do not disappear immediately. Clicking to ignore or stop ignoring will seem to do nothing, until the next time you load the page.
Unlike previous versions, this version will ignore the user and all aliases tied to that account. Ignoring the account or any alias will suffice to remove them all. (Due to this, your old ignore list may no longer work. Sorry about that.)
Like previous versions, this version is also licensed under the GNU General Public License v3+. In a nutshell, it means you are free to download, use, modify, and share (as long as you share-alike).
Evil Lincoln wrote: Cheating as a GM never solves player cheating.
Bullying as a GM won't solve player bullying.
I agree! Two Worgs don't make a Wight.
If you're anything like me, you dislike having to manually remove all the duplicate image files that get created when you do an image export from a paizo pdf.
I got tired enough of doing it that I wrote a little Python program do it for me.
Things you'll need to use it:
1) Install Python (any version)
2) Right mouse click on this link and do a save as. This downloads the python script. Save it to a folder that you'll remember! (Here's the file in github for you nerds out there.)
3) Open up a cmd prompt (Start->Run->"cmd").
4) Change directories to where you downloaded the script. For example, if I downloaded it to my Windows7 downloads folder, I'd type in "cd C:\Users\lhayhurst\Downloads".
5) Run the script by typing the following into your cmd prompt:
Quote: python imageDupeDetect.py --dir $FULL_PATH_TO_FOLDER where $FULL_PATH_TO_FOLDER is the fully qualified path of the folder you'd like to clean up. For example,
Quote: python imageDupeDetect.py --dir "C:\Users\lhayhurst\Documents\Paizo\Modules\3.5\J1_EntombedWithThePharaohs" --verbose 6) The script will then find all of the duplicate files in that directory and print them out. If you'd like to have the script delete them for you, then enter the following:
Quote: python imageDupeDetect.py --dir "C:\Users\lhayhurst\Documents\Paizo\Modules\3.5\J1_EntombedWithThePharaohs" --delete --verbose A few notes:
- If you pass it a top level folder, it will process all the folders underneath and including that folder; for example:
Quote: python imageDupeDetect.py --dir "C:\Users\lhayhurst\Documents\Paizo\Modules\3.5" --verbose would process all of the 3.5 modules.
- You can ask the program for help by typing in:
Quote: python imageDupeDetect.py --help Which prints out
Quote:
usage: imageDupeDetect.py [-h] --dir directory path [--delete] [--verbose]
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--dir directory path directory to recursively process
--delete if set, will delete duplicate images.
--verbose turn verbose mode on
- For you nerds out there, the script is a simple brute force solution, running a md5 check on all the files with the same bytes size.
Enjoy!
I think many of the people that are solidly in the pro-epic-rules camp are forgetting one simple fact when they say “you’re taking away our fun” or “our ideas can’t hurt your game”: all ideas do not hold equal merit. Before the flamethrowers come out, I’m not saying that wanting Epic-level content does not have merit or has less merit than not wanting it.
However, some game ideas, despite their appeal to some, introduce a detrimental effect to others. For example, if someone started posting things like this with the intent of the suggestions actually making their way into a product, I think most of those posting in this thread might object. (And yes, they’re intentionally ridiculous to make a point.)
1. “I want sparkly vampires and the majority of them aren’t evil, just misunderstood. And an emo-point mechanic should be added to the game and PFS play.”
2. “Somatic spell casting should require the caster to wiggle her nose, cross her arms and blink, or should be limited to human females. Oh, and synergistic magic should only be accessible to sisters in pairings of three.”
3. “PC character death should be impossible unless both the player & GM agree that the character dies for story reasons and/or the player has become bored with the character.”
4. “Conditions such as shaken, sickened, and fatigued only apply to NPCs and never apply to PCs.”
5. “PF Core, APs, and PFS should adopt epic point-buy as the standard method of character creation.”
6. “PCs are supposed to be tough. NPC attacks should never be successful against PCs. It reduces my fun when my character gets beat up.”
If someone says “no thanks” to any of those ideas, it’s not a personal attack on the person making the suggestion or an attempt to spoil their fun. It’s an expression of what they don’t want in their game.
If every “want” for the game is to be treated with equal merit, we’re going to end up with an inconsistent hodge-podge.
As for epic rules, chances are good that the pro-epic-rules camp is going to get what they want…at some point. For those of us who don’t want it, we’re not trying to deprive you of anything. But we’re not talking about house rules or a 3PP product. We’re talking about official RPG rules, probably a bestiary, and probably some number of adventures. We might be talking about an incremental impact to the setting. (How great an impact remains to be seen.) Some of us don’t want that. And since we’re customers of Paizo also, why aren’t we allowed to tell them what we do want, just like you’re doing?
Also, there’s a lot more precedent for epic-level content impacting other products and the setting than for it being a self-contained product. APG, UM, UC – all have seen elements introduced into modules, APs, campaign setting sourcebooks, and PFS play. Portions of those products exist solely b/c they will support those other products. Given how problematic epic-level content has been at times, both mechanically & thematically, some of us just don’t want it.
I’ve been down the road of “just ignore it if you don’t like it” with settings like Forgotten Realms, Scarred Lands, & Iron Kingdoms. However, there are elements that “can’t be undone” without effectively reaching a “nothing after this sourcebook” solution. As a subscriber to multiple Pathfinder and Golarion products, that’s NOT an attractive option to me. I don’t recycle campaigns, settings, and game systems every 12-18 mos. Once taking out the elements I don't like reachs 30-50% of a supplement, I have to start asking myself is that remaining 70-50% of content I will use is worth the price of the product in total. It often isn't.
So let’s stop acting as though “don’t want it, don’t buy it”, “you’re ruining my fun”, and “it won’t impact your campaign” are superior arguments when most of us are just saying “Dear Paizo, this is what we’d like & this is what we’re not crazy about/have little use for.” Otherwise, the glib “go play a system that already has epic-content like D&D (3e, 4e) or Exalted” becomes as valid as it is trite.
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.
Evil Midnight Lurker wrote: But they aren't mechanically identical. Student Survivalist is absolutely superior. That's actually an error then, and one that probably should have been caught in the development of the Player's Guide. But it wasn't.
Try this revised version of Student Survivalist, then:
Student Survivalist: Although she is seen as something of a mystery to most of Sandpoint’s citizens, Shalelu has never really seemed all that mysterious to you. Of course, that’s probably because she helped raise you. You have never quite figured out why Shalelu decided to treat you
as a younger sibling, but you certainly appreciated it— and you eagerly absorbed all of the tricks that she showed you over the years on how to fight more effectively against one type of creature. Pick one creature type from the list of favored enemies available to rangers. You gain a +1 trait bonus on attack rolls and damage rolls against that creature type. In addition, you gain a +1 trait bonus on all attack rolls against foes that threaten your mentor. NPC Choices: Shalelu.
Hey everyone,
The wording for concentration checks says that "when you make a concentration check, you roll d20 and add your caster level and the ability score modifier used to determine bonus spells of the same type." Does this count, per RAW, as an 'ability check' (and as such is able to be improved by, say, luckstones or pale green prism ioun stones)?
Thanks!
I have created an HTML and CSS based toolkit for making city maps. It uses the building images from the Kingmaker Player's Guide, some basic HTML and some moderately complex CSS. Using it requires minor editing of the HTML. You shouldn't need to touch the CSS.
For an example, check out the Vessilion Commerce District. Move your mouse over a building to see its label. Buildings can be rotated by clicking them; note that 1x2 buildings are free to rotate on top of existing buildings, which causes things not to work.
It works fine in Firefox and Opera. Chrome works, but has problems with cutting off larger buildings if you rotate them after the page has loaded. Safari I have not tested, but it probably has the same behavior as Chrome. IE 8 works mostly, and IE 9 should be able to handle it just fine (though I don't have an IE 9 handy).
To get a copy and for complete documentation on how to use it, go to:
http://atuan.com/city-map-toolkit/
A few buildings were not implemented for lack of suitable images.
Note that I am not GM'ing this campaign, and we've only just finished Part 1. I built this strictly on the information available in the Player's Guide and in the Book of the River Nations Exploration and Kingdom Building Guide. So if there's something important that I'm missing, it's likely because I don't know about it (and no spoilers, pls & thx!).
If you have bug reports, patches, or comments, post them below.
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