Sean, Minister of KtSP's page

I may want to publish one day. Or someone else might.

Or I may want to setup shop as a retailer one day and advertise all of the adventure paths to potential DMs.

Or I may just want a simple, universal term that I can use to search for a series of modules that encapsulate a campaign.

They may be killing off products developed in the future by their actions today.

At the risk of prompting a warning from the board ops, this is the most ridiculous argument I think I've ever heard. Copywriting the term "Adventure Path" holds no danger whatsoever of killing potential products.

And you claim to be a creative person. Maybe all this energy spent on whinging about this is perhaps better spent on coming up with an alternate term. Then you have no more problem.

But seriously, this is ridiculous.

Sorry to burst in on you, but how DO you do those lovely blue letters?

It'd be nice to have a way of highlighting my posts without CAPITALS, bold, or italics, all of which can give the unfortunate (wrong) impression that I'm 'shouting' or being 'sarcastic' (not that I'm not guilty of this, of course...).

It's the ooc tag that does that.

Well, my preference is to continue on as well. If we have to replace someone, quite possibly Kharid (as sad as that makes me), let's do so.

However, the next couple of weeks are going to be crazy for me. I was supposed to start a job two days ago, that would last two weeks. Snafus have pushed our start date until tomorrow at the earliest. This is bad, as it means we have an enourmous amount of work that has been crammed into a short amount of time, so for the next week or so, my life will be quite hectic.

I will continue to post updates as I can, but we might not get back into the swing of things for another week or so.

Let's wait until then before we make a final decision, and I will post an in-game update later this afternoon.

Sorry, things have gotten a little hairy at work. More importantly, it might be time for a discussion about the game. GentleGiant has said he's just not going to be able to post often, and Arctaris and Jonventus have had problems crop up in their lives, causing them to not be able to post as often.

I'd hate for the game to die out, as I think we've been doing some great stuff. I'd also hate to lose our original players and party, as I think you're good players, and these are great characters. But if we have to pick up new players, or walk away from the game, we should discuss it and figure out a plan, I think.

What do you guys think?

The 3.5 OGL cannot be revoked. Should Wizards decide not to do an OGL for the _next_ edition of the game (and it may not be the same friendly folks making that call next time--things change at big corporations quite frequently), the only option for a company like mine might be to go back to the 3.5 OGL... but if we helped to convert the audience to Hasbro's 4.0, 3.5 will _certainly_ not be a viable route several years down the road.

The 3.5 OGL preserves all of the "sacred cows" important to those of us who care about sacred cows. It is inherently _NOT_ a bad game. Its flaws are relatively easily fixed.

I think this is probably the most important part of the equation, and I think probably the most persuasive argument in favor of not following 4.0.

I suspect at least one publisher will decide to stick with it and be the rallying base for all of the players who are not ready to follow Hasbro down the path they're going.

Whether or not that company will be Paizo very much remains to be seen, but it very much remains an open question.

I think Paizo probably is the short list of publishers (that haven't already done so) that are in any kind of position to put out a 3.75 PHB. Another persuasive argument, I think.

We really appreciate everyone's feedback. This is a weird time for our company and for the industry in general, and your support means more to us than you know.

It seems like the gaming industry has always existed in a ephemeral and chaotic market. But the chaos is clearly on the rise again.

I strongly expect to be playing a very house ruled 3.5 by this time next year.

As Paizo goes, so goes my nation.

For what it's worth, I've already been considering writing my own house rules, and I'm nonplussed enough about 4.0 that I will likely only buy the 4.0 PHB, and gut it for whatever rules will be compatible with my own house rules. I have serious doubts I will ever run a 4.0 game with RAW.

That being said, I would likely play regularly with 3.Paizo rules, and be very interested in any rules/campaign books Paizo puts out.

Like the rest of the conversation on the board, it just kind of rolls along as people post, and you post when you can post (so it's almost like you're constantly gaming!).

Combat is a little tricky, and different groups will handle it differently. The few combats I've been through in the couple of games I'm playing, the players will each roll initiative, and the GM will use one initiative for the bad guys, and anybody can post their action for a round in any order, and the DM will go back and describe the action over the course of the round in the proper order, after everybody's done. Then you move on to the next round.

I know other groups will do things differently, but I can't speak to the specifics of that.

And how do they know ye arn't lying?

Seriously, we're all adults here, right? And those that aren't should know how to act like one.

More importantly, what's the point of cheating on die rolls? You're only making it less fun for yourself and others, but mostly yourself. and heck, if you never fail a roll, and always confirm your crits, people will start to clue in, and not want to play with you any more.

I like Invisible Castle, and try to use it as often as possible, but I'm fine with the honor system. What boggles my mind is that the honor system is shocking and unheard of. Maybe if we try and bring it back, some civility will return to the world. And maybe that starts with me trusting complete strangers talked to over the aether. That's what trust is about, isn't it?

This came up in a discussion with my RL game group last night:

A broken 3.x mechanic that I haven't seen mentioned in this thread?

Movement. In so many ways, movement is overly complicated and more or less broken under 3.5 rules. First off, the fact that every single unarmored human moves exactly as fast as every other unarmored human, provided there's no barbarians or monks in the mix, is stupid. So the only way to move fast is to be a monk or a barbarian? And if you take barbarian, you're just pretending, you don't really want to be fast. If you did, you'd be a monk.

Plus, once you start counting movement as a seperate action in combat (necessary to so strongly tie the game into the lucrative miniatures sales), you've set up idiotic and unrealistic combat situations. It is practically impossible under 3.x rules to move and do something else at the same time. Everybody moves to where they need to be, stops, and then performs their action, or vice versa. Even with Mobility, you're really moving, stopping, doing something, and then moving again.

I think changing that, by removing movement as an action in combat, and making it something you're either doing or not doing while doing something else, would go a long way toward extracting the video game/glorified miniatures game feel that seems will only be exacerbated under 4E.

As it is, I've taken to generally not using miniatures in my game any more. As much as I loved the idea of cheap, pre-painted plastic miniatures, I don't like the collectibility element (I walked away from Magic: The Gamer's Crack, and dangit I am NOT going back to that money suck). But more importantly, by using miniatures and a battlemat, and drawing out even so much as just the basic walls of the room and placing the bad guys in their proper squares, you've given your players more information at the start of a fight than any single real person in a real actual fight in the entire history of everything has ever had.

Fight's are visceral, thrilling, scary experiences, and I used to be able to feel that and capture that all the time when I used to play 1 & 2e way back when. We occsionally used miniatures to set up a vague picture of the battlefield to help fire our imaginations, but it was on the carpet, with no battlemat or grid of any kind, but we never actually moved the miniatures much, we did it all in our heads. I've never had a battle with miniatures and a battlemat thrill my players in that visceral way, but I've been able to do it pretty consistently when I don't use them.

Mostly I just dislike the squareness of the grid. Eveybody's always standing in a grid spot, instead of wherever. And five feet is a pretty large amount of space. Using meter-wide hex grid is better, but using your imagination is best.

I'd much prefer to keep the original party together as much as possible (and I'm hoping GG will turn up sooner or later), so unless it becomes a massive problem, I'd rather keep you, Arctaris.

I'm going to be getting busy again over the next couple of weeks, so let's just play it by ear, and see how it goes.

For my game, instead of giving Penkus' information through a written down handout (it didn't make any sense to me that he would stop to write all that crap down), I decided to have it delivered by Penkus himself, now an urchin covered, unique zombie*, waiting for the PCs at the way at the western end of the sea caves. Instead of the players finding a note from Penkus, I used the text of the note for Penkus' dialog instead. After the scene was over, he tried to eat the players, and they killed him.

*Unique zombie meaning that he had his memories, and could talk, but was otherwise crunch-identical to a normal zombie for the encounter.

I hope GentleGiant is healing up from his illness alright. Has anyone seen him around/know how to get ahold of him?

Here is mine, though it's so short that it probably doesn't need to be in a spoiler. Congrats and good luck to everybody who made it through. To you Paizo guys, thanks for the feed back about the submissions.

** spoiler omitted **

Vissigoth, your submission is very good on adventure detail, I think, but I'm sure the brevity was a problem. My understanding of publishing (and I'm pretty sure this holds true for Paizo as well) is that when a publisher gives you a word count, they want you to get as close to that word count as possible. Falling far short of a word count is as much a problem as going over. I think if you nail the word count exactly, you get a smiley-face sticker.

Obviously for an initial submission, the worry is not about filling up space, but I can see where they would be concerned that, if you can't fill 800 words up request, can they be sure you can fill 22,000 by the deadline? Especially in this case, as they freely admitted that Flight of the Red Raven was on an agressive schedule.

I'm pretty confident at this point that the main reasons I was rejected were the 80%/20% problem (too much back story, not enough adventure detail), and thus not providing enough information on encouters, challenges, and rewards. I know I followed directions properly, proofread it enough to eliminate spelling and grammar errors, and mostly stayed out of the passive voice, as well as hitting pretty close (without going over) to the 800 word mark (I have a feeling submissions that fell far short of the 800 word count were rejected for fear of the writer not being able to hit the word count). I may have run afoul of the IP problem, because I tried to include a reinvented wendigo as a new monster, but I'm still a little unclear as to how much that affected it. Knowing that my main problem was lack of detail (and their lack of time and inclination to provide mass feedback), I'm sure none of the guys can comment on how much my wendigo idea affected my submission.

Next time I'm definitely focussing more on PC perspective detail of the adventure idea.

I've never read or played SC, so I have no opinion on it, but I ran AoW, and was pretty generous during character creation. I was also pretty open about letting them play out of splatbooks. We started with EaBK, and ran through to the end of the AP. It took about a year and a half, and though we had quite a few character deaths (five, ultimately, I believe), there were no TPKs, and at least half the time, it felt like the PCs were just walking through the encounters. Of the last three modules in particular, the only encounter that really challeneged my PCs was the final showdown, and that was partly due to them activating a bunch of encounters close together, and thus facing more or less all of the biggest baddest NPCs in DoaNA at once.

I've been running a different group through ST, though we've only played through TiNH, and have been on a several month hiatus due to scheduling issues. That group made 1st level characters by the book, and they don't own any of the splatbooks, so I have a lot more control over what they have access to (none of them owns a DMG, either, so they have no access to magic item lists, and thus I have a lot more control over that, as well). I think everyone has been knocked below 0 at least once, or come close, but no one has died yet.

Reading RotRL, I'm very, very pleased. The biggest complain about AoW was the railroadiness of the plot. ST is better written to develop character motivations more organically (my players love Lavinia and hate Vanthus). In general, I've felt everyone involved with the Paizo adventures has learned, and gotter better, with every single adventure written. You guys listen to the feedback you get, and strive to improve with every project.

RotRL really feels like the best, most functional AP Paizo has put out yet, which is far more important to me as a DM than lethality or difficulty (though there's plenty of tough, interesting challenges). Burnt Offerings (and what I've seen of Skinsaw Murders) feels like they really leave the PCs options open, let them motivate themselves to progress in the adventure, and still keep a coherent, functional plot.

I have been kicking around an idea for something like this for my house rules.

As it is, I'm now cobbling together some grim and gritty house rules, similar to Grimcleaver's system.

Double check it for non-alphanumeric characters, Eyebite. I'd wager that's the cause.

EDIT: FWIW, your submission was really good.

Reading the posted submissions that were rejected, I'm okay with being in that crowd. The best ten must be fantastic.

Here's a question I'd like to see answered about the submission process, if Mike, Jason and Jeremy are amenable to answering:

Did you have a preference for submissions that gave simple (but creative) bullet point answers to the questions you asked in the guidlines, or submissions that tried to frame the answers in a narrative, or something sort of in between?

(Also, congrats, Hill Giant)

Congratulations, Evil Genius. Good job. And way to live up to your board name, I suspect.

Some good stuff here. And this is the stuff that didn't make the cut.

Just comparing it to what everybody else here did, I can think of a whole bunch of things I wish I'd done differently, but all in all, I'm happy enough to collect my first rejection letter (everybody's got to start somewhere...), that I can't get too worked up about it.

And I'm looking forward to a kick-butt module.

Congratulations, Mothy. Good job.

My submission:

REJECTED!

Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to the guys for what was surely a difficult winnowing process.

Do you have any plans to include any types of religious conflict in Golarion. Particularly anything where groups deny or refute the existence of other groups. Perhaps even people who don't believe in the gods?

Okay, I have done my best to act casual during all this, but the guys (love 'em to death) are really trying to make us all explode. I'm sure of it.

Sorry guys. I got waylaid by a stomach bug, among other things.

Right, back to the game.

You see Sean, Fake Healer has stumbled on my real problem with this. The player was instructed to follow the rules on page 169 of the DMG. I hadn't realized that the rule also stated...

It's all good, Watcher! I get what you were looking for now. And yeah, I think your player pulled a fast one on you.

And I get the bad cliche thing, which is why I still think, if you were to let him keep the character he created, that instead of PCs being mean to him, they should just ignore him and treat him as bland and unispiring.

But really, I'm on board with Fakey, and think you should have the guy redo his character. And even make it clear to players that if they use CHA as a dump stat, they have to play it accordingly, or you'll I don't know, arbitrarily switch his low charisma with one of his other scores, to more properly reflect the CHA he's playing.

But yeah, Fakey has the right idea.

But what happens when you hit that disconnect when a player just doesn't have his character act in any way that isn't completely pleasant?

I suppose one could just make people react negatively, with the PC's evey intention misunderstood and taken poorly.. but.. heh.. what if it is intended to be a 1st to 15th level campaign? After a while that becomes an exercise in dues ex machina, and a tired gag.

My point: you're absolutely right, but everyone has to play their part or you break the suspension of disbelief.

I still think your best bet, if your player is not roleplaying a 6 cha the way you think they should is not to have NPCs react negatively to them, but to simply have them ignore the PC, or otherwise react as if the PC is utterly bland and forgettable.

The PC's player can play as suave, charming, well spoken, and nice as he wants, but NPCs just sort of have a "meh" reaction to it.

Have you ever met someone who was nice and well spoken, but utterly bland and forgettable depite that? That's the NPC reaction I think you should shoot for.

Are you trying to suck up to Jason with your avatar, Talion?

He doesn't really role-play a charisma of six, and I don't really have the NPCs treat him as if he has a sub-normal charisma. I don't want to in fact, it seems sort of dumb when characters are supposed to be heroes.

I don't really understand this. What do you mean, you don't want the NPCs to treat him as if he has a low charisma, because he's a hero?

Your player can role play the character any way he want, but the NPCs need to treat him as if he has a low charisma, which he does.

If nothing else, they just ignore him, and treat him as bland and unintersting, no matter how he plays the character.

And this means you don't have to make the character butt ugly, or have all the NPCs treat him as if he's not a hero (I still don't understand what that means). They just treat him as uncharismatic, which he is.

I think a lot of people just don't have a very good understanding of charisma, and what charisma is.

You can be a big jerk, and still be charismatic. Mal Reynolds from Firefly is a good example of this. He's a very caustic, hot headed person, who does not play well with others, but still inspires people to follow him, because he's got decent charisma.

And charisma is utterly unrelated to heroics. Hitler had a metric boatload of charisma, yet was utterly evil.

Looks have nothing to do with it, either. Think of how many "beautiful people" you know of who are as intersting as cardboard, and how many plain-looking people who are interesting and commanding, under the right circumstances.

Charisma has nothing to do with looks or heroism, and only somewhat to do with personality.

Although the original poster is right that if someone were to do something like this, the timing is now (or at least very soon), I agree that it's not really in the majority of people's best interest (both Paizo as well as the community because I believe the industry thrives with a more unified system - yes, I drank that Kool-Aid from Ryan Dancey years ago).

Except that the biggest problem with this whole "THE TIME IS NOW FOR PAIZO TO GRAB THE REIGNS!" is that it's completely glossing over the realities of publishing. If the "time is now" that actually means the "time" was six months to a year ago.

If Paizo has done no work on such a project, that means that the only way they'd have any hope of putting out a 3.Paizo before 4e hits the shelves is by dumping their entire production schedule between now and then, and focusing solely on putting out a book for the new system. And even then, they'll be lucky if they can get it on shelves after but relatively close to the release of 4e, which doesn't do them any good.

Gaming books don't take zero time to create, design and produce. I know the game is filled with magic, but this world has no magic publishing and funding fairies to make books happen.

However cool it would or wouldn't be for Paizo to put out a 3.straighttrippin edition of D&D that kicks 4e's a$$ and allows Paizo to totally pwnz0r WotC 4eVaH! It's. Not. Happening. Total pipe dream.

Okay, keeping the sun off your kid's face, I can understand.

You can probably pick them up at an auto store, or maybe order them out of a catalog. I'm not really sure how you get them. But anyway, they're typically stick figure representations of people or children, presumably to let random passersby know that you have a family. You stick them on the back window of your SUV.

I never knew why people put those stupid "Baby on Board" things in their car windows either.

Even if the US leaves, the war will follow. Remember Alqaeda followed us there, not the other way arround.

First, I want to reiterate that I don't entirely disagree with your stance or many of your arguments, SK, but I had to make a responses to this comment.

First is that I generally think AlQaeda is a next to useless term to use when discussing the war in Iraq. It's too fluid and amorphous, and the idea of defeating AlQaeda is very difficult to distinguish properly from the vision of winning I mentioned above -- killing or imprisoning every nutjob who thinks that lethal explosions are the highest form of divine offering.

The second is that, while I agree that just pulling out and leaving the country to rot is a bad idea in just about every possible way, defending our continued presence there with any variation of the "we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" argument is a fundamentally unsound position. There is nothing about our presence in Iraq, in any way, shape or form, that is preventing another terrorist attack on our soil.

Gary, I now have access to my PDFs. Thanks for taking care of that.

Aren't you supposed to be on vacation, James? You have nothing better to do with your time than post on the forums?

Silly James. Go do a fun thing, or something.

Guinness
Grolsch
Kirin and Kirin Ichiban

Sean, Minister of KtSP wrote:

::cries over being so far back in the queue::

I'll weep with you as well. Although, hopefully it is due to this....

Gary Teter wrote:

Sean, thanks for your post -- seriously! I just went looking to see if you'd gotten access to your PDF yet, and discovered that you hadn't. While exploring what was going on with your subscription I discovered a bunch of subs that had the exact same problem as yours.

Fixing that is my top priority for tomorrow.

As much as I really don't want to wait till tomorrow, at least I'll get it. Soon?!

Huh! Gary's post is invisible to me. Thanks for reposting it, mevers!

Pushing Daisies is high on my list this season.

I kinda want to check out Bionic Woman, but haven't managed it yet.

Other shows have piqued mild interest, but I haven't been able to see too much.

I've got a bunch of those stickers on my car, but without the names. There's a man, a woman, about 3 little boys, 5 little girls, 2 dogs, and about 8 cats.

People always tell me "Wow, you've got a really big family, huh?"

And I respond "Hm? Oh, heh, no... that's a kill board."

Ha! Well, without the names (whether as a kill board or a depiction of your family) I'm considerably less bothered about those things. It's with the names attached that it veers wildly into irresponsible parenting for me. Especially when I've seen nicknames for kids used.

Last Rogue, do you have a current copy of the Writer's Market? In addition to helpful listings, they also fill the book with lots of good advice for submitting manuscripts and how to follow up on them in the proper way.

A friend of my stepmom found a guy that she'd fallen madly in love with, was close to marrying, and giving him access to a lot of her finances. I even met the guy. He came across as quite nice and charming.

She came to find out the guy had served quite a bit of time in prison, and had a thing for duping women into giving him enough access to rip them off.

She very quickly arrange to invite him over one night when she had several friends present, bust him, and forcibly eject him from her life, in no uncertain terms. She had to change her locks and phone numbers, and otherwise rearrange a big chunk of her life.

There's scary bad people out there, and they will take any and every opening you give them. People need to be more careful, and the sheer stupidity of those car stickers I mentioned is astounding.

It's a complicated problem, which we no doubt made exponentially more complicated. We need to find a way to extricate ourselves, but I do think leaving precipituously would make things worse yet again.

I'm afraid, however, that there's no such thing as "winning," in this situation. What does "winning" look like? Killing or imprisoning every kook who thinks that God or Allah favors lethal explosions as divine offerings above all else? That's unfeasable at best, criminal bordering on genocidal at worst.

So what kind of winning does that leave? I don't know, but staying without a vision of what that win looks like invites just as much disaster as leaving with our tail between our legs.

I'm glad I don't have to be the one making these decisions, but the people currently making them need to be pointed toward the door and handed their collective hats, and let someone, anyone, else give it a shot.

::cries over being so far back in the queue::

In a nutshell, the legal reasons to impeach Bush are there, but politically, to impeach Bush would set a clear legal precedent that US Presidents cannot do such things in the future.

Frankly, I think the bigger legal fear is that bringing such an impeachment case and attempting to challenge these Presidential usurpations/abuses is that doing so would actually set a clear legal precedent that the US President can, in fact, continue to do these things long into the future.

I can see your viewpoint, doppleganger, but for me, every stat block, background, and personality I don't have to come up with myself is that much less of my valuable free time I don't have to spend prepping for an adventure.

Oddly enough, I'm excited, but not overly tense. Truth be told, I don't expect to be able to compete against most of you. Regardless, it'll be a nice learning experience.

Same here.

And frankly, I'm excited enough about entering that I'm perfectly happy collecting a rejection letter (this being my first ever submission). Though I would much rather make it into the final ten, of course....