Taliesin Hoyle's page

Dear Sirs.

A humble suggestion. Use a chat client. cut and paste a log file into the Paizo forums. That way your game can be considerably more fluid and you will still contribute here.
Have fun.

Hoummous and Tahina with a pita.
Greek salad with Calamata olives.
Roquefort dressing on an Italian Salad.
Caesar Salad.
Iceberg lettuce with slices of mozzarella, tomatoes and a drizzle of olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
Japanese seaweed wrap with watercress and sashimi.
Slices of abalone and crab on crushed ice with peppadews.

I love the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk equally, so in my game, I use both. The two are both continents on Toril. Deities are all valid, and are often rivals or allies. I like to keep all options open. Travel between the two is mostly by portal or moonbridge. Creatures from Athas and Eberron find their way through the Plane of Shadows about as often as monks from Kara Tur do.

The thing that most excites me about 3.5 is that class becomes a template. I start with an idea for a character then take a pinch, snifter or ladleful of various classes. I am playing a rogue/fighter who gets into a grapple then sneak attacks using the knife fighter feat. The fact that I used the fighter levels to get the feats and the rogue levels to get the precision cutting is irrelevant. I call his class Butcher. The character would think it strange to be called fighter, and insulting to be called thief. To him, he is a butcher by trade and will retire into the trade again when his home is safe. My gist is simply that class is a matter of perception for our characters and a rules handle for ourselves.

I had a very close friend that I grew up with. We lived in South Africa and were both poor. We spent a few tens of thousands of hours playing a variety of roleplaying games. His Fighter Thief was involved in a low fantasy thieves guild takeover that took us two years to conclude. We eventually stopped using dice altogether, relying on trust in DM judgement. One on one is still my preferred game style. Pure story, absolute focus and a lack of compromise in character stand out as three of the signal virtues of solo play. He is now strung out on heroin and cocaine, he has burned all his bridges and is now living from fix to fix. Best player I ever had and I have been playing since 1979.

This is my first post on the paizo forums so if there are any unwritten rules of ettiquette here that I am unaware of, please let me know.

The use of the greyhawk world as a core world has in some ways limited the scope of Greyhawk. It seems intended to be the vanilla setting and this has led to somewhat of a sacrosanct feel to the setting. Forgotten realms and other settings are able to be far more idiosyncratic and diverse because they are not tethered as closely. I love Greyhawk and have since the box. I welcome a drop to a third party and just hope it isn't White Wolf.

I currently use a hybrid system of Greyhawk and the Realms joined for millenia by portals so travel between them is routine.
It certainly saves time to not have to convert setting details. I found that it is very hard to make the players enjoy the Greyhawk setting in its own right. they seem to far prefer the Realms.