Member of the Ninth Battalion

Thorri Grimbeard's page

61 posts. No reviews. No lists. No wishlists.


RSS

1 to 50 of 61 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | next > last >>

Given that I'm playing a Drow in a Wrath of the Righteous campaign, yes, I think this would potentially be a memorable plot development, if the GM built up to it. By which I mean, the process of redemption of the drow character would have to be something both the player and the GM emphasized before that point.


MagusJanus wrote:
Thorri, you make a very, very excellent point.

Thank you. I enjoy your posts. For what it's worth, I agree that the solution to my alleged discrepancy between peoples' treatment of the tiger cubs and the "anthropomorphized tiger"/"orc" babies is to treat the tiger cubs better. I feel strongly that our society treats animals much more cruelly than is "right". In the unlikely event that I ever run a level 20 mythic game, and it's a homebrew where orcs are "inherently evil", I might very well have an adventure where the PC's have a chance to break the enchantment that is making the world's orcs "inherently evil".

"Good" PC's often act as some combination of soldier/cop/wildlife control officer.

Weirdo wrote:

We've only been studying sentience / consciousness scientifically for a few decades. Pretty sure it took people longer than that to figure out how to properly measure, say, electricity. Just because we haven't got a solid empirical theory of sentience doesn't mean it definitely doesn't exist.

Though I wouldn't be surprised if we did figure out how to measure it and a good chunk of the animal kingdom turned out to be sentient. Not just primates. Crows are crazy smart. Maybe even octopi.

Oh, I completely agree with all of that. I'll go further and say that I think it's a safe bet that orcas would turn out to be sentient. But, as things stand at the moment, we each know ourself to be sentient, we infer that other human beings are sentient, and we can only guess at whether members of other species are sentient. I don't think that's a good basis for making our perception of sentience a prerequisite for treating other species decently.

Annabel wrote:
It ends up being that you just can't portray Orcs as bloodthirsty monsters and interesting people at the same time.

Now THAT is certainly true!


5 people marked this as a favorite.
MagusJanus wrote:
Do you have a quote for me from a different book that backs what you say?

A quick Google search showed that real-world gorillas use tools. That's what I meant.

But, to try to phrase my points better, this is a fantasy game, and orcs and the others are imaginary creatures. So a GM can say "I'm following canon, which says X, and based on that I'm going to say orcs are not inherently evil", and that's fine. Or a GM can say "I don't find inherently evil humanoids plausible, so none of the 'races' in my game will be inherently evil" and that's fine too. But it's also fine for a GM to say "In my house setting, 'orcs' are 'inherently evil' (which means, for example, that they think that killing other sentients is amusing, are incapable of seeing anything wrong with it, and regardless of their upbringing they will end up trying to kill innocents for fun), so there's nothing wrong with killing orc pups, which shouldn't be mistaken for 'babies'" and that would also be OK. Arguing "a humanoid species that we can communicate with that is inherently evil is impossible, and if you play that way at your table you're doing it wrong" is silly when you're talking about a completely imaginary species in a completely imaginary setting, and especially when you consider that "evil" is a social construct.

Arguing "a 'race' that was actually sociopathic/evil like that would kill itself off in a few generations", well, I tend to agree with that, actually. And I find it hard to imagine a species that's good enough at tool use to create and use swords and plate armor but isn't "intelligent" evolving in reality. But, fantasy.

D&D/Pathfinder's scale of intelligence is not realistic at all. But, then again, this is a game where cheetahs use claw attacks.

It's kind of funny that we have some people explaining post-structural theory in the same thread as other people are outraged that anyone should think that "sentience" exists as something other than a social construct. A very self-serving social construct, I might add.


MagusJanus wrote:
Intelligence is a statistical score in Pathfinder. Find me a living creature from a Paizo book capable of using tools that has an Int less than 3.

Gorillas. Int 2, use tools.


Zhayne wrote:
Thorri Grimbeard wrote:
MagusJanus wrote:
The orcs themselves are actually similar to number of human cultures that existed in real life.

And here I was thinking that orcs are imaginary. Silly me.

It's actually pretty funny. I expect none of you would call it evil if a party of PC's killed an man-eating tiger. If it turns out she's a tigress with cubs, I doubt many of you would think that killing the cubs, or leaving them to starve, would be an ethical issue. In real life we often put tiger cubs down due to lack of homes deemed "suitable" for them, even though most tigers that are kept by people who know what they're doing don't hurt people, and there are skilled people who would like to keep tigers but aren't allowed to. But anthropomorphize that tiger, make it stand on two legs and wield tools using its opposable thumbs and give it human-like vocal cords, and all of a sudden it's "killing babies ZMG!"

Yeah, heaven forbid that sentience should enter into the equation. *reverse epic double eye-roll with a half-twist*

Sentience isn't a thing. There are no scientific measurements of "sentience". Intelligence is less badly defined, but it's still something greyscale, not something a creature has or doesn't have. You (and when I say "you" here I am referring to all of our society) are basically making a circular argument where you define creatures that look sufficiently like "us" as "sentient" and then say it's "evil" to kill the young of "sentient" creatures. But there's no inherent reason, at least in a fantasy world, why a creature couldn't be capable of (instinctively?) using tools but otherwise not having higher "intelligence" than a tiger (which are actually pretty bright).


Set wrote:

Of the 'good' (approved for PC use, unlike those icky orcs and goblins) races, dwarves and gnomes specifically have race hatred built into their game mechanics.

They hate goblinoids and / or kobolds with such intensity, that even populations of those races who have never seen a goblinoid or kobold, due to their location, train their children fanatically in techniques to kill them.

And the 'evil' races? Goblins, orcs, hobgoblins, kobolds, even the downright malicious ones like bugbears that get off on scaring people to death? No race hatred bonuses at all. No parents waking them up in the night and drilling them to fight their hated racial enemies.

Let's see:

Pathfinder Bestiary wrote:

[Hobgoblins] generally need little reason to declare war, but more often than not the reason is to capture new slaves - life as a slave in a hobgoblin lair is brutal and short, and new slaves are always needed to replace those who fall or are eaten.

...
Slaves with analytical minds are quite valued, and as such raids on dwarven cities commonplace.

Yeah, those hate-filled dwarves, the only reason they're training their children in hobgoblin-fighting techniques is because they're racist. It certainly couldn't be because they're afraid that their children might get eaten by your oh-so-tolerant hobgoblins.

I think you're being pretty disingenuous here.

1st and 2nd editions had many references to orcs, hobgoblins, etc.'s hatred of particular races (e.g. "If elves are nearby, hobgoblins will attack them in preference to any other troops because of the great hatred they bear."-Gary Gygax, Monster Manual (1978) p. 53), but those are mostly though not all gone in 3rd edition, I presume because of space restrictions.


MagusJanus wrote:
The orcs themselves are actually similar to number of human cultures that existed in real life.

And here I was thinking that orcs are imaginary. Silly me.

It's actually pretty funny. I expect none of you would call it evil if a party of PC's killed an man-eating tiger. If it turns out she's a tigress with cubs, I doubt many of you would think that killing the cubs, or leaving them to starve, would be an ethical issue. In real life we often put tiger cubs down due to lack of homes deemed "suitable" for them, even though most tigers that are kept by people who know what they're doing don't hurt people, and there are skilled people who would like to keep tigers but aren't allowed to. But anthropomorphize that tiger, make it stand on two legs and wield tools using its opposable thumbs and give it human-like vocal cords, and all of a sudden it's "killing babies ZMG!"


Pirate Rob wrote:
Just so I'm clear, is there some specific pet race you are unwilling to play without? Or is 10 races just not enough diversity for you? Or is it something else?

It's not the amount of diversity, it's about perceived "fairness". I'd be totally OK with a campaign that said "no races outside the core book". And a few people having access to exotic races because they gave a couple of hundred dollars to charity isn't a problem either.

But if the society gives people access to exotic races, I want access to the specific exotic stuff that I want, too. In my particular case, that's drow, which is obviously never going to happen in PFS*. Again, I could easily live without the option of making a drow if everyone is similarly limited, but giving the people around me a thousand options that aren't in the core rules while denying me the particular option I actually want is insulting and unfriendly and I'll save us both trouble and not play in your campaign.

(Privilege for people who have played more is already built into the system in the form of access to higher level characters.)

* I'm aware of the canon, I just think the canon's dumb. If I were an American game company that prided myself on being socially progressive, my canon wouldn't include the trope "there's a subrace of elves that are distinctive in that 1. they all have black skin, and 2. they're universally evil." But I digress.


June Soler wrote:
Boons are not a deterrent to new players, actually they are an incentive to get more involved in the campaign.

Just dropping by here, not a member of PFS, but I thought it relevant to mention that the reason I'm not interested in PFS is that I took one look at the racial restrictions and decided I didn't want to touch PFS with a 10' pole because of them. You have no way of knowing how many new players boons deter, because we'll just never join a game.


Paladin of Baha-who? wrote:
Human body hair has nothing to do with keeping warm, even the most hirsute person is too lightly haired to do that.

As a Canadian with a thick beard (that's been field tested at -40) you're very wrong. The beard complements clothing very effectively.


Guy Humual wrote:
It's not till we have monotheist religions taking over that we get the more familiar patriarchal influence. Before that we have many myths and even female deities of war but as to their actual influence I can't really say.

The Odyssey is the most patriarchal work I've ever read (although the Iliad certainly gives it competition!) Well before monotheist religions took over.


Guy Humual wrote:
The key thing to remember about history is that people really aren't that different over time, so if 14% of the total US army is female it's safe to assume that there have always been women interested in joining the military throughout history.

There is a big difference between now and then. Women in agricultural societies used to get pregnant A LOT, and deliberately postponing pregnancy until their thirties was pretty much unheard of. And before gasoline vehicles, serving in an army meant lots of hiking (riding if you were rich) in between camping rough. So it wasn't realistic for a woman who might be pregnant five (or more) times in her twenties to keep up with an army that would be hiking as fast as taller, not-pregnant men who didn't have to care for multiple toddlers could march.


2 people marked this as a favorite.

According to The Inner Sea World Guide, slavery is "commonplace" in Rahadoum. That makes it unambiguously evil by any normal standard. They have their "reasons" why? I'm sure they do. So did the Confederacy, apartheid South Africa, late Republican Rome, and any number of other states.

It's amazing to me how willing people are to make excuses for commonplace slavery because the slavers are "atheists".

James Sutter wrote:
Also, it should be noted that religious folks aren't necessarily executed.

Oh, I'm quite sure we're not. Again, slavery is "commonplace". Where do you think they get so many slaves from? Not by restricting potential slaves to atheists.

James Sutter wrote:
Would I immigrate to Rahadoum? Hell no--I want all that divine magic to keep my PCs healthy and happy. Yet I can also see the nobility in their mission (if not their method)

Yeah. You see, I wouldn't (voluntarily) immigrate to Rahadoum because I wouldn't want to be tortured and enslaved or killed. That you see "nobility" in a "mission" not to end oppression, but to become the oppressor, while dealing torture and slavery to those less fortunate than yourself, as long as it's "atheists" killing and enslaving "religious" people...


A couple of things. I've done the "giving nice stuff to a lover" thing (including the "giving a lover a gift you can't afford" thing), and it feels much like buying myself nice stuff - it's a pleasure, not a sacrifice at all. It's not at all like giving something valuable (to you) to strangers, or (worse) giving to people whom I find unpleasant. Now, if Irabeth had sold the sword to pay for something for Horgus... I'd be impressed by that. But selling it to pay for something for her lover is not significantly different in my eyes than selling it to pay for something for herself. Which doesn't make her bad, it just makes her human.

The reason I wouldn't make Irabeth a paladin is that I see "paladin" as a job. In the real world there are jobs that only people who are passionate about them do well, and "paladin" seems to me to be that sort of job. Irabeth didn't come across to me as being passionate about being a paladin (possibly because she was an NPC with limited stage time). That's all.


Kirth Gersen wrote:
Granted, "infravision" didn't work that way when Gygax made up the drow; based on their jet-black skin and white hair, I can only assume he was thinking of a photographic negative of a (presumably) pale-skinned, raven-haired elf. But in terms of "why didn't 3.0 or 3.5 or PF change it!", the answer I gave makes sense.

Perhaps. I've also heard that the Drow were based on Burrough's "Black Martians", who are apparently a subterranean race of goddess-worshipping black-skinned Martians who periodically raid the surface world.


The alignment system comes from the works of Moorcock et al. (Law/Chaos) and traditional folklore, Tolkien, et al. (Good/Evil). Tolkien and Moorcock wrote during/relatively soon after the World Wars and they see their universes as wrapped up in universal wars between good/evil or law/chaos respectively. They also portray good/evil and law/chaos as physical forces in their universes, in the way that, say, gravity is a physical force in our universe. That's the context Gygax and Arneson were working in when they developed D&D. Whether good/evil/law/chaos make sense to you or not depends on whether you envisage those things as being true about your game universe or not.

So if I'm GM'ing a Pathfinder campaign, there's a backdrop of a cosmic war between good and evil, and a cosmic war between law and chaos. You can pick sides in either or both of those wars, and if you do it comes with benefits, but it's also hard to conceal it from those fighting for the other side. Or you can try to remain aloof, or you can try to play both sides against the other. The sides aren't symmetrical: some of them have distinct technologies. "Paladin" is an example of a technology that's only been developed by one of the sides: the other alignments don't have paladins in the same way that Axis "alignments" don't have advanced equipment for anti-submarine warfare in games set in WWII. And while there's a certain overlap between the alignment you're on and modern concepts of morality, it's not hard and fast.

Lemmy wrote:
You can't have grey moral areas where everything is objectively Good or Evil. So many classical plots and character archetypes become really dumb thanks to alignment system, like a deluded villain who sees himself as a hero, how does he not know he's evil when a 1st level cleric can tell that he is, in fact, objectively evil.

So, by this logic, Soviets in an American Cold War era movie couldn't be deluded villains who see themselves as heroes. How do they not know they are the bad guys when a simple glance at their uniforms shows that they are, in fact, objectively Soviets?

Just like those Communists think the Communists are the good guys, in my world the Drow (for example) think of themselves as the good guys. Sure, the spell the surface elves call "Detect Evil" pings when applied to a typical Drow. So? To the Drow, that doesn't mean "you're a bad guy" any more than "Detect Soviet Uniform" tells the Cold War era Soviet that he's a bad guy. To me, "Detect Good" and "Detect Evil" are, from the points of view of characters inside the game universe, "Detect Our Side"/ "Detect Their Side" and "Detect Their Side"/"Detect Our Side" respectively.

Lemmy wrote:
How can I make a surprise-villain who trick the heroes into trusting him when the Paladin can simply say "Nope. He's Evil. Let's not trust him." with 100% precision as soon as he meets the guy for the 1st time?

I don't know. How could the writers of novels and films about WWII make surprise villains who trick the protagonists into trusting them when the protagonists can simply say "Nope. He's wearing a German uniform. Let's not trust him." with 100% precision as soon as they meet the guy for the first time?

I like the alignment system in Pathfinder. I like that it effects the game in terms of mechanics. To the point where, if Paizo took away those mechanical effects, I'd stop playing Pathfinder. I certainly enjoy playing RPG's without alignment, but those RPG's have been designed without alignment from the bottom up, and IMO they do it a lot better than an alignment-less Pathfinder would.


For what it's worth, if I were a GM running this I'd make Irabeth a LG fighter who used to be a paladin. To me, a paladin selling their holy sword (for something that's not life and death and for the benefit of their own close family, not the well-being of the community) is making an incredibly powerful statement that they're just not really interested in being a paladin. YMMV, obviously, and if a player wanted to play their paladin that way I'd talk with them about it rather than depaladining their PC, but I'd definitely yank an NPC paladin's paladinhood for it.

So Klokk's not alone. On the other hand my GM had the same opinion as Matt Thomason when I talked to him about this. It really depends on how you envision paladins and also on how you envision holy swords. In Paizo-world, selling a holy sword seems about the moral equivalent of selling a used car in the real world (i.e. not morally significant), whereas I see it as a member of the armed forces selling advanced weaponry that's been entrusted to them, but isn't actually theirs, on the black market.

But both paladins and holy swords are fiction so there's no right or wrong here, just a matter of taste.


Kazred wrote:

I agree with you regarding Greyhawk. By happenstance rather than by design, Oerth is as much of a blank slate as Golarion. If I felt the itch to convert an old school setting to PFRPG, Greyhawk would be at the top of my list.

As you pointed out, Krynn and Middle Earth have basically the same issue. The canon heroes loom so large, that the setting simply can't withstand their removal. I experienced this first-hand trying to run MERP back in the day. It ended up feeling like crappy fan fiction. I don't really feel this way about Pathfinder's Iconics. They seem more like examples than actual in-canon characters, and I suspect this is intentional.

With FR, the issue is less the canon characters than it is the canon itself. It moves and changes independently of individual campaigns, which makes any attempts to keep things relatively in-canon impossible. The setting has become over-documented, and has been retconned far too many times across too many different editions... there's no white space left for individual GMs.

That's fair. While you can make FR anything you want, if you do that things won't work right out of the box any more.


Jessica Price wrote:
Not really -- historically, the economic and alliance aspects have been just as, if not more, important.

You can't separate the economic and alliance aspects from the procreation aspect. If two kings make an agreement, how can they be held to it? Well, if king A marries king B's daughter, then king B is helping his own grandchildren every time he helps king A. If king B's daughter dies without issue, the surety on the alliance is gone.


5 people marked this as a favorite.

As a "confirmed bachelor" who is straight, I think it's pretty ignorant to go around assuming you can tell the orientation of other people, particularly strangers and casual acquaintances, based on whether they're in a relationship or not.

Oh, and the real world association of "confirmed bachelor" and "gay", to the extent that it holds, holds because gays were banned from marrying until very recently. In a world where gays were not discriminated against, there's no reason to think gays would be more likely to be single than straight men. So the proportion of "confirmed bachelors" that are straight in such a world would be similar to the proportion of adult males who are straight.


Well that sounds odd, considering what happened in our game, but makes sense. But yeah, he left very early in our trip through the Underdark - I think we were still level 1 - and I can see that the adventure would have seemed a lot less focused on the two female NPC's if he'd stuck around.

"the possibility of them dieing" That is what I thought, too, but that didn't stop him running off alone in the middle of the Underdark.


Odraude wrote:
Having actually read the module, I feel like your GM dropped the ball hardcore there. There's quite a bit of character development between Horgus and the Riftwarden and it seems he over did it with Horgus as well as the importance of Irabeth. Also, to me at least, Horgus has the most compelling, if not tragic, backstory of all the NPCs in Book 1. If there's a weak NPC, it's probably the Riftwarden. But even then, he has some time to shine.

Horgus would be "the rich guy"? Thing is, from reading what people have to say here, it sounds like the main mechanism for delivering the back story to the players was supposed to be the interaction between Horgus and the other main NPC's such as Anevia. But because Horgus left our group right at the start that never happened in our game. (I don't doubt that Horgus has a detailed back story! but we heard nothing of it. If he leaves early, you won't.)

James Jacobs has posted elsewhere that there's supposed to be a possibility of Horgus leaving the group because keeping Horgus in the group is intended as a test of the group's goodness. Rewarding "goodness" is something that this sort of RPG has traditionally been weak at so attempts to do so are awesome; forfeiting rewards because you don't accomplish something is fine; and it's not a fault of our GM that something that's supposed to be a possibility happened. But if I'm right and Horgus' presence is central to the exposition of the back story, then having a possibility of him leaving, with no backup plan for how exposition is going to happen if that happens, is a design flaw. Or if I'm wrong and Horgus' presence is not actually central to the exposition of the back story, then yes, our GM dropped the ball. But I've played with about 20 GM's in my time and he's one of the better ones.

DiegoV wrote:
I have only read it, not played it. But I felt all the NPCs were given interesting background information. I also never got the impression that any of the NPCs were more central to the story than the PCs.

That makes sense. I was exaggerating for effect about the NPC's (although I'd still say Irabeth was as central as the PC's). I also think it's fair to say that I got a distorted view of the big picture of the background information. I know from GM'ing some of "Kingmaker" that it's normal for the players to miss some (much) of the background story at the best of times, so that's to be expected. Since the gay couple are two of the three main NPC narrators, it's going to be easier for players to hear about their back story than any of the others.

Knowing that there's a lot of back story that we didn't hear changes my view on this a lot. I don't think it's anti-LGBT to think "the only NPC's in the module who had a back story were the gay couple, and that's a problem." I would have thought that just as much a problem if they'd been straight, too. I expect there to be more than 2 NPC's with back stories in a Paizo adventure. Obviously that's not what Paizo intended. I now think that Paizo just didn't think through the implications of Horgus leaving on the exposition of the story.


KSF wrote:
If you find it does not, why does another agenda connected to diversity of representation, in this case of LGBT people, provoke such a reaction?

I think it's badly handled here.

Example of handling "diversity of representation" well (IMO): when they said of one of their previous AP's "There's a potential romance in here, if a player wants to take it that way, and if so, make the NPC whatever orientation is needed to make that romance possible." If I were really against representation of LGBT people, shouldn't I be against that too, when actually I think it's great?

In our campaign, the rich guy (don't remember his name) left the party in a snit almost as soon as the game started. That one event made all of the laboriously developed back story of the gay couple irrelevant to the campaign (because there was no reason for it to be asked about or raised). I haven't read the module, just played it, but Paizo might as well have just said "These two characters (who happen to be female) are married" for all the difference the back story made. And meanwhile, there was almost no character development of any of the other NPC's (the Mongrelmen being the exception). Apparently it was all hanging off the back story of the gay couple. Might have been nice to know something of that silver dragon, the one who, you know, saved our lives. Nope. When we came to the gates of the keep, and the DM tells us the names of the two walking bodies, we're like "OK, whatever." He has to tell us that they're the former leaders of the Crusade in this city. Well, DM, you mentioned their names once in the first session: sorry if we don't remember three weeks later. But, hey, mentioning the name of the local leader of the Crusade twice would take away screen time from detailing the love lives of a couple of mooks, who get vastly more back story than all of the other NPC's in the city put together because they're gay mooks. Seriously, if you're going to give Irabeth so much story time

Spoiler:
why doesn't she become Mythic? She's been far more central to the story to date than any of the PC's.

Contrast this to Kingmaker (the only other AP I'm really familiar with) where various NPC's have back stories, but the back story development is scattered widely over many NPC's, not concentrated on just two. The only thing all of whose NPCs have in common is that they interact with the PC's, which makes the PC's the central figures, not a couple of NPC's. There the relationship of the straight couple mentioned is not given any more detail than "they're a couple". Apparently that's enough detail for straight couples but gay couples need to be more central to the campaign than the PC's.

/Rant off.

Varisian Wanderer wrote:
I think it's a neat possibility that something similar to this might have arisen at some point during the Crusades in the Worldwound. :) Maybe an army of lovers sacred to Shelyn?

Now that actually sounds really cool. Paizo should consider hiring you.


I just want to say "thank you" for posting this!


Mythic Evil Lincoln wrote:

Of course, but even if the whole party agrees on that, it is insidiously difficult to banish them entirely. This is true of any established setting really. These characters make up a part of the vocabulary for that world.

They have already worn a track through the setting, and its influence persists even if you try to blaze your own trail. This can be a good thing, but more often than not, it turns out badly. Usually because of self-indulgent writers/developers making pretty amateurish mistakes (see Elminster appearing in published adventures.)

Thing is, this is about the player relative to the setting rather than an inherent property of the setting itself.

littlehewy wrote:

Well, straight off the bat, I'll say I don't love Golarion like I do/did Krynn, the Realms etc. There is a "but" coming, however...

I got into RPGs by reading the first Dragonlance book, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, in '91, when I was 10 or 11. The very last page of the book had an ad for AD&D, where you could play a game in which you were Tanis, Raistlin, etc. This blew my mind.
...
Around the turn of the millennium, I'd read tons of DL and FR books, and had run games in both. But it became so hard. Canon was huge, and I felt like there was little space for me to create stories with my group that could compete with the epicness of the tales I'd originally fallen in love with without completely altering the realities of the worlds I'd likewise fallen in love with (this extended to ICE's MERP as well). What a paradox! I loved these universes so much that I couldn't bring myself to run/play in them because by creating legendary stories I might mess them up!
...
As Broken mentioned, Golarion feels like my world. It doesn't thrill me in the narrative sense that DL and FR did, but that means I can do whatever I want with it. Destroy the Acadamae? Can do. Overthrow House Thrune? No probs - I've largely created my own version of House Thrune, so I can do what I like.
...
TL;DR: I can do whatever I want in Golarion without destroying an object of my fanboy affection. That's why I dig it.

My story is very similar... except everywhere he writes "Krynn/The Realms" replace it with "Middle Earth", and everywhere he writes "Golarion" replace it with "Greyhawk/The Realms". I couldn't game in Middle Earth because Feanor, Luthien, Bilbo, Frodo, et al. have already done everything, and it wouldn't be Middle Earth if someone else did grand things. But writing Drizzt out of the Realms doesn't bother me one iota more than replacing Seoni etc. with LittleHewy's group's own characters bothers him.

@Kazred: Yes and no. Golarion's definitely modular, but that's not exactly it. I have no trouble treating Greyhawk/Realms as modular. Greyhawk/Realms are traditional fantasy settings, and if that's what you're looking for they're great. Golarion has a lot of modular microsettings, and if any/some of those appeal to you then great. Since I'm looking for a traditional fantasy setting, I'd have less work making Greyhawk/FR "my own" than making Golarion "my own". I can see that if you were looking for something more like some of the microsettings, Golarion would be less work (understatement).


Ashiel wrote:
You said that you guys never survive past level eight or nine, and I think that's very telling for someone who professes the virtues of poorly balanced rules and the "mechanically viable is bad roleplaying" vibe I get from you and others pretty regularly. It also ties into a complaint of mine over Sean K's insistence that VoP is somehow okay because D&D/PF is easy (which pretty much ignores that more than half the printed material is written to kill or make your character's life miserable; and by mid levels the monsters are wearing their big-boy pants).

If they never survive past level eight or nine, that sounds to me like an issue with the DM. (Could be wrong: I haven't played Pathfinder to level 8 or 9 yet. But I'm pretty sure that if were DM'ing I could manage to lose fights against any party, no matter how mechanically inept the players, if I wanted to.)

I wouldn't say "mechanically viable is bad roleplaying" but I would say "mechanically viable is constrained roleplaying", and I see that as an indictment of the rules.

(Newbie question) More than half the printed material is written to kill? From what I've seen so far (1st books of Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous) it's been a cakewalk. Are they atypical? Does it get harder as you go further into the AP's?


Kazred wrote:
And that's the problem: a tabletop game is supposed to be about the players, not about the characters from a tie-in novel. In Golarion, there's no Elminster, no Drizzt, no Tanis. The players are the heroes and what they do matters.

There's no reason that there has to be an Elminster (who's probably a quest NPC or a source of exposition anyway), a Drizzt, or a Tanis in your home version of another campaign setting either.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Diego Rossi wrote:
You really think that saying "I am making great sacrifices" without any cost for the character is a fulfilling role playing experience?

Yes. In games like Pathfinder and 3rd, we do this throughout character design. The place where the characters make sacrifices that cost them is during play, not character design.

Diego Rossi wrote:
Any choice that "hurt the real life enjoyment of the game by all of the players and the DM" isn't a good idea, but that has very little to do with the power of a choice. There are powerful choices and options that will hurt my enjoyment of the game way more than a VoP and having a weak monk in the group.

Fair enough. But you may want to consider that a lot of other peoples' real life enjoyment of the game is hurt by the presence in the game of badly suboptimal choices -by the "power of choices"- and it's not just the player who's made the suboptimal choice that suffers, but potentially other players (see the OP) and/or the DM who has to deal with wide disparities in character effectiveness. It's the reduction of real life enjoyment that makes this a problem. If it's not a problem for you, great.


Diego Rossi wrote:
Mikaze, my point is that I agree with Sean: if you want to play a guy that make a sacrifice (like taking a Vow of poverty) pretending to get benefits on par or greater than what you sacrificed by an ability like VoP is absurd.

There's all sorts of situations in this game where characters get unrealistic benefits for making what would in the real world be sacrifices because... magic. Why should a paladin get a bajillion magical powers just because he/she swore a bunch of oaths, for example? But all of a sudden, a monk swears a vow of poverty and they don't get corresponding magical powers because... realism? Why does realism only apply to this one monk power?

Diego Rossi wrote:
If the sacrifice is meaningless it lose any meaning.

You seriously think that in-game sacrifices by characters are meaningless unless they hurt the real life enjoyment of the game by all of the players and the DM?


Noireve wrote:
Well its that Thorri does not seem to understand at all...

I understand perfectly. I just disagree with you.

For instance, I think it's crazy game design to give a couple of races 5 favored class options for every class when all the others get 2-3. I don't think it would be a bad idea to give every race 5 favored class options. I don't think it would be a bad idea to give every race 2-3 favored class options. But giving a couple of races vastly more options here than the others is lame.

And I think it's totally unfair to give one "core" race every option except three that you've given to another "core" race, particularly when those three options are either average or weaknesses. (It's not nearly so bad that they gave half-elves almost every option humans have, so long as you reserve racial traits for humans, because the core human "racial traits" are really strong. The 2 racial traits that elves get and half elves do not are situational, certainly nice as far as they go, but don't begin to make up for half-elves having better stats and 3x as many racial choices.)

And it's really not going to break the game if you give half-elves access to "Elven Magic". "Elven Magic" is basically as powerful as a feat. You might as well give it to a race that will actually be played, instead of reserving it for a race that really has no raison d'etre any more. Just say half elves have "Elven Magic" as an alternate racial trait for "Multitalented". There. Done.


Alexander Augunas wrote:
There's absolutely no "arguably" here because your implication, that you could select actual "racial traits" makes no sense because there is no context for how you could select them.
Alexander Augunas wrote:
This is a perfect example of where common sense trumps RAW, and if you try to justify it otherwise, you're trying to break the game.

Huh? Someone (not me) arguing that one core race, half elves, should get 100% of the stuff that makes another core race, elves, cool/interesting/worth playing, is trying to break the game, but as long as you're only arguing that half elves should get 97% of the stuff that makes another core race cool/interesting/worth playing - which Paizo has ruled they get - that's somehow not trying to break the game? These aren't significantly different things. "Elven magic" is the only elven racial that half elves can't get (elven weapon familiarity can already be obtained by characters of any race through a feat), and it's not all that.

With this ruling there's no reason to have elves as a playable race at all, except for players who want to gimp themselves for the fun of gimping themselves.


Game breaking? No. (But a FAQ ruling should make the game better; "the FAQ ruling isn't game breaking" isn't much of a recommendation.) Yes, I do think it makes half-elves better than elves. They pretty much were already, except in isolated cases.

Agree with Balgin.


Noireve wrote:
1) I am pretty certain that nearly all wizards prefer dex over con (Gish characters being the exception)

The spirit of my elf witch who died last month because of her con penalty disagrees. Granted, as long as you don't end up dying from the difference, dex is better.

ChrisRevocateur wrote:
Except that's not what's been opened up at all. They opened up Favored Class Bonuses, archetypes, and TRAITS. This word might cause some confusion, as the abilities listed under a race are called traits. But more likely is that they're saying you can choose Racial Traits as in the traits listed in the Player Companion books and the back of the APG.
Noireve wrote:
2) Actually no they cannot. When Paizo said that half races can pick elven traits, they mean than when you make your character, of the 2 traits you can pick at creation (you know, things like magical knack and what have you) you can now pick the ones exclusive to elves (there where a few of the traits that were solely exclusive to certain races).
Alexander Augunas wrote:

Remember folks, Racial Traits =/= Race Traits.

The former are the abilities that your race grants you. The latter are character traits (see Advanced Player's Guide) that can only be selected by members of a particular race. This ruling does not let you Frankenstien the racial traits of two separate races together.

The interpretation of the rules that you guys are making is sane, makes sense, and is probably what Paizo meant. But it's not what they wrote:

paizo/faq wrote:
...Half-elves and half-orcs may select racial favored class options, archetypes, traits, and so on...

That quite definitely says they can select racial traits. That's what it explicitly says. If the adjective "racial" applies to "archetypes" it also applies to "traits". "Race traits" are presumably? arguably? covered by the "and so on".

Having said that, I still don't think that making an already strong race even stronger is a good decision. Half-elves were already better than elves for everything except int-based arcane casters, and very competitive in that IMO. I don't think they needed to be buffed. Oh well.


Noireve wrote:
Actually, Dex is often considered the Secondary stat to wizards.

That's why I said "matter of opinion".

Noireve wrote:
Additionally, Elves happen to also have a racial "spell penetration" that stacks with spell penetration. All in all, elves are THE wizard race.

Except that half-elves get that now, if they want it.

Noireve wrote:
Now granted of course just simply cherry picking abilities from 3 different races will net you a fairly powerful race, but that is simply a stupid and illogical thing to do (oh how about I go ahead and grab the elven spell penetration ability with the human's extra feat to grab spell penetration and haven Elven Immunities, that sounds cool right?)

Allowing people to do exactly that sort of thing is the point of this change.

Maybe I just happen to play with unusually liberal DM's, but most DM's I know will allow you a player to take something that's not strictly speaking legal if it fits in with the flavor of the character. What we wouldn't have allowed is what you say. But now, "Paizo says we can have spell penetration and the extra feat and Elven Immunities."


TarkXT wrote:
Elves have several abilities that trump half elves. They make better intelligence based casters for one.

That's very much a matter of opinion. I'd rather have Con than Dex on an intelligence based caster. And I'm pretty sure I can make a better int based caster with the ability to cherry pick any combination of the abilities of elves, half-elves, and humans I want than I can restricted to the abilities of elves.


Tangent101 wrote:
That's actually helpful for my own hopeful WotR game which would be 20-point builds. I was wondering how much to increase foes by to compensate for a possible group of 6 PCs. For the extra two players I was going to increase the minions by 50%. I think I'll also boost monsters by +2 hit points per hit die (or +1 for monsters with a high Con bonus) for the extra five points. It would be like increasing the constitution of foes by a five-point build.

That sounds pretty reasonable.

I'm currently running a (heavily modified Kingmaker) game for a party of characters with 35-point builds, and I'm finding that increasing the CR of the encounters by 1 balances that quite nicely (except that the monsters really could use more hp). However, my players are either new to Pathfinder or deliberately not optimizing. Unless your players are pretty good min-maxers, I wouldn't worry too much about a 20-point buy. Remember that the "advanced" template for monsters is +4 to all ability scores, and only increases the CR of the monster by 1.

The fact that you have 6 PC's is a much bigger deal than the 20 point buy.


gustavo iglesias wrote:
I have seen a LOT of people claiming to have good luck or bad luck. Roleplaying tables are full of superstitious people, when we talk about dice.

Throwing dice is a manual and mostly subconscious skill, like throwing a baseball or throwing a football or throwing a rock. D&D veterans have thrown dice thousands of times, and every time the dice "rolled well" the pleasure centers in their brains lit up. Most people would expect someone pitching a baseball to get better with practice, or someone throwing a football to get better with practice. Why would you think someone throwing dice thousands of times isn't going to get better with practice?

gustavo iglesias wrote:
I've gone so far as to actually take note of every roll made by said "bad luck player", said "good luck GM", and said "high rolling die". And during the course of a session, I write every time the die is rolled, the player rolls or the GM rolls. You know what? They are average. Absolutelly average.

I haven't tracked that. The documented stats I have noticed is the stats that people roll. And, in my experience, experienced D&D players consistently roll better stats than would be expected if the rolls were being generated by an RNG.

There are some people I know who I think consistently roll better than average. I don't consider it "luck" though. If it were really important, I'd insist they throw dice from cups. I'm quite sure that would make their "luck" vanish immediately.


What a terrible idea :(. So there's no reason ever to play an elf, playing a half-elf is just plain better, better, better? Maybe they should add a -5 hp/level penalty for playing an elf, just in case the player somehow missed the message that not playing a half-elf is BadWrongFun.


Alice Margatroid wrote:
1) As noted, just because one group is under-represented doesn't mean we shouldn't strive towards equality for another,

That's true. I'm being a little jealous.

thejeff wrote:

I'd be very hesitant to include autistic people in a game I ran. And even less likely in something I published. Not because I'm prejudiced against them or because I think they don't belong, but because I wouldn't know how to run them accurately and not offensively. Nor, I suspect, would most other GMs.

Homosexuals, even transsexuals, are easy. They have their one thing that's different and even that fits pretty easily into everyone's experience. But in everything else, they act and react just like straight people do.

Alice Margatroid wrote:
3) Part of the problem with representation is that Paizo doesn't just come out and say "Oh, <x> person is homosexual" or "<y> person is autistic". It is INCREDIBLY easy to imply the former ("She is married to <a woman>") but not so easy to imply the latter ("He tends to be incredibly focused, almost a genius, in certain areas of study; however he can sometimes misunderstand social borders" could mean pretty much any high-Int, low-Cha Wizard type)*.

That's true too. Although I'd be hesitant to run, say, a lesbian, for exactly the reasons thejeff's hesitant to include autistic people. As long as I'm never going to go into more detail than "this female character is married to that female character", that's fine, but I would get out of my depth fairly quickly after that. On the other hand, given how much background material Paizo gives DM's in excess of the amount that the players will probably ever learn, there's no reason that they couldn't say in the background material that the reason why a particular character "is incredibly focused... but..." is because the character is Asperger's.

I sometimes flirt with the idea of making the entire species of dwarves in a game world I'm running Asperger's. In most ways it would fit well, until you offered them alcohol and they're "??? Don't you know that dwarves don't drink?"

One stereotype that I don't like is "Gandalf the Gay". If, in our world, older single men are disproportionately likely to be gay, I think that's because it was illegal for them to get married when they were the ages that people typically get married at. I don't think that stereotype would have a reason to exist in a world that didn't have a history of homophobia. But autistic people will always be disproportionately single.

Alice Margatroid wrote:
4) I don't think a movie is a good comparison. A movie is like a single adventure module. Golarion as a whole is supposed to represent an entire world, so let's say... the setting where all the Star Trek series are set. If you don't have a gay person (or an autistic person or whatever) in a singular episode (adventure), that's fair enough; but if you don't have a single one throughout the entire world? That's kind of odd, to me.

Yes, that's fair.


3 people marked this as a favorite.
Alice Margatroid wrote:

** Alice's Handy Dandy Guide to LGBT in Pathfinder **

** Why are LGBT people being included in Pathfinder?
Here's why:
There are a number of reasons, but primarily because Paizo believes that people should be represented in their game, no matter what majority or minority groups they belong to or identify with. Some of the Paizo staff and their customers are LGBT, after all.

Yeah. I'm autistic, and, this may seem strange to you, that's how I identify. Gender, orientation, sex - all secondary. I'm currently straight & male, these things probably won't change but they could. However, I'm going to be autistic for the rest of my life. So, well, Paizo may believe what you say they do, but, if so, from my point of view, they've failed. I don't care whether Paizo include LGBT characters in their products or not (unless that gets in the way of the gaming, which it hasn't), but if they or their fans get all preachy about how "inclusive" that is I'm going to roll my eyes at them.

This especially applies to those people who are saying "LGBT characters exist in real life, so it's bigoted not to include them in the game." Autistic people exist in real life, but I don't see you including us in your games. And I don't think that you should include us in your games just because we exist in real life. Put us in one of your games if that improves the story. If not, don't bother. A good analogy, I think, would be movies. I understand "Brokeback Mountain" included gay characters, but I doubt it included autistic characters. And the recent version of "True Grit" included an autistic character but no obviously LGBT characters. And both movies were better for concentrating on something the writers cared about and doing it well. A D&D campaign is like a movie, not an encyclopedia: it doesn't have to have everything.

On the other hand, it’s quite true that including and not including LGBT characters are both political decisions, while including autistic characters is not. (If Paizo were to include an autistic character in a product, no one would get upset about it.)

Gorbacz wrote:

However, you must remember, that for some people waving the banner is as, or even more, important. They won't be fine with having a PC that acts like a member of the player's faith would, they want to be able to say loudly "I smite thee in the names of Jesus Christ!"...

And since the gaming world doesn't provide that, they're getting disgruntled at seeing other groups included. And so it happens, that they turn their frustration against that one group they consider to be "immoral" IRL (because let's face it, "get blacks/women/democrats/cat owners out of Golarion because they are immoral" would never find any major support these days). So it's the LGBT who get the full dose of "get out".

Way to caricature those who aren’t like you! The longstanding convention of fantasy RPG theology is that there are several pantheons of anthropomorphic gods, and because the vast majority of people in North America and Europe are monotheist or atheist, not polytheist, that's neutral, doesn't offend anyone, and has the added bonus of potential plot hooks if the DM wants. But Paizo chose to go out of their way to shoehorn "atheism" into their setting (even though it doesn't make any sense there at all, in the same way that a PC not believing in faster-than-the-speed-of-light travel wouldn’t make any sense in a Star Trek campaign), presumably so that people who identify as atheist in RL can play "atheist" characters in Golarion. The equivalent of that, for a monotheistic player, is not playing a character who worships one of a pantheon of fictional anthropomorphic gods that were written for entertainment purposes. The equivalent is playing a character who shares their particular brand of RL monotheism. (Not that every Christian player would want to play a Christian character, just as not every Atheist player wants to play an Atheist character. But that's the equivalent level of choice.) Even as a polytheist I'd be more invested in my characters if they worshipped deities from pantheons that RL people have worshipped than the for-the-lolz deities Paizo has written. I don't think it's that big of a deal, but I think it's fair to say that Paizo's concern for inclusivitivity (or at least their success in implementing that concern) extends to atheists but not to theists.

Abyssal Lord wrote:
Interesting to see that the villains doesn't seem to have a love life.

No reason to spend the time detailing the love lives of villains unless there’s some reason that the PC’s will learn of them.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Arssanguinus wrote:
claymade wrote:


"... Okay, taking it from the top."

"For two thousand years, dragons ruled over all. Their sorceror-wyrms

Dragons and elves don't have even anything close to remotely the same flavor and implications to them.

THAT one is easy. "For two thousand years, drow ruled over all..."


James Jacobs wrote:
Alexander Augunas wrote:
Maybe whomever designed the spell didn't like the concept of drow bards? That's not a particularly good argument, but it could be some justification.
I'm 99.9999% sure that's not the reason. It's an oversight is all.

Thank you both for your replies - oversight makes sense. The spell can already be taken by 6 classes, so it's easy to see the writer deciding it was time to move on. I wanted an outside opinion because "drow agent in the surface world" is the concept of the PC I'm currently working on so I didn't trust myself to judge its balance, and according to the search function no one's talked about this before.

Re: the concept of drow bards, earlier in the flavor text for Drow in Adv. Race Guide it says "Female drow typically assume classes that lend themselves to leadership, such as bards and especially clerics." (p. 102, "Adventurers").


Hi! I have a question about a spell in the Advanced Race Guide.

"Ancestral Regression," which allows drow to magically disguise themselves and other drow as elves, is one of the drow racial spells. It's available to many spell-casting classes but not to bards. I was wondering whether this was an oversight or deliberate? It seems like an oversight to me: it seems like a theme-appropriate spell for bards, bards get similar spells like "Disguise Self", "Alter Self", and "Unknowable Alignment", and it seems a natural spell for drow spying on the surface world, and bards a natural class for drow spying on the surface world. Or am I missing something?


Big McStrongmuscle wrote:


Mark Hoover wrote:
3. High death rates = fun or acceptable: my players hated dying.
Also pretty normal after second or third level. My group would sometimes lose characters to freak accidents while still level one, but after that, we rarely had anyone die for good except in very unusual circumstances. As a whole, I always found the high death rate of old school games to be more exaggerated in the telling than true. Maybe it was a Killer DM thing.

Definitely not exaggerated in the groups I played in in the 70's. It wasn't just one DM, either, it was everyone. I used to figure that a character had a half-life of a game session. But by 1980 mortality rates had settled down to roughly what they are now.


A couple of suggestions (I don't know whether they've already been mentioned: this thread is too long to read :)

1. Don't be afraid to house rule A LOT. The further back you go in D&D history, the less defined the rules were and the more rules people made up themselves.

1a. As follows from this, don't be afraid to change monsters from what they are in the monster manual. Gnolls may not have had levels, but there was absolutely no reason the DM couldn't say "the gnolls' leader is 8HD".

2. Feats didn't exist. Fighters in particular were very simple and standardized compared to 3E fighters. In 3E terms, 2E fighters had a standard progression of feats, every fighter getting the same "feat" at any given level.

3. Nerf cleric offensive spells. Clerics' spell capability was very support-oriented before 3E.

4. Half-orcs were part of the standard rules in 1E but not in 2E. So you can have them, or not, it won't effect the flavour.

The editions that have been reprinted are 1E and 3E. The monster manual for 2E was printed in a binder format, the idea being that instead of having a bunch of Monster Manuals I, II, III etc. you'd get a bunch of loose pages that you'd insert into the binder. This turned out to be a total pain.

By the way, there was a "0E" before 1st Edition, if you want to go really old school. D&D was already 5 years old when the first AD&D book was printed. (Even more house rules!)


2 people marked this as a favorite.
Gorbacz wrote:
T-rexes battling Frogemoths in wild jungles located in deep caverns of Underdark miles beneath the surface doesn't make sense either, but you know what? That's OK, because it's fantasy.

And what Gorbacz likes is the only One True Way of doing fantasy, and people who don't like what he likes shouldn't post, apparently.


3.5 Loyalist wrote:
The fluff never worked for me, it doesn't seem sustainable.

I totally agree.

Or to put it another way, it doesn't seem plausible. In Tolkien, elven communities are either really remote from everyone else, or they have a huge tech/magic advantage, or both, and that works for me. In D&D, 1st level elves have to be balanced with other 1st level characters, but if the average elf is that balanced they'd have high mortality rates in war, so how do elven states survive over a couple of centuries of war with human, orcish, whatever, neighbours? It doesn't make sense.


EntrerisShadow wrote:
But definitely some sort of subjugation. Would you trust children to rule? Unrepentant felons? That's how elves would see human beings.

Must they see them that way? You can write it that way if you want, it is fantasy, but I don't think you have to.

EntrerisShadow wrote:
It's true, my biggest gripe is that every elf is a carbon copy. I'm actually eager to read some of these dark (not drow) elves you speak of, because every elf I've come across in fantasy has been good.

You haven't read The Silmarillion, have you?


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Suz wrote:
Is there a list of the Races in the book?

See post #496 (defaults to being almost at the bottom of page 10)


1 person marked this as FAQ candidate.
thebwt wrote:
Reckless wrote:


Between the "typically" statement in the ARG and the "any" statement of Elf Blood, I would say that all the human and elf archetypes can apply to half elves as well.
This is true, I was looking at half elves thinking of going into the drow noble feat lines... Specifically the drow paragon just says that it deals with the 'drow casting' stuff. It implies the part of actually being drow is taken care of.

I wouldn't interpret it that way. Consider that in the Advanced Player's Guide there are feats that are allowed for Elves (e.g. Elven Accuracy), for Half-Elves (e.g. Shared Insight), and explicitly for both (e.g. Arcane Talent). If I were a GM, I'd be really annoyed with a player who wanted their Half-Elf to have Elven Accuracy. I'm fine with a character whose backstory includes both human and elven ancestors and who takes Elven Accuracy as a feat, so long as they use Elven mechanics for the whole build, but the player doesn't get to say "'Elven magic' is useless for my archer character and -2 Con +2 Int is also bad, so I'll pick Half-Elf, but that Elven racial ability is sweet so I'll take that too."

Or, another way, I don't think that "effects" in "effect related to race" mean feats or other factors in the character-building process, but rather stuff that happens in game, such as if you're hit by an arrow of elf-slaying, or if you're fighting a ranger whose favoured enemy is elves.

Half-Elf shouldn't be a "gestalt" race that gets to use human, elf, or half-elf mechanics in different parts of the build depending on which is optimal.

1 to 50 of 61 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | next > last >>