Vic Wertz's page

Sara Marie wrote:

robot chris: especially don't add tequila to paizo.com

How about rum? Can we add 12+ year rum to paizo.com?

Ship it to me, and I will see to it that it's dealt with.

I think she accidentally applied her "out of the office" rule to her saved email.

You're going to want to check out the Paizo Blog on May 30...

It turns out the blog post I was talking about got moved forward a week. You can see it now!

That's correct!

Yes!

Alrighty is a lot of it Iconic art or action scene type art?

There are many characters, locations, and items prominently featured in the Rise of the Runelords AP that don't have good illustrations in the book (and, when it comes to locations, maps don't count as good illustrations for this purpose). Most—but not all—of the new art for the card game falls into those categories.

If we had to commission all new art for the hundreds and hundreds of different cards in the Rise of the Runelords set, the art budget would make the product unfeasible. That said, there's a fair amount of brand-new art here (including the all-new Wayne reynolds cover painting for the Base Set box). You're going to want to check out the Paizo Blog on May 30...

It turns out that our packaging change really played havoc with our paper stock. As a result, Watch Station, Thornkeep, Battlefield, and the revised Basic are all on slightly lighter stock than we really want, and Arcane Dungeons and Thieves' Guild are on slightly heavier stock than we really want. Basic Terrain, due in August, should be the first to use the stock we intend to use from then on.

During the playtest there was also talk about how to construct your own scenarios and adventures. I am not sure if the base rules will contain any suggestions or if that may come later.

There's a *very* brief sidebar that provides advice for making your own story, character, and role cards.

Each Adventure Deck contains 5 scenarios.

An excellent question. There's nothing currently announced, but if you demand it, we can make it happen!

By the description it sounds a bit like the Living Card Game system by Fantasy Flight. Would that be an accurate description?

It's similar in that there's a base set followed by regular non-random releases that extends the storyline and offers new options... but the similarities don't go much deeper than that.

What do the dice look like? Do they have any special engravings or just numbers? What color/pattern are they? What dice(D20, D6, D10 etc.) are included?

They're standard dice, much like the ones in the Beginner Box. d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, cast in blue with white numerals.

Steve,

Jeff gets new bids from DHL and other such shippers on pretty much an annual basis (most of them change their rates annually, so it's worth doing no more or less than once a year).

I responded to that back in February...

A Neil Spicer mini robot? ;)

That's a moneymaker—every time you turn it on, it gives you two cents!

Check out the free Beginner Box Transitions PDF—pages 11 and 12 give you an overview of the seven Pathfinder Modules that are easiest to use with the Beginner Box.

Also, while I appreciate the downsides and limitations of CAPTHCAs, I was surprised to learn that Paizo doesn't use them.

Captchas are mainly intended to separate humans from bots. I'm pretty sure these aren't bots—if they are, they've spent way more money programming them to work through registration and post on our site than any value they could possibly ever get out of that. (Another benefit of not having off-the-shelf messageboard software!)

I'm sure this has been asked before, but I can't recall seeing it.

For my own curiosity, why aren't flat-rate Priority Mail boxes used more often?

I'm assuming that your question ends with "...when I select Priority Mail as an option." (Standard Mail is usually cheaper than Priority, even with a Flat Rate Box; in fact, we'll even check to see if splitting your order into *multiple* standard mail boxes will be cheaper for you than a single Priority box. So most people only choose Priority when their order simply can't ship via standard mail.)

When we quote your Priority shipping rate, we work out whether the stuff you're ordering will fit in one of several different Flat Rate Boxes; if so, we compare the cost of that against the cost of shipping in one of our own boxes, and then we offer you whichever is cheaper.

It turns out that Flat Rate is a great value when it's densely packed, but if it's not mostly full of relatively heavy items, it's often cheaper to put Priority postage on our own smaller box, even after factoring in the cost of the box.

Just for kicks, I tried to order a single die. ONE die. Cost of the die? $5.36. Cost of "shipping and handling" to send that one die regular postal mail? $3.83. Seems awfully high for a single die.

Doug,

Head on over to the USPS Postal Calculator.

• Leave Section 1 alone.

• In Section 2, for the "From ZIP Code", enter 98052. Put your ZIP code in the "To ZIP Code" field.

• Leave Section 3 alone.

• In Section 4, choose the next-to-last option, "Package".

• For Section 5, enter 8 ounces (that's the weight of that die, plus the box and packing materials we'd use to ship it to you).

• Hit "Continue."

• Click to view the First Class mailing options, as those are (by far) the cheapest for that package.
  

You'll see that the actual postage cost quoted by the USPS is $2.92. (The die does not qualify for the "Media Mail" rate.)

Subtracting $2.92 from the $3.83 S&H charge, you get $.91.

Now, let's buy a box*.

The die in your shopping cart ships in a package with outer dimensions of about 5.20 x 3.20 x 2.50 inches. This 6x4x3 box from Uline costs about $.25 when purchased in bulk.

Subtract the box cost, and you're left with $.66. Some of that goes into other direct costs—those are the costs that we're only incurring because we're shipping your package. The packing materials we add to make sure your die gets there in as good a shape as when it left. The tape to seal the box. The paper for the packing slip. The toner for the laser printer that prints the packing slip.

And don't forget the credit card processing fees. Those vary based on volume, so I can't give you an exact number, but it's a small percentage of the total charged to your card.

After adding up all the direct costs, we're left with maybe a couple of quarters to cover the indirect costs—the costs of doing business that aren't directly associated with your package, but still need to be paid to get your stuff shipped. Rent on the warehouse. Electricity for the computer that's used to ship your order. The cost of the shelves in the warehouse. The sprinkler system. Maintenance and training on the forklift. Insurance. Pennies here, pennies there.

And, yeah—not least—some of those pennies go to help pay the person who ordered your die from our distributor. The person who put it into our inventory when it arrived. The person who printed your packing slip, found your die in our warehouse, carefully packed it into a box for you, and shipped it out. The other people on my team and on the operations team who have spent countless hours making sure that our system gives you the best shipping price that we can offer—people who revisit every single one of those variables on a regular basis, because we know that those couple of quarters make a difference to you.

That's where your handling fee goes.

Our profit comes solely from the markup between the price we pay the distributor and the price we charge you. In our industry, retailers generally buy from distributors at about 60% of MSRP. MSRP on that die is $5.95, which means we pay about $3.57 for it. We discount 10% off of MSRP for you, so we're charging you $5.36. Our profit on your order? About $1.79.

I appreciate you're going to be somewhat in the dark compared with products you actually produce. I'd assumed (since my comic book shop got them on Wednesday) that you must have had them a week or so ago.

To complicate things even further, each variant cover is shipped to us separately, so we had *some* of the covers on time, but not *all* of the covers. Sigh.

Sorry—last I looked at PayPal's terms of service, it conflicted pretty hard with our requirements. Specifically, they expire authorizations really quickly after an order is placed, so it wouldn't work with the majority of the more than 31,000 items we offer (because we order them from our distributor when you order them from us, which takes more time than they allow) and setting up a system that said "you can use PayPal, but only if you buy X, but not Y or Z" would increase customer confusion and frustration. (Also, the way they allow processing of "subscriptions" doesn't work at all the same way that we do subscriptions, so even if they changed the first part to suit us, it still wouldn't work with a lot of what we do.)

It really will be out at Gen Con this year*! It has gone to the printer and everything!

I will note that on most platforms, Adobe Reader generally provides the fewest compatibility issues—pretty much every other PDF viewer I've ever worked with, on any platform, renders *something* differently from Reader (where differently is almost always equal to incorrectly). So my first suggestion would be to try Adobe Reader.

I don't have any thoughts offhand. Any other Nook users able to chime in here?

I'll try to remember to post in this thread when it happens...

Making Lite PDFs takes a lot of work, as page backgrounds need to be redesigned, so we only do those for large products (256+ pages). Most modern devices don't have much of a problem with 64- or 96-page books.

It appears that we weren't deliberately entering anything into that field, but something in the process was automatically filling in the file name. We'll look into putting a proper title there for future PDFs. (This won't happen immediately, because we also have to hunt down and modify the part of the process that's inserting the filename, but it's officially on the to-do list.)

You could do a 2-part module series, with one part having the PCs at 17th and 18th (ending at 19th after the final encounter), and the other having the PCs at 19th and 20th (ending at "21st" after the final encounter).

(or a 4-part module series, with each at a single level, but I suspect that tying up that much of the module line into a single high-level series would be a bad idea).

Since the larger modules are quarterly, and we're still using one slot each year for the RPG Superstar winner, even a two-parter would block up the schedule pretty thoroughly.

The PDFs we sell are for personal use only.

Just how big is a Paizo small base?

WizKids' small bases are about 3/4" in diameter.

This supirse product will people who dont go to the con be able to get it or is it exclusive to Paizocon?

People will be able to get it at paizo.com after the show. We want to make PaizoCon folks feel special, but we don't want to penalize people who can't attend!

Sigh. Thanks for letting us know.

PDFs have a property called "Title" (which you can't edit), which can be different from the file name. I suspect that the Nook is showing you the contents of that title field.

To answer that, I need to introduce a bit of terminology.

A scenario is intended for a single play session. An adventure consists
of a number of linked scenarios, and an Adventure Path is a series
of linked adventures.

The Base Set box includes an adventure called Perils of the Lost Coast, which encompasses three scenarios set around Sandpoint, none of which are adapted from Rise of the Runelords. One of the three is actually adapted from "Black Fang's Dungeon," the adventure in the Pathfinder RPG Beginner Box, while the other two concepts come straight from the mind of James Jacobs, and are unique to the card game.

The Base Set box *also* includes the Burnt Offerings adventure, which presents scenarios adapted from the first chapter of Rise of the Runelords. The other five chapters of Runelords will be adapted in bimonthly Adventure Decks; that takes us through a full year of releases.

So yes, there are scenarios unique to the card game, but they're not in future products—they're in the Base Set!

Jake is signed on for at least the next few issues, I believe.

When you gift a PDF, or a bundle that includes a PDF, you must specify the paizo.com account of the person receiving the gift, so that we can add the PDF to their account. Until you do that, you can't proceed.

You can't split a bundle—the print and PDF editions need to go to the same recipient.

Yep... It turns out that maps are done with issue 6. (There is still gaming content, though.)

Vic Wertz wrote:

the Haunted Jester wrote:

Vic Wertz wrote:

There actually will be a special release of a product at PaizoCon, though it won't be anywhere *near* as big as the deluxe Runelords book. What is it? Sorry—you'll have to wait!

So...any word on this surprise special PaizoCon release!?! Please, please, please!!!!

I suspect we won't be saying a word until PaizoCon.

I want people to go into the PaizoCon store and see something that they had *no idea* existed until that very moment!

Oh my poor wallet ha ha. Fair enough, until the con!!!

You'll want to have $14.99 plus tax. :-)

<dice=Your Label Text Here>1d20 + 3</dice> (swap angle brackets for square brackets):
Your Label Text Here: 1d20 + 3 ⇒ (11) + 3 = 14

Vic Wertz wrote:

There actually will be a special release of a product at PaizoCon, though it won't be anywhere *near* as big as the deluxe Runelords book. What is it? Sorry—you'll have to wait!

So...any word on this surprise special PaizoCon release!?! Please, please, please!!!!

I suspect we won't be saying a word until PaizoCon.

I want people to go into the PaizoCon store and see something that they had *no idea* existed until that very moment!

Well, it's not as if you guys are impotent to change things in, uh, your game. ^^ Errata is always possible ( if not always practical, which I do understand ).

Errata is about fixing things that are broken; adding *new* rules is a different thing altogether. New rules are added to the game in new books, not quietly slipped in to new printings of existing books. Doing that would annoy a lot of people.

Actually, almost all of the maps in our PDFs are presented in such a way that you can select and then copy the map without the text or secret door markings.

The interactive PDF feature, which gives you buttons to toggle labels on and off while viewing the PDF, and covers over secret rooms so your players can't even see them—that's the thing we did starting with Jade Regent.

The biggest challenge about making that work with our Community Use Policy is that, while you may descriptively reference trademarks, proper names (characters, deities, artifacts, places, etc.), locations and characters from our AP volumes, you may not descriptively reference dialogue, plots, storylines, language, and incidents from those products. So you have to do it in a way that avoids talking about what came before. But as long as you're careful and clever, it's very possible.

(For those who don't read Chinese, this is a translation of the Goblin Song. It's still a bit of a work in progress.)

Google Translate says it's the Leprechaun Song.

We don't tend to know when a new Q-Workshop die set will arrive until it actually arrives.

Wipe clean to track current HPs

Wipe-clean erasability on cards has been something we've sadly been unable to manage. Best we've been able to get is the "don't press too hard and you'll still be able to erase it" uncoated area on the Item Cards.

Plus, if we gave you that, then you'd need one card for *each* goblin in the battle...

Shalafi2412 wrote:

Is the cover image ever going to be updated?

It will be eventually. ;)

Here's how it works:

We send stuff to the printer. Within a couple of weeks, the printer generates a proof. We then approve the proof—and this is the first point where things are considered final. Finally, about once a month, we go through and update images for all of the stuff that has been finalized since the last time we updated images.

We just sent this product to the printer, so the other steps should all be happening in the coming weeks.

Chocolate dice are the perfect choice for GMs who fudge their rolls.

Cosmo has a Chinese name? Is it 咖死摸?

Google Translate says "Coffee Dead Touch".

I'd say that's spot on, then.

I... uh, what?