The GM has all sorts of tools for limiting the rest available to the party... soft timers, hard timers, reactive NPCs...
But if there's always such a constraint on everything the PCs do, then the players will start to feel that the world is contrived against them. So, like all aspects of GMing, the thing to do is include everything sometimes. Keep it dynamic and unpredictable.
Once in a while, throw the players up against a challenge that is best surmounted with patience and rest as part of the plan. Make it so hard they need a 15 minute adventuring day to beat it. Then laugh hysterically if they bite off more than they can chew because they imagined their own timers and limitations.
Don't always steal the spell book, but sometimes steal the spell book. Don't always use a hostage to imply a timer, but sometimes do it. Don't always allow mid-dungeon rest without consequence, but at least once is okay.
I'm a militant atheist, believe that anyone with a faith is irredeemably stupid
This didn't get called out or moderated. It got favorited 4 times.
Not cool. I apologize. EDIT: I suggest you flag it; I have done so (and should have sooner).
I don't believe that every religious person is stupid. In fact, that is obviously false.
I do believe that human beings are sometimes irrational, and that holding something to be true despite a lack of evidence is a perfect example of that irrationality. Being human myself, I often make emotional decisions -- but I generally don't devote my life to them, or insist that they were, in fact, completely rational. YMMV.
I'd imagine that a group of atheists (or at least irreligious) wouldn't likely remain friends for very long with a member of their circle who became demonstrably religious.
In my experience, we don't hang out in homogeneous "circles" or whatever. When I hang out with a group of friends, it's likely to contain a mix of atheists, agnostics, mildly religious, and devout. Had one friend who was a young earth creationist and used to challenge me about evolution all the time -- that didn't matter, we were still friends, both still spent time with our other friends as well. Religion (or lack thereof) is only a barrier if you let it be.
I'll be the bad guy. There are species of religious people with whom I have no interest in hanging out and with whom I would deliberately avoid socializing. I have no interest in wasting my personal time on a young earth creationist or one of the Phelps sort. I will include in the latter those who piously insist they're nothing like the Phelps Klan whilst agreeing with it on every major policy point except picketing. These people are not friend material. Neither is anyone who tells me a woman needs to know her place or the Holocaust is a great big lie.
I do count as friends religious people who fall into neither category.
I'd imagine that a group of atheists (or at least irreligious) wouldn't likely remain friends for very long with a member of their circle who became demonstrably religious.
In my experience, we don't hang out in homogeneous "circles" or whatever. When I hang out with a group of friends, it's likely to contain a mix of atheists, agnostics, mildly religious, and devout. Had one friend who was a young earth creationist and used to challenge me about evolution all the time -- that didn't matter, we were still friends, both still spent time with our other friends as well. Religion (or lack thereof) is only a barrier if you let it be.
1. Yup, the world use to have some kind of equilibrium before atheist science came along.
2. Now thanks to their crappy genetic engineering and fossil fertilizers, we can feed billions of people: so people breed until they get hungry again.
Sorry, guy, but you're violently confused on a couple of points.
1. Any equilibrium you think you perceive is an illusion. The continents move; climates change; random impact events occur. Species die all the time. No science needed.
2. People breed regardless of food supply. They either starve now or starve later, or kill each other off first. That's how things work, with or without science.
P.S. If you really hate science and technology so much, and aren't just trolling, then put your money where your mouth is. Get off the power grid. Start hunting and gathering all your food. Start making your tools out of stone. All of that takes time that you're wasting by posting in the internet via computer -- both of which are manifestatins of that evil science and technology, by the way. Until then, your statements seem a trifle hypocitical.
Because atheists get very bored dealing, repeatedly, with religious believers who insist that "Atheism is a religion too" and thinking that is some kind of point.
The thread is probably born out of that frustration and a desire that when the argvument is inevitably raised in some moral discussion, they can point here to avoid derailing the existing topic and repeating themselves for the nth thousandth time.
I loved that guy -- he was never afraid to blurt out exactly what he was thinking, and to do it with wit and panache. We as a society desperately need more like him -- people determined to get everyone else to think outside of their comfort zones a bit, to break us out of our respective narcotizing echo chambers.
I often disagreed with Hitch's point of view -- sometimes extremely so -- but I always learned something from reading his columns, and had a good time doing so.
World famous writer and atheist Christopher is surprised to find himself in the Afterlife. I will let you decide if he is in Heaven, Purgatory, or Hell.
Kurt Vonnegut famously said ""Isaac is heaven now" at a memorial service for Issac Asimov.
The crowd roared with laughter at the joke.
I'm going to assume that was your intent was a similar joke, as it does not makes you appear like a complete ass if I do. I hope I am correct.
Q: Atheist regimes in the 20th century killed tens of millions of people. Doesn’t this show that we were better off in the past, when our political and moral systems were guided by a belief in God?
A: This is a popular argument among theoconservatives and critics of the new atheism, but for many reasons it is historically inaccurate.
First, the premise that Nazism and Communism were “atheist” ideologies makes sense only within a religiocentric worldview that divides political systems into those that are based on Judaeo-Christian ideology and those that are not. In fact, 20th-century totalitarian movements were no more defined by a rejection of Judaeo-Christianity than they were defined by a rejection of astrology, alchemy, Confucianism, Scientology, or any of hundreds of other belief systems. They were based on the ideas of Hitler and Marx, not David Hume and Bertrand Russell, and the horrors they inflicted are no more a vindication of Judeao-Christianity than they are of astrology or alchemy or Scientology.
Second, Nazism and Fascism were not atheistic in the first place. Hitler thought he was carrying out a divine plan. Nazism received extensive support from many German churches, and no opposition from the Vatican. Fascism happily coexisted with Catholicism in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Croatia. See p. 677 for discussion and references.
Third, according to the most recent compendium of history’s worst atrocities, Matthew White's Great Big Book of Horrible Things (Norton, 2011), religions have been responsible for 13 of the 100 worst mass killings in history, resulting in 47 million deaths. Communism has been responsible for 6 mass killings and 67 million deaths. If defenders of religion want to crow, “We were only responsible for 47 million murders—Communism was worse!”, they are welcome to do so, but it is not an impressive argument.
Fourth, many religious massacres took place in centuries in which the world’s population was far smaller. Crusaders, for example, killed 1 million people in world of 400 million, for a genocide rate that exceeds that of the Nazi Holocaust. The death toll from the Thirty Years War was proportionally double that of World War I and in the range of World War II in Europe (p. 142).
When it comes to the history of violence, the significant distinction is not one between thesistic and atheistic regimes. It’s the one between regimes that were based on demonizing, utopian ideologies (including Marxism, Nazism, and militant religions) and secular liberal democracies that are based on the ideal of human rights. On pp. 337–338 I present data from Rummel showing that democracies are vastly less murderous than alternatives forms of government.
Q: Wasn’t the spread of Christianity the main historical force that drove down violence? Jesus preached love, peace, and forgiveness. The Spanish missionaries eliminated human sacrifice in Latin America. Abolitionism in the 19th century, and the Civil Rights movement in the 20th, were inspired by the morality of Christianity and led by Christian ministers. The two world wars show what happens when people depart from the teachings of Christianity.
A: Jesus deserves credit for stigmatizing revenge, one of the main motives for violence over the course of human history. But things started going downhill in 312 when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and the historical facts are not consistent with the claim that Christianity since then has been a force for nonviolence:
The Crusaders perpetrated a century of genocides that murdered a million people, equivalent as a proportion of the world’s population at the time to the Nazi holocaust.
Shortly afterwards, the Cathars of southern France were exterminated in another Crusader genocide because they had embraced the Albigensian heresy.
The Inquisition, according to Rummel, killed 350,000 people.
Martin Luther’s rant against the Jews is barely distinguishable from the writings of Hitler.
The three founders of Protestantism, Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII, had thousands of heretics were burned at the stake, as they and their followers took Jesus literally when he said, “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.”
Following the biblical injunction, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” Christians killed 60,000-100,000 accused witches in the European witchhunts.
The European Wars of Religion had death rates that were double that of World War I and that were in the range of World War II in Europe.
Christian conquistadors massacred and enslaved native Americans in vast numbers, and perhaps twenty million were killed in all (not counting unintentional epidemics) by the European settlement of the Americas.
As for World War II and its associated horrors, see my answer to the previous question.
Certain Christian denominations, such as the Quakers, did indeed mobilize the abolitionist movement, but they came late to the party. Christianity had no problem with slavery for more than 1500 years, and agitation against the institution only took off with the writings of John Locke and other philosophers of the Age of Reason and Enlightenment, who found plenty of good secular reasons why slavery was abominable. The American abolitionists fought against a slaveholding South that was, of course, thoroughly Christian, including many ministers who defended slavery because it was approved in the Bible.
As for Martin Luther King, in his essay “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” he discusses his inspirations: ancient Greek and Enlightenment philosophers, renegade humanistic theologians who rejected orthodox Christian doctrine, and most of all, Gandhi. And of course the segregationists he opposed were all Christians, and several of the civil rights activists they murdered were Jewish.
This is not to single out Christians or Christianity as a source of violence; many of the contemporary alternatives were just as bad. And there have been times in recent history when Christian ideas and movements have been pacifying forces, particularly when they have been influenced the humanitarian currents I discuss in the book. But to say that Christianity has, overall, been a force for peace in history is factually inaccurate.
Global warming is the same way: a theory was developed decades ago. It made predictions. Those predictions were the most laughably, embarrassingly wrong thing in the history of science. The theory stayed largely the same after the predictions failed. Then we learned brand new ways to take temperatures and realized we were only taking temperatures at the same sprawling urban areas over time, so naturally they'd be warmer. Then we learned more about cyclical cosmic energy, carbon regeneration in the atmosphere, and more. Authors researched books to assail those who stalled progress on solving the problem, only to find out the problem is being sold to us more by marketing than actual research. Theory stayed largely the same, because the belief interprets the data.
I should really quit, but having broken silence on Buddhism, I figure I might as well go for broke and point out science misunderstandings -- particularly those close to my own area.
Identification of the urban heat island effect was a big step forward for the science, that's very true. The thing is, that was identified what, over 20 years ago now? And it was corrected for (Karl et al. developed methodology for that in 1988, IIRC, and it's been refined since then)... and the data STILL show warming, even after correcting for it. Your assertion that it isn't currently taken into account implies that your understanding of the science is decades out of date (or is being derived from listening to people who dishonestly represent the research). I don't know of any modeling currently being done that does not correct for heat island effects and incoming cosmic radiation to the best extent possible. You can make a claim that the corrections are inadequate or incorrect (some people do), but to pretend they don't exist is no good.
Serious people don't argue about whether the climate is warming now -- we all know it is. The question is about what proportion of this warming is anthropogenic -- most, some, or none at all.
I have to believe that Lisa, Ryan, and the team they are assembling have taken a good hard look at the financial realities of creating, publishing, and supporting an MMO. The fact that they've decided to go forward indicates to me that they have a strategy they believe will result in victory, profit, and a seriously awesome game. Do I think the announcement was a bit premature? Yes. But I look forward to seeing their vision in the coming years.
This in a nutshell. Were we a bit premature? By other company's standards, sure. But if we held onto this news much longer, word would have seeped out. We would be talking to people about investing. We would be hiring folks. And word would have gotten out. Rumors and half-truths would have been given free reign. And that is just not how we want to run Paizo. We like to let our customers know what we are up to before the rest of the world does. So we let the cat out of the bag much earlier than other companies would have. We know that. There is a downside (ie. we don't have much to tell or show at this stage). But the alternative was worse in our opinion.
As for all the doomsayers, all I have to say is, "Give us a chance." Nothing is changing at Paizo. We will be making all the same cool products you have come to love. If MMOs aren't your thing, then that is great. Enjoy your regular Pathfinder game. We aren't and can't make an MMO that works for everyone. We know that. We are happy with that.
Also, we are aware of what has come before Goblinworks. We know what has worked and what hasn't. We aren't going to spend bajillions of dollars. We have a plan that is pretty savvy and innovative. As we get further along, we will share that plan. Until then, have some faith. I wouldn't do something stupid and wasteful. Many of the comments I've seen are similar to ones posted after we announced the Pathfinder RPG. That turned out pretty well considering all the doom and gloom.
Pathfinder Online is a baby. Heck, the baby isn't even born yet. It is in its early gestation period. There is a ton of work needed to get it to market. We want you along for the ride and we want to be upfront about it. So take a deep breath and sit back and relax. I think many of you will really like what we have planned. Some of you won't, and that is totally cool also. We can't be all things for all people. Just like the Reaper minis or WizKids minis or even PaizoCon aren't for everyone, so Pathfinder Online won't scratch everyone's itch. For us to be successful, it doesn't have to.
Still waiting on that reason as to why certain characters "should" be mechanically inferior.
Still waiting on why you think all the options in the Core Rulebook are mechanically equal.
Did you just use "We were bad at developing" as an excuse for making a bad development choice?
No, I'm pointing out to you that "balance" in an RPG where you have healing classes and damage classes and support classes is an illusion. Is the cleric with the Healing domain "balanced" against one with the Travel or War domains? Is the healing cleric balanced against the fighter? Or the barbarian? Or the sorcerer? Or the bard? How do you rate how "balanced" they are against each other? By how much damage they do? By how much damage they prevent or cure? By their total skill point bonuses?
The game, dating all the way back to Basic D&D, isn't built for you to win, it's built for you to have fun. And if you're given different ways for you to have fun with your character, even if some of those ways mean you're not "balanced" against a character specialized purely in damage or healing or Diplomacy checks, you're still having fun. This isn't World of Warcraft where a bad talent tree for a class means you're overall damage is down 2.5% from the best spec and you get yelled at by trying to raid in that poor spec because you're making it harder to kill boss monsters. This is a cooperative game where the odds are stacked in the PCs' favor and you don't have to maximize a number to ensure survival of the group. You're allowed to make choices that suit the story of your character, even if those choices mean you're not the best at damage or healing or Diplomacy. The game has greatswords and longswords and short swords and daggers, and each has its place in terms of damage, utility, and character flavor. Yet I don't see you complaining that the dagger-specialized fighter isn't balanced against the greatsword-specialized fighter.
If you want every option to be mechanically equal, you need to play a different game.
Me, I'm going to write for, and play, a game where it's okay if you want to play a Indiana Jones-style wizard who starts with a 15 Dex and 12 Int and fights with a whip. And it's okay if you want to play a rapier-wielding swashbuckler rogue who multiclasses into fighter and cleric of luck because it suits his theme, even though it costs him BAB and access to some better feats. And it's okay if you want to play a dwarf fighter who's slow as hell, has a 20 Con and 100 hit points at level 7, and takes Great Cleave to finish off all the minions while his monk and barbarian buddies kill the leader. Because those are all fun character options. Even if the wizard is struggling to keep his Int in pace with the minimum needed for his higher-level spells... because sometimes the wizard pulls off an awesome move in combat that he couldn't do with a pathetic Dex. Even if the swashbuckler is always out-damaged by the lower-level paladin with a greatsword... because sometimes the swashbuckler crit-kills a beholder in one stab. Even if the dwarf only gets to use Great Cleave once in the entire campaign... because that one time he kills 8 foes in one round and convinces the campaign boss to surrender in the face of such might.
If you're not satisfied with your numbers, choose another options that makes you feel like more of a man. If you're not having fun, play something else.
To paraphrase my second post in this thread:
Basically, "worthwhile" is not solely defined as "something mechanically equal to other options."
So it is only a worthwhile archetype in those specific kinds of campaigns? If that's the case, why not put the archetype in a Golarion specific book, rather than a general supplement?
Because not everyone who plays PFRPG buys stuff from the Campaign Setting line, and it's a perfectly valid feat for GMs who run their worlds that way and a useful feat for cleric PCs in those worlds.
Basically, "worthwhile" is not solely defined as "something Ravingdork would choose."
I'm sorry, but if we're both homeless and a stranger gives us both $5, if you blow yours on strippers and I set up a lemonade stand and turn my 5 into 20, I'm not giving you ten bucks. :)
Kirth Gersen's Lemonade Stand, An All-American Success Story
So, someone gave two homeless guys $5 each. One blew it on strippers and one opened a lemonade stand with it and parlayed his $5 into the princely fortune of $20. But not for long. Because my fictitious father is a drug lord from some third world country, financed by the U.S. government to "fight communism" on top of his drug empire earnings. I start the lemonade game with $5,000,000,000, not $5.
So I bribe (aka "lobby") the U.S. government to make sure that only Approved Quality Lemons get used in lemonade, legally. And the fine print means that the only lemons that get selected as Approved Quality Lemons are the ones my father's serfs grow for free, because he'll shoot them if they don't. So I wait for the feds to shut down all the other lemonade stands, and set up my own everywhere. If you want lemonade, I'm the guy.
The original lemonade stand guy tries to get back in the game with some of my leftover lemons, but he's working two full-time jobs just to buy food, so he's only got 2 hours left to work on his stand, and he's groggy from lack of sleep and poor health due to unpaid medical bills (his jobs don't have insurance, because he can't get good benefit jobs with only a lemonade stand on his resume. Sucks to be him!). By working 6 hours a day, I'm outworking him on lemonade stands by a factor of 3, and he can't keep up. He drops of a heart attack and I'm free of his bothersome efforts.
Now I'm employing 6,000,000 people to sell my ultra-low-quality lemonade; I pay them minimum wage, have them work 60 hours a week but only let them log 39 (so I don't have to give them full-time employment benefits). I end up putting maybe a dollar a year into the U.S. economy, and funnel the rest into the Bank of Third Worldia offshore. Because my profits are "going into the business" and "creating jobs," and because I have a bunch of my father's drug CPAs working full time on loopholes, I pay no taxes. Life is good!
Over cigars at his mansion, the governor of my state tells me he has listed all my lemonade jobs to prove his state wasn't affected by the economic downturn because of his awesome business-friendly fiscal policies, and asks what he can do to thank me for that and the $1,000,000 in bribes (aka "campaign contributions") I gave him. I explain that my brother Karth is trying to muscle in on the market, with more of dad's lemons. Grrrr! So I ask the governor to set up a licensing board for lemonade stands, and appoint me the head, and no one can sell lemonade without a license. He doesn't want to make it a state board, because that would be "regulation," but he sets up a "Private Industry Self-Regulatory Board" for me with the backing of the state, which is the exact same thing except I run the whole thing without the state as a partner. We shoot some coyotes for fun, and I shut down Karth the next week.
Eventually people realize my lemonade is horrible, and start bootlegging their own or going without. I look at my profit sheet, realize I'm running my company into the ground, and won't even have Dad's drug profits to rely on anymore due to monitoring of that kind of stuff after 9/11. So I go to the Fed and explain to them that if my business fails, the Beverage Bubble will burst, all my employees will be unemployed, and Armageddon will occur. I'm Too Big to Fail. So the U.S. taxpayers bail me out. I pocket their $80 billion as a golden parachute, leave my company to collapse anyway, and retire to the Caribbean.
--
That's how the lemonade stands really work in this great nation of ours -- if you don't believe me, look at the news some time. There are a thousand guys just like the one I described for every wholesome self-made rags-to-riches millionaire you're envisioning. And it would be easy to fix. If any collusion between government and business legally constituted an unconstitutional conflict of interest, carrying lifetime prison sentences, 90% of the tricks I used to create this financial nightmare would evaporate. Government needs to be re-cast as a counter to Big Business, and vice versa, by Constitutional amendment -- instead of the current situation, in which the two of them are in bed together to screw everyone else -- the poor, the middle class, and the small businesses alike. Until that happens, people aren't "self-made," they're government-made -- the same government that won't touch their profits for revenue, but prefers to tax their smaller would-be competetors and the working class instead, and/or cut "entitlements."
nobody needs any more town guards, dwarf fighters, elf bowmen etc
That's great, thanks. Saves me the trouble of checking out my minis to see what I need to get. It also saves anyone new to the hobby from buying stuff like dwarves and elves they're never going to encounter in game.
BTW, I don't buy the Players Companion line. From this I can infer that nobody else does, so can Paizo stop doing them?
I should also mention that I don't automatically equate "nudity" with "sex," but that might put me in a minority. When I get into the shower, I don't actually wear any clothes, but my purpose has nothing to do with any kind of fetish, and more to do with getting clean.
Oh man! I can't wait for 5th Edition! I've already got a set of d30s ordered!
There will also be a simultaneous launch of customizable virtual miniatures and a 3DTV virtual tabletop. All fully functional and available on launch day as part of a new subscription service, which will include all new artwork and frequent updates and add-ons for an additional fee. They promise.
Skull and Bones is more than a working title. It's pretty much THE title of the AP. We've already spent many, many hours thinking up names and so forth for the AP and we're pretty happy with Skull and Bones.
But spells are limited by stat - if you want to cast a spell of 'x' level and you are a wizard, then you must have an Int of at least 'y'.
Should martial characters have a similar constraint - if you want a feat of 'x', then you must have a strength/dex/con of at least 'y'?
The real problem isn't that this feat has Int as a prereq. The real problem is that Int is considered a dump stat for fighters. There ought to be enough uses for skills for fighters that figuring out whether to make a strength build, a dex build, a con build, or an Int build is a worthwhile question.
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