Kata. the .....'s page

I wish to fully support this movement. I will even provide the link for those who have yet to see this tremendous, but a bit dated masterpiece. Don't try the obvious hisname.com site, that isn't even close. I seem to recall in a different thread that there were proprietary and time issues that prevented the updates, but bribery tends to get you everywhere.

Ok, maybe that is a bit of a falsehood but I am hoping to give him a bit of a kick-start. Chris, I love your stuff and just need more! Anyone who wants/needs/begs for Chris West to update his site with more of his beautifully designed and executed maps, here is the place to start bribing.

Please Chris, Please, please, pleeeaaaassssee!

FH(Devout Fan)

Having become a subscriber after issue #122, I only have this to suggest. If the cave-in was a wet collapse (i.e. rocks, dirt, and water). The resulting slurry could definitely have closed off the mouth of a cave to an extent that would prevent the general use of gaseous form to allow travel. As erian_7 pointed out one gets flow out of He balloons or another familiar situation is radon diffusing into houses through bedrock and foundation of buildings. These slow diffusion processes I would consider different than travelling through a crack in a wall or a keyhole. Now if there is a hole in the roof a medium size character can fit through, I don't know how anyone could fix that.

Age: 39 (no really)

Time playing: will be 30 years next year. A couple of friends were a little older and I got started with the little white box. Played 1e till early to mid 90s, then occasionally till about a year ago when a friend started a 3.5e game.

Hobbies: Hiking, Astronomy, watching movies, baseball, cooking
Location: Arizona
Education: B.S. Geology, M.S. Astronomy, basically Jack of all Trades, master of One.

Spent last two months as a stay at home bachelor, signed the paperwork this morning to start getting paid honestly again.

rise. RISE. RISE! it...is....aliiiive!...

Thanks for bringing this back to the top of the boards. Unfortunately, as of 5 October, the domain name www.boattalk.com has expired and they have not renewed it. So, if you want the huge list at the top, you'll just have to copy it to a file on your own computer as I just did.

It was not really a critical fumble or a critical hit. My moment was driving down to watch Comet Hale Bopp just south of Casa Grande, AZ. I was driving down a paved road and failed my spot check to notice road went from paved to dirt AND turned. I was driving my Toyota pickup truck and the back got really really loose, so I turned into the skid and overcorrected and turned into the skid in the other direction. According to the guy who witnessed it my tail swerved "Over A Dozen" times. All, I remember is thinking "Should I take it into the ditch at the side or keep going?" I kept going and after failing a spot check, I apparently made a dozen back-to-back reflex saves and drove off to the observing site as if nothing happened.

James Keegan wrote:

PLEASE tell me you got an autograph, at least. Or a picture where you look super enthused and he looks kind of like,"Alright, you're meeting me, you're meeting me," like a Xena cast member at a convention. That stuff's bound to be a collector's item some day.

Oh! Oh! We need Paizo.com baseball cards, with artistic renditions of ourselves as our messageboard handles and on the back a real life photo. And stale gum! My card would be kind of lame, since it's my real name, but whatever.

Yeah, that mummified baseball card gum the consistency of old tile spackle, with the powdery sheen that stings your throat when you first start crunching, not chewing it.

I figured, I got mead. Mead!!! Best not push my luck asking for an autograph.

Actually, we should be more in the mode for Magic Cards. A Lilith card might be {link to a useful web site). Fake_Healer might be rearrange two letters in a post to create a different meaning (e.g. rouge --> rogue).

I was with a whole bunch of gamer friends who were bowling (something I had not done for 2 or so decades) and I asked the serving wench (err, I mean bartender) for a pint of the only drinkable beer there. They all laughed and said, "It's a bowling alley they don't have pints". Lo and behold, 1 1/2 hours later I was served a beer in one of the (I suspect) 3 or 4 pint glasses they had (it was a 14.9 oz pint glass, but it was a bowling alley). I would have asked to go to a microbrewery if I wanted great beer.

I apologize for my lack of knowledge but where are Sudden Metamagic feats from?

Right now, I'd have to say Dungeon is the best its ever been. The three level ranges for adventures, the campaign workbooks, the format...all top notch. Why not keep it the way ya got it, only ixnay a feature once in a while. Make it two adventures instead of three one month or skip a campaign workbook. I'm sure you get manuscripts that are great but have to be chopped because of space, why not give some of them their due?

I think Luz's idea of the occasional (1/year) 2-adventure Dungeon is great. Of course, I am still early in my Dungeon Magazine history (less than a year). This could allow a bit more space for the plethora of stuff James Jacobs has said was cut from "There Is No Honor". Another idea would be to have a "third" adventure as several short (even unrelated) encounters. These were my bread and butter when I was a 1e DM (and the reason that many players thought you could DM with no notice) but I have enjoyed collecting these encounters from the books and would not mind adding a few from Dungeon as well.

I suspect Lilith will shortly reply to this thread as her site dmtools.org is perfect for this. She already has Churtle, Kobold Cook/Poison-mistress who is currently lonely and looking for other Sasserines to join her.

rpgenius is still looking for submissions on STAP as well. I have heard that he did an excellent job on SCAP and AoW.

The acquisition of skill points should be based on the style of campaign the DM is running.

I do get sick of people saying that the current system is lacking because there are too few skill points in the game (or whatever), and then backing up their arguments with "evidence" that their system is "da bomb" because their players are now happy. This is hypocritical in one sense, because by saying that the current system is lacking they are taking a shot at every group that is happy playing with the skill point system as it currently stands. Their group may indeed be very happy with the change to the skill point system, but does that make their choice necessarily game balanced or right? I think not.

Happy players don't always make contented players. I remember a MERP game I played about 20 years ago where the DM made us all happy (at least at the time, but now I feel cheated) where a friend who played an elf and I, who played a dwarf, had hide skills so high that we could literally hide behind each other in an open field and noone could see us. I also wound up with the ability to walk across the Mississippi River (or a body of water as large) carrying an anvil (OK it was a magic anvil, but that just makes it worse).

The games I remember fondly now were the ones I almost (or did) die in. I talk about the fights where I needed (and did) roll a 20 to survive. The only other thing I remember about that MERP game is that for awhile we used to go into forests and spook deer until the elf decided that might not be the type of thing an elf would do.

I'm a guy who played Gamma World in high school. Oh wait, you mean how many guys are married, dating, etc women who played Gamma World? This meeting does describe the main reason I come to Paizo as opposed to most of the other D&D boards on the web. There seems to be a better collection of people. I actually might go to a GenCon or similar convention for the opportunity of meeting some of the Lords of the Boards and maybe drinking some of their homebrew.

And from what I've seen f2k is one of the best here.

So what you're saying here is that you'll watch the whole IMDb Top 250, no matter what? No matter how good or bad the movies may be?

You would watch Chairman of the Board? 'Cause, dude... That movie sucks.

Short answer: Yes. Actually, it has taken me 10 years or so, to get that close, I believe I had seen 60-70 of the films when I first looked at it and discovered that I was rarely disappointed. Of the 243, I have voted on I have given a 2 once, a 4-5 13 times, and 6-10 on the 228 films (with the average near 8, my average over all films is 5.5) I wish to note that I do not try to do the same thing with the bottom 100 (which I have seen the misfortune of seeing 30 of these, including the current number 7, Chariman is at 12)

BTW, you would also have to get these 5000 people to vote on other films and, I think, do so regularly. It was interesting watching the Snakes on a Plane fans whine that it was not on t250 when their formula indicated it should be. They have a caveat of "regular voters included for Top 250".

And to James Keegan, a scary issue is that Senseless is at 5.4/10 (nominally average, although there overall average is above 6 since people tend to vote for films they like more often than dislike or more importantly, in the rankins, mediocre films)

and thanks to Netflix Idi i smotrii (aka Come and See) will be crossed off the list on Saturday. Hopefully Nights of Cabiria and Hate are coming soon.

One thing that really hasn't been answered is "Why?"

I have heard many times in this thread that none of the classes have enough skill points -- Why?

I have to commend Moff Rimmer on his stalwart defense of his position which I largely agree with. The reason I checked this thread out was an interest in this issue.

The reason I am considering an adjustment, is I am preparing to run STAP (my first 3e DMing) and noted that some characters were lacking basic needed skills (Climb, Swim, etc) when I ran 4 characters I created through the 1st installment. The only adjustment I was thinking about making was to allow you to use the extra skill points you acquire at 1st level to be used in untrained cross class skills at a cost of 1 per point rather than 2, however with the crossclass limit in place. However, the character background would be required to address these extra skill points.

So, that is my "why?". A couple of other whys that don't really involve powergaming are that some DMs like to have players check on a lot of things. Such as, you are walking up the stairs to the city council and the stairs are covered with ice, everyone make a DC 5 balance check, etc. I think this tends to be overkill, but I have slipped on regular polished stairs at school (no ice, perhaps a bit of fatigue). It has the advantage of making players find skills more useful and I would enjoy as a player as I have played with some DMs that only have you make a few checks per session.

The other issue I have with this and am not worrying a lot about it, is the learning of skills through time investment. If a wizard were to spend a few years in a library studying local information, he should be able to get to add to Knowledge (local). Or if a rogue, were to spend 6 months working for a jeweler, he should increase skill in Appraise. However, game mechanics does not allow these increases. As a person ages, even if they do not gain levels, they will still gain some skill points.

Over at ENWorld, we had similar issues w/ Swashbucklers. We discussed it a lot and came up with this revision. Let me know what you think:

The Swashbuckler base class has the following changes:

* D8 Hit Dice
* 6 Skill points per level
* The following are additional class skills: Disguise, Intimidate, Knowledge (nobility & royalty), Ride, and Sleight of Hand
* The class ability progression has been modified to use the following (changes in bold):
1. Weapon Finesse
2. Grace +1 (Initiative, Reflex)
3. Insightful Strike
4. Improved Disarm
5. Graceful Defense (AC, Disarm)
6. - ...

I don't have Complete Warrior, yet...

But this looks generally good, I would adjust something like this by thinking WWEFD? Errol Flynn played plenty of Swashbucklers and I would probably model any such character I played after what I remember from those films of my grandparents life.

In my neverending quest to see all of the IMDB Top 250. I watched La Belle et la bete (1946) and Oldboy (2003) last Friday. This brought me down to 8 films needed to have seen the whole list as it stands now. Both of these were very great films. La Belle et la bete (Beauty and the Beast) was in French with subtitles and Oldboy was in Korean with English subtitles (Sorry, I don't know French or Korean well enough to watch any film not in English or Spanish w/o subtitles, although I seem to catch most of what was said in Swedish films, Tak Ingrid Bergman). BTW, the 8 are:

Cinderella Man (2005)
La Haine (1995) aka Hate (1995)
Idi i smotri (1985) aka Come and See (1987)
Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
Notti di Cabiria, Le (1957) aka Nights of Cabiria (1957) (USA)
V for Vendetta (2006)
Walk the Line (2005) 8.1/10 (32948 votes)
Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)

I will hopefully see Little Miss Sunshine this week as it is playing in the Valley Art locally. I have a friend with Netflix who is trying to get Nights of Cabiria and Hate.

I actually have Queen's A Kind of Magic (basically the Highlander soundtrack) currently playing, but I have been recently listening online to KCDX They used to play ONLY album rock. They do have ONE feature that everyone has to love. NO ADS. At one time, you had to be lucky and live in one of the areas of the state that they broadcast with enough signal, but now they are available a la internet. For a hint of what they play, their last 6 tracks:

7:09 pm - Three Dog Night - The Show Must Go On
7:12 pm - Steppenwolf - For Ladies Only
7:16 pm - Television - See No Evil
7:20 pm - The Beatles - From Me To You
7:22 pm - Crowded House - Instinct
7:25 pm - Electric Light Orchestra - Mama
7:32 pm - James Gang - Woman

I just found this OLD thread. It is fairly interesting. Although, I really was surprised by Mike McArtor's avatar name. I notice that Saern, Sebastian, Heathenson and Cosmo have not added their info or I purposely decided to ignore their entries. Kata is a character I have recently played. I am generally poor at coming up with names and have often chosen odd last names, etc for my characters. So, Kata comes from Matt Kata, formerly of the Arizona Diamondbacks.

And oji040870, I think someone called you on a different thread. BTW, shouldn't it be Oscar Juliet India (followed by your b-day).

of undescribable filth

I'm not going to get too specific for security reasons, but we're using MySQL on OS X Server running on Apple Xserves. With some other stuff. :-)

-Vic.
.

Woohoo! That was all I needed. All your server belong to us.

Actually, I never really had a problem with the messageboards during this Savage Tide. I did spend 2.5 hours downloading the file 1 hour before my Wireless Service decided to cut me off and 1.5 hours to actually download the file.

Keep up the good work everyone at Paizo.

I have been reading this thread since its inception and have been wondering what to post before the homebrewers took it over. I am definitely a fan of a lot of beers. Valegrim "discovered" that fresh tap beers taste much better than even fresh bottled beers. The biggest problem with this is finding fresh bottled beer. I fortunately have a FLLS (Friendly Local Liquor Store, I though about using Drinking but chose not) nearby. This FLLS does not let the bottled beer sit for months. This is the largest problem which bottled beers have. But keg beer is definitely the way to go. Tonight, BTW, I am drinking Pilsner Urquell tonight.

A quick question to the homebrewers, (f2k, lilith, others, not FH yet) how much space does homebrewing take. I live in a small apartment (no pets, no rugrats).

Last night I listened to the song The Waiting by Tom Petty, but right now it is Pink Floyd Obscured by Clouds.

Thank you, erian_7 I followed the links and then explored daz3d.com on my own and it is not as easy to find good links as your post indicates.

I haven't had the group set up the party yet. After looking through the lists here, I worry a little. I am old-time DM, I learned before I turned 10 out of the little white box. I basically played 1st edition until a few years ago. I recently had a friend who was in the Army who played 2e and decided to start a game and invited me. As a long time DM, I jumped at the chance to play on the other side of the screen. Well, now 9 months later, they all want the old curmudgeon whose been running games for 30 years to take the other side of the table. Well, 1e is not 3e and I am still learning.

I was basically hoping the group would have a fighter, a rogue, a cleric and a wizard. This should be fine?

Kata

If it makes you feel any better, Kyle, we also mis-credited the artist for "Challenge of Champions VI." OH! And we misspelled "sorcerer" in the header for "The Mud Sorcerer's Tomb" also.

The Scorceror error was only repeated 15 times. I do wonder how a spellchecker does not catch that. I actually think they are trying to increase the value of the magazine. Maybe, they are in talks with Martin Scorcerorsese for the rights and are just trying to butter him up.

BTW, Great Maps Kyle. My victims (err, I mean players) enjoyed several this weekend and will get the rest in 2 weeks. Keep up the good work. I'll point out to them that you were misidentified, despite that fact I didn't mention it this weekend.

I wish to thank you all, especially Absinth, I am starting up in a new campaign and wanted to play a Paladin that probably would not really fit in the group. This thread has pushed me over to the cleric aspect. I get to play another cleric (but my first 3e cleric).

Thank you all.
Thom

I am surprised to find a group that has no one who enjoys playing a cleric. I am another new/old player who has a lot of experience with 1e and is now just getting into 3e (over last 6 months or so). I always found playing clerics to be more fun (and often a bit easier). You can slowly force the party over to praying and titheing your deity, which can be definitely bothersome to some characters. In lower-level campaigns you have to fight a bit more often than you want to, but after a few levels, you can practically orchestrate many scenarios. I would definitely agree with Absinth that forcing someone to play a role they don't want to is a bad idea. I have often been very flexible by waiting till the end of a new group startup and taking whatever the party needs and often been somewhat dissatisfied (e.g. playing a wizard when you would have rather been a Paladin).