Ok, Planet Stories readers! Do me a favor and head over to the link Doug just posted. Scroll all the way to the bottom until you get to the montage of images of cone-headed robots with tentacle arms.
Would you buy a novel in which every single character looked like that?
My Grandfather had an abiding love of fantasy fiction that he sucessfully transferred to me. Howard, Burroughs, Brackett, Zelazny, Cherryh, Farmer, Cook, Anderson, Moorcock & so many others graced his bookshelves. Some of those books are still with me. Many others I thought I had lost.
Planet Stories is doing a great service to the gaming and fantasy community by re-publishing these works. It is not all Tolkien! There is a deep and broad pulpy narrative history that much of our game and current fiction is drawn from.
Some of these books clearly draw from another time and sense of gender and polity. However, all have something to say about what we consider brave and what it takes to face the darkness.
Thank you for helping me find some of the lost stories of my youth.
1. Have you purchased a Planet Stories novel or anthology yet? If so, which one(s)?
All if them.
2. What author in the Planet Stories line most interests you?
I would get Haggard if you can. I understand why you have included Gygax, but his fiction is pitiable. You also need to recruit some new writers who can do the genre justice. Pathfinders stories would be grand.
3. Please list the following genres in the order you would prefer that we focus on in late 2008 and beyond:
Rebuild the canon. I see this as a project in documenting the roots of the genre. Outstanding work!
4. What can I do to get you to buy more Planet Stories books?
I am buying the full line.
5. If we offer a monthly subscription with, say, a 30% discount off the cover price, would you consider subscribing?
Somehow my copy of Pathfinder #4 was replaced with only the pdf. Can this be corrected? I am a subscriber and should have gotten the pdf and the print copy.
I've never posted anything before but feel compelled to praise Paizo on their customer service and quality of product. There are very few companies today that directly and efficiently deal with customers on a one-to-one basis. I'm also impressed when I read (on the messageboards) the game developers being so forthright and down to earth when it comes to explaining the choices they made for the Pathfinder and Game Mastery adventures. High grades all accross the boards, and on more of a personal note; I hope that Paizo sticks with the 3.5e rules for just a while longer as I felt the switch to 4e was made too quick.
- Sincerely, one satisfied customer.
Absolutely. They are friendly, efficient and transparent in their service and approach to things.
I manage 1132 customer service people. I wish they all had the focus and discipline of the paizo folks.
Computerizing D&D will just never make it. The competition is to much and any attempt to succeed would require WOTC to go all in, dropping the pen and paper aspect...
My call: More of a bifurcated market. Smaller margins. An even weaker business model. RPGs are a very weak business model. Paizo does a very good job of creating high margin product, like the flip maps and item cards, and keeping the revenue flowing. Hasbro does the same thing with minis. Most OGL companies scrimp by in the margins unless they can create a core book that is comepetitive like Conan or Villains and Vigilantes.
WOTC/Hasbro should have stayed focused on selling more core books and letting the Third Party companies innovate and be satisfied with low margin product. That was the argument behind the OGL orginally and it was brilliant. It also used an "open code" model to engage the player base in building out the rules structure. Alas, I think I.P. concerns crashed the model.
So, will 4.0 make a few quarters for WOTC and make Papa Hasbro happy. Sure it will. Will D&D and gaming endure long haul... the ball is in play and I am worried I smell the end coming.
This is a great idea. Having written over 20 episodes and interacives for either Living Greyhawk or Blackmoor, and having edited about four times that, I see 3.5s largest issues with high level play. Play breaks down rapdily at about 14th level and balance becomes a critical issue. Epic play is little better.
Fix this issue, and I doubt any system can trump it.
I agree, that after 15th level things scale very much out of control. But most DMs can tailor things to work still at these levels.
Glad to see you over here Tad. Will you be making it to Megacon this year?
Probably not. I am managing a $16+ million project at work right now and it is sucking up all my bandwidth. Don't even have time to write!
Most homeplay DMs "house rule" high level play under control. However, I'd like to see this eliminated as a necessity. It's also very hard in an MMRPG environment to make high level play function well.
This is a great idea. Having written over 20 episodes and interacives for either Living Greyhawk or Blackmoor, and having edited about four times that, I see 3.5s largest issues with high level play. Play breaks down rapdily at about 14th level and balance becomes a critical issue. Epic play is little better.
Fix this issue, and I doubt any system can trump it.
I have not canceled the Pathfinder Chronicles items from the order. We do not have the Pathfinder Chronicles subscription ready, yet. So if you wish to change that over when it becomes available, we can revisit this order at that time.
Thanks,
cos
Thank you! You are correct. Those are items I want.
It would actually be better if you created the subscription yourself via the website, in order to ensure that it is configured properly to your specifications.
For me to create it for you would require me to make too many assumptions on my part. Most likely they would all be correct, but you know what they say about making assumptions...
Go ahead and create yourself a subscription starting with Pathfinder Volume #4, and I will cancel the remaining items from this order. Let me know (via messageboard or email) when it is complete and I will see that you get the PDF's.
Thanks,
cos
Order # 847834 is my Pathfinder Subscription Order.
To the OP question, though I see he has already made some adjustments to the story for his kids,... I am not personally worried about the family violence being portrayed because me and my wife are generally well adjusted, we don't hit each other, only occassionally actually yell at one another, and there is no domestic violence issues in any of their friends homes or cousins homes.
YMMV of course and I could see being worried, knowing the way kids think, if the children knew of a situation in their vicinity where domestic violence was a real-life issue. Mine however, I suspect, will simply think to themselves...how horrible. I'm glad I have a good home. At least thats what I would like to think their reaction will be :)
Just for the record, not a big wife beater myself. Likewise, my neighborhood is LUC/UMC & noone has domestic violence issues. I know what these kids haver responded poorly too so far and am trying to be sensitive to that.
I have been treating the game as a mechanism to teach my boys moral lessons and to place them in situations where they are forced to make ethical decisions. This has been useful to me as a parent on several levels. First of all, it has made us all much more closer and has been a great way for us to spend time together. I oversee Blackmoor for ZG and Dave Arneson, so my sons have seen me judging at conventions and have seen multitudes of people trek though my house playing different games. They have been desperate to play, and judging for them has been a great bonding experience and excellent for all of us. If you have children in your household, I heartily recommend running a game for them.
Secondly, I have been able to use the game to teach my sons ethical lessons and come to a finer understanding of their thinking and how they approach the universe. My boys are aren’t at the point where they say, “My character would…” to abstractly determine a code of conduct based on their alignment or defined character background.. Their actions are still directly informed by their personal moral compass, so the actions they take tell me quite a bit about who they are.
I have been able to bring them to terms with real world causality. When my 7 year old gets mad in the Rusty Dragon and punches someone, he spend a night in the jail. When my ten year old puts his Halfling mage in front of cleric because he is angry that he is getting more kills than him, he gets knocked down.
So, in terms of ethical decisions, I have tried to give them the types of connections. What people do, has consequence. There is good in the world. There is evil. Here are the issues we have covered:
1. When is violence justified?
2. When is it right to break into a place you do not own?
3. What duties do we have to our friends?
4. How do you help someone deal with death?
5. What is the difference between self-defense and murder?
6. When is it acceptable to attack an enemy?
I think hard moral choices for these kids are a good thing and useful for them and will make them better adults. I am comfortable with the concept of “sin” and am fine with my sons understanding how we understand evil in western society. I don’t want to just abandon the series as a result. I do have to repurpose and translate at times.
Skinsaw Murders has some harsher content because it deals with domestic violence and murders within a household. I presented this in Burnt Offerings when Tsuto killed his Dad and the table of kids took it hard.
I am going to make some slight adjustments. Everyone at Fox Glove Manor who was murdered, is instead going to be entrapped and used to power the haunting. The kids will have to free them instead. The murders in Sand Point will not be mutilations and not everyone will be murdered. Some folks will be abducted. I am not going to dilute the undead/ghoul issue. These kids all watched LOTR and saw what almost happened to Frodo. They are ok with that as a concept. The lesson there for them was that evil can corrupt you through contact.
The changes I am making still let me teach hard lessons, but make the consequence less horrible for the victims. The largest issues so far have not been with the depth of the issues. The boys have been remarkably resilient dealing with complex ethical problems and listening to them exercise these intellectual muscles has been pretty awe inspiring. Their issues have been more with the plight of the innocent and the relatively powerless. They get a big kick out of being protectors and champions of the town. I want to continue to play to that but keep them focused on action and consequence and behavior and cost.
It’s a game, but it’s also a type of story telling. Stories have been potent teaching tools since we mastered fire and began to spend nights around them making sense of the universe.
I'd like to cancel the remaining three Pathfinder episodes in this order and convert them into an ongoing subscription.
As I've purchased Episodes 1-3 (2 through you and one through Gencon) if you were to throw the pdfs my way as an act of good faith and outstanding customer service, I would not be offended and promise to sing your praises far and wide.
I authorize use of my current payment settings for the change in the transaction.
C. But I am stunningly unsold on 4.0 at this point. The mechanics changes seem radical to me. I do a ton of organized play and will have to develop some competency in the rules set to play RPGA events, but I would very much prefer alternatives.
One thing could get me to convert to 4.0. High level play. If you've every tried to design something for ATL/APL 12+ then you know how broken high level mechanics are. Having writen the last Sheldomar sloped for APL 6-18, I can testify to the weakness of the mechanics in this regard. BLEH!
If 4.0 can make a dynamic rules set that is durable through 20th+ level, I will rethink my disdain for the marketing and the way the OGL companies are being excised from the market. If not, Runequest is looking pretty sweet in its current edition.
1. The Rules Cyclopedia was published in 1991, after the 2nd Ed. AD&D PHB (ppub date 1989). The 2nd ed PHB most certainly had Schools and Specialist.
2. The Rules Cyclopedia was for the "basic" D&D game. Basic D&D != AD&D
I'll be more than happy to flip through my (battered and beaten) copy of the 1st ed PHB to see if schools are present and report back. I'm almost positive that schools were present, but perhaps in a rudimentary form, similar to how descriptors are now used.
Schools of magic were present in 1.0. In the first edition PHB there were lsited up near the spell name. Specialization of schools first reared its head in Unearthed Arcana (I think), and became a mainstay in 2.0.
Harbro is not concerned about heritage. They are concerned about salvaging their IP and reselling product.
The problem I have with 4.0 based on this discussion is that it has abandoned some core concepts of the old system. 3.0/3.5 still felt like the old D&D. Spells had levels. There were spell books.
Most of this seems like a radical departure from the old system. However, Hasbro is in dire pursuit of the WoW market, and this taps that ouvre. SAD. SAD. SAD.
I am running this series for my sons and their friends (age range 7-10). Burnt Offerings was ideal for their sensitivities. Skinsaw murders has a bit of a sharper edge. I very much enjoy the product, and they are enjoying it also. However, I am in the process of... softening some of the edges in the plot and was wondering what this group thinks.
How would you adjust this? I am not so much concerned about murders as they understand that there are bad men in the world. I am more concerned about issues involving family violence. Explaining that daddies could kill mommies and children is one thing. Roleplaying it is another. Any thoughts on this?
The title of the thread says "GM Reference" so I would think that spoilers are expected...
ANYway... getting the horse off the island likely requires that the bridge be reinforced, which basically equates to simply disabling the trap. So you could reinforce the bridge with a DC 15 Disable Device check (since the DC is below 20, and since Disable Device is usable untrained, you don't even need a rogue to do this; it's just an Intelligence check for someone who has no ranks). Most people could take 20 on this check and the bridge'll be fine for leading or even riding the horse across it... although you should probably also throw in a Handle Animal check or Ride check in this case.
Besides, it's a great bit of gobliny texture. You can take too deep of a hit off the realism crack pipe trying to think this all the way through.
To illustrate:
My 10 year old, "Hold it Daddy. How did the horse get across that bridge?"
My eight year old responded, "The goblins did some crazy goblin thing. They're big DUMMIES. Where's that punk Tsuto?"
Etc. etc.
By the way, Kill Gull. Awesome. My boys got SOOOO mad at the goblins for that.
Depends on your play style. When I am judging in a shared world campaign like Blackmoor or Arcanis, the gloves are off and it is on. I advocate full consequence for all decision players make.
However, running Pathfinder for my 7 and 10 year old and their friends requires a different aesthetic. This is as much about teaching them the game as it is holding to an abstract principle of detached consequence and mechanics. A certain... sensitivity to the experience and tolerance of the players is prudent. TPKing a table of newbies does not bring them back. Thye will migrate to WoW and the game shrinks some more.
Likewise, some campaigns are more concerned with narrative than mechanics. If it is not a aethetically satisfying moment in the story for someone to get whacked,you don't whack them. This is not my standard mode of play with adults, but I have run and participated in games like this and had a great time.
In general, I will only fudge when players have had a stupid run of luck or when the actions of one of them are about to wipe out all of them. I often don't fudge the dice directly. What I will do is say, "Ok folks, I hate to metagame on you here, but if you push forward there's a good chance you'll get squished." I'll point to relevant clues that support an in character decision to step back or rethink it. This is especially useful when developing new players.
Thanks for your response. I would assess the components of your communication plan to protect yourself from irate customers. The problem here is that my expectation has been set. Once that happens, I become feisty if it is not met.
I would manage the product delivery (pdf vs. print) in two different chains. Making one contingent upon the other makes delays from one to the other cascade. Granted, I am not privy to your full process, so there is clearly detail I am not seeing. My first blush response is to break up your supply chains as resources allow.
So you pleaded well, you made your changes and I subscribed. I'm circulation director at a newspaper so I am sensitive to product overhauls and the need for copy in response to the investment. I promise to pester everybody I know to subscribe also!
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tadkil
(Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Adventure Path, Campaign Setting, Tales, GameMastery Maps Subscriber; Planet Stories Subscriber)
