uncleden's page

Leave the cleric as is and just roll with it.

Run poison the new way.

This is one reason I'm considering updating 7-8 of the classic, need to stay around scenarios and retiring the rest. Still up in the air and very, very infant stages of this idea so please don't get worked up over it. I will poll the playerbase before we did anything like this.

Hi all,

We just came back out of the biggest Con/Pathfinder event run in Australia (Ruby Phoenix) - Which was a great success (more stats to follow), and whilst Pathfinder Society is increasingly growing here there is also an increasing disenfranchisement with Faction missions - specifically how they are written and what has happened to them – I normally don’t weigh in too much with this stuff, but I had enough comments/complaints that I felt that I needed to bring some attention to it.

1.The first issue is that of the innate nature of Faction missions as a flavorful plot hook.
In Season 0, these seemed to be geopolitical. Players enjoyed their singular Faction mission as a ‘hook’ into the world of Golarion, with ties to nations, political issues and what was going on. One of the Key benefits is that missions had clear goals and reasons as to why you were doing your mission. The ‘macguffin’ mission wasn’t that common (unless you were Osiriani, in which case that is all you did). A great example of this is the Cheliaxian Faction mission in Slave Pits of Absalom.

This seems to have changed. Faction heads now seem to send people on arbitrary missions for personal or random reasons. Stereotypes have developed. It has literally got to the point where one player was saying to me ‘what random sexual toy does my supposedly powerful fascist nation wish for me to collect now’ – which is the increasing feel for Paracountess Dralneen. The Faction interplay is something that was initially very well received, but now seems to be just a random task that you have to do with little to no serious explanation. That isn’t that fun, as if it is meant to be a Golarion roleplaying hook – then it should be!

2.The second issue is the PROPHETIC nature of Faction missions.
How is your Faction leader able to know exactly that you will have to veer off course in a storm, arrive at a small island and find a small item for them? Or that you will manage to end up somewhere the venture Captain or you aren't intending on going? Faction missions should be related to the plot of the briefing, and should come in AFTER said plothook to allow PCs to maintain suspension of disbelief. These Faction missions seem lazy and arbitrary, and I had several players refuse to do them at the con out of irritation.

3.The third issue is the instruction clarity and occasional rigidity of the missions.
Quest for Perfection Part III is the most obvious example of this, where the players genuinely don’t know how to achieve their Faction goals, and regardless of how smart, clever, or well they roleplay/work together can only achieve them through sheer luck. (See Shadow Lodge Faction mission)

Ideally, it would be nice to reconcile Factions back into golarion, rather than as a mechanical process for item access, and moreover, TIE THE FACTION MISSIONS TO THE PLOT EXPOSITION. There is a lot of opportunity being missed here, and it is obvious Factions are being created as afterthoughts, rather than though being put into how each mission affects each faction, how much each Faction head should know about the mission, and what realistically is a cool plothook to be followed.

I understand this is already being brought up by my VC, Alistair Rigg – but I felt I should have my feedback provided – as we all want to improve this great game we got going here!

Any insight if other people are getting similar feedback would be interesting.

Regards

Dave Metcalfe (Metz)

That would really suck, frankly. I know they want to support newer players to play new characters by releasing mods aimed for lower tiers (Levels 1-7), but their core following is continually leveling up. I'd hate that they would ignore those that have put in the long hours to get their characters up just to have to shelve them as soon as they get to 12th because they already have finished the retirement mods w/ a different character.

You ask for a second retirement arc, but when I look at your sessions, I don't see any reported sessions of Eyes of Ten, either GMed or played. It is hard for us to justify looking at doing a second Tier 12 retirement arc when people either aren't playing them or are not reporting the sessions when they are played.

What is Paizo's mission statement?

Never been a fan of them. I realize that the point is to have some simple statement that you can measure grand decisions (or even small decisions) against, but to me, the whole concept essentially presupposes that the people in charge don't have the brains to figure out which ideas are good and which are bad (or at least have such a complicated organization structure that decision-making is spread out over more than a reasonable number of people).

I would, however, be generous enough to allow him to throw the bottle and use magic missile to break it just as it is close to the target's face - to blind him, a la Dirty Trick maneuver.

Personally, I would not allow this. The Magic Missile specifically targets creatures, not objects. I recall this being a huge issue in 3.5 and there was clarification made that it could not be used to target objects. I assume this still holds true in PFRPG. Otherwise, it would open the game up for using Magic Missile to, unerringly, target ropes being climbed, shooting bow strings, targeting objects being held, etc. IMO, if you fail to designate a creature as the target the spell fails to function. But the caster would know better and would not attempt to use it that way. YMMV.

Note that alchemists are one of the least PFS-friendly classes there are. I saw this because often other players like to participate in combat too, and with splash weapons you pretty much run into voluntary PvP every round with the melee types. The only worse "non-group" class is anything with a large animal companion, which blocks the melee types out completely in any underground or indoor situation (in other words, most of the time).

It's a group game, with the added complication that you don't always know the composition of the group in advance. My suggestion is to choose something general that lets you shine in a few different areas, doesn't just do max damage/AC/ubergrossness in one situation (no matter how common), and something that you like the concept of. As Painlord says, "Have something to do every round" in every situation.

I never audit chronicles as I consider it to be disrespectful to the player. It's a bit like accusing him of cheating even though I have no evidence unless I go fishing for it. So long as the character is on a par with my expectations for their wealth and level thats good enough for me. So long as everyone has fun at the table I'm happy.

Generally I don't have my character numbers with me when I'm running a game as if I'm traveling any distance, I'm going specifically to Judge.

I have applied credit after the fact when I'm home with my characters, my spreadsheet of who has played what and what I have and haven't taken credit for.

Being forced to report which character has GM credit applied immediately will mean that as a Judge I just will never take credit and therefore essentially lose out on that.

I'm sorry, I don't think it's fair to people that donate their playing time for Judging and have to already bring maps, books, dice, minis, the scenario and other paraphernalia to also now start requiring them to bring character information because one or two people think that one or two people are getting some sort of special advantage.

In my opnion enough is enough. Honestly I'm really super tired of all the nitpicking that seems to happening lately. It's a game .. let it be a game

No.

PFS does not use in-game solutions to out-of-game problems.

If a player is cheating, the other players should talk directly to him about it.

Your definition of 'healthy' is nowhere near mine.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm going to make a list of them and give them to the player.

As for the existence of bad dice luck... Objectively, I know that we all get the same chances, but I have watched this player roll poorly way more often than statistics would suggest.

Anyway, even if bad dice luck doesn't exist, this is still an interesting topic. Some people don't like to be at the mercy of the dice.

TOZ wrote:

What if the player wants to minimize the effect of die rolls on his performance, Bruunwald? I think this discussion would be quite helpful.

That's fine. But doing so can only start with a clear understanding that the player is not "cursed" with bad rolls.

I call BS. Having a discussion about end results without understanding the basics behind them is a time honored tradition for all of humanity.

For instance, I don't understand the first thing about computer programming or microprocessors, but I can still hold a conversation with my friends about building a gaming PC. What goes on inside? Might as well be magic for how well I understand it all, but that doesn't mean I can't evaluate how the machine comes together using basic rules of thumb that I've learned (for instance, a higher speed on your processor is good, but possessing multiple processors is better).

Similarly, bicycles continue to baffle science. There is no satisfactory model of physics that explains how a bicycle is able to stay up while ridden, or be used as a method of travel. Yet it works, and has for quite some time, and there are people who spend their lives building and designing better ones (and no, they can't explain how they do it beyond gut instinct and experience).

Or doctors, who still run into problems that they only know by the symptoms, and which they have to try and fix? There's an actual term in the medical field for anything like this, that they don't understand the cause of.

You dislike the superstition that a lot of gamers have, and that's all well and good, and none of us will deny you have the right to your opinion. But a discussion about how to avoid the apparent symptoms of bad luck, and how to minimize the effect of dice rolls, are going to come out in similar places, regardless of which conceptual framework is adopted.