Zedroom: PbP Superstars (Inactive)

Game Master Wilmannator

I liked it or I would have suggested you post it to help out. In our current scenario house/dungeon crawl I anticipate it will really help move things along. We have blown through 2 encounters already and I want to keep that high pace up.

Sorry its taken me so long to get posts up today everyone! Been a bit busy. Definitely cashed in a few brownie points to pull this one off so early in the evening.

Happy Halloween everyone! May be a slow day for me, but I've caught up on all the superstar action. Enjoy the candy.

So weird... we had maybe 20 trick or treaters yesterday. I have an obscene amount of left-over candy.

So much for my weight loss goals this month.

Paizo's servers were down for maybe an hour last evening, and all I thought was "Damo must be mad."

Sorry everyone for my absence this weekend. Real Life commitments took up an unexpectedly large amount of time. Beginning the process of 'catching up' Hopefully will be caught up by tonight.

Paizo's servers were down for maybe an hour last evening, and all I thought was "Damo must be mad."

I wouldn't be mad, except it was my hour and they were also down in the afternoon at my posting time.

Don't worry about your absence, John, this weekend had server issues galore for me (on Sunday anyway, Saturday was fine). I'm not sure if Paizo is doing regular maintenance on the weekend now or some stupid sh*t like that, but it just galvanizes my resolve to consolidate and move to fewer games (alts / drongos + my two GMed games).

I'm not sure who was hoping for it either, but it also means that (unless servers fix up by the time I finish the regular module) I will not be running a kingdom building version to continue the fun.

Don't worry about your absence, John, this weekend had server issues galore for me (on Sunday anyway, Saturday was fine). I'm not sure if Paizo is doing regular maintenance on the weekend now or some stupid sh*t like that, but it...

*cough**cough*(link)

Lolz.

I'm pretty sure this recent outage is all my fault. In trying to snark Damo, I angered the BoardGod, bringing his wrath down upon us all. Edit:From reading Damo's rant, above, looks like I brought double the wrath with one snark. Go me!

I would apologize, but I've always found the BoardGod to be a contentious prig when I've tried to be nice to him in the God'sRoom. Piddlespot that guy.

The DiceBot God ain't so bad though. Yeah, I know a lot of you hate him, but he and I can hang out. Sure, he's a dick to most, but he treats me right as I supply him with new PbP players to dick with. I've brought plenty of new PbP souls for him to victimize and torment with critical misses so...so...yeah, we have a good working relationship.

And that's why I don't lort as often as others lort s&@! up.

You want to know what god I avoid in the God'sRoom? The ProfanityFilter God. That is insane. He doesn't make a lick of sense. He speaks in umlauts and weird EuroFrenchy symbols that don't make sense when spoken, but his words might read right if he wrote them down. He doesn't. Some words he says you know are offensive, but he doesn't think so. But if you put the word b~#%% out especially when talking about dogs, he slaps you silly. He doesn't make any sense.

I used to see the DualGod of Focus/Defocus, but you have to press a button to understand him. But he also makes things disappear so I can't find them. So I avoid him lest I lose threads that I like.

So yeah, I'll bring a 6-pack back to BoardGod and see if I can get him back to work. Sometimes I think that if the ProfanityFilter god would just let the BoardGod invect and cuss properly, he'd get over his tantrum faster. But he won't...both are bound to their domains.

Meh. Gods are dicks.

Damien, we completely understand the frustration over our recent downtime issues, but abusive comments regarding our staff are unacceptable. Our tech team is actively working to solve the problem, and we appreciate the patience our users have shown. This specific feedback is not best suited for the Play-by-Post area of our site, however. If you have comments/suggestions on paizo.com, they really ought to be posted in our Website Feedback subforum so that the appropriate folks can see it.

Also, do not circumvent our profanity filter (as outlined in our Community Guidelines).

I blame painlord. The site first went down today.. the moment I tried to click his *coughcough*link lol...

I personally don't mind the downtimes all that much, but that's just because I recently bought Rocket League, and the downtime gives me a good excuse to play that game much more...

I'm always curious to know why certain things don't work, or why there's a fault. Even when I was working as IT support (the hands-on type) I never settled on solving the problem, but rooting the problem out and preventing on it happening again. Unfortunately many companies' policies prevent them from detailing the issues at hand. I for one would love to hear the technical details of the problem even if they were over my head.

This one time I had some very peculiar problems with my home internet connection, seemed like I couldn't upstream anything. It severely prevented me from e.g. playing multiplayer games but allowed me to browse the web and whatnot. After I finally made a call to the ISP's support, I detailed my error and it took maybe two tries... one guy there apparently knew what he/she was doing and noticed my MTU (maximum transmission unit) value was skewed, and set it to 1500. Prior to that incident I had absolutely no idea of MTU's existence. But the point of the story is that I was told what the source of my problem was, though I doubt they would have told me the technical specifics if I was a 80-year-old lady.

I forget that this is not our own personal playground.

Damien, I feel your pain. I really do. Since Paizo is blocked for me at work it is challenging to get quality posts in. And when the site is down, it stinks.

I also had dreams of finishing an AP. I heard a rumor that only 1 group has ever finished an AP over PbP and I wanted the superstars to etch their name right there too.

Having said that, you must do what you have to do. If you move Isle or RoW to a different hosting site I would be cool with that, but like the others I want to keep a presence here, at least for PFS.

If you bow out, you had a great run and I thank you so much for all you did the last year + to make my gaming experience so great.

I would say the same for the rest of you, but you haven't declared your intentions to Texas the forums.

I am committed to the RoW game, wherever it goes, and to Isle of dread as well.

I will continue to stay on these boards for PFS though. (And perhaps an AP, depending on the group and GM) I don't want to separate Cyrus from all the work we have done on his backstory with Ibid, and frankly this is the biggest pool there is for other gamers to be able to continue his story with (and my other characters).

Eventually Cyrus will have to retire, but I have loads of other ideas, some fleeting, some probably broken, but ones that I want to try in the PFS framework, and this is the easiest place to do it.

It kinda reminds me of my cable internet service. It works most of the time. When it doesn't, it makes me angry, but everything else is slower and more expensive and not any more reliable, so I deal with the times when it is flaky because there just isn't anything better out there.

Hopefully the rumors about a new forum site that fixes all these problems we are having are true. Either way, I'm not going anywhere anytime soon.

Besides - If the Drongos level out of PFS before GenCon, we need to make sure we have a stable of characters ready to maul GenCon 2016!

I also had dreams of finishing an AP. I heard a rumor that only 1 group has ever finished an AP over PbP and I wanted the superstars to etch their name right there too.

@TheBobJones: *cough**cough*. The Council of Thieves game also completed. It's possible to complete APs via PbP.

And while completing an AP might be a goal, it's the journey that truly makes it. It's the 5 or 6 other players that you bond with for years that makes it worthwhile.

Don't give up, TheBobJones.

FYI - check out today's blog post... there seems to be something shiny going on there!

Sorry for missing posts yesterday. Busy day at work, and then servers were down when I'd have the chance.

Having been involved many enough upgrade-project-gone-bonkers, I trust the people at Paizo are working hard to get things stabilized. So I do not have any plans for abandoning the forums. While I hope any of you wouldn't either, I can understand your frustration, and respect your decisions.

@Bobjones: can you still access paizo.com by phone? If you could then use evernote or similar cloud-notepad, you could type your posts in there, and then just copy paste to forums by phone...

@Jack: So you're officially anointed five-stars now, congratz! :)

Huh. Looks like my rant has been removed. Fair enough really.

Since I had to have it on my notepad*, here it is again (with the profanity filter uncircumvented and offensive comments removed):

* By the way, John, when I was experimenting with solutions "Simplenote" has the best syncing, "Evernote" had the worst.

Well, the site was finally up to (slowly) load this page... and then link took me to the http://paizo.com/nostore. So Paizo's down for the 3rd time this morning... which means this post likely won't work, so I'll be sure to copy and paste it later (10:54am now, FYI).

Whatever reason they ascribe to it, I really don't care. I sincerely doubt that these times I've decided to post (and I've missed out on 4/5 of these now) have been the only times the site has been down - so that puts the site's uptime at some number worse than 50% over the last 24 hours. This hasn't been the first time its happened... just the most recent and catastrophic (this week and last). Oh, Google caches stuff... *checks*... so... yep. They were upgrading to new software and it's temperamental. Well the old software was temperamental also. I won't hold my breath.

Also, we're restarting instances now which should fix everything for now.

Unless the restarts have taken over 14 hours, it didn't work.

For me, being able to post when I want is key to enjoying PbP. I set aside a block of time, and I 'reward' myself for getting s#+% done by chilling out for a while and responding to posts either as a player or GM. So now, instead of posting, I'm ranting. I don't like to rant. I genuinely don't... I just want you guys to understand where my head is at.

To that end...

I really dislike having to catch up on a massive amount of posts, and it interrupts my flow when it's a day or more between GM posts particularly. It's not fair to you, and it's not fair to me. If this is how it's going to be, then I'd rather spend my time on something work through my back catalog of Playstation Games or get through my DVR recordings now that Summer is over.

So, I'm just left wondering how I can gracefully and respectfully get myself off of PbP. For our PFS games, it's easy - I just stop at the end of a scenario. I don't want to sell you guys short on the Isle or RoW, though (especially since in Isle we're just about to get to the f%%&ing monkey, and, in RoW, Whitethrone beckons!). As such, I'm just thinking for now.... but I'm fairly certain (unless the servers stay this bad) that it'll be end of book 2 at a minimum for RoW, and <redacted> for Isle of Dread (I'll continue to play alts+drongos for as long as I continue to GM).

The servers have until then at the latest to get running properly before I'm out.

By the way, in case there was any doubt: the site was not working on my first try at submitting this. Nor my second. Not on the third either.

Looks like #4 is the charm. After #1, I thought maybe my language was too strong. At #4, I was considering upping the vitriol. No time to read properly and post anywhere today. Sorry.

Damien, we completely understand the frustration over our recent downtime issues, but abusive comments regarding our staff are unacceptable. Our tech team is actively working to solve the problem, and we appreciate the patience our users have shown. This specific feedback is not best suited for the Play-by-Post area of our site, however. If you have comments/suggestions on paizo.com, they really ought to be posted in our Website Feedback subforum so that the appropriate folks can see it.

Also, do not circumvent our profanity filter (as outlined in our Community Guidelines).

My apologies for the bitter and offensive comments. I'll reign it in in future. Thanks for the link about the profanity filter. I was unaware (though I probably should have been able to figure it out for myself).

However, this was a rant, pure and simple and not feedback in any way. It was intended for discussion with those I play-by-post with, so this was the right spot for it as far as I can tell.

In unrelated news, Chris B used to run a game (as recently as 16 days ago) of Curse of the Crimson Throne for a group of people. He did so under his alias of "DM Crispy". I played in it for a while, but bowed out due to a clash of gaming preferences (posting frequency and playing style - an issue that Chris has since resolved, actually). They've been through a few iterations (change of GM, then a change of PCs) but currently have a motivated group now, who are all posting well and regularly (daily+).

Is anyone interested in stepping up and helping out? Maybe even until Chris B returns or is confirmed permanently absent.

DM Crispy's Curse of the Crimson Throne

They seem to be in the middle of book 2.

It's not PFS, but CotCT is sanctioned, so you could get GM credits and hand out chronicle sheets for it (most of them have already signed up for PFS, and I'm sure the two hold-outs wouldn't mind creating "dummy" characters).

PS: Not to diminish any issues that Chris B might be having in reality, can we just colloquially refer to his disappearance as "the forums ate him"? Eg. Hey, remember when the forums ate Chris, well it's been about that long since Damien posted... I wonder if they've claimed another victim.

FYI - check out today's blog post... there seems to be something shiny going on there!

You know just the other day I was wondering how PFS would maintain its bureaucracy with all the expansion going on.

Then I read that post Jack liked to. Regional governors. How brilliant. Cross that one off the worry list.

Just kidding Jack! Congrats man. If I was you I would be spamming the boards to show off my new star.

Interesting additions to the animated objects discussion

@Silbeg: Would this rationale be enough to change things for the way your local GMs run it? Or did you have a more compelling argument for still using regular object properties that I didn't manage to make in my post?

Jack, you probably missed this in all the posting... any thoughts here?

So feeling a bit cheeky today, and my good friend LOVES a conspiracy theory. So what if Chris B. really works for Paizo's IT department, and he has been part of the upgrades/downgrades/throwing the master switch so we can't get our games on, and in some Tron related incident he got sucked into the Paizo network.

So he is trying to get out to return to his family now that Philip Rivers has more kids than him, and he wants to get back on top in that department, so he knows Damien is always on. So every time Damien gets online, Chris is trying to get out, and the only way he can get our attention is by crashing the servers.

So who is up for a little road trip to Seattle to break into the IT department and rescue Chris?

Cyrus'd by Damien. See he is in there. He is trying to get out. We need to save him.

Cyrus'd by Damien. See he is in there. He is trying to get out. We need to save him.

I'm in. Can I actually have Cyrus do it? He is much better at that kind of thing than I am...

Damien Wilmann wrote:

Interesting additions to the animated objects discussion

@Silbeg: Would this rationale be enough to change things for the way your local GMs run it? Or did you have a more compelling argument for still using regular object properties that I didn't manage to make in my post?

Jack, you probably missed this in all the posting... any thoughts here?

Nope! ;)

Which of my 3 questions is that a "nope" to?

Would that argument be enough to change the way your local GMs run it?

Damien, I know that you cross posted, but I will have to pass on taking over for Chris. Posting on my phone, tethering, or running to the Starbucks across the street are all sub-optimal solutions for my work work-around blocking Paizo.

I just feel I couldn't give an AP enough quality.

I still hold out hope of getting into a Wrath of the Righteous game one day.

Thanks John. Any takers on GMing for these guys?

I have to pass... I'm comfortable with my bite sized pfs scenarios right now, I am not ready to take on anything bigger. Thanks for bringing it up though

-Posted with Wayfinder

Yeah, I'll have to pass too. I don't think I could do it the proper justice. It would be fun, for sure, but I'd have a hard time giving it the proper effort it deserves. Cool thought though, Damien, trying to help find a way to keep it going in the interim.

I will have to pass as well, unfortunately. I am just too busy right now, especially with Siege of Serpents starting Thursday!

FYI - I am not going to start The Enigma Vaults until paizo.com stabilizes, and I clear a game or two from my list.

Thanks for considering it, guys. I would like to help, too, but GMing 3 games was insane before... and you know how I'm feeling right now about the forums.

Anyway, as for Chris's group - I hope they find someone.

I've been meaning to cut down my entire PbP collection in order to prepare for the Dragon's Demand megamodule. I've already asked for interest for it here, and I intend to repeat my inquiry in case someone changes his/her mind.

Furthermore, since the topic of Paizo's messageboards' reliability has come under the question I've started to look for potential alternative that would not, however, compete with Paizo's community and opportunities. I, personally, like to see if another system is better and gradually shift my attention there. For a more grand campaign I feel I need more customizable platforms to work with all the given attachments and whatnot.

So, again, if you are interested in playing Dragon's Demand, voice your interest via PM. I intend to try out RPoL as the PbP platform. Word of advice, though: the site does not utilize https, so all traffic is in cleartext. Thus, when creating an account there, use a disposable password. My inner internet security expert cringed when I received a verification mail that contained my inputted password in plain text accompanied with my account name. While this might put off some people (those highly concerned with their security), the site so far has proven to be alright despite the 90s-esque theme, which overall seems to a prevalent phenomenon among the older roleplaying sites. (The site was launched in August 2000, so it's pretty old for a still active site)

RPoL does offer aliasing and character names, includes a dice roller, has quick formatting buttons (straight up html codes, actually), and a private scratch pad, multiple threads per game/campaign etc. The layout does feature an irritating thing, though, since under each message's heading there's a squiggly line instead of a neutral, light gray horizontal line like in Paizo's messageboards (the one under my name). Once I've used the site for some time I'll make a collection of improvement suggestions and post them, and seriously hope I'm not disregarded. That happens often and it frustrates me.

tl;dr Dragon's Demand on RPoL, mmkay?

Just in case not everyone is following along - THIS post I think adequately sums up our collective frustrations with the site, and there is some good conversation before and after that comment.

Later in that same thread there is also THIS post from Vic Wertz, the Chief Technical Officer of Paizo who confirms what Painlord hinted at not to long ago in our thread.

Just wanted everyone else to see that apparently there is hope. No idea how long it will be before it gets here, but they do seem to be rebuilding the wheel.

Hooray!

Just in case not everyone is following along - THIS post

That dude is the best PbP GM on these here boards. There aren't enough words for the respect I have for what he does. Took us through CotCT complete and now through 2nd Darkness. Dude's referenced in all my guides.

Later in that same thread there is also THIS post from Vic Wertz, the Chief Technical Officer of Paizo who confirms what Painlord hinted at not to long ago in our thread.

I was right?! Oh of course, I was totally right. I knew it all along.

+1 to Vic's reply.

Not to interrupt any thoughts about the website, but I found something when I was studying my Bible not to long ago, and finally looked into it a bit this morning. This is totally and completely by coincidence, I swear there was no pre-planning involved in this.

Cyrus the Great is a former Persian king of the Achaemenid Empire, which was the largest empire in the world during its time. He is referenced in the Bible because the prophet Isaiah foretold that he would overthrow the babalonians and release the (some of the) Jewish people from their captivity. (most of this is in the book of Ezra, Old Testament)

Darius the Great was a persian king of the same empire who was after Cyrus. This king released more Jews from captivity, who eventually built the wall around Jerusalam (that story is in the book of Nehemiah) and ruled the empire when it was at its height.

So in Cyrus' backstory, he is the son of Darius, and both are keleshites. I don't know if Kelish has any sort of parallel to Persian, but in my head it does. Anyways, I just found it interesting that there were real life people with these names who had a connection to each other, and I managed to pluck them out for the names in my character's story.

If I ever get a catfolk boon, the character will be the child of Cyrus and Sheeba and will be named Xerxes.

Unless that is just to weird for Damien... :)

Posting this below on behalf of Damien because the NoStore Gremlins are pulling his teeth and nails out right now...

I am busy as today getting ready for poker, so those posts were my last posts for today. I'll be playing until late, so I very likely won't get my typical early morning posts in tomorrow. I'll do my best to get caught up by mid-afternoon. Sorry for the late notice - I really thought I'd get more poker prep in last night.

If I can, I will try to monitor the games I'm playing in for my turn at combat. Bot me if you'd rather not hold things up until mid-morning tomorrow.

1st attempted 10:49am, Thursday
Attempted 1 time since then

EDIT: Thanks for posting that for me, Steve!

I just tried to post an "I'll be away for the rest of today" notice. The site went up and down 3 times in all of that, and as I write this on my notepad I still don't know if those notices went through.

I've read all of the thread that Steve linked to. There are right ways and wrong ways to change the underlying architecture of a big site like this. You all know which way I think is happening right now. Triple the number of developers doesn't help if they're still not doing things right. Maybe they are. Maybe there are things that are truly beyond their control. I really don't know. I really don't care.

The downtime (and slow loading time) is really messing with my fun. I sometimes have to work hard to get a block of time set aside for posting (especially on a weekend, the time it's down the most) and when I can't do that I've wasted the effort at freeing up time - and I don't get my desired fun. I'm all about having fun. Not wearing out my "R" key.

I'm placing Isle of Dread and Reign of Winter on a 2.5 week hiatus (returning on Monday November 23rd). If any of you have reason to believe that the website is running better in the meantime, please let me know. I will continue to play all games I'm currently in. I will post twice daily (one in the early morning, one in the afternoon or late morning). If the site is down, I will email or text the GM to say that I tried and then I will do something else until my next posting time.

After the 2.5 weeks of hiatus from the games I am running, I will give it another go. If it happens again, I will just stop. Sorry guys, I know you've put a whole lot of effort into all of your characters and I really, really, really don't want to do this - but I'm far more often finding myself frustrated than enjoying myself. Even when I'm enjoying myself, I'm treading on eggshells wondering if the site will last long enough for me to post it. When frustration > fun, it's time to stop.

I've had a look at the alternatives, and none are a good replacement (for a whole raft of reasons already explored), with RPOL.net being the closest. However, for all of those, the set up time and all the rest of the crap that will come with sorting out another place to PbP (even if it all goes smoothly) will most definitely not be fun.

So. 2.5 weeks off from my games. Enjoy your free time.

If I had any doubt before, it's gone now. I just did an edit, and it double posted instead.

I think taking a couple weeks off is very reasonable. The situation is clearly not fun for you, and I bet most if not all your players would agree a hiatus is reasonable to recharge and patiently wait out this technological storm.

Besides a 2.5 week hiatus doesn't mean the players should remain silent. They could try to come up with an improvisational theater type of thing and keep the show going on and on and on and on.

I'm configuring that Dragon's Demand on RPoL (the o is lowercase for some reason), and I could give a short report about how it went down, among other things. I don't mind trying it out.

I ever get a catfolk boon, the character will be the child of Cyrus and Sheeba and will be named Xerxes.

Unless that is just to weird for Damien... :)

Missed this through the red mist of downtime™ that clouded my eyes.

That's a classic - and awesome. The real question is, will Xerxes be raised by Sheeba or Cyrus?

By the way Steve, love your PbP rant on the link to the website issues thread above. Just saw it now. It exactly mirrors my own feelings on the topic (and it pisses me off that they seem to have ignored it and haven't replied).

Missed this through the red mist of downtime™ that clouded my eyes. That's a classic - and awesome. The real question is, will Xerxes be raised by Sheeba or Cyrus? By the way Steve, love your PbP rant on the link to the website issues thread above. Just saw it now. It exactly mirrors my own feelings on the topic (and it pisses me off that they seem to have ignored it and haven't replied).

I just spit milk reading that first line. I've got to stop reading these when I am eating or drinking.

Let's see... Initially at least it would have to be Sheeba, since Cyrus is out saving the world and wouldn't know about the kiddo... After that there could be some flashbacks. Cyrus has hardly known his dad, and so wouldn't want his boy to grow up like he did... It would be fun to brainstorm. :)

-Posted with Wayfinder

For the rant, I just wanted them to see that pbp drives sales, and therefore should be treated with an urgency to match. Maybe they have that urgency, but being so coy and secretive about it is frustrating to the customer.

As customers, we want to believe that it's all going to be perfect and amazing. Throw us a bone, you've got a +10 to your bluff to right off the bat... Just give us a little something to latch on to!

-Posted with Wayfinder

In case you didn't see Jon's "Unique" announcement!"

Some crazy pants stuff in that thread...

-Posted with Wayfinder