Shattered Star Player's Guide

I liked the book and it feels more like a players book than most of the previous ones have.

One thing though, I would LOVE to have a big image of the center map up in the blog. It is nice in the book but I would like to print out a copy of it and give it to the players as a hand out. Especially so i can age the paper a bit and make it look more like a real map might.

How about you let us do all that for you? :)

Dark_Mistress wrote:

I liked the book and it feels more like a players book than most of the previous ones have.

One thing though, I would LOVE to have a big image of the center map up in the blog. It is nice in the book but I would like to print out a copy of it and give it to the players as a hand out. Especially so i can age the paper a bit and make it look more like a real map might.

How about you let us do all that for you? :)

I would like a million dollars too.

The PGs shouldnt be looked at as a product so much as they should be looked at as advertising. You put out good stuff for free rpg day each year, and IMO the PGs are far more essential since they are promoting your flagship product and are more player oriented (and thus read by more people who are usually not willing to spend as much to begin with) as opposed to DM focused stuff you put out for FreeRPG day.

And Crimson Throne was a grrat PG but so was SD and LoF. It has been a downhill trend since then, but not because of inability to do them better but choice.

I havent looked at the Varisia companion; Pirates of the Inner Sea/Skull and Shackles was the same though. PoIS was awesome for making new chars but I was the only one who read it because we all make characters at home concurrently and there is only the one book.

You want to shy away from the PGs? Fine, make the Varisia companion pdf free, and do the same for whichever one comes out for RoW. I doubt it will be a huge loss money wise, but a huge a boon promotion wise instead.

Well, can't win them all I guess.

I feel that I've enumerated the philosophies that went into the new formats for both the Player's Guides and the Player Companion in the pursuit of creating high-quality products.

I also understand that with any change there will be certain parties that things work for better than others. To help mitigate that we will continue to produce PDF Player Guides for all of our Adventure Paths and these will remain 100% free, as we in the editorial department feel that such introductory material is important.

I appreciate that you've taken the time to put such detail and fervor into your responses, but I think we can both recognize that a measure of your argument is based on assumption and not insight into Paizo's inner workings.

We will, of course and as always, continue to watch these boards and gauge reader response to both this free Player's Guide and the newly refreshed Player Companion, and based on what we see and hear we will continue to refine our processes (as we endlessly do).

It also remains my hope that everyone interested in Shattered Star, Varisia, and just cool player-focused game content will checkout the first of the new Player Companions: Varisia, Birthplace of Legends - whether that means picking up a PDF or just flipping through at your local game store. It's like nothing we've ever done before and is really worth a look!

Thanks!

How about you let us do all that for you? :)

I would like a million dollars too.

We've got this great tontine going at the office. Want in? ;)

F. Wesley Schneider wrote:

How about you let us do all that for you? :)

Dark_Mistress wrote:

I would like a million dollars too.

We've got this great tontine going at the office. Want in? ;)

If I lived close enough to make sure I was the "winner" and well had funds to put in, in the first place. I totally would... but then i would be sad cause i would have all this money and no one to buy new PF books from. :)

Coridan wrote:

And Crimson Throne was a grrat PG but so was SD and LoF.

The Player's Guides to Second Darkness and Legacy of Fire were actually part of the Player Companion line and thus not a free download. So that kind of works against your argument that free stuff can be as good as stuff with a price tag on it. If things have gotten worse since then, maybe it's because they went from a paid product to a free one.

I still think that every PG should be available in print as a bundle of 5.

I hope you'll take a look at Player Companion: Varisia (if you haven't already) before you make your mind entirely up about this.

The type, amount, and quality of the content we can present in a product like a Player Companion as opposed to a free PDF of any stripe is starker than night and day. I think we at Paizo have a reputation for putting out products with high design and artistic standards - and if not, we aspire to such...

Thank you so much for taking the time to share this insight into the thought process, Wes. It all makes complete sense, and I'm a 100% behind it. The new Varisia book is fantastic, and has really made me look at the Companion line in a whole new light. Coupled with that, the Shattered Star PG gives just the right amount of info to get a player properly prepared to start up that campaign.

I look forward to seeing how this new direction progresses. :-)

Nameless wrote:

Is it too late to throw my hat into the Achievement Feats revival ring? I liked the way they worked quite a bit. They gave the PCs a goal to get them into a certain mindset early on, they gave tangible and flavourful rewards, and they made sense from a progression point of view (i.e. it makes sense that killing a slew of gnolls would make you better at killing gnolls).

I'd love to see what Paizo could do with them in future Adventure Paths, but if they were really that unpopular, I suppose it's not meant to be.

I really liked the concept of the achievement feats too. There were some that were way to much bookeeping/too hard to qualify for, however. When I ran LoF the group's healer got to the last adventure without having healed 1000 points of damage via spells. She was at about 600, I just let her take the feat anyway so she would have a chance to use it.

So I have to wonder if was the concept of achievment feats that wasn't popular, or if it was those specific feats that weren't the best way to do achievement feats.

Admittedly, I had a small group for Legacy of Fire, so we didn't use up all the Achievement Feats, but the ones that were used went over pretty well, I thought. Obviously, the achievement for healing was not balanced properly, but it was a first try after all. I'd like to see them come back someday nonetheless, maybe in one of these fancy new Player Companions I keep hearing about and that sound awesome.

What do you know, I ended up back on topic!

Well, can't win them all I guess.

I feel that I've enumerated the philosophies that went into the new formats for both the Player's Guides and the Player Companion in the pursuit of creating high-quality products.

I also understand that with any change there will be certain parties that things work for better than others. To help mitigate that we will continue to produce PDF Player Guides for all of our Adventure Paths and these will remain 100% free, as we in the editorial department feel that such introductory material is important.

I appreciate that you've taken the time to put such detail and fervor into your responses, but I think we can both recognize that a measure of your argument is based on assumption and not insight into Paizo's inner workings.

We will, of course and as always, continue to watch these boards and gauge reader response to both this free Player's Guide and the newly refreshed Player Companion, and based on...

Sorry if I came off as a bit of an ass; and no I did not remember that SD and LoF guides were companions at the time (I was still subscribed to the companion line then. Right now I am in the process of moving into the house we spent a year renovating so money being tight I had to drop a couple subs. I'll probably pick up the companions I missed once I'm all settled in)

Mostly I was just annoyed with how this PG came out. The campaign traits were very meh and I am not a big fan of the reprinted prestige award stuff.

In future PGs what I would be happy seeing
- Double the number of campaign traits
- Nifty new items for low level players to nab
- Description of the starting area (like the Magnimar at a glance)
- List of rumors and bits of lore that starting PCs would know.
- Advice on character creation for class and race (not necessarily a full breakdown as in the past but like you guys did but with races advice as well)
- Gallery of local notables with a sentence or two of player friendly info.

I am happy with the player companions and their quality, but I really need something I can give my players to read at their leisure and a free PDF is the easiest since they can download it themselves.

In future PGs what I would be happy seeing

- Double the number of campaign traits
- Nifty new items for low level players to nab
- Description of the starting area (like the Magnimar at a glance)
- List of rumors and bits of lore that starting PCs would know.
- Advice on character creation for class and race (not necessarily a full breakdown as in the past but like you guys did but with races advice as well)
- Gallery of local notables with a sentence or two of player friendly info.

These are just flat out great ideas and you can bet that we'll be keeping exactly this sort of thing in mind for future Player's Guides and other awesomeness. It's seriously my hope that we get to a place where we can make doing fun stuff like this, unbeholden to scary budgetary goals, more a part of our operation, and the support of awesome readers like everyone here is totally what's going to make that possible!

Thanks man!

My only problem with the Varisia Player Companion is in fact the two pages devoted to Shattered Star.

Because every bit of crunch on those two pages is the same as we find in the freely downloadable Players Guide.

Why couldn't those two pages have had different campaign traits?

Not enough scantily clad exposed females in this one.