Axym's page

For both me and my partner, it was a need-based decision to step-up to GM.

As the forever GM in my home group, PFS was my way to play characters I thought I'd never get the chance to. However, as I noticed the same people gm'ing time and time again, I stepped up.

My partner may be Gm'ing for the first time this weekend, as most of our usual GM's are at conventions, so we needed people to run games for the influx of new players we got (college town).

I don't really know if an incentive would have helped my partner jump into GM'ing quicker, as he's often too worried about it being "perfect," and not ruining the immersion.

For me, double the achievement points really helped, but I also know that many of our players don't really care about achievement points, as they just want to play their character each and every time.

Something that might help, is repeatable GM credit for non-repeatable scenarios. An issue we're running into with non-repeatables, is that most of the veterans have both run and played in those scenarios, so there's no one to run/play in them with newbies. Even with "boon-hunting" allowing a GM to get the boon on multiple characters might be enough to get them to GM more often.

Presumably, it's the old "split the market" issue:

If they provide a deluxe subscription then, almost by definition, the largest cohort of people taking up the new subscription are going to be people who currently have the regular sub. It's hard (for me, at least) to picture someone who is not now a subscriber jumping on board for a deluxe subscription.

So Paizo will lose a bunch of regular RPG subscribers. If it's significant enough to reduce the number they get printed that results in a direct hit to profitability (since number of copies is the principle driver of print-costs-per-unit). The only way they make that up is if the surge in sales of deluxe copies is significantly greater than the number they're going to sell anyhow on top of regular subs.

That makes sense, but I would still like some sort of "automatic" option so I don't have to worry about missing one and then *gasp* my entire collection is ruined. /drama

Also not having to buy the PDFs separately would also be nice.

So question, are the "Deluxe" editions of the Rulebooks going to be a thing now? Can we start a subscription just for these if that's the case? I most certainly AM NOT going to mix and match my collection between normal and deluxe versions lol. Also, it kinda hurts to not have the PDF in the cases I don't want to lug my beautiful books around. I'd be happy to pay a bit more to include the PDFs.

VERY happy for the expanded monster rules and lore!

1st, I want to thank you for taking the initiative to offer some sort of compensation for something that wasn't your fault.
2nd, Thank you for letting us know as soon as possible. I was a little disappointed, but the PDFs will do nicely. I ordered the books to have a piece of "history." Most of my play group can't read the same book at once anyway.
3rd, I hope to all that is mighty that you are getting some sort of apology from Amazon for this. I was planning on starting to pre-order other things through them in the future and this has me reconsidering (though I will admit we don't know the full story so it could be both Paizo and Amazon at fault).
4th, if you do decide to use Amazon fulfillment in the future, maybe look to getting tracking information? I myself wouldn't mind paying just a little bit more to make sure I know when a package is arriving. That way I can stop watching the mailbox like a sad person.

I most likely have just missed it, but can anyone tell me where the Phrasmaran priestess has up and left to? Or kidnapped to? My PCs are rather concerned since they have befriended Winter, and I don't want to make it some side-quest if it'll be explored later? The only mention I can find is that she hasn't been to the church in several days.

This has piqued my interest intensely, but I will probably need to thumb through it at my LGS before purchase. I wouldn't mind more Golarion flavored rule books, as I tend to modify certain rules on a whim on a campaign by campaign basis (yes I drive my players insane).

Overall, I wanted to thank Paizo for at least experimenting with the idea. If it turns out well, I would be happy to purchase future products.

Veldan Rath wrote:

I feel like I am missing something here.

The characters start ready to go, and most likely will have a scrape or two from the rats and zoog before coming across the survivor encampment.

Who wont let them in. Unless they prove themselves by dispatching...

3 Doppelgangers. At 1st level???

AC 18, 26 HP for 2 of them and a leveled one with spells and more hp.

This seems unlikely.

Again, what am I missing?

Great point, but the easiest solution is right in front of them. They can just walk north from the barricade into B11, grab the 3 dead doppelganger bodies there (removing any evidence that the guards killed them), and drag them back to the barricade. Done! You might want to make it a bit harder on them by having York question them at the barricade about how they got those bodies so fast, etc., which would just allow your bluff/diplomacy character a chance to shine.

I ran my group through the dopplegangers last night and they can be nasty, but doable if the players can get the dopplegangers isolated. I have 3 PCs at a 30 "point buy" (they still rolled but min was 25 point buy). For Scaen, I had rolled a 4 for the number of rounds she would be distracted, and my PCs had decided to use this time to escape and grab weapons from the table, moving to flank her for advantage. One of the players ran off to find their weapons and thankfully ran right into the direction of the furnace, and then they were able to make quick work of the doppleganger (lucky rolls helped too). My players also employed combat manuevers such as trip to help give them an advantage, 20 CMD is no joke, but I gave them bonuses for being clever.

The doppleganger they really struggled with was Latchke, who is also in B11. My PCs didn't think that using these doppleganger bodies would actually convince York, and at this point were mostly at full health, so they just walked on through. He did his disguise and reached out to trip on the PCs, and then 100 to 0'd the two melee. Since I had Latchke remain prone, wanting to trip the PCs, it made the encounter slightly easier despite him still hitting like a truck. They don't have a dedicated healer, so they did need to go back to Winter after this, which since they had produced 2 of the 3 corpses, I had York escort Winter to B3 to channel, which got them all back up to snuff for Oathsday.

Oathsday was definitely doable, they had tried to save Juglan, so she had time to set up her silent image and shapeshift. It took them a while to notice something wasn't right but I had her make some dumb mistakes for both PCs and players to be like "wait...." Looking back I was reading the wrong bluff skill, so that might have proven difficult, but using the dagger over her claws helps cut back some of the damage. Since they realized on the second ghoul they could feed him to get him to talk, they took down the corpse the other ghoul was eating and tossed it in, and the ghoul even mentioned "I still smell her up there." Since there are bodies all around it didn't give Oathsday away right then, but definitely kept the PCs on their toes.

I've added a few "lieutenants" for some of the big villains/adversaries. This gives the dottari and Order of the Rack some sense of actual hierarchy than Nox/Thrune or anyone else giving all the orders the peons. Its works more or less well enough, giving my players a greater sense of "one step at a time," and that they are making progress rather than just going about doing good for the city.