Apologies if this was already asked and I missed it, but how much of the gazetteer portion will be copied from the existing, recent gazetteers found in the Starfinder adventure paths (Castrovel and Eox so far)?
It doesn't help that the Shifter's mechanics are also just plain boring. Not the concept, the execution. Rarely have I been so disappointed with a Paizo offering. Even Advanced Class Guide had a few gems.
I edited this originally very grumpy post because Paizo staff went out of their way to fix my issues, which were entirely my fault. Paizo, I'm sorry I ever doubted you. You guys are great and I'm sorry I was grouchy. Once again you've proven to be a better company than I deserve.
Please tell me there will be more than a sentence of lore for these dragons. Honestly the only part of these bestiaries I'm continuously disappointed in is that the true dragons are nothing but art and rules. I have all five bestiaries and I don't use any of the true dragons past the first since there's no lore to grab my attention. We need another dragons book to breath some life into them!
*All monsters get 2-page write-ups. It's something I've wanted for a really long time—there's never enough room for flavor for me! That said, a lot of the creatures will have additional stats, race information, and other crunchy bits beyond just a single stat block. This is excellent news. Six bestiaries in I have enough monster stat blocks. What I need is something compelling, and it's much easier to get me excited about a monster with a page of text than a paragraph. That's especially true for the playable ones - honestly I have very little interest in a number of the pathfinder player races because there's so little info on them. This is particularly frustrating because I first fell in love with Pathfinder because of the "Monsters Revisited" books, and those have basically died off. And I am constantly frustrated by the lack of any real background information on the new dragons in each bestiary. As far as I'm concerned the true dragon entries for the past few bestiaries have just been wasted space for me - I'd rather only have one age statted up and give the rest towards making the dragon feel like more than a one-line catchphrase. Particularly aggravating is the wasted two page introduction to the true dragons that could be like the great single-page introductions to each outsider race, but instead repeats the same convoluted true dragon rules over and over again. tl;dr - please give any dragons an actual reason to be there and excite a GM, and not just a pretty picture.
Which is why it's a trope that I would have hoped they'd avoid, now that it's become such a cliche. I was hoping for something more original. Except basically the entire mission statement Golarion was based on was taking well-known tropes and making them original. Golarion is a bunch of tropes mashed together, but each with something original and exciting and very well integrated with each other to make the old tropes interesting again. And after all, one of the original recurring book series for the line was the "monsters revisited" series. Plus the majority of adventure paths are based on classic roleplaying tropes. If you weren't interested in seeing tropes reimagined, it's hard to see why you are buying from Paizo in the first place. This is what Paizo does. From a certain perspective mechanically as well as in the fluff - after all, what is Pathfinder but a reinvigorated and reimagined rules system that is made to feel new again with creative twists? And Paizo have managed to do that repeatedly for a decade. That's why they keep getting my money, and that's why I'm always willing to give them a chance to impress me - because they usually do.
I for one am very excited about this adventure path. There's plenty of room for multiple styles of Lovecraftian play. If you want the kind where you're mostly just roleplaying and investigating and any combat will inevitably end in rolling up a new character, there's already a game for that. Actually, there are probably a dozen for that. I'm looking forward to a more Robert Howard approach. What I will say, as I always do, is that when the Paizo team is stoked about something weird, it comes out amazing. So, if you want to talk about diluting things and whatnot, think about how you're "diluting" Team Paizo with negativity. That's not nice, to them or to the rest of us. So you're not excited? Get over it. You don't see me whining about an AP that's all about giants this, giants that, giants all the time. The old adage about giving constructive criticism or none at all is a good life lesson to learn. Mr Jacobs, I have one question: will we be getting some of Lovecraft's dreamlands? I thoroughly enjoyed our mission to Leng several years ago, so I don't expect a return there, but to me the dreams element is critical to Lovecraft's oeuvre. Thanks! I'm thoroughly excited about this!
Please give the new dragon type at least a page of background. There's so much stat block that usually the new dragons have zero personality, and I never end up using them. What makes these new dragons different besides a few combat tricks and alternate spell like abilities? The last batch in bestiary four was particularly frustrating: I loved the idea of Outer Dragons but all I got was more monsters with the dragon label. I would rather have had the same amount of space dedicated to background on these guys and just had a page or two reskinning old dragons to fit this great new idea. I have every confidence Paizo can blow me away; your single-page guides to outsider types do this job brilliantly. I'd just would like dragons to get the same love, so they're worth more than a second glance.
Looks awesome! Is a print version in the works?
Paizo, please do not support Gary McBride by selling his products. He shows no respect for his customers. He has ignored all our questions for over a year. He continues to support other kickstarters, using the money we gave him for books. He continues to solicit new customers while ignoring his old ones. This is simply unacceptable. We have no recourse but to take our grievances to his places of business. Please do not purchase any products from Gary McBride until he learns some common decency.
I do not understand the current rules-light fad. Completely not to my taste. I hate going back to square one, and I love the complexity. That's why I play Pathfinder. There are rules-light systems out there. Pathfinder is not one of them. I hope they keep it that way. It's not for everyone, and that's good - something that appeals to everyone cannot exist, and those that try generally fail. We'll see how well it works for 5th ed.
Putting Owen on the module line might actually make me a subscriber (the only game publishing line I'm not currently subscribed to). So, good job, Paizo. I completely agree! But I'll never run even all the adventures I have now. That little extra hook of crunch, something interesting and well integrated into the story, is often what tips me in favor of a product. I have faith you'll find a way to put in new crunch often.
Putting Owen on the module line might actually make me a subscriber (the only game publishing line I'm not currently subscribed to). So, good job, Paizo. That said, I'd hope to see a little more original crunch in them if I'm really going to take the plunge. But I'll definitely have to check it out.
Bullocks to your bullocks. You once played another roleplaying game, so that makes you an expert? Ars Magica is absolutely no more historically accurate than D&D. It's a dash of this and a dash of that, often with little regard for historical accuracy or even chronological feasibility. Even when it is attempting to stick to a realistic portrayal of medieval attitudes, it can't possibly hold a monopoly on the truth because there was no single real world attitude towards magic. If you knew absolutely anything about the subject in an academic context, you'd know that. Clearly you do not. You'll note I was very careful with my words in my first post (far less so in this one, because you have shown yourself to be both rude and ignorant). I didn't say Gygax took the one and only approach to magic or miracles. He took a prevalent one. There are dozens, hundreds, and they can't be synthesized because they are contradictory. Did he draw on Jack Vance? Of course he did. And what exactly was Jack Vance drawing on, the wind? The more I have delved into both D&D and academic literature on magic and miraculous, the more impressed I am by how much effort and research Gygax put into his creation. Not that he was a slave to the historical reality - that would have been counterproductive and certainly would have seemed less realistic to a modern audience more inclined to believe hogwash like the Da Vinci Code than pick up a work of serious scholarly erudition. Anyone in the RPG industry trying to sell you a "realistic portrayal of historical reality" is lying to you, or too ignorant to know they are lying to you. We don't want the historical reality, we want a fantasy world that conforms to our preconceptions, which blend over 1500 years of history and half world of geography together and then blur it through a 19th century lens. I'm simply pointing out that there is in fact a historical basis for the magic/miracle divide on healing spells. It is not solely an arbitrary game mechanic. There are of course counter examples because, and I know this may come as a surprise to you, MAGIC ISN'T REAL and therefore people have made up a lot of stuff about it over time, much of which is contradictory. But pretending that you know everything about the wide variety of medieval attitudes towards magic over the course of more than a millennium because you've played one other roleplaying game (or any number) is laughably ridiculous.
Because the magic system in D&D is fundamentally based on notions found in Western legend and myth, inextricably bound up with Judeo-Christian cosmological notions. The Cleric class spell list is a grab-bag of miracles commonly found in a genre of medieval writing called hagiography, the lives of the saints. Gygax did a lot of homework, and he read up on the saints. These miracles were based principally on biblical examples, especially the miracles of Jesus and the apostles in the New Testament but also the Old Testament prophets. The overwhelming majority of the miracles attributed to the saints (the prototype of the cleric as a spellcasting class) were healing miracles. This was taken as the primary proof of their sanctity - that is, not just that they could perform miracles, but specifically miracles that could heal. These emulate the healing miracles of Jesus, which make up the bulk of Jesus' miracles. According to one theory in medieval Christian theology that was especially popular among writers of hagiography, the Devil and his demons had no power to heal, they could only take away injuries and diseases that they themselves had inflicted. The only true power to heal lay with Jesus and through Him the saints. The basis for the arcane/divine split in magic is the Christian notion that all miraculous acts not from the Christian God were inherently evil and corrupt - not every use of magic by medieval authors may subscribe to this idea, but they were all affected by this divide. According to this theory, the magic of wizards, witches and sorcerers therefore came from Satan. Combine this with the Devil's inability to heal anything but wounds he caused, and the intense connection between the saints and healing miracles, and you get the "wizards can't heal" notion in D&D. In other words, no, it's not just for balance. There are solid, real-world historical explanations for the distinction. There are also real world examples that would counter these examples, but that's because magic isn't real, and so there are lots of contradictory things written about it. But it is absolutely not something Gygax dreamed up on a whim, nor is it mere gaming convention that perpetuates the distinction.
I've backed something like 20 kickstarters with varying rates of timeliness (Rappan Athuk, DungeonaDay, Numenera, Razor Coast, Ultimate Psionics, Deep Magic, Legendary Games, Advanced Bestiary, Obsidian Apocalypse, Primeval Thule, and others...I may have an addiction). Kickstarter is not a purchase, it is not a hard timetable like a job in the so-called "real world." If you're treating it like that then you failed to read the very clear, upfront explanation of how kickstarter works. More than that, I recognize that for most 3pp this is a labor of love, not what puts food on the table. I know that Jeremy at Dreamscarred has had some tough tasks to handle within and outside the project, but I know when I get my limited edition, it'll take pride of place on my shelf and that I'll be thumbing through it when I'm old and grey. When I heard about Louis's wife my very first thought was "whatever time he needs, if I get it at all" - and I got a superb project anyway. I backed Razor Coast despite the warnings because I knew anything FGG put out would be worth the price. I'm still waiting on Rich Burlew and I feel for the guy, what with chronic illness and debilitating injuries. I trust these guys' talent, I want a chance to enjoy what's in their head, and I feel privileged to patronize these artists, especially the ones who have a day job. If I'd bought these on Amazon's storefront it would be different, but I'm not shopping, I'm investing, and that's a greater risk for greater potential gain. Moreover, kickstarter is still new, efen for the companies that have a lot of publishing experience, and people are still figuring out what a realistic timetable even looks like, and how to jive that with the brand new notion of stretch goals which can throw initial projections way off as people get into the excitement of the final countdown for a project. It's a brave new world, and there've been some bumps. I'm happy to have been along for the ride with the share I bought, but it's the stock market, not the drugstore. That said, Gary is among only two who have honestly frustrated me, along with Hyrum. And it's the issue of communication. Louis was very honest with us about his personal tragedy - I would have accepted "I have a serious personal issue." But the point is he said something. I've appreciated the updates from Jeremy too. It's unacceptable not to address backer concerns. Gary may be updating again finally, but he's ignoring our questions about print copies repeatedly. I'd accept ”the printer I used fell through, here's what I'm trying to do, I don't have a timetable yet." But I want ackowledgment of our concerns. That said, I can take a pretty good guess why he's not responding. He's afraid of the reaction he'll get at this point, and considering the comments some people have made there and here, I can't say I blame him. The internet brings out the worst in some people.
I am incredibly happy Pathfinder is going on an expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Plenty of people do ho-hum ordinary adventures. Paizo raises the bar. Really hoping to get a good collection of tech and monsters for this that I can port into some more Lovecraftian, spacefaring and other adventures. Too many fantasy-with-a-bit-of-sci-fi only gives a taste without giving you the tools you need to really explore the potential of mixed genres. Some kind of techno-mage that really gets fluffy, interesting rules and a range of spells that integrates the two elements thoroughly would also be nice. My hopes are high, but my confidence in Paizo knows no bounds. If they're going to do it, they're going to do it right.
It is greatly appreciated. And I should say that there have been several APs and other projects from Paizo that I did not think would be good, and Paizo have proven themselves every time. What makes Paizo worth the investment is their ability to both capture the spirit of a genre and yet invigorate it with new elements. I expect the same will happen here. The only thing I worry is that there will not be enough technological elements to really use them outside of the AP itself - I would love to combine this with material from Distant Worlds!
Thank you! Also, I would like to suggest again that it would be nice to put the poster map folios on their own subscription separate from the Campaign Setting written material. I know it would save me the (admittedly very mild) aggravation of having to cancel and renew twice a year. Thanks again!
"They choose to be offended..." I should have stopped reading right there. Really, I should. You're not offended, so anyone else's reaction to the contrary must be faked. It couldn't possibly be an honest reaction. The very fact that you've included something like that in your game means that you want to elicit a reaction, either offended or approving (I assume offended, but I'll be open minded). Frankly, if no one was emotionally invested in the game and just ignored it, it would be a pretty crappy game. I agree there's a way to bring such things in to give the storyline nuance, but that takes a deft hand and a really good rapport with the people you are sharing the experience with. And the above quote does not suggest to me that rapport is going on here, because you are not acknowledging the possibility of an honest opinion which is different from your own.
It was good. Not as good as the first trilogy - it's lacking some ineffable quality. The high frame rate isn't helping, either. We did not need to see every single room in Erebor. That was the main drag on the time in my book. otherwise, it went along at a pretty brisk pace. PJ did a GREAT job with Bard. That character is terribly developed by Tolkien. PJ gives him actual personality. And the Black Arrow was very well done too. Although having the Master of Lake Town be from the 16th century bothered me, but then I'm rather invested in keeping Tolkien firmly in the Early Middle Ages. I'm really looking forward to the third movie, which will center around the Battle of the Five Armies, because that's the weakest part of the book. I taught a course on Tolkien and Medieval History this semester, and let the final discussion be about the films and how they depict both Tolkien's works (the students were required to read the core three) and medieval life (which, let's face it, is what serves as the basis for the whole endeavor). Interestingly, my students, who were at the age to first read Tolkien just as the PJ movies came out (6-9), really enjoyed having both together. It was only the ones who were a little older and had read the books several years before seeing the movies who wanted to recapture some kind of lost personal imagination of the story. The ones who saw it at the same time commented that at that age it was difficult to picture everything described, and PJ's version helped them enjoy the books much more than they felt they otherwise would have. Just an interesting observation to share. They were very smart, imaginative kids, and they didn't feel that PJ had somehow denied them personal creativity in any way - they were capable of appreciating each medium on its own. Which is more than I can say from many older people I've spoken with about it. The experience was different, but not necessarily worse in any way.
Or six hundred and twenty six. It depends on the manuscript. Lots of ways to get the letters to add up to Nero! Fun times in the ancient world.
As a Kickstarter backer of this, I can tell you its epic. It's a lot more than just the two previous psionics titles brought together. I'd guess at least a third of it will be new material, and the art is pretty good too. Any idea about when this will come out though? The original date was nixed because of all the (amazing) additions we got through stretch goals, and they've not said anything about a new one (that I remember).
If Paizo were going to hardcover any other adventure path, it would be Kingmaker. And if they did, it should be to add mythic options.
Good idea, good title
Nothing gold can stay. Someday, Paizo will need to go back to the well. I hope it's a long time coming, but to imagine it never will is ignoring reality. For one thing, they will eventually run out of hardbacks people are willing to buy, and hardbacks are the big moneymakers. Eventually, the APs will start to seem either too familiar or too outlandish, and not enough people will buy them, and there goes the other pillar. Planned obsolescence is aggravating, but necessary for creative companies to survive. When there aren't enough new players coming in and old players willing to buy increasingly extraneous products, Paizo will have to start the cycle over to survive. Paizo is doing it a lot better than TSR or WotC, but that just prolongs the inevitable. I'll be there to support them, whenever the time comes. I owe them for all the fun.
Never played an AP, yet I own a complete set. Only wish I'd kept my founding subscriber from when I got switched over from Dragon. This is what I read for fun - I never found a group to play with. Also, I'm a completionist. I have ten to twelve bookshelves of RPG stuff going back to first edition. But then I rarely buy alcohol of music, so I suppose everyone's disposable income works differently.
Tip #1 - If you claim that what a woman wears is the problem, you are the creep. Period. No discussion. On the "he's a creep if she doesn't think he's cute" - so many ways to take this. I'll take a stab at it though - women don't want to go around being hit on all the time. Sure, if you go to a bar, you expect it. That's what people go to bars for. But not what people go to gaming conventions for. Or the movies. Or the sidewalk. Try to remember that in this screwed up world, we've decided that one gender always initiates and the other is a brazen hussy if she tries (whether you personally feel that way or not is not the point - that's what she's been told). It's a really horrible situation to be in on both sides, but frankly, a lot harder for the receiving end, who have a lot less control over what's happening to them. Related point - when was the last time you saw an ugly guy get the pretty girl in a movie, because deep down inside he's a good person (and if you haven't seen Forgetting Sarah Marshall, go do so right now)? Now when was the last time you saw the genders reversed, and an unattractive woman get the hot guy? Seriously, look up some good discussions of gender. There are a lot of sites for this on the internet. I'd start with Jezebel, and the magazine that a Paizo employee was recently interviewed for (which I believe it is against forum rules to use the word, ironically enough). This is not a criticism - I asked many of the same questions just a few years ago. My wonderful wife became more interested in feminism, and since she thought it was interesting, I figured it would be worth investigating for myself. And it was. I realized I did not even realize all the ways that I was perpetuating a messed-up system. Thinking you treat everyone the same is not enough. It requires putting yourself in their shoes, and actively trying to behave differently than society expects you to behave. And remembering that most women are just as messed up by societal expectations as most men are.
And yet I can't stop myself. It's so much more fun to read when it's not for a paper. The berserk thought they were trying to get off by talking. He began to howl and to bite the rim of his shield. He held the shield up to his mouth and scowled over its upper edge like a madman. Grettir stepped quickly across the ground, and when he got even with the berserk's horse he kicked the shield with his foot from below with such force that it struck his mouth, breaking the upper jaw, and the lower jaw fell down on to his chest. With the same movement he seized the viking's helmet with his left hand and dragged him from his horse, while with his right hand he raised his axe and cut off the berserk's head. Snaekoll's followers when they saw what had happened fled, every man of them. Grettir did not care to pursue them for he saw that there was no heart in them. The bondi thanked him for what he had done, as did many other men, for the quickness and boldness of his deed had impressed them much. Grettir stayed there for Yule and was well taken care of till he left, when the bondi dismissed him handsomely. Then Grettir went East to Tunsberg to visit his brother Thorsteinn, who received him joyfully and asked him about his adventures. Grettir told him how he had killed the berserk, and composed a verse: "The warrior's shield by my foot propelled
Grettir's Saga, chpt 40 So still evidence either way. It seems it was the place to position the shield, but it also seems that having the shield right there was pretty tempting in a fit of rage. Considering the accounts all agree that the berserker worked himself into a fit of rage, why is biting his shield unreasonable? It's anachronistic to expect a berserker's, or any other viking's, mentality and thoughts on decorum to be the same as ours. Benjamin Blaney has an excellent article on the trope of unwelcome berserker suitors in numerous sagas, both historically based (the Icelandic family sagas) and legendary. There have been some very interesting works on the history of emotions in recent years that points out that what we think of as extravagence and embellishment, such as the numerous recordings of King Henry II Plantagenet becoming so angry that he fell to the floor in a rage and "chewed the rushes" (which were popular disposable floor coverings at the time), were reality. Why should we disbelieve the contemporary sources simply because it's not how we express ourselves today, when the sources seem to find it apropos? Barabara Ronsenwein has an excellent book on how to study the history of emotions. This has significant roleplaying applications. Perhaps one of the most difficult things to capture in modern fantasy is the attitude of a people in a culture different from our own chronologically. People reacted to things in ways which often don't make sense to us. Many works of fiction fail on this fundamental point - you can have people wandering around on horseback with swords killing each other, but they act like twentieth century people in those circumstances. As much as I love GRRM, his books are particularly guilty of this. Tolkien, as a historian and literary critic steeped in medieval mentalities was much better about this, particularly in his superb Slmarillion. Roleplaying a character should take you outside your comfort zone, should cause you to work from different assumptions, should push you to consider a different worldview. Otherwise, you could just as easily play a videogame. It's not that there's no place for putting yourself in the same situation, it's just that you're not getting everything you could be from it.
Sadly, I'm out, mostly because Hayato Ken hit the nail on the head. And all I'm getting in return is semantic arguments instead of a substanative discussion of my wider point.
So this may have been addressed, hard to say in a thread with over six hundred responses, but I thought I would add something often missed. On the first page, Jessica helpfully pointed out John's article using MMORPGs and difficulty levels as a metaphor for life. She brilliantly added that often straight white men (the difficulty setting I play on) can't even see the monsters other are fighting. I would go a step further - we often don't realize that we are the monsters (which in this metaphor sounds remarkably harsh, but perhaps that is helpful). My wife has, in the past few years, become much more attuned to these issues, and I have spoken with her a lot and tried to becme attuned to it myself. When you don't see the problem, it's really easy to become part of it without even realizing it. But you can see the problem and not really understand it either. There are a lot of ways to be sexist without being a learing groping chauvinist. A lot of men who think they are helping or "just treating women equally" are actually setting up different kinds of hurdles. It bears more thought from all men in our society. It's worth talking about with people who have less privileged lives, which includes our mothers, sisters and daughters. My gut reaction, and that of many men, was to be defensive when faced with real examples of how I, who had always thought of myself as perfectly fair, had in fact been perpetuating the million little things that dissafect women every day. It's the expressions we use, the way we interact, things we were brought up to do and are hard to change in ourselves. But those things are worth changing. Ignorance is not an excuse. And society needs to change, and those changes will require hard work to change ourselves. We all need to be playing on an equal playing field. As Emmeline Pankhurst said: "We have to free half of the human race, the women, so that they can help to free the other half." Fair is only fair when it is fair for everyone.
The following is meant to be constructive criticism, but those not in the mood for a little snarky grouchiness should just ignore: Spoiler: How many times will the well be returned to? Not all of us are PFS members. Clearly enough are, or these wouldn't keep coming out. I had once believed that I could never have enough Ioun Stones. This is clearly a test of that belief.
Sorry, I'm grouchy about the Player Companion line. I do not care for the new format. Far too much space taken up with pictures, and I don't find any utility in the character suggestion pieces, which take up a lot of space. Between that and some of the upcoming subject choices for the line, like this one, I am close to dropping my subscription.
Much of this assumes that evil is a choice. The stories that modern fantasy are based on do not generally assume this. Evil is by nature, and good is hard. I like the idea of evil as a universal force. And the game caters to that, with subtypes and spells. What I really can't stand is the idea that evil means baby-eating. Evil means selfish and cruel, not sociopathic. I would rate a good chunk of humanity in the real world as evil by the alignment spectrum. Remember that they don't have to imagine that they are evil. But even an end-justifies-the-means approach would constitute evil. And what I hate most of all are emo vampires, and people who whine about them as misunderstood antiheroes. It was cool when it was new, and now it's just boring. Stake them all, especially David Boreanaz and James Marsters. It gets old so damn fast. Vampires should be evil by nature - that is how they were always portrayed until Ann Rice got to them. She did it well, everyone after has been downright annoying. Evil is interesting. Evil makes the world nuanced. If everyone is neutral, you've got nothing to push against. And finally, antiheroes can be evil, and still do good things. This does not make them neutral. In the immortal words of Meatloaf, "good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere."
This is probably the most brilliant expansion idea I've ever seen for the d20 ruleset. You've basically made it another game while keeping the old one - very cleverly, or so it appears. This should postpone Pathfinder second edition by several years at least while people play with their favorite game that is suddenly shiny and new. Braveau!
Really sad we lost the vivisectionist, and I would like to hear why, from a mechanical standpoint, they are unbalanced. If they aren't, could we please have some other archetype of the alchemist that has sneak attack instead of bombs? That was an amazing idea, and I hate to see it go.
I disagree with the principle of making a crime out of a motivation rather than an action. Which is why I disagree with the designation "terrorist" having any legal meaning (the same with term "hate crime"). Try a man for what he does, not what he believes. Otherwise, you run the risk of condemning beliefs, and that is antithetical to a liberal democratic system, even when those beliefs are antithetical to liberal democratic values.
I was on the fence about this, and then I saw it was the same author as Northlands. Sold!
I am particularly excited about the Hellknight Signifiers. I can't believe we haven't seen them earlier. This book is a great boost to the world of Golarion.
I'm so happy. The backlash against Prestige Classes has gone on too long.
Caedite eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. [Kill them all! God will know his own]
Tolkien is better if you can make it past the whole Tom Bombadil bit and get to the actual story. And the Silmarillion is vastly superior, but you have to like medieval literature. And I loathe "The Once and Future King." For that matter, since he's been brought up here for some reason, I'm not a huge fan of Faulkner either, although he writes a much better short story than a novel. Mostly they're just dull, but I feel that way about most realistic fiction. Loved the Belgariad, but the Elenium was the same thing, only better. Feist was good, but his licensing to Jenny Wurts is much better.
That is in no way "obvious." To me, it seemed that metal armor, being "unnatural," prevented them from connecting to the source of their spells. It in no way implied some kind of ethical dilemma to me. I have no problem with them putting metal armor on their companions; perhaps they are ethically obligated to protect their companions to the best of their ability as wardens of nature, while not wearing armor made of metal is an important sacrifice to prove their devotion. You are adding in a fluff element which is only one of several possible explanations for the RAW. It is in no way RAI. More importantly, this also reminiscent of a standard problem for lit professors the world over: the authorial fallacy. Do you imagine that if you could just sit down with Monte Cook and Skip Williams they could just tell you whatever they intended the rule to be, and that would be an end to it? Such a concept is ridiculous. Read any column of "sage advice" from the old dragon or "ask the kobold" in KQ and you'll see the same thing. Skip will clarify the rules when people are confused and actually wrong, but when it comes to a RAI situation, Skip makes it clear that what follows is his opinion, and he actually wrote the game! He understands that once the rules got out there, RAI go out the window. The game is flexible, as any game of this complexity absolutely must be to give any semblance of realism. There will always be @**holes who want to make minmax characters. I personally won't play with them, but some people are masochists and martyrs. But for someone to get all high and mighty and say that they understand what the authors of the game intended and therefore I'm wrong is pretty much just as juvenile. A better solution is to sit down and find a compromise over two interpretations of the rules. To do otherwise is basically the same as getting into a theological argument - entertaining, but ultimately useless unless you can convince the other person of your opinion (and still just as far from reaching some mythical "ultimate truth"). And for that, well, you'll catch more flies with honey. (note that I am not trying to use honey; I've never been particularly good at or interested in catching flies. But I have a lot of work I'd much rather procrastinate on than do, so here I am)
Yes. Level 20+ please. Call it whatever you want. And give it to us in an AP. In fact, just start the AP at level 10. |
