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Cool, but like was already stated above, very frustrating since everyone of these events is smack dab in the middle of the Pacific Coast work day, so we won't get a chance to participate and won't get a chance to have a chance to win any of the swag. It would have been nice if the times were varied so that there was an evening event for everyone eligible at least once. Ah well.
Thanks Brian, It does help. It turns out that the Doubletree is part of a national "lost and found" service called Charge Back. DT security told me at the con that I should enter a report though them. Last night at 2:30am, I received a text letting me know that they found my hat. Woot! I was given the option of having them hold it for me to drive down to pick it up (a 2 hour round trip for me), or to pay $24 to have it shipped to me. I went with the $24 and have already received notice that it's been shipped out. Hopefully it will be my hat in the box. LOL
This might be a long shot, but I figured that I'd ask anyway. I accidentally left my black bowler/derby hat under the table I sat at during the banquet this year. Neither the Doubletree, nor Paizo found it by the end of the con. Any chase someone reading this did? I was sitting at a table two rows from the bar and two tables to the right if you were facing into the room with your back to the bar.
So, as far as I can tell, this seems to be a secret this year. According to the event catalog, the event lottery signup for 4-day pass holders for this year has been live since 12:00 PST today. I've already put in some requests and it has registered them as entered. I don't know about anyone else, but I never received an email about this and the deadline to enter is 11:00AM PST on Thursday, May 2, so if you didn't know, you might want to jump on this...
I did a playtest of the new rules at Paizocon last year and really enjoyed it. I'm definitely looking forward to the finished, polished version.
This is definitely way cool. Any chance that you'll do an enhancement book/s as add-on's for the original four PACG's to give them the same kind of treatment? I would think it would be pretty popular and people who start with the new version of the game will be more likely to go back and buy the older products if they had something like that to support it.
The Player's Guide is available for DL now.
Ed Bourelle of SkeletonKey Games has done some incredible prop scrolls as a Kickstarter campaign. The one for level one scrolls is over, but the one for level two are starting soon. The photos are cool and don't remotely do them justice. The weathering is both sides and some of the backs have bits of art as well. As we blew the project out of the water with support and got to vote for additional spells, one of the things we focused on were scrolls that would be more "generic" and so usable for multiple spells - for instance, Summon Monster I could be used for almost any summon creature spell. I highly recommend these. Go to:Spell Scroll Kickstarter
It's been mentioned numerous times, but I also really don't like that the side bar is gone. Not having it has hugely slowed down the general usability of the site. We used to be able to see all the most recent posts and store and Paizo blogs entries at a glance. Now we have to hit at least a couple links to get to each of those areas which means even a general visit to the site now takes quite a bit longer. I used to "ping" the site 10-15 times a day, just to see if anything interesting was up, now I'll likely drop down to once or twice because it's now a significant time investment to "drop by". The revised site does look cool, but there's no good reason to not have it also include a very cool new version of the side bar too...nudge, nudge, wink, wink....please?
I agree with the weapon finesse ideas. You could make them rangers with paired katars, favored enemies that match the PC's and favored terrain of urban. They specialize in hit-and-run tactics, with or without poison. Toss in spring attack as soon as it's possible and they aren't too sub-optimal. Give the elites bane katars and they get even scarier.
Well, remember that both the Shoanti and the Varisians originated from the two main human servant groups of the Thassilonian Empire, so that's a very distant root language, with Azlanti an even deeper root. After 10,000 years, there could be very little similarity to those languages, but you can look to Thassilonian/Azlanti people and place names as a start. That said, I've always leaned towards the idea of using Native American badland and plains cultures as a template for the Shoanti; perhaps Apache?
sorry, I mean November/December
Do you mean like the Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Construct Builder's Guidebook that is coming out in March?
"Bring out your dead!" "I'm not dead yet....I...I feel like dancing!"
Playhouses
Don't forget all manner of bureaucratic offices for any number of odd departments Also: Accountants
I second the questions about the iconics cards.
I've made an Excel document that contains the following information for each character: Name, Race and subrace, classe/s and level/s Saves (it's good to have these for passive saves like when a PC doesn't know someone has cast a spell at them or they've been exposed to a disease and you don't want them to immediately know it). CMD Skill totals for: Appraise, all Knowledge skills, Linguistics, Perception, Professions, Sense Motive, and Spellcraft. I also make a note of their "take 10" totals as the less dice rolling you do, the more focused everyone can be on the story. If the DC is under their passive check, I just skip the rolling and keep the dialog going. The profession inclusion is a reminder to myself that a character will notice things tied to their professions that other characters won't. Just mentioning something tied to being a sailor once or twice helps players feel like putting ranks in a profession wasn't a waste and it adds to the depth of your world and story telling. Notes on special racial and class abilities, languages, important magic items, and background bullet points that I want to make sure I don't forget. I also include a full breakdown of all a character's base armor classes (regular, flat footed, and touch) with what "to hits" are avoided/blocked/taken by to-hit rolls of 10-34. This makes it lots easier to be descriptive during combat action as I can see how a character avoided damage. I can tell them they leaned back as the blade misses their nose by a hair, or the arrow shatters against the shimmering edge of your mage armor, etc. I actually highlight in color the cells I use to show the groups possibilities so it's easy to see the ranges and to speed up the process - for instance, Dex AC is blue on my sheets. So if a PC has a +3 Dex bonus to AC, there are 3 blue cells. My sheets hold two "characters" per landscape page and I usually have a PC on the top and their familiar/mount/animal companion/eidelon/etc. on the bottom if they have one. This helps me remember that the PC has one too. Oh yeah....you have a toad familiar don't you?....
The trouble with the alignment system being so black and white is that it really suggests that all villains are necessarily evil, but remember that in the "real" world things are rarely that simple. The old idea that the victors write history makes villains out of losers, no matter what their alignment is. How about this as a 180 degree different idea from those above? What if there were a Lawful Good being and thought they had discovered a way to completely destroy evil in the world, wouldn't it be worth doing anything to make that happen? In this senario, your paladin no longer needs to be fallen and now you have all the good aligned outsiders and other creature that might align with them as potential opponents/enemies of your PC's. Maybe your dragonkin has a base of gold or silver? There would be huge roll play options here. What if the paladin is right? Will the ends actually justify the means? How big a sacrifice will your players be okay with? What if your secondary "villain" starts as your PC's patron or ally? How long does it take them to discover the ends that their patron will go to for the greater "good"? How would they deal with things if they find evidence that the paladin is "definitely wrong"? How might they deal with the doubt that their knowledge is more reliable than the paladin's? If the paladin's plan really will destroy all evil, or evil thinks he's right, you will have evil beings that discover the plan trying to stop them. This could lead to some interesting situations in which good aligned PC's ally with, or are aided by evil beings to stop the paladin. Okay, I'm starting to ramble a bit, but I think I've made my point. How far from the stereotype of "villain" would you be interested in going? Then again, there's nothing wrong with obvious white and black hats and it really being that "simple".
I haven't seen this posted elsewhere, so figured I'd just through this into the mix. The Fallout 4 soundtrack is available on Amazon for $9 and it's over 3 1/2 hours long. There are enough gems in here that you should be able to find several tracks to enhance your games. On a side note, there is a separate Fallout 4 digital album that consists of 5 of the songs that Linda Carter sings as her character in the Third Rail. It's awesome!
Sounds like a lot of fun. Just an FYI, at least for me, the links to the 3rd and 4th photo albums are messed up. The 3rd one also sends me to the PaizoCon Oz album and the fourth one only sends me to a Google login screen.
It really depends on how much you care about the suspension-of-disbelief challenge. Any time you convert a situation into the numbers of game mechanics, you've just turned your game into an exercise of rolling dice and adding numbers. Obviously rolling dice and adding numbers are what we're doing, but the more you can distract players from that fact, the easier it is for them to be "in the story" and not "at the table". Every opponent entry shows a breakdown of what its AC is. I try to use that and how much they missed a hit by to describe why their blow was ineffective: "Your axe bounces off the lizard's tough hide"
Observant players can use clues like these tactically by trying power attack, bluff, or dispel magic respectively to improve their chances to hit. Telling a player that all of these opponents have an AC of 20 is boring.
Years ago, I played a 2nd Edition dwarf fighter/thief named Bunko that had a wisdom of 5 and I had a similar challenge of figuring out how to play him. In his case, it was compounded by being the only time I've every played a chaotic neutral character. At the beginning, I handled the situation by rolling a d20 every time I had what I personally considered a "good" idea. If I rolled under 5, the character would take that action. Conversely, every time I came up with what I considered to be a "bad" idea, I rolled a d20 and if I rolled under 5, the character would NOT take the action - roll above 5 and away he'd go and I'd hope for the best. After 3-4 game sessions, I started to build a picture of the "dumb" things were typical gaffs on the character's part and what things he tended to have actual "uncommon" sense about. Doing this ended up with all kinds of laughable situations including arguing with a sentient magic sword that set him on fire and challenging a pit fiend to a thumb wrestling contest...In the long run, he became one of the most memorable characters I've ever played. BTW, he had an intelligence of 11. As he would put it, "I'm not stupid, I'm just a little dumb...".
I agree that one of the biggest reasons for starting at 1st level is it increases the likelihood of the players (and often the GM's) actually knowing what the characters can do and then actually using those abilities. Too often in games I've played that started at higher levels one of two things happened: either the game crawled because everyone was trying to figure out what they could do "on the fly", or everyone just stuck to the old "hack or cast a spell" routine and then it's pretty much 1st level with more hit points and larger plusses. I also fall into the category of being most interested in playing through my characters' progression and growth and the more levels available to play through, the more I can do that. I also find that first/lower level play encourages more roleplaying. The vast majority of my most memorable RP moments come from low level games and the lower levels of campaigns.
I could be wrong, but it seems like none of the posters so far have read the Dark Horse Comics graphic novel, Shepherd's Tale. It pretty well gives Book's entire back story including his operative past and criminal connections and will definitely answer all of your questions. It, along with the other Serenity collections in the series, is considered canon, so I recommend them to anyone who is a Firefly fan. |
