Carlson's page

Okay, with WotC we had 3E, 3.5E, and 3.XE.

Now along comes Pathfinder RPG. We've been clamoring for it, telling Paizo they should make 3.75E, but they actually surprised the hell outta us and went ahead and did it.

But 3.75E just doesn't have much appeal. Neither does 3.Paizo, as some folks locally have taken to calling it (Watcher, who started that? I lost track.).

How about 3P? Short. Simple. Just as easy to say as "Three-E", and easier than "Three-Point-Five".

Okay,thanks to a lot of circumstances coming together (both positives and negatives), I'm going to be getting my 38 year old butt back in school this fall. The downside is that in order to do so, I'm going to have to significantly cut short the Savage Tide campaign I'm running so I'm not ignoring school work for game prep (always an issue with me). As it was, I had to stop reading more than one issue ahead in the adventure path - it was distracting me from prepping for the next session!

So here's my situation: after a year, we're about halfway through Sea Wyvern's Wake (lots of ROLE play, lots of no-wife-no-kids camaraderie, some side quests, every other week game that gets preempted by real life every few months...). What story elements, Here There Be Monsters to Prince Of Demons, are essential for it to truly be a Savage Tide game?

Stopping shadow pearl production is critical.

Discovering Demogorgon's plan as well.

What else needs to be in there?

For example, reading through Here There Be Monsters, I'm really not finding anything that the characters need in the adventure in order to move the plot along, and plan on moving straight from Tamoachan (current point in SWW) to Farshore. (Don't worry - they'll be getting plenty of Isle of Dread time - I've got too much nostalgic feelings for IoD to let this opportunity pass by.)

Okay, when Paizo had the Dragon and Dungeon licenses, we had t-shirts for them.

Pathfinder comes along, and we get the Goblin T.

Titanic Games gave us the Kill Doctor Lucky and Stonehenge/Spinal Tap Homage T's.

When are we gonna see a T-shirt featuring the Paizo Golem and Logo?

Okay, I hit the Paizo Boards, same as I do at least twice a day. For the first time in a couple days, I glanced over at my shopping cart, and see there's a 10% discount listed on the total. What's up with that?

For those of us whose time is only slightly more limited than their attention span, would it be possible to have, on the GameMastery Module page, a checklist of the GameMastery modules sorted by levels?

Okay, Gamemastery General Discussion seems as good a category as any for this...

Does Paizo have/intend to have demo teams (beyond Renton employees at the major cons)? People dedicated to hitting the shops, game days and minor cons to demo and promote Paizo products? And if so, how does one sign up for the team?

Would it be possible to set up printer friendly versions of the Paizo Blog? I have trouble reading it on screen, and the sidebars require landscaping the page to get the main text/images to print complete.

Also, how about separate pages for each blog entry? Keep the full blog, but allow for printing, say, the Pathfinder Lore entries without the Gamemastery Item Cards promos.

So, it's been a few weeks since THE ANNOUNCEMENT, and within the past 24 hours, I had the wonderful realization that the 2 on the right side of the room and the 2 on the left side of the room really could come together to make 4.

Okay, I'll be less cryptic.

The 2 on the Right:

I guess what really appealed to me about Dungeon, especially through the Adventure Paths, is something that has been missing from D&D since first edition: the Shared Experience. For the first time in fifteen, twenty years, I was hearing players and DMs, many who had never played together, sharing conversations and "war stories" about the same adventures. It took me back to the days of White Plume Mountain and King Snurre Ironbelly's Hall.

When the licensing announcement was made, both of Dungeon ceasing publication and Pathfinder beginning, I was kinda bummed. Over the past year, the quality I've seen in Dungeon has really appealed to me, so much so that a Pathfinder subscription seemed to be the answer. The problem, however, was the price. Even at 33% off, 14 bucks a month was a bit outside my limited gaming budget. <sigh> C'est la vie.

The 2 on the Left:

Even though I never subscribed to Dragon, and only began a Dungeon subscription within the past year, they have been a part of my gaming pedigree since shortly after I began playing. When it was announced that Paizo's license was being pulled, and WotC announced the upcoming digital initiative... well, it was like they came into my house, shredded all the pictures of my son, then handed me a CD with digital copies of those photos - yeah, I still have the pics, but only so long as I have a PC to view them on.

I had already been lamenting, privately, the decline of quality in WotC's products. Every D&D Minis product of the past year or more has had some major issue, from the paint quality in War Drums to the split Hellspike maps to the Blackguard on Nightmare distribution snafu. Each new sourcebook seemed to include a smaller and smaller percentage of useful material, while the page filler content continued to increase.

When I started buying Dungeon, I pretty much stopped buying WotC's paper products, except for my two or three D&D Minis boosters a month. With the upcoming pre-painted plastic minis line from Reapor, the fact that I can trade for the few DDMs I might still want, and the fact that, from what I'm seeing, WotC just isn't concerned with providing the information that their customers have asked for, NDA be damned... there's just no reason for me to keep giving my money WotC.

The 4 in the Middle:

So today I was trying to figure out what to do with the 12 bucks per booster I've been paying for D&D Minis. Well, let's see, what to do with $24 to $36 per month. I'd love to sub to Pathfinder if...only...it...

...and the light bulb over my head flashed on with a ding.