Shaking his head with a grin, Mukluk raises his free hand as if to say "no". Ladies first. Mukluk insists. He gestures down the hall.
Moving to flank with Snorg , Mukluk cackles as the creature misses him. Ha! Not so brave, eh? Me and Snorg cut you to bits! Flashing an evil smile, Mukluk swings his blade again, this time in an upwards arc, trying to lop off the beast's head.
Rushing towards the giant dog, Mukluk yells out a battle song: Big dog, big dog
Anselm clenches his jaw and fists at Razvan lying right in front of him. I cannot believe he is lying to a priest... I am going to have to talk to him about basic integrity, it seems. Does he have no faith, no direction in his life? Sigh... I cannot abide a liar. Come what may for him, the truth must be told. Clearing his throat, Anselm speaks with the measured and careful tones of a man of the church. Of course, if this lawless liar didn't just make things more difficult for me... I'm afraid this story about a swordmaster is a fabrication... one I did not authorize. Please return the gold. As for why I am traveling with someone so willing to sully his reputation with lies... I do not know this man. We were merely brought here for Professor Lorrimor's funeral. I apologize for his befouling of the truth. But we have more important things to do than chastise liars. We are here to seek your aid in possibly linking the Whispering Way to the strange events that have been happening in the town. If you could grant me and my companion he says, clearly indicating Iagon, access to the library, I would be delighted to keep you apprised of what's going on that we may all more ably serve the townspeople.
Remains constant? You must have some pretty epic software devs if it's not increasing... See also: entropy. Until we can prove that we can reduce the entropy in a software system, doing anything with it increases the bugs. I might be a bit too jaded at 28.
Seeing and hearing the horse, Mukluk charges directly at it. He raises his dogslicer, screaming a war chant. Horse too tall
As he closes, Mukluk leaps and tries to embed the blade in the horse's stomach or chest.
Ooh, didn't know this was out. Think I'll wait 'til it's back to non-free so I can show my financial support.
Indeed. How important is his faith to him? Is it less important than conforming to the expectations of some of his fellows? If so, then why is he a cleric? ... besides, if your fellows are true dwarves, they care more about prowess than the tools used. I think even stuffy Torag would be okay with his followers using whatever tools are most appropriate to further his goals. Only the foolishly conservative are so inflexible as to dictate methodology in addition to policy.
Everything that follows is, of course, my personal opinion. You don't have to read it, you don't have to agree with it. Before I start, a bit of advice: yes, you're oldschool. Are your players? That's the important thing. You're running the game for them to have fun. If they don't want to roll abilities, it won't be fun for them. I'm not saying that you should let them have 35 or more pointbuy, but don't stifle their freedom just because of a personal opinion of yours. If their using point buy really ruins your fun, I would reconsider why you're running a game. That said... I go with 20 point buy. I don't like the statistical irregularities of dice for character creation. PFS uses 20 point buy. It's a nice middle of the road. I don't play with people who want to start with especially powerful or weak characters. No one has complained about the 20 point buy yet. So I keep things simple in terms of stats and take the middle-of-the-road approach. My games are focused on roleplaying more than combat, so those high stats won't help you much anyway. For some, that makes me a boring GM. That's fine. There's plenty of other games out there. I have created a character using traditional (2nd ed, even) 3d6 rolling. It created a character dramatically different from what I envisioned. I feel that having players roll stats is sort of like telling them to eat their vegetables: yes, it can be good for them in terms of character development (unless what you rolled doesn't let you select the class you want... too bad, maybe next game*). But they don't want to do it. Why not? Most folks who come to the table have a preconceived notion of the kind of character they want to play, either in terms of mechanics or backstory/personality. And why shouldn't they? This is a roleplaying game. It's all about pretending to be someone else. Having a preconceived notion of who you want to be is entirely the point. Random die rolls interfere with that. I wanted to be a charismatic silver-tongued rake. But the dice didn't let me. As has been said above, the game is supposed to be fun. To continue the vegetables analogy, it's supposed to be like the sweets at the top of the food pyramid: it's supposed to be fun. I see fun as the system not interfering with how I want to express the person I am pretending to be. I am decidedly oldschool in my gaming. I let my players use any skill they can think of in a situation. Want to use Perception to have the guard not arrest you for murdering his buddy? Sure. Roleplay it. Battlemaps? Fooey (until my players asked for them, anyway). But I will not force rolled stats on my players. Forgive the heresy, but this is something I really think Dave and Gary got wrong. * So glad 3E got rid of stat-based class restrictions.
I am not the target audience of this thread, but I love what you're doing here and wish you the best. ... and just to be clear, some of us straight guys are bothered by scantily-clad women, too. I specifically don't want sexualized (and sexist) art in my RPG materials. I could rant for hours and hours about this, but I'll just say that I am happy to put money behind material that isn't sexist and womanizing as a means of supporting it and saying I want to see more. I am reminded of a certain webcomic.
1. Golarion's past. History is the context with which we inform the actions of the present for shaping the future. I would love to see a detailed history of Golarion, more than a timeline. More than anything else, that would help me set a game in Golarion.
But what if Hemingway bores your players to death? Some people want detail and verbal beauty. Going the Hemingway route is an extreme which will make them very, very unhappy. I suppose what I'm saying here is to have balance. It sounds like John hates Tolkien's vivid, sweeping (and engrossing, in my so-not humble opinion) descriptions. I personally cannot stand Hemingway and wish he never took pen to paper. You're probably going to have both sorts of players at your table, as well as people in between (unless your group is comprised of people who affect a sampling bias, like English majors or MMO players). Going to any extreme, like Hemingway's sparseness or Tolkien's lushness, will disappoint someone. Seek the path of balance, and it will be the most enjoyable for most of your group. Unless you see reason to do otherwise, of course.
To be fair, those meanings are from over a thousand years ago. And (the prescriptivist in me sighs), well, language evolves. For better or worse, 'warlock' means something different now than it did then. Yes, the old meaning has value. Yes, the new one does, too. But we can only really reference the latter conveniently in conversation because that's what the generally-accepted meaning is. Sure, to you it might still have the old meaning, but tell me: did it have that old meaning before you read about it on the 'net or heard about it in school? I doubt it. That's because society has a different meaning for it, one entirely separate from what we think of when we think of a witch*, and a meaning that I'd like to see as a class in Pathfinder. As such, it's suboptimal to name the class something based on an obscure, uncommon meaning for a word that someone has to cite a dictionary to prove. It wouldn't be the first time roleplaying games have things that use uncommon meanings of words (Hold Portal, I am looking squarely at you), but I'd personally like to not continue the trend. That said, Adamant Entertainment already made a warlock so the name is taken and this whole discussion is moot. ;) I'm not sure if the one on the d20pfsrd is converted from Complete Arcana, but if you're familiar with it you're free to check. * which is itself based on misconceptions and history written from the wrong point of view, but that's a debate for another thread on another forum.
All the AEG / Fantasy Flight d20 books. Like Guilds and Good and Evil and City Works and Toolbox and ... . I think they're OGL, too. But I'd like to give Paizo money to do the work of converting them for me. And I'd like them to be in print still! :D |
