Chris Nehren's page

I would like to change my avatar name and alias, both "Chris Nehren". I created these when I knew less about myself than I know now, and I do not feel comfortable with those names (I identify as non-binary and my given name does not represent who I am any more). I emailed customer service in June and have yet to receive a response beyond asking for some identifying information. I understand that folks are busy, but I feel that two months is a long time to wait. Would it just be easier at this point for me to create another account and wait for them to be merged?

The RP is why I wanted to get back into PbP--it's missing in a lot of games elsewhere (PFS, IME, being the biggest example). Looking forward to your deviations, whether they be from the books or creatures we fight. ;)

I hear the sound of someone changing their passwords.

History of Golarion pretty please! History gives us the context in the present to shape the future. And there are so many secret things in Golarion's history that would make for great reveals. Why not have a few in novels?

It's not that he's not a good fit for Grand Lodge; I just have one character there already and wanted to do something different.

Hmm. Allegiance to the nation, rather than strictly the faction, per se. That could work... something to consider. Thanks for the insight.

In trying to assign a faction to a new character (a Monk, specifically), I encountered great difficulty in selecting a faction that fits. He prefers order and law, so Andoran's free-spirited approach is a poor fit. That said, he's not "neutral, honest, don't detect evil me bro", so Cheliax wouldn't work either. I didn't want another character in Grand Lodge. I wanted something different. But as you'll see, we'll be coming back to Grand Lodge in the end. He's a monk, and doesn't care for power. Osirion is out, and so is Taldor. These two seem to be more or less the same faction to me: a broken nation wants to be powerful again. He doesn't care for wealth, so that means Qadira and Sczarni are out. Again, very little distinguishing these two. It seems that the former is only a shade less seedy than the latter. Otherwise, I'm having trouble distinguishing them. He's not out to save the world, so Silver Crusade doesn't fit. I admit I'm simplifying here, but the Guide to Organized Play doesn't really differentiate the two pairs of factions very well.

At this juncture, a very fair question is "You've turned your nose up at all the factions. Why's this monk a Pathfinder if he doesn't get on with any of the factions?". Essentially, Stagmar adventures to bring pride to his family and to become a better martial artist. Wealth and power don't mean much to him. Through process of elimination I'm left with Grand Lodge. Yet even this doesn't fit. And here is the crux of the problem: Grand Lodge has become a "default" faction for a lot of characters when there's no better fit, even when it doesn't fit at all. This, combined with what seems to be a lot of duplication of goals in the existing factions, presents players who aren't interested in politicking and wealth with a difficult choice for their faction. My wizard is in the same situation. Talathel explores to learn more. Power through knowledge fits a wizard well. He'd be Osirion if he cared for their politics. But he has no ties to that nation, and has no interest in politics besides. Again, he's in Grand Lodge as a default.

This is as much a request for guidance as it is an observation that neutral-leaning characters with no interest in wealth and / or power have very few choices as regards faction. Have I missed something obvious? Am I simply doing it wrong? I realize that it's impossible to accommodate everyone, and this isn't meant as a criticism of everyone's hard work on the factions. Maybe I just have a penchant for playing characters that don't fit the mold. I'll accept that, along with the hope that things will improve in the future.

I totally would have gotten a scenario subscription when I had the disposable income to be a superscriber. Beats the tar out of buying each one manually.

This is probably not going to make me any friends, but it has been something that's been on my mind a lot recently, so...

I have a temper. A rather bad one, actually. Things that upset it include many of the personality traits that are, unfortunately, woefully common in tabletop gamers. I don't like powergaming. I don't like the murderhobo theme that is common in organized play. Rules-lawyering is another thing that really annoys me. Lack of hygiene, etc. etc. etc. All of these things set off this temper of mine.

You'd probably never know it, though. I'm strongly anti-drama and conflict-avoidant. Instead of confronting these sorts of things, I just stop playing with the people who cause me issues. Especially with the advent of virtual tabletops like roll20, the pool of available players has never been larger. I'd rather not be the one person who ruins everyone's fun by complaining. I just move on to find new people to play with.

I GM so I can be more selective about who I play with. I have a lot more fun when I play with people I know and like than I do when I play with random people. In essence, it's a self-serving decision to have more fun. I suppose that's why we're all here, though, so perhaps it's not too horrible.

This is a little obscure, but the Dawnflower Dissident prestige class in Paths of Prestige gets something called "Secret Caster (Ex)" which allows the caster to use an opposed Bluff check to hide that they're casting spells. Not sure if this is what you're looking for but it seems to match the description you gave.

There's very definitely a rust monster in at least one PFS scenario I've played. The barbarian I was playing with was... less than pleased.

Description up above says "As if that weren't enough, however, am longtime rival" which should probably be "a longtime rival".

It's standard industry practice to not try to send a large number of emails all at once. That's the sort of thing spammers do, and it's one of the quickest ways to get one's email servers blacklisted. Given that, it's not surprising that there's been a delay in people receiving the message. All this means is that Paizo's sysadmins know what they're doing (I can't say I'm surprised).

Now, what I'm curious about is if everyone received the same message.

Anyone class can use any skill in 3.5 and Pathfinder. Do note that some of the skills are Trained Only, which requires at least 1 rank in the skill to use it.

Almost. You need a way to fly every day (or similar) to take ranks in Fly.

I mentioned this in another thread, but it appears as though this one would be more proper: all but the GMG and IWSG download and open fine on my iPad. The other two are over 100 MB and will not open/download.

Now that I've had time to play with these a little, I'd like to offer some stats for debugging / further optimizing purposes.

I have an iPad 3 64GB CDMA (Verizon) and it renders the ISWG without issue, along with the others. The non-lite PDFs were usable, but a little slow. These PDFs are zoom zoom fast. So now I have another reasonably zippy choice for reference on my tablet while playing.

Just for giggles, I put the lite PDFs on my iPhone 4 16GB CDMA (Verizon). They're just as zippy there, though I do need to zoom in to actually read things. :)

Both devices are running iOS 5.1.1.

I love you guys.

Mind sharing with the class, Crystal?

This forces me to ask the question of what the image search was.

Please ditch Comic Sans. :(

On losing weapons:

Right, if this is 3.5E FR and no Spellplague, I am beyond interested. I'm running a game today so won't have much time to get something together, but will try to do so tomorrow. Might go with a human fighter if I can resist the allure of a caster class.

You say FR 1375. Are you intending to follow Wizards' story with the Spellplague etc.?

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.

You'd get a lot more bites for that software dev position if you opened it to telecommuters. Just sayin'. <_<

No you're not.

I am having timeout issues reaching paizo.com from several points on the Internet. Here's the list of network points whence I cannot connect:

* Philadelphia, PA: Comcast
* San Mateo, CA: Comcast Business
* Fremont, CA: Hurricane Electric
* Dallas, TX: ThePlanet
* Manchester, UK: ByteMark
* Atlanta, GA suburbs: Comcast

Networks from which I or a friend can reach paizo.com:
* a friend in Raleigh-Durham on Roadrunner
* Verizon 3G
* Verizon 4G LTE
* Clear Wireless 4G

I can provide traceroute / mtr for all points of presence. My friend should be able to do that if I annoy him enough.

Heck, up in Asheville NC, the saying is "if you don't like the weather, wait 15 minutes."

Having staffed a technical conference there last year, I can verify that this is indeed the saying and is accurate.

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.

There's a couple of useful posts on other fora that collect a large number of acronyms. There's one on the Giant in the Playground forums, and one on the Wizards forums.

Their forums are arguably more amenable to collecting this sort of data due to the restriction on post editing here. Most of what I've seen here is covered in those two threads—except for some of the Paizo-specific stuff, of course.

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.

Belle Mythix wrote:

Why? Sterility? Contraceptive measures? Necrophilia? Something that cannot be said here?

Well... most women can't knock you up, for one thing. So that like cuts my chances down by about 75% right there.

I was originally thinking along the lines of "in a reality where magic is real, surely contraceptive magic would be one of the first things devised", but that works, too.

... now I'm curious what the other 25% is.

This is my favorite book Paizo will publish in 2012 and I haven't even received it yet. I am a serious fan of gaming world history and so far this seems to be the best book for the subject.

Oh, and if it's not too late, I want NPCs! As I said elsewhere, history is the context for the present that guides us to shape the future. As a corollary, it is the hands of the people of ancient societies which shape that context. So, more NPCs please!

About bringing characters together and starting the story: taverns are boring and overdone. And what if one of your characters is a teetotaler? The Paizo modules and adventure paths I've looked through / played through have character traits that link the players into the story somehow. They're varied and specific to each story, but provide a lot more flavor (and storytelling hooks for you as a DM) than "so you're in a tavern one night and ...". Avoiding the tavern cliché is probably one of my favorite things about Paizo's adventures. It's a tough thing to do, and they do it well.

It sounds like your other players aren't really supporting you. Talk to them about this. Tell them that it isn't fun for you any more. If they're mature adults, this should be all you need. If they're not, find another group.

Chris, I hope you've perused the kotaku-male-entitlement thread!

I have, yes. I'm a software developer by trade, and the same sort of thing is extremely prevalent in the tech industry as well. It's something I'm familiar with from several aspects of my life.

If we are to use Star, Cosmo, or Women's Health as models for what women want to look at, it is pictures of attractive women. Who could blame them.

I just... wow. Seriously? There are so. many. things wrong with the media regarding how women should see themselves / behave that are utterly in contrast to reality. One Google search for something like 'magazines women photoshop' will show you just how insane it is to use the media as a guide here. Please talk to any female you know about how utterly and totally f@#$ed the media is in its depiction of women.

Stepping off the soapbox now...

That is true and intentional; our style is one of a few things we've held back to distinguish our own products from third-party products; we therefore don't have a lot of motivation to provide details about it.

See this thread for more info.

I think you failed a Knowledge: Webcomics check, Kelsey.

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.

Wait. Succubus? I'm a Tiefling Paladin/Magus/Sorcerer/Dragon Disciple.

Doesn't that strike you as needlessly complicated?

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.

'taller' is an adjective. 'colour of fresh blood' is an adjectival phrase. I presume that you didn't mean "don't use adjectives", so can you clarify, please?

Arg. I knew I saw that before. Should've read all the comments instead of using the browser search. Yeah, I'll definitely want to pick up some of these for my PFS characters. Thank you!

Is this going to include a folder or something for me to store PFS chronicle sheets? I very well may order more than one if that's the case.

Making a +2 enhancement "Always Available" for any character that has reached an appropriate level, somewhere between 5 and 7, would be a good way to fix this.

Sounds like that requirement could be expressed with Fame. Unless there are scenarios in the 1-5 tier that grant disproportionate fame, I don't think that'd be a problem. And even if there were, if your character survived an especially tough scenario, maybe they've earned the right to carry around a +2 item. :)

Evidently you haven't actually looked at Mac app pricing. :) I don't mean the big names like Photoshop or Logic; I mean the everyday apps for non-professionals like iWork ($20/each app) or GarageBand ($15). Then, updates are always free. And App Store apps can be installed on as many Macs as you have; you just need to associate an Apple ID. In-app purchases tend to be much smaller than what's being asked here for what will be the equivalent, too.

I have three Macs and would like to run this on all of them. But there's no way I'm giving you $60 to run one app on three computers. That's not the way the Mac ecosystem works. Ditch that silly "one computer == one license" clause and I'll consider thinking about it. Put it on the App Store and I will think about it—provided a full-featured demo, of course.

What specific clarifications would people like on online games? For the most part we've left it open so people can do it however works best for them, using the programs and forums they're already using. I fear that too much clarification will result in people who feel their method of online play isn't covered simply not playing.

Okay, right. Fair point. But my questions are even simpler than that and are of a logistics nature. I want to run a PFS game as a PbP. How do I handle the chronicle sheets? Do I need to send them to my players, have them fill them out, return them, and then I sign and send them back? Is there an honor system? Basically, I'd appreciate some structure, or at least guidance, for making the record tracking work. Conversely, what should I expect as a player in a PbP game in terms of chronicle sheets?

Responded to russodrezden via PM; any other takers?