We need a META-lore book that creates NOTHING but merely points to what EXISTS so that EVERY GM can buy this book and get a handle on the lore’s ARCHITECTURE. And it’s best if the product is digital and constantly updated.
That would be the wiki.
Every article in the wiki documents (with links) exactly where in the canon the information comes from.
You could start from scratch yourself, but it seems like you'd be better served by putting your energy into improving the wiki.
Hand-waving just isn’t for me though. At least not on the subject of this thread.
You got an official answer from Paizo's Rule And Lore Creative Director.
If that's not satisfactory for you, then you've moved yourself into homebrew territory.
There is a Homebrew Forum here. Folks there might be able to help you craft a ruleset that covers all the various religions and how they handle their congregation's "day of rest" (if any) issues.
Any chance we can get preview images for flip-mats back?
Please! Very small images marked "PREVIEW" are fine ... we're not asking to steal the images, I promise. There are SO MANY Flip-Mats out now (I own 100+ physical Flip-Mats); we really need previews.
Amplifying both of these requests! Adding a + to the posts wasn't sufficiently emphatic.
Good news for Nobody, Vany, and anyone else who hates corporate password rules.
National Institute of Standards and Technology
https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-4/sp800-63b.html
New password rules from NIST
3.1.1.2 Password Verifiers:
The following requirements apply to passwords:
Verifiers and CSPs SHALL require passwords to be a minimum of eight characters in length and SHOULD require passwords to be a minimum of 15 characters in length.
Verifiers and CSPs SHOULD permit a maximum password length of at least 64 characters.
Verifiers and CSPs SHOULD accept all printing ASCII [RFC20] characters and the space character in passwords.
Verifiers and CSPs SHOULD accept Unicode [ISO/ISC 10646] characters in passwords. Each Unicode code point SHALL be counted as a single character when evaluating password length.
Verifiers and CSPs SHALL NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types) for passwords.
Verifiers and CSPs SHALL NOT require users to change passwords periodically. However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator.
Verifiers and CSPs SHALL NOT permit the subscriber to store a hint that is accessible to an unauthenticated claimant.
Verifiers and CSPs SHALL NOT prompt subscribers to use knowledge-based authentication (KBA) (e.g., “What was the name of your first pet?”) or security questions when choosing passwords.
Verifiers SHALL verify the entire submitted password (i.e., not truncate it).
Of note:
Verifiers and CSPs SHALL require passwords to be a minimum of eight characters in length and SHOULD require passwords to be a minimum of 15 characters in length.
Verifiers and CSPs SHALL NOT require users to change passwords periodically.
The supply chain is still working through some of the lingering effects of the pandemic.
Fluctuations and shortages are still happening fairly frequently.
One of the exacerbating causes is the "bullwhip effect" which magnifies the bumps and potholes. The 'beer' game is a tool that is often used in first-year engineering classes to teach young engineers about how these effects can impact their jobs and their projects.
this past Tuesday morning, one of my two best friends died.
First, be gentle with yourself. Unexpected deaths are considered 'traumatic' (as opposed to dying of a lingering illness, or dying at an advanced age). And grief is not linear, nor predictable.
Feel free to DM me if you want more conversation, I am a 'death doula' IRL, and I have some experience helping families and friends through this process.
Second, be there for the kids.
It's not just what you do now, but how consistently you show up in their lives. Things like continuing to include Magus in your gaming activities will go a long way to provide the stability he and his siblings will need over the years.
Your part in the tales does not have to have "ended". Granted Ex and Newb may make things more difficult in the future, but you already have a relationship with Magus; keep it going.
I had an uncle-by-friendship in my life: a friend of my father who treated me and my brother just like all his other niblings. You can keep fulfilling this role.
I pre-ordered the hard copy of the Player Core 2 book on 7/26 and it has shipped. I went to try on 8/1 and 8/2 to download the pdf that you usually got for free when you paid for the hardcopy of the book. Its not showing up in my digital content.
Do we have to buy the PDF seperately now?
Paizo has never offered a free PDF for single purchases. That's only a perk for people who subscribe the product line the item is a part of.
How about rereading Octavia Butler's "Parable Of The Sower"?
Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, imagined a future in which California is inhospitable, weather is deadly, wealth disparities are vicious, and a presidential candidate may set the country back a hundred years. It all begins on July 20, 2024.
What does this mean? Will all the pages be there? Is it just a bit of wear & tear or are we talking huge rips and/or somebody dumped their coffee on it?
I always buy non-mint if they are available.
The quality difference is often indiscernable. I've examined things that were 'non mint' and haven't been able to see what the flaw was.
Often it's a bent corner on a cover, ar a crimped edge on a map. But nothing that even requires fixing before it's usable. And nothing that my players have ever noticed.
In fact, after a few trips in my GM bag, some of my 'bought new' stuff looks worse than the non-mint that Paizo has shipped me.
Buy with confidence. If you think something is so damaged as to be unueasble, you'd be the first person I'd heard of who had that happen.
University of Michigan President Ono, May 21, 2024, on why police removed the campus anti-war encampment:
"These actions were not free speech; they were destruction of property.
Dec 16, 1773, Boston
Free speech is fine, but the destruction of East India Company property by tossing it in the harbor crosses a line.
Benjamin Franklin stated that the East India Company should be paid for the destroyed tea, all ninety thousand pounds (which, at two shillings per pound, came to £9,000, or £1.44 million [2014, approx. $1.7 million US])
"A speedy Reparation will immediately set us right in the Opinion of all Europe. "
It's not just lore for me, it's context. Sometime the 'beginning of the chapter' overview paragraphs help me understand the nuances of the wording of the rule.
PDFs allow much faster access to context-relevant information than AoN does.
And, of course, lore. Pathfinder is about so much more than just the rules.
I remember in a fiction workshop one time asking someone why a thing in their story (which I felt wasn't working) was the way it was. They just kept repeating "Because that's what happened
Are you sure it only happened one time?
I think there's one of those folks in every fiction writing workshop. And it usually involves their dog.
One of my true frustrations with financial institutions is their insistence that they need to tell you everything.
Yes. I understand that getting my quarterly prospectus is legally required and all that, but this isn't about investing.
I had to create an Experian account to unlock my credit. Fine.
So I signed in to Experian figuring that I could turn all that s*** off.
And Experian isn't exactly a company whose email you want to auto-route to spam, because something important might actually happen.
I'm sorry I created an account.
So you went decades without knowing what was going on with your Experian account.
But now you're afraid something important might happen if you don't accept every single one of their emails?
How about a compromise? You shut off all their emails and then manually check your credit score once a week to see if anything alarming has happened. If you went all those years without checking it at all, perhaps once a week will be sufficient to manage your fear-of-missing-out concerns.
Paizo does not read emails from random nobodies on the internet, much less respond to them. They are far more busy with other more important/pressing matters. Suggesting a purposefully fruitless course of action is not helpful and is borderline trolling.
That has not been my experience at all. In addition to the usual "thanks for your feedback", I've gotten some amazing responses from unexpected senior staff.
In a customer-orieted organization like Paizo, customers giving constructive feedback ARE important/pressing matters.
If all you ever send are rants or heated condemnations, your experince may vary, of course.
I wouldn't buy anything more than the Player Core 1, GM Core, and Monster Core*, and then pick up Player Core 2 when it is released.
I'd use Archives of Nethys for any information that you need that you can't find in those four books.
If you discover that you're consulting AoN a lot, keep track of which book or books are being referenced. Choose your next purchase based on which book you consult the most.
There are literally hundreds of books you might want to buy.
If you're buying pre-written Adventure Paths, Bounties, Scenarios, etc, you'll need a different set of setting books than if you're creating a home-brew world, or simply writing your own adventures in Golarion.
* If you like using pawns, you might want to buy the Monster Core Pawn Set when it's released in a couple months.
As a reminder, we do not user the terms 'crunch and fluff' to refer to rules and lore on the forums. Rules and lore are the preferred terms. I will be enforcing that, and it will appear in the next update to the Community Guidelines.
You and your players all need a way to track the loss and restoration of Hit Points.
Traditionally, players' character sheets were written in pencil, and everyone spent a lot of time erasing and re-writing all the changes.
Personally, I keep my PC character sheets in plastic sleeves, and use wet-erase markers to track those.
As a GM, I use both white-boards and the Combat Pad as tools to track NPC/Moster HP, rounds (especially how many rounds spells and effects last), and as a way to track initiative order (crucial when people are dying and you need to move their turn in the initiative order).
You can, of course, use digital tools for these tasks as well. But if you're somewhere with less-than-stellar internet access (the basement of a store, or the middle of a convention center), these manual tools are a godsend.
I think any person who engages in creative endeavors does so, in part, for their own joy. If their creation brings joy to other people, that's a bonus.
So, from the story you've told, it sounds like you have already achieved the primary creative objective: designed a new game that you and your friends enjoy playing.
If you have goals beyond 'creating' and 'bringing joy', then sure, those goals may not be met by your game. If you want to become a renowned game designer, then maybe this isn't the best piece to showcase to the wider rpg world. First attempts in any creative field are seldom commercial blockbusters.
It might help you if you identified what goals you are 'afraid' of not reaching if someone else uses a derogatory term like 'fantasy heartbreaker' to describe your game. If you've already met your primary goals, there's probably nothing to fear.
I'm wondering if there's a way to link my local gaming store book purchases to my paizo account. Mainly because I've been looking at playing Fantasy Grounds and it pulls your paizo account purchases so you dont have to repurchase products. I mainly buy my pathfinder books through one of our local stores so while I have all the remaster books, none of them are reflected on my paizo account.
Anyways I hope I put this thread in the right spot. :)
it pulls your paizo account purchases so you dont have to repurchase products.
This is only partially true. The true statement is it pulls your paizo account PDF purchases.
Most Paizo products come in at least two* versions: print/hardcopy and PDF/digital.
If you buy a hardcopy version of a Paizo product from the Paizo store, you do not get a digital copy**. That's a different product and you pay for it separately.
Fantasy Grounds only pulls the digital/PDF version from your Paizo account.
So, it doesn't matter whether you buy your hard copy/print version from the local gaming store or from Paizo. In either case it won't synch with your Fantasy Grounds account.
*there are sometimes special versions printed of some products.
** if you subscribe to an entire product line from Paizo (like the adventure path line or the rulesbook line) then you get a free PDF each time your hardcopy ships. But that's a gift that is only available to subscribers.
Do you prefer to get to the airport early so you don't have to stress, or are you an, "In an ideal world they'll call my row just as I arrive at the gate" person?
I come from a family of "no stress" folks.
My parents had booked a trip-of-a-lifetime birding tour in South America that included time in the Galapagos Islands.
On the way to the airport from their home, they had a flat tire. My dad changed the tire himself and still got to them to the airport in plenty of time for their flight.
I really, really struggle to imagine someone new to a ttrgp system and dropping X hundred dollars to get all published books at once without playing it first.
Paizo seems to believe that spending $20 on the PDF of the Beginner Box is sufficient for folks to have fun playing Pathfinder.
Since they have decades of data on product development, pricing, and marketing, and years of refining their first attempts so that the current offerings are aligned with what people actually buy and what they actually do after making their first purchase, I trust* Paizo's business decisions (based on decades of sales data).
Uninformed, anxiety-driven posts by people who couldn't possibly have the necessary information needed to proclaim what the "default" buyer wants, or how bad Paizo's business decisions/norms are, or what people who 'want to have fun playing the game' need to do to become Paizo customers basically showcase the care and anxiety behind the username, but not the actual impact of Paizo's decision making.
*honestly, if Paizo ISN"T using that data to make decisions, I'm far more terrified about their future than I am by the current state of their offerings.
And yes, there's still an entire book of player options coming out in July where all of the "missing" spells and material can be published. Difinitive statements about what has been "removed" probably should wait until we can see what's included in that next publication.
Not being a lawyer, I'm left with a queasy feeling.
[snip]
I just can't figure out how calamity has been avoided.
You avoid legal calamities by hiring your own legal team to steer you through the situation.
That's the job of the Intellectual Property lawyers that Paizo hired:
to make sure that everything they publish under the ORC license is free of any and all material that WotC could possibly claim as their intellectual property.
Paizo has its own lawyers, who are looking out after Paizo's best interests (and to some extent, the best interests of the other, smaller ttrpg publishers)
This is not Paizo's first encounter with IP hostilities from WotC. They aren't naive or inexperienced, and neither are their lawyers. Paizo's lawyers kept them from being sued by WotC for all of PF1 under the OLG license. It's highly likely that Paizo's lawyers will keep them from getting sued by WotC under the ORC license.
And all our our anxiety, hand-wringing, and reading of tea-leaves (and forum posts) is not going to stop any legal moves by WotC.
If you don't trust Paizo's lawyers, and are still uneasy, then the only safeguard you have is to buy the books you need to run games totally independantly of Paizo's existence.
I found the story a delightful, eye-opening example of the variety of stories that can be told on Golarion.
I'm not sure why there's a norm that Pathfinder stories have some timeline limit, and can't include anything later than the 19th century. Stuff that was common more than a quarter of a century ago seems to me to be reasonable fodder for "fantasy" stories. Being able to include late 20th century events and artifacts seems less "anacronistic" and more "expansive" to me.
More than 40% of the world's population is under 25 years old. Being able to tell stories about things that were common before their birth seems reasonable in a fantasy setting.
Joe M. wrote:
I haven't listened to the discussions of hp on shields. Could somebody who has explain how it works? How is damage from an attack distributed between the shield and the character?
Captain Morgan wrote:
I think the only hard data we have on it was what happened in the game trade media demo.
Joe M. wrote:
That sounds right (don't know if more was said in this seminar). I wasn't able to piece together, from folks confusing forum posts, exactly how this is supposed to work. E.g., if a shield has 8 hardness and blocks an attack that deals 10 damage, how is that distributed?
(A) Shield takes 8, character takes 2;
(B) Shield takes 10, character takes 2;
(C) Shield takes 10, character takes 0.
I would assume (A), but some posters made it sound like (B) or (C).
Mark Seifter wrote:
It's the simplest possible operation that still applies damage to both the shield and the PC (A would never apply damage to the shield under any circumstances): Reduce by hardness, then both shield and PC take what's left. The dwarf axe and shield fighter in my WftC game has tended to have even greater durability with her shield from this method than from dents, I think it hasn't been broken since the change, but that depends on the exact amount that's dishing out.
Joe M. wrote:
Thanks! I guess I was using "hardness" imprecisely :-P
Mark Seifter wrote:
No worries! In your example, that means shield and character both would reduce their HP total by 2 (assuming they don't have other resistance hijinks going on).
Edit:
Props to MGKatana for finding that.
I'm just making his post a bit easier to read and understand.
