David Chart's page

I love these bundles. They're still a great deal, even when I already have half the pdfs.

I'm just waiting for "Left-over PF1 stuff that wasn't in the previous bundles" Bundle. Needs a snappier name, though…

I've just heard back from customer service, and I want to publicly say that I am very happy with the content of the response. As you can probably see from this post, the upshot involved cancelling my subscription, but that is because I am in Japan, rather than because of the delay.

Anyway, public kudos for the customer service team for this particular bit of their efforts to solve this problem.

I have a hypothetical.

I create a book with remaster rules and Golarion lore. Before publishing the book on Infinite, I strip out the rules, and put them on my website under ORC.

It looks as though I can do this. I have the right to put the rules on my website under the ORC. No problem. I have the right to put the rules on Infinite, because that's covered by the Infinite license. (All the rights involved are mine or Paizo's.) The Infinite product is derivative of the website product, which was published first, and the agreement does not prohibit that — it only prohibits publishing derivatives of your Infinite product. (You warrant that no-one else's rights are involved, but that is true. You do not, as far as I can see, have to warrant that no part of the Work has been previously published.)

So, I think this is a mechanism to allow people to ORC their rules, and still publish on Infinite, as long as they have substantial Golarion content as well. It will not allow you to use non-Infinite ORC material (finite ORCs?) on Infinite, but it will at least allow rules to flow out of Infinite.

Do Paizo and Roll20 agree?

I don't think it's fair to say that Paizo are punishing customers. They are having serious problems, but there are limits on what they can do to fix them.

The limits on extra work they can demand from the warehouse staff are probably quite tight. This is true for ethical reasons (it doesn't take much harm to the staff to outweigh "people get their game books later than hoped") and probably for contractual ones as well (Paizo is unionized now).

Hiring new staff would probably just make this problem worse. They wouldn't be able to contribute soon enough to make a difference, and people who could help would be busy with the hiring and training process. I'm sure they are looking at this as part of "make sure it doesn't happen again", though.

We don't know what the other problems are, but, again, they can't do anything other than try to fix them as quickly as possible. For systemic problems, that may mean working around them now and applying a proper fix once the crisis has passed.

Paizo is going to have deal with the reputational damage to the subscription program from this, and the top management may well be thinking about that already, but the first priority for the front line should be to minimise that damage by getting everything shipped as soon as possible

Given what I know of Paizo, I am sure they are not deliberately holding up our orders for the lulz. The company is not actually run by (PF1) goblins.

I expect this to be more stressful and unpleasant for the staff than for us. I hope they do get everything solved soon.

That's fair. I've looked at whether it would be faster and cheaper to cancel and go with PDF+Amazon, and the answer seems to be "probably not", but it is borderline. I'm not even sure which way makes Paizo more money, come to think of it. Maybe I should check.

I think this month has exposed systemic problems in the subscriptions, but I also get the impression that Paizo knows about them and is already looking for solutions. Whether subscriptions are the best option right now will depend on the person.

I didn't get the impression from your post that you were taking it out on anybody, and I hope my post didn't suggest that I did.

I know where my stuff is. It's in the Paizo warehouse, waiting to be shipped. I very much doubt that they have the capacity to hurry up if I send an email.

So, I hope they post a "shipping finished" message here when it is, so that I can email them if I still don't have a shipping email at that point.

I'm still waiting for my books to be put on an actual boat. (OK, I'm really hoping it will be an aeroplane…)

I'm not at all surprised that the Remaster has slowed things down this month. I can wait.

If you do get rid of the wish, please use JJ's suggested "any one spell you know" option.

FP

I have to say that I like this suggestion as well; it feels properly universal. It should probably be "any one spell of level 8 or less", like wish, because otherwise it's very likely to be better than the corresponding power for any other school, since it would include that power.

(Incidentally, was Meteor Swarm supposed to swap for wish at 18, rather than for the 20 power?)

Thinking about this more, the "iconic" wizard spells tend to be iconic because they are the most effective spells of their level. Giving all of them to the Universalist will tend to give it the most powerful set of abilities, along with flexibility. Level 8 and level 20 have good powers, but I might be inclined to completely revise the rest, along similar lines.

I think, from page 17, that it's only the specialist bonus you lose if you prepare prohibited spells.

The options don't look immediately unbalanced to me (well, apart from that free wish thing), but I need to mull them over some more and play with them a bit first.

I generally like the new race modifiers, including the net +2. I'm also in favour of not adding per-level race advancement, primarily because I feel that's too far away from 3.5.

I thought humans were fixed, until I started running through character creation in my head. For each of the core classes, another race looked like a clearly better choice.

So, I'm in favour of giving humans a bit of a boost. I'm a little wary of a weapon proficiency, however. It should be something that is useful for any class. For example, I like wizards. The extra boost should be something that makes me neutral between elves and humans when picking a wizard. But it should also work when trying to decide whether to play a human or dwarf fighter, or a halfling or human rogue.

The problem, of course, is that the current boosts cover the three categories that work like that: stats, feats, and skills. I'd still rather see humans boosted than the other races nerfed.

Right now I don't have a brilliant idea for what to add, however.

(Maybe humans should get a free additional language, as well? Bilingualism is actually quite common in the real world, outside Anglophone countries.)

I'm in the camp that doesn't like the total package. As written, you can only use Spring Attack once every three rounds; so much for extra mobility on the battlefield. (It also completely nerfs the Tusk Terrors in MMV, which I designed to make massive use of Spring Attack, so I have personal "not backward compatible! Hate!" reasons here...)

Things would be a lot better if you dropped "only one per round", I think. Not being able to use Spring Attack until the third round of combat is a lot better than once per three rounds.

I also think that a three-round chain is just too long. Combats change a lot in three rounds. On the other hand, I could see some two-round chains making a lot of sense; doing something this round to set up for the next round has a nice bit of style. Mobility/Spring Attack is not really one of them, though.

So, put me down for "likes the concept, thinks the implementation needs work".

I want to agree with what Rambling Scribe said. Further, since you only get the skills for the class you are at 1st level, there is a strong motive to start as a rogue, and then multiclass into whatever you really want to be. That's even more of a problem than it would be if you could pick up a bunch of skills later by taking a level of rogue, in my opinion.

I'm neutral on the skill point issue; I liked the customisation potential, and it will cause problems for existing prestige classes, but on the other hand sorting out skills for NPCs was a bit of a pain; I tended to end up using this system anyway.