While I will be using Paizo stuff either way, I'm going to take a look at 5th when it comes out.
I pretty much abandoned D&D at the release of 4th Ed like many did. It only took a store-side examination of the content and watching a few game sessions to realize it wasn't for me, which was disappointing give the fact I had played each of the prior 3 (or 4 depending how you look at it) editions with a fair amount of zeal.
Up until now, I've had no time to examine it due to other life obligations. I'm hoping it's something I can play...if it's honestly going to be a throwback to 1st I probably can and will. If it's going to be a tweaked version of 4th, well lets just say I'm glad Paizo and all the old pre-4th material is available in such abundance.
Not sure how it plays out, but if my player is rolling dice using his BAB and hitting with a weapon, I'd say it's fair game to consider it an attack action.
A Gorillian is, simply, one million Gorillas. The term was first coined by Jane Goodall as she was doing her research on primates. As she came across each Gorilla, she realized it would be most difficult to count the number of Gorillas she would be studying. That night Gorillian was invented.
This doesn't bother me at all because of the limited usage, the single-enemy usage, and the fact that in the beta the pally was still lagging towards the back of the class a bit.
So the pally gets to party like a rockstar against one or two enemies during the course of a gaming session... I dig that. It will also add kind of a fun element to gameplay (where perhaps the goal of evil outsiders won't always be to hamstring the spellcasters).
I am in complete agreement on overhand chop/backswing though *tear*
We RPGers need heavy books to carry around, it helps keep us in shape from all the garbage consumption eaten during play.
If I'm going to have a core-rulebook, I want to be able to bludgeon somebody to death with that sucker if need be. I want to be able to drop it from a height of five feet and have it cause lethal impact to any bugs, small rodents, cats, small dogs, and perhaps even children under the age of 14. My backpack should be so exceptionally heavy that if I hold onto the end of it and spin around in circles, the gravitational pull of the earth changes in the process.
Books should be big and heavy! (course I have a laptop for my PDF's :P ) Do some push-ups if you need to....maybe some squat thrusts and pull-ups too. We don't need any of these sissy-books infecting our gaming sessions.
I'm sorry that's the order number that did NOT get shipped. I want to make sure I'm not getting charged twice for the same thing, as I re-ordered, and I also wanted to make sure I'm still getting the PDF.
The vast majority of the world for the vast majority of history thought slavery was a good thing, too. Does that mean that keeping slaves is now a Good act?
No, but it would be fair to say that slavery isn't a natural taboo for humans.
Edit: This quote was from Paul Watson... I screwed that up somehow.
I would be willing to say that this isn't the case even remotely.
There is a difference between it occurring in small pockets without absolute horror from a small group, and having it lack general taboo status almost universally. There is a big difference there. You can look back thru history and most likely find documented incidences of incest, that doesn't mean incest isn't a fairly universal taboo regardless of where you go.
Go ask somebody you meet from India, Africa, Pacific Islands, South America, etc. about their views on cannibalism...go tell them their society openly engages and accepts cannibalism. Then get ready for either a very angry or very confused response.
Go travel around the world and find a place where a significant mass of people readily eat other people, and everybody is just dandy with that...then get back to me.
I suspect you and I are arguing different things. You infer that I believe that cannibalism is an accepted practice today, which I do not. I have stated that it existed in the past, among a number of social groups (the small groups argument doesn't hold up either, as the one case I am quite familiar with, the Maori of New Zealand, reached an approximate population of 100, 000, which is a substantially large number for a prehistoric island population).
An abhorrence towards cannibalism is not an innate, human response. Its purely cultural, learned through society. Therefore, your original argument that cannibalism is evil based on a false universal abhorrence is incorrect, as I orgiginally argued.
Like I said before, I did not say any contemporary populations practise cannibalism, and another poster stated that European influence is a major factor of this. I do however, live in a country with a previous history of cannibalism, and I know it is a touchy subject, as this country has a history of bad cultural relations. Statements like yours though, that espouse the evil of the practices of their ancestors, and insinuate that those...
Even if large singular tribes in remote locations in the world during specific time periods practiced cannibalism, it still doesn't break cannibalism from near-universal taboo status in human history.
As far as the Maori go, this first of all seems to be a ritual of battle, which means even if this was regular amongst a tribe of 100,000 it's still rare and probably had more to do with inciting fear in an enemy than food. I would argue that the purpose of this is exactly that it does violate a natural taboo, which is why it was most likely done...to let people know they should fear the eaters of the dead. The author of the controversial study of the Maori said himself, this was not an issue of food but fear and humiliation of the enemy.
It's also important to note that their is some dispute about the Maori and the level of cannibalism enacted up until the 1800's.
Even if you argue this was much more common than a battle tactic occasionally used to humiliate the enemy do to the violation of what I still say is a natural taboo, it's still an isolated group that practiced this over the period of a few hundred years and still wouldn't much scratch the fact that the vast majority of the world has and always will find this practice abhorrent.
I would consider cannibalism evil at least from a human standpoint for two reasons.
One is that cannibalism is indeed a worldwide taboo, this isn't simply a western culture thing. Every culture sees cannibalism as morally abhorrent. There may be a few tribes in remote areas that have stories based on something weird like eating the heart of a dead enemy, but this taboo is actually fairly consistant taboo, just like incest to direct relatives is a worldwide taboo.
The second reason might be tied to the first, and that might be the fact there could be some kind of genetic reason you shouldn't. It seems that this behavior can lead to protean diseases like mad cow disease at least in mammals, so there might be a solid reason to find this an evil act.
Obviously you could justify it in another species by saying they simply do not function the same way, but there would certainly be a reason to consider cannibalism a universal taboo in your campaign setting.
I must completely disagree with this. You simply cannot make claims of a universal taboo for cannibalism. I'm no cannibalism scholar, but I know it was practiced on every continent at some point (barring Antarctica I suppose). Even a basic wikipedia search lists africa, north america, prehistoric europe, australia, new zealand, south america, india and sumatra. It was still practiced within the last two centuries by various cultural groups (not just individuals), and was only halted by european colonialism and the absorption and sometimes outright extermination of those groups.
You have to face the fact that a large proportion of cultural groups practiced cannibalism at some point in their history. A lack of cannibalism today can be directly linked with european colonialism, and a universal 'moral abhorrence' is simply not the case. To suggest so is highly ethnocentric.
The second reason is also questionable. Taboos of cannibalism may be related to genetic diseases, but we lack direct evidence of this. The...
I would be willing to say that this isn't the case even remotely.
There is a difference between it occurring in small pockets without absolute horror from a small group, and having it lack general taboo status almost universally. There is a big difference there. You can look back thru history and most likely find documented incidences of incest, that doesn't mean incest isn't a fairly universal taboo regardless of where you go.
Go ask somebody you meet from India, Africa, Pacific Islands, South America, etc. about their views on cannibalism...go tell them their society openly engages and accepts cannibalism. Then get ready for either a very angry or very confused response.
Go travel around the world and find a place where a significant mass of people readily eat other people, and everybody is just dandy with that...then get back to me.
I would consider cannibalism evil at least from a human standpoint for two reasons.
One is that cannibalism is indeed a worldwide taboo, this isn't simply a western culture thing. Every culture sees cannibalism as morally abhorrent. There may be a few tribes in remote areas that have stories based on something weird like eating the heart of a dead enemy, but this taboo is actually fairly consistant taboo, just like incest to direct relatives is a worldwide taboo.
The second reason might be tied to the first, and that might be the fact there could be some kind of genetic reason you shouldn't. It seems that this behavior can lead to protean diseases like mad cow disease at least in mammals, so there might be a solid reason to find this an evil act.
Obviously you could justify it in another species by saying they simply do not function the same way, but there would certainly be a reason to consider cannibalism a universal taboo in your campaign setting.
Honestly, I don't see much difference in either of these two candidates, and I'm done voting against a candidate...from now on I'm voting for the one I think is right. That's neither of these two.
Both of there plans will add over 200 billion dollars to the current national debt, not to mention do nothing for our current budget shortfall or deal with our soon to be skyrocketing cost of social security and medicare.
This of course also has to do with the fact that I think by 2020 we will have true financial meltdown.
I still can't believe people debate this and actually try to put up in-game situations with folks who want to argue only on the theoretical.
Note that the example given earlier was characters w x y & z going through a scenario where the fighter was useful in a way the other characters were not, or could not have been.
The first step in this theoretical argument is of course to bash the original character selection... in this case character "x" is pronounced arbitrarily worthless right off the bat when in real gameplay, even a terribly built character is rarely worthless all the time if ever. You know this when you actually play as opposed to run battle scenarios all day.
The next step of course is to remove the setting, previous play, and the future challenges and boil it down to a single encounter where all items are potentially available, strategy of the enemy is laid out by what the creator deems as "logic", the play of the DM is considered unchanged, time is not a factor, and all possible combinations of strategy and skills are ready for use instantly. If any of these bizzare preconditions are not met or agreed upon, then the player, DM, or entire setting is deemed "stupid and bad at the game" when in reality games are NEVER played like this. I've never in my life even seen people playing an RP in this fashion, much less my own group.
These arguments are not based on metagaming...metagaming actually happens all the time and this does not. This is some superset of metagaming taken to an absurd extreme. This is why regardless of how many arguments are made for this type of massive imbalance you never actually see this level of imbalance at the table rolling dice.
You are not stupid, bad at the game, or don't understand some underlying brilliance that the people who make up these scenarios have. The reason you don't see it is because the actual game never under any circumstances plays out like this.
Actually using OpenRPG, I have made characters for the first two adventure paths. I was able to cut and paste their actual pictures on the icons, take text-backround and blocks from the PDF itself, and program all their attacks with macros and put all the handouts in icons as well.
PDF's and a photoshop program basically can make any handout you need. I'm thinking about using something like OpenRPG even for regular tabletop use plus a laptop because of how useful it is during play.
for pictures it's pretty easy as well... I've done this on one or two occasions. Just copy it into photoshop directly or if you cannot because it's a flat image then just copy the entire area with the cam and erase the text around it.
I would make a world where they fight thru swarming hordes of exploding midgets diametrically opposed to living origami monsters made out of giant sheets of magical paper, which turn into flaming balls of death when they contact the swarms of combustible midgets. The setting would be a rocky landscape devoid of life except for small frogs that can sustain you eternally as long as you have at least 10 them duct taped to your body at all times... problem is they are very slippery.
I would have no plot, hand out gummi bears instead of treasure after encounters, and play Elton John's "Tiny Dancer" on repeat in the backround while running the campaign.
That or I would just start from the second adventure path from one of the pathfinder chronicles...and make something up as a reason why they are there.
If it's a hard choice, you can always flip a coin.
I have never seen a shortage of clerics in comparison to other classes.
What I have seen is sometimes, nobody wants their character to be a cleric... just like sometimes nobody wants to play a ranger, monk, fighter, or bard during the session. This isn't really people "not" wanting to play clerics, but what can become apparent is that missing a cleric sometimes sucks for the party. This makes it seem like clerics don't want to be played.
The only characters I see being played more often than clerics in the groups I've seen are rogues and wizards. That's just because everybody wants to be the cool kid. :P
Well we don't have a completely unregulated market now. That being said, there is a big difference between severely restricting the types of loans out there and saying there can be a wide variety as long as there is a method for determining their risk by being able to actually see truthful info on the loans.
Either way, it wasn't the driving force behind this. Before they could be bought and sold in a nonsensical frenzy, the capital force behind frenzy needed to injected. Transparency is a problem related...not the root source.
I brought up transparency because many people don't seem to think it's a good thing, but I don't see it as hampering the market. Strict regulations on what loans can be made would, and it may not secure us from this problem in the future either way.
As an analogy:
Spoiler:
Lets say you decide to wear an eye-patch around town (you just think it looks sweet, and it fits your new pirate character). You wear this sucker day an night wherever you go.
One day you are walking around town and are spotted by two corrupt cops... lets call them "Fannie" and "Freddie" for no good reason. Now these two cops basically can do whatever they want because the police force doesn't really keep track of them... in fact you might say they have taken measures to encourage them to engage in ruthless behavior.
These two cops sneak up on you on the side of your eye-patch. You never see them coming...and they clobber you with sticks.
Rather than blaming the corrupt cops or the police force that encourages this kind of behavior, you blame your eyepatch, because if you weren't wearing it, you would have seen the attack coming.
Now is walking around town with an eyepatch on smart? Probably not. Can it break your face all by it's lonesome? No. Was it the root cause of the attack against you? No.
You are correct that the Federal Reserve doesn't control how the money gets lent out or how it gets spent. But the business cyle you refer to, the boom and bust cycle, is caused by fractional reserve banking. Fractional reserve banking precedes the Federal Reserve, and you can trace just about every single big bust/crash in economic history since the 17th century to fractional reserve banking, with a notable exception being the Dutch tulip mania. That exception had other causes but those causes duplicated in some ways the effects of fractional reserve banking.
Would it be fair to say that Fannie and Freddie do control how the money gets lent out?
Here's a small article on how fannie and freddie might have been part of the problem. It's fairly politically charged and doesn't mention the contributing factors the republicans made to this problem, but I think the assessment of fannie and freddie, and how they helped drive the bubble is fairly accurate.
Spoiler:
Many monumental errors and misjudgments contributed to the acute financial turmoil in which we now find ourselves. Nevertheless, the vast accumulation of toxic mortgage debt that poisoned the global financial system was driven by the aggressive buying of subprime and Alt-A mortgages, and mortgage-backed securities, by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The poor choices of these two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) -- and their sponsors in Washington -- are largely to blame for our current mess.
How did we get here? Let's review: In order to curry congressional support after their accounting scandals in 2003 and 2004, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac committed to increased financing of "affordable housing." They became the largest buyers of subprime and Alt-A mortgages between 2004 and 2007, with total GSE exposure eventually exceeding $1 trillion. In doing so, they stimulated the growth of the subpar mortgage market and substantially magnified the costs of its collapse.
It is important to understand that, as GSEs, Fannie and Freddie were viewed in the capital markets as government-backed buyers (a belief that has now been reduced to fact). Thus they were able to borrow as much as they wanted for the purpose of buying mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. Their buying patterns and interests were followed closely in the markets. If Fannie and Freddie wanted subprime or Alt-A loans, the mortgage markets would produce them. By late 2004, Fannie and Freddie very much wanted subprime and Alt-A loans. Their accounting had just been revealed as fraudulent, and they were under pressure from Congress to demonstrate that they deserved their considerable privileges. Among other problems, economists at the Federal Reserve and Congressional Budget Office had begun to study them in detail, and found that -- despite their subsidized borrowing rates -- they did not significantly reduce mortgage interest rates. In the wake of Freddie's 2003 accounting scandal, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan became a powerful opponent, and began to call for stricter regulation of the GSEs and limitations on the growth of their highly profitable, but risky, retained portfolios.
If they were not making mortgages cheaper and were creating risks for the taxpayers and the economy, what value were they providing? The answer was their affordable-housing mission. So it was that, beginning in 2004, their portfolios of subprime and Alt-A loans and securities began to grow. Subprime and Alt-A originations in the U.S. rose from less than 8% of all mortgages in 2003 to over 20% in 2006. During this period the quality of subprime loans also declined, going from fixed rate, long-term amortizing loans to loans with low down payments and low (but adjustable) initial rates, indicating that originators were scraping the bottom of the barrel to find product for buyers like the GSEs.
The strategy of presenting themselves to Congress as the champions of affordable housing appears to have worked. Fannie and Freddie retained the support of many in Congress, particularly Democrats, and they were allowed to continue unrestrained. Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass), for example, now the chair of the House Financial Services Committee, openly described the "arrangement" with the GSEs at a committee hearing on GSE reform in 2003: "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have played a very useful role in helping to make housing more affordable . . . a mission that this Congress has given them in return for some of the arrangements which are of some benefit to them to focus on affordable housing." The hint to Fannie and Freddie was obvious: Concentrate on affordable housing and, despite your problems, your congressional support is secure.
In light of the collapse of Fannie and Freddie, both John McCain and Barack Obama now criticize the risk-tolerant regulatory regime that produced the current crisis. But Sen. McCain's criticisms are at least credible, since he has been pointing to systemic risks in the mortgage market and trying to do something about them for years. In contrast, Sen. Obama's conversion as a financial reformer marks a reversal from his actions in previous years, when he did nothing to disturb the status quo. The first head of Mr. Obama's vice-presidential search committee, Jim Johnson, a former chairman of Fannie Mae, was the one who announced Fannie's original affordable-housing program in 1991 -- just as Congress was taking up the first GSE regulatory legislation.
In 2005, the Senate Banking Committee, then under Republican control, adopted a strong reform bill, introduced by Republican Sens. Elizabeth Dole, John Sununu and Chuck Hagel, and supported by then chairman Richard Shelby. The bill prohibited the GSEs from holding portfolios, and gave their regulator prudential authority (such as setting capital requirements) roughly equivalent to a bank regulator. In light of the current financial crisis, this bill was probably the most important piece of financial regulation before Congress in 2005 and 2006. All the Republicans on the Committee supported the bill, and all the Democrats voted against it. Mr. McCain endorsed the legislation in a speech on the Senate floor. Mr. Obama, like all other Democrats, remained silent.
Now the Democrats are blaming the financial crisis on "deregulation." This is a canard. There has indeed been deregulation in our economy -- in long-distance telephone rates, airline fares, securities brokerage and trucking, to name just a few -- and this has produced much innovation and lower consumer prices. But the primary "deregulation" in the financial world in the last 30 years permitted banks to diversify their risks geographically and across different products, which is one of the things that has kept banks relatively stable in this storm.
As a result, U.S. commercial banks have been able to attract more than $100 billion of new capital in the past year to replace most of their subprime-related write-downs. Deregulation of branching restrictions and limitations on bank product offerings also made possible bank acquisition of Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch, saving billions in likely resolution costs for taxpayers.
If the Democrats had let the 2005 legislation come to a vote, the huge growth in the subprime and Alt-A loan portfolios of Fannie and Freddie could not have occurred, and the scale of the financial meltdown would have been substantially less. The same politicians who today decry the lack of intervention to stop excess risk taking in 2005-2006 were the ones who blocked the only legislative effort that could have stopped it.
I'm not an expert on the subject, but my family is heavily involved with both the real estate and mortgage markets...and business finance for that matter.
I think two things that aren't getting mentioned in the political debate over this are these two:
1) Transparency and the ability to determine value in the secondary market was indeed a problem. I'm not for regulation of business on basic principle, but if mortgages are being bundled and sold on the open market with no way to determine either the value or the risk of that purchase...well I think that's a problem that can be solved. I consider this more of a matter of consumer protection. We shouldn't do anything like go back to 15 and 30 year fixed rates only, but we should at least have the right to say if you are selling mortgages there has to be some kind of halfway reasonable method to determine value and risk. Let lenders make any loan they want, but if they want to sell it after they make it, then saying they have to make loans that have methods of assessment is fair.
2) Fannie and Freddie, and what basically worked out to an open line of credit were a big driving force behind this. This organization had a political agenda behind it, and I think that's dangerous. People are trying to make the argument that redlining laws were a large part of the cause but really that's a minor problem compared to the other driving forces behind this bubble like the existence and political goals of fannie and freddie. We should really question if something like this is really a good thing to have exist. Also, before we start bashing free markets, we should really take a look at the quasi-government agencies (now fully government I guess) that probably shouldn't even exist under a free market concept.
Ok, honestly what I would really like to see is some big book that is similar to "Elminsters notes" about locations, items, and creatures unique in Pathfinder.
I always loved that section of the magazine and the one that stands out in my mind was the sword thrust into a pile of skulls.
I would LOVE to see a whole book devoted to stuff like that...stuff that you can use as adventure hooks.
I noticed that quicken spell can be used by spontaneous casters, which made me rather happy, but the wording of it in the beta seem to imply that it was ONLY for spontaneous casters.
Did the wizard get robbed out of quicken spell? I can't imagine that would be consistent with backwards compatiblity.
Battle Dancers get cool abilities too...sadly a male Battle Dancer is...less than inspiring of an idea, isn't it? Who can really picture a male Battle Dancer...or Cloaked Dancer for that matter?
Well for male Battle Dancers, consider some examples of Jackie Chan's work or Eddie Gordo. Possibly with knives or katars. And speaking of katars, for an extreme CN variant, VOLDO.(sorry for the inherent wrongness of this example)
Senses are great to use in conjunction with one another, or even better at odds with one another.
We do first and foremost identify the world visually. Our hearing and sense of smell are not nearly as developed and often act more as a warning system.
Smell is the sense that tells us that something is amiss more than any other I think. Sights can be gruesome, sounds can be startling or annoying, but nothing makes your brain come to life like a foreign smell...be it rotting vegitation or sweet perfume. If you walk downstairs in the morning and in the living room something smells like dead animal...well you may not panic but you instantly know something is wrong and the smell is instantly recognizable even without a visual.
Sound gives us the most warning...it's easy to startle or creep somebody out with sound especially when there is no visual. I think sound has the most impact when used on it's own. The sound of chopping and breaking or a wet, squirming noise behind a locked door or down in a dark pit you can't see is always startling. This works because everybody has woken up in the night from hearing a foreign sound comming from the darkness outside.
Touch and taste are the most personal. If you want your players to feel calmed, aroused, or violated nothing works as well as these two...visual or no. Touch and taste also work great to describe any kind of foreign particles in the air be it dust from ferrous metal, hot sand, smoke, or some kind of vapor.
My favorite is to use these things in conjunction when they cannot logically go together when describing something alien. A beautiful woman who smells like rotted meat, a slimy horror that makes noises like little girls laughing, a giant creature that should thud and vibrate the very earth that instead makes soft-damp noises as it moves...these are always my favorite.
Don't forget grappling. You might not care for it and the rules are a mess, but unarmed combat is more than throwing punches.
Also, improved disarm. I still wish for some clarification on a monk disarming while bare handed, but if you work it like we have been working it, improved disarm is a must-have for any monk.
My guess is that's what it says in theory and question if it's even mildly enforceable.
We have been through this rodeo ride before, no?
WotC cannot protect their mechanics. They cannot protect any game concepts that have been used before in previous editions that are indeed open content, or protect anything that overlaps with another game-type. They cannot protect general ideas of fantasy that the game that makes up the majority of fantasy. They cannot even stop a company from claiming that the stuff written by them is compatible with 4th edition right on the front cover of their book.
I think most people signing up for the GSL are doing so because they have decided to play nice and didn't want to burn bridges...that or they see the value of the logo.
Either way, I'm not sure if this in any way effects Paizo, seeing is they have mentioned they are interested in possibly making 4th edition material in the future, just not the pathfinder line. I don't think that has stopped has it?
That and while I agree somewhat that I don't think this edition will have the longevity that 3.5 and 2nd had, I don't think it will be anything close to a failure for WotC. Perhaps they have lost some of the older, more constant gamers but they will probably pick up new ones and still have the majority most likely.
Control MK ... use it with a xbox360 controler (or whatever controller you prefer) to emulate the keyboard functions and use a controller like the olden days of yore!
works on every emulator I've tried.
The 360 setup I use is
x axis- VK_LEFT
x axis+ VK_RIGHT
Y axis - VK_UP
y axis+ VK_DOWN
