David knott 242's page

With Netflix closing down its DVD by mail service today, I did a Web search for any surviving DVD by mail services and was pleasantly surprised to find a couple. One was CafeDVD (which seems to have a rather limited selection, which is probably why I never joined up with them in the past), and another was Scarecrow Video in Seattle, which appears to be a non-profit video store that is located in Seattle and (the part that makes it of interest to someone like me who live on the east coast) they have started up a rent by mail service that apparently offers a good portion of their tremendously large DVD selection.

So -- Does anyone from the Seattle area have anything they can share about Scarecrow Video? Apparently James Jacobs loved the place as of about a dozen years ago.

I must admit that I am having a tough time wrapping my head around their business model, but it does look like something that I should look into further if their prices are reasonable and they can stay in business as they are.

Not exactly a book, but this seems to be the closest to the right place to put links to a nice short story about a girl orc who moved into a modern human neighborhood. Or would Off-Topic Discussions be better?

Reddit version

Youtube version, narrated by Agro Squirrel Narrates.

I really wanted that Starfinder flamethrower. I have been really bummed since I was unable to get the Spaceballs flamethrower.

While I was perusing the Subscriptions page, I noticed that the "Lost Omens Special Edition" subscription was nowhere near the "Pathfinder Lost Omens" subscription. Shouldn't these two subscriptions be paired up in the same way as the regular and special editions for the rulebook lines? It would certainly make more sense than the current arrangement.

For anyone who made a pass through the singles to order various minis -- this is the one that was missing at first.

With the addition of this mini, this set of singles appears to be complete.

There seems to be an ongoing problem in subscription orders that do not ship via UPS. For the second month in a row, my order was shipped via "Standard Postal Delivery", but Paizo provided a "Track This Package" link to ups-mi.net. This link will obviously never work.

It seems most likely that this is a systematic problem, as last month I read posts from many people to the effect that their "Track This Package" link was never being populated. Last month it took me a few days to figure out the problem, but this time I caught it immediately.

The order pages need to be recoded to either say that the package is not trackable or link to USPS.

I have an Esquire Cavalier who is looking for ways to boost her Leadership Score in order to ensure that her aide-de-camp can keep up in terms of level advancement. One interesting feat I came across was Masked Symbol, as one of its options is a +2 bonus to Leadership Score while in your masked persona.

Most of the other options for this feat are bonuses to various sorts of checks, so they can be turned on and off with no problem. But what happens when a bonus to Leadership Score is temporary in this way? Just by reverting from the masked persona to one's true identity, she suddenly has a cohort above the level that her reduced Leadership Score can support, and (if she had any followers) she would also have more followers than her reduced Leadership Score could support.

And would the answer to this question differ if her cohort or any followers were aware of both of her identities, or if her masked persona is more generally compromised? I was actually considering having the masked persona be the cohort's idea, if that would work. Also, while I could have her stay in masked persona form more or less full time, there are some factors in play here that would make her disguise paper thin and very easy to see through.

In the thread for Hurricane's Howl (volume 3 of 6 of the Strength of Thousands AP), there was mention that some customers got incorrect versions of pages 80 and 92 and that they should report those issues in this forum.

In my copy, page 80 is correct and page 92 (the page previewing volume 4) is incorrect. Since I already have volume 4 as well, I don't consider getting a corrected version of volume 3 a priority and am not requesting it -- I am just reporting what I got. I probably would have requested a replacement if there were a problem on page 80.

Since I am not requesting a replacement copy or any particular action from Customer Service, please feel free to reply to this post with your own reports of how those pages look in your copy of the book, especially if you are not requesting a replacement. If you are requesting a replacement, you should probably either e-mail them or start your own thread so it doesn't get lost in this thread.

There are a number of feats (such as Squire and Torchbearer) and archetypes (such as Esquire Cavalier) that grant a PC a cohort who is initially prohibited from multiclassing. Would you interpret that restriction as preventing the cohort from variant multiclassing, or as just disallowing the cohort from gaining levels in any class except his original class?

There are a couple of other threads discussing PDF only subscriptions, and it is clear why those are not happening -- except in the case of the Organized Play scenario subscriptions that already exist. So there is clearly no problem with PDF only subscriptions in the case of products that have no physical equivalent.

So, since PFS scenarios, SFS scenarios, and bounties generally all come out at the same time, why not have a subscription for bounties (and possibly other PDF-only adventures)? The only relevant way that the bounties differ from the PFS and SFS scenarios is that nobody gets them for free as a reward for other subscriptions and/or Organized Play activity -- but the existing scenarios are already set up to work as either free rewards or as paid subscriptions.

Is there any problem with this subscription that I have overlooked?

I decided to post this thread after seeing a similar thread started by another customer. I ordered three Savage Worlds Bones minis in late July, shortly before you ran the auths for that month, and opted to have them ship with my subscription. They did not ship with the July shipment and they are not designated to ship with the August shipment either. I did not see any indication that any of these minis were on backorder or otherwise unavailable.

Could you please check to see whether these minis are available to ship and either get them into the August shipment or let me know their actual status if they are not currently available?

For a long time, the only archetype I was aware of that got any advantage from carrying a shield while wearing no armor was the Savage Barbarian -- and that archetype did not work very well, as it retained armor proficiency and at every level was better off wearing armor than depending on its archetype bonuses to AC.

Recently I noticed that the Sacred Attendant Cleric, while not specifically mentioning shields, also has no shield based restrictions, so it would make sense for such a character to carry a shield while not wearing armor. Furthermore, by selecting this archetype, you are pretty much committed to doing just that. Unfortunately, you do have to resort to some 3rd party feats to make this archetype work mechanically.

Does anyone know of any other archetypes that are designed to work with the combination of a sheld with no armor? I am looking for any such archetypes, whether they work well mechanically or not.

Somewhere on the Paizo Blog page, there appears to be some code that opens up a string of text in italics but never closes it, with the result that most of that page is in italics.

Now that I have received all three of the packages for this month's subscription order, I can confirm that, instead of one copy of the Malevolence adventure and one copy of the Malevolence map, I received two copies of the Malevolence adventure.

Could you please add a replacement copy of the Malevolence map to my next monthly shipment?

Order 36543091 was authorized on Tuesday, and all of the scenarios in that order are now showing as for sale from Paizo, but the order remains Pending. Shouldn't I have those PDFs by now?

I just wanted to confirm that Order 36459411 was set up correctly. I have my shipping method set to Cheapest Available. My auth e-mail and the order listing have it being shipped as three separate packages, all by standard postal delivery. In the past, the cheapest method has been 1 or 2 packages set via UPS-MI.

So -- Is the current arrangement of my order indeed the cheapest option this month?

Order 36368186 shipped on Monday, March 29th. The "Track Package" link is still coming up blank as of a few minutes ago -- it does not even show the package in Fife, WA yet. So I am contacting the shipper (you) to ask what is up with this order.

My "My Subscriptions" page shows a number of canceled items dated 4/20/2020. These cancellations resulted from a last minute rush to get orders out the door prior to the intensification of the COVID lockdown, and in fact the cancellations occurred strictly for the purpose of making it possible for the orders to ship (if that makes any sense to you).

But since none of these items were truly canceled, the general customer service situation has settled down a bit, and these "canceled" orders are creating some display confusion at my end, is there anything that can be done to completely remove these items from being displayed on my "My Subscriptions" page?

In my February shipping order 36347206, the Transit Estimate entry says "Expected to ship in 18 to 30 business days". Since the order was generated this past Thursday and the end of the shipping window is a week from Friday, even the minimum time for this estimate exceeds the maximum shipping time of 15 days. Was some error made when the auth process went through my sidecart or when I added missing minis from my Darklands Rising case to the order?

Posting just so I can favorite the story.

Issue is described in this thread.

It looks like the warehouse folks told you they would finish shipping on Wednesday, but now Thursday is nearly over (or already over if they aren't pulling an all-nighter) and I can't find any mention that anyone else is still waiting for their subscription orders to ship, nor have I seen any indication of overall shipping status.

At this point, Mengkare has shipped, but the bundle of items that includes everything but the Darklands Rising minis still hasn't shipped. Now my card authorization is about to expire (which I know does not matter except as an unofficial shipping deadline) and (more importantly) I may have to go through yet another weekend without my subscription PDFs.

Could you please update me on the situation?

Edit: I was wrong about nobody else still waiting for their shipments. This thread seems to have fallen through the cracks. Subsequent postings by this person in the January subscription thread indicate that this person is also still waiting for shipment.

At the end of last week, my January subscription order got merged with my Pathfinder Battle subscription and a bunch of other items that were in my sidecart at the time. The new (?) order number is 36291452, and it looks like it was split into three packages.

The Pathfinder Battles Case has shipped, so there is no problem there.

Mengkare (the big premium mini) is listed as "Not Yet Shipped". I assume that it will ship some time this week and am not too worried about it yet.

However, everything else is in a package that is listed as "Expected to ship in 15 to 38 business days". I probably should have said something about this earlier, as that is an unacceptable delay for a monthly subscription shipment.

Could you please check my order and see what is holding it up? An earlier order got held up by sidecart items that got added to the order even though they were not expected to arrive at the warehouse before my next subscription order was scheduled to ship, so I don't know if we are having the same problem all over again. Since I have enough subscriptions to guarantee a shipment every month, it makes no sense for my order to be waiting for items that won't arrive before the next monthly auth run.

I submitted order 36299748 on Monday, December 13th, as soon as the holiday21 discount code came out. That order now shows as "Waiting for backordered product(s)".

Do you have any idea which products you are waiting for and/or how long the wait is expected to be? I am not in a major hurry for this order, but I do want to verify that this is not an indefinite wait for a product that you are in fact out of, as this order does not have the usual monthly subscription deadline to prod it along.

I got an e-mail informing me that my subscription order 36261656 was shipped on Wednesday, December 2nd, as a single package. However, the tracking link is still coming up empty four days later. Per the instructions on the tracking page, I am informing you of that fact and inquiring what may have happened to the package. Did it perhaps end up sitting on your loading dock longer than expected?

On order #22847617 I did not get my Paizo Advantage discount. Should it stack with the Black Friday discount? If so, could I get a partial refund for the difference?

Thank you

I had the same issue with Paizo Advantage (Tier 2) for order #36296876. I cannot find anything in the blog about the discount or its sale link stating that this discount does or does not stack with other discounts -- but since I got exactly 25% off on that PDF, the store evidently operated as it not stacking.

The Pathfinder Flip-Mat Classics: Red Light District map is wrongly showing that I purchased it today and also that it was canceled a week ago. Since its release date is in February of next year, it should still be in my sidecart. Could you please put it back there and clean up order 34948226 so that no remnants of this item or any other canceled items will delay shipping for it?

As an aside: I assumed that this error occurred because a future product was confused with a future product, but it looks like you may still have some copies of the original Red Light District map in stock. Since I assume that the two maps are identical (and I could have sworn that the older map was out of stock when I ordered the Classics version), I would be perfectly happy to help you clear out some old inventory and get the older map instead, a few months sooner and for a dollar less as listed.

I saw a thread in Customer Service where another customer mentioned a problem downloading the PDF of this product.

I proceeded to attempt to download it myself and found that it had an obviously useless file size of 153 bytes. This does not seem to be the result of a bad update, as I myself bought this product several years ago and successfully downloaded it shortly thereafter -- and the date that this PDF was last updated is earlier than the date I bought it. So something seems to have messed up this PDF at your site.

Could you please investigate this PDF and see whether you can recover it to its former condition so that people who own this PDF can once again download it?

As cited here:

This problem persists, with only the exact numbers changing. I now have five items in my sidecart, with a statement that it has 19 items, for a total of 14 missing items.

After my August subscription order was authorized, the description of my sidecart on the My Account page read as follows:

"You have 18 items waiting to be shipped with the earliest possible subscription shipment:

Starfinder Starship Combat Reference Cards
Starfinder Alien Character Deck
Pathfinder Lost Omens: Ancestry Guide"

What happened to the other 15 items?

I would understand if you determined that these items would never be in stock and removed them from my sidecart, but in that case shouldn't the count of sidecart items been decremented?

Order 29190600 looks a bit strange as to how it was split up into three packages.

The first package comprises The Slithering Flip-Mat alone, weighing 1 lb.

The second package comprises The Slithering adventure module alone, weighing 1 lb.

The third package comprises everything else, weighing 15 lbs.

Is that the most economical way to ship these items? From the shipping costs of each package, that looks doubtful. Please take a look at this and make any appropriate corrections.

While you are in there, please confirm that I am not being double charged for the Thieves' Guild set, as it seems to be mentioned in both this order and in my previous Pathfinder Battles subscription order.

I was going to hold off on this one until I realized how far off the prices were.

In order 26850777, I have the following issues:

Minis case is $279.99 on product page but $358.18 in order.

Dragon minis are $41.99 on product page (and that page was accessible only in incognito mode, with extra sign-in and other shenanigans required to see the page) but $50.99 in order.

And the Thieves Guild minis are completely missing from the order (That is the one I was going to hold off on, as it doesn't seem that anyone got this item.).

I am not sure whether this situation is too unusual to worry about fixing, but I figured I should bring it up.

Yesterday I added the PDF for Rituals by Everybody Games for Starfinder into my shopping cart in Internet Explorer.

Later on, I did more shopping in Google Chrome and added more PDFs to my shopping cart. I noticed that the Rituals PDF was not there, so I added it to my shopping cart again. I then completed the purchase and downloaded all of my PDFS.

Still later, I went back to take another look at my shopping cart and found that the Rituals PDF that I had put there earlier in the day had reappeared there, with the indication that I had already purchased it. I was able to remove that item from my cart.

I recently received the auth e-mail for my PFS scenarios in order 20105162, but it does not include the SFS scenarios that I am also eligible for, nor does there seem to be a separate order for them.

Order 15868951 seems to have a similar problem to the one that my February order had. On Thursday, a "Track this package" link appeared next to the Transit Estimate part of my order, which led me to believe that it was about to ship. However, the statement "Product(s) not in stock" also appeared in red above that link and has not cleared up since then.

Could you please do whatever you need to do to get this order on its way, with or without whatever item might be holding it up this time?

Interesting....

The transit estimate on my subscription order for this month (order 11034618) recently added the statement "Waiting for backordered product(s)" in red. Given how late we are in the shipping window, my order shouldn't be waiting for anything but for your warehouse folks to get it on its way to me. Could somebody please take a look into it and see what is going on?

Posting to get blog moved to correct forum.

I was unable to change the shipping method for this order, which needed to get into your system this month for the holiday20 discount. It defaulted to "Ship it", and I got either no response or an error message when I tried to change it. So I submitted the order with the shipping method unchanged, since that could have worked out well if the order could get out this month for tax reasons.

After submitting the order, I saw that all of the packages have indefinite shipping times that suggest they probably won't get out this month, and thus there appears to be no advantage in having them ship separately from my subscription shipments. Could you please change the shipping method from your end to "Ship with Subscriptions" so that I don't get extra packages at unpredictable times?

One of the new feats in the Character Operations Manual is "Improved Kip-Up", which reads as follows:

"You can stand from prone in a blink of an eye.

Prerequisites: Acrobatics 1 rank, Kip-Up feat or moxie racial trait.

Benefit: You can stand from prone as a reaction. If you have 5 or more ranks in Acrobatics, you can expend 1 Resolve Point to stand from prone during your turn as part of another full, move, or standard action you take."

The first sentence of the benefit appears to be a reaction with no trigger. When can you actually use this reaction?

And the second sentence of the benefit seems to be of dubious value. To qualify for this feat, you must already have the ability to stand up from prone as a swift action -- so the only time you would want to spend that Resolve Point would be in the relatively unusual case where you want to stand up from prone and take another swift action on the same turn.

Is there something that I am missing here?

Order 9543223 shows that I paid $1.99 and received no product for it.

I think this order was supposed to be for PFS Quest #4 (for which I should have received a discount because of subscriptions granting Paizo Advantage), and that PDF is in my digital content.

I noticed this issue after I tried and failed to order an extra copy of the Advanced Player's Guide via Internet Explorer. I am pretty sure that I can take care of that issue via another browser later this evening, but I am mentioning it here in case my attempted order corrupted one or more of my existing orders.

The playtest document contains two references to an Investigator's investigative field (one under initial skill proficiencies, and one under the 3rd level ability skillful lessons). "Investigative field" is never defined in this document. I am fairly sure that these references should be to methodology instead.

In the Divine Spellcasting section, we have the following:

"Each day, you can cast up to three 1st-level spells."

However, Table 2-2 Oracle Spells per Day grants only 2 1st-level spells at 1st level, with the 3rd spell available at all levels thereafter.

Found here.

It looks like the folks at WotC learned from Paizo that an Advanced Player's Guide or equivalent would be a good idea for D&D 5E and are testing out ideas for their own version of it.

Sorry for the confusion! This issue should be fixed now. If folks need a refund for a subscription discount they should have received, please contact our Customer Service to get that all sorted. Thanks!

It looks like I did not get the discount for Pathfinder Society Quests 2 & 3, even though I did get it for #1. So I guess I am due about 60 cents worth of credit to my account.

I recently was going through the first order under "Upcoming Subscription Shipments" on my "My Subscriptions" page to estimate the price of my December order when I realized that it was not my December order but my January order.

My December order seems to have disappeared completely from that page, which I find a bit disturbing since the generation of that order is still a few weeks away. Could somebody please look into this matter?

I do want to be sure that all of my monthly subscription orders get generated (as well as double check the price of the December order).

Also -- All of this seems to have happened after I purchased several minis to be included in a later subscription order. Please double check to see whether any of the minis added to the January order are already available to ship with that missing December order.

In other threads, I have seen mentions by other people of several problems with the auth orders for this month's PFS and SFS scenarios.

In my case, the problem with the auth order is that it has not been generated at all -- not only did I not get an e-mail, but there is no pending order for it in my order history. I should be getting two PFS and two SFS scenarios tomorrow.

I recently ordered some custom miniatures from Heroforge.com. They cost about $20 and I am happy with the ones I have received so far.

I also discovered a site called Anvl.co. They appear to charge only $10 for their minis and have a different (not necessarily better or worse) set of customization options than Heroforge does.

So, last Saturday, I put in orders with both of them for very similar minis. I hope to be able to compare the quality and speed of delivery for these minis later this month. So far Anvl.co has the advantage on price but may be at a disadvantage on speed of delivery (as they are located in England and both Heroforge and I are located in the US).

Does anyone here know of any other sites that create custom minis that might be worth checking out?

Please cancel my Starfinder Accessories subscription. It is my understanding that I will no longer be a Starfinder Charter Superscriber but I will still have Tier 2 Paizo Advantage.

I am canceling because my gaming group prefers miniatures to pawns and thus I no longer have any reason to maintain that subscription.