Dead 510's page

I'm getting ready to run Mechageddon and I came across some confusing rules regarding mech upgrading in the adventure path.

On page 4 of Mechageddon the book is clear that credits are supposed to be used for character gear and UPB for upgrading mechs.

"Credits are intended to help the PCs purchase new equipment, while UPBs are provided as material for upgrading their mechs."

And throughout the adventures the players are rewarded with vast hordes of UPB. Many encounters in act 3 rewarding tens of thousands UPB per encounter. And the purpose of UPB is repeated multiple times throughout the book. ex "...pays each PC 25,000 credits for completing the job and approves a work order worth 6,250 UPBs each for mech upgrades and repairs."

But in Tech Revolution, mech construction and upgrading is done via the Mech Point system. By level 20 a PC will have 300 Mech Points to spend on building their mech. The ONLY mention of UPBs is for repairing mechs, and even then, the normal cost is 10UPB per HP. So a tier 14 mech with 170hp would only cost 1,700 UPB to repair from zero.

So there seems to be a gap here.

TR has mechs created and upgraded with Mech Points, a level based build point system. Mech parts only have prices listed in terms of Mech Points. And usually not that many mech points. A chainwhip costs "tier x3" so a Tier 20 mech would have a chainwhip that costs 60 Mech Points, That's not a lot compared to PCs getting rewarded with close to 60,000 UPB at one point.

Mechageddon has mechs upgraded with UPB, a currency used as an alternative to credits. And it's clear these are meant to be used to upgrade the PC's mechs.

But I can't find where these two rule system meet. It seems like something is missing.

I've seen a comment on a reddit thread where someone thought that maybe PCs are supposed to use the "Scaling Equipment" rules from Starfinder Enhanced to calculate the cost of mech upgrades. But that seems to just be a guess as Mechegeddon doesn't seem to recommend using it.

Also there's no indication if the UPB upgrades are meant to supplement Mech Points, or be a replacement for Mech Points (a currency to buy, sell and trade mech parts in a mech based campaign. Like how it works in Mechwarrior).

Am I missing the part in Mechageddon where this is explained? Is there an errata?

How have you dealt with this in your own Mechageddon campaigns?

Yeah, that's what you get when they hire a corporate CEO, we can phrase it as we want, but it's damn obvious they want to simply eliminate their competitors and Paizo is probably the first on their target list.

It may have something to do with the fact that now the Hasbro CEO is former Microsoft, the president of Wizards of the Coast is former Microsoft and Amazon, and the VP now in charge of D&D is former Microsoft 365.

While I am a lawyer, I am not an expert in licensing law. It is all but certain that this will be litigated in court and it will be expensive. BUT I also believe that WotC is on shaky ground at best since the original license states that it is a "perpetual, worldwide, [and] non-exclusive license."

There would also be a clear defense of Latches and Equitable Estopple, which are fancy legal jargon which generally mean that if a party relies you your statements to their detriment, you can't then change your mind midstream.

Obviously, this is but the first salvo in a fight that may last until Pathfinder 3E.

Appreciate the appraisal from a professional. I'm an MBA with an interest in contract and IP law and I know some of the basics but this one is a doozy to me. It's been a heck of a time trying to explain the issue with this to some folks.

It seems like one of those cases where someone up in c-suite get's a really stupid idea and doesn't listen to the warnings from the guys in legal. One of those "we can violate the contract because we REALLY want to. BRILLIANT!" ideas.

But one that frankly is going to do real damage to the hobby until it get's challenged in court. Now here's the fun question. Multiple lawsuits or a big class-action?

People publishing under the 1.0a OGL will say: The 1.0a OGL was explicitly advertised and marketed as irrevocable. We'll continue to abide by its terms, but we do not acknowledge that you can terminate it at your discretion and do not feel bound by the terms of OGL 1.1

Wizards of the Coast will say: We can terminate the 1.0a OGL and update it to 1.1 and in fact have, now pay us 20-25% of your revenue if you make over 750k

Given that we've had this whole fight before in 2008 and that the GSL was deliberately named differently rather than being marketed as an update to the original 3.0 OGL I suspect the nays have the stronger argument, but if anybody wants to force the issue it'll ultimately be up to a court.

Mark Seifter and Stephen Glicker were skeptical that this would affect anything PF/SF related.

Let's be honest here. In the IP war that's comming, Paizo's basically going to be our Gondor.

One of the potential issues with creating a new product for these older Paths is the partial unavailability of physical copies. If someone buys the Carrion Crown guide, only to find that print copies are unavailable from Paizo (and command ludicrous prices on the secondary market), they probably won't have a lot of good feeling for Paizo. Even if only a few react this way, it's still a factor for the people at the top who have to approve such a product.

Aren't many of the AP's available as PDFs on the Paizo store here on the website?

The Nightgaunt wrote:

I've looked at the various Assistance threads here and they are a great resource. I'm running Carrion Crown module 1 right now and some of the haunting ideas I seen on these boards for Harrowstone Prison have been fantastic.
But the downside of them is that data is very spread out and it doesn't really work well for a GM looking for a clean and comprehensive layout of the AP's plan.

Carrion Crown is notorious for its big bad feeling disconnected from the story. I haven't read a huge number of APs, but the ones I have looked over seem to do a better job of bringing out the main antagonist and outlining their goals and what they plan on doing to achieve them (Reign of Winter and Hell's Rebels being good examples, even if it takes until book 2 for the PCs to realize who they are fighting in Reign of Winter).

Unfortunately, the assumption does seem to be "read at least the outlines of all six books in an AP before you start," which I recognize can be frustrating. Perhaps you could be a pioneer in this as of yet unexplored field on the boards? I'm sure if you posted the information you seek in the Carrion Crown threads (once you have said information) people would be grateful :-) I think I may do that with Reign of Winter some day soon... hmmmm...

:p

But that would require me to actually do some work! Heh. It's something that has been going through my mind recently though. Unfortunately it wouldn't be for at least a year min. I'm helping write a module for my friend's game "Victorious: Steampunk Adventure in the Age of SuperMankind" (woot!) and working on my own setting in my spare time.

I've been running games almost constantly for about 15 years now. We've changed games, players, real-life cities, but GMing has been a constant that whole time. So just this last year I started GMing a Pathfinder game and I am both thrilled by the material and sorely disappointed by it.

As modules the Adventure Paths are fantastic. The art, writing, and challenges are great. But from a campaign perspective they are CRAP. Sorry, but they are. Let me explain, then please prove me wrong. I would like to be wrong here because I really like the game. ^_^

Now the issue might be that there's a book or resource that I don't know about, please tell me if that's the case.
As a GM I like to know what the point is for my campaigns. I plan out the villains, their goals, and how they plan to achieve those goals. I layout clues like bread crumbs for players to follow. But the Adventure Paths don't seem to be designed with that style of GMing in mind.

Take Carrion Crown for example. The first module sets up a very vague idea of what the main plot of the campaign will be, but it fails to setup anything on the NPCs that are meant to drive the conflict forward. The main antagonist is vaguely described and his plans are not elaborated on at all. In order to get even a vague idea of what's going on, a GM needs to read through every single adventure module before running that first adventure. That's a very tall order, especially if you're not sure that a game will last long enough to make buying the whole AP worth it.

As the GM, I have a slightly better idea of what's going on than the players, but the gap is not that large.

What would help and what I would really really appreciate is a GM Guide to each AP. I would happily pay for a GM version of the Players Guides that Paizo produces for each AP for the players. A book laying out who the main Antagonists are, 1-2 NPCs of note from each module (the most important ones), what the Antagonists plans are and an outline of the events that will occur during the AP. I would like to have that core knowledge beforehand so that I can plan the transition from module to module so that it's an almost seamless move.

I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this thread. If it's better suited for a different forum on this site please let me know.

I'm looking into self-publishing my own setting using PDFs, and it looks like my best bet would be to follow in Pathfinder's footsteps, so to speak, and use the "no actually d20" OGL.

I'm a big fan of Pathfinder and I've looked at how they incorporated the OGL into the design of their system and made it wonderfully unobtrusive in the design. They haven't had to segment off OGL content in grey boxes or format it differently, instead it's all covered by the first page of the Core Rule book in 2 paragraphs defining Product Identity and Open Content.

So does anyone know if that's ever caused the Pathfinder folks any issue? Most of the advice I've come across has been to explicitly set apart all OGL content within your book. But it looks like that's exactly what they didn't do with Pathfinder. Or are the rules just different for a decent sized company like Paizo?