Donaar's page

Hello Gatecrashers,

We aren't starting until ~September, but I thought it would be better to put this up now so I could leave my thoughts for you all in one place instead of trying to remember who I told what.

First notice: I made an Obsidian Portal page for Gatecrashers so I'll need your names/emails/firstborn if you have an OP account.

:P

James Jacobs is now Creative Director, previously Editor-in-Chief, Pathfinder.

James Sutter is now Fiction Editor, previously Editor.

Any I missed?

For too long has the bug loving community been overshadowed by the Jacks, the Poodles, Politics, and other threads that can not hold a flame to the love of insects we all hold.

My favorites are the ones dipped in chocolate

How does a pdf get backordered?

I can still scrounge if I want to right?

You can find all kinds of cool old books in those places.

What is Kingmaker?!?

:-k Is the world prepared for a Boomer AP adventure?

cool!

Yeah...

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You get this!

Oops!

I deleted it, though it might be interesting to see if it continued to affect the page after it droped of the recent posts list...

Adam Daigle?

hmm....

I recently started and am spending way to much time playing, and I wanted to see if there was any interest in forming a new corperation.

I have the money needed to form the corperation, and would be willing to train the skills needed. I don't care where its put right now

My main character is a Caldari soldier, in about 12 days depending on how fast I can switch skills I will be flying a caracal with all of the recomended certificates.

So, Who wants to join an EVE guild?

In the store blog at the time of this Message there was a picture of Erik Mona, but when you click the link no further information is available, and I couldn't find an item page.

This leaves a me with a few questions presented below in no particular order.

• What system is Erik Mona compatible with?

• Is Erik Mona backwards compatible?

• What is the cost?

• Are there also a James Jacobs, F. Wesley Schneider, Lisa Stevens, Jason Bulhman, Cosmo, Joshua J. Frost, Gary Teter and other Paizo employees available to forma a complete set?

• What services does he provide?

• Are there more than one Erik Mona available?

• Is Erik Mona collectible or randomized in any way?

• Does Erik Mona come with any small parts which may present a health or safety risk to small children or the mentally disabled?

• Does Erik Mona come personalized in any way?

• What would the shipping fees on this item be?

Thanks
David Wickham

I got this package in the mail today and Mindshadows was not in the box.

If Paizo Order #1074483 is going to be shipping soon could you put it in there?

Thanks

David

Also a little paragraph story thing about their relationships with others (proffesional or otherwise) and other stuff would be cool too.

You all know what is in that parargraph after the stat block...

I would ask that people don't do themselves.

My brother and i were ordering some stuff and he added about $60 worth of common minis and looked like he was going to keep adding to the cart until he saw the line that says
[qoute=Paizo]This miniature may or may not be in the original bag, and may or may not include the stat card.

I was wondering how which minis wouldn't have stat cards or how that was decided?

The lack of bag doesn't matter, but it may be a deal breaker for him if they don't have the cards

Thanks
David

I got the Factions Platnium version of this game yesterday and was wondering if there were any Guilds for Fans of Paizo i could join.

During a short and Glorious Coup i have taken control f a small section of the chat and formed my own realm where my newly founded order of knights may mock each other and tell tales of thier grand adventures for my ammusement.

I invite all to come and request a royal title!

Or face my dipleasure and join Master Yoda the Diminutive...

My Table has already attracted great Knights such as

Sir Blazej the Wrong
SirHoustonDerekThe Unseemly
Sir Eyebite the Blinding
Sir Gear Knightly Piercer
-and-
St. Pygon the Patriarch

Sir Cappadocius the Saracen has made himself known to the realm but has yet to choose the side of humor and recieve a proper naming.

A Picture of it

Noticed it twice now and then i grabbed a picture

The picture is from THIS thread

Then the post monster ate my thread... i think its a conspiracy ;)

EDIT: The original showed up and i deleted it...

Today I posted 36 (this makes 37) times.

Heathy posted has posted 9 times as of this post.

I think i deserve a medal or a prize or something...

what are you all up to today?

considering the semi-humerous nature of my posts, i dont htink my Red Mantis avatar quite fits me any more...

any suggestions for a new (not the poodle) one?

Anyone play anything near here?

Or you'll have bland food!

...or something ;)

I got #1608 Josh said online numbers started at 1605 or so...

Does any else here wonder if you could trap and image between some mirrors even after the source was taken away by angling the mirrors just so?

Could I get only this order to ship to:

[address redacted by customer service]

Thanks
David

Who got it?

Sweet!

wheres the new forum? ;)

It is already in the wiki...

Is there any way I could get this to wait and ship next month?

Thanks!
David

I've seen a few threads saying that shipping can be cheaper if orders are split and was wondering how I should split my superscriber orders for July and LB1 to save the most money on shipping.

So would the monthly, with ap, or with mods sub be the cheapest?

thanks!

I used to see dots next to threads I had posted in, but know I don't is this sometihng on my end or Paizo's? What happened to my poor little dots?

Is the act of hiring an assassin legal in any of the areas of the world presented in the gazetteer?

Or any where else?

No gazetteer here :(

A few questions

Does the Print issue come with the map?

I was thinking about starting a campaign where the PCs each ran a gladiator school and was wondering if this had rules for nonlethal experience gaining gold through combat and other rules that would be helpful for this find of game, or if someone could direct me to a product that would have more of the stuff i'm looking for if this doesn't fit what i'm looking for.

Are these set in stone or will they change between adventure paths as more pathfinder stuff becomes available that better fits the flavor of the character?

I have always felt the kill it if it pings evil is a GM problem. They way we always played it is detect evil is asking your deity's opinion. Pinging evil is your god directly telling you that, yes the person you are detecting is better off dead. If your don't want that well as the GM now is the time to speak up (as the paladins God) or forever hold your peace.

I wanted to talk about the subtleties of managing an world spanning online community. I got compared to a pedophile at a BBQ, and generally treated like an idiot.

At the other end of the spectrum, baalbamoth brought up the same thing, though in a far more antagonistic way for sure, but the response from the CEO of Goblinworks was to threaten him with bodily harm and an insult, breaking one of his very own rules I might add. Followed by others encouraged by this behavior, pontificating on additional tortures that he "deserved".

Insult and derision has been encouraged against anyone not in complete agreement on this subject.

I can't possibly fathom how you intend to manage an MMO when your forum already has a toxic environment.

This isn't a company I can trust to be reasonable, to see more than one side of a debate, or even hold themselves to the same standard they hold others. I said I was only going to lurk, but I feel I have more than enough information to make an informed decision, and I will not be playing this game, nor will I advise others to. In fact unless things change I will be doing the opposite. As much as you look down on me personally that isn't a good thing for a niche game, in a bloated genre, that's expecting players to be the content.

People want songs not notes. Evil Lincoln hit the nail on the head. Every VTT program I have seen is trying to sell access to components, but to me this is like trying to sell pianos by the key in a world where keys are easily reproduced with a couple mouse clicks.

Instead Paizo should focus on being the iTunes of VTTs. They could even enforce a copyleft style license where any unique resources introduced by a 3rd part would be required to be added to the general pool, including both art and rules subsystems (also Game Space should be scriptable).

The other thing that Paizo could sell would be hosting. A free account would have just enough memory to host a single campaign, while for X$ a month you get X megs of extra storage space. This would be an abstraction of what you are really buying (bandwidth) because having a single database serving all instances means that the art resources are not actually getting copied.

I would buy into such a system, and before long Paizo would have such an insurmountable level of content Game Space could become the de facto VTT.

Another way to encourage community addition of resources is giving each artist a small cut of Paizos portion of the profit when someone buys an adventure. This way everyone gets paid but only Paizo deals with the details.

Anyway that's how I would do it.

Some loot ideas:

Each creature should have a plethora of lootable items depending on it's type. Lets take the common boar for example. Tusks, hide, meat, and bones would be a good start. To keep people from just loot>all make each item take some small amount of time if done in the field. Also each lootable item has some % chance of being destroyed in the fight that killed the creature. A fireballed boar reduced to ashes is useless, even the ashes have been scattered in the blast. Was it taken down by a slashing weapon? Well there goes any chance of pulling a good hide out of it. Poison? Now the meat is bad,and so on. To receive the maximum utility from a boar it should be hunted with piercing weapons, and processed at a butchers shop. But if all you need are a couple of pigs feet for a spell component or something it wouldn't be too cumbersome.

Carts and horses. There is no reason that mobs have to be field striped. Why not just pile up those boar on a cart where the local butcher can do a better job (bonuses for access to masterwork shop tools for example), and do it faster (batch jobs require the correct facilities), at some cost (gold or a % of the loot). In a system like this merchants needing supplies could hire adventures to do the killing while they pile up the cart.

Back in civilization you get a bonus to butchering when in a butchers shop or well equipped kitchen, if it's going to take a considerable amount of time to transport or processes a wand of purify food and drink could prevent spoilage. Also being in town makes it easier to separate and store the bits and pieces, skins could more or less just be stacked on a shelf but you are going to need jars for eyeballs, a barrel for the livers and salted or dried meats, etc. This would require a robust container system, something I would love to see.

You are not going to just throw a bunch of unprocessed pig parts in a backpack and towing around all the necessary containers is a pain (especially if there is a breakage mechanic). But it's sill useful to field strip a pig if you find yourself out in the middle of nowhere and need rations or maybe just a specific part or two.

Also carrion should attract carrion eaters.

The same system could also be used for logging, fishing, mining, etc. Raw goods should come into town (mostly) raw, where they are processed and put on the market. Wile collecting raw goods gives opportunities for players to interact as guards, collectors, caravan handler, highway men, etc.

Addendum: some processing could be done in field camps. A lone ranger could make a decent living as a trapper/hunter bringing in a stack of skins he treated and tanned in a field camp. A logging camp could cut the logs into rough planks for ease of transport if they are not floating the logs. A mining camp could do some basic smelting, and so on. Anything more advanced would require returning to civilization.

I would love to see no auction house in a game again. Finding merchant houses in early SWG was cool too. If you bought an item from the market it often had a manufactures tag, and if you found their house you could often get a good discount as well as order custom gear.

I would like to expand on the "transportation" element of the player generated economy. This is where you will make it or break it. SWG broke it not because it was nonsensical, because with careful consideration and exploration the difference between good and perfect equipment was vast. On more than one occasion our team of a dozen or so carefully equipped characters would decimate our enemies facing between two and five to one odds and we wiped the floor with our enemies taking base after base. While tactics played a large role, it was careful planing at every stage of the production processes that made the biggest difference.

Where it broke was encumbrance. There wasn't any. Not in any meaningful way at least. You didn't need a binary load lifter to lift loads. That excluded the droid manufactures for a huge part of the game. A player could instead just carry huge loads on his person, jump on a speeder and that was that.

If instead lets say you needed to bring load lifters to move your resources from the factory, to the cargo carrier, then off again, not only does that include more professions (cargo carrier builders, droid builders/operators), but also slows the process down enough to put guards to work, guarding the collection processes, the transportation processes (the more massive the hauler the slower it should go vs speeder but less efficient methods), and it also spreads the wealth around so the crafters don't end up with all the money. Also by increasing interdependency you create tighter communities, as well as emergent content (ala eve's PVP).

On a slightly related note, give every player a purpose no matter the level. Easy to obtain ores should be required for every item. If it's made of steel then iron ore mined by an army of lowbies should provide it to the higher level characters, instead of just increasing yields for the higher level character. In place of having higher yields more levels in mining mean you can mine more difficult and valuable ores. Low level smiths could provide smelted iron ingots to higher level smiths that then add ingredients to create specialized ingots and/or equipment (iron ingots into steel ingots, steel ingots into specialized or higher quality steel ingots). Give people a reason in engage in master apprentice relationships, get the levels mixing together, and the race to level 20 will be far less important/necessary.

I hope that made some sense, I got a fever today so I might have been a bit rambly.

I'm seeing a lot of confusion over point buy vs random, game theory and design decisions in general. So in the interests of understanding instead of offering my opinion (a very strong opinion at that), I offer research material.

First of all I would suggest reading the RPG Design Patterns. Specifically the Point Spend Attributes and Random Attribute sections. Many of the entries were compiled from knowledge gleaned from an indy RPG forum called "the forge".

Bringing us to "the forge". If you are into theory, there is no other place like it. The archive is a treasure trove of very carefully reasoned and thoroughly argued RPG design tropes. I suggest starting with the glossary, then reading the archive. The RPG Theory forum is mostly about how each rule impacts the game as a whole and why you would choose each and every rule while the GNS Model Discussion forum separates play styles and allows a designer to better compile individual rules to match a specific flavor or flow of the game.

I hope this helps reduce some of the more antagonistic banter by providing a common framework to hinge our discussions on in the future.

Powergaming

A potentially dysfunctional technique of Hard Core Gamist play, characterized by maximizing character impact on the game-world or player impact on the dialogue of play by whatever means available

I'm having a difficult time finding the essay on Gamist play but it's in there if anyone is interested, I was going to go on but life calls me away from the internet.

Happy gaming everyone.