Dorigin's page

Welcome. You guys are in for quite a ride!

I organize at one of the locations that Unklbuck attends regularly. And at that store this clarification of rulings is affecting a few people there.

This location has been supporting PFS since Oct 2011 and has had the organizer torch passed 2 times since then, I am the 3rd organizer there but have played at this location since Nov 2011. This location runs 3-5 table every week and doesn't have a GM pool large enough for me to simply dictate what games are going to be run. Many weeks, I'm begging for GM's and those willing to step up have a short list of the games they are willing to run. That being said, just because there is 300 sanctioned options, doesn't mean they are all available on any given week. And in fact many of the new GM's willing to help want to run games they have already played (and rightfully so). This doesn't however do a whole lot for the variety of games being offered in a 2-3 month window.

I find myself disappointed most by this ruling when thinking of conventions. If I'm scheduled to run a table, I obviously wont be pre-registered to play at a table I can sit at. And if my table doesn't make for some reason, I'll be stuck at the admin desk like a puppy in time out. That's not cool... I go to cons in order to meet new pfs players and support this brand. But now I'm told that I can't sit in for gitts & shiggles even though I'm doing everything I can to support the efforts of the campaign as a whole. That doesn't make me feel very appreciated.

I immediately righted the ship in regards to this ruling in the shop I organize for and will continue to be vigilant in adhering to the rules laid out for us. But I think we are missing the mark on this one.

The newer classes haven't seen a whole lot of love in this department. But some of the old season zero scenarios have + stat items that occupy different slots than the current Pathfinder gear.

Things like a Cloak of Cha +2 or Periapt of Wisdom +2. Something like this may open up gearing options that can't be procured any other way.

How often does your PC die?

This is a fun question! All of my characters will likely die from something. It's almost a right of passage in our area.

We play would-be hero's in a fantasy setting. You have to do something heroic to BE a hero.

Do I want to grapple the giant 4 armed, winged ape statue thing with my Tetori monk? Heck yeah I do!! That's WHAT I do.

Do I want to stand alone vs a large 2 headed dog thing that just spit fire all over me? I'm a raging Tiefling in a layer of Hell, ABSOLUTELY!

But then when my Oracle goes sneaking through some house, I failed a save and jumped over a balcony head first. Save or suck, I sucked!

Not all of my characters have a death wish, but they happen to be employed in a non-Osha approved business! Stuff happens. :)

@Ben - I feel much the same way you do about wanting to provide the best experience for my players. The question then is how do you do this when everyone has different opinions on what the best experience is.

You can generally get a good feel for a players gaming style during a character introduction. If a player has a rich story and gives details about their out of game (no mechanical affects) habits, I go with a story driven player. If the player describes their character as being a walking armory that's good at breaking stuff, or gives details that are very much mechanical to combat, I feel confidant running a stiffer game.

It's my opinion that adventuring is a dangerous business. Otherwise anyone would do it.

There are plenty of ways to feel out a player or groups of players. But finding a way to do this will help you provide a good overall experience for as many players as possible.

Are you counting the ones who are brought back by breath of life?

I would be sad not to. One of my favorite stories is about 1 player dying 4 times during 1 encounter!

But another question is has anyone else ever had a rash of players starting to die at your table? Did you lighten up from the tactics and start holding back?

It depends on the group. If the group was looking for a challenge, no way! If the group looked completely demoralized at the idea of death and/or it is a group of newer players, I will alter tactics in the players favor.

I roll in the open for everything except tier 1-2. There's no softening a crit from a x3 or x4 weapon. But it's for that reason I roll behind a screen for tier 1-2.

I've killed just over 50 characters (not including pets) over ~130 games. So 1 for every 3 games roughly.

As Kyle said, Tier is pretty critical. But I may go a couple months without a death and then run something very deadly like

Jiggy brings up a good point too. Some of us have a reputation of being more lethal than others. So there's nothing wrong with knowing the Gm's available and using that as part of your criteria for selecting a scenario to sign up for.

I can see both sides of the argument here and would defer to the GM on their interpretation.

I guess the big question here is which of these "specific" rules is to be considered the "general" rule. I would imagine the class ability is the "general" and the equipment the "specific". And if that's the case, the op would be correct and he should be able to move at full speed in the Mithral plate.

Unless the extra movement somehow broke an encounter, I as a Gm couldn't bring myself to split hairs over the players interpretation on this.

Godsmarket Gamble (1-5) Either tier
Rise of the Goblin Guild (1-5) Low tier
In Wrath's Shadow (3-7)High tier
My Enemy's Enemy (3-7)High tier
Heresy of Man part 1 (5-9) Either tier
Rebels Ransom (5-9) High tier
Drow of the Darkland Pyramid (7-11) High tier
Waking Rune (7-11) Either tier and Hard Mode should be unbeatable

It's my opinion that the GM is the largest variable when it comes to how deadly a scenario is. The ability to mask what the players are about to jump in to is a skill that must be learned if you want to truly challenge your players.

One of my favorite more recent kills was touching a fighter with "Plane Shift" and after failing the will save, rolling a D20 to see which plane he ended up on. Lets just say it didn't take many rounds on the Negative Energy plane before he expired.

To his credit, he sat through the remaining 3 hours of the PFS scenario to quietly collect his chronicle.

Thanks everyone. I'm eager to continue contributing in whatever way I can. Pfs has been a constant through tough times. Our gaming community is awesome and can only continue to get better.

I've used 2 of mine. Both of which were to make room at tables for new players and I shuffled over to a higher tier table with room that I had already played.

I don't mind using them to the benefit of new players, but there are scenarios I would like to re-play with either a more competent group or better prepared GM's.

I'm currently saving the rest as "emergency" mustering tools. And for these reasons, I too would like to see this reset annually.

I've seen chase scenes at different tiers play out very differently.

Tier 1-2 is going to have the most difficult time with chases, but as characters level up, they have additional resources available to them.

Mechanically, the chase rules are about 2 things: Skill point allocation and movement speed. Since we cant do much about our skill point allocation at the table, the next option is to boost our movement speed. Many people forget that you get a bonus to your skill checks for every 10' of movement you have over 30 feet.

Fly, Haste and Expeditious Retreat are all viable options and give significant bonus' to any skill check throughout the chase seen. A flying and hasted character should see just about any skill check as trivial.

I appreciate all the comments and suggestions.

We have all struggled with balancing our muster to provide the best play experience for as many of our players as possible. This is not a new problem. Actually a welcome one as it means we have a good sized player pool to pull from.

However, it would be great to hear how others are dealing with the hand they are dealt once the muster is complete. And stuck with a group of 6 that barely fell in between tiers for a season 4 or 5 scenario. How are you keeping pace to finish on time? Are you rolling behind a screen to softball encounters? I'm all for challenging, but challenging normally equates to time consuming. And this is the thing I have lost control of that needs correcting.

I have come to sincerely dislike the new sub tier system introduced this season as well as the faction mission guide lines.

More often than not I find my tables fall between tiers and at 6 - 7 players. So they have to play the higher tier with the 4 player adjustments. This has resulted in uncontrollable player deaths. Most of you know, I have no sympathy for players doing dumb stuff and getting killed. But this environment doesn't leave room to make the deaths enjoyable. There is a very small window to make the deaths either glorious or comical. I feel it's important to make sure may players have fun regardless of the outcome of their adventuring, and I feel the ability to manipulate poor situations has been stripped from me when a couple level 1, 3 and 5 characters are facing a CR6 or CR7 encounter. This was fine when the players chose to do so as most groups opting to play up where either optimized builds or strong niche builds.

I have also found it more difficult to keep the games within a 4-5 hour window. Last night was a prime example of this. I was running Veteran's Vault which has a reputation of being a "quick" scenario. Last night it took my table of 6, 5.5 hours to complete. The group did not play poorly, but being that most of the players were "out of tier" they simply lacked the damage output to handle the encounters in a timely manner. They even diplo'd through one of the encounters and it still took over 5 hours. Thank the gods, I didn't have to handle faction missions in conjunction with this.

I have also come to dislike how the factions are being handled. I thought it was a great idea initially; giving more freedom to both the players and GM's to see each Pathfinder push for their factions. Since we play and run so many more of the old seasons vs. season 5, most of my players have become unattached to their factions. I even had one of my newer players (New to PFS, not RPG) come to me and ask what the point of the factions was. This was disappointing to hear as much fun as I know I had in the past with the faction hand outs.

I wasn't running into these issues until the Season 5 changes. Is anyone else running into these issues? I'm sure I can't be the only one seeing this and I would love to hear how others are managing the faction separation as well as managing their tables to keep them on time.

My personal favorites are:

I will repeat what I said the last time this was brought up

There are 2 NPCs that always seem to get players in trouble and I think they are secretly villains!!

Yargos Gill & Nigel Aldain!

This!

Every time I read Nigel's name my players drop their heads in disgust. And I want to thank whoever decided to add his picture in season 4. It has earned a place over the dart board.

#4-26 The Waking Rune (Hard Mode)

Do not play this unless you are ready to see creative ways to die.

Florida has a collective website that we use for organizing. Check us out!!
Floridapfs.org

Very good news. Grats Dom!!

I use "Drop box" for downloading material on my iPad. The issue typically is that iOS does not have a "folder" type system that most of us have become proficient with. Drop Box fixes that issue.

Talking on our local forum had me thinking about how viable an Organic LED display would be for gaming.

I must not understand the tech, because this sounds pretty darn simple. It would need a power source. And video input. At that point it's just an extension of the display to our portable media.

Where can I buy this? When could I buy this? Is there something like it on the market yet?

I mean, what contractor wouldn't want to save all his blueprints in digital form and roll out a single map and flip through the pages? What designer wouldn't like to go on site and unveil their plan digitally to their potential customer? And for the love of all that's holy, what GM wouldn't want all their maps at their disposal in an instant?

I've only been involved with PFS for about a year now, and have just gotten to see some of these baddies come up.

1 - One "tiny" dragon in a room that could have been by-based is all I have seen of them. So more dragons? Yes please.

2 - Goblins I feel have had a balanced spread of interaction and recently getting to run an adventure with a goblin that had Bard levels was pretty brilliant.

3 - Have yet to see an Orc on either side of the screen. More Please.

4 - Same with Drow. More please.

5 - Im prepping a game for Thursday with my first look at Dinos, being as most of what I have run is low - mid tier stuff, I'm glad there wasn't much. But I hope to see some at higher levels when they can truly be threatening.

6 - Undead have a place everywhere at all levels imo, I would encourage more class level CR bumps instead of 6-8 fodder mobs.

7 - Although I personally do not like swarms, I havnt seen an overwhelming use of them either. And it is a great tool to make players spend resources. And those purchases have lead to some creative uses too.

8 - I would like to see more terrestrial outsiders, tie them in with some of the current lore in place, and please send us off to investigate!

9 - Golarion being humanoid dominant, it only makes sense that this is our largest volume of threats. However, I would like to see us actually put an end to larger organizational threats. Its great to have a recurring thorn in our side, but eventually, we need to stomp a mud-hole in someone like the Aspis so there is room for a NEW recurring pita.

If your going healbot, I would take up a buff or debuff role as well. The Life Mastery caters to this with its free spells known, but being able to remove status' or buff the party is always appreciated.

Depending on what you intend to wear could sway your stat choices, or how you want to play into your skill selections. The INT score is only giving you additional skill ranks, where you could bolster your DEX for better range touch attacks. Using meta magic feats for your touch spells or a Rod of Reach makes it easier for you to stay out of most combat and effectively fill your role and possibly gimp your STR score if you wanted to.

Dorigin wrote:

I am a fan of the old school sword and board as well.

PFS 20 pt buy was 17/16/14/12/10/7 with the first pt in STR and the following 2 in DEX.

Feats:
1- Weapon Focus, Power attack, Imp Init
2- Dodge
3- Shield Focus
4- Weapon Specialization
5- Furious Focus
6- Vital Strike
7- Step up
8- Imp Crit
9- Greater Shield Focus
10- Critical Focus
11- Improved Vital Strike
12- Greater Weapon Specialization

This is a balanced build, leaving you semi-mobile with focus on taking a single attack without the penalty from power attack and still gives you additional damage through Vital strike. It also lets you act early in combat and gives decent bonus' to AC.

The point buy also lets you take full advantage of your DEX bonus while wearing Mithral Full Plate and a Heavy Mithral Shield with no Armor Check Penalty.

i thinkfurious focus only work with two handed weapons.

To your point, it is also for using a one handed weapon, 2 handed. I found it useful when AC wasnt an issue and needed to unload on a mob. Drop shield, Power attack/Vital Strike w/o penalty.

I am a fan of the old school sword and board as well.

PFS 20 pt buy was 17/16/14/12/10/7 with the first pt in STR and the following 2 in DEX.

Feats:
1- Weapon Focus, Power attack, Imp Init
2- Dodge
3- Shield Focus
4- Weapon Specialization
5- Furious Focus
6- Vital Strike
7- Step up
8- Imp Crit
9- Greater Shield Focus
10- Critical Focus
11- Improved Vital Strike
12- Greater Weapon Specialization

This is a balanced build, leaving you semi-mobile with focus on taking a single attack without the penalty from power attack and still gives you additional damage through Vital strike. It also lets you act early in combat and gives decent bonus' to AC.

The point buy also lets you take full advantage of your DEX bonus while wearing Mithral Full Plate and a Heavy Mithral Shield with no Armor Check Penalty.

Cancel order #2182948 please.

Thank you,
Andy

Cancel order #2182948 please.

Thank you

108 " I hope you still have some fate chips..."