Dr. Horatio Thwack's page

I love a good turn-based RPG, but sometimes it's nice to just turn off my tactical brain and just hack and slash my way to glory. The potential for couch co-op would be amazing. I loved the old Dark Alliance and Champions of Norrath games on the PS2 and this has that same feel. As much as I get absorbed into the story, details, and systems of a good turn-based RPG, the thought of a diablo-clone style PF game with an AP that just seems tailor-made for it hits all my happy buttons. Looking forward to this one, but I do hope it gets a console port at some point as this sort of co-op game really shines when you've got a handful of folks all playing along in the same room, screaming and yelling and just having a good time.

Hello,

Please cancel the below subscriptions associated with my account I have already received my October shipment:

I have already sent an email to this effect as well but I wasn't sure whether that was the correct process or if I should cancel through the forum.

Pathfinder Lost Omens
Pathfinder Rulebook
Starfinder Roleplaying Game
Pathfinder Accessories
Pathfinder Society

Thank you for your help.

Regards,
Rob

Email has been sent off to the powers that be in solidarity.

Best of luck to the unionization attempt. I know I'll be watching for management's reaction and making my buying decisions accordingly.

Hey good news, it arrived today! Folded in half, but it did arrive!

Thanks for your help with this, I know how swamped you folks have been and I really appreciate it!

Hi! Unfortunately, this is an ongoing issue we've had with UPS Mail Innovations where tracking information won't update. Your order left our warehouse on September 17th and, with the ~4-8 business day shipping estimate, it's latest estimated arrival date would be today (September 29th). I'm hoping it will show up today, but I'd recommend waiting through the rest of the week to see if it arrives late!

If there's no sign of it by Monday, let us know and we can go from there!

Thank you so much for your help Raychael, I'll go ahead and wait and see what happens. If it doesn't show up should I reply to this thread or start a new one?

Appreciate the quick response!
have a good one,
Thwack

Hi I placed an order back on Sept 11 and according to the internal system it shipped on the 17th. However, the tracking info says that the package hasn't even been handed off to UPS or exists in their system. Did something goes sideways with this shipment? The original estimate was 4-8 days from the 17th. We're well past that and I just want to make sure that nothing has gone wrong or to see if I can get updated tracking info.

Thanks!

This is a painfully shallow, disappointing and tone deaf response Jeff. You had the opportunity to get out in front of this, address concerns and more importantly list actual actions that would be taken. You instead gave the scandal 101 corporate response that says nothing and promises vague and I’ll defined attempts to be better. I was withholding dropping my subs waiting on Paizo’s response. Nothing in your statement has convinced me to hold onto those. In fact that lukewarm response with its tepid promise to be better I’m five years than you are today is pushing me further in the opposite direction. While it may have been hopelessly bait of me to think Paizo was better than this I genuinely hoped the culture was representative of the inclusive and progressive work found in your books. This canned response does not support that. I will watch for a more nuanced and perhaps detailed response in the coming days following GenCon, failing that I will be cancelling my subs and moving on.

Hi,

I'm interested in subscribing to the Lost Omens Pathfinder subscription line but I already have both the books it offers as your starting book. I was curious, now that the Mwangi Expanse book is out when those options will update? I looking to do several subs as the discount is attractive and I'm getting all these items anyway and the PDFs would be handy, but I'd like to start them all together.

Thanks!

Ring_of_Gyges wrote:

Wealth seems relevant.

When I was a kid, I had a new RPG book at Christmas or my birthday and that was it. I devoured those books in minute detail, because I wasn't getting another one for six months, I knew every illustration and jot of text. Even if they were terrible, you had to wring every drop of juice from them, because they were all you had.

Now, I have PDFs, the internet, a giant library, and more games than I can possibly read. If I go to DriveThruRPG and drop $100 on PDFs I can get more stuff than I can digest in a decade, and I could do that every week if I wanted to. The constraint on my gaming now isn't money, it's time, a million diverse offerings are paraded before me and I have to decide carefully not what I can afford with cash, but what I can afford to invest reading and playing time in.

It really sucks that gaming isn't what it was when I was a kid, doesn't it. :)

Plenty of time and no money. Now it's plenty of money (relative to game costs anyway) and no time.

I was just discussing this very thing with my wife. We have enough games, game materials etc to last us for years and years. I have books I haven't had time to read for games I bought that I plan to run in the future that I likely won't get to even start for the next several years! It's an odd inverse frustration to devouring the books I had as a kid and then re-reading them over and over while waiting for something new to come out and then waiting to actually have the money to get it.

A ways back my group played Earthdawn for a while when we had gotten a little burned out on second edition AD&D. We played it for a time and enjoyed it overall, but when we eventually jumped back into D&D with 3.0 and through 3.5 and now into Pathfinder one thing we find we really missed from Earthdawn was how it handled magic items.

Magic items were legitimately special. They had a history, the PCs had to form bonds to them, research them and spend resources to unlock new powers and abilities. Now while I know they don’t want this to be the case for every single item they find but they really like the idea of magic items that “grow” with their characters. In fact these items ended up becoming a major portion of the characters identities themselves.

So I was wondering if there is anything out there like this for PF. I know Weapons of Legacy tried something similar to this concept, but I didn't feel it was all that successful. I remember reading some write ups in a Monte Cook sourcebook that also attempted to tackle the subject, also not quite what I was looking for. So my question is has Pathfinder tried anything like this yet? Maybe in a supplement I haven’t pick up or something?

Any advise would be appreciated, even if its just “nope they've never done anything like it” or “They kind of did, but you're going to need to modify it a lot.”

Thanks!

Gamers unfortunately sometimes want to read what they want to read and imo have a huge overinflated sense of entitlement.

A friend of mine and I were discussing this very thing when discussing the approach of WOTC vs. Paizo's approach to Fantasy gaming and why one worked where the other didn't seem to have the same appeal. The conclusion we came to was this: Paizo’s method of inclusion and the fact that their staff comes off like “gamers just like you” is paying off so well for them.

WOTC’s constant turnover and most recently the actual posting of their past business plans by former staff shows a strong corporate bent to their approach tends to be inherently distrusted by a lot of gamers.

We’re very easy to manipulate, and we’ll take it from one of “our own” but give the impression that you’re manipulating us in a gratuitous corporate-driven money grab and we freak. In short we don’t want RPGs to make any one fabulously wealthy, we want it to do well enough to allow people who love what they do to make a living doing it.

We’re like the punk scene. We only want them to be SO successful, otherwise they’ve sold out. Gaming is a tight-knit community, but is fractured by cliques and VASTLY varied gaming styles. It’s a dice-rolling, card-flipping, storytelling-through-hallucinations collection of contradictions.

But there is one consistent element; we want to be able to identify with the creators of the product. We want them to just be some homebrew guys and gals who actually got a chance to do what they love and get paid to do it. Not live on a yacht, but at least pay their mortgage and raise a family so they’re happy…and can make more games.

Of course YMMV.

-DHT

I've posted this on enworld, but honestly it still pretty much applies here as well:

I feel tentatively positive about 5E. WOTC has a long way to go to show me that they can create this mélange of different editions into a coherent whole. If they can I will whole heartedly support it, but I’ll admit it seems like an almost unattainable goal, not simply because of the difficulty but because of the resistance of people who simply want it to fail so they can say that they predicted it.

I’ve played all the editions now and I’ve liked things about all of them and hated things about all of them, I look forward to a new edition simply to see what comes of it, with a goal this lofty it may be that the journey is better than the goal itself. Regardless, succeed or fail, I have to admire the willingness to try something like this and risk the chance of failure, particularly since I look at something like this and think it smacks of a “last chance to get it right” dictate on the part of Hasbro. I am more than likely wrong, but I could see it happening and it would be a shame for such an ambitious attempt to fail and result in the shelving of the game for a decade until Hasbro decides it’s “safe” to try again.

But succeed or fail, I still have PF which has managed to satisfy what I am looking for in my game.

-DHT

very goblin-themed ar of course the goblin-snake and goblin-dog fom Rise of the runelords

in 3.5 there where really cool feral hobgoblins, I think they where called Varags

Good call, I've been grabbing anything with "Goblin" in the name and perusing them as well. Yeah, the Verag, I forgot about them--excellent suggestion, you guys are really helping a lot!

D.H.T.

Excellent idea, I hadn't even considered the Oni option. I'll have to take a look at it. And I've been meaning to pick up the classic monsters revisited book, I think this gives me an excuse.

Thanks!
D.H.T.

It's worth noting that Grindylows (bestiary 2) are somewhat akin to goblins (in appearance and behaviour; though not at all in creature type)

Okay, I'll take a gander at them as well. I think the next step will be branching out into similar types of creatures. Ones that fit thematically or behaviorally with Goblinoids.

-Thanks for the suggestion!
D.H.T.

In Pathfinder, those three are pretty much it for now for goblinoids.

Excellent, while it wasn’t the answer I was hoping for, it was really quick! No problem I can work with three Goblinoid races and some thematically appropriate racial add ins here and there. Thanks.

I am attempting to track down a list of all the current “Goblinoid” type monsters in the current PF releases. Does anyone have any suggestions for an easier way to accomplish this short of leafing through the Bestiaries and other supplements I have? I’ve searched the SRD and “Goblinoid” only brings back two entries. I know the obvious ones, Goblins, Hobgoblins and Bugbears, but it seems like there were quite a few more once upon a time. I know over the course of the editions that the Goblinoids have been pared down, but are we down to only the three? I appreciate any suggestions anyone might have.

Thanks,
-D.H.T.

The core books yes, companion/setting bundles are typically more in the range of $5 for two or three books.

Right, thanks for clearing that up. I don't actually run a game in the PF core setting so I've never really had a need to pick up any of the setting/companion materials.

And taking price out of the equation, the speed with which they get the updates out for PF has been very impressive. There's nothing my group hates more than getting a new book with options for their characters that they have to "wait" to use because the character creation software is pending an update!

I've been using Herolab and I love it. It has a bit of a learning curve when it comes to creating custom items but otherwise it's incredibly intuitive. The only real complaint-- and it's not really a complaint per se-- is having to buy new updates as new books come out. It adds an additional 10 bucks typically to any new PF book I buy. But given the sheer amount of creation ease, not to mention the ability to run combat from within the program, tracking hit points, spells, conditions etc. makes it well worth the cost.