Elendur's page

By using resonance as a class resource, and then giving buffs to that, it makes the alchemist a magic item expert for no apparent reason, right?

I went to Gen Con the first time in 2004. It was the 30 year anniversary of D&D and it was everywhere. Wizards had a huge booth and the RPGA hall was the largest gaming area. Paizo didn't really exist as an RPG publisher. I think they had a small booth for Dungeon and Dragon magazine.

In 2008 Wizards was launching a new edition and they were still very present. Their booth was smaller but still one of the bigger ones. They had the entire Sagamore Ballroom for their organized play.
Paizo had a very nice area in the exibit hall and the Pathfinder core rules beta was flying off the shelves. They had a decent sized room to launch their Pathfinder Society Season Zero in.

2014 was the first year I've been back and wow what a difference 6 years make. Now Paizo is in the Sagamore Ballroom and Wizards has an area about half that. Paizo's retail area in the exibit hall had a line to get in most of the time and I think they sold out of all their new releases. Wizards doesn't even have space in the exibit hall. They had one small retail booth in their organized play area that I believe was manned by Gale Force 9.

I don't know how much that translates into sales, but I was pretty impressed by how much stuff Paizo has and how enthused people were by it.

Thanks. Basically I just played a round after a long while and forgot about the skill feats so I was rolling d12 +2 the whole night. When I was looking at her card afterward I remembered "oh damn she has +4 that's awesome". Then I looked at that "arcane die +d6" text of her power and began to question things.

Glad to know she is still awesome. On to the next adventure!

I think you are both saying the same thing but just to give an example, my Seoni

Charisma d12 +2 (from skill feats)
Arcane is Charisma +2, so Arcane is d12 +4

Force missle: d12 +4 +2d4

Seoni's card power: d12 +4 +1d6

Correct?

Is it charisma +2?
If her charisma has been boosted +2 would that be d12 + 4?

I just now realized her special power says "arcane die + d6" and not "arcane check" so I've been thrown into confusion.

On a related not I always assumed the "add 1 die" of the blessing cards means just that, whatever die you are throwing add one more. But now I'm questioning whether you throw the modifiers in there too.

This is going back to your first review part, but I'm trying to understand the core mechanic here. If difficulties 7-10 equate to a d20 target of 21-30, does that mean there is zero chance of success, or is there something modifying the d20 role?

Does a natural 20 always indicate success?

Just seems like it would be frustrating for a player to be faced with a DC 7 and not know that they could never succeed with applying some extra effort. Is the difficulty communicated to the player somehow?

Yeah Seoni sort of powers up when she's about to die, because she can keep recharging her spells over and over. Was blasting through all the combat, unfortunately there were encounters causing discards outside of combat that killed her.

I'm going to assume that you also can't play cards at non-relevant times, in order to recharge them and avoid a discard at the reset phase. For example, Seoni explores a site, gets a boon and then plays invisibility (or whatever spell) to recharge it and get her hand down to 6.

I'm pretty sure you only get to recharge the blessing when Sajan uses it for combat. If he could do that for everything he'd be sort of broken since he has so many blessing cards.

I played Seoni solo and she worked pretty good. Definitely a glass cannon though. Blasted through most combat encounters but was on the verge of dying way before the blessing deck was depleted.

I was tickled at the mention of Gimble because I have the original painting on my wall. I have a couple other originals from WAR, can't wait to see if they made the book.

I just wanted to put in my personal testimony as to why this was a good idea for Paizo.

When I heard about this I was immediately overcome with the urge to by a PDF, even though I don't even play Pathfinder. I just wanted to support such good customer support. I came to my senses, however I did start thinking about Pathfinder and in the following days found myself perusing the PFSRD, particularly the Summoner from the APG.

Well it just so happens that same week at Pathfinder Society game is running near my house. Bingo, I buy the APG, have a fun time at PFS game, and am now back perusing the site for things related to the character I just played.

Open rules + PDFs + Organized Play = More money going to Paizo. Keep it up.

The GM Kit says:
"Just like your Flip-Mat from the Beginner Box, you can use wet-erase, dry-erase, and permanent markers with GameMastery Map Packs!"

I'm pretty sure that's incorrect.

Found it! For now... Try going to http://dungeonaday.live.subhub.com/ to access the site. I was able to get to it as of 8/19/11. I see rooms 18, 19, and 20 of the Necropolis. No idea what the guys have as a benny for subscribers due to the outage, but I'm sure it will be good. Here's hoping its back to the regular URL soon.

[Update] Can't access the forums or the current map page. Some of the major menu choices on the top and upper left just lead to the investment club or 404's, but Wednesday's, Thursday's, and Friday's content is up and accessible.

Cool that works for me, thanks.

I still kinda have the urge to move to Ecuador, though.

That is a topic I wondered about too: There seemed to have been a whole "Rise of the Runelords" map pack with all the maps from Rotrl (or was it just the AP#1 maps?) back in the days. Any plans to put out something like that for CC?

Yes it was just the AP1 maps, not battle scale.

Hey all, thanks for addressing my concerns about the Oracle without bashing them. I feel a little better about the flavor now. Going back to the root meaning of oracle, this class can be viewed as a speaker FOR something, an advocate. That makes more sense to me.

I still hope to see a more explicitly divination focused, er, focus.

A divine spontaneous caster seems a logical role to fill, so I'm on board with the premise of the oracle. However a few things stand out to me flavor wise.

There's not a whole lot "oracular" to the oracle. Oracles are people who can see the future. But this class has no divination powers or bonuses to divination spells. There isn't even a divination focus. (Also focus already has a specific game definition as a type of spell component, so that should probably change).

Not a big fan of the light armor and shield. I'd rather have some inherent bonus to defenses to reflect their special insight.

I do like the curses though. It can be difficult to have disadvantages in a RPG because players learn to work around them. However this is an advanced player's guide, so I'm sure an experienced group should be able to work with the GM to keep it relevant.

It was free.

It has a nice double sided battlemap.

I consider the inclusion of original artwork and maps a positive.

It has stats for the giant frogs.

I got a free RPG product in the mail, unexpectedly. I'm not going to complain.

I'm in favor of dropping the favored classes. It's a small mechanical subsystem that would be easy to forget about. It's based on race but only conditionally takes effect when leveling up. The only thing similar is the human bonus to skills. That applies every level, but even it can be overlooked when multiclassing. Say you start out a human fighter and are used to your 3 skill points, but then decide to take a level of rogue, you look it up and see the 8 points but forget about your human bonus.

I DM a very casual group of players and know from experience the fewer the isolated subsystems the better. Some of my players only crack a book when it's time to level.

I think both racial substitution levels and racial feats do a good job at supporting flavor and encouraging stereotypes, but I agree they may be more appropriate outside the core rules. I like racial levels as well, but they are definitely non-core.

I like it a lot. And it prints out fine, it's just the standard 8.5 x 11 in landscape.

Wotc would have saved themselves a lot of grief if they had just come out with this format to begin with.

Can we play these scenarios in any combination or order?

As of last night, hotels.com had 3 hotels available right downtown, quite expensive though. ($250 a night and up).

Ah, the free wotc adventures sorted by level, nice!

I received the Hangman's Noose yesterday. I love it as written. I tend to DM solo adventures for my wife and I am thinking of tweaking this module to expand the Jury. If she were to play a character with ranks in the social skills, do you think this would be a decent module for a solo quest. I would think that some of the more honorable members of the jury could be utilized to help in the investigation. I would still see most if not all of the others being done in by the Hangman but I think this would be great in the Alien, Scream type of story--strong female rising to confront a terrible menace all alone.

Any thoughts?

You have a few choices. The first is having three NPCs who are descendants like the PC. Essentially you're just running the other three PCs. Alternatively, come up with three new jurors, who have more clues to give, and maybe new gruesome ways to die. This would be a good option if you really want to expand the upon the adventure with your own ideas and characters.

Another option is to just reduce the number of jurors to nine. This is a fantasy city after all, they could have nine man juries (or majority vote verdicts, and three voted innocent, etc) This option allows you to run the module pretty much as written. You just have to scale down the combat encounters and make sure the NPCs are helpful when necessary. I'm guessing that's usually the case with solo adventures.

By the way does your wife enjoy an evening of you trying to creep her out?

I've played Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes/Villians and WOW, but I got burned out on traditional MMORPG's: too much of a time sink. That's why Guildwars is my game of choice for the last few years. I can not play for 6 months, then jump on for a special event or see what new feature they've added. Since there's no fee I don't have to feel guilty for not playing.

I too had this game back in the day. I'm sure these days folks would cry "Nerf the crossbow, it's overpowered!"

I was a bit confused on this article. Does the plant companion get everything an animal companion gets, plus the abilities listed in the article?

Most fantasy races don't hold up under much scrutiny. Elves in general must be developmentally disabled in some way if it takes them 10 times longer to become a 1st level wizard than a human.

Personally I never understood why bugbears don't rule the fantasy world. They are physically superior to most PC races but they don't have any intelligence penalty that would hamper the development of a sophisticated civilization. They aren't so big as to cause food supply problems, and they don't have any light blindness issues.

Well I've ordered my item pack, and am very interested to see how I can fit this into my game. I do have some logistical worries though. My players aren't the most organized. They manage to bring their sheets to the game, but I don't know about them keeping track of a bunch of cards. Any suggestions? Should I buy them card keepers and 3 ring binders?

And what about card reuse? If I write 'potion of fly' on a card and hand it to a player, that card would be a fly potion forever. Can a write on these things in pencil? (Sounds silly but many cards are very glossy and don't take any writing well).

Where exactly does the projector sit in this set up? Seems like you would block the projector when you leaned over the table.