Eluhil's page

I'll be posting odds and ends from the Alpha Instructions document as I find them interesting.

Chat options are: Hex, Party, Local (about 50 yards), and Whisper (direct tells sent and received).

So far at least, no World Chat.

I've been mulling it over, and while World Chat can be very convenient, I'm currently in favor of not having it. Too immersion-breaking.

I usually GM, and we're a bunch of newer players with one experienced player among us, so not a whole lot of PC death going on, but we have one player in particular who's very fickle, and likes to roll something up, play it for 1 or more sessions, then decide he doesn't like it. Invariably, he asks the experienced player to kill his character off, and me to come up with a reason to justify it. He's about to do this with a 4th level ranger he's been playing for nearly 2 months. It's ridiculous. We make many a joke about how he offers his characters as sacrifices to the other player, and how, if this were Highlander, the player he "feeds" would've won by now.

First in regard to.

"Thief: Characters gain looting rights to NPCs and other players they defeat in combat. Looting rights unlock after about 5 minutes so that anyone can loot a corpse. Looting an unlocked husk that you did not originally have looting rights to will mark you as a Thief. This flag lasts for a decent length of time after the act."

This seems very odd to have an immunity delay and a thief flag. Surly if it has sat there for five minutes unlooted this would mean the person with rights doesn't want it? Why not remove the flag and extend the immunity time a bit more and avoid it all together? Or remove the immunity bit and have actual stealing rather then picking up abandoned goods as it seems now.

I fear the only real use for this is leaving stuff laying about and waiting in ambush for anyone to foolishly pick up the seemingly abandoned objects.

My presumed logic for this being thievery is that it is because you're stealing from the killed party. Yes, we know they can come back and retrieve their things, but since soulbinding points will vary in distance from where you die, there are sure to be times when it becomes impossible to reach your husk, even going as fast as you can, in 5 minutes or less-particularly if you were out gathering resources in an unclaimed hex adjacent to or even farther from your own "home hex" if you will.

This flag also has interesting implications in other ways. We know you're only allowed to apply "Calistria's Sting" to those who did the actual killing of you, seemingly leaving open a niche for scavengers to try and steal from a PC they did not themselves kill. The Thief flag provides a fairly balanced way to still have an OOC reason to at least want to question those flagged. Or more concretely, let's say I'm harvesting away from home, a 10 minute run away from my settlement. A bandit held me at bladepoint threatening me. Being brave...and noticing a powerful NPC monster about to enter aggro radius to us both, I let him kill me rather than surrender to his tactics. I run back to my body, fast as I can. I find both of our husks have been looted already, and notice you walking away casually with the Thief flag up. I now have probable cause to question you for my belongings. Maybe I pay you to have them returned. Maybe I just ask you if you know who took them. Or, perhaps I make the not illogical conclusion that YOU are the one who stole from me, and RPing my character as well as using the metagame knowledge that killing a Thief-flagged player has diminished penalties, I choose to attack!

Sebastian Hirsch wrote:

One of those has a chance of meaningfull human interaction, the other doesn't...

That's actually a very good response. So, how about a kid that doesn't interact with anyone - except a GM when absolutely necessary?

To me, this is just as bad as a bot, though in a different way. Both of them are having a detrimental effect on human-game interaction. Although in the case of your latest example Nihimon, I think the qualitative difference is that it's this poor kid who either doesn't know how to, or doesn't want to interact and is being made to who's being cheated, at least as much as you could say that other players are cheated by bots.

Age charts, as well as height and weight, are available in the Dragon Empire Gazetteer.

Tapestry's Embrace was probably a new spell that they cut. Just ignore it.

Wow...I honestly feel a bit dumb on that one. It never occurred to me to reference the previous gazetteer. Guess I'm just lazy and used to the convenience of things being in one place. My bad Paizo staff! I am curious about the spell though. You may very well be right, but I'm nitpicky, and it has kind of a cool name, so if there's something missing, or if it's a hint towards the future, I'd love to know. It occurs to me that, both being 3rd level Wizard/Sorcerer spells, that maybe it was just an early draft name of the presented new spell Call the Void?

Not sure at all if I'm in the right place to be asking this, but it's been nagging at me since I read it. How do we determine middle age, old age, venerable age, and maximum age for each of the new races of Tian Xia? On a tangent from that...I see the spell tapestry's embrace listed as being one of the new Void element, but I can find no description for this spell anywhere!

In the old days there was the greatest "humanoid" monster ever -- the Githyanki. It's the famous cover monster of the 1981 Fiend Folio. Anyway, the Githyanki had "lieutenants" that were called "Gish" -- they were fighter-mages.

So the nickname "Gish" refers to any class that is a mix of fighter and mage: Duskblade, Hexblade, Mage-Blade, Magus, etc., etc.

Often, "Gish" is used as a pejorative by the many gamers who despise Ftr/Wiz combos.

Though I don't like gish classes, I've never used "Gish" as a pejorative.

Many gamers use the term "gish" instead of "magus" or any of the other gish classes from the past. Paizo can shout it from the mountaintops that it's a "Magus" all they want but sorry, b*@~*es, it's a "Gish." It's always gonna be a "Gish."

I'm new enough to gaming that that description was pretty much informative to the standards of an encyclopedia, or at least wikipedia, okay maybe TVTropes. In any case, thanks.

Truth be told, this thread has already gotten too long for me to bother reading all of it, so I have no idea what has been said by whom, but basically, I'm psyched for this game. I'm relatively new to roleplaying, and almost as new to MMOs, but, compared to DnD 4e and even 3.5, I find Golarion and all its mysteries infinitely more interesting. This is certainly a game I'll be paying for when allowed to. I don't think I've found myself so immersed in a fantasy setting since I first read the Lord of the Rings years ago. I want to attend the Arcanamirium! I want to see the world in all its glory without either having to go through the trouble of GMing myself-though I do enjoy it, or having to put up with the often unreliable at best other GMs in my relatively rural area. Basically, yeah, I'm geeking. I definitely like the idea of the model as presented in this article as well. I do have my concerns though. Middleware can be marvelous, especially when done right, but I've seen games where it creates its own kind of money pit-just that the money is going to another company instead of towards your own infrastructure. Still, I'm very optimistic. Now, adapting the game for a different medium is a creature in itself, though based on my game experiences, I do hope they keep its digital system as close to that of the core game as possible. I like having to prepare spells! Call me crazy but I do. And it's faux pas for almost any MMO, but I like the idea of character death being significant and having major detriments. Don't just go trying to charge the Gallowspires at level 7 you fool! In any case, regardless of what the mainstream gaming media will say, I know people who play EVE Online. If this is as wonderfully-developed a world as that, I know we'll find success! I look forward to the day when I can even venture to Akiton for some planetary romance, things like that. I hope the sandbox can even drive the Theme Park elements nicely. I'd like to see the Gluttonous Tome first discovered in pieces by unsuspecting PCs, and have its current location be determined by what they then did with it!