Faxsemmar's page

As a suggestion to those folks that get overwhelmed by tracking tons of "minion"-type creatures, try just setting a damage threshold for that group of creatures. If the attacker damages over the threshold, the "minion" goes down; if not, the minion's still up and fightin'. Tack on the "always fails saves" part and you've eliminated about 75% of the paperwork and hassle of handling large groups of creatures. (You can base the threshold on whatever you want--HD, average hit points, "feels right", average damage of your main fighter's weapon, whatever.)

If the creature has special attacks you'll have to figure out how to handle that in a group setting, obviously, but if you're preparing the encounter ahead of time you can decide that at your leisure; if you're winging it at the table you probably have the skill to either roll and shout or just ignore the attacks altogether.

I've found that most players won't even notice you're doing this sort of thing. You can even pretend to make notes on some paper or something if you like, but with most groups I'd bet even that's unnecessary.

If you must track creature hit points individually, and you're using minis, try getting a paint marker and putting a number or a letter on the base of the mini (works better with unfinished bases, but you can also put it on the bottom if necessary). Then you can track them by number on your scratch paper (or whatever) and it's easy for you and your players to determine who's attacking what ("Erowyn's attacking #1, Borlack's pounding #2, Yvelyn's casting hold person on #3, and Ombras is going to try to tumble behind #4 and sneak attack because Borlack's providing flanking there.")

Generally, though, if you've got enough enemies that the sheer amount is a problem, just using a damage threshold will keep the action going and your players will thank you for it.

Oh, you guys misunderstand me. I'm not going to intentionally kill the gobbos off. If they do come into direct conflict with the raiding force, yeah, there's a good chance of casualties. But I'm not going to spin it that way intentionally--it'll all be able how the players handle it.

As an aside; these are not the most tactically oriented players on earth. That's not a bad thing, but it means that many of the big set-piece fights in the AP are going to be higher hurdles for them. The raid on Sandpoint is likely to be one of those times, and it's likely that *player* actions will put the goblins in jeopardy, simply because the players aren't thinking things through. And yes, I'm pretty generous with combat advice if they're a martial character or smart or both.

They've already set themselves up to hate Mokmurian, though they don't know it yet. One's courting Shayliss, for example, and the half-orc has offered to help train the Sandpoint militia (and anyone else who's interested). So when the raid hits Sandpoint, it's going to touch a lot of buttons for the party. The gobbos are just one more button that could possibly get touched, so to speak.

I'm generally all for players doing odd things. It's part of grounding the characters in the game world and adding that bit of flavor that campaigns often lack--the stuff that you say "remember when" about years after the campaign's done. Occasionally you have to rein it in a bit, but I find that's pretty unusual.

So to sum: the goblins aren't going to be Plot Corpses. If they die, it'll be because of the flow of the game and player choices & actions, not because They Must Die. :)

Yeah, I suspect the gobbos are going to go out in a blaze (perhaps literally!) of glory during the chapter 4 fight. They won't really be able to actually do much against the giants and whatnot, but it'll sure make the party burn like hell for Mokmurian's head. :D

Yep. The players specifically took the place outside of town so they could conceal the little buggers for a while during the "rehabilitation."

I gave them a month of downtime following Thistletop, and the mage spent pretty much all of that dealing with the little guys. They don't try to bite him as much now, and he's discovered that mage hand can function nicely to pick the little guys up and toss them into the cages if they're getting too scary. The cleric of Saranrae's been helping out with feeding duties, and said half-orc has been teaching them some fighting skills.. though that's mostly been pulling the inevitable furball apart once their blood gets up.

They've displayed a serious and slightly frightening interest in fire, and the cleric's ability to spontaneously chuck firebolts out of her hands has them awestruck. (We're playing with the PFRPGa3 rules, and she's got the fire domain.)

Next they're going to be learning to talk.. and sing. That should be interesting.

So far no outright fights in the party, though the ranger's been rumbling about turning the lot of them over to Hemlock and the goblin-hating crowd in Sandpoint. So far he hasn't made good on the threats. He and the mage don't get along all that well, so we'll see what happens.

Also, they let Gogmurt and one of the (female) goblin bards get away from Thistletop, so they're likely to turn back up at an inopportune time (possibly during the chapter 4 melee as well, I think; that's going to be a giant hairy furball of doom if I have anything to say about it).

I'm running Rise of the Runelords currently; we've just finished Burnt Offerings and are stepping into Skinsaw.

As a throwaway, I included four Goblin children in the nursery, to see how my players would handle it and to stimulate some intra-party roleplaying (one of the characters is a ranger with Goblinoid favored enemy). They ended up taking the four cages back and putting them up in a rented house outside of Sandpoint (where the mage has established himself).

I've got Classic Monsters Revisited, and I've read the goblin entry in that fairly closely. It appears that goblins are nasty due to upbringing rather than inclination (nurture vs. nature). Right now, the little bastards are mostly comic relief and a money sink for the party, but I have a feeling they're going to be asking some questions about how their reformation efforts are going.

I'm inclined to let them succeed to a degree, though the goblins (should they live) will no doubt be irritating and capricious even if turned to "good."

(Honestly, a good chunk of my willingness to let the players "win" is the idea of 4 ~2' goblins fighting with the 6'10" half-orc fighter to defend Sandpoint in chapter 4 tickles me, as well as associated melodrama should one or more of the little buggers survive.)

Anyone else include this element in their playthroughs? How did your players handle it?

I'd also argue against special rules for helmets. Armor's always been handled as "full suits" in D&D because there's not really any kind of hit location system. If you start separating out pieces (like a helmet), you more or less have to include such a system and break out ALL the various armor pieces to some degree.

Shields generally cover a significant chunk of the body, and are part of the wielder's "active" defense to a large degree--you want to take blows on the shield, so you're going to move to do that when you have it. From that derives the shield's AC bonus, in my mind. The user is actively trying to use the shield to block a blow, so it provides its defense bonus.

Helmets are passive armor. You generally aren't trying to block blows with your head, ala a shield, unless you've got a fairly bizarre fighting style or no vital organs in your skull. So providing an overall bonus to AC for a helmet type doesn't really make all that much sense, because unless all or even most blows are aiming at the head, it's just not going to be the only means of defense all that much.

Maybe for specific kinds of armor (full plate, anything else that might reasonably have big bulky helmets) you can specify perception penalties. It seems like a lot of work for not very much payoff in the end, though.

Faxsemmar wrote:

I guess I should have asked "why haven't you used it more in the 4e forum more often?"

It seems like we went from "please be civil" to removing threads and deleting posts in one pop.

January 4th we asked people to be civil. This was in response to months of folks not being civil.

March 12th we put the hammer down.

That hardly qualifies as "one pop". :-)

Um.. I might be misunderstanding, but that is one pop: you put up the warning thread and then a couple of months later started removing threadsn and deleting posts.

I guess I was just expecting something along the lines of:

* Put up "please be civil", give it a week or three
* No/inadequate response: start issuing warnings and timeouts
* Warnings/timeouts not producing desired levels of civility, change sticky to "Be civil or you're gone" and then give it a few days or a week (while still doing warnings/timeouts)
* No/inadequate response: drop the banhammer

...which is considerably more than one pop. I'd also have no problem with reducing the delays/wait for response to a couple of days on things. This may in fact have occurred, but I didn't notice it.

Water under the bridge at this point, though, so what can you do?

Faxsemmar wrote:

Why don't you use the timeout feature more?

We issue warnings to people before we resort to that. That usually does the trick.

I guess I should have asked "why haven't you used it more in the 4e forum more often?"

It seems like we went from "please be civil" to removing threads and deleting posts in one pop.

We do not disappear posts without leaving an explanation in the thread. If posts are missing and there's no explanation, it's almost certainly one of a few known messageboard bugs which I am trying to fix.

We also do have the ability to give someone a timeout. We've used it precisely once.

[edit]Yes, on the day we started the moderation of this forum we removed a bunch of stuff from a lot of older threads and didn't leave notes, but that was mainly because there was just so much crap to deal with. Going forward our policy is to be open and always leave a note.

That's fantastic to hear, then. A couple of questions:

Why don't you use the timeout feature more? I suspect most of the posts that are vitriolic are so because the poster is writing in the heat of emotion, rather than some kind of systematic attempt to be a jerk/troll. Giving particularly "energetic" posters a timeout for a while might be an easy way to cool down heated discussions without forcing censorship.

Is there any way to collect these reasons somewhere for everyone to see? Obviously this is easier if they're tied to timeouts or bans rather than just being a mod snip in a particular thread. I bring it up because I think if there's no way to centrally look at moderator activity it makes it much harder to get a sense for where the line is. I don't read every thread, generally, so the odds are I'm going to miss someone being a jerk and getting slapped down for it.

Also, as a general note for people posting: take responsibility for your words and think before you hit that post key. Are you being a jerk? Are you responding to that other guy's points, or are you calling his mother fat (or both at the same time)? Are you angry about the person's post and that's why you're posting? If so, maybe you should cancel and step away from the thread for a while. Come back later when you've got a bit cooler head, and post then. I suspect your post will be better quality and you'll avoid seeming like a lout. Doesn't mean you have to take crap from someone, just that you should weigh your words before putting them out there.. because they're yours and reflect on you.

This applies double to people who are passive-aggressive and snarky to others who are obviously passionate and emotionally involved in something: you know what you're doing, and if you don't the first couple of times you get a blistering response should clue you in. You're equally at fault in things, and I hope the moderators keep a sharp watch for you as well as the frothers.

It's a shame that there isn't some middle path. Another message board I'm on that has some ...interesting posters has the ability to put folks on probation: they can read the forums but can't post. It's used in place of a ban or outright deletion to give people some time to cool off. Often *both* sides in a particularly heated debate will be put on probation for a day or three. In addition, the reason for the probation is available to *everyone* to see (it's like this for bans, too).

I think that transparency is key to making it work. Yes, probations or banning are censorship, but it's censorship based on the dynamics of the forum. Each online forum is a pretty unique community if you're doing it right, and like any community it's going to have its own set of mores. The only way for people to know what that particular forum considers egregrious offenses is to see what has been banned/probated/censored in the past. You build a much better picture of where the line is, and because it's open to everyone to see, people don't have really any excuse for being an ass.

Right now, I think a lot of the problem is stuff is just disappearing into thin air. I know I've been confused by a number of threads where posts just disappeared with no marker or anything. I only noticed it when people below the suppressed line had responded to the post prior to the removal and the quote was still there. You want to rein in the flaming and threadcrapping? Fine--rein in the people doing the posting. Prevent them from posting for a bit, and let them (and everyone else) SEE that they're being punished for being jerks and asses. THAT'S how you moderate without coming off as being censoring, because people start to figure out where your line is.

Moderating a forum, particularly one as active as this one is, is *not* an easy or fun task, as numerous posters have pointed out. But it is necessary, because the moderators are responsible for maintaining the "culture" of the forum. Right now, Paizo's falling down on that--just "disappearing" things you don't like works in the short term, because hey, the inflammatory stuff is gone. But it backfires in the long term, because people don't know where the line is and they get paranoid about it and end up leaving or reducing their participation for fear of the banhammer.

I'm *not* for a complete lack of moderation. People *will* be jerks on the internet, and if you don't control them they *will* overrun your forum. But you can't pander to the thin-skins, either, because that kills (as someone else noted) the passion and involvement people have--forums and such are a place where you're supposed to be a bit over the top. If the load on Paizo's staff is too high, perhaps consider adding some volunteer mods from the community for particular areas that attract flames.

It seems to me that there's two things missing: a technical ability to cool people off through probation or something similar and a willingness to moderate in the open so that the line is visible.

I always thought Earthdawn's approach to magic items was interesting and very much addressed the Christmas Tree issue. Essentially, utility items tended to be limited use (like one-time or limited per day) but pretty widely available. So everyone had a "magic item" or four, though they didn't really do all that much.

Occasionally (usually as part of a campaign focus), a character would acquire a really powerful magic item--these things had backstories, were unique, and were head and shoulders above the normal utility items. The neat part was that until the character spent time using and linking his/her own story to the item's, it wasn't really all that powerful.

By performing Deeds (actions specific to the item, like visiting pivotal spots in the item's history, finishing tasks unfinished by the creator/owner, etc.), the character gained the ability to unlock additional powers--to use the item closer to its full ability. (There was also costs associated with this unlock, so it wasn't just a 'complete quest, gain power level II' type situation.)

Characters could also use a similar system to make their own mundane items into these legendary items over time, which was an even neater mechanic--by working with the GM, you could start with a plain longsword and gradually tie it to your character and his/her history, imbueing it with powers as you gained in power yourself.

Earthdawn had its share of problems, but it also had some really awesome concepts.