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For what it is worth, Americans can generally think in metric units if we want to. We just don't want to. We prefer to think in feet and pounds. Five decades of trying to make metric units work in the United States has resulted in two liter soda bottles...and little else.
I think the gaming was fun, overall. I had less fun than in previous years. I gave Paizo less money. My suggestion for Pathfinder Society scenario play would be a bit less talking and a bit more action. It seems to me that a group meeting at a convention should be able to jump right into play. This is especially important for situations with so much background noise.
I did not have trouble finding a PFS game to join. I thought the setup worked pretty well - for an aggressive person. I showed up at the proper station, at the proper time, raised my hand and joined up. The real trouble with this seemed to be people with event tickets who did not turn up on time. Perhaps, instructions for these events should stipulate a time frame (and a very narrow time frame) after which your reservation is void. You cannot show up at 1:15 for a 1:00 game and look surprised when things have moved on. On the other hand, my good friend brought his son to PaizoCon this year. He wanted to get involved in the games, but the character creation area was blocked by some other group and not available. (What was with that? It was only the start of the convention, so not an important time at all, right?) He wanted to find out about PFS, but he was puzzled by the chaos, lack of instructions and the lack of interest PaizoCon staff seemed to display about giving information to newbies. I think he did finally get into a game, but I don't think he's coming back next year. Customer service actually does count. I was puzzled by the placement of the bulletin board where people could pin up reservation cards they were not using. 150 feet away from the gaming area, around a corner and down a narrow corridor seemed odd to me. I was annoyed by the constant announcements about how people needed to turn in their game tokens. Start with more of them next time. ("If you don't turn them in we're not going to give out any more!" Wow, that is really fair to everyone!) It took two tokens to roll the dice. At one token per game and three games per day, it was painfully slow to earn a roll. In the jam of the hallway, it was hard to even get at the table to turn in my tokens. Game masters who do not show up for scheduled events? Really a large problem. You say you stayed up late on Saturday? You want to see Seattle on Sunday? Show up for your game no matter what. Game celebrities who are at the convention but cannot be bothered to keep a commitment? What's with that? It seems a simple matter for a company that produces miniatures to have scenario miniatures on hand for PFS game masters. Did you do that and I just got the wrong impression? I was VERY gratified by the absence of larpers putting on a play that few can hear and even fewer care about. The Reaper Paint and Take area was fun and they had it staffed all the time. It was like a calm oasis at the convention. I just wish they had brought more miniatures for their vendor area. I wanted to buy some - and at special, convention pricing. The vendor area was empty - by which I mean "empty of convention specials." I know you cannot control it, but there need to be more vendors, more RPG items on display and more effort at really generating sales. An author with a few graphic novels on the table (only $39.99!) is taking up space that could display RPG products. Paizo themselves should have convention specials on many more items. There is a reason for convention specials: They generate sales and they provide motive to buy now, rather than looking on Ebay. Do your vendors know the internet exists? You might consider whether the Paizo Banquet is really the best use of time and space. Perhaps, a shorter event where you hawk new product at a faster pace? As PaizoCon grows, the banquet is going to become a bigger and bigger albatross. Is it really worth the hassle? Is it worth the opportunity cost? There cannot be enough clear signs to identify where each event is supposed to take place. There were some. More are needed. If PaizoCon is really locked into the SeaTac desert for another year, I would suggest a frank conversation with the Marriott management about their event staffing. Four guys waiting to park cars. No guys cleaning the bathrooms. That seems a wrong priority. There were other examples.
I hated the Marriot. 1) Box perimeter design means a long walk to anywhere in the hotel. 2) Bathroom adequate for 150, used by 500 and cleaned once a day whether it needed it or not. We might as well have just pee'd on the floor. 3) Parking ripoff! The $36 they ripped off from me to park was $36 Paizo did not get in sales to me. When the parking costs almost as much as the convention, there is something wrong. 4) No restaurants or other facilities within walking distance, and no in/out privileges from the parking ripoff. Ate at the 7-11 numerous times because there was nothing nothing nothing nothing else. (Did I mention that there was nothing else? Nothing!) 5) Price gouging in the hotel store and restaurant...more money siphoned off from Paizo. 6) I thought the larger gaming area was great, but that also meant lots more noise. One event, I could only hear about every third word our squeaky-voiced game master said. That really complicates things when "Fortress of the Nail" turns out to be a yawner "talkie" with three ludicrously petulant Hell Knight officials. The noise in one big room could have been dampened by using the dividers to make it three big rooms. 7) It seemed like there was another group using the hotel entrance and the space set aside for character creation on Friday night. Was there really another group scheduled for Friday, not only in the same hotel, at the same time, but also literally in the same space as PaizoCon? The Marriot was a terrible venue.
The call for volunteers mostly had to do with Pathfinder Society volunteers. That is not what I want to do. I want to run several games as part of the lottery system.
Ready to volunteer to run a Pathfinder game. Not sure who to email or what.....
Actually... go with the 1d8 base damage for the hill giant's hurled rocks. The universal monster rock hurling rules at the end of the book are the generic rules. When you go to the actual entry for the hill giant on page 150 of the Bestiary, though, it does 1d8 base damage with rocks. Basically—changes to universal monster rule expectations in a monster's stat block always overrule the "generic" version of those rules. It IS a bit awkward that all the monsters who use "rock hurling" use different dice than what the universal monster rules suggest, and if there IS an error there, it's in the universal monster rules. But it's all good, anyway. Reading the hill giant's rock throwing ability as written...1d8+10 means that getting hit by a rock thrown by a giant is just slightly worse than getting hit by a human with a good longbow. And, given that the human could fire a bow multiple times, the giant as written is at a serious disadvantage against even a moderate warrior. This means that in an exchange of projectiles with any reasonably adept party, the giants would always come up short. They are essentially throwing glorified darts rather than crushing hunks of stone. Doesn't it make much more sense to admit that the monster stats as written are in error and follow the rock throwing abilty as described and make the hill giant's damage 2d8+10? Also, wouldn't it make sense to allow the giant to throw more than one boulder per round?
You probably didn't like Zardoz, either. Right?
The dumbest movie ever made was Hercules, starring Lou Ferrigno.
Zardoz was better than Highlander II. Zardoz was an artsy sci fi film with a difficult plot. Highlander II was an insult to the intelligence of fantasy fans.
Always remember...when you're being "fair,"...you do not go out for pizza after the game with any of the monsters. Nor are any of the monsters going to be best man at your wedding.
That is pretty cool role-playing. You should be happy to have players like that...unless what the players did was actually sarcasm intended to drive home a point.
Think of your role as a gamemaster as a bank account. When you provide a fun adventure and make good rulings, you deposit good will and credibility into that account. When you let the PC's win even though it frustrates your plans or kills your favorite villain, you deposit good will and credibility into that account. When you make a ruling the player's don't like, you make a withdrawl from that account. Sometimes, this is necessary. When you do really unworthy things...like having your favorite villain get away using an obviously contrived device...like cheating on dice rolls so your monster lives longer or hits harder...like having NPC's do things that are either illogical or based on information they could not possibly know...you make a serious withdrawl on both your good will and credibility. Probably the worst thing you can do is retaliate against the PC's because they did something that merely annoyed you or struck you as out of character. Gamemasters who draw their accounts dangerously low lose players.
Is there an in-game reason why anyone would know about the magic items the player characters took? Yes - Have NPC's do whatever they would logically do. Follow that logic without malice, limiting NPC actions to what is actually known and what the NPC's would really do...including choosing to ignore the matter. No - Is there any sort of religious penalty or alignment violation penalty that might apply? For instance, could a paladin lose his powers until he atones for his misdeed and returns the items? Could one of the PC's (like a monk) lose her ability to advance in a class because she is no longer Lawful? Best Advice: The absolute worst thing a gamemaster can do is retaliate against the PC's (and thus, their players) for not playing the way the gamemaster thinks they should. There is no way this will come off as reasonable to the players. This embitters players and sets them up against the gamemaster. They will stop trusting you...and for good reason, since you will have proven untrustworthy.
The Black Monastery is listed as being for levels 7-9. Hopefully, game masters will take the encounters and treasure as listed and modify them for their own games. There are notes for changing the deadliness of any given encounter and a good range of monster stats for different situations. The entire module is meant to be fun, in the Old School style, with lots of strange events and interesting and amusing encounters. You can't go wrong if you take what is written and run with it.
That seems kind of sexist to me. Women can't defend themselves and/or are intimidated easily? It doesn't sound sexist to me. It sounds accurate. Change it to "Most women" and "more easily" and you pretty much have it right. Seems that the wife handled the situation well. She doesn't appear to have been intimdated at all.
Because dudes have more upper body strength than women and children,
Geez. How many Mexicans were you planning to devour?
The biggest area of need from 2010 was the vendor area. It needed a bigger room, more vendors and more things going on with those vendors. The funniest thing that happened at PaizoCon 2010 (for me) was when I visted the Kobold Quarterly/Open Design table. I picked up a business card from Wolfgang Baur....then I spent $20+ on copies of Kobold Quarterly and got the chance to spin their Wheel of Swag. And I won.....(wait for it).....a business card from Wolfgang Baur!
The largest area of need I saw at PaizCon 2010 was a larger vendor area and more vendors. Oh...and I could always use more free swag. :) |
