Elvish Fighter

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Organized Play Member. 24 posts. No reviews. No lists. No wishlists.



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James Jacobs wrote:

What's taking us so long to clear up these issues is that we've got more on our plates than keeping our house "in order," unfortunately. The pace at which we produce products, which need to come out on as regular a schedule as possible due to our subscription models (a model that, by the way, makes what we do at Paizo possible since it allows us some resistance against the fickle whims of distribution and lets us observe and control a significant amount of our business which allows us to more accurately spend resources and money on things like print runs—something that a lack of played a MAJOR role in driving TSR out of business) means that the bulk of our time is spent working on upcoming products.

It's certainly frustrating to see errors show up in print, just as it is frustrating when two different philosophies of game design sometimes clash together. We're doing what we can to adjust things. We ARE working on solving the issue with the monk, but the timing of when we do that and release that information has to work hand in hand with other things, like our regularly scheduled production responsibilities, RPG Superstar, Mythic Playtests, Convention duties, licensing stuff (such as with the minis, comics, or Goblinworks), and vacations/personal lives.

To a certain extent, though, fans of the game need to help. First, but letting us know when we mess up is important. It might take several months or even a year or more to see that error corrected in print due to the time it takes for us to turn the metaphorically immense battleship that is Paizo Publishing, but if we don't realize or know we made a mistake, we can't fix it at all in the first place.

Second, being patient with us as we react to feedback is IMMENSELY helpful. Letting us know that there's concerns with the monk is certainly important, but gnawing and worrying and obsessing on this fact non-stop isn't very productive, and only really leads to flame wars and internet-fueled discontent. And realizing that no two people play the game...

This was an interesting thread and having started my RPG adventuring with the boxed set (before it was a boxed set) and actually owning a copy of Chainmail, what struck me throughout the thread is that creativity of the GM and the players seems to have been stifled over the years by the desire to have the rules be so clear as to be non-ambiguous 100% of the time. Rules lawyering and arguments over rules have, in my own experience, broken up more groups than anything else. I understand the desire to get it both right and be fair. I spend a lot of time scouring the boards for clarity on rules from time to time and even post to get some feedback occasionally. So I understand that desire, but I wish more players would appreciate the adventure more, even when every rule doesn't work quite the way they want it to and every spell isn't as awesome as they would like it to be. I'd like to see creativity be more important than the the need for a PFRules database (though that would be kind of awesome and eliminate hours of searching.)

I find that the Paizo team is one of the best teams in the RPG industry and their success has created some of the problems discussed on this thread. Their popularity and success also present them with many obligations as noted in the post that I quoted. I felt as I was reading many of the posts that those posting had barely a clue as to how any large and successful business is run especially when it has to balance time, resources, and the "wants" of it's customers. The fact that James posted at least seven responses to this thread means that he and Paizo are interested in feedback and want to address customer concerns. For all of us that should be enough at this point.

Ravingdork and others have planted the seed. Now let's let it grow.


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The Adventure Paths seem to have artifacts in them quite often. When the party got one of them in the campaing I'm running, the wizard rolled to identify the item and got a 41 on his check which was enough to identify the item per my interpretation of the rules using Detect Magic and Spellcraft.

However, one of the DMs in the group said that the abilities of an artifact can't be determined that way. The Detect Magic spell doesn't say this. Analyze Dweomor says specifically it won't work on artifacts. Legend Lore only gives you legendary information about an item and doesn't specifically say that it will tell you the abilities of an artifact.

The artifact rules don't specifically say how the abilities of an artifact are determined nor how the ways to destroy the artifact are discovered.

So my big question, is how does a person determine what the abilities of an artifact are? And how does a person determine how to destroy an artifact?