Come join us! The more the merrier when it comes to shenanigans!
Awww. I'll miss Radillo. But happy to see Imrikja. Forgot - I am also not playing for Tier Progression
For example, my very first PFS female character thinks everyone else is beneath her and she uses her super good looks to take advantage of the opposite sex. So, if there is a role -playing encounter where there is a NPC male that we are having problems getting information from. I will literally describe to the GM how my character is flirting. I will often tell the GM (after reminding him of my picture and Super high Charisma (32),) Something like- ” I walk up really close behind him barely brushing up against him, I let him smell my scent and I lightly blow in his ear.” If that doesn’t work I might go on further and start hinting at something special later.This would make me extremely uncomfortable. Extremely. I will second this. I have walked away from a table that I was playing where someone was doing this because it made me so uncomfortable.
Hi Dan! I'm in charge of the PACS Open this year! Advancement is done by teams. When you fill out your scoresheet for Round 1, you're going to talk about which slots on Saturday you are available for Round 2. Once I know which teams have advanced to Round 2, I'll spend some time on Friday night making a schedule that can suit everyone, and then text teams that advanced letting them know when they should show up.
- Pre-print character advancement. I spend a lot of time reminding new players when they get a card feat, power feat or skill feat. This might be hard to combine with the above idea, but a generic advancement sheet in the guide would be nice. Hmmmm... this could be an interesting cheat sheet to make...
Also, I've heard Nikolai Adonai from The Sealed Gate is actually a PC character turned NPC, but I'd like to see what became of him.I believe he was the authors Venture Captain PC. He wasn't the author's VC PC, he was another person's VC PC. *puts on PC historian cap* Back in the early days of PFS, there was a running joke on the messageboards that Kyle Baird was the deadliest GM in all of PFS. Joe Caubo constantly kept daring Kyle Baird to kill one of his characters, and it became a running joke of its own. Eventually, at one big convention, Kyle ran Race for the Runecarved Key 1 for Joe playing VC Nikolai Adonai at Seeker tier, and killed him in one of the biggest combats in that scenario. Kyle then added that character in Sealed Gate, presumably so that we could all rejoice in killing him too.
I said this on Facebook but I'll say it here too: The Frozen Oath is the closest I have ever seen to a PFS scenario where I don't feel like I need to make a prep document. That's saying something. I plan on testing GMing this without doing my prep document to see how it feels.
In the board part at the end, my table realized they could jam doors, and proceeded to do so for 30-45 minutes as the Jinsul in my tier were wholly unable to get through the bulkhead doors. Poor Jinsul :( We may have been a bunch of different races on our character sheet, but we were all half-troll.
Thanks everyone! Bonekeep has be in the works in some form for about 2 and a half years, so I'm excited it finally got to see the light of day. I would also like to give a huge shoutout to Rigby. They were an amazing second and really helped me manage the ACG area. If people played in the Open and have feedback for me, both good and bad, please feel free to send it to me. (Just don't post spoilers publicly!)
Running book 5 and utilizing the rebuild. Anna's contingency still works in the monastery that has forbiddance cast within? I... may have forgotten about that when writing Anna. The reason why the contingency is there is because at the time that the book is happening, Anna is supposed to be in a prison in Russia IIRC, and I figured that it was plausible that she just disappeared from the prison to be with Rasputin for a while and no one noticed. She is supposed to show back up in a few years to the rest of the world, so the contingency is supposed to be a failsafe against the players killing her and breaking the time stream. However you want to deal with that issue when you run it is up to you! Glad to see people using my Rasputin!
So I'm waiting on the PFS Prep forum to be created for Skitter Shot so I can upload it, but in the meantime, here are my GM notes for Skitter Shot. Player Cheat Sheets will be coming later.
Has anyone done any prep documents with stats of the bad guys or gear/ability descriptions yet? I want to have some for Saturday, but don't know if I'll have time to do it myself as well as finish my ship build for it. That is on my list of things to do. There should be a document up before Saturday.
If you're playing just the RPG side, then you don't need to worry about it at all. There will be playing tables that are playing the ACG that effect the room's overall outcome and some events during the game, but it's not like we're going to sweep the map and minis away from an RPG table and pull out an ACG box. (We are NOT bringing enough boxes to do that with 150+ tables of the RPG!) If you want to play the ACG though, we'll have some tables playing through the ACG version of the adventure. It's gonna be a lot of fun! We'll have class decks to lend if you don't own any, but feel free to bring your own!
I believe that Iammars was suggesting a way of describing her that includes the fact that she's transgender. I think the important distinction here is that Miss Feathers has always been a woman, even if she presented as male before. That was exactly what I was trying to say.
Prepare for that aspect of your character to never matter - you've seen a little bit of a skewed point of view - the fact that Cathran is trans has become extremely relevant thanks to a quirk of that adventure path. The vast majority of my trans characters never really have it come up at the table. But that's okay. I know they're trans, and that's important to me. (But certainly don't feel like it's something you need to alone - one of the great benefits about RPGs is that you can be something that you aren't presently.)
I get why you feel that way — pushed on all sides. But do realize that many of us are also trying to find the right words so that we can say the right things to be more welcoming and inclusive. We’re just not always very good at expressing ourselves. There’s going to be a lot of flailing around. (It’s not only trans folk in transition. Our society is transitioning too.) Oh, I get that. I may have been a little more terse at the end there than I meant to be – that was mostly because I was falling asleep while writing that last post and I wanted to get it out before I passed out from tiredness. I’m sympathetic to helping people figure out the right language. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be in this thread. What I’m not really sympathetic to is cis people telling us what would be easier for them. There is very little that matters less in this world than a cis person’s opinion about a trans or nonbinary pronouns, yet we seem to get those opinions given to us a lot. I realized I quoted Hmm at the top, although that’s not really fair because this isn’t really directed at her. But as a general message to various people in this thread – your opinion about what trans and nonbinary people should or shouldn’t do isn’t new. We’ve heard it multiple times before, and we’re tired of it. Don’t be afraid to ask about what you should do, and if we specifically ask you what we should do then go ahead and respond. But we’re really tired of cis suggestions as to what we should do. More directed towards Hmm’s post: Yeah, trans tends to be used more as an umbrella for nonbinary folks than the other way around. There’s no way that I would describe myself as nonbinary for instance – I’m very much a woman, which puts me straight in the gender binary. That having been said, there are a growing number of nonbinary folks who don’t appreciate using trans as an umbrella – as trans is more often used to represent moving from one side of the binary to the other, whereas nonbinary are exploring their gender in other ways. That’s why I’ve been trying to avoid using trans as an umbrella in this thread.
Ignorant cis white dude here. When portraying non-binary character and in the position of correcting a wrong pronoun, is it better to use "I don't identify as..." over "I am not..."? Alternately, would it be better to use a more affirmative "I am nonbinary"? Is there a preferred standard around that language or should I look for clues in the character's write-up? Again, I can’t speak for nonbinary people, as I am a trans woman, but I never use the phrase “I identify as” or “I don’t identify as”. I am a woman. I admit that eventually our language would adapt to the new use of 'they.' My point is that it would likely adapt quicker and smoother if a completely new word was used. Which, again, I would think would be something that community would benefit from. I have a friend who uses ze & zer as pronouns instead of he/she & his/her. I know it is just one of several pronouns schemes available. I still have trouble remembering zer pronouns sometimes, but I try. My problem in Paizo products is remembering to use they instead of ze. I would have prefered Paizo use a different pronoun scheme, as it would have a)Taken away the 'they' controversy and b)Been easier on my own usage. But they didn't, so... oh well. Right, so here’s the issue. To the two of you (and many other people as well!), this seems like a really obvious choice. If you make up a new word as the singular gender neutral pronoun, then that eliminates a lot of the ambiguity of using they. But that solution is not as obvious to other people as it is to you. They rolls off the tongue much easier than a pronoun that you’ve never used before. It already conjugates verbs in a way that feels natural to us. And the “not telling the difference between singular they and plural they” is usually figured out from context clues. After all, if there are two men in a mission briefing and the text refers to one of them with “he”, usually you can figure out which one they mean. In the end, there will be advantages and disadvantages to using they/them or something like ze/zer. And quite frankly nonbinary folks don’t always agree on which they should use. I know both people who use they/their and fey/feir. It seems like the majority of nonbinary folks are pushing towards they/them mostly due to its wonderful use as an umbrella term. (If we were having this discussion 10-15 years ago, we might have been pushing the other direction with making up our own pronouns for each instance.) But I’ll be honest, the part that’s really bugging me is the whole “if you do this, it would be easier to accept you.” Like, part of the issue with being trans/nonbinary is that you get a lot of people policing what you “should” be doing to properly be trans/nonbinary and often giving conflicting messages. I can give an example as a trans woman. If a trans woman dresses feminine, there will be complaints that she’s “appropriating womenhood” and that “she’s just wearing a costume”, while if she dresses more neutral there will be complaints that she’s “not feminine enough”. There’s never any acceptable region to be in. This discussion is starting to sound like that. Miss Feathers: I portrayed her a smart information broker who happened to be a prostitute. My description: “Miss Feathers is a boisterous large and muscular woman with sharp eyes and information on everyone in town. At one point, she was male, but that was a while ago.” Better: “Miss Feathers used to present as male, but now she presents as female.” Also, Miss Feathers and Medda Spiritbreaker are not nonbinary – they’re both trans women – or so they’ve shown us.
Since we have the attention of Iammars and Rigby, let me ask what you would do, beyond trying to nail the pronouns (which I flub pronouns of PCs all the time, but its a thing to work on), with player characters who make the effort to point out that they are non-binary? I wanted to make sure I responded to it before it got lost in all the other posts in this thread. Pronouns are obviously going to be the biggest thing, as that is probably the biggest way a character’s gender manifests in the game. The other major thing is going to be to watch for gendered responses and gendered language. One of the nice things that the PFS developers make sure of is that there’s not any real gendered responses baked in. This means that you just need to police your own language and make sure that you’re not using stuff like “man”, “dude”, etc. A smaller thing is that oftentimes, nonbinary folks (or any other trans folks in general) can often feel like they have to be the “bad person” and correct people about their pronouns all the time. (I've also seen this be true of people who play nonbinary characters who aren't necessarily nonbinary themselves.) Obviously it’s a bit awkward as the GM to interfere on PC’s in-game discussions, but out of game if a player refers to a character by the wrong pronoun, it would be helpful to have someone other than the same person correcting that player. That makes it feel like it’s not just one person insisting that everyone refers to their character by the correct pronouns, but that everyone else is insisting.
This is a common argument against “they” as a pronoun. I’m going to start by linking to one of Rigby’s older posts about the subject. It’s not 100% relevant to this particular discussion, but there’s a quote that I want to pull out of it that’s really good.
People really like telling nonbinary folks what pronouns they should or shouldn’t use, or what would be easier or not for other people to learn. The fact is, nonbinary is used as a catchall term for a lot of smaller stuff, and different people feel differently. They is a good catchall term for a lot of different identities, and it’s already built into our language. Besides, languages change and words change. As a former IT helpdesk, I will occasionally get confused when someone says “window” to refer to a pane of glass in a wall. Never mind the playing this game and the overuse of the word “level”. As we as a society are becoming more accepting of nonbinary folk, our language is going to grow, and it’s going to sound weird to people who aren’t used to it at first. It will become natural with practice.
I can't respond to everything this morning, but here's a quick couple points before I run off to teach: 3. If the scenario brings up their transness in a way that’s visible to the players, don’t skip it! – I’m mainly looking at 8-99 here. The way 8-99 brings up the fact that Medda Spiritbreaker is trans is natural and visible to the players Perhaps I wasn't as clear with that point as I should've been (especially in the section that you cut off with that quote), so let me explain further what I meant. In an alternate timeline where Solstice Scar was instead a three-part series instead of a multi-table special and that line of dialogue was included in the first part, I think you would find players running into it more. I agree that the time constraints of the multi-table special are to blame here. Most tables are just trying to resolve the situation quickly, not try to figure out details about who exactly this person is. In a normal scenario without the time crunch, this problem wouldn't come up nearly as much. That having been said, my point was that despite the time crunch, if someone does engage with that line of dialogue, don't shy away from it or play down Medda's transness. There are multiple reasons why someone might have gone down that path, both intentionally and unintentionally, and it’s really important that you engage that. Agreed with this, as well. When I first played City of Strangers and met Miss Feathers, our GM really played her as a stereotypical drag queen. We all (apparently, including the GM) thought she was supposed to be a RuPaul/"Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" type performer. We had no idea she was supposed to be transgender. I don’t have time to go into all the problems with Miss Feathers right now, but the short version is: 1) The drag community and the trans community have a complicated relationship, but there are a lot of trans people who are not fans of drag because of drag’s visibility and its effect on how society views trans women. (I say complicated because there’s also a racial aspect to this, and probably not in the way that you first think of it. There’s a lot to unpack here that I may go into later.)2) A lot of the trans community’s negative response to Miss Feathers has to do with the overall community’s response to Miss Feathers. There has been a lot of “man in a dress” jokes that have to do with Miss Feathers (including a Miss Feathers cosplay I saw once at GenCon which was particularly problematic), and despite Paizo’s attempt to redefine the characters, there’s still a lot of knowing winks and jokes. In fact one of the most common responses to Miss Feathers being listed as female that I heard was “Oh, looks like someone got the surgery.” This was in multiple regions, on the boards, and multiple different national conventions, and from both new players and old fogeys alike. I just want the jokes to stop, and while the community as a whole is getting better, as long as that character exists, those jokes will still continue. 3) When you only have one example of a minority group, that character defines that group in your work. I’m not going to deny that there are trans prostitutes out there (and in fact, given recent crap in the US, I’m going to actively support them even more), but when your only trans-coded character is a prostitute, you’re saying that you believe that trans people are only prostitutes. What PFS has desperately needed for years is a second trans character to diversify PFS’ message. This is why we’re so defensive of Medda Spiritbreaker. I simply meant "politics" in the sense of political correctness. You’re not helping yourself. When you use the phrase “political correctness”, what the rest of us hear is “I find it inconvienent to give people basic respect.” I obviously don’t know how you personally feel about trans people, but I do get a sense that you’re honestly trying to learn how to navigate when trans and nonbinary characters show up in RPG. The problem is, IRL trans rights are under attack, and you keep using the language of people who are trying to attack those rights. It’s not doing you any favors. Also as someone who GMs mostly in German there are a LOT of different problems with the pronouns: I’ll admit that I’m one of those arrogant Americans who only knows one language, so I personally don’t know much about how nonbinary pronouns work in other languages. (Although I’ll admit that I love the Spanish use of @ instead of a/o. It’s so brilliant!) That being said, I guarantee you that someone else has thought about this, and that I’m sure that there are German LGBTQ groups who have figured this stuff out already and have advice for you. But one thing I’ll point out that I get that it seems awkward, especially if there are no nonbinary people at the table. That being said, this is something that you want to figure out before the first nonbinary person shows up at your table. Most nonbinary people I’ve met will explain to people who’ve never encountered it before, but it can be depressing to have to explain the basics of nonbinary gender and nonbinary language over and over again. By making an effort before any nonbinary folks show up at your table, you’re going to be much more likely to keep those players in your community.
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Pathfinder Society GM. Starfinder Society GM. 1,990 posts (3,434 including aliases). 2 reviews. 5 lists. No wishlists. 60 Organized Play characters. 8 aliases. 
