JBSchroeds's page

So I had my first GM'ing experience this weekend. I'd like to share, and hear what other people's experiences were like.

My gaming group consists of seven people (including me) but only four of us can currently meet regularly. Everybody else has run a game (3.5, 4th Ed, WoD Changeling/Mage/Hunter) except for me. I decided to play a game of GURPS set in the Mass Effect universe. I statted out all the races and equipment in addition to the story. None of us had played GURPS before, so things went real slow at the beginning. Character creation took about 2.5 hours, mainly because I had to do most of the work being the only person who was at all familiar with the system.

Once we got into play it went really well. The story I came up with was straight forward and relatively linear just so we could all ease into the new system and I wouldn't be overwhelmed running the game. Most things went as planned, except I allowed the PCs to have a couple toys that I'm going to have to take back. One of the players was an Elcor and another was a Salarian. The Salarian and Elcor split the cost of a heavy machine gun to mount on the Elcor's back. This works and is pretty close to how the Elcor actually wage war. Unfortunately, the gun is REDICULOUSLY powerful and totally unbalanced the game. In what was supposed to be the climactic shootout with a Krogan bodyguard ended with the PCs surprising the Krogan and blowing him away in a single burst before he could even draw his gun. Oops. No more HMG for them. But overall it was a fun night.

So what was your first GM'ing experience like?
Also: Take THAT thread monster! I copied my post before you ate it.

So I just got back from watching Avatar in 3D in an IMAX theater and had to walk out with an hour left. The 3D never 'worked' for me (this was also my first 3D viewing experience). Thankfully I'd already seen it in 2D, but I was really disappointed because I'd heard great things about the 3D. My problem:

The 3D never worked correctly. My eyes would try and focus on one element and the entire rest of the picture would look terrible, blurry, or out of focus. I tried unfocusing my eyes, only looking at a single element, even closing a single eye to see if that'd make it watchable. Nothing I tried worked. Whenever the scene would cut or there would be fast movement everything would go wonky and I'd have to refocus and it would never look as good as it did on a regular 2D screen. After about an hour and a half of this nonsense my eyes were so fatigued that they gave up on trying to focus and everything became a blurry and jittery mess that started making me nauseous and I had to leave.

Anyone else have this problem with 3D movies (not just Avatar)? Is there some 'trick' I'm missing? I think part of the problem is that I'm extremely right-eye dominant. My regular vision is decent but not perfect. I normally only need glasses to read a board to take notes in large lecture halls and have never needed them at the movies. I was at about the 1/3 mark off center for seating. Thoughts?

So, I finally got around to reading Ender's Game and enjoyed it greatly. I was looking on amazon and its sequals seem to have a lot of mixed reviews. For those of you who have read them, are they worth reading? Are there some that should be avoided or seem to ruin the characters? I'd like to spend more time with this character and in this setting, but I don't really feal like ruining my experience with the first book.

I've been playing 4E with some friends for a couple month's off and on and we're up to level 5. I've been playing a Star Pact Warlock, and I've found it to be mind-numbingly boring. I deal less damage than other players, but I don't have the increased hit-reliablity that a focused striker should have. I find that I miss just as often as everyone else, so that balance of the targeted striker's more hits/lower damage/single target doesn't seem to be there. I have min-maxed my heart out and have taken the best possible options that I've found and I still think that if my character wasn't in the party I wouldn't be missed. Also, due to my ranged and mobile nature I rarely am involved in other aspects of combat and have gone entire encounters without having to move and just roll a set of dice when I hear my name called for initiative. Have other people had this experience? I had a 3.5 Warlock and he was awsome but not overpowered.

I was messing around with this on another thread and thought I might as well make a thread for it. Using the values on the height and weight table for humans you get unrealistic body type distributions. I wrote some code to analyze the distribution of height and weight and found that using the numbers on the chart you get:

Male/Female Percentage
Under Weight- 0.06%/3.44%
Normal Weight- 36.88%/63.94%
Over Weight- 58.44%/29.81%
Obese- 4.63%/2.81%

If you adjust the base weight for males down to 95 and down to 75 for females you get:

Male/Female Percentage
Under Weight- 8.25%/11.88%
Normal Weight- 78.44%/68.56%
Over Weight- 13.31%/18.94%
Obese- 0.00%/0.63%

I find these distributions much more realistic, especially for men. 58% of all male characters being overweight is not right. All weight determinations were made using Body Mass Index. I can easily modify the code I wrote to do the other races, except the BMI ranges for what is "normal" would need to be modified.

I've seen this come up in numerous threads and hotly debated during alpha. So here it is:

Could I please get an official explination on why the cleric domains were changed? I've never run across an explination that really made sense to me. The change seems to do a lot to hurt reverse compatibility, and I'm not seeing the benefits.

I know that one of Jason's goals with the core classes were to add incentives to single-class. 3.5 domains lack that, no doubt. But wouldn't it be easier to add a 20th level capstone ability to each domain than to rejigger the entire system? Personally, I'd much rather see the 3.5 domains rebalanced for power and have a capstone ability instead of a totally different system. Overall, Pathfinder seems to be doing a great job of systematically fixing the big problems with 3.5, but domains are one spot where I think it misses the mark.

Thoughts? Explinations? Terrible retributions?

In one of the other threads someone mentioned an idea that I really liked and thought warranted its own discussion. They brought up skill groups. You could spend a skill point and get a rank in each skill that is part of the group. I'm new to the boards, so if this has been debated in detail already I'd love to read up on it. This is the part of the post I saved:

[quote=]
Example skill sets:
Acrobatics, 1 rank each in Balance, Jump, and Tumble.
Stealth: 1 rank each in Hide and Move Silently.
Perception: 1 rank each in Listen, Search, and Spot.
Linguistics: 1 rank each in Decipher Script, Forgery, and Speak Languages.
Disabling: 1 rank each in Disable Device and Open Lock.
Diplomatics: 1 rank each in Diplomacy and Gather Information.
Arcana: 1 rank each in Concentration, Knowledge(Arcana), and Spellcraft.
Divinity: 1 rank each in Concentration, Knowledge(Divine), and Heal.
Natural Lore: 1 rank each in Concentration, Knowledge(Nature), Survival, and Use Rope.
Animals: 1 rank each in Handle Animal and Ride.

There are a few things above I might change up, but it looks like a great place to start. I think this would allow for a number of positive features. The first is that you don’t have to get rid of any of the skills and they can be used as written in the SRD but purchasing them is still consolidated. It also lets separate skills remain tied to separate stats. Concentration can remain CON and Spellcraft can still be INT, but you can still get both for a single skill point. Another possibility is that you can say anyone can purchase a group, but a class can still only have one (or none) of those skills as a class skill. So you could get acrobatics as a fighter but get the +3 only on Jump checks (and the other two would be less useful in armor). You could even give certain skill groups to specific classes (i.e. only Ranger and Rogue can buy stealth, everyone else has to invest in each skill separately). I think skill groups would also be easier to house-rule than having to expand out a skill that got consolidated that you don’t agree with. Thoughts?