Jaimsley Cooper's page

Actually... while you're correct that part 3 had to have a fairly large rewrite and edit due to the author writing an adventure and a half's worth of words... Part six did not have that problem. It is not truncated. What you see is what there was, for the most part. If there are errors or parts that don't make sense, it's because of an error during development where I wasn't as clear about something, but there wasn't much at all left on the cutting room floor after we were done with "Spiers of Xin-Shalast."

Thanks for the reply James. I really love all the work on RotRL, just to let you know that. When I read part 6, I just got similar vibes as in part 3, where some things seemed cut down. The example of the wendigo allegedly being before the dwarven cabin and the paragraph discussing how we could learn about Karzoug's backstory and how to defeat him in Xin Shalst. My assumption had been those things were loose threads hanging from a larger manuscript that had been honed down.

It really means a lot to me that the good folks from Paizo are on here so frequently and reply to our concerns and comments so rapidly. I know you've heard this a million times by now, but it can't hurt for me to lop so praise on you as well. I'm 3 sessions into RotRL and my players are having a great time. It's definitely a refreshing turn of events after the last campaign we were all in - inexperienced DM at the reigns without the desire to put much effort into creating a homebrew campaign, though he refused to use published modules to help himself out. Now that I am back at the helm, people are loving the chance to experience everything Pathfinder has to offer.

That's a fair point. I personally wouldn't run a path until I have all of the components in my hot little hands.

Here, here! I didn't even open the envelopes containing RotRL until I had 4 of them on hand and didn't start running it until I had read all of them. Curse of the Crimson Throne #1 is still tucked in a sealed envelope, in my magazine rack, where it will be staying for 3 or 4 more months.

Probably the most fun was the _Radiant_ space opera campaign (run in a homebrew) where the PCs started out as crew of a struggling tramp merchant starship, and ended up as major players in two different star systems (one highly civilized and connected, one a "lost colony."

And after five years of play the PCs were pretty complicated people, with friends, lovers, enemies, family, culture clashes, hopes and fears.... The APs go by so fast, farm boy to archmage in 6 months, I just don't get that level of characterization.

Farm boy to archmage in 6 months.... Radian Space Opera....

I bet you loved Star Wars.

Pretty sure Luke went from farmboy to savior of the galaxy and X-Wing Fighter Pilot supreme that destroyed the Death Star in something silly like 6 months or less.

But seriously, no, an AP is never going to be like a 5 year long homebrew campaign. I've done both. Now I'm married with 1 (almost 2) kids and don't have time to do the homebrew campaigns like I used to. AP's are a savior now. I once wrote a 1000+ word file for a homebrew campaign over the course of 4 years. Paizo isn't going to ever hit that level of detail for me. But really, I think your constantly ranting on their logic is kind of flawed.

If they have a problem, it's that parts 3 and 6 of RotRL came in overlength and had to be brutally hacked down by someone that had not written them. James Jacobs had to truncate them and in doing so lost some of what was intended. That's what happens in the business. I don't find myself throwing down the books screaming, "Good God, why isn't this logical to my vulcan mind!" I find myself saying, "Wow, I wonder what was really supposed to happen with the Wendigo stalking the PC's before they hit the dwarves cabin and how about all that stuff in Xin Shalast I can tell has been carved away, all the backstory of Karzoug that is promised."

I just think you're going at this the wrong way. You write a lot of eloquent posts on here, with some of them even having valuable information in them. But, you seem to have a lot of rules-lawyering, nitpicking posts as well. Don't freat about Nick Logue's logic and refer to him as "the author" that said he "didn't care about logic," which isn't true, I read the post. Scold him for not following the guidelines and writing an adventure that exceeded the scope given that hard to be trimmed down.

How illogical is it for a queen to poison the king? How illogical is it for a demonic spirit the possess someone? How illogical is it for the good guys to get duped? These are staples of fantasy. It seems that if this isn't your cup of tea, you could get a different cup of tea, instead of pissing in this one and proclaiming how crappy Crimson Throne is going to be before it's even been released.

For what it's worth, Power Attack and Deadly Aim are both feats that do exactly what you are asking for. Taking a penalty to your shot to get extra damage is making a called shot. That was one of the things that my group loved about the Power Attack feat when 3rd Edition first came out - "Hey, it's a feat that makes called shots fair!" Deadly Aim, you have an 18 Dex, you are calling a shot to a vital area, taking a -4 penalty for aiming a specific area of the target, but gaining +4 damage for hitting a vital target. I understand this doesn't do the "one shot, one kill" archer, but to my knowledge, you've never been able to do that in non-house-ruled D&D or AD&D of any edition. Sure, in 2nd Edition AD&D we had house rules for taking a 12 penalty on your attacks to go for the jugular or an eye and score an instant kill on any humanoid that was anything less than a deity, epic type, or major villain. My ranger would run around decapitating people all day. But, it wasn't in the actual rules. There are prestige classes created to try and mimic it, but they do it badly. If there were a way for archers to get this power, why shouldn't a fighter with a battle axe get the same thing? What about a wizard putting an acid arrow or a ray of frost into a baddie's eye to kill it in one shot? This isn't just an issue for archers.

I've changed my opinion.

Power Attack, Combat Expertise, and Deadly Aim need to be modified.

Power Attack and Deadly Aim should be able to be selected in a range from 1 to your Str/Dex modifier.

Combat Expertise should be able to be selected in a range from 1 to your Int modifier +2.

After thinking about it for a few days, the new Combat Expertise totally hoses fighters, even with the extra attributes. It was already kind of a subpar feat before - pretty much only taken by anyone in my campaigns to make an Uber AC tank or as a gateway feat to better feats or prestige classes.

High Dex and high Str creatures/PC's are screwed by the changes to Power Attack and Deadly Aim. However, I do like the limit, as it keeps a fighter with a 14 Str from going crazy on Power Attack to get damage that seems impossible, as in how does he swing so hard when he is so weak?

For what it matters, the "pincushion approach" to archery is actually historically factual. Armored warriors back in the day were brought down from bleeding suffered from numerous "minor" wounds. It's been illustrated that a warrior wearing plater armor would generally only have the arrowheads penetrate a small amount into his flesh. Eventually, he was riddled with so many arrows that he collapsed from blood loss, but there was no automatic kill shot.

I get what you are saying. Just tossing this out there.

I don't get this thread.

It was stated that Turn Undead was meant to be another source of healing to keep clerics from having to use all spells for healing.

Apparently no one read that part.

Most came on here and ragged on it.

Then Jason Bulmahn comes on here and restates that and all of a sudden people are all, "Whoa, that's a cool idea now. 10 minutes ago I thought it was a rules abuse. Now, by telling me it was intended, I think it is the best thing since sliced bread."

I think it's a great idea. I don't think many evil clerics would care if they hurt people. Honestly, being forced to spontaneously cast inflict instead of cures is a bigger disadvantage to evil and neutral clerics that choose poorly than this. How have you managed to live with that little piece of pain in the ass?

Not trying to be dense - tried a paizo.com search and a google search with no good info, so here goes...

In the stat block for the Denizens of Leng, their gear is listed as +1 dagger and 10 doses of shadow essence. What exactly is shadow essence and where is it detailed?

If this has been answered elsewhere, I am sorry, but my searches turned up nothing.

As a side note, this kind of leans on my main issue with Rise of the Runelords - I find myself constantly paging back and forth between all 6 books and the Player's Guide to try and find things. Pretty much, "I know I read about this somewhere... was it this book?" and keep flipping around until I hit the sidebar I am searching for. Was doing this with the calendar the other night - ended up just finding the calendars people made on the messageobard and stealing the Excel files. Actually getting all of the download links out of the Blogs and into a place for Rise of the Runelords would be great too. I just happened to find out about the magic item web enhancement by reading a related posting. I don't really have time to read all the Blogs and have been missing out on things I thought would have been collated together by now.

Limited wish and wish need to be replaced with other spells.

The first level Hand of the Apprentice could be rather powerful at 1st level - a 1st level wizard with base 18 Int, +2 for race, +3 for age modifiers gets a 23 Int and can levitate a sword that attacks with +6 to hit and +6 to damage. This tapers off quickly. Not really much of an issue with it, as it gives the wizard a good option to use instead of spells and makes low level more fun.

I don't mind all of the metamagic bonuses and all that jazz, but think wish and limited wish need to be taken out of the equation. These are terrible ideas as spell-like abilities, which have no cost.

Perhaps some limitation could be put in such as "At the start of your day, you must prepare spells of all the other schools to gain your Universalist bonuses. If you are unable to prepare a number of daily spells that is great enough to prepare all of the other schools, you must prepare as many schools as possible." But, I don't think this would work well, as it would limit your spell choices a bit.

The multiple attack mechanic has been part of D&D for generations, and is a quite satisfactory method of handling higher level play. The problem comes in where simply getting "2 attacks" at 6th (or any) level is a really jarring doubling of your offensive potential. Various strategies have been employed including giving out attacks at penalties (the 3.x way), or giving out attacks that happen every other round (the AD&D way).

The 3.x way has the drawback that the bonus attacks make very little difference past the first. Also, there's more than two attack bonuses to remember, which makes it more work than it is worth. There are a number of possible solutions:

1> All iterative attacks are at a flat -5 penalty. You can take a feat (multiattack) to drop that penalty to -2, and another feat to drop it to -0. Thus, players only have two attack bonuses to remember: Primary Attack and Bonus Attacks. Also, the Bonus attacks would actually matter at all levels.

2> Iterative attacks increase by +2 when your BAB increases until they catch up with your primary attack, then you get a new iterative attack. In this way the progression of attack potential is relatively smooth from level to level. Unfortunately, it's also kind of hard to explain the transition of:

+6/+1
+7/+3
+8/+5
+9/+7
+10/+9
+11/+11/+6

-Frank

FRANK IS A GENIUS.

But, seriously, that is very similar to how I thought they should be fixed. They need to stay in the game, to make martial characters worthwhile, but they need to be better on the low end. The level 20 fighter praying for a natural 20 on his 4th attack is lame.

Make the iterative attacks better - either all at a flat -5, or escalating like the monk's flurry.

The standard action for a full attack for fighters sounds good, but methinks it could get as crazy as a warforged barbarian scout dervish with a glaive.

I like the Power Attack fix. I don't see it penalizing high strength characters greatly, as it is going to keep them in line with their BAB. There are other feats and abilities that can add to their attacks. Maybe if they could choose a range between 1 and their Strength modifier, but I see their chosen fix as possibly being a great idea.

Expertise gets knocked down a bit, but it makes more sense. Also, remember that characters are going to get more attribute points than previously, so it will be easier to play a smart fighter.

In regards to favored classes, I say eliminate them. They are not entirely logical (elves are better wizards than rangers or sorcerers or rogues?) . . .also it practically begs normal players to play a dwarven fighter or an elven wizard and nothing else, because you are penalizing them for not playing to type, which in my opinion is hamper on roleplaying.

If missing out on 1 hit point per level hampers the roleplaying of your group, I think your group has other issues than favored classes. It's really just a minor bonus for people that play to the iconic characters. Personally, I'm glad they removed the xp penalties, so people are free to roleplay whatever crazy character they desire. The downside to that comes with people dipping into vast amounts of insane classes that can be combined to break the game. However, people can still roleplay game breaking characters. Your roleplaying is really independent of how sweet your PC happens to be.

Going through the skills section, I couldn't help but feel tripped up by the idea of Open Lock being rolled into Theft. Being a mechanical process that allows you to essentially "break" the device, it would make more sense to roll it into Disable Device.

At first thought, I also agree.

Russell,

You are truly awesome. My players are going to love this stuff. I am so glad I came across your work - I had been privately griping about going through the process of trying to copy and print the handouts in an effective way, or just hacking them out of the .pdf's. I am going to totally rip off your style and use your work, as I don't really have the time to do this sort of thing. Once I did, but those days are gone.

I really impressed my players once by creating an entire journal, of about 45 pages, and using a woodburning tool to etch the cover and pages with runes. What you have done makes me long for my younger days, with untapped creativity and ample free time.

Thanks again.

I think I just threw up in my mouth...

Seriously, the more I see about 4E, the less I am interested. At first, when it was put forward as "an extension of Book of 9 Swords" I thought that would be pretty neat. The first things I heard were interesting. Since then, wow. The rogue preview was crap. The rules primer is lame. It is certainly going back the way of Basic D&D. I'm sure it will be a playable system and probabl quite fun, but there is no way my group will switch for at least a few years. Too many of us will be outraged by the saving throw mechanic and the obvious pandering to MMORPG's (I WANT TO BE A STRIKER!!!)

1) Do you plan to convert to the new edition of D&D?

2) If Paizo converts its RPG products to 4.0, how will that affect your purchasing patterns for our products?

3) If Paizo does not convert its RPG products to 4.0, how will that affect your purchasing patterns for our products?

1) Based on information released, previews, and glancing at the Star Wars game, I plan on resisting the conversion to 4th Edition. If there is a conversion, it will likely not occur until 18-24 months after 4th Edition is out. I am going to run Rise of the Runelords with 3.5, after the current campaign we are playing ends. I am the primary DM of my group, and it is pretty much in my hands whether or not we convert, as the majority of the books used by the group are mine. At this time, I place myself and 6 players in the will not convert column. This could change. Many of them did not want to convert to 3rd, but I convinced them to change after perusing the material and deciding it was the game we were looking for. I am a gamer that played D&D from Basic to Immortals, thought 1st Edition was lame, fell in love with 2nd Edition, realized that 3rd Edition was the closest incarnation to perfection that could be, and ground my teeth in frustration as I bought 3.5 books that fixed a few things that needed fixed and then spiralled out of control.

2) If Paizo goes 4th, I will purchase some more Pathfinder, until you convert. My purchase of material will then pretty much peter out until the time that we decide to upgrade. Will we? At this point, I am guessing not. Maybe when my son is old enough to start playing, he can give 4th a whirl and teach his old man and fake uncles a thing or two. I see my group as the grizzled old men that stuck with 1st or 2nd all these years. Maybe 35% we keep buying Paizo if they convert.

3) So far, I think Pathfinder and many other Paizo products are better than anything done by Wizards since Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. If Paizo stays 3.5 I will keep buying Pathfinder, as money allows. I do think $20 is steep for the booklets, as that is placing the cost of the adventure path at $120, plus $10 for players guides for everyone. There's a lot of info in there and it is well done, but I think a better base price for the books would be $12 to $15. I'd say my group keeps buying Paizo at a 85% liklihood if they remain 3.5.

I think the chance of them ever making even a crappy book out of this is roughly equal to the chance that I will have sex with Eliza Dushku this evening. In fact I like my odds with Eliza better than the odds of ever seeing a STAP compilation.

The problem is that STAP is 3.5. According to WotC, 3.5 sucks so bad that it will take them until 6th edition to make up for for the suck of it all. On the plus side, at least we get to have online versions of the mags that suck on the order of 10^297 times worse than the actual print versions. Still, be sure to spend odious amounts of money on all the 3rd edition stuff they threw together at...

Would you bet me Eliza Dushku? I'll take you up on that one.

Lilith wrote:

Everything produced by Paizo for the Dungeon & Dragon magazines is the propery of WotC, not Paizo. To put out a STAP or AoWAP collected book requires WotC's blessings.

Yeah, probably poor wording on my part.

It belongs to WotC and requires WotC's blessing to go ahead in book form, but Paizo would be the ones making the money out of it rather than WotC.

As far as I know, at least.

Wizards owns it, so my presumption is that they would slap it together and sell it, very much like what they did with Ghostwalk. For those that don't know, Wizards decided to tank Monte Cook and Sean K. Reynold's Ghostwalk Campaign. Then, when two or three other d20 publishers tried to buy the rights from WoTC, Wizards decided there must be some money to be made and slapped it together for quick release. I figured they would eventually do something like this with Savage Tide, since it seems like there would be market for it, as people that are nostalgic about the end of Dungeon mag would more than likely buy it, as I had been planning on doing. Actually, the assumption I could buy the entire thing at once someday was kind of a driving factor in my decision to convert all of my Paizo credit into issues of Pathfinder, rather than buying up all of the Dungeon mags I needed to complete ST.

Is there a date when ST will be put out like Shackled City? I did some short looking on Amazon and a few other sites and found nothing. Am I missing it? I really wanted to buy this whenever it actually gets put out, which I assumed Wizards would do to make some cash off of something they already had.

My post submission blues? I just realized I blew it and put an error in my item. Stupid, stupid me, too worried about getting it all in 200 words and overlooking a rules item. Oh well, maybe next year.

So, who else went into the realms of the absurd with me and posted a big time item? I tossed out a cool 245,000 g.p. value with my submission. Did anyone actually top that, or did I push the theorhetical limit of what common sense would dictate should get sent in?

I pressed the fancy button to submit my item at 11:17 p.m. EST and then got forwarded to the standard Internet Explorer "this page can not be displayed - press refresh" error page. My concern is whether or not my submission actually got through. I am unable to make another submission, which is correct, but I do not know if my item got submitted, or if I just set you a blank page. Could a judge or someone with some authority let me know so I could get it to you again if needed? Might be tricky around my work schedule tomorrow, but I spent time getting this hammered out and don't want to blow it because of a network burp.