I misspoke (or miswrote). The rule was actually no politics on game night. We often have dinner together beforehand, so this was necessary. But now that you mention it, that should also cover any parting shots after the game is over. Thanks for the well wishes!
This is really the issue. I'm glad someone understands where I'm coming from. I talked to one of the other original players. I'll call him Big J. He claimed to be unaware of the issue. Not sure how that is possible, but he is one of those super open minded accepting people so maybe it really doesn't bother him. He said he couldn't bring himself to kick Bob out of the group. He also said that Bob needs people that will confront him and challenge him. Without us, he doesn't really have anyone that will do that. I think if I pushed the issue, Big J wouldn't stop me from kicking Bob out but it may cause even more strife. Big J offered a compromise. We are laying down a strict "No Politics" rule at the table. This should remove most of Bob's outlets for annoying people. I am dubious, but I feel like it is a reasonable compromise. It works as both a warning and a partial muzzle. If it turns out not being sufficient, then we may go on to removal. Once again, thanks to all of you for your input. Some of it was hard to hear, but all of it gave me additional insight and direction. It was appreciated.
Wow. That escalated quickly. It's a frought situation. People are rarely a single thing. Bad people can do good things. Caring and helpful friends can also become obnoxious. 80% to 90% of the time he is a good guy to have around. But that remaining percentage of the time he is obnoxious. This usually works out to about 15 to 20 minutes a game session dealing with him being annoying. People have busy lives and lots of options for fun things to do. Going into an evening being pretty certain your are going to be annoyed for 15 or 20 minutes makes the other options look better. When he annoys me with the stupid things he says I chew his ass out and he either shuts up or tones it down. Not everyone is comfortable doing that and there is no reason they should have to. But in the gaming community I've met a lot of people with poor interpersonal skills. People with odd personalities. People with poor insight into their behaviors. I know Bob is the problem and I know something needs to be done. I am fairly certain it will lead to an old friend feeling rejected by people he trusts, becoming angry and defensive and probably storming off. I'll probably lose an old friend over this. I've known from the beginning that this would probably be the way it would go. I just wanted to explore all the possible options before I made the move.
I want to thank everyone for their feedback and advice. I appreciate it very much.
I want to clarify that Bob isn't a huge jerk. He can be annoying and tiresome. He is very political, very outspoken, and very poorly informed. At least once a week he goes off about something he heard a fringe political pundit opine about. He will take an already skewed story that he only partially listened to and take it to a whole new level. In today's charged political environment it gets tiresome. I really don't want to kick him out because of his politics. In fact, myself and the other two "old timers" often consider it an asset to have a diverse set of views in our social group. I'm not sure if the others would even be on board with removing Bob. They are both very fun reasonable guys. Bob can be a great guy to have around sometimes. But his confrontational and ill informed conspiracy theories have worn thin.
Bob is Bob and that's never going to change. Another issue is that we went through almost the exact same thing about 4 years ago. The original founder of the group had grown increasingly belligerent. After many casual comments to him about his behavior were ignored, we essentially had a group intervention. It got ugly. After that experience we are all a little gun shy.
That's a good way to frame it.
Bob has killed your group. Give it up. Ouch. Accurate, but ouch.
I've got a group that has played together for about 10 years. There are 4 of us that have been around since that first year and we have always had 2 or 3 other players to fill out the table. It seams like we lose about 1 player every year or so, but we have always been able to recruit someone to keep a full table. One of our original players has always been a bit off putting. Let's just say he likes stirring the pot and this tendency has grown over the years. Let's call him Bob. A couple months back one of our players that has been with us a few years dropped out. He didn't say it directly, but indicated that he just isn't having fun anymore because of Bob always stirring the pot. We got a replacement player, but the new guy has very directly indicated that he is not sure he can deal with Bob and may have to quit. Recently another player that has been with us for a couple years has informed me that he doesn't enjoy playing with Bob. He hasn't officially quit but has started finding other things to do on game nights and is missing sessions regularly. I'm worried that this group is falling apart. I don't think it's feasible to kick Bob out but I'm worried about being able to recruit more players with Bob around. Not sure what to do. Has anyone had a similar experience? What did you do? Any advice?
Ok. Looks like it's not just me. Patron Deity isn't actually defined anywhere. At this point it looks like any distinction is just a judgement call.
Is there a way to extend the Fear condition from an Intimidation attempt? I have a fourth level rogue and have just started using intimate in combat. It's pretty powerful, but it would be really nice if I could get it to last more than a round or was able to intimidate someone more than once.
I found some. That's not bad. I tried a lot of word combos in my search, but never thought of that one. Those results look better than anything I found. Nice. Thanks!
I really like the concept and the backstory! Thanks! I try to make many of the NPCs in my campaign flavorful and three dimensional. I even have a wall of "Mug Shots" in my game room. They are small 3 x 5 pictures of NPCs with a note card attached with a few bits of info about the character. The players are welcome to add info to the note cards. It really seems to help the players connect with the NPCs instead of treating them like disposable characters.
In a campaign I am running, there is an NPC that has become a fallen paladin. I mean, he didn't fall a little. He fell hard. He has had a complete crisis of faith, but wants to still do good in the world. He has become a bit of a favorite character for the party, so I am trying to think of a way he can continue in the world in a meaningful way. Any advice for a direction to go with a character like that? Any gods that make a habit of rehabilitating broken people? Any good classes I should transition him to, or should he stay as a fallen paladin, keeping only his BAB, feats, and armor/weapon proficiencies? ----------------------------------------------------------
I was running a home brew version of a high level pathfinder scenario. The scenario gave the option of drinking a demon lord's blood to gain power, or even eating the demon lord's heart and gaining a small level of divinity, including granting spells and powers to followers. Long story short. Desperate paladin sacrifices his soul to gain enough power to help the party defeat a great evil. He drinks the demon blood to gain power which is an evil act that causes him to become fallen. He then offers himself to worship and serve the party member that ate the demon's heart and becomes restored as a (semi-)dark paladin. He is just an NPC that was supposed to die heroically. I ran him most of the time, but several players in the group have taken turns running him and making decisions for him. He has now become a party favorite. They went to significant lengths to save him, support him, and get him through the adventure alive. In the end, the fallen paladin helped the party defeat a great evil, but in doing so he committed many acts that would be considered evil. The paladin won't do an atonement, partly because of a backstory self loathing thing, but also because he doesn't regret doing it. Atonement requires remorse and regret for the the deeds done. He doesn't regret it because it allowed him to defeat a great evil. He believes damning his soul was a worth while trade off for the good accomplished.
Well.... well.... what the Hell..... He survived. I gave the player a bit of a heads up as to what was about to happen and how the situation came about. After a discussion he declared that he didn't want to meta game and didn't want me to softball the encounter. I did alter a few things, most importantly the stealth bonuses for the assassins, so that it was at least theoretically possible for his character to make a perception check to spot the invisible assassins before they attacked. So, of course, on the critical stealth roll the 3 assassins rolled a 2, 3, and a 7 and the PC rolled a 19 and was able to spot two of the assassins. In the surprise round he got an initiative over 30, so he attacked first. He got off one shot, made a critical hit with nearly max damage, and made the roll to overcome the 50% miss chance. First dead assassin. As planned, the assassins spent one round attacking other people. During the first full round, the PC hit himself with a see invisibility wand. This would not have been a big deal for the assassins, but the assassin mage with dispell magic prepped happened to be the one that the PC had smoked in the surprise round. There was a running battle on the ship,with the assassins trying to hide behind cover so they could jump back out at him for sneak attack a round or two later. I never saw the player roll lower than a 15 on his perception checks, and the assassins never rolled higher than a 7 to hide. When the assassins did attack, they rolled the biggest collection of 1s, 3s, and 5s I've seen in a single combat. I was worried that the PC would die in an unfair fight, but the dice gods decided to step in on this one. The assassins never stood a chance.
I would absolutely add something that is not technically allowed. I do always try to do it in a manner that makes sense. I may give a subterranean goblin tribe access to dwarf only feats, but I'm not going to give them dragon mounts.
This is just me grumbling about a session from a while back. I'm playing in a long running game. We are all friends. The players are all fun and the GM is usually pretty good, but he can get a bit heavy handed when something happens he is not prepared for. We were in an encounter against a group of soldiers. They were pretty much an overwhelming force and our party had been instructed not to engage in open combat with them anyway. Basically they were blocking the road and we were going to have to find another way around. The GM was playing the leader of the guards as especially antagonistic. He is hurling insults, accusations and generally derisive comments at us. I'm playing a knight like character that is obsessed with honor and image. On top of that, in the previous session we all had to deal with some negative consequences after someone impugned the honor of our party. I figure there is no way my character would just let it go, so he challenges the leader of the guards to an honor duel. I figure this could go bad, but didn't see another way I could play it. The GM has the guard instantly attack. The GM tells me how the Guard Captain launches his attack and I tell the GM how I plan to counter. It was a pretty good counter. The GM stops and says that the guard didn't really attack me that way. After a few moments the GM says the Guard Captain attacks my character with a different tactic. I say OK, and tell him my response to that attack. Once again, it was a decent counter. The GM stops again and says that the Guard captain didn't really attack that way either. He calls a five minute halt to the game and pages through a couple books and picks out the most powerful magic item he can find. When we start the game back up, the Guard Captain is now armed with a weapon capable of incapacitating a character with nonlethal damage in a single blow. Coincidentally, my character is immune to that particular magic item. When I inform the GM of this, the GM declares that this is a different version of the item that will bypass my character's immunity. In addition, he has the item do lethal damage instead and kills my character. Now, we were able to raise the character from the dead, but there are repercussions. There is a permanent loss of stats and some system specific penalties that will put my character behind the curve for probably a few months of gaming. Am I wrong to consider this a rather egregious abuse of GM power? I didn't want to make a big deal about it during the game, but I talked to him about it outside of the game. He didn't think it was a big deal. He said he just didn't have anything planned so it was a "spur of the moment decision". Now, during games, he regularly says he has to make encounters easy because "Some people get upset when characters get killed." I finally called him out last session and informed him that there is a big difference between having a difficult scenario where a character might die, and intentionally killing a character. Am I wrong to be annoyed by this? I know it's not a bid deal, but it irritates the heck out of me.
So the rules for a good character are: 1. Never back down no matter what the opposition is. It is better to die in a futile gesture than to bide your time and strike when you have a chance to make a difference. If you have ever met an evil creature and did not immediately try to kill it, you deserve to die. 2. Murder everyone that might be a threat. Don't ask questions. Just kill. If someone is seen near an evil person, they are now evil and deserve to be killed.
Okay, then Atonement wouldn't work, but Mark of Justice could. Sure, I guess it could. If she could find a few warriors that would go along with her without any of them ratting her out. If those warriors could hold down a 15th level barbarian chief for 10 minutes. And managed to do it quietly enough that no loyal tribe members noticed anything for the full 10 minutes. Yes, they could have tried it. But, unfortunately, that particular constellation of circumstances did not come to pass.
Unfortunately Atonement only works on someone that is willing and truly wants to change. Mark of Justice also clearly states that the target must be willing or restrained as it has a ten minute casting time that involves writing symbols on the target's body. I'm sure the old lady has her sneaky side, but she probably isn't going to be able to BS her son into letting her spend 10 minutes writing arcane symbols on his body.
I have a standard progression when I am upping the ante on stock bad guys. First I give them the the Simple Template: Advanced. This gives a +2 boost to natural armor and +4 to all attributes. This can fix most minor power deferential issues. The next step is to fix the feats the critters are given. Usually they have a few lame feats that don't really help much. I will often swap out or just give them 2 or 3 new feats. My favorites are Toughness, Weapon Focus and sometimes Dodge. They are simple feats that add easily calculated boosts to the bad guys By this point the bad guys should have a +3 to attack, +2 to damage, +4 or 5 to AC and 3 extra Hit Points per Hit Die. I also usually get them some slightly better gear. Just 100 gold or less can go a long way. In the case of the gnolls, I would give them hide armor (15 gold), Heavy Wooden Shield (7 gold), and a Battle Axe (10 gold). If that is not enough, I then give one or two bad guys in each group the Simple Template: Giant. That's a one step size increase, +3 natural armor, and +4 to both STR and CON. You also take a -2 to Dex and the size bump gives you a -1 to attack and AC. In the end, you get +1 to hit and +1 to AC. You also get a reach increase, + 2 to damage and another +2 HP per Hit Die. If that is still not enough, I start adding class levels. Fighters are generally the easiest, but a dash of cleric or rogue can be fun. If I want to throw the characters a curve or just have a little fun, I'll use something else. All of these bumps stack, so the power level can take off pretty fast. An Advanced Giant gnoll with Toughness, Weapon Focus and Dodge, as well as two levels of fighter can get scary pretty fast. I think that critter would have a CMB of +10 and +8 to hit, and do a base of 2d6+5 damage with the axe. It would have 2d8+2d10+24 hit points. The AC would be 22, and the CMD would be 19. Just follow that progression and something along those lines should get you where you need to be. Good luck and happy gaming.
Why? It makes sense that people could be caught flat footed if combat spontaneously broke out or if people are taken by surprise. In those situations I keep the rule in place. On the other hand, if two groups are facing each other down and expecting a fight to break out at any moment, it didn't make sense to me that people would be caught flat footed.
I don't believe the combination works. At least not all of it. Close weapon mastery allows you to use the base damage of the weapon or the unarmed brawler damage -4. Either the damage of a spiked shield, or the unarmed damage. The two do not combine in any way to ramp up the damage. On the other hand, the bashing property does probably work to increase the damage.
I'm not sure I have a ton of sympathy regarding difficulties in playing geek sudoku when there is an incredibly easy to use tool. If people refuse to use it, that's on them, not the campaign rules. Oh sorry, this is my fault. I didn't properly emphasize the point I was trying to make and then got sidetracked the the replies. My bad. I'm sorry. It's not that is takes so long to sort out games. That is a side issue that can be a bit annoying, but is not particularly relevant to the discussion. The relevant part of my comment was that when all is said and done, no games could be found that could accommodate enough people to make a table.
Ok, I have put on my face mask and protective padding in preparation for all the rotten fruit that will be thrown at me. It's inevitable, considering the topic, but here I go. What about allowing replays after a certain number of years? Let's start with 3 years. Maybe it should be 4. Originally I was thinking 5, but that felt a bit much. Anyway, I was pondering recently the concerns about replay. Most had to do with people "farming" scenarios over and over, or ruining the experience for others by knowing what was going to happen. It was really that second part that got me thinking along these lines. After 2 or 3 years the scenarios start to run together for me and after five years I'd be surprised if I could reliably recall more than a few details. So that thought led to my next thought. It would be pretty hard to farm a scenario if you could only do it once every 5 years. But it sure would throw a bone to those hard core dedicated players that have been at it since the first few seasons. I'm sure there are those who would always balk at any replay for any reason. Some have been seriously burned by replay in other game systems. It's a touchy subject. But this idea seemed simple and to have limited downside. I've only been playing for 3 or so years, so this wouldn't impact me yet. Maybe there are repercussions I haven't thought of. Just a thought. Figured I'd kick it out there. Might give some people some more opportunities to have fun with the hobby.
I ran a scenario a while back that required the players to roll a will save every 30 minutes, real time. If they failed the roll, a random demon or three burst out of a magic item they were carrying. The saving throw got progressively harder and the critters that popped out got nastier. The players needed to complete a mission and neutralize the magic item to stop the demon attacks. I have never seen a group play more intensely. There was a real edge of panic in the air. You could do something like that. Every half hour they need to make a group stealth check or they get found by a squad of bag guys. If they are still fighting a half hour later they need to make a second stealth check at a major penalty or a second group joins the fray. I've also just recently started having things go one while the group plans. If they spend too long plotting what they are doing the bad guys get another action. It really cut down on the lengthy dithering.
I love Channel The Gift. Many of my higher level characters carry a couple scrolls of it. So many times I've been in a situation where the wizard has the perfect spell to pull the party's butts out of the the fire, but the wizard is crying "But I only memorized that spell once! What if I need it latter!!" Now I just whip out the scroll and say "Quit your whining Gandolf. Now fireball that jellyfish swarm before it finishes digesting the rogue!"
I just stumbled across the Leveraging weapon quality. It doubles a weapon's enhancement bonus when performing a few combat maneuvers. I have a high level magus character that has been using and abusing the Dueling weapon property from the Pathfinder Field Guide. The Dueling property gives a weapon a luck bonus equal to double the enhancement bonus when performing most combat maneuvers. So what I have been doing is using my magus's arcane pool power to boost his weapon's enhancement bonus up to +4. Combined with the Dueling enhancement, I get a +8 Luck bonus on combat maneuvers. If I give my weapon the Leveraging quality, it looks like my +4 enhancement would turn into a +8 enhancement bonus with a +16 luck bonus when performing maneuvers. (Well, not all maneuvers. Only a few are on the list for both qualities.) That is a combined +24 bonus on maneuver attempts. Is that right? I keep thinking this can't work, but it looks like it does.
This is what I do, but it works for me: Start with the things that make your character uncool. Remember that deep down inside, everyone was a shmuck once. He may be a hero now, but at one point in time he was a nobody. Next, I like to give my character quirks first and then figure out how he got them. I have a character with a limp and a missing finger. It was fun figuring out how it happened. Another character smokes cigars, and the story of how he picked up the little habit has helped define the character through 14 levels. Your character is a big damn hero now. More stories about how awesome he is unnecessary. The time a drunk barbarian got beat up by a pack of street urchins is inherently more interesting that a story about the barbarian beating up 101 bugbears by himself. Motivation is good, but what I like even more is a character that wishes he was doing something else. The guy who just wants to be a simple farmer, but has been caught up in events can be pretty compelling. All the advice has been pretty good so far. The backstory doesn't need to be perfect. Just needs to add a little flavor to breathe some life into the character.
I don't want to assume too much here, but it sounds like you were given multiple hints to be a responsible player and tone down your character. When that failed, nudges, pushes, hammer blows, and then eventually death were applied. Sounds like there was ample warning. I was in a game about 2 years ago where the GM handed out some magic items off a random treasure chart. My character ended up with a weapon that worked so well for him it could have potentially broken the game. After a couple sessions I had a talk with the GM. We discussed giving the weapon to another character that would not synergize so well with it. We ended up just quietly removing the item from the game. Then the campaign went on and everyone continued to enjoy themselves. It is not just the GMs responsibility to make the game fun. If your character is messing things up for others, take a step back and maybe give up one of your treasured little powers, abilities, items or whatnot. Or maybe just cut back on how much you use it. As people have mentioned earlier, it's not about winning, it's about having fun.
Sounds to me like a GM ran out of patience with a disruptive player/character. Seeing as the other players want to finish the campaign, I would say they appear to be enjoying themselves. Some groups play pretty fast and loose with the rules. One of my old GMs liked to apply the "Cool Rule". If it sounded cool and fun, he would allow it. But if you took the cool things he let you have and started to disrupt the game, making it less fun for others, he would smack you down. Best GM I've ever had.
Anyone mind if I just pick up my original question and quietly back away into the darkness?
I don't think tieflings are legal anymore. At the the very least, I think you need a boon for PFS play.
Disposable guns is an old trope, which I can only assume has some basis in historical fact. One of my gun affectionado buddies said that in the era of muzzle loader combat it was common to have 2 or 3 or more firearms stashed about the body. These were not for duel wielding but were essentially fire and forget tools.
Are there legal PFS races with prehensile tails?
There's no prohibition on temporarily emptying your hand in order to load a firearm. But how many extra double pistols are you going to be carting around? I'll presume you aren't going to be spending the cash to make them mwk/magical so what's your next step once the lack of enhancement bonus becomes a significant issue? I'm thinking only 3 or so double pistols as well as a dragon pistol or two for fun. It could be entertaining surprise to mix a fireball into the melee action. I'm hoping that specialty ammo could alleviate some of the problems with damage output from the nonmagical firearms. I'm going Mysterious Stranger for Charisma to damage, and combining it with deadly aim to put damage at around d8+10. I figure by the second or third round I will be in the mix of melee and using the sword in my off hand. Now, you have a point with the negatives to attack. With -4 from TWF and -2 from Rapid Shot and another -2 from Deadly Aim, we are starting with a -8 to attacks. To bad no firearms are considered light weapons.
I would love to use gun twirling, but that is three more feats I would have to shoehorn into an already feat intensive build. I am a little fuzzy on the requirements for order of all attacks. So you may be right Bob^3
I've never actually played Overwatch. I've heard of it, but don't really know anything about it. As a general rule I don't play "Shooters". But recently I had a character with Improved Two Weapon Fighting come across auto loading pistols that bestowed the Rapid Shot feat. I never got a chance to use them during the scenario, but I have been pondering ways to recreate the effect.
I'm building a gunslinger-like-thing. With my current build plan, by 7th level I will have the basic gunslinger feats plus Rapid shot, TWF, ITWF, and quick draw. My plan is to have one good pistol with all the magic goodies and a series of semi-disposable double barrel pistols. I want to make sure my planned method and order of attacks is rock solid legal.
Rinse. Repeat.
Alternatively, I'm considering going the grossly inefficient route of sword and pistol while making use of a Glove of Storing. My plan is the attack actions would work similarly, but instead of dropping the off hand weapon to reload, I would take a free action to store away the sword and then bring it back again with another free action. Is this legal?
Throw paired opportunists in the mix and I think you would theoretically have 100 AoOs. Outflank in this situation could easily generate a 100 more. In reality, maybe a dozen of those attacks go off and the BBEG is smoked. No one should worry about this being too powerful. The group should be congratulated for working as a team and coordinating their efforts.
Yep. I know. This post was mostly just joke with a punchline something like "You can teach an ape how to use a greatsword, but you can't make him murder-hobo".
Just to gather all the bits together: Spell Combat
Wand Weilder Arcana
Use Magic Device
And for those concerned adding UMD into the mix: Action
I came in skeptical, but this collection of rule points makes it pretty clear unless I'm missing something.
So, I've built a dirty trick based character. I've mechanically maxed the character out. He can do between 2 and 4 dirty tricks a round. He can apply two conditions with each dirty trick attempt. He can dirty trick as an AoO. And at 8th level his bonus for dirty trick is over 20. Nice, right? Unfortunately, now that I am hitting higher levels nearly everything I run into is immune to dirty tricks. At least, I've been having an awful lot of difficulty justifying my dirty tricks. And that's the real difficulty with dirty tricks. You can't just mechanically say you do it. You need to think of a way to justify to the GM that it works, and I'm having a hard time doing that. How do you dirty trick an elemental? An incorporeal creature? An ooze? Can you sicken or shake an automaton? Can you do anything but entangle mindless creatures? Help...........
I also would like to point out to those that seem to imply that I support unlimited play with full reward, I most certainly do not. Very early in this discussion I shifted my stance after reading the many legitimate concerns others would have for such a system. Limited replay. Maybe 2 or 3 additional runs for a reduced credit. No boons. No special equipment. That, to me, seems like a pretty reasonable comprise.
An incentive system that gets people to GM who otherwise would not want to is not a good incentive system. Actually that is exactly what an incentive system does. I think the misunderstanding is the belief that wanting to GM is a dichotomous thing. That is to say, one either 100% wants to GM or 100% doesn't want to GM. In reality, nearly every player at least considers GMing, but for one reason or another does not. Nearly every player wants to GM as some level, but the desire is not strong enough to overcome the impediments. I'm advocating a system that gives a little extra bump to increase the odds. Let me give you an example. There is a module that I have received a significant number of requests to run. Now this is a module that does not get run very often. I've been trying to play it for about two years and have never been able to get in on a game. The words I have heard used to describe it include "unpleasant" and "unsatisfying", but it is part of a series of modules that many players would like to complete. I had been kicking around the idea of running it for a while. I consulted with a Venture Captain and a Lieutenant, and they both told be to avoid running it because "It wasn't worth it." I was asked again recently by a group of players to run the module. Now, I'm going to GenCon in a few weeks and I have a Buffer Build character I would like to bring. It hands out feats and saving throws and all sorts of fun to it's allies, but is pretty unplayable at low levels. I just wont have time to get him played enough to use him at GenCon. So I figured "What the heck, I'll run it." The players get their game and I may be able to play my character at GenCon. Everybody wins. If I'd have run it before I wouldn't be getting credit for it and I probably wouldn't be running this module tomorrow. Everybody loses.
Evergreens are written to be run multiple times, which means tehre won't be anything on there so overpowerful that every dm is going to want to run it to put it on their characters. 4 and 5 star dms have seen the higher level scenarios, know what the really good cookies are, and what people would do if they could run unlimited sessions and put them on every character. I think most of the people that have been advocating GM credit for additional replays have also believed the replays should be "generic". By that I mean no boons, items or other special things. Pretty much just a straight 1XP 2PP and standard gold. Personally I think it should be slightly reduced from that and only give 1 XP 1.5 PP and 80%-90% Gold.
If someone finds GMing too much of a hassle, I can't think of any incentive that would bring them back to the table. Well then, sit right down and I'll tell you about one. You see, it's called GM replays with credit. You know all that work you just did prepping for that game, well guess what, you can run that game a second time and you'll get PFS credit the second time you run it too!!!! No seriously! You actually get credit for the game just like all the players that sat at the table. Yes, I know. It's revolutionary. GMs actually receiving credit like ALL THE OTHER PLAYERS AT THE TABLE!!!! This crazy world that we live in. What will they think of next?
I just want to let people know where I'm coming from on this issue. I've spent the past 20 years working in the field of psychology. The vast majority of this time was spent on psych wards and maximum security psych hospitals. My primary focus has been on behavior modification. I've built my career on shaping behavior. Small incentives can be used to build large changes in behavior. Small barriers, much smaller than we realize, can be major hurdles to desired behavior. When I look at the incentive system as it relates to encouraging new GM's, I see a system that is designed to discourage the recruitment of new GMs. The reward for working hard and learning to run a scenario, is that the next to you run it you get nothing. You are told to be grateful you get to do it for nothing, and the alternative is to start from scratch learning a new scenario so you can get rewarded once for than one and then get nothing for any additional times you do it. This is a system designed to actively reduce the number of people willing to start GMing. I enjoy PFS very much. It's my favorite hobby, and I'd like to see it flourish. And I think a few minor tweaks to the GM reward system would help with that.
I seem to recall when the magus first came out there was a lot of hotly debated threads going around about how it worked. Now, for those of us that have played a magus and played with a bunch of other maguses, the mechanics of the magus seems natural. But it is completely reasonable that a new GM could be a bit flummoxed the first time he/she sees a magus. If you don't believe me, dig through the graveyard of old threads for some on this topic. There were an awful lot of angry people on both sides of this issue.
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