Lakstoties's page

Difficult and Challenge aren't synonymous as some people like to think. A proper challenge is often fun. The main thing is to find out what is a proper challenge to your group. For an RP and Story heavy group, they are probably looking for plot twists, rough choices, and awkward situations. Now a good party should be a thinking party, so they are just going to have to get used to that. But instead of puzzles and the like, I'd stick to have to weigh choices for the now and future. As for hating taking damage and getting into scuffs... That's a very useful tool to add a bit 'o' drama to the mix. I'd start leaning to more "dialog/options first" encounters with that group. The gang of bandits won't simply attack off the bat, but will demand valuables from them. Give them diplomatic options and opportunities for evasion... but always at some price.

Do you jump in to save a bunch of strangers from a pack of wolves or let the wolves have their feast to avoid having to deal with them as you travel through the woods?

Give the bandits your valuables to keep from a fight or use some "Iron Diplomacy" instead?

I'd be curious as to the behaviors of people on either side of the debate when it comes to reloading from saved games after a failed game and "Iron Man" rules when playing computer games.

I see fudging as a mechanical balancing system. Yes, statistically, event X should succeed 75% of the time. The trouble is with statistics, they indicate the theoretical odds as the number of attempts approaches infinity. The die could roll numbers that place you in the unsuccessful 25% range for the extent of your lifetime. Unlikely (but there have been a few die I was suspicious of), but it could happen and it does happen in much smaller stretches. If you happen to be making some very important roles that sync with that bad series of rolls... Then what are you to do? Some say let them fall as they may, other say to fudge it out. It a choice between hoping that the streak ends soon or buffering the odds back to what they should be for the short term.

Thought musing:

You have a sliding glass door to the patio. Somehow a small warping of the metal track stops the door from closing all the way. You have two options: You can open the sliding glass door all the way and slam it forward in hopes of straightening out the track enough to close it, or you can get a hammer to work the track functional again so you can close the door.

Now, I'll admit the tension and trial of slamming the door a few times can lead to triumphant moments when it finally succeeds. Unfortunately, this gets REALLY old after a number of times and can lead to a whole host of other problems.

Getting the hammer to fix the door might seem less exciting or seen as resorting to aspects outside the mechanics of the system in place. It does get the job done with the least amount of stress and the rest of group sometimes just wants the damn door closed so they can do other things.

My rule: "Everything in moderation."

I got a wild hare up the hind-side and made very rough character sheet experimentation based on the official Pathfinder sheets. The focus was to try to re-allocate space, do visibility tweaks, and increase writing room. Took the afternoon in between waiting for laundry and got a front page draft.

Here's the ugly rough: The Ugly, Tax Form Character Sheet

It looks like a tax form, needs a lot of polish, but it may have promise. Played around with shading and gray, write-over text. I believe most decent laser printers will print it fine. (I got a Xerox Phaser with PostScript 3 support, so my test prints probably aren't typical.)

So, I want to get some feedback to even see if there's enough interest to make it worth finishing. Be as critical as you want, it'll only help.

I can see sneak attacking with a greatsword. Just imagine the average guard standing around looking the other way near a dark alley way. From behind him a hooded man quietly approaches with greatsword in hands, setting up like a hitter watching for the next pitch. The hooded man creeps to striking distance behind the, still clueless, guard. A quick smirk from the hooded man signals forth a powerful swing of steel. The arc starts out glittering cleanly, ending up tinted spotty red. It tears through the guard with a tenacity that'd make the Bear Jew from Inglorious Basterds proud. The hooded man then casually poses himself with the greatsword over the still twitching remains of the guard.

With a showman's flair the hooded man muses, "And that's how you sneak attack with the greatsword."

I had Half-Elf Rogue/Fight/Ghostwalker combo from way back that did horrible things with dual bastard swords and the occasional use of Ethereal Jaunt. Don't need Hide in Plain sight if you can appear right behind them. The group always joked about my character's sneak attacks. We had descriptions ranging form scissor attacks to enemies absolutely confused as to why there were two huge swords sticking out of their chests.

I noticed the resulting quality from using the Pazio provided PDF of the Pathfinder Character Sheet was a little lacking. Upon investigation it seems the PDF's color space was RGB instead of CMYK. (A big difference when using most printers of quality.) A quick convert and the text was sharper and toner use was far better.

I might just be nitpicking, but I would like to see if Pazio could release a higher quality character sheet that's optimized for better printing. Adobe's Web presets for PDF's can sometimes butcher anything meant to be printed if you are not careful. I have access to a decent color laser. So, it'd be nice to have a character sheet PDF that provided proper color spaces and a vector art (straight Illustrator import?) Pathfinder logo instead of a bitmap.

Again... Nitpicking, but it'd save me the trouble of corrections on my end to get it to translate well.