Lerch's page

These are just suggestions. YMMV.

The question isn't to be a more difficult DM. It's not difficult to kill characters. The difficulty is to be a more challenging and fun DM. The object of this Game is to have fun. As the judge we entertain our players and through our players be entertained by them.

Read. Read read. Know your monsters. Know your environments. Know pathfinder rules.

That being said. Lose the screen. Roll out in the open. You'd be surprised how much tension you can make with a little stare down on an open confirm crit with a scythe. Don't use initial cards or use those init cards to maintain hps. I've bought a journal book to maintain hps and The init board that Paizo sells is great.

Think like your monster, don't use complex tactics for animals or statues. Conversely if he's smart and you see someone get healed...go for the healer or other spellcaster just like regular parties do...

You should (in my opinion) dial it down for new players because you are the ambassador for pathfinder and you might the first, last, and only judge if a player has a bad experience with the system. I've seen this happen in person.

Good luck!

Son of the Veterinarian wrote:

Not a big issue, and I haven't heard of anyone having a real problem with it, but maybe next year buying either Blue or Black tablecovers, not both, would keep any potential problems from cropping up.

ICCLOS only had 6 colors available, so that's what we used.

Did they use white? Now I don't remember.

Here are my Comments for Gencon 13 hopefully generally readable, constructive and usable and not in any way viewed as a personal attack against anyone.

I agree whole-heartedly with Bob. Send the five/four real tickets to the tables-- the Marshall writes the number and subteir by the table; and as single and or double real tickets can trickle in then the Marshall can send those real tickets to the holes. Not to hard for the marshal to keep track of on the paper. The four-five person real ticket holders are legal tables and can get seated and are then out of the way. The six person tables should get priority but 10 minutes into mustering, timeliness counts too.

Mustering is not for the faint of heart. Having working previous conventions in bygone years(as a Marshall) musterers/Marshalls need to be seen and heard...the purple shirts work but not in a huge crowd. They need to elevate (especially any who might be height challenged (I sometimes stood on chair YMMV) and project their voice. I've seen people wear funny hats (like pirate hats or I actually bought a top hat this year). The RPGA had separate button up shirts then wore t-shirts to be judges. And they need to be thick skinned as some players might get irate at seeing tables of five get turned away when most of the room has been seated and there are judges with empty tables waiting on Players whether or not the event is timed. It was suggested that players having trouble getting a full table should seek help from HQ. Players aren't thinking of going to HQ to get a table because its not HQ's job to muster. Training to deal with irate players would be helpful. possibly go over it during the judges/marshals meeting y'all have on Wednesday. IE "I think you need to go to HQ with your issues sir"...

A lot of gamers are introspective and don't intuitively muster themselves into groups of 6, they need to be prodded by the musterer/Marshall. To this day I am still impressed by the new player base Pathfinder continues to build, but with that new player base comes the unfamiliarity of mustering into groups of six. Another thing I think should be recommended is those playing on pregens should mustered together. They have no investment in the pregen while people that have been playing that 6-8 level character (and have so many chronicle sheets behind it) have much more invested in its survival.

Signs needed to be changed every slot. This could have been causing some confusion. Especially if you came in on generics just wanting to play a game and had a PFS character. Finding a module that you hadn't already played could have been an issue. I know that multiple signs had the same teirs for the special but weren't next to each other. If the Marshall on one side ran out of tables there was no coordination with the other Marshall with the left over tables/players.

The special seating took over 1:30 and we just happen to have the table of five and two different generics holders were seated first before a real ticket holder was found. I don't know if this was built into the scenerio but that was a lot of waiting around. I did have a great time. The Wife/husband team from my old group did mega damage. I say it that way because she did the most. It was great seeing and playing with them again. The mustering issues the husband had with bonekeep #1 made him give me their two real tickets for bonekeep two...so he decided to go with an alternate schedule. 15 minutes before the bonekeep 2, I acquired a third ticket at event registration so that a wife/son group could join me at bonekeep 2 then I ran into a gunslinger that I had played with earlier.

One thing of note..(this is for Mike Brock). I looked in the Guide to Organized Play and it said that For modules and Adventure Path content below 9th level, if you do not have a character in the correct level range, you may use a Pathfinder Society pregenerated character, when we sat for bonekeep 2 the two randoms that we acquired weren't going to play their real characters. They were going to play pregens until I convinced them to play their subtler appropriate characters, we (the four of us) would keep them alive. What is Pathfinders policy about playing a module when you _do_ have the level appropriate character but don't want to risk the character death. My impression was they would play bonekeep 2 with the pregen then immediately apply it to the character they didn't want to risk. This seems to be out of the spirit of the game.

People with pregens have no investment with them and playing them in special events the players could callously or unintentionally cause unneeded deaths of real characters by their actions/inactions. My buddy and I played bonekeep 1 with 4 pregens. It wasn't pretty or fun. Well I made it fun, but that's me. The judge had issues with breaking magical weapons and hardness but fixed it eventually but the damage had been done time wise... Didn't matter I got to game with my friend and no pregen , my buddy , or me for that matter died) .but we only did four rooms. Meh. Very challenging. Sphincter factor rating extreme.

I overheard that the placement of banners was not by choice and the attempt to move them and some tables was left on deaf ears. Unfortunate. That did leave the hallway during bonekeep and the interactive a huge fire hazard. Maybe this should be brought up next year to convention center management. (And maybe you will have the entire Sagamore ballroom :-))

The colored table cloths were a great idea. It definitely helped my wonderful wife and family find me and occasionally bring me food. My wife also helped out a nice teammate and caffeinated her with coffee. (Sometimes its good to know people. Hehe) she was much appreciated and wide-eyed the rest of the module :-).

Judging crew were really good this year. Suggestion for judges: have a storage area for them or a judge "staff lounge" that is nearby even if it part of designated HQ. checkin baggage- check out baggage. I bet if ask your judges they'd like something like this. My compatriot was also a volunteer. While playing I often was standing watch over his judging materials while he roamed the dealer hall.... I hope the judge that got the blood clot has gone to the hospital and is feeling better. (I don't remember his name but he is a real trooper).

This may also be paltry in the scheme of things but its not the judges fault if their table doesn't make. Can they still be tokenified so they can get a chance at a boon.. Yes, the judge has been compensated in other ways but the boons from Gencon are only (to my knowledge) available there. Just a thought. If they go off to play, so much the better; they offered their time and prepared to judge, they should possibly get more chances than the average joe.

You folks are awesome!

Thanks to the overwhelming response, all 150 tables of Pathfinder Society have been filled with GMs. If you would like to add your name to a waiting list in case a GM has to cancel the trip or pull out for the lottery events, or some other event, send me an email. I will add people to the waiting list in the order as I receive them.

As for the Grand Convocation, I don't want to reveal too much yet. I will reveal more in a blog in the near future. But it is going to be much more than just the arena.

Thanks again to all the volunteers. Paizo Con wouldn't happen without your efforts.

Curse you xbox.

I sent you an email....as soon as I read the announcement email. So, stick me on the waiting list... :-S I had a blast last year.

Does power creep into a gaming system? Invariably.

It's almost unavoidable in fact. New books come out that the players want the business needs for cash flow and everyone is happy.

The open play systems try to control the pier creep by banning those MUST have feats/spells/items or restricting(house ruling it some way where it will be usable when used in the neighborhood of 30K+ players.

Time passes. And New books will come.what does the company do when power creep has become " unmanageable". What does company do....of course there are multitudes of reasons companies come out with rule sets...this one possible explanation. I won't wax poetic on other reasons.

Release new rules and reset the power base for the power creep.

For 1st Ed it was1974ish to 1988-89
2ndEd 1988-89-2000
3rd was 2000-2003
3.5ed 2003-2008
Pathfinder 2008-?

Just play the game and have fun....otherwise play checker or something else that tickles your fancy. It's what Gary would've said. All this arguing is moot.
Lerch

Recommendations: players self muster into parties of 6 like minded levels. That way friends are most likely guaranteed to play with friends and you are more likely to end up with balanced parties. After a party of six has "self mustered" one person can go to the muster location and ask for a table. Generics (if there are empty tables) can do the same.

I still dont have my voice.but I had lots of fun...my wife was a nice helper for HQ.. yes?

Partitions may help but make general announcements problematic. Although I LIKE the idea since for the life of me, I still cant find the other two octaves of my voice
I don't know what these four modules you speak of... I had two. The special and one I had to do seven times. But who's counting. Had to explain the faction three times because five times my tables were pregens. Others had characters but didn't have the level required.

The Boons were really cool...keep them coming.

Tada!

...

(Introductions really aren't my forte. Expect a better blog post.)

Congrats! Hope to see your name in print soon!

Lerch

Asphesteros wrote:

What's the ETA on hearing back after emailing an offer to volunteer?

It'll be some time, I need to compile everything.

I made my use Internet check (albeit a bit slowly), but my wife and I wanted to help at Gen Con as well. Hopefully the emails made the cut.

Just trying to cover all the bases, not trying to annoy.

Lynn & Laura Register.

Kyle Baird wrote:

I'm going to have to put this thing on my radar for next year.

ComicCon is something that must be experienced to be believed. It has taken over all the area surrounding the convention center.

If you do end up heading this way for ComicCon let me know and I will make sure that you get the info needed to make the experience incredible.

Also realize that on the first day of the con that 4 day badges for next year with preview night are expected to sell out. Keep an eye out for when tickets are available and plan on buying your tickets the moment they open up for sale.

Man O Man. Do I want to go to this thing. *sad face*

I mentioned it to the wife and the lasers ricocheted off the inside of skull and bounced around a bit from the stare I got.

I think that was no. Then she said maybe next year after I told her about what you said...

Which I translated as "After I get a trip to Australia and Hawaii". Hmmm. I let you know. Maybe I can talk her down a trip.

Lerch

Hey Mark, get your act together! :-)

Seriously though, I need to know if anyone else is interested in playing Delirium's Tangle at tier 4-5 at 1pm. Otherwise we might roll into town later. Or maybe we'll play a different scenario, or maybe I'll just play a different character... or, or, or..

I'm sure Brian and I would love to play the game with you instead of being on the wrong side of the screen for once. ;-). He's fifth and I'm sixth.

Unless the table is already full of Kyleordians. Minions of Kyle that is. ;-). Hopefully he's free Wednesday Brian just started a new job.

Lerch

Most challenging test of my patience yet.

Parties involved did apologize. At least I did. Chad really did do a great job despite our effortts. At least I had a partial excuse my dudes charisma was 7. ;-). I think he's going to be nervous during high winds just because...

Thanks Chad you've given my character a psychosis.
Lerch

I would Love to go but will not have a car. But will be at the hotel. Can I bum a ride?

Lynn Register

I never said they were equally evil, just that both are evil. In fact, I've said that about a dozen times. Nobody seems to actually read my freaking posts, they just spout back about how I'm trying to force someone's alignment to change based on the [Evil] descriptor on the spell and how I am full of fail for it. Sheesh.

+1

I'm with you mdt, ignored and unloved. *sigh* If they go back to one my older posts it has the descriptions for Animate Dead since 1st edition to current....its always been evil. The wording has been changed or a subtype was added but the "spirit" of the spell remains the same. Its evil. How badly [evil] is between the player and the judge.
Your Mileage WILL Vary between judges.

Shifty wrote:

casting Spells with the [evil] descriptor WAS in fact an EVIL ACT, and would shift the characters alignment for casting them before long.

Divine casters yes, arcane casters no.

Furthermore, if you are going to play it that technocratically, then nonaligned spells should also shift you to neutral over time. By your logic, it only stands to reason that repeated contact with neutral spells will compel you to change your ethos to neutrality.

Another FALSE ASSUMPTION. There is one entry for Animate Dead. It has the [evil] subtype for both types of casting.

There are "descriptors" for spells. Most of these descriptors have no game effect by themselves,but they govern how the spell interacts with other spells, with special abilities, with unusual creatures, with alignment,and so on. pg 212 Core rulebook.

The descriptors listed in the Core book: acid, air, chaotic, cold, darkness, death, earth, electricity, evil, fear, fire, force, good, language-dependent, lawful, light, mind-effecting, sonic, and water. (also pg212)

I don't see anything about spells being unaligned, the alignments spells have available to them are chaotic, good ,evil or lawful. Neutrality is not mentioned, I guess they sat out at the magic fest.

when you go and say to the player, "btw your character is approaching evil because he uses neutrally obtained undead to save lives." Do you expect that to make sense? Actions have a non-circular reason of why they are good or evil. This reason is related to who is affected by the action and how. Saying, this spell has an evil tag and thus using it turns me into a bad person is equivalent to saying to that player, "btw, doing x is evil because it is evil."

circular...

Argument has no merit because it is based off of a false assumption.

"neutrally obtained undead"

The casting of the spell Animate Dead is Evil by subtype. How great or small WILL vary by judge. Regardless of how the corpses were obtained or created once the spell Animate Dead was cast, it now has an Evil act attached to the process. Until you can get past that all other facts are moot. The discussion of how many acts it takes to become evil/good/lawful/chaotic are a player derived and/or a player-judge decision. (I have seen a player decide through his own actions that he was no longer neutral but chaotic; and after discussing it with the table judge, he changed his alignment.)

And yes....evil begets evil. Just saying. :-)

seekerofshadowlight wrote:

TriOmegaZero wrote:

It is only inevitable if the DM decides it is so.

So? Murdering a whole village as it amuses you only makes you evil if the Gm says so as well.

An evil act, is an evil act. GM always has the call when to many evil acts cross the line.

Hello, I'm a True Neutral Wizard casting his 50th Summon Monster III to bring a Lantern Archon this month, am I Neutral Good already?

Intent.

Its the judges job to discern intent from the players from the guidelines on pages 166-168 of the core rulebook. Hate to be a book thumper, if you going to ask questions like these when the answers are in the books.

The judge makes a decision based on your intent, especially if the spell is predestined to be an evil act because it has a [evil] subtype. IF you save the superstitious village from the evil necromancer with your own newly created animated dead, it's conceivable that a judge would give some allowances. However, if that is your modus operandi on a regular basis, the judge is more likely to say that you are "dipping into the well of darkness too much" and you might want you rethink your methods (otherwise known as a alignment slip warning.)

YMMV

Animate dead has an [evil] subtype. How many of these acts does it take to slip to an evil alignment...up to your varying judges. And no set number in the guide to society play that I saw...if that's in error let me know.

Lerch wrote:

Make careful considerations (1st edition) when using this spell by a good cleric and then 11 years later after some gaming went by...they made it usable by only non-good priests. Third edition let the wizards in on the fun but made it unequivocally evil with the subtype [evil]. Something that Pathfinder has continued in their traditions (otherwise known as rules).

Minor correction.

Those were quotations from the actual Players Handbook. Semantics need not apply. "and only evil priest use it frequently." emphasis mine. Does that logically mean others use "seldom"?

Frequent (dictionary definition) equates to constant or habitual (you could read that as a monster manual label of "always evil") With seldom being the odd exception...

Would you like to try again?

An act is arguably wrong if it harms another individual. If you manufacture a corpse, then you have not wronged an individual on the creation end of it. If you do not then use the undead to harm other people, how is this act of creating and using undead evil? Give me a why other than because it is RAW? You guys are eventually going to have to DM a game where someone asks this question. If your only answer is, "because by raw, animating dead is evil." you are going to look foolish.

I might have an answer for him....back when animate dead was only a clerical spell..:

The first edition (circa 1978): "The act of animating dead is not basically a good one, and must be used with careful consideration and good reason by clerics of good alignment." From the description of the third level cleric spell.

The second edition (circa 1989) is even more harsh (and still only a third level cleric spell): "Casting this spell is not a good act, and only evil priest use it frequently."

Third Edition (circa 2000): gained the evil descriptor, now cleric 3 death domain 3 and sorcerer/wizard 5. No descriptor text about evilness just a subtype.

3.5 Edition (circa 2003): has the evil descriptor, cleric 3 death domain 3, changed to sorcerer/wizard 4. ditto

Pathfinder Core Rules (third printing 2010): has the evil descriptor, cleric 3, sorcerer/wizard 4. ditto.

Simply stated it is and has always been the rules as written AND he/she has at least 33 years of rules to back him/her up. Or if you would like me to rephrase the answer...33 years of Gaming History to back up that the creation of undead is inherently "not" a good act.

Make careful considerations (1st edition) when using this spell by a good cleric and then 11 years later after some gaming went by...they made it usable by only evil priests. Third edition let the wizards in on the fun but made it unequivocally evil with the subtype [evil]. Something that Pathfinder has continued in their traditions (otherwise known as rules).

Rules are how we play or guide our games.. we have run the RAW in Pathfinder Society Games, you can do whatever you like in a homebrew...but in a Pathfinder core rules (Society in particular) "discussion" about animate dead, it is by definition an [evil] subtype act. I hope I don't look silly using 30+ years of just rules/history as the basis for a judge decision. Just by claiming something has always been that way, it should still be that way. That would suck.

Now to put all these books back....sheesh.

But I'm 100% certain I never claimed that the undead were not evil. There's no reason for them to be. Heck, their very fluff text contradicts itself. It's logically stupid for them to be evil (mindess = cannot make moral decisions, moral decisions are required for alignment, if you're aligned without morality then you should have the appropriate subtype).

Mindless = - on the Intelligence score, fortunately they have 10 wisdom to judge things. He may not be book smart, but he morally must kill everything that moves (hopefully the good guys....he is a monster.) Sounds evil to me. BTW Wisdom describes a character's willpower, common sense, awareness and intuition, a creature with wisdom of 0 is incapable of rational thought and is unconscious. (Intelligence is learning and reasoning)....Therefore, by the Core Book descriptions (pg16-17) the skeleton/zombie can't learn new tricks (hence the lost feats) but is aware, has willpower and capable of rational "thought" or impulses (Wisdom > 0)

Moral test. 10ft room. Baby and a zombie..zombie sees the mom run away and shut the door. Will the zombie return the baby to mom or will he eat the baby? Morality and undead is a very bad idea to put to the test. Conversely, undead is an unnatural state of being, for them to be anything other than evil is illogical. Just throwing that out there...and that's probably why the paladin's are so up in arms about their existence in the first place. now its time for sleep.

Alizor wrote:

Herald wrote:

Larry Wilhelm was our GM...

All I can say is Ms. Feathers...

I grabbed an opportunity to GM a table of 4 former Triad members at Origins. If any of you know Lynn Register, he can come off as pretty gruff (he's actually very cool if you know him)--but when I introduced Miss Feathers he spit up the coffee he was drinking all over his character sheet. It was one of my favorite moments from the convention.

Hey! I made it to the battlemat. Good thing Dave brought a lot of napkins for the coffee ;-).

Yeah that was something that obviously took me by surprise. Props to Larry and that, and I apologize for not remembering the so-in-so's name; but he decided to try to re-introduce Ms. Feathers to me later on in the module. The "role" play was uh..memorable. Much to my _Paladin's_ chagrin.

Thanks for a great game Larry, and thanks for the help Doug, I really didn't mean to come off gruff. Thanks to Brian for pointing out this post. That game helped me decide to come back to gaming after a two-year hiatus and the years of work I put into a different campaign based off of 3.5. Brian and Dave convinced me to give Pathfinder a try and my fellow Triad members were on the money.

Lynn
aka
Bryson Paladin of Abadar