Matt Filla's page

If TNG busted open the door, DS9 tore it off the hinges. Here you have a federation crew running a space station for a non-federation species. The crew doesn't have the convenience of flying around doing things by their rules under their morality. We also get to see that not everyone in the Fed is a shining example of moral goodness. When push comes to shove, the Fed gets dirty (section 31).

Just having a main cast that didn't always get along and had to learn to trust each other was great.

"OK - let's try some different braid-tugging scenarios. First, Rand is being a typical addle-pated male...Good, I felt your frustration. OK - something different. Lan is getting you all hot and bothered and he really smells good, but at the same time he and Perrin are talking about how good the ale will taste when you reach the next inn...Nice - very conflicted tugging."

Unikatze wrote:

Also. One box has made it's way to ebay. There's one day left on the bid and it's going pretty high.
But I thought I would share.

https://www.ebay.ca/itm/Pathfinder-Pawns-COMPLETE-MONSTER-CODEX-BOX-extreme ly-rare-and-out-of-print/283462680103?hash=item41ffb13e27:g:9pgAAOSwNpdcwXa b

$405, Yep not enough demand that's fore sure.

Seriously, people need to quit equating "a couple of people are willing to pay a crazy price on eBay" with "there is enough demand out there to justify a large enough print run to make the price reasonable (and the associated inventory storage costs, etc)". They are not related.

"Look - I have to put up with all your characters' bombastic pronouncements during the game, so shut up and listen for once. Nothing's going to happen until I allow it anyways, so you might as well settle in."

but there is enough about it that I just don't like. The whole bounded accuracy thing really annoys the hell out of me, for instance, and the arcanist casting, advantage/disadvantage, and more.

You just listed several things I like about 5E.

People ask each other what class they are all the time - "so, what do you do for a living?" Why would it be different in the game?

Matt, I haven't played Skyrim in a long time, so I'm out of the game on most of the mods. I'd love to hear what other mods you like that add new content to the game. I'm not necessarily interested in mods that are about changing the game mechanics, but new quests and story lines would be fun.

Sure - here are the ones I think are great(note: I am playing the Special Edition but most of these are available for the original Skyrim. I get all the mods from nexusmods.com):

- Legacy of the Dragonborn (as if it wasn't clear)
- Moonpath to Elsweyr (travel to the lands of the Khajit)
- The Forgotten City (solve a murder in an underground city)
- Immersive College of Winterhold (adds locations, quests, etc., to flesh out the college of magic)
- Helgen Reborn (rebuild Helgen after the dragon attack which opens the game)
- Forgotten Dungeons, Skyrim Underground, Immersive Dungeons, Easier Riders' Dungeon Pack, The Unfinished Business (each of these adds several new dungeons to Skyrim - some with quests, some just cool to explore)
- Beyond Skyrim - Bruma (sends you back to Cyrodil and the province of Bruma, from Oblivion)
- Falskaar (a whole new island with many quests)
- Qaxe's Questorium (over 100 new quests, voiced NPCs, covering several different quest lines)
- Vigilant (adds a whole quest line for the Vigilants of Stendarr - make sure you get the English language add-on as the original is in Japanese)
- Artifacts of Skyrim, Royal Armory:New Artifacts, New Treasure Hunt, Amulets of Skyrim, Hidden Treasures, Skyrim's Unique Treasures (add tons of new items to find scattered about Skyrim)
- Fossil Mining (now you can find cool fossils when you mine for ore)

Legacy of the Dragonborn works with most of these to provide displays for the new items you find.

I got the Skyrim bug again a few weeks ago and I installed the special edition and modded it up, and found my favorite mod of all time - Legacy of the Dragonborn. It adds a museum in Solitude that has displays for over 3200 items (it supports a number of mods that add weapons and armor, other "treasure hunt" items, etc.), has several associated quests, allows you to form the Explorer's Guild, adds excavation sites to many of the Falmer, Dwemer, and ancient Nord ruins - it's amazing, and it has totally changed how I play the game (the Live Another Life mod now has an option to start as the newly appointed head of the Explorer's Guild, which is how I began my game, although Legacy works with any start - you will find a letter on the counter of some shops announcing the opening of the museum if you use a different start). Someone commented on Nexus that this mod allows you to play Indiana Jones in Skyrim and that's a perfect description of it. I can't recommend it highly enough - definitely add in the mods it supports, and you can basically turn Skyrim into one giant treasure hunt.

An adventuring group is going to be actively putting itself into life-threatening danger on a regular basis. Why would such a group include a member who is a liability? If the only reason for including your character in the group is "because it's being played by a person sitting at the table," when otherwise that character would never be considered for inclusion in a group of people who need everyone to have each others' backs and pull their own weight as a matter of survival, then your character needs to be reconsidered. This includes both the under-powered (relative to the rest of the party) character as well as the character who is a jerk/evil or otherwise causes significant conflict/antagonism within the party.

A competent fighter, cleric, and rogue are not going to fill out their group with an incompetent wizard, and if they accidentally did, they would boot him/her out at the first opportunity, because their lives are likely to literally depend on it.

Nope. Now I just need to know when to cancel my AP subscription before they become second edition products.

I milked every last quest XP I could get out of the Nuka-World raiders, and then slew them all in an orgy of blood.

I never read the comics, so I don't have that point of reference. I liked it overall, didn't love it. I would consider it "lesser" Besson (and I generally love his films). Fifth Element is a far, far better movie.

Things I liked:

- the opening sequence showing how Alpha came to be
- the sequence in the extra-planar market
- Bubble
- the incredible and imaginative visuals (one area where it topped Fifth Element, although the technology advances since then helped a lot)
- the idea of casting Herbie Hancock
- Cara Delevingne's beauty

Things I didn't like:
- Cara Delevingne's acting
- Dane Dehaan (as was stated above, sounds like Keanu, acts as well as him too)
- plot was meh

Hi all,

I run occasional one-shot adventures for friends of mine who don't have the time for/interest in playing in a campaign. Since they are not regular players, I do a lot of prep work to create characters, and provide all the relevant information for their PCs (e.g., feat and spell descriptions) to make it as easy as possible for them and to minimize lookups from the one set of rulebooks (mine) which we will have available. This means I don't want to spend additional time actually creating an adventure, and so I am looking for some suggestions which meet the following criteria:

a) can be run within a single six-hour session (I am willing to cut down a longer option if needed, but any PFS scenario should be meet this one),
b) has a "Ravenloft" feel (a request from one of the players - I try to vary the types of adventures I run for these one-offs and we haven't done one like that before)
c) is suitable for a group that includes a 15-year old and a 12-year old (this is less critical - I can always change things that are too "adult" and the kids can actually handle a pretty broad range of stuff).

Any thoughts? Pathfinder Society scenarios are always a good source but I am not sure if there is one that fits the type of session I am looking to run.

I will say it again: Don't underestimate him. Everyone did, and he became president. The game isn't over until it's over. The only one who wins from a casual, dismissive attitude to him is Trump himself.

Take the problem seriously. Mock the hell out of him as well.

I agree with you that it needs to be taken seriously, although I would argue that Trump becoming president was at least as much about overestimating the American public as it was about underestimating Trump.

My group has never had an issue with this, and I always find it strange that other groups do. Coins, gems, etc. and items no one wants get sold and divided into equal shares (with some amount for the party fund) - people claim the items they want and we have never had an argument about any of it. None of us care if one player has gotten "more" - the items go where it makes the most sense for the party overall.

Frankly, I would not enjoy playing in a group where everyone was obsessing over whether the fighter got more treasure than his/her character, or having to use spreadsheets and the like to make sure it was all "fair". The GM should be making sure that there is something for everyone eventually - why stress over it?

The future of successful political party cannot be "how do we win next time?" It has to be "how do we make this a better place?"

Hard to do anything as a political party if you don't win first.

I have never in my life walked into a retail store and dropped $550 on gaming stuff.

That's for the best. It works much better if you take the gaming stuff to the counter and give the money to the person at the register.

The words of the Constitution don't make mention of race or gender as having different tiers of rights - it simply stated that all men (mankind) are created equal

That's the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.

I am honestly depressed when I see people that really think either of these two people are good, competent, qualified people to take the office of president.

Please - whatever you may think of Clinton as a person, she is both competent and qualified to be President. "Competent and qualified" has nothing to do with "agrees with me on positions" - it's about whether the person has the skills/experience/knowledge to do the job. In fact, she's the only candidate in the race about whom that can be said.

"Despite winning the second debate in a landslide (every poll), it is hard to do well when Paul Ryan and others give zero support!" -Trump's Twitter account

Every poll, huh?

He also had a graphic citing a bunch of the totally unscientific online polls that he won, from such respected polling organizations as Breitbart, Drudge, Local 4 Detroit, and Fox 5 San Diego. He's like a terrible movie that has to fill its ads with quotes like "Best film of the year!" - Tom Wilson, Omaha Weekly Shopper.

(The PERCEPTION is also that their fellow cops will back them up.)

Unfortunately, these perceptions are too often correct.

We need to change our definition of what we consider a "good cop". Obviously, if you do the bad things you are not a good cop. But neither are you a good cop if you are aware of other cops doing bad things and stay silent (or worse, back their stories). When people talk about "a few bad actors", they are forgetting all the other cops who enable the really bad ones.

I really can't speak to Florida, but I can say that people in the Rust Belt are justifiably raging pissed-off that they lost their jobs to outsourcing, and watched their towns and cities slide into Mad Max times. If given the choice between a person who pushed to remove their jobs and factories, and someone telling them they are going to bring the factories back, who do you think they will pick? Is anyone really surprised?

It's not stupid to be angry about the really crappy hand that blue-collar workers have been dealt. It's stupid to think that Trump is the solution.

To be clear, I'm not worried about Clinton, I'm uninspired by her.

I've never understood why people need to be inspired to make a rational decision. Selecting the person who leads the country should be the textbook definition of a decision which should not be made on the basis of emotion, but somehow it always is for far too many people.

I'm pretty tired of neo liberals as well, a side effect of moving so far to the right has been it's driven the republicans to the point of cartoon villainy.

No one drove the GOP to the far right - they did that all themselves.

I grew up purchasing games from brick-and-mortar video game stores. There is literally nothing about that experience that I miss. Absolutely everything about gaming is better today than it was fifteen or twenty years ago. I mean everything. The games are higher quality, the community is much stronger, the logistics are a cakewalk, the variety is insane, all of it is better.

And I've never thought that gaming sucked. It was always fun. But today's world is a g~#$%#ned paradise for an active gamer. The children we were could not have even imagined having it this good.

Could not agree more. Games are delivered to my PC, patches applied as they are released, from a gigantic ever-growing library. Want old games? Head over to GOG and get them dirt cheap and ready to run on modern machines. As Scott says, better in every way from the old days (and my "old days" go back to Apple ][ machines in 1980).

For me it comes down to the fact that I don't like DMing for people I don't know. I have a long-standing group that I run a game for, and I have a friend who likes to play very occasionally, so she gathers a group for occasional one shots that I run. They are all fun people and a pleasure to run games for, so it's worth the time and effort. Strangers? Not so much.

This, however, is like half the game. Settlement building is part of the gameplay design - setting up settlements, assigning settlers, balancing imports and exports, defenses, all of it.

Half the game? You can completely ignore it and have far more than half the game available to you.

One thing I prefer about Fallout 3 compared to FNV, is that there are *lots* of vehicles in the former, and most of them can be blown up. Especially nice when enemies are next to them. (Not so funny if *you* are next to one if the bad guys blow it up though! ;)) In FNV very few vehicles can be blown up.

Happily that is back in Fallout 4. :)

There were two great places for that in FO3 - the sunken freeway near the NukaCola plant, and the underground tunnel behind Three Dog's location. Lots of cars near each other and big chain reactions (deadly in the underground tunnel if you weren't prepared).

The problem with that is that players seem to prefer XPs for killing things, not just leveling up at X point. There are exceptions, true. But most of us are here from D&D 3.5 and some from all the way back to 1st edition AD&D. So we're used to XPs for killing things, not just giving us levels because the story calls for it.

My group is entirely made up of people who have played since 1E and everyone was happy when I dropped XP.

eakratz wrote:

Slumbering Tsar as an obituary table included, if that tells you anything.

So does Rappan Athuk but aren't both of them megadungeon APs?

Slumbering Tsar goes from a sizable wilderness adventure to a sizable city exploration adventure to a sizable dungeon crawl.

I would say no to that request, and no to the next three requests just on general principles for trying to do that in my game. :)

Baxter is fantastic, as is the late lamented Iain Banks.

Had a funny moment in our S&S campaign last week while running the Free Captains' Regatta. The party had decided to take advantage of the "Walk the Plank" imposition and sacrifice someone to get the +2 bonus on skill checks for a day (they had captured Giles Halmis during the assassination of Corlan and still had him as a prisoner on their ship, so he was the obvious choice). I figured that there were several other pirates in the race who would also have accumulated disrepute during their careers and would do the same thing, so the PCs saw about half the other ships at the starting line sacrificing people as well - just a constant stream of splashes as people were made to walk the plank. The sharks ate well that morning. :)

This is yet another great argument for decoupling health insurance and employment and going to a single-payer government health care system.

Slumbering Tsar looks to be all kinds of fun - someday I hope to run it.

When you are adding a new player to an existing group, it does seem kind of funny (from an in-game perspective) that the expectation is that their PC will be accepted into the party regardless of what the current makeup of the party is.

"So we're agreed - we need to recruit a new member for our adventuring party. Now, Throndor seems to be able to keep us relatively healthy, and Brok and Felthys, backed up by my magic, have proven able to fight any foe. Given that we're planning on exploring the tomb of Valakar the Trap-Builder, and that we've been running into a lot of difficulty recently with traps in general, we should keep that in mind when we look for a new member. Let's bring in the first applicant."

"Hi. I am Krunk. I kill things with my axe."

"You're hired!"

Sure. My primary source has been 1001 Spells - I'd have to go look up the other ones I've used. Our next session isn't until Jan 7, but I'll post an AAR of some sort here.

My party consists of:

Human Paladin of Iomedae 17
Human Wizard (Evoker) 17
Gnome Cleric of Irori 17
Human Monk 17
Dwarf Fighter 1/Ranger 16

I've just had them level up to 17th level for the final battle - none of them have ever run 3E/Pathfinder PCs at this high of a level before and I thought they should at least get to use 9th level spells. :)

Yeah, actually part of the reason I gave up on Fallout 3 so quickly was my previous attempt to play Oblivion - I played many hours until I realized the world was so immensely big that nothing I do matters, and I spend most of my time looking for something, *something* interesting to do.

I'm always finding interesting things to do in Fallout and Elder Scrolls games - the wandering around and seeing what's over the next hillside is what I love about those games.

As to the being good or evil in Fallout 3 - Iv'e never been able to chose the evil option in any game (KotoR, for example). Somehow I just can't disconnect myself enough from the avatar I'm controlling through the game, and I feel really awful after doing something bad in a video game.

Yeah, I have the same problem. I tried playing once being evil and stopped after the first time I actually did something bad. I think it was even just saying something mean to someone and I still felt terrible.

I'd be perfectly fine if Paizo never put out another rule book again, as long as they kept making adventures. I'm not opposed to additional rule books, but I wouldn't miss them.

As a customer, I have to say that I love the game, I in no way expect Paizo to provide reprinted cards for the minor errata which has cropped up, and I think Vic was more polite than I would have been. I have noticed on the Paizo boards that people often keep asking for things that Paizo has already said no to, and it would drive me crazy if I was the Paizo person who had to deal with this. A perfect example of this is the whole topic of AP reprints, where no matter how many times Paizo has said RotRL was a special case and they are not going to do it for the other APs, people keep saying, "But...but...but..." ad infinitum. Paizo has said replacement cards aren't feasible. They know their own business far better than any of us do. Asked and answered - move on. "Entitled" is exactly the term I would use for some of the posts I have seen here.

Throatwarbler Mangrove

Well, good point - I'm sure it will be brought up at their trial. :)

The Sons wouldn't have time for all their gunrunning, drug dealing, porn backing, and murder if they spent time working on their bikes. :)

Because I have an interest in good television drama, and interesting characters. I have no interest in crystal meth, but I love Breaking Bad.

I'd find it interesting if the show gave more insight into what being in a motorcycle club was all about, but I wouldn't have any interest in the technical details of the bikes (I type as I sit across the street from the Harley Davidson HQ).

I was under the impression that you could use weapons with any checks that require "Melee" or "Ranged" if those weapons have that trait. In fact, my group has been playing it that if you are trying to acquire a weapon that has a Strength/Melee 8 requirement, you can use another weapon to do so. Is that not the case? If not, that should be specified, IMHO.

Myriade is correct. Weapons are used for combat checks, as it says on the weapon cards. They may make the combat check Dex/ranged instead of Str/melee, or give you a die in addition to the one you get for your Str or Dex, but it specifies combat checks on the cards. Acquiring a boon is not a combat check even if it uses Str/melee or Dex/ranged.

There is zero chance I would have allowed this when I started running RotRL. Thassilon is supposed to be mysterious and unknown for the most part to almost everyone. Having a PC who not only knows something about Thassilon but knows enough to be able to understand their framework of magic breaks that, IMO.

Given how much time passes between the release of an AP and when I would get around to running it, I personally would be very likely to wait for the hardbound edition, even if it was coming a few years down the road. You'd likely get additional content, incorporated errata, all without (for me anyways) any delay in when I would actually run the thing. Plus, you can cherry pick the APs you want without the hassle of canceling and restarting your subscription.

I don't think Paizo is overestimating the problem at all.

Loving this...

The Shield is my personal choice for best television show of all time. I have watched the entire run 4 times (once as it was actually on TV, and three more times on DVD), and I feel like I am due for another viewing.

Sounds like your buddy's wife needs better friends Cal.

Sounds like his buddy needs a better wife - maybe one who isn't so shallow as to be embarrassed about her husband's hobbies, or that concerned with what her friends think.

BB36 wrote:

1: Who has 300 Wands just "sitting around" for so relatively cheap?

1. No one. He was exaggerating. And the price is a set price in the book. Its not like they are buying them at a discount.

Actually, if I was going to buy 300 CLW wands, I'd be hoping for some kind of bulk discount... :)