MicMan's page

Pay to win Examples(not sure if these are still happening):

World of Tanks - Best ammo in game obtainable only through shop...

Spoken like a pro... NOT.

"Gold ammo" in WoT is actually obtainable through ingame silver. In fact it is not even that expensive AND while it offers an advantage in penetration it also has disadvantages (spaced armor / less normalisation) that make using 24/7 a stupid thing to do in most cases.

The amount of your Pathfinder AP modules is only slowly approaching the amount of your Dungeon modules.

......players have been trained to want experiences that they don’t actually want...

THIS!

When you ask the players what the new best MMO should be like they say "totally different to WoW".

If you do something totally different to WoW everyone complains that this is not WoW.

It is time to teach the players to stop worrying and love the bomb that is meaningful player interaction!

As I live in Germany (likely +7 to +10 hours from you) the answer to the thread topic question is probably:

In my hands (one way or the other *grin*).

At first it was the Bloody Sheath...

Your item was the only sheath/scabbard/weapon storage thingy that I actually liked and upvoted because the effect was nice and fitting and not some lackluster "blade gets fiery when drawn".

WAR had some of the best PVP I've ever engaged in...

Really, that astounds me a bit.

WAR PvP was okish up to level 10 but was seen by many (me included) as taking the worst aspects of WoW PvP while not building on any of DAoC PvPs strengths and then season it with horribly unbalanced classes and balancing decisions ON TOP of broken PvP end game.

I remember when they introduced easy to get magic resist gear because ONE mage class was very OP which resulted in this:

Matt Firor also stumped hard on his first big job: DAoC Trials of Atlantis. This does not give me huge faith about the direction of ESO.

I now declare to be able to build a complete monkey (heads to feet) from item submissions.

Would be a nice idea for an adventure path, "the monkey of seven parts" or something like this.

Being absent from the boards for a few weeks and the first thread I see on my return is one that (falsely) states that Fighters suck...

Feeling at home at an instant :)

To the topic:
Time and again it has been said that there is a need for an easy to play character without much "on use" powers that covers the basic fantasy thrope or armored hero. I have very fond memories of my dwarvish axe Fighter Glod Glodson (thumbs up for anyone knowing where this name comes from).

Fighters are fine, its just that GMs tend to favor spell casters with things like the 15 minute workday.

Not to nitpick, but "fascinating" is a bit strong.

You provide a most basic descrption of Paizo with a few facts, that you imho fail to tailor to the "consumer" of your paper (d20?, OGL?). Some of the statements are at least debatable ("WotC gaining a huge advantage by the OGL" is certainly a view not shared by quite some people).

You close your really short paper (though maybe you had to be this brief) with a statement that is very generalistic and hints that you don't really understand what the term "customer service" (as opposed to "customer relations") encompasses.

If I were you, I would expand the word count to explain a few terms. I would also use a distinct example to portray the point you want to make, for instance the detailed process how the Pathfinder RPG came to be and exactly why you think that Paizos relation to it's fans (fans as opposed to "mere" customers) is the main reason for it's success.

As a Paizo fan, I would say that the main reason for Paizos success is that Paizo gave the 3.5 fans what they wanted when they wanted it in the a way they wanted it AFTER doing a great job on existing formats (i.e. Dungeon and Dragon magazines).

"Customer Service" is really just the tiniest part of this.

I just want to say that your Bonus Location is imho the best single idea in this round. This has evoked so many pictures in my mind I could put together an adventure just based on the few words you gave me here.

Imho the main reason why many people think that a game would be better without PvP is that many people want to feel in MMOs like in a movie or in a single player game - they want to be the king, the focus of the whole.

This is normally impossible in an MMO and PvP most drastically demonstrates this to these players.

So what these players usually mean is that they wish that PvP would be there but they would always win.

Add to this that in most games PvP had no cause but was rather another tacked on feature and it is understandable that many peopel think they could live without. But an MMO without PvP will either be a themepark and thus fail to out-WoW WoW or not be a MMO at all because it severely restricts player interaction.

About DAoC:

So if you want a real MMO with no (non-consensual) PvP, you are pretty much stuck with WoW or one of it's clones because in a sandbox this is likely never gonna work.

...and it needs more epic quest lines culminating in a RAID.

If you provide raid-Dungeons that is a lot of work and you need to add a new one every few months or else the raiding crowd gets bored.

All classic fantasy MMO games since WoW have tried to establish such a cycle AND FAILED.

So your suggestion is that PFO should do like all these games - fail?

There will be no shortage of guides for PFO.

There will be no shortage of people who ignore these guides and then whine if something turns out to be not totally foolproof.

There will be people who will recommend that the whiners go and play WoW instead.

This is all nice and fine, but where are the Dwarves? Tankard swinging Dwarves in full mail and with axes larger than a man, I say!

A group that asks itself how it can be more friendly to female gamers is already pretty much at the destination because it reflects upon itself.

Most female unfriendly groups do everything to avoid reflecting upon themselves because then they would see that most of their "ideals" and rituals (like trash talking, a fixation on "combat" or the notion that you must "earn" something by endless boring repetition) are just a hollow facade for insecurities and traumas.

Bad ideas in D&D: Vorpal Swords...

Worse ideas: removing Vorpal Swords.

D&D IS Vorpal Swords in one way or the other. Removing these aspects is crippling the spirit of the game and results in 4e, a fine game, just not D&D.

Same with MMOs. Removing the risk from MMOs resulted in fine games for the masses, just tha these were no longer the MMOs that the fans of old came to love. Many got over that fact and some never did (I surely rank among the latter).

So PFO will follow the advice of GG in some way and not do so in another way.

You can become extremely powerful in PFO but this power does NOT depend on your gear and in game skills but rather on your out game skills which determine wether you will be King/Chancellor of your country, the hand that launches a thousand players to drive your enemies before them and take their.. um, you get the idea.

I never understand why in a game of great heroics there should be severe penalties for death. Missing a some moeny and a good portion of a fight even at high levels (which can mean a good portion of the game-evening) and likely even more game time in lower levels is penalty enough for me.

If you want a gritty, "one wrong step and your done for good" approach, then make a houserule.

...First, and most importantly, did the item spark my imagination and make me say, "I want this in my game!" Only about ten items that I saw did this, sadly...

This!

I believe this the only rule you need to follow but also the hardest one.

I didn't "get" quite some of the items that made it to top32 in the previous years after reading them, but I understood what makes them special after I read the judges commentary and finally after I now experienced first hand what the sorting process is like.

Huh, roleplaying, in a roleplaying game?

Outrageous.

That means 10000 per hour, definitely doable.

And yes, Sunday is always very slow.

Best 1st level core spells for a low level Wizard:
a) Color Spray (Illusion)
b) Sleep (Enchantment)
c) Mage Armor (Conjuration)
d) Enlarge person (Transmutation)
e) Summon Monster I (Conjuration)

Best 2nd level core spells for a low level Wizard:
a) Invisibility (Illusion)
b) Mirror Image (Illusion)
c) Spider Climb (Transmutation)
d) Glitterdust (Conjuration)
e) Summon Monster II (Conjuration)
f) Web (Conjuration)
g) Scorching Ray (Evocation)

So I would say Abjuration, Divination and Necromancy are the worst schools, spellwise, and Illusion and Conjuration are the best (even though sleep is a killer).

Yeah, I noticed this too. It seems that we are going through the now bottom 25% all again.

Hopefully that means that Paizo prepare to cull the herd again.

...The odds of a mid-range item not getting paired to anything better are vanishingly small.

Could be, we don't know. But the ELO system is used for a reason, it provides a good ranking in far less tries than the compare-method.

If we say that about 2000 items have made it, then there are 199900 possible pairings.

If pairings would be fully random then the item at "rank" 31 would have a chance of 30/199900 of being paired against an item that it needs to be paired against (multiple times!) to really see if it is better.

I would say, that is a problem, because I guess that there won't be hundreds of million of votes that would be needed to assure that the top items are voted against each other very very often.

I assume that the items were assigned an ELO-rating which rises or falls with each vote depending on the score of the compared item. Also I think item pairs are constructed based on the relative elo ratings or else a mediocre item could end up top because, by chance, it was always paired to very bad items.

This made me read the items much more thouroghly at the beginning (when ratings are close to one another and every pick might matter) and only cursory right now as I assume that most items are already out of the race by now and it doesn't matter much which of those two I give my vote.

But every now and then I spot an item that I think of "quite good" and these I compare throughly to their counterparts (which often are also quite good).

Most important for me is the visual image that the title and the description evokes and the effect that the item has (novel, befitting, useful).

Only for those items I also bother to consider template, pricing and overall presentation.

...are the ones that actually start with a novel and well presented idea only to deteriorate because of a single badly thought out aspect near the end (most often by being horridly OPed or wholly unusable).

I now had my third item of this sort in over 10 hours of voting and it drives me nuts every time.

I have now stumbled three times over the word "somehow" in a description.

If the author doesn't know how exactly the items works, how should anyone else? All in all I am shocked to see so many items that make no sense at all or are basically unusable.

A real eye opener for sure.

I am astonished about the large number of items that are totally useless in the hands of a typical heroic adventuring PC.

I am irritated about the large number of items that I do not understand despite reading the descritpion several times.

I am angered by the items that steal my time by using a whole paragraph for pompous fluff, follow this up with several sentences of explaining needlessy complicated restrictions only to crown this by having a wholly boring effect.

The game is still on the drawing board, I think there will be a lot of things that can not be adressed right now.

So, as usual, the kickstarter is all about confidence in the ability of the team.

...Then I am sorry I don't think I can support this game with a community like this...

I found the discussion here very mature in comparison to the boards for WoW, Aion, Rift, Conan and Diablo III.

What you should try to understand is, that some here have the feeling that GoWo is building their dream game. A game like none before.

Now a lot of people come here with opinions that may be labled as "not very informed" and try to tell anyone how this game should be exactly like WoW.

Tiring, to say the least.

It's ruined with meaningless PvP.

If someone kills newbie PCs just for the fun of it over and over and over because there is not much else to do and noone cares about it then PvP is meaningless and indeed the game would be off better without it because it doesn't add anything.

This is not how it is in EVE and it is not how it is gonna be in PFO.

Tell me why anyone would be stupid enough to pay for that?

Will do right after you tell me why a lot of people pay to do the same raid over and over and over for the miniscule chance of some stuff that will be worthless within the year.

The demo was to show that the core team can do an MMO, period.

Personally I liked it because it looked a lot like my favorite MMO of all times (DAoC).

If you ask "why DAoC" then I would answer because I was in the best guild in this game.

In other words, if the system is solid, I don't care alot about the garphics and I much prefer a game with a good game system than with fancy graphics and not much else (like AION or SW:TOR).

...Weekends spent pinned back at the entrance to the higher level areas of the PVP portions of the DAOC, which was necessary to enter just to level up, because your faction was outnumbered 2:1...

As a DAoC veteran I can only say LOL. You could reach max level and best gear without engaging in PvP at all.

Get yourself a guild man and you will be fine, run around solo and you will die. No risk no fun!

The saddening inability of the vast majority of people to grasp this concept led to the decline of innovation we saw in the past few years and has finally caused most games to be a mind numbing affair of logging in, queing up, running an instance with 4 complete strangers and log off in order to get 5% of the points needed to buy medium gear that will be wholly worthless in 6 months.

Why can't these people simply realize that they do not want an MMO but rather a single player/small group game with an animated lobby.

About the Marketing vs Development civial war:
I think there is no better example where this can cause a game to falter than Warhammer Online.
There we had the (till then unique) situation that the Marketing was actually very strong. Games Workshop send in a Marketing Hitman who hyped the game in a way not seen before.
Alas the game he hyped somehow wasn't the game that was developed...
So WHO goes down into history as one giant leadership fail, as almost noone seemed to know what anyone else did - choking the game in false assumptions, bad last minute panic measures and, consequently, a lot of bugs, glitches and utterly horrible balancing.

About theme-parks in general:
Right now they all feel shallow to me and I stopped playing them and will likely never play one again. I had my "high times" with DAoC and WoW was a disappointment for me for lack of RvR (realm vs realm combat). Really, the people who thought it was a good idea to introduce elo-like rankings for the early bettlegrounds should still be flogged. I stopped playing WoW between this and the endless raiding that was the only alternative.
I followed and played Shadowbane which was a great concept but a bad game.
Tried Aion a while later and like it but this game made all the same "mistakes" than every other game out there (including WoW).

So now being pumped for something new.

I think that PFO will be me last MMO in one way or the other. I believe that I like the "up to yourself" playstyle, that the same things I liked in DAoC will be present there (in spirit) and that the most important thing is a great community. Which I think PFO will have (and, yes, that will mitigrate many problems with griefers without the need of stupid and unfun rules to shackle all the players because of very few idiots).

It is always a bad idea to try and show a GM that he is wrong with in game measures rather than speaking with the GM, especially if all the other players agree with you.

Second it isn't actually that easy to neutralize a character class - which is just fine because then it would be badly designed.

However Gunslingers aren't actually good in close combat and have no innate methods to escape easily so you could build a fast moving close combateer (druid would likely work best) or try yourself at a specialist monk with insane touch AC through crane style.

Alternatively a trusty Wizard with Fog Cloud/Blindness and the usual goodness in the form of mind affecting spells works well.

Point by Point:

Break Enchantment frees victims from enchantments...

Is the Vampires Dominate Person an enchantment? - Yes, it is, as it works like the spell.

So it should work.

But...

If the spell is one that can't be dispelled...

Is this a spell? No, so the line is irrelevant.

Therefore Break Enchantment should work.

Congrats, even though you botched some spells!

It should haven been Liz's Floating Disc and Liz's Transformation and not to mention Vic's Disjunction and James Grasping Hand.

Oh, the hyperbole. A ring that breaks the game when used with... hold your breath... Timestop, a spell that 99% of all the players have never and will never cast anyways.

What remains upwards 10th level that can be exploited with this thing?

Well, actually not that much. A dedicated shaper could be transformed for all the time that mattered anyways and still buff himself further.

So, no, I don't see this thing as game breaking. OPed? Yes, it is very powerful and I do not see 2 Rings I would rather have as a shaper Wizard, but broken, not really.

...And we'd all do well to remember that WBL isn't a constraint on the GM...

Yes indeed, it's just that magnus said he can't play APs as written because of the craft feats and how they influence WBL which in turn makes his PCs steamroll all the encounters...

MY players in Kingmakers are most often close to double their WBL because I like being Santa Claus as much as they like being Christmas Trees :) and no, they don't steamroll anything.

Limiting access to selling opportunities works... for a while...

The prime motivation for anyone playing the game should be having an adventure.

The rules are written as such.

If a player complains that he rather would like to play "D&D: the economic simulation" I think it resonable to say, as a GM, that the rules were not made for this (and not many here seem to find that a problem) because they don't cover almost all the things that are important such as inflation, buying power, marketing, competition...

So I guess this is what we do not agree upon:

You say that the rules for Item Creation should cover the ramifications if the PCs start to engage in heavy Magic Item dealing.

The rest here says no, we don't need this.

Which might give you an indication of why there actually are no such rules.

Wizard BBEG can work well if they can prepare (which is usually the case in APs) for the party.

If the party manages to surprise the Wizard the only thing that a Rod of Quicken will do is to bring a cheer on the parties casters face.

You don't need house rules to constrain item creation. It's the gold. That's in the rules. Not Rule zero. GM controls the flow of rewards. That's his mandated role.

Uhm, you mean, I have to ADJUST the WHOLE AP so that the PCs only receive half the gold than listed?

Outrageous, I can not put that much effort into a published product to make this broken game work!

...But I think I can make a good case that it really is an objective problem area of the game.

Hum,

no single magic item breaks this game nor does any combination do it
there are only so many slots to fill
I can still very easily challenge my players that crafted the "optimal" items for them, all of them

So I completely fail to see the problem here.

*Edit*

That's very nice for homebrewn stuff...

Ahh, the problem is not the item creation rules but the notion that published adventures must be playable without any adjustments for n00b parties of first time players/GMs and seasoned min/maxing veterans equally.

Yeah, serious problem here.

I predict this thread to grow long although everything has already been said.

The game itself is flexible enough to change or avoid whatever you perceive as a problem.

And, as 4e demonstracted, people can have what they ask for and still not be happy.

If, at high level, everyone in your party is decked out in these and you are playing a "normal" char, then, yes, the big six is mandatory for you to compete witht he challenges that the GM must throw at such a party.

If your game is heavy on linear flip-mat encounters and dice rolling then the big six give you the best bang for the buck.

If you are a novice player then the big six are easy items in their "staticness" and thus good, albeit boring.

The problem with the big six arose only after the game made it possible to easily create your own items with lax level restrictions and GMs felt the need to strictly adhere to the WBL to avoid "OPed PCs".

So the big six are a home made problem, if at all.

It is important to mention that plate armor in its heyday, combined with the warhorse, offered almost total protection from being killed in action (and the practise of ransom offered protection from being killed after the action).

As such Plate isn't accurately portrayed in PFO (gosh, who would have thought) where it gives only a small bonus over chain.

I read quite a few times here that medieval armor is supposed to weight ~40kg?

No, that would be the aforementioned Renaissance Armor used for playing knight, about 400 years after the high middle ages, where Platearmor had it's peak time. These were extra thick for extra protection during a jousting and you could hardly climb your horse with it. It is this armor that you encounter in almost every castle in europe.

The very few remaining original armor parts suggest that the armors where around 25kg, still quite heavy, but not excruciatingly so.

And, as a sidenote, is is usually not useful to question stories that already suggest an anecdotal background.

Wow, a thread about D&D and medieval history that I've missed!?

Time to chime in:

I am an avid historical fencer (NOT stage combat or "historical free fighting"). I've worn everything from padded wests to field plate so I think I can give a few hints.

1. Medieval Fieldplate is nothing like most of the Platearmors shown in castles today
The reason for this is simple: most of these armors are not medieval but being made only 200 years ago when the medeveal times and jousting were en vogue. These armors were very very thick for extra protection and were only used on romantic jousting tournaments (which itself were not at all a historically faithful recreation).

2. Armor hinders you quite a bit in combat
Even padded west and chain mail hinders you during combat, regardless how proficient you are. You simply are a bit slower which can not be overstated in an endeavor where speed and control is of upmost importance.
So why did people wear it then?
Because a battle is nothing like a duel. People tend to mix these two things which really have nothing to do with each other.
In a battle protection is paramount because death can come from all sides at any time with no chance to react. But even in a duel a Fieldplate is an obstacle that is very hard to overcome.

3. Armor hinders you quite a bit outside of combat too but...
...just not as much as many people think is does. There are three main factors
- Fieldplate is quite stiff so crouching is hard
- Gauntlets take away a lot of your manual dexterity
- the helmet takes away a good 80% of your vision

So I'd say that armor check penalty in D&D is about right, maybe a bit to high for the heavy armors here and there.

About Fieldplates (and knights) vanishing during late medeval and renessaince times:
This has been discussed quite a lot. It is not that armor was suddenly no longer good, but that battles drifted away from the "a few elite warriors clash amidst many untrained peasants" to "thousands and thousands of trained combatants clash".
A knights equipment was very very expensive and with the dimished role of the elite and the bigger emphasis on trained rank and file it was no longer justifiable to pour most of your funds into just a few knights.

The prime example is the english longbowman.

The thing that makes the longbowman so special is NOT primaly the longbow but instead that the longbowman is so expertly trained over many many years despite being rank and file.

I have only one houserule: if something is cool and awesome it flies, regardless wether the rules allow it or not. If something is stupid and makes no sense it doesn't fly.

Has been contentious a few times over the years:

AD&D Thief/Cavalier backstabbing a deaf Ettin with a lance charge from horseback...

When the non-weapon proficiencies were introduced one player wanted to counter "a wave of demons" with his swim check...

Monk:
"You do not gain armor proficiency. You can not flurry in armor."

Sohei:
"You gain Light armor proficiency."

Wishful thinker:
"This must mean I can flurry in armor."

Classy.

Alternative class features that replace others read "This replaces...". Period. No interpretation necessary.

The things you suggest fall into three categories.

1. Fundamental game functions
The range of sight like other fundamentals should never depend on skills because this opens up a huge incentive to cheat! Mr. RD already said so in a discussion about darkness and darkvision.

2. Fluff
There are two major skill trees in PFO as far as we can say: fighting and craft/gathering. The second is the one to make the first better.

So any skill outside these two groups is something of a problem unless it can be trained at the same time. In other words: not that many people will "waste" their precious skill training on getting friendly faces from NPCs when the focus is on fighting.

3. PvE
As there is likely no passive skill to change your experience with other players (as that should always requires action), it could be so in PvE. However the focus of PFO is strongly on PvP so I doubt the game will have a lot of intricate PvE only skills that do not revolve around crafting/gathering.