They're both figments of the imagination!
...wait, that's not right...
Search Posts
The Ebon Triad: I'm not sure this needs fixing at all, even though (as stated) it doesn't fit with Oerth's other details. Think about it. The stereotype of evil cults is that they're aware of hidden, but accurate, Evil Secrets (the rituals of ancient and forgotten gods, the true names of demon lords, or whatever). It was a refreshing change (IMO) to see evil cultists who were being duped by another, greater evil, and who were both dangerous and truly, fatally, pathetically wrong in their doctrines and beliefs.
I could see that as a "dazzling display" sort of thing, but even that is thematically different from a bardsong I feel. The concept of "invoking the world's latent magic with supernaturally skillful performances and then affecting your enemy's minds with that magic" is just hard for me to reconcile with magician's tricks. (delurking) Did you just say that magic is irreconcilable with magicians? Would it be too snarky to ask what kind of god-awful abominations of stagecraft were inflicted on you before you decided this?...I guess I'm okay with the idea. I'm not musically-inclined myself, but my father and sister are, and I've seen enough examples of "singer's tricks" and "guitarist's tricks", i.e. technical details of performance, that I don't see the difference.
This used to happen to me, too. In my case, I thought that Internet Explorer and McAfee's antivirus program were trying to kill each other. It stopped after I switched to Firefox and Defender Pro.
What facing rules? I think he's talking about Unearthed Arcana. Fortunately, they're optional.
Check this out! (nitpick) They got the sword wrong! It's supposed to be blocky with holes in it!(/nitpick) Hopefully Tyralandi Scrimm is up next! Either Tyralandi or the sorceress that got introduced for Savage Tide. Or, preferably, both.
The "standard" figure that I've heard is one gallon per person per day. So yes, these three PCs can conjure up enough water for themselves and the passengers by expending a few 0-level spells. However, the NPCs are going to want their own water stores for two reasons. First, some of the more superstitious ones might be nervous about the "unnatural" conjured water (though this attitude would be much less common in D&D than it was in history). Second, adventurers as a group are a rootless bunch, and they micht get the idea to abandon the ship if some more enticing adventure opportunity presents itself -- that is, if they don't get killed first in a fight that any sensible NPC would avoid. If either of these things happen, and the ship doesn't have water stored, the NPCs will die. Personally, I'd go with the second one. Amella wouldn't object to the PCs' steady generation of "magic water," but she'd want to prepare for the worst. And has anyone another good reason to stop at the river mouth? If the ship was damaged, they might want to replenish their lumber supplies (the PCs aren't high enough level yet to conjure that out of thin air). I don't know how useful this would be in your case, though -- from the sound of things, the ship hasn't even been scratched, so you'd have to add a freak mast-snapping storm or something by DM fiat. And since your players probably suspect that you have an encounter set up on shore...
I am a little concerned about trying to fit 5k-10k names in the book.I suggest on one page in a very very small font. ;) Have you ever seen the one-volume unabridged Oxford Dictionary? The one that comes with a free magnifying glass?
So that's why humans rule the world.
I suspect there'll be a line about "the Paizo messageboard community" as a whole. They could name each messageboard member by name, but that would take a lot of pages...
I thought of a cool fix for rust monsters that would make them still feared but less likely to annihilate every precious item a PC has. Perhaps they can make a touch attack versus items (that provokes an attack of opportunity) that bypasses hardness and does a variable amount of rust damage to the items hit points with a save for half damage. I like this. If you wanted to be really mean, the rust monster could gain a portion of this damage as temporary HP or healing.
Thank you.
One of the things that WotC is doing right is keeping up its exciting website. I am hoping that Paizo has great plans on gussing up its website, too. I respectfully disagree. For me, Wizards.com is something I dip into for a minute or two, checking to see if there's any new content that's worth the wear and tear on my hard drive. As for their messageboard... er, no. In contrast, Paizo.com is the website that I save for last, because it can eat hours of my time if I'm not careful. Any changes forecasted? The only changes I'd like to request are: * add an art gallery, and* hunt down that post-eating monster and beat it into paste.
The same thing happened to my magazine. I wonder if it's a Borders thing... Professor, I'd like a copy too, if you could. Thanks in advance. (misanpilgrim at yahoo.com)
I feel the need to point out that "not terribly costly" (from the average PC's perspective) is equal to "hopelessly out of my price range" for most of the NPC populace in the typical D&D campaign world.
They really, really, really should add an art gallery to this site. Let's see... how can I best express my reaction to this idea... YES!!!!
I have tried to do the Wound/Vitality thing... I haven't tried this variant, but it looks somewhat interesting.
Since i never liked the "class-ification" of about any half-noteworthy organization in any world, i would suggest hellknight membership to mean "I am a Paladin, Fighter or some such", with maybe a feat or two specific to the group - but not a prestige class, let alone an entire base class Seconded. Two words: Hellknight warlock.
isnt the Whispering Tyrant just a lich cause Mike would clearly be a dracolich... Sure, he looks like a dragon, but that's probably just a shapechange spell. A lich of Mike's level and ability bonus can probably cast shapechange seven or eight times a day...
Hmm... You might have a point. Replying to a troll runs the twin risks of sinking to the troll's level and counting, from the troll's point of view, as a win. Once in a great while, though, I get this uncontrollable urge to vivisect someone's messageboard scribble, and Aaron set me off.
Please consider dropping the simplified and boring skill system! Promising so far. You think Pathfinder's skill system is boring? Why is that, and how should Paizo fix it? You LIED when you said PAthfinder would be 3.5, with the retarded simplified skill system its just as bad as 4th edition. ...and this is where about a third of the messageboard audience probably stopped listening to you. Arguments that start off with "You LIED!" tend not to persuade. I do NOT want to only have to roll one check in order to detect a rogue, I want my bloody Spot AND Listen checks. I want characters who may be good at spotting but bad at listening is that so bloody wrong? I shouldn't be allowed to get 10 bloody ranks in spot, listen AND apparantly now smell, taste and touch just by spending 10 points, that should amount to 50. (1) Who has 50 skill points to spare? (2) "Bloody" is considered a profanity in some countries. Since you're using it as such... this is where some other people probably stopped listening to you.
(1) You aren't allowed to Godwin yourself until you learn to spell "Führer." (2) How is the Fly skill related to fascism, exactly?(3) This is where even more people probably stopped listening to you. And NO I am NOT a troll, this is really what I believe. You know who says "I am not a troll" a lot? Trolls. Especially when it's their first post on the messageboard. Point is, Paizo PROMISED to stick to 3.5 and they seem to have LIED! I'm tempted to revisit the "you LIED!" thing again, but I've bashed your writing style enough for now, so I'm (finally!) going to address your complaint. Paizo did not promise to stick to 3.5e. They're writing a new ruleset that's supposed to be (mostly) backward compatible with 3.5e. This isn't the same thing.
This question has come up a LOT since the magazine licenses were pulled, about a number of different things (Dungeon web supplements, a Savage Tide version of the Shackled City hardcover, and so on), and the reason why these things can't happen always boils down to the licenses. Paizo can't make and distribute new Dragon PDFs for the same reason I can't: it would be a violation of WotC's copyright.
Crap.
I'd like to see a rage power which gives the barbarian a spell resistance while raging. It would be an expansion to the enchantment bonus they currently get. Seconded. The classic sword-and-sorcery barbarian disdains the fragile spiderwebs of magic and makes effete magic-weavers quake in their silk shoes. A method for the Pathfinder barbarian to do the same would be a good thing.
I'd like to add my name to the "please God no" list. Regarding mooks in a city of giants: one classic solution can be found here. More generally, you can add lower-CR, rules-simple critters to your encounters already, without cluttering up monster design with another rules subsystem.
My, that's a lot of things that Chaos always is and always does. Seems a bit predictable, a bit... ahem... Lawful to me. Plus, chaos is so much more fun. Can do what you want. So can we. The difference is that we sometimes choose not to. Which makes us better than you. See? We win. On all fronts. Haha. But the "win" of Chaos is always temporary, because Chaos -- being infinitely changeable and thus very, very temporary -- will have self-destructed and made room for glorious Order in less time than it takes to read this sentence. You won? Congratulations. Now step aside. ;)
Something to test before game time: can that looped-looking tentacle (upper left in the picture) hold a Medium-sized mini? Upside-down by the base, maybe?
Are you boycotting the works of other writers, actors, and musicians because they might act in a way you are against? Yes. I guess I don't care if my mechanic is a jerk if he can fix my car to perform as I want it to. What Frank was doing (besides arguing) was rewriting the rules of a game. To be successful, he had to convince the readers that his solution, and his understanding of the game, are sound, and that's hard to do if the readers are blinded by anger at the very sight of his name or if they're convinced by some of Frank's unrelated comments that his judgment is faulty.
I have a copy. Some of it looks interesting. Some of it might find its way into my future games. After reading Frank on The Gaming Den, though, I had to think long and hard about whether to keep it on my hard drive, because the concentrated asshattery I'd just read tainted my perception of Frank's work.
The rule of thumb in Alpha seems to be, "If it isn't mentioned in the book, then the 3.5e rules apply."
This thread actually makes me think of new rules for my MessageBoard Card game, so thanks! Messageboard card game? Details, please.
I'm surprised no one mentioned F.A.T.A.L. That would involve admitting to having read it. Well, I'll admit it. All the recent discussion of bad RPGs prompted me to track down the F.A.T.A.L. PDF (second edition, allegedly sanitized), and I skimmed it. Some games have bad rules. Some games have bad fluff. A few games are just bad, in the "morally reprehensible" sense. F.A.T.A.L. is all three.
I'll speak up in favor of NPC classes. The commoner and expert classes are a good way to handle noncombatant NPCs that get caught in combat or are otherwise in need of stats. The aristocrat is, essentially, the politician class -- without it, all socially adept NPCs would be required by the game rules to also know backstabbing, magic powers, or martial arts. I don't see the point of the adept, myself, and I could live without the warrior class, but I don't really mind them being there. I'm not going to assume that the space they take up* would be filled with enough pure awesomeness to make up for the people who get use out of adepts and warriors. * If memory serves, the cleric takes up about as much space as all five NPC classes combined. Assuming they stay in the game, though, I'd also like to speak up in favor of fixing the 20th-level commoner, AKA "the XP farmer." If he's a CR 19 encounter, then so am I.
I tried to read Hybrid but got lost somewhere in the first line. I think the designer read all of TimeCube.com and lost his sanity somewhere along the way. Is that even a game? I looked at Hybrid recently, and I noticed a couple of problems with it. 1. It's written like a blog, so when you go to the website you find yourself staring at Rule 500-something. Also, the oldest rules seem to have fallen off the bottom of the page (as of this writing, the first rule available is #312). 2. If there's any structure or organization to Hybrid, I couldn't find it. 3. I suspect that sometimes the author forgets that he's writing RPG rules, since some of his "rules" read like plain old blog posts. For example... Rule # 551: Spoiler:
I NEVER (except once, but even that they managed to leave out the worst bits) hear of any news of any crimes committed by USA by the American news media, unless I research it through google or/and watch the history channel, which even that they imply it but NEVER directly state it, else fear of reprisal from the Pentagon, as happened to CNN, for a decade, after Gulf War I. Most current example would be Iraqis INDIRECTLY telling the USA you can have our oil, but stop bombing us, as well as the internal religious & cultural strife between the 3 different ethnic groups, same as in Yugoslavia, where it was about mineral rights by USA companies rather than about oil, allowing USA to legitimize and legalize through UN the illegal aggression against a NON-threatening nation by USA, which the USA feeds on, the old tactic of divide & conquer they learned from Britain, which divided Iraq & Kuwait, which resulted in the Gulf War I & II, which is manifested in the so-called free elections, which legitimize USA aggression of taking over a sovereign country for its oil, which few seem to notice that the Gulf War I & II was about oil & the Euro, and it NOTHING to do with WMD, since the top Iraqi scientists had IQ of someone with an Associate degree in physics, which is enough to understand the basics, but NOT enough to build all the complex parts, why Iraq needed help from the French. Most commonly used tactic of trolls is to call (a) NON-troll(s) (a) troll(s), sort of like Capitalists were calling Communists evil, when both were same: what was happening was that 2 super trolls fighting each other for supremacy. And, Negative Energy is so powerful that it takes an entire society to stop a troll, sort of like 1 bad fruit can ruin all the good fruits in a basket. And, there seems to be levels of trolls, from the most vicious to the average: society seems to be infected with them, mostly average, which seem to be controlled by the few, who are most evil & vicious. The amount of Negative Energy it takes to control society or/and escape laws of society is proportional to amount of energy needed to bypass laws of physics, in what is commonly understood as the light barrier, escaping it allows FTL, time & dimensional travel, by excessively manipulating Negative Energy, which in the/this 2nd example: I don’t mean psychology, but in manner of accumulating science TL in similar way excess greed would accumulate wealth, power, resources, & fame, which where US(A) Presidents have a nasty habit of having ulterior evil motives for their so-called good deeds, some form of imperialism. Formatting note: The above doesn't duplicate the original's intermittent font-color changes, and ~1/3 of the quoted text was underlined, which this messageboard doesn't support (not that I'm complaining). At least he sticks to the same, semi-reasonable font size.
Did you know there's a page two? Did you know there have been at least two Timecube RPGs? Thankfully, one of them seems to have vanished, but there's a review of it here. The other one (very short) is here. The surviving version (by Jeff Yaus) gets the general idea across, escept that Jeff is apparently too sane to capture Timecube's true essence. A sample:
Spoiler: Dice
All gameplay is done by rolling a cube, which gives a result of 1 through 4. (6 sides constitutes a sextet -- not a Cube. Rules that say a Cube has "6 sides" with no top & bottom induce an evil curse that pervades all role-playing games.)
So anyone not actually in the game reading this? Please give a shout out so I know I'm not just talking to myself ;). SHOUT. Don't worry, you're being read. We lurkers just don't announce ourselves very often, because then we wouldn't be lurkers. (Also, most of us don't have anything useful to contribute to other people's campaign journals. Or at least I don't.)
Bingo. Intensely convoluted plots which manipulate mortals and make them jump through hoops? That seems like it would be Malcanthet's third-favorite pastime. As for her foreknowledge, information gathering seems to be her second-favorite pastime, which is how she might have surmised that the PCs would carry the tooth around with them. (And if they try to sell it, there's probably another convoluted plot running behind the scenes that makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to do so.)
The good news is that you won't have any trouble motivating the PCs. The bad news is that they'll be motivated to track down the wizard, beat the stuffing out of him, and thus end the campaign. In Dungeon #49, there was a Side Trek, Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow by J. Bradley Schell (thanks, Google!). The adventure featured a conjurer who posed as a barber to get locks of adventurers' hair. The PC would be summoned not only for last-ditch defense of the wizard, but for chores such as house-cleaning and chopping and stacking firewood.
For there to be compiled PDF magazines, there first has to be enough material to fill a magazine. Putting out a "monthly" PDF every three or four months would just highlight the embarassing lack of content. Or: the online magazines' editing section might be woefully understaffed. If I were Chris Youngs, and I had to choose between putting out new material and compiling PDFs of old material, I'd let the PDFs wait. I'm leaning toward the first possibility, myself, but that might be because I'm generally bitter and disappointed in Online Dungeon and Dragonm, and I can't rule the second possibility out entirely.
LINK WARNING: The review itself is fine, enjoyable, and well worth reading. However, near the top of the review is another link labeled "Timecube.com." Don't click on this link. Seriously, don't, or your head will explode and you will die.
There is already an evil gnomish race. They're called "gnomes."
We'll see how it goes wont we? I hope so. Keep us posted, would you?
Ban all magic items and item creation feats. Completely. Same with all healing magic. Use only NPC classes. Then use the slow advancement tables and +3 encounters. Oh, and be sure none of these restrictions apply to the bad guys. Load them up with 3x normal wealth in magic items that all explode for 6d6 force damage in a 500-foot radius (per item) when they're killed. And make new characters start as level 0 apprentices regardless of what the player's previous XP total was. There are too many NPC classes, though -- everyone should play a commoner. Seriously; things like magic item distribution and the list of prestige classes allowed are completely under the DM's control. If the DM doesn't like it, it doesn't exist in that DM's game, period.
Player: I'd like to play a goblin bard --
I could probably live with only having 1 Campestri. It would makemore sense from a Companion point of view. No, no -- go for the campstri chorus. My neighbor has (I think) eleven, and because the walls in my building are so thin I get to enjoy them just as much as he does. All day and all night. For free, even. At least I hope that's what that noise was...
Congratulations. You've just discovered one of the "Ravenlofty setting"'s Dark Lords: Ascii, the Art Mangler of Interwebb. Sure, some have tried to explain it away with such nonsense as "different fonts" or "the limitations of the medium," but the very name ASCII art acknowledges the sinister truth.
Xandar, elven adventurer and aspiring diplomat: "If all you've got's a 10-gauge, I'll say whatever I f****** want." (reaches into his coat, pretending that he has some sort of weapon there)
What EG said. If you can get hold of the 3.0e Arms and Equipment Guide, I seem to remember an expanded intelligent-item chart in there. Be warned, though, that the prices will be (ahem) "off" for a 3.5e game.
The game is starting to look like Poke Mon. "Howling Hag! I CHOOSE YOU!"
(chuckle) If the custom-avatar thing ever happens, I'm sure that G-G would be the next Order of the Stick in terms of avatar pilferage. Just think, the panels are already squarish. I call dibs on "THIS IS NOT MY LUCKY HAT!"
|