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Apparently, several artists and "tech" folks were laid off as well.Don't suppose you have a post or a link? Not that I don't believe you, but just because I know some folks... It's in the ENWorld thread - I think posted by Rodney, who as a courtesy didn't mention any specific names.
Please cancel my AP subscription. Thanks.
It has a special place in gaming lore, but have there been many adventures that have really put the Shadowfell/Plane of Shadow to great use? I'm signed up - your pitch sounds great, and given how good your take on the Feywild/Plane of Faerie was in Wrath of the River King, I have every reason to expect great things again here.
Now I remember why I converted to 4e. :) Sounds like your players are pretty sharp on the rules/options. Either 1) make sure they make all have their stuff ready to go (and all the adjustments calculated), or
Are they doing the buff-and-teleport thing?
I'm not a fan of the specific piece of art used in this demo model... ...but I can imagine any number of great pieces of D&D (or even MTG) art that would look great when painted on the canvas like that. Choosing among the proposed MTG designs (well, the half of them that I've clicked through), here's a pair of shoes that I would actually love to wear:
Sometimes people seem to go out of their way trying to find a reason to be annoyed. I could use a new pair of Chuck Taylors. Wizards has produced some darned fine D&D art over the years. Depending on the design(s?) eventually produced, I could imagine wearing a pair of shoes that had a good illustration on them and didn't scream "I AM A CORPORATE BILLBOARD."
We need to adopt a child and buy a house this summer. Every bit will help. Thanks. I'll be back soonish.
So, Wizards wants to provide exclusive content through DDI? Good for them. I'm paying for the DDI; I might as well get something for my money.
As has been said before, don't buy it for rituals or character options. If you're going to buy it, do so for the cosmology and the fluff.
I am quite interested in a higher-res digital map option to go with Paizo products. I would pay money for such a thing.
I like the 4e monk a lot. That is all.
So here are some other free fan resources to soup up H1: Sebastian's 'Chop Shop': click here Maps! Winterhaven improved:
Breathing life into the Nentir Vale:
So why in the world are you wasting time hanging out in the 4e section of.... Oh, never mind.
Scott, thanks again for posting this. This will be absolutely invaluable to me when I get to it.
I know those are available for free, it was more a throwaway comment about some of the issues people have had with the quality of editing for the AP... at least with the early part of it, I haven't kept up with discussion about the later parts. So: just a random insertion of a 4e dig. I must be on the Paizo boards again. FWIW, the series has been uneven to my eye - but then, the last couple of Paizo AP's have been hit-or-miss in my eye as well, so I could just be getting jaded. However, there've been some great 4e adventures in WOTC's adventure path. I'd recommend Ari Marmell's "The Temple Between" most highly.
At least they released KotS instead of the first few portions of their Scales of War AP... :P Those are already available for free: Rescue at RivenroarSiege of Bordrin's Watch The Shadow Rift of Umbraforge #3 is pretty darned good, although #1 does nothing for me at all.
My opinion, paraphrased from Dragnmoon:
And from Dryder: "Maybe you can cancel the whole map folios and give us a better resolution in the pdfs, or put all maps into the back of a pdf file..."The Map Packs (and the card decks) were my main reasons for quitting the Chronicles(?) subscription. Well, that and the fact that I'm playing 4e these days. I'd much prefer to have label-free maps included in the original adventure PDF's instead.
Disturbing.
My local Target sells black foamcore for a mere $2.89 a sheet.If its flat black foamcore with a black foam center then that's a great deal! That shinny black foamcore with the white foam center isn't ideal. You have to take a black marker to the edges to get rid of the white foam edge and the semi-gloss surface can cause glue adhesion issues (just warning you in case that's what they have there). Nope - it's the good stuff: black foamcore sandwiched between two sheets of matte black paper. It's the same brand that I've bought at an Office Max/Depot for $5+ a sheet. The only shortcoming is that Target only stocks 5 or 6 sheets at a time, hidden in a narrow little slot in their art/office supply section - and some of them seem to get a bit damaged at the edges during the shipping/stocking process. Still, for sheets that are going to be cut into pieces anyway, who cares what shape the corners are in? Also, for those looking to put a bit of Technicolor into their creations, Target also stocks a yellow foamcore sandwiched between two sheets on navy blue paper. :)
Yeah, foamcore is really variable depending on where you live. Its about $5.00 for a 20" X 30" sheet of black core foamcore here. My local Target sells black foamcore for a mere $2.89 a sheet.
Nice set! Two things: 1) Belt-tightening led me to cancel my Pathfinder subscription last month. This month, Worldworks' Pathfinder terrain prompted me to resubscribe. The prospect of terrain this good, designed specifically to fit the adventure, was simply too good to pass up. 2) This has been surprisingly quick to put together. I built one room Thursday night, and another last night. The circular room took about an hour or so to build (I haven't built the props yet.), while the most fiddly room - the temple with all the alcoves - still took less than two hours from start to finish. While the terrain is very detailed, it remains straightforward enough to reuse. Just looking at "The Sunless Citadel" maps, I can see two places where the circular room would fit in very well, as well as a location to use the alcove room. I really look forward to the next set! I can only hope that the adventure is anywhere near as good as the terrain. Oh, and: what about N'wah's paper miniatures?
Hot diggety! Two of my favorite things, packed together!
Please cancel my subscriptions, both for Pathfinder Modules, and the Adventure Path. I'm afraid money is very tight.
That far already? Well, I won't spoil anything for you, but it's pretty much a cakewalk from here on out. By the way, what kind of a body count have you seen? Is the Tomb still deadly in 4e?
It was written up by the DM, someone other than me. I'm not sure what format he's keeping it in, but it's definitely not improvised on the fly. I'll see what I can do about getting him to share what he's got once the campaign is finished (which should be in a couple weeks). If he's willing to share it, that'd be great. I love that adventure, but I've only run it as far as the early encounters with giants - and that was ten years ago, at least. So where have you gotten to on your adventure there? The tomb? Beyond the tomb?
So far, played in a homebrew game (to try out some new stuff with the system) and an updated Return to the Tomb of Horrors. Hey Scott, Was your Return To The Tomb of Horrors 4e conversion something you wrote up semi-formally, or something more improvised? If you statted anything up for the Tomb, I'd really love to see it.
CORRECTION/UPDATE TO MY PREVIOUS POST: The Character Codex is now form-fillable! I downloaded it today, and it is extremely convenient / nice. Thanks to Goodman for updating this product. And thanks to Paizo for emailing me about the update!
Oh here we go with Scott again. You know, I never see you post unless it is a response to my remarks on the wonderful 4E game. As is so often the case, I find that I agree with Scott. (Darn doppelgangers and their sneaky telepathic abilities.) I'm quite enjoying the DDI. The Character Generator Beta is very good, and - more importantly - there's been some very good material in the online Dungeon and Dragon. Ari Marmell's recent dungeon was particularly good. I haven't looked into quitting the DDI, but as far as I know, the only way to cancel a Paizo subscription is to send an email, or post on the customer service board.
It's always dangerous when the corporate bean counters are in charge of product design. Like so many failed Microsoft ideas of the past, this turd will never fly.
Screw that...I want a Pathfinder gals pin-up calendar What, are you saying you don't want a Pathfinder guys pin-up calendar? F. Wesley Schneider's feelings are likely to be quite hurt.
Last year, both ENWorld and Wizards.com were offering us teasers of the coming new edition. So some drop off is to be expected after the 4e release. I don't know how much, but I'm not checking either site 10 times a day any more (or Paizo's, for that matter). But I'm still very pro 4e.
Personally, I feel that the current Beta as it stands is TOO far afield from 3.5; not in a major way, but in some minor ways that take the game a shade too far from the previous incarnation. I'm glad someone on the inside feels this way. I hope the final version remains closer to the original - it'll make the prospect of conversion less painful.
Even with the decision to not publish under the GSL for now, Paizo remains my favorite adventure publisher for 4th Edition. I just have to do a little more work than usual to make use of them. Me too. I'm just hoping that doesn't change when Paizo converts from 3.5e to Pathfinder RPG. We'll see.
To be fair the only reason any one ever used used daggers in 1st and 2nd was because perverse DMs would hand out a Dagger +5 when all you otherwise had was +2 weapons. Daggers were pretty useful if your PC was crawling through a 2' square tunnel and came face to face with a half dozen kobolds, or had just been swallowed by a giant frog. That, and in 1st edition, dagger and hand axe were the only weapons that could be used off-handed - at least until Unearthed Arcana came along.
So what would be some examples of the kinds of adventures you'd like to see in 4E? What kinds of adventures would be so different from the early crop? Feel free to point to a particular adventure as an example. The first couple adventures in the 4e Path made no impression on me whatsoever, but Shadow Rift of Umbraforge seems a cut above the rest. Evocative location, a feeling of being in over your depths, and a not-impossible mission to accomplish - very nice. Of course, the Shadowfell gate seems a bit underwhelming when it's just in an otherwise ordinary dungeon room, but I can fix that. Also, there's much in the H3 Pyramid adventure that I really like: I love the head in a crystal ball, and I love the overall concept and the villain/backstory. But as I actually read the adventure, I get bogged down by page after page of stats about terrain and monsters. I think the biggest problem with the 4e adventure format is that it just doesn't read well. If it doesn't read somewhat like a story, I have trouble getting excited about running it.
Pediatrician.
20 pages: 1: front cover
It’s similar to the WOTC char sheet, but less cluttered, and more useful.
The lower 2/3rds is divided into 2 columns. The left column is a ‘Power Index’, listing powers by At Will, Encounter, Daily, and Utility. The right column has sections for (from top to bottom): Action Points, Movement, Senses, Attack and Damage Workspaces, and Basic Attacks. 4: 2nd page: Skills, Feats, Magic Item Index (including slots), Race Features, Class/Path/Destiny Features, Languages Known, Rituals. 5: Weapons & Equipment, as well as a classic 1e-style Wealth section Then it gets on to the less essential ‘Character Folio’ pages:
Then back to a good page:
And again to the fluff:
The good: I really like the layout
I looked at a paper copy of this at the FLGS. I really liked the layout of the character sheet, and I haven't been impressed by any of the others I've seen so far. It's a fairly straightforward layout, and not overly cluttered with calculations like the WOTC form. A question for the makers (or sellers) of this PDF:
If yes, it'd definitely be worth the $5. Or more. Nah, scratch that. I'm just gonna buy one right now, and I'll let you know.
That actually is extremely similar to how rituals play out.... It's pretty cool in practice, and I like that they have incorporated skill checks into the ritual process to add some variety. Yeah, I do want to try those rules out and see how it goes. They look great on paper - with one exception. Somehow, a 10-minute casting time sounds like forever to me, so I think I'm going to houserule it down to 5 minutes. (Same end result, but it sounds a whole lot quicker.) So far, my 4e experience has been limited to DM'ing a small group through a loose version of the old Dragonlance modules, and we've been keeping it pretty fast and straightforward in order to keep my friend's 11-year-old daughter front and center in the game. She (and the rest of us) are having a great time with the new rules, but I haven't been able to try out many of the bells and whistles of the system in this game.
Heh heh, nice try, but you're vaguing it up massively there and you know it. Come on, admit it, good or ill, removing the Vancian magic system is a BIG change, and inevitably big changes affect the feel of a game. I just had another thought: Back in 3.x (and 2e), my wizards typically memorized several combat spells, and kept pearls of power to recharge those. I then left as many other slots as possible open, and flipped open a book to quickly memorize (and immediately cast) the appropriate utility spells only when I needed them.Boy that sounds a lot like encounter powers and rituals. But of course, I have always found the Vancian system limiting , and I've devoted a great deal of time and rule-stretching to figure ways around its limitations.
I'm witholding judgement on wizards (and whether wizards feel like magic-users) for a couple reasons: 1) Nobody has played one yet at our game table, and2) Once we have more rituals and rules for alchemy and more magic items, it'll be easier to judge. My 1e wizard (M-U) became an effective every-round, 23-hour-a-day spellcater through clever use of items and a lot of persistent/contingent/broken spells. My 3.5e wizard became an effective every-round, 23-hour-a-day spellcasting machine through liberal use of wands of shocking grasp and scrolls and potions. Now with 4e, I don't have to come up with complicated schemes to have something 'wizardly' to do every round. But the end result is the same: I'll have a couple tricks that I can use pretty much all the time, and a few other powers for really kicking butt. And some non-combat spells (rituals) to do the really cool stuff. When I get around to making a wizard, I'll try out a few rituals, and no doubt make up a few of my own. With a bit of clever planning, I expect that my character will feel a lot like the ones I've played before Certainly as similar as any of my wizards have felt relative to each other.
Mmmm, I doubt it. Movies are ad-driven for the most part and focus on heavy marketing. Role-playing games usually emphasize word-of-mouth marketing instead, which tends to take longer to spread. Sales will certainly decrease over time, which is true with most things, but I don't think you'll see a movie-style drop in purchasing. We're two months out of release and the books just went into their third printing. So if this is opening weekend, it's one hell of an opening weekend. Are RPG's still spread by word-of-mouth? Most of my favorite hobby stores have closed, and I now do most of my shopping for (and talking about) D&D online. Unfortunately, I do not know any RPG gamers in my town apart from my own small group. I'm not claiming to have an answer on this - and I hope this theory is wrong - but it is possible that the D&D market is still slowly contracting, despite the encouraging initial burst of 4e sales. Personally, I really hope that WOTC comes up with a killer introductory game, and finds a way to recruit a fresh new wave of players. Because I think the new edition is very interesting and easy to play, but it isn't self-explanatory straight out of the PHB. I think they did a great job in the new DMG with good advice for new and old DM's on how to run a great game. But I don't think the PHB accomplishes the same thing for players.
This link is just the first of many results from Google. The core 4E set sold out by preorder alone. A more interesting question is: with increased availability of preorder options and online marketing and shopping, are the sales of new D&D editions (and other RPG products) merely getting compressed into an ever-smaller window? I remember that it took me almost a month to get my hands on a 2nd edition PHB - and I was hunting for one rather hard. This time, I got 4 of 'em (mine, wife's, and 2 gifts) in the first day after release. It could be simply like the blockbusterization of movie sales: sell lots in the first weekend, and drop off precipitously a couple days after that.
Past experience with edition changes (1e->2e, 2e-3e, 3e->3.5e) shows that after an initial period of vocal outrage, most people end up playing the new edition - while a smaller number do not.
I'd like to cancel my Chronicles subscription (but not my Adventure Path or Modules subscriptions). Thanks.
This is the one area of the game that I find needs to be expanded soon. Hopefully, a clever (or at least quick) 3rd party publisher will publish a Book of Lost Rituals as soon as the GSL is revised into something more sensible. I'd ritualize the following:
I'd keep the following out of the game:
These could be hit or miss, because in 25 years I've hardly ever used them:
For those who adopted 4e early, has the game started to lose any of its luster? No; it's still shiny.
I'd suggest taking a look at Thunderspire Labyrinth. This very encounter can be found there.
Yeah, I'll buy it. The swordmage, drow, and genasi look good, and the fluff previews look chock full of ideas. Can't get worked up about the fluff changes: I like to see new versions of old things. I've still got old versions of FR on the shelf if I want to use them, and I've played in many contradictory versions of Greyhawk - without any impairment of my enjoyment of those games.
I am, always have been and always will be, a diehard Detroit Lions fan. (NOW do I have your pity?) Yes. Still, it could be worse: I live in a land of Vikings fans. They have to deal with the annual ritual of starting off as The Next Great Team, then somewhere along the way it inevitably goes in the tank. Better to just know you're team is lousy, and keep hoping for the best. That's how it was as a Packers fan from 1970 to 1993 or so.
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