RunelordDM's page

Excellent stuff. After getting so annoyed about the WotC decision it's a great relief to see that some companies do know how to do business! :)

I'll be back for some more PDF goodness in about a week - if I'm not mistaken that's when the first Legacy of Fire PDF arrives.

"He's standing right behind me, isn't he?"

Well, I was surprised and disappointed to be honest, but Paizo must do what they feel is best for their business. I really loved Pathfinder, its art, its stories, its feel, but I really don't think I can be bothered with conversions.

Having read the alpha rules, it looks like it fixes a lot of currently broken things, but I wish we'd had those fixes a year or two ago.

I'm running Rise of the Runelords right now, and hope to wrap it up around the time of 4th edition release. Before this campaign I ran a homebrewn one, and I think I might venture that way again with 4E.

Here's hoping that Paizo did not make a counting error in their community's edition love/hate.

I'll give this a go.

1. The Elemental Chaos. A place of raw, chaotic, primordial energy, truer to the word "elemental" than any current one-trick-pony planes.

2. The new cosmology in general. I like the idea of potentially infinite dominions within the astral sea. The Feywild also seems very interesting and potentially dangerous.

2. A bigger role for the Shadar-kai. Their concept art in Worlds and Monsters rocks.

3. Tons of new art, and a welcome return to landscapes, from a very object centric direction under 3.5. I like pictures of armours and weapons, but a large vista with all sorts of details speaks volumes to my imagination.

4. More focus on race, with the ability to develop over the course of one's adventuring life.

5. A core set of truths in the main books, which will mostly hold true across campaign settings. A problem I had with the current Manual of the Planes, for example, was that it only held true for the core setting, while your campaign setting mostly overrode it. (Sure you can grab bits here and there, but it still wasn't worth the whole book.) With 4th edition, ostensibly, we'll get a set of core assumptions in the main books, that settings can expand upon, rather than replace.

6. Tieflings and Dragonborn as core races. Their backstories in Races and Classes sounded really interesting, and made me want to roll up one of each immediately.

I've been talking about flavour so far, so here are a few mechanical ones too.

7. Diversify rather than increase power. Situations should allow for a greater variety of solutions, rather than a given one that is statistically the best.

8. Cinematic traps. The running boulder trap example that was posted looked interesting because it could involve every character for a number of rounds. Example: The rogue is frantically trying to unlock the manacles on the victim trapped in the boulder's path. The ranger leaps over the boulder, while the fighter runs up to it and tries to slow it down, etc.

9. Less book-keeping for the DM. Running an encounter with multiple high-level monsters is currently an annoying exercise in continually flipping between pages and pages of stats. Although it has to be said that Paizo's "before combat" and "during combat" paragraphs really help already.

10. A clean slate of mechanics and resource books means a tabula rasa for the cheesy min-maxers out there. Roleplaying will move away from "how can I do this within this ruleset" to "I'll do this", at least for a while.

They're all good points. I was pretty sure someone else had thought of this before me. :)

So there's my solution to Paizo's quandary. :) I doubt offering two print versions will make much financial sense, but two PDFs (or one big one with both versions) should be doable. Especially since statting 4th Ed monster will take hardly any time at all apparently! :P

1) Do you plan to convert to the new edition of D&D?

Yes. My 2 groups and I have been playing 3.x for so many years now that's become more of an exercise in stats and rules than roleplaying. A fresh ruleset will redress that balance.

2) If Paizo converts its RPG products to 4.0, how will that affect your purchasing patterns for our products?

I will gladly continue to buy them (and seriously hope that that's the way you're going!).

3) If Paizo does not convert its RPG products to 4.0, how will that affect your purchasing patterns for our products?

I don't plan on buying any further 3.5 products at all after the release of 4th edition. (Notwithstanding nostalgic purchases many years hence. :))

4th Edition is.... Windows Vista? Yeah, great analogy :/

LOL - unfortunately Microsoft has been shooting itself in the foot with its backwards compatibility efforts (regardless of how successful or not!), a symptom game design is not necessarily subject to.

Many years ago, before 3rd edition was out, me and a few friends made a stab at designing a brand new game system. What started with lots of ideas and enthusiasm, started to break down into deadlocks with details very quickly. What stats and skills should there be? Weapon proficiencies or weapon group skills? How much statistical weight should equipment have versus character skill?

After a couple of months of design it became clear that the task we had set ourself was much bigger than any of us had anticipated. We eventually gave up, and got hooked by 3rd edition instead when it came out, and have been playing D&D exclusively since then.

What we learned from our experiment was that game design, like any other design really, benefits enormously from what has gone before. If software designers had to start from scratch each time, invent a high level programming language, build editors and compilers, write all tools required, new software would never emerge.

I just wanted to present that little analogy as a compelling argument for a new edition (and future new editions) and belief that it will be better than what has gone before. The designers of this edition have all of the experience and statistical data to look back on, all the way down past 1st edition to the original Chainmail game.

And now for a question! :)

Are there any plans for or discussion about a brand new setting at all?

If they put one use codes in the books, they would have to shrink wrap them to avoid people copying/using the codes for free and locking the person who does buy the product from using it.

How about printing the code on an insert, which the shop owner can remove and hand over on purchase?

There could be a note in/on the book saying something like "Please remember to ask for your insert from the shopkeeper". It's a little clunky, I know, and wouldn't scale terribly well to huge shops with lots of staff, but I expect it would be doable.

(Frank Reding aka RunelordDM, trying to sort out his message board settings. :)