Static's page

Well, obviously the first thing I notice is the awesome Sci-Fi theme. I'm super excited about this and I love the special rules/foreshadowing on Numerian time-worn technology. As always, the artwork is imagination fuel. I can honestly say I am now looking forward to the 6th season more than any other before.

As for the factions, I like the theme-based. Allows for more creativity with characters. With nation-based, people were always having to pigeon-hole their characters into supporting the nation, even when it didn't really make sense. It also makes it a lot more apparent from the name alone what a faction stands for.

To go against the tide, I find the faction symbols to be great. Very art deco/mid-century modern. Clean lines, flat colors. Should be easy to scale down. They are a different style than the rest of the Pathfinder art, which might be why people are finding them jarring and/or ugly.

Ok, back to making space gun noises. Pew pew pew pew, BOOM.

I think this paragraph from the Bestiary might help you:

"The longer a tribe of gargoyles abides in a region of ruins or buildings, the more its members come to resemble that region's architectural styles. The changes a gargoyle's appearance undergoes are slow and subtle, but over the course of years, it can shift radically."

I read this to mean a gargoyle can look like pretty much any kind of stone statue or structure, maybe even natural stone for "wild" gargoyles. You can many real examples of predators that stay still to hunt (herrings), and many creatures have evolved for human society (rats). You can imagine pre-history gargoyles posing as fertility statues, stone-henge-like structure, and Easter-Island heads. Really, that one paragraph suddenly makes the possibility for when and where a gargoyle might pop up almost endless. A modern-day gargoyle would probably look like some abstract art sculpture.

Agreed. But, we have to recognize that many new players aren't going to be good yet at that teamwork function, some players just aren't ever going to really get it, and some players actively eschew doing anything in a cooperative manner.

If the game has transitioned to a difficulty level in which strong teamwork is not only prized, but fundamentally necessary for success, that's an important thing to note, as I think it makes it a lot less newbie-friendly.

It is a co-operative game, there's no way to get around that. Co-operation should be fundamentally necessary for success and a well-written scenario should force players to play as a team or lose (maybe not die, but at least lose). New players also shouldn't expect to have an easy time of it right away, not that it should be impossible, but not easy. While "too hard" can drive a new player away, so can "too easy." I think "First Steps" does a good job of being challenging (for new players) and forcing teamwork without easily killing the players. But that's why there are introduction scenarios for new players - because not every scenario should be aimed at making it easy for the newbies.

For players who just don't seem to get how to play a cooperative game, I think part of being on a team is to help them.

I sympathize that sometimes there are people who just don't want to cooperate, but that's just people.

Larger issues that display a lack of attention to detail and familiarity with our products and style: capitalizing spell names; not capitalizing feat names; not italicizing magic items or spells; not adhering to our established format of presenting encounters in separate sections describing creatures, traps, development, treasure, and so forth; lack of understanding of how to calculate CR for a multi-creature encounter; misspellings of established proper nouns from our setting or the campaign; not spell-checking your document; not proofreading your document for grammatical errors.

In both cases, the more your submission looks like what we publish in both style and quality, the more likely we'll be to accept it.

The Open Call form says to only use bold and italics:

You are encouraged to use bold and

italic text to conform to the style and formatting standards
of the Pathfinder RPG, but please do not use additional
styles or artificial means of recreating horizontal lines (such
as those in statblock headers or section breaks); these will be
added by Paizo prior to publication of accepted submissions.

The only trouble with this is that the text the GM is suppose to read aloud is in a lighter colored font. When you don't have the advantage to use a lighter colored font, there's no way to distinguish between the box text and the rest of the text. Would it be okay to italicize the box text to make the distinction? Or would that put us in the category of someone who is lacking familiarity of the product?

I liked the podcast and seeing everyone and the real-time feedback. Gives paizo that personal touch and I'd like to see more done.

Actually finding the podcast, though, that was annoying and I was a bit surprised it wasn't directly linked anywhere obvious (I still don't know if it's directly linked anywhere on paizo). It probably took me about 10 minutes of searching around the world wide web to find it on youtube - only after I had the idea to go directly to youtube to look for it. This was the first podcast I've ever watched live, so I'm not "in the know" about where they are traditionally hosted. I'm sure there were more people who may have wanted to watch it, but couldn't figure out where to go.

Urg, I just did that annoying thing where the complaint is longer than the praise. In actuality, my complaint is rather small compared to how much I liked the podcast format.

If we're basing it on reality, then I'd say "non-action" or "free". Probably free for reasons explained below. The "readjusting your grip" argument isn't very convincing only because in sports such as tennis where one has to readjust the grip often, it becomes part of what you're doing. Even people who play with two back-hands in tennis (which requires switching your hands every few seconds) can do it very quickly and compete at high levels.

Then again, in extremely fast sports such as ping-pong, only slight adjustments are possible. Out-of-turn actions are more likely to be like ping-post, fast. So, that's why I ultimately would go with "free." Again, assuming the goal is to make the game realistic.