Student of the Way's page

DRM? An emphatic NO!

Why? DRM does nothing to stop "piracy". There is not a DRM system currently in use that has not already been cracked and any future system probably has an effective lifetime measured in weeks, if not days. All DRM does is inconvenience honest customers by limiting their use of books that they have paid money for and force them to illegally breal the DRM on their purchases to get full use of them.

I generally make it a habit to avoid buying DRM'd ebooks for these reasons.

All ePubs sold through the iBookstore have DRM: the same one the iTunes music store uses. However, ePubs purchased directly from Paizo do not contain DRM: they are watermarked instead.

I just downloaded my first Piazo ebook (Winter Witch) which I pruchased directly from the Paizo website. When I try and upload the EPUB to Stanza on my iPhone, however, I get an error message saying the file contains DRM (hack-spit) and it cannot be read by Stanza.

So, *is* Piazo using DRM on the ePub books purchased from their website? I hope not as I won't be buying any more ebooks if they do. If not, does anyone have a clue what my problem might be?

That really depends on a lot of variables, but one I have seen before is players who have played D&D/fantasy games for many years and are either tired of playing the core classes and races or just don't like the core stuff.

I guess I just can't really relate to this. With all the existing races, alignments, basic and prestige classes, not to mention the numerous possible multi-class combinations (let alone the variety introduced through character background and role playing), I don't understand how someone could not be able to create a PC they found interesting.

Now, the way you phrased what I quoted from you sounds like you are referring to munchkins, min/maxers and power gamers, and on that point I agree with you.

I admit it sounds like you have a lot more experience dealing with long-term players than I do, but in my more limited experience, it always seemed to me that when I GM'd or played, the people who were most vocal on using third party or non-core material were doing so not for variety but becase they thought those options gave them some sort of advantage.

Now, its been so long since I played D&D that I consider myself something of a newbie at the game, so I don't feel quite up to judging whether some obscure 3.5 supplement is balanced or not. So at this point I'm more comfortable just not trying to squeeze it into PF. Now, I would hate to lose a player becuase he felt he just could not enjoy a game unless he played a half-Deva/half-Ogre multiclassed Ninja/Onmyouji, but I just don't want to risk breaking my game and the other players enjoyment for the sake of one players excentricities.

I come to PF from a slightly different background than most(?) players, in that I have not played D&D for years (was using other systems), and never played 3.0 or 3.5. So I have no existing library of 3.5 books I feel any compelling need to use.

That said, while I could see dipping into 3.5 for some of the "softer" material (adventures and campaign material, mostly) I personally would never use any of the "cruchier" stuff like character classes, spells, etc, as I think that would tend to negate the hard work that Paizo did in fixing all the "cruchy" bits that were percieved as broken in 3.5.

I'm sure there must be some worthwhile and balanced content that could be imported from 3.5, but it seems to me that Paizo provides enough new and fully PF compatable core material now that I don't see the necessity of trying to fit old, and possibly problematic, 3.5 material in anyway.

Even when I used to play AD&D and other RPG systems, I never really felt the need to continue layering on more and more supplementary material on top of the core system. By its very nature I feel such additions have a tendency to creat problems through introducing unbalanced or poorly thought out consequences. It seems to me the current and planned PF "core" books provide enough flexibility, variety, and complexitiy that there is no real need to add more "stuff" other than just for the sake of adding "stuff".

I mean, do other players realy feel that they absolutly have to add things like more spells, more PC races, and morePC classes to enjoy PF?

The old 3.0 and 3.5 rules were open, meaning others could copy them and use them in their own books. This is the major factor that allows Paizo to do what they are doing with their rules. PFRPG is also OGL, meaning it is published under the OGL and that other publishers can use the rules in their own books.

I have to admit, as a relative newcomer to Pathfinder this confuses me too. If Pathfinder is OGL and OGL is not D&D 3.5, then what is the different between products labeled (OGL) and those labeled (PFRPG)? <scratched head in puzzlement>

I have to agree with the sentiments espoused that not all literature ages well and that SF has a tough road to hoe with respect to time,

Personally, while I agree that some SF suffers due to "aging" much of the stuff that is looked at as bad today, was not very good to begin with. There was lots of poorly written stuff published during the "golden age" of science fiction, but the same can be said for today. It certainly does not mean that none of it is still worth a read.

Except for closed minded people who refuse to read a story because it failed to predict thumb drives or cell phones or the internet, its really not that hard to overlook the ocassional anachronism if the story, characters and writing are good. That's why "outdated" stories from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to Stranger in a Strange Land are still read and enjoyed by thousands of readers even today.

Tiamat!

So evil, yet so.. colorful! Like an evil, world destroying rainbow!!!

Uh?

You might want to check out the free Bestiary Preview and Bestiary Preview II. They'll give you an idea of both some of the new content you can find in the book, like crag linnorms and tengu, how older content has been updated, like the tiefling (which now balances better with the core races), revisions to creature types and subtypes, and variants of old classics like blood skeletons and fast zombies.

You should also check out the free PDF of the Bonus Bestiary. It contains not only write ups for several monsters that did not make the cut in the regular Bestiary, but it also contains a complete listing of all the monsters covered in the big Bestiary book.

Will the OGL material be converted to Pathfinder once the final version is out?

Its been a while since this was asker but I would be interested in an answer to this, too. There are a number of "older" Golarion supplements listed as "OGL" that I was interested in. If there is a chance of them being updated to PFRPG I'll hold off and concentrate on the newer stuff that is fully PFRPG compatable for now.

(Yes, I know I can convert any OGL stuff to PFRPG, but I'm lazy so if Paiza is going to do it anyway, I'll save my time.) ;-)

It's in print. It's a rule.

I honestly think this is where you are repeatdly making your mistake. It's not a rule. There is absolutly nothing in the "RAW" saying a wizard can only have one spellbook. If the core rulebook said "A wizard can only have one spell book." that would be a rule. What you are doing is reading into the use of the singular in discussions of spellbooks and assuming that means there is rule preventing multiple spellbooks, when in fact no such rule exists. It is in fact just your interperetation of the text.

Although the rulbook may not explicitly state that a wizard can have multiple spellbooks, there are all sorts of indications that they can indeed have more than one book, which others have already enumerated so I won't bother to repeat them here.

My only additional argument would be to point out, that as far as I can see every single person who has responded to this thread disagrees with your interperetation of the rules for single verus multiple spellbooks. If after all this time you have not managed to convince people of your interperetation of the rules, it would seem to be a strong indication that you may infact be incorrect. ;-)

After a looooong break from D&D RPGs I just recently "discovered" Pathfinder. I'm still pouring over the core rule book, but after sampling the tastey previews of this volume, I can't wait to get it. The artwork, the writing, everything about this book has me excited.

I feel a new campaign coming to my tabletop! ;-)