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What does the timeframe look like on Strange Aeons?

I haven’t played through it, but my impression is that it is one of those “chase” APs, where the PCs are trying to catch up to the BBEG but are always a step behind him.

This is what I mean by the APs feeling like they’re on a timer even though JJ says that’s not the intent. I just can’t see my players feeling comfortable with training, crafting items or doing some bespoke/unrelated side adventures when e.g. they’re supposed to be racing to catch Count Lowls!

One counterexample that comes to mind is the Legacy of Fire AP. I think you could easily put a significant amount of downtime after each of the first three books in that AP. In fact, the AP recommends a year of downtime between books 1 and 2! It’s only in the fourth book that the PCs get on the “non-stop rollercoaster ride to the end.” Which actually is fine - I don’t mind some AP books needing to follow right after the other, I’m just looking for campaigns where the characters do occasionally get a break to go do their own thing for a while.

So my sense is that PF 2.0 is unnecessary because PF 1.0 is not what Paizo is selling. Paizo is selling Adventure Paths (that's why the game is called Pathfinder rather than e.g. Crypts & Conquistadors).

There is an urban legend in the games industry that "adventures don't sell." The argument is that only GMs buy adventures, so adventures by definition only target ~20% of the potential RPG market. I think this view is misguided.

While it's true at some level that adventures only sell to GMs, my impression is that the vast majority of tabletop RPG campaigns are run off published adventures, because most GMs don't have the time or the inclination to do their own adventure design. Therefore while adventures only sell to GMs, if you don't produce and sell adventures, you don't sell any core books either, because no one plays a game that doesn't have adequate supplement support. You can have all the coolest crunch books in the world, but without copious numbers of adventures to run the players through, you get nowhere,

This is why the greatest and most long-lasting RPGs are those with heavy adventure support rather than heavy rules support - D&D (all editions especially Holmes, Mentzer and AD&D 1E), Call of Cthulhu (all editions), Runequest 2E, Shadowrun, Traveller, and yes, Pathfinder, because of the APs.

Paizo doesn't need to do PF 2.0 because that's not the product. Paizo just needs to keep churning out top quality APs and stand-alone modules (as well as PFS scenarios) and all will be well.

It's my favorite Umberto Eco novel.

Seconded. One of my favorite novels ever and I can read it again and again just for all the little digressions and side-tracks. As for "what's it about", you almost get to the point of "what isn't it about"?

Yeah - anything which is created & sold specifically to be collectable very rarely goes up in value.

Exactly. Even things that have collectible value (coins, bank notes, antique furniture, art) usually get the caveat that you should buy them because you like them, not for potential future value.

I collect bank notes (paper currency, both US and foreign) and every reputable dealer in the field made sure to tell me that if I want to invest, I should buy stocks and bonds. I haven't got the slightest intention of ever selling my collection, and would assume I'd take a loss if I did, so I think it's all about going in with your eyes open and without unrealistic expectations.

Sounds like the guy in the OP may have believed the hype...

CBDunkerson, I understand your position and I don't think there's really anything to talk about. You're in the same place as BigNorseWolf: "I cannot." Let's leave it at that.

The problem with this exercise, which I think is generally a useful one, is that you run the risk of whitewashing real threats. You're coming up with your own excuses for someone else's bad behavior.

At the risk of Godwinning us, I can imagine a Jew in 1930s Germany making a similar list of reasons and deciding his neighbors really couldn't be that evil and it would all work out fine.

As I said in my original post, the exercise doesn't work for all positions and I referenced the Holocaust and the Khmer Rouge as examples where "evil" was the only reasonable answer. I also suggested Flat Earthers as examples where "stupid/misinformed" was the only reasonable answer.

I also said that the view that half the US voting population going for Trump is in the same category as Hitler and the Holocaust is unserious and not worth engaging with. Trump is not Hitler and none of his statements or proposals are the Holocaust.

The benefit of the exercise, which debate teams, attorneys and negotiators engage in all the time, is that if you can't find a good faith explanation for your opponent's position (something that doesn't hinge on them being evil, racist, stupid or misinformed), then in the majority of cases the problem lies with your lack of understanding, not theirs. It challenges a person to think harder and understand other people's point of view better. Doesn't mean they have to agree with it or accept it, just acknowledge that people can have honest differences of opinion without being Nazis.

Yes, occasionally it comes down to the fact that your opponent really is Hitler or the Khmer Rouge - but not often.

You make a fair point. I tend to subscribe to "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence" myself. Usually I can put myself in another's place and try to comprehend their point of view, but I have nothing here. That's why I'm asking for help.

To be fair, there's nothing new about my exercise; debaters, attorneys and negotiators frequently do exercises where they argue one side of an argument, then switch sides of the table and argue the other side. It helps ensure your own arguments are robust and can stand up to challenge, while also helping to build bridges and find win-win solutions. Often people think they're opposed when they actually are arguing at cross-purposes and can both get what they want if they're more thoughtful and creative.

In terms of Trump voters, an easy position to start from is that many people thought both candidates were awful and voted for Trump because he wouldn't be as bad for them as Hillary. Why might they do that?

- Hillary is pro-renewable energy and talked about putting coal miners out of jobs and coal companies out of business. Trump did not and spoke frequently about the plight of blue collar workers without a college degree. If I'm a coal miner, I don't need to be evil or stupid to decide Trump makes more sense for me than Clinton.

- The above can be expanded more generally to cover blue collar workers who are opposed to illegal immigration for economic reasons rather than evil/racist ones. Trump takes a harder line than Clinton on this front.

- People who are first generation legal immigrants or those married to first generation legal immigrants (like, for instance, me) might prefer Trump's stance on illegal immigration simply because they or their loved ones went through great effort to legally come to this country and they don't agree with letting others flout the law and jump the line.

- Proponents of individual freedom who prefer smaller government may support Trump for first taking on and defeating the entrenched Republican political elite and then taking on and defeating the entrenched Democrat political elite. This is one of the positions I personally am most sympathetic to.

- From a foreign policy perspective, people could be opposed to Obama's wars of choice in the Middle East; the nuclear deal with Iran; the weakened or deteriorating relations between the US and Israel, the US and UK, the US and Russia; the failure to identify or deal with the threat of ISIS; the relative lack of progress from the pivot to Asia. Clinton is widely viewed as a continuation of these policies or a creator of them while SoS while Trump represents an opportunity for change (for better or worse).

- Many, many people on both left and right are deeply opposed to free trade agreements for reasons that cannot be easily labeled as evil or stupid. Trump is vocally willing to go protectionist/fair trade and Clinton is not (or waffles depending on her audience).

- A fair number of voters may have been bothered by the fact that out of a population of 300 million people, the Democrats thought the best choice for President just happened to be the wife of a previous President. That's as bad as Jeb Bush or Dubya being President. The United States isn't supposed to have royal families or aristocracies and the very fact that both parties were pushing nepotism in the primaries and (for Democrats) the general suggests an entrenched and corrupt political elite that believes it rules the people rather than serves them. For better or worse, Trump is not part of a political dynasty and is very much an outsider.

There are more reasons not based on Trump being the lesser of two evils, but that's a start for now. Do you think you could add any more now or are you still pretty much in the stupid/evil camp?

Since there are people on this thread that clearly think the results of the most recent election are good, I'd like to hear their justification for that attitude. From my POV, we have elected a [various bad things].

I'm not a Trump supporter, but when I find myself disagreeing with someone, I often try to do an intellectual exercise where I assume that person is neither evil nor stupid, and then try to defend/justify that person's position to myself. I ask myself, "If I wasn't evil or stupid, what would be the reasons I might hold that position?"

I can do that for Trump supporters if you'd like, but you might find it interesting to have a go at it first yourself. I would be genuinely interested in what you come up with.

Note that this exercise doesn't work for all positions, e.g. there is no argument for the Holocaust or the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge that wouldn't point any reasonable person to "evil". Similarly, the arguments of a Flat Earther almost certainly point to "stupid" (or more charitably, "misinformed").

For the avoidance of doubt, insisting that half the population just elected the next Hitler because they were too stupid to know he was Hitler or too evil to care is not a reasonable position. Or at the very least not a position worth engaging in discussion.

OTOH, while nothing magically happened overnight in 2016, a lot has happened since 2012 - Black Lives Matter and all the protests around it came into existence, the same sex marriage decision and the religious freedom cases and laws, including the bathrooms bills. Social issues were a lot more prominent in the last few years.

Exactly. Instead of talking about the Americans who lose from globalization and free trade, both the Democrats and Republicans wanted to talk about social issues (from opposite ends of the spectrum). The Rust Belters watched the news and could only think, "No one even wants to talk about me and my problems."

Remember, Trump destroyed the Republican establishment before he destroyed the Democratic one.

Going back to the topic of the thread, none of this would matter much in a country where the popular vote decides the election. But since it is an electoral college, this stuff does matter. And going back to my first post in the thread, if the election was decided by the popular vote, both candidates would have run very different campaigns.

Most, I am willing to wager, voted despite Trump's worst policies and rhetoric because they wanted change and they were not going to get it from Clinton.

This is it, I think. Based on the post-mortems, I think the folks who put Trump over the top are the ones tired of living hand to mouth and wanting decent jobs doing hard work that they can be proud of. When that's your context, you don't have to be racist, homophobic or bigoted to vote for the candidate talking about your problems rather than the candidate talking about fighting for transgender bathrooms, Syrian immigrants and BLM.

Many of these Trump voters are probably sympathetic to those issues -- Trump after all breached Clinton's "firewall" by winning counties that supported Obama in 2008 and 2012. It's unlikely something magical happened in 2016 to turn those counties racist overnight. However, that list of issues is probably less important to Rust Belt voters than reopening the mothballed factory that their parents and grandparents used to work at before all the jobs went away.

The big (and very doubtful) question is whether a President Trump can or will do anything to reopen that mothballed factory. But Trump is probably the first candidate since Bill Clinton to even bother acting like he cares whether the factory gets reopened. Hillary Clinton certainly didn't and I suspect that made the difference.

"Gamer boy" could work as I'm not aware of "skater boys" being bothered by the diminutive - though they often spell it with a z (boyz) in the plural.

I can't remember if the Bad Boys/z movies with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence used an "s" or a "z".

As "Gamer Man", my superpower would be the ability to properly execute the rules for grappling including creatures with the Grab special attack.

I think it would be "gamer guy" to keep the alliteration that goes with "gamer girl."

"Gamer man" and "gamer woman" wouldn't roll off the tongue and sound like two very dorky superheroes.