WormysQueue's page

Mighty Trudd, lend me your strength!

Willorn reloads his Crossbow then fires at the nearest Misflit, before he drops it and draws his axe, ready to jump into melee.

Attack: 1d20 + 5 ⇒ (1) + 5 = 6
Damage: 1d8 ⇒ 6

Oh come on, this is like the fourth 1 in a row.

As an international customer, the pdf subscription would probably made Paizo more money from me personally, because I'd love to support them via a subscription and also because I'd probably pay for stuff that I just don't buy automatically these days (I would have probably bought less than half of the APs I have if not for the initial charter subscription I held on to longer than I should have just because I didn't want to lose the charter tag).

This said, what I would love even more is if Paizo found a European distributor that would allow me to sub to the physical product without having to pay insane amounts of money for shipping including the fear that it'll never come to my house because our national custom laws make them disappear somewhere during the process.

But unless one of those two things happens, I'm just not willing /can't afford to subscribe to any of the lines, especially considering that I'll never use more than a small percentage of the stuff I already have in actual games. Will still buy pdf's directly from Paizo off course.

So, here’s Willorn Flamehand, my dwarven rogue

Why are those 'existing storylines' less worthy of being followed up on, compared to the thought of doing yet another Chelish or Varisian story?

I think it's not about being worthy, it's just about what you are actually interested in. I kinda can understand where CastleDour is coming from, because I'm actually even worse, and in my ideal egotistical little world, we would have never left Varisia in the first place, because I love that region so much, while my interest in non-medieval European fantasy is pretty much non-existent. A bit of Arabian nights (which is, at least partly for historic reasons, still European fantasy) added to the mix, and I'm fine.

Which is, by the way, a completely hypocritical stance, because I have been very vocally critizising WotC for pretty much doing exactly that with the Sword Coast, while ignoring most of the other fun parts of Faerun. And of course I'm talking about the other European-ish parts of Faerun, not about Maztica, Kara-Tur or even Chult.

That said, I don't think it needs to be an either or. Especially with the shorter APs, they can cover more ground easily, and given that most APs are still Inner Sea APs, I think blaming an Arcadia AP for not getting exactly what I want would be kind of unfair. Especially when I don't even have the time to peruse all the stuff that looks like it is written with me in mind.

Do you mind sharing what those specific opinions are? Saying this sort of thing without at least gesturing in a specific direction almost begs to be taken the least flattering way possible.

I mean I don't know if other communities are really less toxic, but getting belittled everytime you state that you'd prefer certain things not to be changed by a new edition, things (to give a few examples) like Vancian Casting back before the 4e days, removing alignment, or to get in some hotter waters, evil dark elves and orcs, will, in the long run, make you either go away, or make you so angry that you say something stupid (which, of course will get you punished, while the people provoking you can triumph that you fell into their trap).

And there used to be a certain group of people that did that for a very long time by playing the system and just staying polite enough to not get moderated. Probably still does, though I don't follow those things anymore so I don't even know if they are still here.

I know this product line is centered on lore, but how would you feel if they threw in 5 statblocks for the most important characters?

Would you prefer getting other content instead, or would this be interesting?

Not a big fan of that idea, because I would have no use for those stat blocks most of the time. it's kinda the same to me like with the Deities, where I have never been fond of having those statted up, like they were back in the day.

But that's just me being completely uninterested in running a game where the players end up fighting NPCs/gods that will probably return in official material yet to be published. Especially those that aren't even intended to serve as adversaries.

If the "No Sequel" is the easiest option for you to handle, I would support going that route, even when I love things like the Runelords trilogy building an overall arc.

But one of my favorite leisure activities is rewriting the APs to fit into other settings anyways and that is much more work than making it fit as a sequel to an otherwise unrelated AP, so having to do that work wouldn't really bother me at all.

By the way, one of my favorite parts back then in Dungeon Mag times was the columns by Eric L. Boyd and Keith Baker for the Age of Worms AP giving options how to make that AP fit into the Realms and Eberron respectively. So why not doing something similar, only to connect APs together. Could be done via Blog entries (or I assume, via the Player's Guide, though that might become difficult with the ever increasing number of APs eventually).

Which is exactly what the monthly Adventure Paths have been for 15 years, like Keftiu said.

It's not quite the same though, because you have only one long adventure vs. several shorter adventures you had in Dungeon Magazine. As an old fan of the magazines, I still feel that the adventures contained in Dungeon hit a very sweet spot for me regarding length, scope and variety of content in a way neither the single adventures nor the Pathfinder Society Scenarios ever did. And that goes even for the years when they had the Adventure Paths in Dungeon Magazine itself (Even after all those years I would love to throw money at whoever would be willing to give Age of Worms the HC treatment Shackled City got), they still had a variety of adventures.

I trust that Paizo uses their ressources to the best possible outcome and that probably means no Dungeon or Dragon magazine. But damn if I don't still miss those. And the APs, while great in their own right, don#t really scratch the same itch.

To be fair, its not just matter of jerk and non jerk players, some players when they play "morally gray settings" tend to go to silly edgy ends compared to "black and white settings".

Which is why I'll put alignment directly back into the game, if they remove it with regards to character building. Because I hate those edgelords much more than I do hate the people that just don't get that the alignment system has never been meant to narrowly define every single action you take.

I'm pretty sure Paizo is past having an AP written entirely by men.

Well I'll happily expand my list of authors I'd love to see more from with Amber E. Scott, Crystal Frazier and Amber Stewart. This said, I wasn't trying to make a point about them being better writers than the authors of more recent APs. I was just saying that I absolutely loved what they did back then. And I certainly didn't want to instigate another diversity discussion. Didn't even cross my mind that my post could be taken this way, to be honest.

This might be nostalgia speaking and is probably completely unfair towards all the new voices adding to the Pathfinder universe, but reading all those names that worked at the Kingsmaker AP makes me realize that I would want to throw my money so hard at another AP written by those people (add Logue and Leati to the mix, of course).

Thank you for all the splendid work you did that has made me invest in this wonderful hobby for more than 20 years now. I loved basically everything you touched during your career and while we all love to sing praises to the creatives in the business, we sometimes tend to forget how pivotal the people behind the curtain are.

I kinda lost interest in Pathfinder in recent years for different reasons, but I'll ever be thankful to all the people that helped start Paizo and especially the Pathfinder endeavor, so again, thank you very much and I truly hope you can enjoy retirement and that you stay healthy enough to do so.

All the best,

Wormy

Perhaps the employees you view as toxic are that way because the environment they're in is itself toxic.

I view exactly one (ex-)employee this way. Everyone else working (or having worked/suffered) in the same environment I don't. So I still think it's the person.

I was happy to not mention her anymore, but as you insist (and I'm only speaking for myself here):

What is the difference here I wonder.

Well, I've seen her toxic behavior while she was posting on these boards. I've seen her fabricating lies about why she got fired from Arena.net. I've seen her basically throw dirt at every former employer. So I've just not a single reason to believe anything she says just because she says it.

Never seen SKR behave like that. Never seen Crystal behave like that. I've just no reason to not believe them when they say something. And it was because of Crystal that I was willing to consider the allegations as serious in the first place.

So it has nothing to do with sex, gender or anything like that. My opinion about your trustworthiness is strictly based on how I see you act as a person.

It is great that the setting has lower level NPCs yet what happens when the party gets High level. Artificer is my favourite class

That Eberron (at least in the original setting book) seemed a better fit for lower-level characters was, in fact, one of the major early appeals for me. I've never been fond of high-level play too much, because it changes the style of the game in a direction I don't care for. I don't want to play super-heroes, and Eberron initially did a great job focussing on the lower-level experience.

This said, I think there's a lot of higher level stuff to work with, and later books often expanded in that territory, so it's not as if you had to stop at level 10.

Midgard has been great for me, because it just came out at a time I was thinking about creating my own homebrew steeped in the myths and fairy tales of middle-european folklore. Also, Empire of the Ghouls.

This is in part caused by the fact that the moderators have not been funded and it's a tertiary aspect tacked onto their daily tasks..

I fully understand your stance in the rest of your post (and I agree), but I wanted to point out how much I agree with this. Having been a forum moderator myself, I know that moderating a forum of this size is a full-time job so to tack it on top of another full-time job simply can't work. At all.

As a brief follow-up to KC, why would someone choose differently?

What makes me hesitate sometimes, is that calling someone out for being a hateful person in my experience only leads to them doubling-up on their hate.

And in the current situation, with moderation being slow for the known reasons, and me not being the one directly* attacked, I fear that with my interference I just make things even worse for the people already attacked.

It's more of an instinct than a deliberate choice, and reading what KC, Corie and all the others have to say about it shows me that I need to rethink that.

But the feeling that instead of helping, I would add fuel to the fire is hard to overcome, so this is some thing I'm struggling with (unless something I read is so egregious that I go in full rage mode which might also not be the most constructive thing in the world).

*I'm fully aware that any attack on a member of my community is ,by extension, an attack on myself, but there are definitively different stakes at play here.

I partly blame Paizo for Golarion not to be higher on my "most favorite settings" list. Back then, when they published Age of Worms, I fell so in love with the Forgotten Realms and Eberron Conversion Appendices written by Eric L. Boyd and Keith Baker, that adapting adventures to other settings has become a favorite pastime of mine.

So whenever I read a new Paizo adventure, my mind goes from "Oh, this is great" immediately to "hm, where to put it in Eberron/Faerûn."

I also steal freely from the Pathfinder regional sourcebooks because they are shockfull of cool ideas, that can be used to expand on the lore from those other settings.

Of course, that involves a lot of rewriting and -painting, but that's part of the fun.

In the end, I just love setting design and settings in general. I only came to D&D when the Realms already were established, so I missed out on a lot of earlier stuff, but the magazines did a pretty good job making me intrigued with Greyhawk and Mystara. I also love Planescape to death. And special shout-out to the City of 7 Seraphs.

Then there's Aventuria, Kobold Press' Midgard, FGG's Lost Lands, Ptolus, the world of Numenera, and of course there's Golarion, which I also really like.

But in terms of personal ranking, the Realms and Eberron top them all. In a perfect world and a lot of time at my hands, I'd simply run games in all of them, but the last time I tried didn't turn out too well, so I try to focus on one for starters.

and ok, last post from me as well on that side-topic

Bu...but.. Faerûn was my first love, and it will be my last...

In all honesty, I'm constantly torn between those two. The Realms have much more lore, and an actual metaplot, that I used to love (until I suddenly didn't), so the idea to take it from there and develop my own variant of what happens after 1375 DR is really appealing to me.

On the other hand, the way Keith worked magic into his setting, it's tone, the historical background with the Last War, integrating Psionics, the different spin on traditional ancestries, the Kalashtar, Eberron just oozes genius from every pore.

So I've been procrastinating about this for years now.

Oh wait, looking at your avatar now, I guess that that second part came across in a horribly wrong way. *blushes* I was strictly speaking about those two figurines above, and you have to admit that the red one looks more dangerous than cute.

*goes hiding in the next oven.*

Things ain't looking too hot over here in Germany, where the onset of winter, a quite high percentage of the population being unvaccinated and a currently ongoing change in government have created a situation where cases are rising dramatically and nobody is really doing anything about it. Makes everyone here pretty nervous.

Hey, at least they are now thinking about forcing us nurses to get vaccinated, because if we don't care enough about our customers to get the vaccine, we should be removed from our jobs. That we literally risked our lives for more than a year to care for those customers, when no vaccine was available, seems to have been forgotten already.

Of course all those idiots out there denying to get vaccinated for Q'Anon reasons can't be bothered with the same standard in the meantime, because solidarity seems to be a one way ticket these days.

Full disclosure: I've got my vaccination as soon as it was available and I've been a pretty vocal proponent of a general vaccine mandate, but that they'd rather single some professions out and even giving that stupid line of reasoning for it really riles me up. Especially as it is not us that is the problem.

People thought Wil Wheaton’s column didn’t belong? What heathens.

Right? And the only thing more embarassing than that was the level of stupidity I stooped down to in defense of that column.

congratulations y'all for proving shivok's points made in the original post.

And thank you to the posters from page 1's first half for simply disagreeing, and even arguing constructively why shivok's idea might come with some problems.

Man, do I wish back to the times when the worst thing we were bickering about was if Will Wheaton's column in Dungeon Magazine was a waste of space. Turns out being one of the longest surviving fossils on these boards is more of a curse than a blessing.

Oh, and as a reminder, there's that nice thread created by Hilary on how to disagree without being disagreeable. Probably worth rereading that thing once in a while.

And if you are worried about how that basic idea might be "taken too far", maybe give us and the moderation a little more credit than that and stop assuming the worst of us.

Assuming that post was directed at me, the problem is that "us". Because that "us" is a pretty diverse group of people.

You get all the credit in the world from me, as I've seen you going out of your way trying to be fair and understanding time and time again. There are a select few posters that I hold in the same esteem.

Then there's the majority that I think are decent people I don't have any beef with. A lot of those are angry at the moment - understandably so - which severely limits their ability to stay fair towards "generally good-faith posters", especially in case of a disagreement. And it's sometimes hard not to feel accused as well, which is probably why the Raven caught me flat-footed with their post.

And then there's one or two pretty loud voices that I basically consider to be as much of a troll than any other troll out there.

I've been doing a lot of self-moderation in recent weeks so as not to add additional - unintentional - hurt to people that are already hurting, but I'll certainly not let the trolls (no matter from where they come) in any way influence what and how I post.

I absolutely did not mean extra scrutiny on a poster or any kind of guilty by association.

Apologies from me for getting so angry at your post. I was aware that you didn't mean it that way but still it rubbed me in a terribly wrong way. But that's on me, not you.

So, it likely needs reviewing, even if the poster did not want to provide fodder for the abusive poster.

Full stop. That's where you lose me completely. If you judge my posts based on who agrees with them (and I'm pretty sure that I've been favorited several times by forum members you probably count in the abusive crowd), that is solely your problem, and I will not change my posting behaviour because of that.

If you have a specific problem with what I actually wrote, though, you're free to point that out to me, I'm more than willing to listen. But I'll certainly not let you paint me as a troll by proxy. Or rather, I couldn't care less if you try to.

It isn't possible.

We don't need to change all communication at once. If everyone reading this would try to apply those tools to their own communication skill set (and of course use them), we'd still see a bit of an improvement.

I'd count that as a win and better than any kind of lowest common denominator we could probably agree on otherwise.

I'm so glad that our cats never needed this. They would have probably killed me several times just for thinking about it (and yeah, I'm pretty sure that cats are natural telepaths).

Remember that some of those "new guys" aren't all that new (and a lot of them aren't guys either.)

You're right of course. Didn't want to exclude anyone. In fact, part of why this topic makes me scratch my head from time to time is, that even in the 80, the group I played in was 50% guys and 50% gals. Some of those belong to the LBTQ+-community (of course we didn't use that term, not sure that it even existed back then). And while I don't want to pretend I ever had to experience the same issues my friends from that group had, there was a measure of being bullied and harassed involved just for being part of that group.

What that experience obviously did, though, is blind me to the fact that just because we could handle it pretty well* 35+ years ago, it doesn't mean that it was handled equally well in the wider RPG community. For the longest time I was thinking that that safe space was a safe space for everyone (and of course we didn't even think about being privileged compared to other people).

*"pretty well" is a relative term, of course. In hindsight, I'm quite sure that there were transgressions happening, that nobody did comment on because they were used much worse from other people, and that jokes were made and things were said that wouldn't fly in 2021. And thinking about it this way kinda makes you from the "good guy" to the "not as bad" bad guy. Another thing I would probably have been outraged just a few years ago, if someone had suggested that to me.

I'm certainly not expecting perfection from anybody. Heck, that experience I was talking about was me nearly being banned from another board for getting so fed up with certain trolls that I started to retaliate in equal measure.

As far as the oversensitivity goes, I can only talk from my own perspective. There are obvious trolls, of course, but I think a lot of it also has to do with the history of RPGs and who played them. I mean, there are probably a lot of us older guys that stepped into the world of RPGs to escape from a world were felt like we didn't belong, where we weren't accepted and even bullied and harassed because we didn't conform to certain societal norms of the time. So RPGS were our safe space and with that comes a certain tendency of gatekeeping (because it's OUR safe space).

Now that RPGs suddenly have become the cool thing to do, not only do we have to share that space with the new guys, but now those new guys also start to tell us what we did wrong the whole time (which probably is especially infuriating when there's a grain of truth to it). And suddenly my safe space doesn't feel that safe anymore.

maybe I read too much into it, but sometimes I think that all this childish behaviour (and of course, it's childish) has it's roots in the thought of "you wanna feel safe too? Hey, great, but why don't you go feel safe somewhere else? because this is my territory". It's a gut reaction to feeling threatened, which is a completely irrational feeling, that needs to be confronted head on. But it's also what happens in a lot of other areas in society right now.

Doesn't excuse troll behaviour, that's for sure.

One thing I'd like to add regarding item three: I know that I've been guilty of repeating myself several times, but it was never because I wanted to be heard. It was every time because I felt the point I was trying to make was misrepresented by the poster reacting to it. Not necessarily misrepresented deliberately, I'm not talking about troll behaviour here.

Summation can help here, because it makes it easier to identify the details that might have been misunderstood by the recipient. What also can help is just asking if you understood everything correctly, especially when it is something that might make your blood boil.

EDIT: Cis folks of these forums, /this/ is why so many of us are acting “abrasive.”

I understand and even sympathize with that. Problem being of course (and I speak from experience) that it can easily turn you into the bad person in the eyes of the moderation while the trolls are having a field day with having you brought down to their level.

Also keeps people like me from posting at all because I don't agree with you (general you, as in: the good guys) all the time with everything you say and I don't want to be in the crossfire just by being confused with the trolls for not agreeing 100%.

They are in 3.5 and are old, old, old. You have to buy a buncha outta print magazines...

Unless you happen to have that beautiful Shackled City Hardcover that still makes me mourn for the fact that Paizo couldn't give AoW and ST the same treatment.

Brings back great memories when I started to run SC and AoW in Eberron. Unluckily, those games died due to me having a major case of GM burnout, so I never got to finish them.

Hehe, I knew about the Let it Go version. It's absolutely hilarious how the guy can barely hold his laughter when the juror gets excited about the song, not knowing what will follow.

And thanks for the warning; I had probably liked it better if it had been another attempt to rickroll me (and not André Rieu) ^^.

As far as finnish bands are concerned, I remember that Children of Bodom once covered Brittney Spears, but that was, while absolutely awesome, even more horrible than the original, so I won't link it here.

I'm more into stuff like this amazing piano cover of Insomnium's Heart Like a Grave. That's music that I find relaxing.

Then you clearly don't understand how cheap gamers can be.

Not quite sure though if that applies here. We already can get the rules for free (via Archive of Nethys). We can already get a huge lot of Golarion lore for free as well (Pathfinder wiki). And with just a bit of search, you can find an array of free (or at least very cheap) adventures to go with if you don't want to create your own or adapt those you already have (which in my case, would be enough to last for several lifetimes).

Add to that that you can already get the official adventures as pdf only, and I'd think that mose people that sub for the APs do so explicitely because they want to have them in book form, not because they have no alternative.

Yes, a digital subscription would mostly be a thing of convenience to me. On the other hand, my AP subscription becomes more and more of a hassle to me (for reasons Paizo can't do much about, aka international shipping and German customs/tax laws), so I'll probably end it at the end of SoT anyways. Maybe replace it with the Pathfinder Society subscription.

If Jessica had done this, I'm honestly not sure how many people would think a simple apology would be enough.

Kinda feel addressed by this, so yes, it would. In fact, seeing her apologize for some of the things she actually did would probably make me rethink my dislike for her.

To add to the last point Balacertar mentioned: GM burnout is a real thing. You can absolutely run two (or even more) PBP games simultaneously, but you really need to consider if you can do that over a longer period of time consistently without being stressed out by it.

And if you find that you bit more than you can chew, you absolutely need to be willing to lose some weight (aka end one of the games) because if you don't this will cost you so much energy that in the end the other game(s) will start to suffer for it as well. And yes, this can seriously impact your own health as well.

I mean I really am unapologetic about that.

I'm fine with a simple apology as long as it doesn't happen again. That's my absolute minimum and he has already met it.

To me that's completely sufficient. Of course, anyone can have their own opinion about it, it's just that I won't support claims for more.

I don't dare to click youtube links, is that Beatles or Frozen?

Doesn't matter; if it isn't finnish melodeath, it isn't relaxing.

And if a magazine just isn't feasible, I would love to see more game- and setting related stuff popping up on the blog in the vein of what WotC did during 3.5 and 4E times. Articles that expand on the Golarion setting like Ed Greenwood's Realmslore or Keith Baker's Dragonshard series did. More Game-related series like Class Acts, Save my Game or Rules of the Game did. Adventure ideas like the Steal this Hook! - series. That stuff was awesome then and it would be awesome today.

And yes, I would be very willing to pay for stuff like this. Especially with all the great fiction that is already part of the blog.

I know it's not really staff members I want to talk about but still:

I want to thank Kobold Cleaver, Cori Marie, Mergy, dirtypool and everyone else willing to stand up to protect other people of our community (and make no mistake, every former or current Paizo employee IS part of that community), even if that means facing direct or indirect threats made by some individuals that just can't be bothered with basic human decency.

We might disagree here and there, but I hold you all in the highest regards nonetheless and consider me lucky to be part of the same community.

You're beautiful people and don't let anyone else tell you otherwise.

In case people are missing the point - being able to clearly display pronouns prevents the assumption of people on the internet that everyone is a cis man from leading to people being misgendered.

Makes things much more clear to me, and as much as that helps anyone, I am all for it.

Have to admit that I misread KC's last sentence in the OP. Because as a GM basic information to me is Ancestry-Background-Class. As far as Sex/Gender is concerned, you can pretty much be whatever you want in my games, but it also won't influence gameplay in my games that much so it isn't really relevant to me.

I'm not trying to knock anyone's preference for PDF - I get it, I promise.

It's not necessarily a preference for pdf as much as an admission that after 45 years of collecting books (and not being able to bring myself to get rid of even those I don't use anymore^^) I just don't have room for new books anymore.

I already talked about the ridiculously high fees for international shipping (which is nothing that Paizo can do something about). I could avoid those by either buying over Amazon or by restricting to the German localization (both I don't want to for a variety of reasons), but getting the pdfs directly from Paizo beats both, at least in my opinion. And I can use the money saved to support other artists that I wouldn't be able to support otherwise.

Add to that ecological reasons; if you read as much as me, ebooks is way more ecology-friendly than the printed products, especially with shipping adding to the ecological cost.

This all said, I still prefer reading real books about reading ebooks 100%.

This idea would force me to choose between getting a PDF or a physical copy for each subscription

That wasn't how I read the suggestion, so maybe I misunderstood something? To me, it sounded like having the choice between getting the print product (+ a free pdf) or the digital product only (for the price of the print product). So you either get both or you get only the pdf. But in both cases, you pay the same price.

At the moment, thanks to the legacy advantage, I get the physical product at the price of the pdf AND I get the pdf basically for free (option 1).

Unluckily, because of international shipping, I pay additional 13$ shipping cost for a single issue, and as it seems, thanks to some changes to tax laws, it seems that since july I have to pay additional taxes on top of it (plus I have to wait a lot longer for U.S. imports over 20 $ to arrive at my house).

Which means that I'd happily pay 25$ for a pdf-only subscription because that would actually spare me around 10 bucks of expenses per issue. This is 120 $ a year; if you think about it, for me to keep the subscription borders on sheer insanity, and Paizo doesn't even profit from it.

So injustice only exists when it is done to people with world-wide name recognition? Is that your argument here?