Goblin Squad Member. Organized Play Member. 2,512 posts (2,697 including aliases). 4 reviews. No lists. No wishlists. 3 Organized Play characters. 11 aliases.
I'd like to apologize for staying out of the game in the last week. I didnt intend that to happen but I also have no excuse for it, because time has certainly not been any issue. Seems like I finally have to admit to myself that the hobby and I have grown apart from each other and that Pathfinder 2nd as well as D&D 4/5 succeeded in completely killing my interest in tabletop roleplaying (and by extension, PbP).
So while I'm sorry to have caused any disruption to this game, I don't think it'll get better on my side anytime soon, so again, I beg your pardon and hope you'll continue to enjoy the game.
I'm certainly not. I rarely watch tv/streaming services or movies, the last four movies I watched being Spider-Man: Far from Home, the D&D movie, Inside Out 2 and Deadpool/Wolverine, and even those I probably wouldn't have seen if not for my kids. So unless you're saying "Hasta La Vista, Baby" to me, I probably won't be able to place any movie related hint or quote at all.
I am always a bit torn on this matter. On the one hand, I've never been big on banning things and have always relied on that players don't do anything stupid and my ability to balance things out in the game. So even in D&D 3.5 and PF 1, I never banned mechanics outrightly and I see even less reason to do so in Pathfinder 2nd.
On the other hand, I am leaning towards the traditional side of fantasy in reading as well as in rpgs. And while I can appreciate more exotic stuff when it is really ingrained in the setting (like Warforged in Eberron), a lot of the stuff added in PF2 doesn't really click with me, and now that Leshy are part of the Core books (also: Orcs), for the first time I'm thinking about simply ruling out those options for at least some of the games I would run.
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.
Feats
Dwarven Weapon Familiarity ancestry feat
Hefty Hauler skill feat
Titan Wrestler skill feat
You’re Next Class feat (Reaction)
Class Features
Rogue’s Racket [Ruffian]
Sneak Attack +1d6
Surprise Attack
Languages: Common, Dwarven
Background: Willorn grew up on the streets of the Coins in Absalom, soon becoming a member of the Fortrights, a band of „honorable thieves“, who took him in and gave him shelter. It’s there where he learned about the history of the church they inhabited, making him want to atone for the sins of his ancestors and become a devout follower of Trudd the Mighty in the process.
Unluckily, one of the thieveries he was involved in earned him the wrath of the Bloody Barbers, so he had to flee from Absalom and landed in Otari, where he found works at the Giant’s Wheel initially. There he also became friends with Lasda Venkervale, and when Lasda vanished, he started to work at the Rowdy Rockfish for his mother Brelda, doing all kinds of reparation work, helping at the bar, but also serving as a Bouncer, which might attribute to the fact there’s basically never any barroom brawl at the tavern.
He also started to search for Lasda in the Fogfen, bringing back outlandish tales about monstrous creatures roaming the swamp, that, much to his chagrin, no one will believe him to be true.
Here's Brax, human ranger in the making. I'm a bit rusty, so I hope I didn't forget anything important.
Brax:
Name:Brax Yravasu
Ancestry: Human [Mulan]
Class: Ranger 1
Alignment: NG
Patron Deity: Chauntea
Init +2 Perception +4
Attributes:Str 12 Dex 15 Con 13 Int 08 Wis 10 Cha 06
AC 15 (+2 Dex, +3 armor), touch 12, flat-footed 13
HP 11
Fort +3 Ref +4 Will 0
Speed 30 ft.
Base Atk +1 CMB +2 CMD +14
Melee short sword +2 (1d6+1, x2)
Ranged longbow +3 (1d8, x3. 100 ft.)
Feats: Point Blank Shot, Precise Shot
Skills: Climb +5 (+4 in armor), Handle Animal +2, Perception +4, Stealth +6 (+5 in armor), Knowledge (nature) +3, Sense Motive +5, Survival +2 (trait bonus)
Background Skills: Knowledge (geography) +3, Craft (bows) +3
Traits
Child of Nature: +2 trait bonus on Survival
Bastard: +1 trait bonus on Sense Motive and Sense Motive becomes class skill
Fearless Defiance: +1 trait bonus on all saves against fear effects, if successful, +1 trait bonus on attack rolls against favored enemies for 1 round
Flaw Paranoid (Aid Another to help me has DC 15)
Class Features: favored enemy [humanoid(human)], track, wild empathy
28 gp, 8 sp, 5 cp (weight 70,5lbs. with all equipment, 33 lbs with clothing and combat gear)
Background: Brax was born into slavery, as his mother was bound to a minor Thayan noble in the tharch of Priador. He was never treated as any more than that, though being a bastard son to that noble probably saved him from being sold at the slave markets of Eltabbar, when he would have been old enough. Instead he was groomed to be one of the shepherds, which not only allowed him a bit more freedom than most other slaves was granted, but he even was allowed to bear weapons to protect his herd from the monsters roaming the Priador wilderness and sometimes entering more inhabited regions.
Two things made him break his bonds and escape slavery, together with a ragtag band of other fugitives and ex-slaves. One thing was hearing rumors of Thay preparing an army to try and invade Aglarond, while at the same time slaves were suddenly disappearing with no one knowing what happened. The other was the death of his mother, while his sire was on a business journey.
Brax succeeded in stealing a hefty amount of money from his father’s chests and, together with his companions escaped to the wilds. They somehow succeeded to escape to Murghom, where the hid in the Ganathwood out of fear of Thayan pursuers, although those never came.
In the meantime the money got scarce, and when his companions started to steal cattle and other things from the farmsteads surrounding the wood, he eventually separated from them.
Living for a while alone, he nearly died in an accident but was saved by a miracle, when a wolf found him, and instead of going for the easy prey, led a priestess of Chauntea to him, who lived an eremite life in the woods, but took him in and nursed him back to health. Since then it is the Earth mother he directs his prayers to, but that event also led him to realize, that he needed a purpose in life. He certainly wouldn’t go back to Thay, but he also didn’t want to fall in with the bandits his former companions had become, so he decided to go south to try and make his luck in Mulhorand, the homestead of his ancient ancestors.
He is never really alone now. That wolf that saved his life seems to follow him wherever he goes, always keeping it’s distance, rarely to be seen, and Brax sometimes questions his own sanity, fearing to suffer hallucinations.
Appearance Brax is in his early 20‘s, though his haggard face shows the hardships he had to live thru. He has the dark skinned complexion of his Turemi ancestors, though you can also see traces of his Mulani heritage in his facial features as well as his slim body. He is more than 6 ft. in height and shaves his hair in Mulhorandi fashion. He’s a loner by nature and experience, and while he’s friendly enough with new people he meets and always willing to help people in need, it’s hard to earn his friendship and even harder to win his trust.
A question regarding the traits: I would, for reasons of background story, like to chose two traits from the Ultimate Campaign book, if that's ok. I can easily replace those with other choices, but as that would slightly change the backstory, I wanted to ask beforehand.
edit: It's the Bastard Social trait and the Fearless Defiance Faith trait I'm talking about.
Count me interested as well. I'd apply with a dwarven rogue (ruffian) with the Fogfen Tale-teller background, probably working as a bartender/bouncer/utility man for Brelda Venkervale, maybe being a friend of her son Lasda.
Man, as much as I like rolling the dice, I often feel as if those are touched by Beshaba as soon as I do it. So here's to the hope that my offerings to the Lady of Luck were enough.
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.
As I want to go back to PBP for quite some time now, and as this is around my favorite Realms era, I'd be interested as well. All three locations would be fine by me, though I have to admit that when you said Conan, my mind immediately went Old Empires. I also admit that I'm not too interested in dinosaurs in my fantasy (unless we're talking Talenta riders).
As far as characters go, I generally try to play characters that fit the setting, so I haven't chosen something specific yet. When I asked the dice, they told me something Half-Elf/Gnome Ranger/Rogue, but that was just me looking for initial inspiration.
unless their attachment to, say, an entire ancestry being inherently evil is revealed to come from a tangle of other less socially acceptable views.
I'm certainly not defending those people. I just don't want to get lumped together with those people just because I share a certain opinion (just from another point of view). And the problem is that, contrary to what you did in your answer to the initial poster, most of the time there's no benefit of doubt given and no clarification asked for.
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).
Had to look up when I was last posting on a regular basis, which was around 2021. Was driven away by the negativity going on back then, and I'm kinda tired in general of how everything can only be discussed in black and white colors these days, when there used to be a continuum of opinions a while back, so I kinda withdrew from all kinds of social media, not only this forum. I'll always come back from time to time to have a look and because I still love Paizo, but I also have a huge lot to catch up regarding lore and general on Adventure( Path)s, and those parts of the forum seem to have become way less frequented than they used to be, and I have no interest whatsoever in rules discussions, so there's that.
Still want to go back to playing/running PbP though, and I also have even less interest in things like Discord, Twitter and Reddit, so I'd love to see that forum flourish again in terms of setting and adventure-related discussions.
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.
Now you've given me something to really look forward to. Besides the Inner Sea region, that's the one Golarian region I really care about and I can't wait to see what you'll come up with to expand on what we already know about it.
I think "Charter" is a modifier to "Superscriber".
"Charter" was a tag you got for subscribing to the Pathfinder line when all we knew about it was that there will be a Pathfinder line. Basically it was a reward for putting your trust and your money into a new and unknown product at a time Paizo needed it most.
edit: Also I think to remember that you had to pre-subscribe to the Adventure Path line specifically. But I might be wrong about that.
Well, I'm also still here even when I lost my charter tag quite some time ago, when I had to pause my subscription for financial reasons. And in the meantime, international shipping costs have unluckily become so insanely high that it just doesn't make any sense to resubscribe.
Basically, buying the pdf here at Paizo and the book over at amazon separately is still cheaper than subscribing.
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).
Can only speak for me but the reason it took me so long (even when I wanted to dive into PF 2E right away) is that I'm more of a story than a rules player/DM. Having to learn new rules isn't that much fun especially when it's that much of a paradigm shift than it was between PF 1 and 2.
At home that's not much of a problem because my players (all family members) don't care for rules anyways so I can just wing it. but here on the boards, starting a game when you'll most probably end up with players with better rules knowledge than you have is a tad intimidating.
Apart from that I'm also not that much into the PFS stuff dominating 2nd ed play here on these boards. And offerings like you just made are unluckily more than rare, so I haven't had the chance to ease into the system like I had way back with D&D 3E.
I'd be interested as well. I'm planning on finally getting to run my own PF2 game next year, but to dip my toes in the system via shorter adventures as a player sounds like a good opportunity to have a look at it from the players' side as well.
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.
Alright. But you must provide the PrC rules so I can look it over.
I can do that, but as said before, it's not that I necessarily want to use the rules, but that I would want to use the lore from that PrC. I'd be perfectly content with building the character with PF1 rules only.
So while doing a bit of research on characters that might fit the setting I stumbled about an article from Dragon #307 that offered some Cormyr-related PrCs.
So without knowing anything about the duration and level range of the mini-campaign, would you mind me building a character with one of those PrCs in mind (not necessarily talking rules, I'm coming from a lore standpoint)?
In specific, I'm talking about the Royal Scout of Cormyr (according to the article, an "elite order of Purple Dragon scouts in service of the Crown"). Now as you've said this to be a FR 1st ed. game and this article already is from the 3e era, I'd just like to know if it would be ok for you to add the lore into the game (I'm thinking about playing a ranger either striving to get admitted into the ranks of said order or already being part of it)
Ok, after some pondering, I feel like I have to bow out of this game. I just don't get a feel for a character I would wanna play that would do this world justice. Maybe it's just been too long that I read the books. So have fun gaming, I'm probably gonna enjoy and read the story as it unfolds.
Hm, not that bad as it usually is with me rolling. Not quite sure what to make out of it yet. Thinking wanderer of some sorts, possibly woodsman/armsman. Maybe going for blademaster.
OK, dotting for interest. Love the Realms and that I'm not very well-versed in Cormyrlore (which means I would have to read up on those Cormyr books that you mentioned) makes this seem like a good chance to learn a thing or two, while having fun returning to what still is my favorite setting.
I wouldn't mind starting after the battle of Dumai wells. It's a great closure to what came before and a lot of new things began after that. But if we were to start earlier, after Falme would also be a good starting point.
But in the end, whatever would fit your version of the game best is fine with me.
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):
Cori Marie wrote:
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.
Well, full disclosure, I never finished the series. I had read everything up to Crossroads of Twilight and had just started reading into Knife of Dreams, when Robert Jordan died, which made me unable to continue reading when I thought I would never see the end of that story.
Up to that point; I'd say that I had read the first 7 books 5 or 6 times, 8 and 9 maybe two times.
In the meantime I have started to read through the books again several times, but never got through it to the end, mainly because there are so many other books worth reading that I just keeped getting distracted. Still planned to read them, and now the tv series might just have given me reason to dive into the books again.
Not sure we can ever be too old for pop culture when the pop culture just keeps getting recycled, song is from about a decade ago and re released :D
Well, I just listened to people celebrating a *certain sound from the 90's (Gothenburg melodeath as in In Flames or Dark Tranquility) as the soundtrack of their youth, and that made me feel really old, so I'm pretty sure that I can^^.
*edit: it's relevant only because that sound just got recycled by a new supergroup consisting of actual and former members of said groups.
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.
Being from Spain, I have suffered thid change and I have had to pay an additional amount of 80$ in taxes in the last 4 months, so I am considering to unsubscribe.
Great. I'm still waiting to even get any of the SoT issues to my home, so now I know what I have to look forward to.
It's like the people changing the rules weren't even aware of that their staff might not be able to stem the additional workload. but I'm also pretty sure they wouldn't have cared either way.
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.
