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The dailies were removed a few weeks ago - according to CCP, they had altered the behavior of players who were playing but did not get more people to log in. And, for the war, the Imperium has decided that they are leaving Saranen sometime this week for somewhere yet to be announced.
Daily? As in the kind of daily that WoW did/does? *facepalm* Once per 22 hours per account (I've seen per character and per account, so I'm not 100% sure which is true), a player can receive 10,000 unallocated skill points for killing any non-Concord NPC. CCP says that this is the first pass on providing daily rewards for activities and that it is mostly being used to gather data. CCP is claiming that the change to make the skill queue allow for unlimited scheduling (instead of the previous limit of not starting a skill more than 24 hours in the future) has affected game activities negatively; that people had been logging in to adjust their skill queue and then getting lured in to play the game, while now people get their skill queue set for however long (weeks or months) and aren't checking back in to get in game.
The Imperium has lost all sovereignty. A week ago, they changed their strategy by setting their vulnerability window to European time, so they could field more pilots against Entosis ships and the defense fleets that came out, effectively increasing the number of pilots for both sides. Still outnumbered, the Imperium was forced out of null sec. They are still staging in Saranen, having two Astrahus (large) citadels up; the third that they tried to deploy in that system was destroyed. With the war winding down, Shadow Cartel was moving supercapitals back to their low sec systems using the POS (Player Owned Starbase) of Snuff Box (who was set to friendly with them - they were rivals in low security space, but had both joined the Moneybadger Coalition) - the Supercapitals were using jump drives to teleport across systems and the safe area inside the POS force field to wait out the cooldown before they could jump again, but this required Snuff Box to set up a password for the Shadow Cartel pilots to use. While supposedly setting this up, Snuff Box gathered a fleet, dropped the force field, jumped in and killed at least one of the supercapitals. After this, Snuff Box left the MBC. There was an internal argument with several corporations leaving Snuff Box. Shadow Cartel then set up a trap for Snuff Box, which was sniffed out until the Psychotic Tendencies forces that were held in reserve for the trap left to kill an Imperium citadel. The fight was begun, with Snuff Box getting the worse of it and needed to escalate with supercapitals. These supercapitals were caught by Escalating Entropy (a group formed of the corporations that had left Snuff Box after the original betrayal), and reinforcements from Psychotic Tendencies, Circle of Two, Pandemic Legion, Northern Coalition, Mercenary Coalition, and The OSS joined in, resulting in over 300 billion ISK in losses for Snuff Box. EDIT: And today, the first daily comes to EVE.
Still going to be big battles (though no supercaps). The Imperium deployed a Citadel in Saranen, and came out to defend it. Over two thousand players involved and 88 billion ISK in losses. The citadel apparently onlined, so there should be another push when it becomes vulnerable. I'm not sure when it will be vulnerable.
I was listening to a podcast breaking down some of the changes from Citadel and the general state of the game. With the rebalancing of capitals and supercapitals in Citadel, apparently the fits for the existing ships changed dramatically. The end result is that the previous fits for the ships were terrible, so the Imperium's supercapital fleet would need to escape from null sec to be refit, often with what are now extremely fragile fits. So it doesn't look like the Imperium will be bring supercapitals for this war.
And Crossing Zebra's has posted an interview with the man funding the war. I haven't listened to it all, so no idea on the quality of it.
No news on the war, but with the initial hike in sales taxes that came out with the start of Citadels, someone took advantage of extreme leverage from margin trading to make a (future) fortune. Apparently, this person used margin trading and techniques to reduce escrow so they could amplify the amount of buy orders for PLEX they could post to the market. Keeping the prices low (though having to adjust them for the downturn in PLEX prices that came with Citadel), he is able to undercut the margin of other sellers to make a profit. It is also possible that someone realized what was happening and tried to wipe his position out; if so, the effort failed. I wonder what is going to happen in the future - CCP was planning further tax hikes as more features of Citadel became available.
I never knew that about the economy - I started paying a little attention in 2008, but most of the people I heard from then were interested in the political machinations and boasting about hardcore they were for playing it, so they didn't really cover the economy. I had no idea they had handled all of that with NPCs.
For the economy - would it be totally offline as well? I do wonder if EVE Offline with an online economy would work.
Always cool to hear stories from people with more experience playing EVE than I have, even if it had a less than fortunate ending. I still enjoy hearing about EVE, but life is too short to play something you don't want to. I'm pretty sure the Sansha incursions are still ongoing, though they have been broken down into a list of what everyone in a fleet should bring to succeed. I think they are considered pretty much risk free if an experienced group is organizing and teaching it in game - but they fits recommended are around 1.2 billion ISK from my understanding. Supposedly, a developer said incursions don't make sense at the just completed Fan Fest, so no idea what will happen to them. Sleepers were added in late 2014 or early 2015 - these were NPCs designed to have better AI that could evolve their tactics to better react to players. I am not sure how effective the new AI for them was though, or if this was bringing the AI that other MMOs had for over a decade to EVE. Looks like they are only in wormhole-space though. Citadels are slowly being rolled out and blown up. Debates still rage on if anyone will really use them in a big way and if so, what areas of space will be most impacted. For war news, there was a Crossing Zebra article on a new player joining Pandemic Horde for the war. Apparently, Pandemic Horde is not doing the best right now. They are right near the staging area of Saranen so they are getting attacked by the Imperium, and are somewhat loosely organized (and rife with spies) due to focusing on newbies, training new fleet commanders, and heavy recruiting for the war. Depending on who you talk to, this is to get them fights and experience while keeping the Imperium from holding sov while the other groups solidify their sov behind this screen, and they are still mostly winning.
Unfortunately, it seems like EVE is still heavily in favor of PVP. I'm not aware enough of CCP's development changes to be able to comment on that. A number of players seem to still have the "if you aren't playing my way, you're doing it wrong" - I just watched part of a review video that had trashed every PVE career it had gotten to before I stopped watching it. The "don't do mining" meme is still alive and flourishing. EVE seems to take the "if you aren't playing the game like I do, you're doing it wrong" instinct of many players and increases it to the max (except for those who want easy prey - they are happy to find players "doing it wrong" to kill them, even assuming they don't want the tears of their victims). A sociologist would probably have a field day breaking down the in-game conversations. And the carebear meme is still going on in a fair amount of the current war discussions. The assumption that any PVE player in the Imperium would be able to contribute anything in a PVP fight beyond getting destroyed. It looks to me that the Imperium is fielding very low numbers relative to their size in part because they have a lot of PVE pilots and in part because a lot of their PVP pilots aren't interested in the war, either due to disinterest in EVE, the current war mechanics, or the lack of experienced, skilled Fleet Commanders in the Imperium.
I knew that the politics were skewed towards the organized, mostly null-sec groups, but I hadn't realized it was this bad. Apparently there was an effort to boycott the election (not sure how widespread it was known) by some high-sec players to reveal the lack of legitimacy they feel the CSM has. Darius JOHNSON won a petition to be given control of a new Goonfleet corporation - apparently, the old corporation was locked in under BoB when that disbanded, which led to the creation of Goonswarm due to CCP policies at the time (not sure if CCP denied a petition back then or if it was just the policy of the time). When CCP went to make this change, the way they did it changed the corporation history of everyone who had been in the original Goonfleet to show up as having been in oldgoonfleet. CCP apologized and fixed it and are going to try another way to address the issue. And CCP just deployed the Citadel expansion, allowing some of the structures that have caused a lot of drama to finally be built. Also - a lot of changes to capital ships.
The Imperium lost all of their sovereignty in Deklein sometime this morning. Fighting continues in the Fade, Pure Blind, and Vale of the Silent regions. The Imperium seems to be roaming into Fade, fighting Pandemic Horde (a group focused on newbie pilots partnered with Pandemic Legion). Darius JOHNSON, one of the founders of Goonfleet, has posted to the world that he has come back to the game and started Ten Dollar Bond, a home for all "true goons" who want to escape the Imperium.
Edited to add: Polygon article on the war: Meet the Gambling Kingpin Funding EVE Online's Biggest War (I haven't gotten to read it yet) /EDIT Non-war EVE news: At Fanfest, CCP showed off an extremely early playable demo of Project Nova, their follow-on to Dust. The article says it will be free-to-play, though no date is given. They still want to have a tie-in to the world of EVE beyond just using lore, but they are focusing on getting the shooting mechanics to feel good first. It sounded like it was class-based but also provided equipment selections per class. The 11th Council of Stellar Management has been elected (the CSM is a group of players who are elected to interact with CCP on development plans for EVE and bring concerns/feedback from the player base to the company). Due to low voter turnout, the results were tilted even more heavily than normal to null sec candidates; the candidate from Circle-of-Two was on the Goonswarm ballot from before the betrayal. The two permanant candidates for summits with CCP:
Steve Ronuken of Fuzzworks, in Vote Steve Ronuken for CSM
Not sure if this is the coverage CCP wants: EVE Online: The Battle for Control of the Most Boring Video Game in the World by the International Business Times. I thought the article was fairly good (other than the title - though I put it down to click-bait and probably also suggested by an EVE player), though I'm not sure if they revised it after the leak about how the Mittani said the press would print anything he said. They did credit the Mittani as an arch manipulator and didn't cover the progress of the war. Almost all of the commenters blasted it as a pro-Mittani piece; they might have a point. The only other glaring issue I saw was the part about having to mine as a starting player - there's a lot of effort in showing new players that you don't have to do that if you don't want to (sometimes going too far in the "the game isn't about mining at all" for my tastes). I did think it was interesting as it covered the meta-conflict more than the in-game conflict, and the history of some of the events leading up to it.
The value of holding Sov is, I believe, one of the narratives of the war - there are non-Imperium observers arguing that the Imperium is making the right choice by not fully fighting this war and withdrawing to low-sec. The method by which these wars are fought was changed in summer of 2015, which is one of the points of contention in a lot of discussion of the war. Here's my understanding: Disclaimer: This is really outside of what I know about the game, and there are currently a lot of arguments over the Sovereignty system and the value of holding Sovereignty. For the broad overview, it seems to be that there are benefits but they aren't really essential:
None of these are really needed to live in null sec - there are NPC regions where anyone can dock at the stations, though it is usually viewed as being much easier to be camped into a station (having enemies sitting on the undock with bubbles to force a fight if you undock). And some groups make deals with sov-holding alliances to use their stations - though they are then at the mercy of that alliance to stay friendly. My understanding is that supercapitals used to be much more important - they were better able to kill Sov structures under the Dominion sovereignty structure that used to be in place. But the new sovereignty doesn't encourage their use, so I believe they are currently being held in reserve to keep the threat of escalating fights viable, but the Imperium does not seem to want to use them for fear of them being destroyed. This was the Imperiums claim of success when Circle of Two betrayed them - that the Imperium did not fall into a supercapital trap. Upgrading the space and the reduction in costs of production are just enhancing activities that can already be done, not providing new options. Groups run NPC sites, mine, and perform production without them. Jump bridges are mostly for being able to get to a region of space quickly without having to traverse the intervening space. These are arguably part of building an empire in null sec, but wouldn't be needed by a group holding a small region or who is just looking for content that would be near to them. Holding a large territory also allows the owner to rent space out to other groups, who might want to live in null sec space but don't want to worry (as much) about security and holding space. This practice has fallen somewhat out of favor, though to some groups have invited these renters have been invited into the space of their protectors since their ratting/mining activities directly help with system defense by making the system harder for attackers to take. I'm not sure how many or which groups still rent space, but I had heard the Legion of xXDeathXx does and their rental empire is getting attacked).
For war news, the region of Deklein, the home of the Goons, has finally come under attack from four different entrances. It is expected to fall sooner rather than later, as the staging area of Saranen used by the Imperium is too far away to easily defend the region. The Mittani seems to believe that the Imperium/Goons can still launch a hellwar against the Money Badgers. The negative PR campaign of the Mittani has recently caused the owner of IWantIsk.com to declare that he will fund the war against the Imperium/Goons in response to a Goon piece on themittani.com that claimed that the gambling site was breaking Florida law. The Drone Walkers continue to take territory from Legion of xXDeathXx. And I saw a non-CCP blogger post on CCP's 2015 financials. His summary was:
EDIT: Fidelas Constans (FCON) left the Imperium in good standing yesterday.
Gunjack is a VR shooter (I think it is on-rails with the user just aiming and shooting, but I'm not totally sure - here is the gameplay reveal trailer), described as:
It was for the Samsung VR but got ported to Oculus as well.
Out of morbid curiosity, I know EVE is the main attraction, but how do Dust and Valkyrie fit into this? I probably don't follow this close enough to address the business/financial side. CCP did recently change EvE to add the Skill Extractors Turin the Mad mentioned above, which allow skill points to be removed from a character and sold in game for ISK but requiring real money purchases of the extractors. These are valued much more highly than the game time equivalent for PLEX - though some is probably novelty, the diminishing returns of skill points, and the abundance of characters for sale that are being purchased and stripped down by vulture investors. Another move being discussed is adding incentives in EvE for daily activity - the first proposal was 10,000 skill points a day for the first NPC pirate kill by a character. The last I heard, Dust was shutting down on May 30, 2016. I don't know if they ever got Dust tied into Eve - I don't believe so. They did say that there is a Shanghai team working on a first-person shooter that is an evolution of the vision of Dust, using the Unreal Tournament engine and the experience of working on Dust. There should be more info at Fanfest on April 21st. For Valkyrie, I haven't heard much other than some moderately positive reviews, but I haven't really tried to follow it. Same with Gunjack, their other VR offering. I believe those are both just set in the New Eden universe but don't try to tie in to the live world like they had planned with Dust.
The focus seems to be shifting to Deklein, though the other regions are still being mopped up. Apparently, the Goons can still make people angry enough to get them focused. The Mittani has decided that all defensive timers should be set to the AU time zone, pushing down participation on all sides. Deklein is being camped hard, which is killing the ratting needed to keep the ADMs up, making defense of the systems harder. Another attack on the station at YA0 is planned for tomorrow morning; if successful, the final timer will be set for Friday morning and the richest trade hub in null sec might be taken by the weekend. On the Russian side, the Drone Walkers have started attacking the Imperium and the Legion of xXDeathXx has broken away from the Drone Walkers and declared war on them, having a great deal of success. It remains to be seen if this conflict spreads beyond the Russian groups - so far it does not appear to have done so.
And SpaceMonkey's Alliance has announced they are leaving the Imperium on good terms. They are hoping to regroup in the Outer Ring region (NPC null sec). It'll be interesting to see if the Money Badgers go after them (either as a whole or in part).
I wish I was more aware of the history of the people, groups, and regions involved. I started paying attention to EvE about four years ago. There's a new Scope video (CCP) about the war, though the news is basically the outlying regions of the Imperium are being overrun. The Imperium is concentrating their staging area in Saranen, but they are still outnumbered and looking at too many fights to cover, so high-value targets and anything nearby is getting prioritized for defense. It sounds like they are having either no success or extremely limited success at defending anything the MBC goes after. Deklein is being cut off for an eventual multi-pronged invasion by the MBC. There is a World War Bee timer board - I'm not that familiar with the whole system of sovereignty and the layout of the space involved to tell much :( I haven't been able to figure out from all the arguments and propaganda if any real fighting has happened in Deklein or if the MBC is still focused on getting the non-Goon alliances to leave the Imperium. There apparently was a Pandemic Horde group that tried to capture the trade hub YAO but were driven off. I highly doubt that the Mittani's defiant words and predictions of the coalition falling apart are going to matter - MBC is having a lot of success, so it doesn't seem like they'll get bored of the fighting, and while the coalition doesn't appear to be totally united, the divisions don't seem to be affecting the current operations and the arguments seem to be on what to do after kicking the Imperium/Goons out of null sec.
Thanks! Though I'm probably as poorly informed as anyone directly involved and high up in an alliance. The downside of EvE is how everything is part of war propaganda and/or secret, important information. It makes it cool but also hard to keep up in real time. For people who want more general EvE information, I've heard that the Empires of EVE book by Andrew Groen is available on Amazon thru that site (also a video with some EvE info, plus reviews), for people who missed the hugely successful Kickstarter campaign. I don't have a copy yet, but I've heard that it is a great resource of information about the history of the game. Also, the unexpected success of the Kickstarter for that book led to The Mittani launching his disastrous Kickstarter for a book on The Fountain War in November/December 2015, which led to further ill-will against the Imperium. Seriously - a bunch of the pledge goals had to be changed due to violating RMT prohibitions in the EULA (including a reward of flying thru space in-game with The Mittani). So - this whole thing is on topic :) Another book on the motivations of people who play EvE and what the game is about is Internet Spaceships are Serious Business. I haven't heard as much about this, but I've heard that it is good.
I don't play anymore, but have been somewhat following the war as it gets posted. Here are my semi-rambling thoughts. Currently, it sounds like the Imperium are still getting pushed back, having to cede a ton of territory that they couldn't defend and getting heavily outnumbered (which has pretty much been the story since around the betrayal of Circle of Two from what I can tell). According to reports, the Imperium is heavily outnumbered - 40,000 pilots, including alts and economic characters, vs 50,000 pilots in the Money Badgers, which would be mostly combat pilots. Also, unlike previous wars, this hasn't seemed to have gotten widespread coverage, though it looks like Massively finally has a story about it. I have seen a lot of discussion on whether this war will boost EvE like some of the past wars have. I hadn't heard it called the Northern War until I read this, though I have seen it mentioned that since - I have heard it called the Casino War and World War Bee. CCP was calling it the Easter War but since then have decided to call it World War Bee. There is some debate over whether this references World War Z or World War Three. Meanwhile, the Goons for some reason want to style this as the War of Sovless Aggression, apparently poking fun at how the Money Badgers hold very little sov and to style themselves as the Confederacy fighting against the Union (Northern United States of America in the American Civil War)... The Money part of the Money Badger coalition comes from it being financed by an ISK-gambling site (IWantISK.com) that got into a dispute with members of the Space Monkeys Alliance over a financial dispute (it apparently is more complicated than I had thought if you believe the story. Full disclosure - that is a story on the Goon-run news site. One of the bankers for for IWantISK.com, IronBank (the twitch streamer 1ronBank), is notable for buying and training up every skill in the game on a three-day old character, costing 1.8 trillion ISK (roughly $25,000 in US dollars if you bought in PLEX). What I'm currently wondering about is if the Imperium is defeated and lose their sov, what happens? How much membership does the Imperium maintain? What does the Imperium decide to do - I've heard the idea of a great migration through null sec, destroying sov as they go but not trying to hold a fixed homeland. Or of migrating to low-sec or high-sec, affecting others in the game - with the conspiracy theory of holding CCP hostage with threats of such an action. I've also heard that the fix is in - key members of the coalition have been paid off to make sure that the Imperium survives. In this view, Pandemic Legion are the true winners - coming to dominate null sec without being hated by everyone, while keeping the Imperium around in a weakened state to keep everyone focused on as the bad guy. And then in a month, Pandemic Legion creates the mega Citadel as close to Jita as possible, forging a new player-run market hub and earning profits that make them unassailable.
Currently not getting enough time for any serious play. I experimented some with the Ballistic Shield with the Health regen perk and a newly purchased good sidearm (don't remember the model - it was level 21, purple, had a 20 round magazine but didn't have a magazine modifier slot). I don't have any perks for the First Aid skill yet (all my friends were picking up Support Station for group play, then I was saving up for the Medical super skill), so I was using Support Station. Just roaming the world and fighting regular guys five levels below me it seemed to work fairly well, though I was solo so I didn't really get to test the attracting attention part of tanking. When position properly, shield was taking most of the damage and I was nearly full health. Killing with the pistol was not too bad. When I got fixated and things went south, with one or two rioters flanking me, my health (~11,000) dropped quick (a few seconds) and cover + Support Station was needed. Things seem to go bad quick in the Division (though it might be my build). I'm thinking the cover, threat generation, and suppression plan is much more survivable.
I'm playing with some of my clanmates. I got dragged from level 13 to 21 today, playing with higher level friends. I wish the game handled letting you play with friends of different levels better - I was pretty much doing Pulse or Turret + Healing Station, reviving people when I could, and being dead most of the time. On the other hand, Firepower is my lowest stat, so at least I could blame the level difference instead of build choices :) I'm mostly in Electronics, then Stamina. I might need to look up how to tank - it sounds like it might be enjoyable for me (and something my group might want - I'm not sure if I have the player skill for the end game content). It is different enough from Destiny for me, though I'll have to see what happens as I go up in level and get to other content.
That's interesting. Sorry, I don't know very much about the Hell Knights - just what I read on these forums. Thanks for the information.
Before Linxia could become a full Hellknight, however, the Order of the Rack had a test for her loyalty. One of Linxia's brothers had been arrested for attempting to rekindle the spark of rebellion that had been stamped out in Khari with her parents' execution. He had been tried, found guilty, and brought to Citadel Rivad for sentencing. Without hesitation, Linxia drew her sword, and looking straight into her brother's eyes, beheaded him without remorse. I was half waiting for the Hellknights to tell her she failed for being too merciful :) "That was too merciful. You should have noticed the stack of wood and spikes in the corner, and the whip and torture implements under this tarp. We have doubts that you can properly enforce the law if you can't even handle a simple scourging and crucifixion. We will be merciful and grade you as a C - do not disappoint us again."
Out of the Abyss has GM crunch for underdark settings, so if you're not going to use that, I'd avoid it. Princes of the Apocolypse has some good player crunch in the form of new races, but probably not enough to justify purchasing the book if you don't plan on running the campaign. That said, it does have the Goliath race and the elemental touched (the genasi), plus that one bird race. The original playtest for these races is also available here, or can be downloaded directly from here, though the stats were probably updated for Princes of the Apocalypse (I don't have it to check).
Destiny just launched a refer a friend program. It sounds like it needs to be a veteran that has played linking to a new account that hasn't played.
So it's more like the lair itself is a combatant, with its own action each round? Or is it like the monster gets an extra action each round, but that action has to be spent doing something that involves the terrain/setting? As Lorathorn said, it is the second. From reading parts of the Monster Manual, it looks like the monster gets to choose from three options once a round - these usually have something to do with the terrain, but it might be something to do with the monster. For example (off the top of my head for the actual options), a monster might be able to do one of the following once a round on initiative count 20:
It looks like the options are usually limited so that the same option cannot be selected two rounds in a row; sometimes there is a requirement that all of the options have to be used before they can be reused. Monsters with these lair actions have an increased CR if they are encountered in their lair (the Monster Manual lists the increase for the monsters it gives these actions). There are also (optional) Regional Effects for a lair. They list two to three ideas for unusual conditions having the lair causes in the area. I'm not sure I'm sold on these - some are subtle, like creatures sometimes feel like they are being watched, or the monster can cast control weather once a day around the lair. On the other hand, it can feel like a giant signpost. "Gee, all the water is polluted and there are overgrowths of plants? I'm sure that's normal." It is atmospheric, but might get to be a giveaway - I'm on the fence about these.
And changed the robot's voice.Good point. It adds a little more "C3PO" sounding feel - he's not as monotone but also a little annoying in a chirpy sort of way. I wasn't impressed with the reworking of several of the old lines - going through some of the old missions, it felt like he was gleeful in inappropriate situations ("Guardian down" and "We've awoken the Hive" seemed fairly sadistic). I wonder if the issue was the clipping for the "ghost" voice removing some register and that just makes the voice sound "off" emotionally. The voice acting for the newly writing items are much better - not sure if I just got used to the voice in the week before the expansion or if the lines were better - I haven't gone back to see if I still react the same way to the lines that originally bothered me.
My experience is that the old items (light 160/170) are useful while leveling from 34 to around 37/38 - somewhere in there, you are switching out to better gear that you find and get rewarded. The old weapons are still good in the regular Crucible - the armor is less so because the Intelligence/Discipline/Strength stats got reduced to barely contribute. I do wish they had made different rebalanced versions of some of the perks on the old weapons instead of rebalancing the perks on the old weapons. Field Scout is still pretty good, but is nowhere near where it was - which is probably good but really hurts a lot of the weapons that needed it to be useful like the Efrideet's Spear sniper - going from a 6-round magazine to a 3-round is hard. I was able to use the old items on patrol, though I only pulled them out for special cases (used Invective for kills with Shotguns since it regenerates ammo, and used Patience and Time for kills with a sniper rifle since it had Field Scout for more ammo - but both were only to polish off a specific quest and were a one-off).
76. Conservation - reuse and recycle those old encounter and campaign notes with no one the wiser! :)
64. Because every week, the group votes someone off the island. After this was started, they realized that the campaign was designed for far longer than they had people, so they keep restocking the group.
Player 1: What scenario are we playing? GM: Nothing too hard. (hides the cover of the scenario, "The Land of all the Fire-Immune Things")
C) Without a warrant from a court, Dropbox couldn't access any of the material stored in your cloud. This would be a business relationship no different than the US Postal Service contracting with Delta to deliver your mail. (EDIT: Well, Americans' mail.) IANAL, but my understanding is that this is not currently the case in the United States (though the courts may at some point change their minds). The view of the government is that anything entrusted to a third party is not protected by the fourth amendment, so anything on Dropbox would be fair game (in addition to hosted email, etc). Anguish already replied about the fact that Dropbox could access your files if they wanted to (without being ordered by the government).
Not entirely correct on the no "d20 license" - there is a "d20 System Trademark License". It allowed the use of the d20 logo to indicate compatibility and allow the use of certain trademarked terms. The products also had to exclude character creation rules and be labelled as requiring the core rulebooks. This was separate from the OGL, which was still needed to get the actual mechanics. You might remember the controversy about the Book of Erotic Fantasy - that was over whether it would be approved for the d20 license; it was denied, but was still able to publish under the OGL. See Wizards of the Coast's FAQ. Edit:
The OGL does two things, it makes the content available for use to anyone and lets them, with some restrictions, claim their material is compatible with D&D. I believe this is wrong as well - the OGL allowed the content to be designated as OGL compatible but it could not indicate it was compatible with D&D, but I haven't dug up a source for that (though it is what I recall from trying to buy products at the time).
Visible being the key word. Also one of them brought a wolf and expects nobody will question it. And the group will argue about whether anyone who ambushes them should shoot the unarmed guy or someone else :)
I don't think anyone would complain considering the last post in that thread was two days ago. No - he'd just have to deal with more replies on how he should give it another shot, since it's past page 1 :)
It varies based on proof versus being told (and might depend on GM interpretation). Saving Throws and Illusions (Disbelief): A character faced with proof that an illusion isn't real needs no saving throw. If any viewer successfully disbelieves an illusion and communicates this fact to others, each such viewer gains a saving throw with a +4 bonus.
I'm still enjoying it, but I wasn't paying any attention to the hype and didn't get the game at launch (I have a coworker who plays; he's enjoying it but was disappointed that the game didn't live up to the hype). I am still progressing on my characters, which helps prevent burnout, but I also like the gameplay enough that it is my FPS game of choice.
An evil cult believes that the black dragon is destined to grow up to be the mortal vessel for some evil dragon god to possess. They are determined to kidnap him and convert him to the worship of their deity so he will fulfill this role. Some suitable anti-slavery faction feels that this relationship is basically enslaving the dragon and attempt to save him from his bondage.
An evil dragon has heard of the good black dragon and uses disguise self or similar to appear as a black dragon and terrorize villages, etc, to frame the good dragon (alternately, the evil dragon *is* an evil black dragon). Party has to prove that another dragon was behind it, since who would expect two dragons in the same area? The dragon gets controlled by a lower-level version of an orb of dragonkind (or a converted spell similar to planar ally but for dragons) and the party has to determine who is behind this, if the dragon is being used for good or ill, and convince the responsible entity to free their ally. The black dragon discovers something deep in a lake (due to its water breathing) and needs the party to investigate - possibly it was driven off by something). A ranger who hunts dragons (and possibly has the clichéd backstory of his family/village/lover/etc wiped out by black dragons) starts hunting the dragon down. Sheep or other similar animals start to disappear in the village the party is at (possibly around the same time the party is tight for funds to buy meat for the growing dragon). The ranchers believe that the dragon is eating their livestock, but perhaps it is caused by wolves/worgs (led by the obligatory winter wolf?) pushing into the lands (perhaps from the dragon foraging in the natural wolf habitat, from other creatures outcompeting them, or from their intelligent evil leaders direction). A druid tries to convince the dragon that it isn't natural to associate with people and live among them. One day, the dragon goes out and doesn't return. He has gone hunting and gotten injured by an animal.
started as a Wizard 7, you could retrain to a Wizard 5/Evangelist 2 Ah, I didn't notice the update to the FAW that said you couldn't retrain base class levels to prestige class levels - my apologies.
If past experience is reliable, judges and voters have also been vehemently against items that: make camping safer, exchange class abilities, turn alchemical or magical consumables into multiples of themselves, and/or require you to die to use them.I completely understand disliking the others, but why, may I ask, do people dislike camping items so much? I didn't create one, but I have voted for them a few times. There was more discussion in the advice from judges didn't like camping items (as a sub-category of "items that make adventuring safe").
Couldn't you do that as long as the resulting character could have been built from the ground up? My understanding of the FAQ is that if you started as a Wizard 7, you could retrain to a Wizard 5/Evangelist 2 so long as you had taken the Deific Obedience feat as one of your feat selections as a Wizard. You could not go lower than Wizard 5 because you would not meet the prerequisites for Evangelist with non-Evangelist levels. I might be misunderstanding the FAQ or what you are saying though.
I thought of one thing to add: since you weren't aware of the Open Game License, you might not be aware that Paizo makes many of their rules information available online on the PRD. I find it useful for looking up rules and wanted to pass it on in case you weren't aware.
I was not aware of the OGL. So does anyone still play D&D 4.0, I heard it was more like a MMO on a tabletop,and old school D&D players didnt like it. I played D&D back when TSR owned it back in the day...somewhere around 1982,, Some people still play 4th Edition; there is a D&D 4th Edition (and beyond) forum at Paizo. The current talk is mostly about 5th Edition since that recently came out, but there are still those who play 4th.
When 1 of my game club members suggested we play Pathfinder( we mostly play Table-top minitures games, Warhammer ect) I asked him if it was like D&D he said yes. He said the player response to D&D 4.0 was less than desireable, so Pathfinder was created.He said think of it as D&D 3.75.I still have my 3.5 book,and I see many similarities. I'm surprised Wizards hasn't yelled 'IP INFRINGMENT! ' on Paizo. One of our members actually worked with Gary Gygax on the original rpg he made,Chainmail. Jeraa nailed it. Portions of Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 were released under the Open Gaming License, Paizo was able to modify portions of the game to improve it while maintaining backwards compatibility (essential to keep their previous adventures viable). Opinions vary on how much change or compatibility should have been pursued (Paizo could have just reprinted the portions covered by the Open Gaming License with no changes, for instance). Here's Lisa Stevens (Paizo's CEO) comment to Ryan Dancey from 2010:
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