ZenPagan's page

First of all a happy new year all and as I am heading out for a party after I post this I wont be responding till tomorrow :)

A lot has been said about SAD from the bandits side and the I am good and want to help out side. Time now for a merchants perspective.

I am not really wanting to talk strangely enough about the mechanics but the consequences and the reason I am posting it is to make my fellow merchants think about the SAD consequences more deeply.

here is the kicker for my thinking

A successful SAD, while good for an individual merchant on that one occasion is not good for merchants on the whole! Surprised? You shouldn't be it is simple economics.

Merchants make money by selling items or repairing items. The scarcer the item the more profit that can be made.

A successful SAD causes no damage nor does it remove any items from circulation by their being destroyed. In many cases the bandits will even disrupt the market by undercutting in order to shift their ill gotten gains more quickly.

While painful for the individual merchant at the time making them kill and loot you has the following effects. It removes 25% of the goods from the economy totally therefore inflating the prices a little due to scarcity. Attacking and killing uses consumables again removing them from the economy. Item wear also needs repair bringing us more money.

If prices start to rise in settlements due to banditry you can also be sure those settlements are going to notice and they will then take steps to eliminate the problem.

In the long run I believe we as merchants gain more by saying no to SAD's than we do by kowtowing to bandit tyranny. This then is a call to arms for merchants everywhere. JUST SAY NO!!! Our reward will be higher prices and laughter as the settlements drive the unwashed from the trade routes

Aeternum Sponsored Charted Company recruitment

With the recent information from Ryan Dancey some people are feeling a little nervous about what their future in PfO may hold.
We at the nation of Aeternum feel that it is therefore the right time to bring our Sponsored Chartered Company (referred to as SCC hereafter) Recruitment program to your attention.

So to answer some of the burning questions up front

1) Will our people have to join Pax

No the members of a sponsored chartered company are not expected to go through the Pax recruiting channel, nor do they become Pax members. They are however expected to become settlement members.

2) Will Pax control our organisation.

The answer to this is slightly more complex. The simple answer is no Pax will not control your organisation. You will remain your own company with your own officers and your own culture. You will however be expected to follow the general thrust of the nations policies. For example if we are allied with another settlement, we expect you to regard yourselves as allied with them as well. Common sense really we are an alliance and we pull together.

3) How are national policies made?

The nation has two bodies that form the decision making process. The High and Low consuls. The high Consul is a small body that makes policy and votes upon it. This will consist of the High Thane, settlement leaders, and a couple of advisors. The other is the low consul which is an advisory body and consists of all chartered company leaders whether Paxian or sponsored company.

4)How will we be treated within the Nation

The nation of Aeternum regards all of its members whether of Pax origin or Sponsored company origin of equal standing. We stand as one and we live as one.

5)How will joining the nation help us?

Strong nations will be necessary to weather the stormy sea's of early enrollment. We believe we are capable of building such a nation. As such you will be under that umbrella when the storm comes. We will do all in our power to help your SCC grow and thrive. Should you become big enough to make a settlement in your own right we will assist in every way to make this happen at which point your settlement leader will take a place on the high consul.

6) What will we have to do for Pax

We would answer this simply. You will not have to do anything for Pax. You will however have duties to the Nation of Aeternum. The Nation is not Pax the nation is all of us both Pax and all of the sponsored companies that it consists of.

This is probably only a small percentage of the questions you have. We are currently preparing a longer faq. We already have the very much more detailed Aeternum agreement but it is felt that can be a bit too dry for those just wanting more information.

Should what we have said interest you feel free to PM me on the Paizo boards and we can arrange further discussions either in a teamspeak style setting or via pm's.

Also if you do not wish to get in touch quite yet we currently in the interests of openess keep our boards and wiki readable by all for the most part unlike most groups. We believe we have nothing to hide so if you wish to find out more of our nature before talking feel free to poke around as Pax Gaming

Hargun Thunderborn (Aka ZenPagan , aka Pagan)
Ambassador to the Nation of Aeternum

On behalf of the Nation of Aeternum I have a statement of confirmed policy

The Nation of Aeternum believes that leading by example is the best way to encourage particular behaviours in newcomers who come to play the game in the spirit intended when the open enrollment starts.

To this end the Nation of Aeternum wishes to make the following unequivocal statement. Except during times of war we the Nation will be using the Not Red Don't Shoot policy within our borders.

We also intend to keep our Red list as small as is prudently feasible and would see the returning of wartime Reds to neutral grey status as an integral part of negotiating their surrender.

Hargun Thunderborn
Ambassador of Aeternum

At the start of open enrollment we will (hopefully) have a lot of new players starting. A lot of these new players will be new to either open skill selection style games or Pathfinder or even both.

Our putative new player will therefore come into game thinking hmm I like the sound of being a mighty barbarian. His first problem is "wow what a lot of skills what should I train first to achieve my life dream of striding through the forests of Golarion clad in naught but a rabbit skin loincloth".

I thought I would start this thread so we could discuss how this sort of player can be helped without feeling totally dependent on the goodwill of others answering quite basic questions.

Two games I have played had systems to give such guidance to new players so I will start by mentioning those. The first is Eve with its skill certificate system, the second is TSW with its deck system. Both help the new player who can find a suitable profession amongst either certificates or the predefined decks. These then allow them to get started without feeling they need to be asking basic questions.

So the questions are

1) Are there other such systems worth considering from other games?
2) What are the pro's and con's of each system?
3) Do we feel a system of some sort is needed (obviously I feel it might be :) )

A few of us on teamspeak were talking about settlement laws and thought it was worth a post and hopefully discussion.

We believe that settlement laws will be of the checkbox and enter a number sort for instance

Ban players with reputation less than ------

or

Ban all elves

or

The following spells may not be cast

or

A list of permissible equipped weapons

Given the above what selectable laws would people like to see?
In addition should laws be allowed to be different for members and visitors

eg Only short swords are permitted for visitors
members may be permitted long swords in addition

The second idea we kicked about was player guards or "enforcer" flagged characters being able to police contraband (settlement flagged items) by an adaption of the Stand and deliver mechanism whereby player guards could search other players for contraband

I have seen the fact that only 100 people or so post on the forum and therefore we can't take what they say as indicating anything about the more general PfO client base.

Out of curiosity, seeing as this forum is small enough and numbers are relatively accurate for both forum population and initial early enrollment population, I dug out my trusty calculator and calculated where the forum population was in relation to statistical sampling

assumptions forum population 100
Early enrollment population 9000

For these figures the forum population can be seen to have a 95% confidence level with a confidence interval of 10%.

What does this mean cry the non nerdy maths geeks?

It means that on a given issue,for example to take something non controversial number of people who currently play wow if the forum population had 40% of people currently playing Wow that the 40% figure is likely with a 95% chance to be the same for the total early enrollment population give or take up to 10%

STATISTICS WARNING!!!!!!

This however breaks down if there is reason to belief that the forum population is skewed by self selection on a particular issue compared to the general early enrollment population.

Note I am not trying to prove anything by this just thought it was generally interesting as you often see people saying forum posters don't represent the game population but usually it is impossible to know numbers of both and here we have some reasonable estimations to work with so I did the maths