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It appears to be possible to do so from your profile, though perhaps not if you have special instructions for how you want orders cancelled. (Someone correct me if I'm mistaken.)
Thank you. I didn't realize it was the day we'd get billed for the order until I checked my email later. I received the email confirmation of the cancellation. I guess when the order arrives we'll consider our options for returning books. I appreciate your help.
I would like to cancel my subscription for Pathfinder Core Rulebooks, effective immediately. I would like to cancel my AP subscription after book 6 of Tyrant's Grasp, but before book 1 of the first Pathfinder 2.0 book. I believe this would result in receiving half of the next scheduled order. Thank you for your attention to this. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do to complete this cancellation. I have enjoyed my Paizo subscriptions and a number of Paizo books bought outside of subscriptions. I wish the company the best of luck, but at this time it does not make sense for me to continue these subscriptions.
Modern armor is not particularly more comfortable than medieval armor. I've dealt with both (medieval: hobby; modern: army infantry). You can pretty much assume that after all the training and a year of time spent intermittently in the field as an infantryman, pretty much everyone in my unit effectively had the Endurance feat. It was still miserable wearing armor, and everyone looked for excuses to take it off all the time. Yes, we were able to sleep in our body armor and ballistic helmets without it affecting our ability to function the next day (or in three hours, as sleep was not always at night, and often far less than eight hours). In fact, I could sleep through outgoing artillery fire (an important skill when that may be the only time you get to sleep for the next two days) in the back of a moving truck in full combat equipment with my rifle in my arms. What I couldn't do is consider any of that even remotely comfortable when I was awake to notice, and yeah -- if I was in conditions were I was allowed to remove the gear and it was safe to do so, I damned well took it off when I sat down to eat. Ivo was in the middle of an encampment filled with his combat veteran underlings, personal guard outside the door, probably imagining himself quite safe from surprise guests. Of course he wasn't wearing his armor. It's not a matter of being more or less "realistic" than someone taking on the form of an earth elemental or throwing fireballs or having conversations with dragons. It's a matter of Ivo being something we recognize as "human", and thus inclined to be comfortable, regardless of the penalties he may or may not suffer the next day. . . . and if we can just ignore the idea of sleeping in armor being uncomfortable, of having cramped muscles in the back and neck and moving stiffly after snoozing in twenty pounds of steel (or a flack jacket with steel plates in its pockets), we should ignore the rules for how much gear you can carry, forced marches, sleep requirements, starvation or dehydration, heat in the jungles of Smuggler's Shiv, and anything else related to human comfort and stamina in the game. No, thanks. I'll stick to the assumption that, even if you have the Endurance feat, you're not going to sleep in armor unless you have a Very Good Reason to do so.
I just gave up partway through reading an old thread, titled "HIGH-LEVEL WIZARDS ARE BALANCED - IF YOU SANDBAG LIKE CRAZY!" It turned into a place for people to give James Jacobs grief for the lack of min/max optimization in iconic character stat blocks in the backs of the AP books. This got me thinking. Something Jacobs said several times, and mostly got ignored, is that the stat blocks were created more as a way of expressing the concepts for the characters than of providing characters explicitly and solely well-suited to maximum damage output and utility. This is, I think, exactly the kind of thing Paizo should be doing -- focusing on flavor, on concept, and on theme. The idea of using different stats for the (nominally) same iconic character in different APs, creating something a little better suited to the ideas of the characters as they would fit in the campaign -- sometimes enhancing the sense of someone totally out of his or her element in strange environs -- is great, and I applaud the effort. This is especially nice because it's not just about the iconics in the backs of the books. I see little touches here and there throughout just about every book, even in the books that list three or four authors and were obviously put together at the last minute in a huge rush because of some publishing process catastrophe -- touches that give a sometimes quirky, sometimes surreal, generally more interesting feel to the adventure as a whole thanks to the deviations from the optimizing norm that arise. These quirks and touches of flavor can help tie things into the world of the AP more firmly than someone who just has the right combination of Magic cards in the deck to be able to get unlimited mana for one turn or something like that. If the main concern is stats optimization for maximum combat effectiveness, the end result at a punishing rate of two complete, extended campaigns per year is that after a few years all the NPCs in the APs are going to start looking the same, all the plots will start to blur together in the mind of the player, and there will be less and less reason to buy new AP adventures. I like the variety, the quirkiness, the flavor, and all the other nice side-effects of these personal touches added to the APs by the staff at Paizo. Yes, there are flaws from time to time, as in the case of an NPC having a feat without its prerequisite, an occasional typo, or something in a description that doesn't make a whole lot of sense at first glance because of an editorial change that missed a detail, and obviously Paizo should always strive to improve on these things. I just don't think that interesting flavor and a kind of personalization of things qualify as flaws. I think they qualify as indications of the great investment of care and craftsmanship -- even on a tight schedule -- that the writers for Paizo bring to the development of the AP books. I've been an AP subscriber almost since I realized that was an option, and along with a couple of friends the books I missed in my subscription have also been bought (including the prehistoric Shackled City hardcover). Sometimes we make changes to things, of course; sometimes something is difficult to use as written (in a manner common to basically every nontrivial adventure module ever published, such as overly complex dungeon floor plans), and sometimes we just come up with better ideas. Something we never do in our games is change something that makes great sense from an in-character perspective just because looking at the numbers suggests the combat benefits could be better if different optimizations are chosen, because we really like the flavor. Good flavor is harder than optimization acceptable to the casual min/max player, and I really appreciate that flavor in the APs. Thanks, Paizo. We get through about two AP books a year (lots of plot derailing through roleplaying, y'know), but I still accumulate twelve of them a year with my subscription, because I can't bring myself to let any of this great work pass me by. I just want the staff to know that we (the customers and players) aren't all out to get them. Keep up the good work.
What kind of sample do you want -- just a general writing sample, a sample of the sort of thing that fits the "So What" line specifically, or . . . what? I'm a published writer, a hobbyist RPG designer, and a big fan of Pathfinder RPG in particular and Paizo in general, so obviously I'm interested. I'll send an email this evening, whether I get a response to this or not, but figured it might be useful to others to have an answer to the question of what kind of sample materials you'd like.
This is a dreadful oversimplification, and completely ignores my carefully stated situation above. Thanks for reducing a nuanced argument to polarized points. Maybe I'll believe you when your friends start demanding that the iconic monk put on a shirt. Until then, I'm with Gailbraithe on this one. (Note: My girlfriend thinks the monk is kinda hot -- and I'm fine with that. I'm just not convinced your friends are consistent in their ideological bias, which seems to be a common, though not universal, problem amongst atheistic liberal women in this country.)
How hard would it be to get that EPUB to work as a print on demand book like I mentioned earlier? I did not notice you mentioning that before. If I had, I might have mentioned something about it. I imagine it would not be too difficult. There are several services set up for that kind of thing. I guess I'd just need to find one with agreeable terms that takes file formats I would find relatively easy to produce, so if I do create those EPUBs at some point I'll look into setting up some kind of print-on-demand. Considering the print-on-demand would be something done entirely for the benefit of others, but the EPUB format would be for my own benefit and sharing it wouldn't really cost me any additional effort, I'd probably make the EPUBs available for free and charge a slight markup to make me feel compensated for my time for the print-on-demand. Of course, the PRD is all OGL, so if it turns out that a decent print-on-demand service provider takes EPUBs you could very easily set up your own printing and probably save yourself some money; no hard feelings from me if you did. It's all hypothetical at this point, though, because I don't have the time at present to bother even making EPUBs for myself. I've got a lot of coding, article writing, invoicing, and bureaucracy to deal with right now, and may not be caught up for a month. We'll see. At this time we do not have plans to release the Pathfinder RPG line as ePubs, simply because our products have things like tables and sidebars that cannot be accurately laid out in that format (or at least in a way that is comparable to our PDFs). If we were going to do them, it would take some time to evaluate what functions the format would serve, how best to lay them out, and what features would be available to make them viable as a stand alone product. Thanks for the information. The tables were the one thing I had in the back of my head as a possible problem, really -- and might require some nontrivial reformatting work. Sidebars should be reasonably easy to format as offset notes within an EPUB, I would think, but maybe I'm overlooking something. I don't really think it's all that big a deal to make the format comparable to the PDFs, of course; the important thing for an EPUB is to make it lightweight and easy to read, which means avoiding things like two-column page formats, images with text wrapped around them (or images at all if they can be avoided), and so on. I totally understand if it's just not considered worthwhile to pursue the option right now, given whatever business concerns might apply that I don't see as a customer. I just think EPUB versions would not be too difficult to offer once the publication process was set up to handle them. It'd be more of an up-front investment in nailing down a good way to incorporate that into your publishing process than an ongoing difficulty, I think. I'm just some outsider looking in, though, so obviously I might be missing something. Again, thanks for the reply.
I'd still like to see an EPUB version with no images in it at all, by the way -- and not because I dislike the pictures, but because it'll load and work more smoothly on my Nook. Just sayin' -- since I think this suggestion is much more productive than the vast majority of the rest of this discussion (even the parts with which I agree). re: wives not having a problem with the art My girlfriend (we've a more committed and meaningful relationship than most legally married couples I've met) actually pointed out this thread to me, remarking on the extreme approach the OP takes to censoring his own books. We find it odd, but I don't think that means there's a problem with someone wanting a cut-down version of the book -- especially because I'm pretty sure he'd be willing to pay for his copy. It's kinda hard for me to tell, though, given the stream-of-consciousness "sentence" structure in his comments, making my eyes glaze over before I get halfway through one. I guess it's a personal failing of mine. re: the difficulty of reformatting for EPUB Yes, it would probably be a fair bit of work to rework a PDF layout to produce an EPUB document. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure someone at Paizo is maintaining pre-PDF text in digital records somewhere, in a form much more easily formatted for generating EPUB format. There might be a little trickery necessary for generating tables, but y'know, even HTML is easily enough translated to EPUB format with the right tools. Speaking of which, if I ever find the time, I might end up just creating EPUBs from the PRD and offering them to the world. Unfortunately, that doesn't solve my problem where things like my AP subscription, my copy of the Inner Sea Guide, and other things that don't appear in the PRD are concerned.
Maybe a future option for the Paizo peeps to consider would be to offer a PDF version without any character art... same layout and everything else, just a blank white rectangle as a placeholder for the art? Then the adult purchaser would have the full version, and the kids (or mom or whomever) could view their redacted version on their PC/iPad/whatever. Actually, screw that. I'd like a version available for me in EPUB format (though I'll take PDF in a pinch) that has *no* images whatsoever, including margin decorations, so I can load it up on my Nook and have pages load some time this week -- and so it won't look like someone took a magic marker to the Nook. I want the normal PDFs (as I already have them), too, because sometimes I want to see them on my laptop as well. Of course.
Allow mines to be expanded upon. 6BP for the initial investment (+1 ECO / +1 ECO) and cost 4BP for each additional +1 ECO.Obviously I meant +1 ECO / +1 STA. That's an interesting idea, but it raises some problems. The first problem is that your mine hexes still cost more than your farmland hexes and still produce less advantage than the farmland hexes overall even if the mine is built on a resource hex, which means that there's no economic reason for a mine hex. The second problem is that, even if there was a marginal increase in effective revenue for mine hex improvements as compared with the effective revenue for farmland hexes (which there isn't), you would still need a substantial number of improvements to break even. You would then need a substantial number more improvements to provide enough eventual return on investment to justify losing money (relative to making it a farmland hex instead) until you reach the break-even point. By the time you get around to doing that, you pretty much sink all of your mine-building resources into one mine for something that you have to expend resources to protect so that you eventually end up being able to sink enough into it to start turning a profit. Ultimately, I think it makes more sense to just leave the rules as they are. They state that claiming a hex containing a resource grants a +1 to your kingdom's Economy score. So . . . claim it, build a road in it, and call it farmland. You can call it a "mine" hex instead if you like. The rule, then, would be "A mine hex costs the same as a farmland hex, with the same requirements, plus it needs a resource. It provides -2 Consumption and +1 Economy." Same goes for "camps" as for "mines". Voila. Done.
Thanks for all your help in clarifying the issue. I think that tells me what I need to know for now. I'll go pore over the OGL once more (and the CUP again, just for the sake of measuring twice and cutting once), and eventually probably release my program under the OGL or rewrite it so I can separate any OGL materials from the software itself.
Okay, thanks for clarifying some of that. I guess the attributes and alignments stuff, where the specific terms are used, does indeed fall under the OGL; I'd managed to forget about that take on it. Could you direct me to where the declaration of the spread mechanic as being open game content was made (if only to satisfy my own curiosity)? My reference to "full use of terms and concepts" was meant to apply only to the product identity stuff. I apologize if that was not clear in my statement. So, based on your statement about what the Compatibility License covers . . . should we assume that there is no possibility of being able to make statements about Pathfinder RPG compatibility, or use logos to that effect, for any software or anything else that is not strictly textual in nature? Also, to hopefully wrap this all up: If, after examining the OGL one more time to see whether it is at all reasonable to apply it to my software, I would like to release it under the OGL+CUP, as appropriate. Is there anything else I need to know before doing so about the possibility of litigation, DMCA takedown notices, et cetera? Is there some specific set of materials related to the Harrow deck and its use that I should avoid incorporating into the software and its associated materials to remain compliant with Paizo's licenses and policies? Thanks for your time and help. As a final note, I'd like to encourage you guys to provide some FAQ, license, community policy, or other official, "standardized" (for lack of a better term) guidance for people who want to share software written to support Pathfinder RPG.
As for your specific question, look to the last part of Section 2 of the OGL: "No other terms or conditions may be applied to any Open Game Content distributed using this License." Does this even qualify as "open game content" in the OGL, though? It's basically just references to terms like "Harrow" and "The Liar" (one of the cards in the deck), which as I understand it qualify as Product Identity (thus exempted from the Open Game Content) that we only get to use in accordance with the Community Use Policy. Given that game rules as an algorithm are not covered by copyright, and the terms employed for identifying things are "product identity", my understanding of the interaction of policies and licenses here is that the Community Use Policy is what provides our guidance for use of the Harrow deck -- which needs clarifying where software is concerned. Please correct me if I'm wrong, of course; I'd appreciate it, though, if you'd provide an explanation of how the legalities of the issue apply such that the OGL is the governing policy in this case, rather than the Community Use Policy. . . . and, regardless of whether I use the OGL or the OWL for this software, there's still the question of whether including functionality that actually aids in the interpretation of the spread (summaries of card symbolism and meaning, for instance, briefly paraphrasing what's in the deck product's included booklet) would attract unwanted legal attention. I don't wish to nag, but legal issues are always something of a sticky matter, and I want to make sure things are nailed down pretty precisely for my purposes. EDIT: I'll just paint a picture of my current sense of the situation. I'll proceed with my explanation on the assumption that my picture is legally accurate in this description of my sense of things (though I make no such assumption at this time with regard to the disposition of my software). According to my understanding . . . The software I'm writing, unless I actually excerpt explanatory text from the Curse of the Crimson Throne AP (CCT) or from the Harrow deck product materials themselves, does not actually have anything in particular to do with Open Content as defined in the OGL. The software basically only makes use of Product Identity such as the term Harrow and the names of the cards, plus some game rules stuff that is technically outside the realm of copyright and trademark. Because Product Identity is basically what the Community Use Policy addresses, that means that the software itself is subject to the Community Use Policy in terms of what I'm allowed to do with it. Since the Product Identity used in the software is included in a Community Use Approved Product List Section 1 product (CCT), which allows essentially full use of terms and concepts under the Community Use Policy, that would seem to me to indicate that I can release the software under any license I like that does not have direct commercial implications, so long as I also include some indication of the applicability of the Community Use Policy and provide access to the software for free (and so long as the license I select allows such combination with an external agreement). Unfortunately, copyright (and, to a lesser extent, trademark) is a protean legal landscape built on a foundation of sand, and I'm no lawyer, so I'm seeking direct guidance on this matter given that the Community Use Policy is somewhat unclear on matters related to software.
additional information: I've noticed there's a run-down on the Harrow deck's use for fortune telling, with (extremely brief) summary of each card's meaning, in the Curse of the Crimson Throne AP. That's in Section 1 of the Community Use Approved Product List, which suggests more leeway for me to create software that simulates Harrow spreads. I would still like some guidance on the matter particular to software (as opposed to just natural language independent game materials) and on how I may license the software, given that the OGL is so poorly suited for application to software. For additional reference, see the Open Works License Website.
I'll poke somebody to take a look at this thread tomorrow - 'tis outside the scope of my ability to answer. :) Thanks -- I appreciate it. I wasn't going to clutter up the thread, but I figured I shouldn't be one of the people whose fault it is that customer service people don't get enough thanks for their work.
I'm a big fan of Paizo's open policies toward community use and development of Pathfinder related content. As someone who likes to write software in support of his gaming habit, though, I find there is a lack of similar guidance in Paizo's licenses and community policy for writing code based on Paizo products. I'd appreciate a little bit of help figuring out what would or would not get me sued, particularly as applies to my current situation. My girlfriend and I have been using Paizo's Harrow deck product in recent gaming. In online gaming with friends out of state, however, it really isn't very easy to use the physical deck. I was inspired last night to write a program to automatically generate what amounts to simplistic ASCII art Harrow fortune telling spreads (that is, outlines meant to represent the cards' locations with text inside the outlines indicating the salient characteristics of the specific cards). For an example of output, check out this sample result: http://apotheon.net/rpg/tmp/sample_spread.txt At the moment, generating random spreads like this is all it does. I would like to develop some more functionality in the future, including perhaps a Web interface, and maybe eventually a more graphically robust interface for the desktop. I'd like to add some useful documentation for how to interpret results and so on, too, of course. I want to put all the code on BitBucket (a free code hosting site) under an open source license (specifically, the Open Works License), but after going through the Community Use Policy materials, the Compatibility License, and everything else I could find with a fine-toothed comb, I'm not finding much that seems to apply to this situation. What little I do find (the minimal mention of what we get to do with the materials in Section 2 of the Community Use Approved Product List) is frankly discouraging. Knowing how supporting Paizo has been of community investment in the Pathfinder product lines in the past, though, I hold out hope that someone will allay any concerns I might have. Of course, I'm pretty sure that the program as written right now should easily fall under the doctrine of fair use, but I'm no lawyer, and would be hard-pressed to justify the expense of a lawyer for something inconsequential like this, so I'd have to think long and hard before going that route. In any case, considering how much I like Pathfinder RPG, the way Paizo has been handling game development, and the community outreach the company and its staff have pursued, I'd much rather be a part of the officially supported community with this rather than having to step outside it and watch every move I make for signs I might accidentally overstep what the doctrine of fair use would clearly protect. So . . . help? What can I do without getting DMCA takedown notices or subpoenas in my mailbox?
Don't forget that, according to the intelligent items rules in the CRB, any intelligent item with a 20+ Ego is considered to be in a constant state of personality conflict with the wielder because it considers itself superior to everyone and everything around it. Giving a weapon an Ego that high is a great way to annoy the crap out of your players by sucking all the fun out of playing their characters, making every day an ordeal to maintain control so that they do not have to be the sword's automaton. You may want to rethink that +10 Ego thing, unless you want to make that kind of trouble for your players.
As it happens, the campaign came to a screeching halt because half the players (me and medullaoblongata) decided to quit while we were ahead. Our play style and that of the GM simply do not mesh at all. . . . in case anyone was curious, and is actually still paying any attention to this discussion.
That is good news, indeed. It looks like the common "wisdom" -- that D&D is the top of the heap, and nobody else really even compares -- is going to have to change to keep up with the times.
I'm the player of the Oracle in this particular game. The rules interpretation regarding Life Link came up in last night's session. The character is basically 100% built around his healing capabilities, and he's damned near combat ineffective otherwise -- because the character concept is a guy who doesn't like hurting people but, due to circumstances somewhat beyond his control, finds himself traveling with the rather more confrontational members of this party. He's basically their combat medic. What would you consider a case of munchkining my way into some stupid combo? The basic use case for Life Link in the case of my Oracle is to absorb damage from other PCs without having to be close enough to touch them for a Cure spell, then using Cure spells on himself to keep from falling over. Aside from that, he mostly tries to avoid getting hit and to stay out of the way of the other PCs when they swing their big bladed weapons around. The question of whether the Life Link can be established at a distance, rather than by touch, is kind of important because it determines whether it would *ever* be a good idea to drop the Life Link. Once it's down in a given encounter, chances are it *stays* down if the Oracle has to actually touch the other PCs to reestablish it, thanks to the tactical realities of combat.
I'm interested in where the fine folks at Paizo will eventually take this Cyphermage concept. They were mentioned briefly in Second Darkness, and I've been waiting on the edge of my seat for some more hints and clues, or even for a new Prestige Class or some other definitive information on them. Unfortunately, the Cyphermages still appear to be as much a cipher as the name suggests. I'd appreciate it if some Paizo staffer would let me/us know whether there are any ideas about the direction the company plans to take with Cyphermages (if any). In particular, I'm looking at the possibility of playing one in the near-ish future, and would like to know what to expect of an official Paizo take on the concept in preparation for that.
Seems there's always one. The leak has been tracked down and plugged. If you're referring to my FLGS -- please be gentle. They're nice people, and I'm sure it was an honest mistake.
You may also use your Dexterity modifier instead of your Strength modifier to calculate your offensive combat bonus modifier for the purpose of performing the Disarm, Sunder and Trip combat maneuvers. I have only one question . . .
Why?
"Charisma" represents, among other things, force of personality. Half-orcs can definitely have that. Intelligence represents, among other things, intelligence. Why can't half-orcs have that, too? I know one complaint a lot of my 3.x players had was that the half-orc Charisma penalty meant that unless you specifically built a charismatic half-orc, they were innately poor at Intimidate checks, which didn't make any sense. Sure, they could buy ranks in it, but half-orcs shouldn't be penalized when trying to be Intimidating. I can also see half-orcs being good at lying (Bluff) and even, savage tribesmen that some of them are, Handling Animals. So not being penalized on the stat related to those skills is a good thing. I'd be tempted to solve the problem by giving all half-orcs a free Skill Focus in Intimidate, or maybe given them all the Intimidating Prowess feat for free so they can add Strength bonuses to Intimidate rolls, if your only major complaint is the Intimidate skill. To me, the Int penalty makes more sense--half-orcs growing up with orc-kind aren't going to be encouraged to expand their intellects; half-orcs growing amongst "civilized" races are going to be hard-put to find schooling and are going to be assumed to be dumb, so they are fighting against that and raw small orc brains to begin with. Intelligence isn't the same thing as education, though. When you say a half-orc has a -2 Intelligence, you are literally saying that orcs are, on average, stupider than everyone else. If the attribute was meant to represent academic achievement rather than innate intelligence, it should have been called "Scholarship" or something like that instead. I always found it more interesting to make the idea of "small orc brains" a stereotype than a truism -- especially since, with an entire race of idiots, having half-orc characters in a game quickly devolves into having comic-relief characters in the game.
He'd have to turn his head sideways to fit through a door. Those are ears -- not horns. They're surely kinda flexible, and an elf can probably even move them around a bit.
No just klingon foreheads Emo personalities and hot-topic shopping binges. No interpretation of vampires that fits that mold will appear in any game I run. I'm no bigot -- I hate all stupidity equally.
Yet another is the Vampire.. Ranging from its older plague zombie cursed by god form to the newer 'Buffy' vampire. Thousands of people throughout the years have added subtracted or taken away a power here and a weakness there from vampires to better fit the world view of an author or game designer. On the plus side, at least vampires haven't developed tusks, pig snouts, and hairy backs, or inexplicably lost 20 IQ points when nobody was looking. Thank goodness for the non-ridiculous appearance of half-orcs in the racial comparison images, even if the average half-orc still has all the reasoning capability of someone with fetal alcohol syndrome whose head got caught in a cotton gin, judging by stat modifiers.
Maybe some people want to do mor with orcs then just.. Oh rip off Tolkien ? I mean god knows people never take words that sound like words or words from other languages and use them for completely different things or things that are kinda alike but not exactly the same.. Do more? Great. My idea of "more" involves stuff like "rich culture", "interesting alternate origins", and so on. It doesn't involve "stupid pig-people who are a cartoonish variety of evil".
I take it you haven't read much Tolkien. He invented orcs, y'know --The fantasy image of an organized army of bestial creatures called "orc" came from Tolkien, but orcs were folklore monsters long before him. Charles Perrault had orcs in some of his stories, and they appear in a lot of traditional fairy tales. Er, no -- last I checked, Perrault wrote Little Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty, not The Two Towers. Which stories of Perrault's included orcs? Please enlighten us. and the way Tolkien described them, they never had pig snout noses, tusks, Neanderthal brows, or carpets of fur over their bodies. TheyHe said they had flat noises and wide mouths, if I recall. The rest is artistic license and borrowed from the folklore versions of hairy bogey-men. The words "Orc" and "Ogre" were interchangeable until Tolkien and other fantasy authors made them separate. The word "orc" is related to the word for swine in many Indo-European languages and the pig association comes from that. Citizens of Nigeria typically have flat noses and wide mouths, too. They don't, however, have pig snouts, tusks, Neanderthal brows, or carpets of fur over their bodies. The word "Orc" actually came from an Anglo-Saxon word for "demon", which is supposed by some to be derived from "Orcus", the name of a god of oaths (and not a demonic god of the undead, as AD&D 1st Edition had it). It had nothing to do with pigs. also weren't ever described in a way that suggested they were dumb as rocks, either.Sam fooled them easily if that's any indication. They certainly weren't known for their intellect or love of academia. They were into fighting and eating and that's about it. It's not a stretch to assume they weren't very bright or came from a poor educational system. I'm fine with orcs having no love for academia and no typical access to a good educational system -- but these things are not identical with native intelligence. In one PRPG game world, I have moved the orcish stat penalty from Intelligence somewhere else, but in another that I'm still building I'm planning to just rename "Intelligence" so that it relates more to scholarship than intellect, and adjust some minor effects of that stat on the game to suit -- because, as I pointed out, education is not the same thing as intelligence. As for being tricked -- well, if that's the deciding factor, I guess dragons should have INT penalties (Smaug was tricked), demigods should have INT penalties (Sauron too), halflings should have INT penalties (yes, I remember some hobbits getting tricked), dwarves should have INT penalties (ditto), and so on. Damn. I guess everyone should just be dumb as rocks according to stat modifiers, if we're going to base it on whether or not a member of a given race has been tricked by someone in Tolkien's books. "Real orks?" They are mythological and fantasy creatures. Really? I thought they were real creatures. Oh, wait -- no I didn't. Would you like to stop insinuating I'm an imbecile now? If you go with majority rule, most fantasy literature regards them as big stupid brutes. I take it you didn't bother to read the take on them at the Real Orks link, since you just decided to mention a "majority rules" take on the race and didn't actually address, y'know, any of my actual objections to the "hairy pig" version. Star Wars Gamorreans were based on orcs, not the other way around. I'm aware orcs came before Gamorreans. Why are you telling me this? Is this some odd sort of straw man fallacy?
The language in that section is lifted directly from the SRD, which unfortunately does not include the note on page 11 of the PHB (under "Racial Characteristics") saying that Intelligence (and Intelligence alone) cannot fall below a 3 due to racial ability score modifiers. So it might be worth adding a similar note in either the ability score section or the half-orc entry for Pathfinder. I find a character with an Intelligence lower than 10 essentially unplayable, anyway -- because I simply cannot effectively portray such a character in roleplaying for very long.
Under Intelligence, it says thatA creature of humanlike intelligence has a score of at least 3.Consider modifying that to "a sentient creature." There are plenty of creatures that think in entirely different ways than humans, but have INT scores over 3. I'm also a little concerned about the fact that half-orcs are sometimes not even sentient, by that standard. In fact, close to one in fifty wouldn't qualify as sentient, assuming 3d6 for attributes. Of course, I've always been a little concerned by Intelligence penalties for half-orcs (and orcs).
- dwarves - unless the intent was to show a dwarf that was dishonored and ceremoniously had his hair cut, please restore his hair. It would also be great to see if the dwarven females of PRPG also have facial hair or not. Nice of you to assume everybody's game worlds must assign exactly the same cultural norms to dwarves that you do in yours. Besides, he doesn't look so much like his hair was cut so much as it just started falling out in middle age. He looks like he's going bald. . . . unless your complaint is the fact his beard isn't long enough to trip over. - halfling - I miss seeing them with their steriotypical pot belly. I don't. I always hated the "fat busybody with furry feet" idea. I'm all for some (more) traditional treatment of orcs, but not for halflings -- which may seem like a double standard unless you stop to consider that the traditional "hobbit" style halfling is a damned cartoonish joke, and the common carpet-furred Gamorrean treatment of orcs who can't add 2 + 2 and get 4 is also a damned cartoonish joke. Meanwhile, the image of each in the PRPG racial portraits looks like something worth playing for more than laughs. - gnome - well, where do I start. It seems there has been a growing desire to change gnomes from their small, dwarven-kin appearance to just slender, cute, fae-ish, large halflings. I kind of preferred the traditional look of gnomes (made them far more unique). Really? You think making them look like smaller dwarves somehow made them more "unique"? I'm afraid I can't really agree with that assessment. With them now being shorter than humans, rather than being shorter than dwarves, now they look like the traditional elf. My thought was that, with them being taller than two-foot-nothing, they are no longer quite so ridiculous. For the first time in twenty years, I have a game world in which gnomes look the way they're depicted in the game book. Not only do they look like traditional elves now, but with their exaggerated "cute" appearance and slim bodies it looks like to me they stepped out of the pages of Elfquest :) Just how short do you think elves should be? I thought elves were supposed to be attractive. I wonder how anyone could find someone attractive who looks like his eight year old brother or sister. - half-orc - the physique is perhaps a little too exaggerated -- but maybe I'm just being picky now? Yes, you are. Did you notice the +2 Strength?
-The Elf is way too buff, I agree. Nothing about him looks different than human. An Elven male should be built more like a female human; lithe and graceful. Elves are usually also depicted with very FAIR skin. Dark skin and white hair? He looks half-drow. Or Night Elf. Both are not standard elves. The elf may be a touch more "buff" than he needs to be. On the other hand, I wouldn't call his skin tone "dark". It's more a pale gray, which I think works well. I suspect the hair color the artist was going for is "silver", but it just ended up looking like a mix of gray and white, like an old lady's hair. I've never been a fan of white or "silver" hair -- that's what happens to human hair when you get to be a senior citizen. It looks especially stupid for a black-skinned elven race, and I wish people would stop doing that to skin/hair color combinations. -The Dwarf should be completely covered in hair, and the half-orc should have a fair bit of it. Dwarves do not shave. It's agianst their way of life. Especially not their chests. I take it you haven't read much Tolkien. He invented orcs, y'know -- and the way Tolkien described them, they never had pig snout noses, tusks, Neanderthal brows, or carpets of fur over their bodies. They also weren't ever described in a way that suggested they were dumb as rocks, either. While I respect a DM's or game world designer's wish to alter a race for his or her own purposes, I'm pretty annoyed with the way people always seem to want to make orcs into a fantasy RPG version of Gamorreans with copious body fuzz. One or two game worlds, fine -- but the majority of versions of the orc? Damn. When do I get to see a game, or game world, that uses Real Orks, aside from the game worlds I've created? One of the things I liked most about these race portraits was how the half-orcs were depicted in a way that someone might actually want to play one. edit: The dwarf doesn't look at all like an unhealthy fat guy to me. He looks like an Olympic weightlifter. Just thought I'd clear that up. -Nobody has any toes. I noticed that -- and there aren't really any fingers to speak of, either, though at least there's more of a suggestion of fingers than of toes. No biggie, though; it still good art, and it kinda fits the style. -The builds aren't standardized. The Dwarf is clearly NOT in as good shape as the Elf, and the Half-Orc male fails to give a good idea of a half-orc female. All characters in a picture to show the races need to be set at straight 10s+Racial bonus/penalty, and we need both male and female versions of each. I guess you've never met a guy with a stout build who's wearing two hundred pounds of muscle. Trust me -- a guy could look like that dwarf and still rip someone who looks like that elf limb from limb. Being "cut" (i.e., having obvious muscle definition) is not the same as being physically powerful. As for the idea of a half-orc female -- I'm afraid they'd disappoint me by making the female look stupid the way World of Warcraft did. I'm okay with the assumption of physical stats being higher than 10. After all, we're showing examples of races for PCs. Player characters are usually above average. Who wants to choose an example from amongst a bunch of guys with beer bellies, or girls with flabby arms and chubby hips, when imagining how a character's going to look? -The gnome is adorable. Do not change her. Except maybe adding toes. That was too amusing for words.
I checked the experience chart in the Beta, and it's the same as in the third Alpha -- so no need to upgrade the program as it is currently written for compatibility with the Beta. . . . in case anyone wondered.
"Some of the rules in the EPH were not perfectly suited to PRPGa3, and some of them just needed to be changed because we felt they could have been done better in the first place." -- This is not very specific. This wasn't actually one of the things I suggested you read. I mentioned "developer notes" -- which referred to the blue sidebar labeled "Developer Notes". In that section, I mentioned: 1. "important in-game suspension of disbelief concerns" 2. "that makes it essentially impossible for a mid- to high-level character in an ongoing campaign to become an Elan without becoming an unsuitable character for the campaign in most cases" 3. "many GMs and players use the Charisma attribute not only to measure force of personality but also appearance (while Elan appearance is unchanged from its Human origins)" . . . so those were each part of a specific example of a reason things needed to be changed. "A lot of the detrimental effects of the system on an Elan character are not clearly visible in the numbers, but they exist nonetheless." -- This is not very specific either. No, that alone isn't very specific. However, it immediately follows these sentences: "Now consider what happens if a character runs out of power points, and doesn't get to meditate for four hours. Spend one hour meditating, and you've just run over your four hour maximum. This limits the benefits of not requiring sleep, food, or drink, but (perhaps more importantly in the general case) it also serves to limit how much a psionic character might want to use psionic powers, giving him or her strong motivations to avoid spending power points too quickly -- thus effectively limiting an Elan's power in the game under many circumstances." Since I placed it in a separate paragraph from those sentences, I guess it's possible you just didn't notice the context. "With the removal of the ability to prevent damage, in exchange for an ability to meditate to recover damage after the fact, I think the balance of power is definitely in favor of the EPH version -- which is as I intended, because I believe that for an Elan Psion the power granted by Resilience was a bit much." -- O.K., here's something concrete. I can see the opinion that preventing damage is too powerful, although I haven't found it to be so in practice; I've found it to be almost always more useful to use power points on (a) manifesting powers, or (b) getting a +4 racial bonus on saves. At middling to high levels, the ability to prevent so much damage in combat has the potential to turn what amounts to a spellcaster class (assuming your Elan character is a Psion, for instance) into a front-line fighter that can often outdo actual Fighters, Paladins, and Rangers. As for #1, I don't find your elan any more "Pathfinder-y" than the original. That's a matter of taste, I guess. The idea there was to modify mostly by changing things that do not damage continuity of concept and avoid eliminating abilities altogether. This made for a particularly interesting challenge, considering that the Elan in the EHP are, in some ways, too powerful even to balance out with Pathfinder-upgraded core races. Elans should get the same net +2 bonus that all other PC races do. That wasn't actually a specific design goal at all. It just worked out that way. why did you change the rest of the elan's powers? Please list specific items you don't already understand, and I'll be happy to address them individually. At the moment, though, I'm beginning to feel like I've done too much typing already on this subject (I need to get back to work-related typing soon), and don't want to try justifying every sentence I wrote one at a time in the hopes that I cover everything you want covered. I personally don't the need to create the "Pathfinder version" of every monster or character race. Nor do I, necessarily. There are some improvements that could be made to some of the rules in the EPH, however, and I think the examples in PRPGa3 of rules changes offer some excellent ideas for how to make some of those improvements. In fact, I kind of got the impression that the PC races (dwarf, elf, etc.) were beefed up in order to compete with PC races from other products (like elans, whisper gnomes, etc.). Under certain circumstances, I think the Elan could still be extremely unbalancing, even compared against the "upgraded" PRPGa3 core races. That's one of the reasons I took on the task of changing the Elan race -- to tone it down in those cases without seriously damaging the race for other purposes. So if you improve PC races from other products, it sort of defeats the purpose. I guess it depends on how you're "improving" them. If you improve them by cutting down some unbalancing effects and making suspension of disbelief easier to maintain, that doesn't defeat the purpose at all. If, on the other hand, you just load up the Elan race with a bunch of extra superpowers, that would certainly defeat the purpose -- which is why I didn't do that.
Let me put it another way: Why do you think the elan's abilities need to be changed? Having an elan template makes some sense, I agree, but what specifically do you dislike about the 3.5 elan's special abilities? Please read my comments above and the developer notes here for some of the details.
What makes you think it's so easy to "just become an Elan"?What makes you think it's easier than becoming a lich? Uh, what? the having-to-do-irredeemable-evil which is largely a problem because it means that as a lich you have a giant sign tattooed on your head that says "Adventurers, kill me for renown and lots of XP!" I thought we were talking about "big bad evil guys" -- you know, the sort who do "irredeemable evil" regardless of whether they're liches -- rather than good-aligned PCs. you don't have to worry about Turning at all. Nice how you just overlooked the compensatory benefit I mentioned. I guess it's easy to make being a lich look like it's all down side when you ignore the good stuff. Whereas dropping you back to level 1 gives high-level casters a very concrete reason to not want to become an elan Yeah -- like, there shouldn't be any Elan, since nobody in his right mind would ever do that. "Oh, I'm just going to give up everything that makes me me." I'm sorry, but destroying all sense of believability for the motivation of a character isn't justified by an attempt to maintain game balance by making a character lose all his levels and capabilities (which, by the way, just swings the balance very far the other way). has no real effect on the playability of it for PCs Losing 16 levels has no effect on playability . . . ? What exactly did you like about them that I changed?Everything, which is why I didn't bother explaining. That's exceedingly unhelpful. I liked that you could block and attack or boost your saves. It gave you interesting tactical decisions. I also liked that you could just spent a power point to not need food and water; it was clean and easy and didn't require any bookkeeping (plus the whole "psifoc for 20 hours a day" strikes me as inelegant). Thank you for finally saying something useful. Finally. I'll have another look at things in terms of providing that kind of interesting tactical decision making opportunity. You changed it to be more useful (probably not a good thing, since the race was pretty balanced before), but less interesting, and there are a few parts that bother me. I found the "nothing can hurt me as long as I have power points" thing pretty unbalancing. 1) If you have psifoc, you get +2 to saves, which is better overall (especially if he has a second psifoc), but also means the bonus becomes pedestrian, just a general part of life for you rather than a special decision you made. I think you're trying too hard. The save bonus thing doesn't get more or less interesting based on whether it's a function of psionic focus or of spending power points -- and, speaking of bookkeeping, part of the reason for changing the way the save bonus worked was a decision made after a lot of play, where I discovered that in a save-heavy game session I damn near erased a hole in my character sheet because of all the repeated erase-and-rewrite instances of spending power points. 2) Being able to heal yourself after the fact is better overall than blocking an attack since you can get yourself back up to full, rather than having to choose whether to block this 10-point attack or waiting in case he crits with his next swing. It's only better overall if you don't actually need the ability to negate damage while it's happening to stay alive. A ninth level Elan Psion/Elocator -- specifically, my Elan character before the translation to PRPGa3 rules -- can typically have as many as 150 hit points' worth of fight in him at one time even after activating a few combat bonus powers. That is unbalancing. it was one of their selling points that they could potentially survive an 1,800+ attack at 20th level, albeit for the cost of their entire PP pool. Yeah, that's a great selling point -- for munchkins. the sheer audacity of being able to take such a ridiculous attack made them unique. I take it "unique" is your euphemism for "absurdly unbalancing". At higher levels, it is entirely conceivable that the elan could hit 50+, which means unless the GM never gives the group more than an hour between encounters, there's a good chance the elan won't have to worry much about energy management . . . which is just a fraction of a typical 20th level Elan Psion's power point total. Hell, by 10th level my Elan Psion/Elocator had about twice that -- and I don't know about you, but I don't tend to let people meditate effectively while walking, riding on horseback, et cetera, when I'm GMing a game. Are you imagining a party's Psion being carted around in a wheelbarrow during a dungeon crawl so that they can make progress and let him sit around meditating all the time? Do you expect everyone to want to wait a couple hours after every encounter before they even open another door? energy management, which is half the fun of playing a psion (or, maybe just 30%, but still) You must be an accountant if that's what makes the game fun for you. Anyway, it's not like it actually eliminates "energy management" -- it just changes the rules a little bit. It also means that the Kineticist and Egoist are by far the best Psion disciplines for the elan, by far. If you wanted to play any other discipline, you would pretty much have to take some feat to make Autohypnosis a class skill. The revised Elan race is not intended to exist in a vacuum. As far as I'm concerned, giving Autohypnosis to some Disciplines as a class skill and not to others was a pretty bad oversight (or just a really bad idea, if it wasn't an oversight). Hell, maybe I should amend the Elan race so that it adds Autohypnosis as a class skill no matter what class you choose for your character. I don't know yet if it's a good idea -- but it's worth considering. Basically, I guess all my differences of opinion with you relate to one of the following: 1. You consider taking away all of a character's levels a good idea, whereas I consider it a way to gimp a character so badly it tends to become unplayable within an ongoing campaign. It can be pretty difficult for a first-level character to contribute meaningfully in twelfth level campaign. 2. You seem to think that making lichdom more palatable than becoming an Elan by making the process of becoming an Elan something only the certifiably insane and the effectively suicidal would consider is a good idea, whereas I think it's basically just a really passive-aggressive way of saying "You're not allowed to play an Elan." At least, that's the case when you have players that want to play a roleplaying game rather than a roll-playing game. Even roll-players would only really consider it at first level. 3. You seem to think that being able to take a single 1800 HP attack and keep on swinging isn't a game balance destroyer, while I do. 4. You seem to enjoy heavy bookkeeping as a way to force players to make difficult decisions in terms of character actions, whereas I prefer to reduce that kind of bookkeeping in favor of more roleplaying-related decisions. 5. I guess you don't think a GM can keep track of four hours' time in a given in-game day very easily. Meanwhile, from actually playing an Elan, I've found it pretty easy. 6. You seem to think that initially neglecting to mention any specific differences of opinion in favor of just saying something sucks constitutes constructive criticism. I disagree.
Remember, an Elan is immortal, which isn't very powerful from a mechanical point of view, but it raises the question of why someone would want to become a lich when they could just become an Elan. Immortality is a major source of motivation for BBEGs, and if they could get it for the cost of a feat... well, that just seems a little silly. What makes you think it's so easy to "just become an Elan"? There are other costs and obstacles than those made up purely of game-mechanics. Otherwise . . . why become an Elan, when you could become a lich? I mean, all you need to worry about then is 20th-level Clerics turning you, and as a side-benefit you're now immune to criticals. You can even be healed by arcane magic. If all we're considering is the cost in game mechanics, I'm having a hard time finding the benefit of being an Elan, especially if you started out as an arcane spellcaster rather than a psionic character. Oh, but . . . there are costs and obstacles aside from mere game mechanics effects of a template for both Elan and liches. Plus you changed the mechanics of the Elan, which I liked almost as much as the flavor. I'd keep those as they were. What exactly did you like about them that I changed? I don't see a whole lot of explanation there. If there's something specific you like about EPH Elan, I'd like to know what it is and why you like it. (Also, while we're on the subject, "Half-elf" would really fit as a template. Getting it to work is tricky, though). True, it would be a good candidate for a template race, at least in some game settings. So would half-orc, for that matter. Maybe I'll look into that at some point in the future -- but for now, I have other things on my agenda.
There is at least one other cost as well. Specifically, you no longer get to choose your character's "favored class" -- it's chosen for you. In the D&D 3.5 system, that benefit of being a Human is pretty significant. By the way, I think eliminating the ability of Humans to change "favored class" designation to best effect at any level is a mistake, but I'll withhold final judgment for now, since I don't know Paizo's reasons for making that change. Of course, if your intent for the character is to be a Psion anyway, that may not be much of a difference. On the other hand, I think acquiring a -2 penalty to an attribute is pretty harsh. I'll consider it as a possibility, though, and if you have further arguments for this measure I'd be glad to read them. I also like what you've done to the elan's basic psionic abilities though, with the exception of Repletion/Psionic Fortitude. Again, just my opinion, but trying to keep track of how long in a day the character was psionically focused in order to determine if he needs to eat/sleep/drink is a bit more difficult than just spending a power point and calling it a day. Also, using the 20 of 24 hours rule, I would be a little hard pressed to determine when the consequences took effect. I'm guessing they would take effect the next day, but it's a little confusing (and it doesn't say, but I'm also guessing the elan would still need 8 hours of "rest" to replenish spells/power points, right?) Actually, the Elan as presented in the EPH don't require any sleep at all. As with standard D&D 3.5 Elves, the Elan are described as needing only four hours of meditation instead. The way the numbers work out with my reinvention of the Elan race, it should be normal for a character to have to meditate for four hours a day to replenish spent power points, assuming it was a typical adventuring day (requiring extensive use of the character's psionic powers). Very heavy psionic power use or very poor Autohypnosis rolls might result in needing a fifth hour, while very light psionic power use or very light Autohypnosis rolls might result in needing only three hours (or less, if the character sat around reading a romance novel all day). Now consider what happens if a character runs out of power points, and doesn't get to meditate for four hours. Spend one hour meditating, and you've just run over your four hour maximum. This limits the benefits of not requiring sleep, food, or drink, but (perhaps more importantly in the general case) it also serves to limit how much a psionic character might want to use psionic powers, giving him or her strong motivations to avoid spending power points too quickly -- thus effectively limiting an Elan's power in the game under many circumstances. A lot of the detrimental effects of the system on an Elan character are not clearly visible in the numbers, but they exist nonetheless. Further, the Elan in the Expanded Psionics Handbook also have a level adjustment of +0 and are in some ways more powerful than my revised Elan race. With the removal of the ability to prevent damage, in exchange for an ability to meditate to recover damage after the fact, I think the balance of power is definitely in favor of the EPH version -- which is as I intended, because I believe that for an Elan Psion the power granted by Resilience was a bit much. . . . which brings me to a final point: My aim is (at least) three-fold. 1. Make it fit with a Pathfinder flavor of rules "upgrade". 2. Improve on the shortcomings of the original rules in the EPH. 3. Keep things compatible with the (non-OGL) expansion books for D&D 3.5. Number 2 in that list must be limited by a couple of things, though: 1. It has to be similar enough to attract the same players who liked the EPH itself. My desire is to make it more attractive to both the people who like the EPH as it is and those who found the EPH lacking in some way, but who liked the basic ideas and want them updated for Pathfinder RPG. 2. It shouldn't screw too much with already existing character concepts when they are converted to Pathfinder RPG rules, including a conversion of the EPH rules to my updated rules. Adding a little to what such a character has on his or her sheet is acceptable for that purpose, as long as it doesn't make the character's place in the campaign more unbalanced, as might be changing some of the mechanics so long as the end result is similar -- but subtracting from the character sheet is a great way to piss people off and generate flame wars and bad reactions. Both of those two concerns, and especially the second of them, suggest that it would be a bad idea to create completely new limits on the character's stats that did not previously exist. It takes a light, subtle touch to bring the Elan race back in line with the core system races without creating more problems than it solves, and I think the replacement of the damage prevention Resilience race feature with the damage recovery ability of the Psionic Fortitude race feature makes up for the alteration of the Charisma penalty with enough left over detriment to the character's combat abilities to limit some of the potentially unbalancing features of the Elan race as presented in the EPH. Now . . . that's my take on the situation. I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong about anything you said -- but this is what I believe to be some of the most important influences on the process of updating the Elan. If you have more to say that might convince me to take a different course of action than I have taken so far, I welcome it; I want to make informed, well-reasoned decisions, after all. All in all, though, a good job. Thanks. I appreciate the compliment, and the rest of the feedback as well.
I seem to have overlooked part of the skill bonus thing when I wrote that up. I've changed it so that it's clear that only the bonus point at first level, and bonus skill points for levels gained before becoming an Elan, remain. I didn't intend it to come across as providing ongoing bonus skill points. Thanks for pointing that out. Was there anything else about it that made it seem too powerful to you?
I've been working on converting some rules from the Expanded Psionics Handbook to Pathfinder RPG Alpha 3, and writing them up to a somewhat professional standard, for possible eventual publication if and when I finish converting everything in the book that's worth converting. Today, I made the first draft of the content for the Elan race available in my personal weblog: It's available under the terms of the OGL (of course), and I hope some of you will give it a shot if you have need of the Elan race for Pathfinder RPG playtesting, and give me some feedback on how well it works for you. Suggestions, requests, and critiques are welcome -- including requests for specific rules from the EHP to revise/convert and suggestions for what you believe should be changed as part of the conversion process. Notes for optional rules will be addressed in green sidebars (you'll see an example of this in the Elan entry), and developer notes explaining some of the thinking that went into the rules choices I made will appear in blue sidebars. Let me know what you think, and I hope you enjoy it.
Oh, no reason other than curiosity. I haven't heard much about Ruby, so I'm uninformed of it's uses. Curiosity is good for you! Maybe the first thing to know about Ruby is that it's not Rails. A lot of people who have heard of Ruby, but haven't heard much, have first heard of Ruby on Rails. Rails is a Web development framework, though -- and it happens to be a framework that uses Ruby. Ruby itself, meanwhile, is a general purpose dynamic programming language whose reference implementation is an interpreter, and it does a heck of a lot more than Web development. In fact, I'm working on a secure proxy client in Ruby/Tk right now. You may notice that the Web interface for pfconv uses two files -- one with the filename extension .rhtml, and the other a CGI script with the filename extension .rb, both of which indicate that the files in question include some Ruby code. The .rhtml file has Ruby code embedded in (X)HTML, similarly to the way PHP is typically used, while the .rb file is just a ruby script (which generates some XHTML, in this case) that I store in the cgi-bin directory. I'm not using Rails for any of it, in part because using Rails for something simple like this would be overkill. I would have probably done it in PHP or c++, but that is, undoubtedly, more work than fun. :) I found PHP fun back before I had enough experience with other dynamic languages to realize just how limiting and painfully bad the design of the language really is. C++ is just sorta "work" by definition -- I'd much rather use C (if I wanted to go that route) than C++ for something like this. Ruby allows makes for fast, easy, fun programming, with great clarity of the code and very few lines of code needed. Well-written Ruby even starts to read a bit like plain English. If Ruby has a major failing, it's that the language isn't always well-suited to uses that are very performance intensive, because the Ruby 1.8 interpreter is damned slow. Usually, though, improving an algorithm improves performance far more than choosing a different language, and the type of coding I do usually doesn't rely all that heavily on runtime performance anyway -- so the coding efficiency performance (e.g., how quickly I can write good, solid, maintainable code) ends up being a more important factor, and that's an area where Ruby really excels. Again, if anyone thinks of some feature requests or has some complaints about bugs for pfconv, please let me know.
Why not? Also, as Sleepy mentioned, Ruby is a lot of fun. I'm serious about my own counter-question, though: why not? Good work apotheon! Thanks!
I was wondering what kind of programs do people use to make your own Character sheets? I prefer Scribus, but sometimes break down and use something less perfectly suited to the task, like The GIMP or OpenOffice.org. One of these days, I'll probably learn how to do this stuff properly, with LaTeX. I've been toying with the idea of creating a character sheet generator of my own for the web, but haven't gotten around to it "yet". I put quotes around "yet", of course, because I'm not sure I ever will get around to it.
This last weekend, I created a new command line utility, written in Ruby, to help with converting stats from D&D 3.5 to PRPGa3 rules. At this time, it only does XP calculations (for any of the three advancement rates in PRPGa3 Table 4-1). As long as you have a Ruby interpreter on your computer, you can just download the script and use it. I recommend starting with the --help option to get usage information. Yesterday, I created a web interface for it so you don't even have to download the tool to your computer if you don't want to. You can just choose an advancement rate and plug a character's current D&D 3.5 experience point total into it, then click the Convert button: I figure this should help for people who want to convert an ongoing D&D campaign to Pathfinder RPG Alpha 3 rules for playtesting. If you can think of any other conversions you'd like to have the script perform, let me know at the Weblog entry about it -- I'm happy to take feature requests. Let me know if you find any bugs or otherwise unexpected behavior, too. The script is distributable under the terms of the Public Distribution License, which pretty much means you can modify, redistribute, copy, fold, spindle, and mutilate it to your heart's content, in addition to not having to pay a dime for it (though I suppose you could charge for copies of it if you think anyone will pay). You just have to make sure that whoever receives a copy of it from you gets notice of the license -- and of course, no plagiarizing. I hope some of you find it useful. I rather suspect the Web interface will get some use, and the command line utility script won't get downloaded at all. I am planning to create a simple GUI widget front end for it, too, by the way. Thus, if you like clicky buttons and want a local copy of the program in case you need to use it when you don't have Internet access, you'll be able to use that. The GUI doesn't exist yet, though. Let me know if that sounds interesting to you -- the more interest there is, the sooner I'll get around to creating it.
the plane of Axis is a gigantic city. The first city, sort of.Also the last city, sort of. So . . . you're saying that Axis has its own theme album?
Anyone who's interested in the Wikipedia article -- I recommend you head over there and contribute more reference links, more content, et cetera. I've seen someone come through and delete a good-sized chunk of information from the article (not rephrase it -- delete it), and someone else recommend the entire article for deletion because there wasn't enough independent (read: non-Paizo) information in the article and in reference links. I added a couple of links after that and removed the deletion recommendation from the page, but I'm not sure they won't come back, and I don't have the time to check on it daily to see if someone else found some other "notability" complaint for the article. The Pathfinder RPG article at Wikipedia needs a little bit of babysitting to make sure it survives to the point where it is no longer subject to these dangers. If there are a lot of people checking into it when they have the time, and contributing content and links as needed, it'll be easy for everyone involved to do his or her part. If there's only one or two of us, it will be much more difficult, and we may fail to keep the page intact.
Well, I've talked to Derek Noonburg of Glyph & Cog. He had the following to say (collected from two separate emails in our exchange):
In other words, as already discussed, this is a problem with the way the font is specified in the document. Judging by Mr. Noonburg's comments, though, it looks like it's a problem with how the font was specified in the document by the PDF authoring tool, and not with the font itself (where the latter was my guess). note: FreeType is the font rendering engine used by poppler and Xpdf to render "TrueType" fonts.
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