apotheon's page

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.

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.

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?

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:

Elan for PRPGa3

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.

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:

pfconv - Web Interface

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.

I seem to recall seeing somewhere that there might be plans for a Pathfinder RPG logo at some point in the future. I also seem to recall some related statement that there'll be no such thing available before the final, release edition of PRPG hits stores. Please correct me if I misremember any of this (which I can't remember how to find right now).

Here's the problem:

I'm undertaking a game development project. The project is intended to ultimately be designed specifically with PRPG compatibility in mind. I won't release it in a final form until I have a final release version of PRPG in my hot little hands so I can make sure I get the compatibility right -- but I do intend to offer pre-release test versions, perhaps in a manner similar to the way Paizo is doing the Alpha and Beta test versions of PRPG itself (though probably not on the same grand scale).

While I'm doing this, I'd like to be able to refer to it as a development/test version of something intended to ultimately be compatible with PRPG, developed parallel to PRPG itself. What would be the preferred manner of doing that? "Pathfinder RPG" is a trademark of Paizo -- yes? Well, I don't want to step all over Paizo trademarks, or for that matter use the name without some kind of at least unofficial sanction for doing so, if I can avoid it.

I still need some way to specify the game system basis for what I'm doing, within the text of what I'm creating, though. Answers from people who actually speak for Paizo in some way would be most appreciated.