cpt_machine's page

I got WLD and didnt enjoy it at all, too much wandering through mazes and empty rooms to find something intresting to do and the quality of the product (in my opnion) is below parr.

While a 'sandbox' is great in theory, a level based system like pathfinder isnt friendly to the idea unless the bad guys level with the PCs.

I would advise against using APs, they are a very linear form of gaming (not there is anythign wrong with that, my group are loving RotRL at the moment) but for such an open world game just stick with your own stuff, maybe cherry pick certain elements from different adventure, like set pieces or plot ideas. However overall I think the money would be wasted on you if your group dont like to follow the breadcrumbs that have been laid before them.

Simply changing the wording from free action to swift action fixes the issue and makes it work as intended.

I remeber this topic of conversation coming up around the table when I was trying to find a presitge class for my fighter and couldnt find one I liked, I realised that the fighter given its massive amount of aviable feats is basically its own custom built presitge class.

ahh so great minds do think alike :)

Just a quick note to say I am playing through the old pathfinder adventure paths with the new rules and having a blast. I'm really loving the rules and the world our games not occupy.

I got to thinking you have producted a whole pile of monsters for your adventure paths but these monsters are very useful for making home brew adventures set in simliar areas and with the new pathfinder finally out I was thinking, maybe collect the monsters from the pathfinder magazine and update them to match the new rules.

It could be a pdf or even print version and it would be nice to collect all this information in one place, for those who love the world but dont want to by the magazine.

Just a though...

I tried it RAW, the casters in the party got frustrated. Added a feat that let them reroll a failed attempt. Neither caster was thrilled but are willing to give it another try. I was tempted to remove the x2 to spell level, but figured the added feat still keeps it difficult but allows a determined caster to learn to do it more safely just never completely safely. I might add in a feat to counter the one that allows melee to follow the caster during his free 5 foot step, a bit of an arms race I know, but I want them to be able to do something if they are willing to devote themselves to it. Think of all the meta magic feats they are passing up to do this, I think it's somewhat balanced.

Why was he getting frustrated? yes the DC is a little higher but it does mean your not going to auto pass anymore, if you want him to auto pass just ignore the rule but be prepared to have spellcasters running rampant and your melee will be very frustrated.

If you spellcasters are in melee, ask yourself why? a good spell caster will do everything in his power to avoid that and the rest of the group should help to. This issue is far more than mechanics, its how the game is played. I used to group with a lad who though charging in with his wizard was a good idea, he didnt last...

As for concentation, yes its almost like having max skill, no you dont get the +3 but you do get you related stat (which is usually +3/+4 depending on your stats) and you dont have to stack Constution which concentration used dto go off of to get any other bonus.

I personally feel this is very fair, its really does urk me to see people houseruling the crap out of a brand new game because people are unflexible to new ideas.

I like it, very well done.

Why do you have to explain it, its magic!

Last knight, I'll respond the question because I think I think equal to the one you asked:

There can be magical items that are simply evil because they are made with evil spells. If you really follow the way you are leading, there aren't evil spells, just evil uses for spells. A magic item, if you think deeply, can't really be "evil". But it has a tainted aura, it was created with evil spells and (supposedly) with evil rites and such things.

In my way of thinking, a creature without inteligence can't be evil. But it's a creature. This extends only to creatures. it's not an exercise of applying this way of thinking to extremes. If it was, you couldn't even have evil rocks, evil doors and such things. This sounds really dumb, evil doors or rocks, but there could be. They're probably magical too. But I believe that the rock being evil (hehe) just means that it has an evil aura, no that the rock wants to kill babies...

For me, mindless creatures won't ever be evil. Creating an undead may be UNNACEPTABLE because this taints the sacred death and this kind of thing, but isn't to be something EVIL. A cleric could raise a dead ox to help the farmers with the harvest. They would look strange, and wouldn't trust it, but then, the ox isn't evil per se. It's a construct. A thing.

A magical evil item isn't a thing? It is. But it's evil because it was created with an evil spell.

There are many evil spells that don't use negative energy, and they should still be evil. There are some that destroy and kill but shouldn't be more evil than a fireball!

And in my opinion, a spell shouldn't be evil just because it uses negative energy.

My two cents.

You sir need to play my Ravenloft game, where evil is evil, for the sake of being evil and spells and items can be evil.

Come swim in the evil, it tastes like broken dreams and made of negative energy.

Did I mention the evil?

Because Negative Energy is made of Dead Puppies.

Just about to start a new pathfinder game using the older adventure paths (that were written for 3.5), not sure if this has been asked yet but what xp speed should I be using to make sure that the PCs are actually at the required level at the required time?

Uh, actually, I hated the old Power Attack, and I even used it in a game.

Someone did some pretty crazy math, and found there was a sweet spot to using Power Attack if you knew your own attack bonus and what your opponent's AC was. It's not hard to find that AC number for a monster over a few rounds, and once you do, you could set your Power Attack value to _just_ the right amount to maximize hitting and damage. And yeah, using that made a gigantic difference.

Trouble was, you basically had to carry around a little spreadsheet of crib notes with you, and I hated the fact that my 'doesn't care to bathe, or to think too hard' barbarian really had to do a lot of math in his head if he was going to be effective.

The new Power Attack preserves the spirit of what the feat is supposed to do, and makes choosing to use it rather simpler. I'm in favor.

hear, hear!

I'm going to be cheap and say both.

I was tired of 3.5 and found I was playing it less and less so the rules brought me back, if was while I working with beta I picked up pathfinder and loved the new setting, had I not encountered it I would have most likly just played Scarred Lands again.

I find they come as a very nice package.

I'm gonna wait and see. It works pretty well for 2-handers, and gives one more minor benefit to sticking with your melee class for 20 levels.

That and the extra 20 hp.

I'll be running the new pathfinder next week and I'll be running it from the book, I like the new powerattack, its not pointless anymore as it was only really used after stacking modifers or fighting high level monsters with low AC, alot of the high end stuff has really high AC so Power Attack was never used, it was just seen as a gate-way feat to bigger and better feats.

Under Piazos stewardship, dragon printed an article on 'paladins' of other alignments, just take that article (if you can find it) and just adapt the rules. Basically it boiled down to a slightly different spell list and smite good, not evil.

When I run Ravenloft the party is always human, and I enjoying having them encounter sithcus elven ranger with hatred for humans, it always stings.

I would like to see an adventure path or a set of modules set in a mega-dungeon setting. A full throtle dungeon delve from level 1 to 15.

I second this, something big and epic like temple of elemental evil, in a box set if possible. Something that gets as big an nasty as Castle Maure you did in Dungeon a few years back, I loved that.

1) The removal of Concentration, and the continued existence of Spellcraft.

Not sure if you have bothered to look, concentration is in there but its no longer skill dependent which frees up skill points for casters, how is that a bad thing? Also spellcraft covers so much more than just identifying spells flying at your face.

Pathfinder rocks harder than Metalocalypse, Ted Nuggent, and Manowar holding a benefit concert for PETA and the NRA.

Nothing "SIR" rocks harder than DethKlok, and you should be ashamed to even consider it.

However I really like the balanced classes and races but my biggest improvement was the skill system, a real game killer for my 3.5 game and one of the first things I house ruled to fix.

Given the quality of magic weapons wavered around at end game, 7 attacks at 2d10 damage isnt overpowered. You dont know pain as a GM until a 20th level fighter kills an green wyrm in 2 rounds (by himself) monks wish they could do that.

Why are people so quick to house rule this, my advice is give the books to the players and see what they pick, for most groups your going to see a big take up in the "underpowered race", people need to learn to try the rules before they give them stick, the games not been out long enough for this discussion to carry any merit.

I have very fond memories of playing in FR so I dont like the beating it gets here, for the most part in D&D 2nd and for some of 3rd, FR was the only play to adventure in, sure we could home brew or visit Sigil, Oerth, Ravenloft etc but FR was so cool we never bothered.

However when I wanted to start GMing of course I wanted to do it in FR and was taken aback by the number of material out there and given how t he world was constanly evolving it required a large collection of up to date material to keep i canon, material that was largely out of print :(

As for Glorian, I love the patchwork nature of the world, its supports every fantasy sterotype quite easily while being very intelligent with it. I think the thing that sold me the setting was Geb, which from the outwards appearance was just a country ruled by undead. However looking deeper reveals a very intresting nation ruled by an uncaring tyrant. Normally you would expect that country to be shunded, but Geb has made efforts to be need by its neighbours. Firstly its a very large breadbasket for the region, mindless undead working in fields, not needing the very food they grow, creates a massive surplus of cheap food. Second given the countries proficiency in magic there services are easy to sell and I bet a few nobles have paid large sums to overcome death itself.

So just a small slice of the pie that is Glorian

PS. Sorry for my poor spelling.

Rich2346 wrote:

The bonus is you get your books when it appears other places dont seem to be able to.

Tell me about it. I seriously doubt by now that enough books made it into retail here. I heard that some folks in Germany already have theirs, and all the distributors seem to be out of stock already, so it could be that I get a copy with the next print run, even though I ordered one at my FLGS in June or July. Well, in the meantime I can see if Ulisses really manages to have the translation done by September.

Stefan

Sad but true... I've been trying to get my friends to get their orders in, I dont think they realise the shortage. There are still come copies out there but leg work is requireed.

Fair enough, sounds like you though it through and despite the cost its the best choice for you, well played sir.

To all the UK gamers - Paizo has some Core Rulebooks left after GenCon, this might be your chance to grab it !

sadly the P&P for ordering from Piazo to the UK is quite frankly silly so most dont consider it, this is made worse but the fact we can get deliveries from Chaosium, Noble Knights and Amazon(US) for a fraction of the cost that rubs salt in the wound.

Is there a Paizo UK office by the way? I would love to take out a subscription but once again the P&P makes it impractical.

I don't think that only Esdevium underoredered, but almost everybody did, From Distributors down to Local Stores.

Nope, everybody, including Paizo underestimated the run on that book. I hope that this enthusiasm keeps up and that gamers world wide will order a hell of a big number of copies. Anything to keep Paizo going. ( and maybe in November I get my copy.

Crying.., throwing fits... WHY, WHY, WHY cant it be November already???

Had to correct you but the reports I'm hearing is that the stores have done a fantastic job of drumming up intrest but when they ordered enough copies for everyone intrested plus a few more for the shelves the suppliers are letting them down.

But you are right it does sound like there are simply not enough copies to go around, I understand the desire for Paizo to keep the numbers down, first there is cost and second they are testing the market, under-printing to a business makes sense, however making gamers waiting until November for a reprint is just plain mean, after all if the books sold out you need to get on the phone and make sure more are printed ASAP and keep the book in print.

Ah, so this is happening elsewhere. I picked up my copy from my FLGS just as the owner was unpacking all the copies (our timing is awesome). He was incredibly pissed off as he'd ordered 30 (and triple checked with them days before shipping, as he'd had a load of interest), but Esdevium only sent 8. Since he had 3 definite preorders and 3 of us standing there chomping at the bit to get copies he had only 2 left to put on the shelves. This was Patriot Games in Sheffield, so hardly Manchester or London, but hardly middle-of-nowhere either.

Patriot Games in sheffield nice! I think I was there. To be honest I had a brief stint with Esdevium when I ran a small game shop and I found they had a habit of under estimating the demands of a certain popular product so they ration (rather badly I might add) the good and places like travelling man and leisure games get first dibs due to thier relative customer base.

cpt_machine wrote:

Is this ever going to see print or a pdf only?

There were print copies at GenCon. I believe it was just a limited run for the con and pre-orders, but I recall hearing that it will have a full print run in the fall, releasing in October or November.

Hope it does, looks like it will sell well off the back of the pathfinder name, also I cant stand pdfs, i know alot of people like them but i cant read off a screen, maybe when a good portable pdf reader comes out I will change my mind, until then.

surely there is the demand to keep this in print?

Is this ever going to see print or a pdf only?

I agree that consensus might be hard but I'd like to at least give it a shot. I've DM'd Castles & Crusades and played D&D since the early 80's so I thimk I have a decent grasp of both the history of D&D and an understanding of lite rules systems.

Check out what I have so far and feel free to comment either here or on the messageboard I started for discussing this PF-Lite as I'm referring to it.

I would seek permission from Paizo before publishing such a document, this goes to all those above who have had the same idea, if your going to use the Pathfinder name you really need to ask the owners of that name, even if your just sticking it on your own website for people to download and uploading it to Lulu.com is a massive no-no.

If you want to make your own rules and classes thats cool, you just to need to make sure you include the open gaming licence legal stuff at the back.

You all are missing the point, after years of poor diets and exercise Piazo wants us fighting fit, lifting the book for every rule clarification is like 10 push ups, you get fit while gaming... genious.

cpt_machine wrote:

joela wrote:

vagrant-poet wrote:

...and its so rarely going to feature in the AP....

Adventure Path? An AP based on psionics? Now that would interest me.

That would be very intresting, however I heard that paizo were going to do Psionics in the future, did I hear wrong?

I was at the Paizo Chat last night.. and I asked James because they have scheduled in 2010..

1.) GameMastery Book
2.) Bestiary 2
3.) Advanced Players Handbook

..all of those three 3 rule books in 2010... would we see Psionics from Paizo in 2011?

He said not very likely. Mind you, as he often reminds me, that is always subject to change.

But I walked away from that with the understanding that there was likely to be no psionics in 2010 or 2011.

Seems like there is a niche there to be filled with anybody with the ambition and desire to fill it.

Well at least he's honest and your right no point rushing out a product when with the open gaming licence someone else can do it justice.

Doodpants wrote:

Both amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com list August 19 as the release date. I'm guessing that there's something about how distribution works that causes these online retailers to get these books later than everyone else. Or perhaps Paizo has intentionally delayed the release date for these online stores so as not to pull sales away from game stores?

No, this hasn't got anything to do with Paizo delaying anything. It's apparently customary for Amazon to release new books on the following Wednesday after the actual release. Vic Wertz said something to that effect elsewhere.

I could be proved wrong but I've been informed that Amazon.co.uk simply havent gotten any of the 2000 units they ordered. This is one of the many reasons I never use them, Amazon have never been upfront with me about anything. While its nice to have cheaper books it really does harm the FLGS, this time the FLGS has come through and I have my pathfinder while (as it appears) Amazon have still yet to dispatch them.

vagrant-poet wrote:

...and its so rarely going to feature in the AP....

Adventure Path? An AP based on psionics? Now that would interest me.

That would be very intresting, however I heard that paizo were going to do Psionics in the future, did I hear wrong?

I do think it was a bad choice to allow specialists to cast spells from opposed schools off of scrolls and wands.

Maybe but it casting from scrolls or wands is highly ineffective compared to casting from memory, however if its an opposed school it does cost twice as much effort, while you can ask for 2 charges per casting on a wand you cant do the same for scrolls (increased cast time maybe?)

Also it means that the wizard is forced to find these items in treasure or pay for their manufacture.

Actually people are. A few had said during the Beta that the paladin being able to gain such bonuses with two weapons was overkill. But rather than change that, they made smite last even longer.

How many players on this forum "whined" when 4th Edition was announced, long before any rule changes were publically announced? Not all changes requiring playtesting to see their effects. If I house-ruled that fighters gain a +20 bonus to their damage rolls every level, I could easily just say "play test it" to anyone willing to argue as well. While the smite isn't as extreme as my example, you get the picture, it is possible to see problems with rules before playing, so don't act like it isn't.

Thanks for taking part in the Beta, thanks to people like you we have a nice rounded game, sadly your observation that Smite was overpowered was sadly drowned out by the hundreds of people who compared the ability to mass-feats(fighters) or rage(barbarians) and found the rule lacking. Now we have an ability that allows paladins to go toe to toe with the big bads of the Pathfinder/D&D world. Something they couldnt do as well as others until now.

Sadly your +20 damage fighter/playtest example misses the point, we ACTUALLY did the play test, what we hold in our hands is the product of input from some of the best games writers in the business backed up by thousands of suggestions and reports from players around the world. Does that mean that your paladin was overpowered in your game, maybe? But the reason why playtest have to be more than one group is to see how different GM and players approch the same rules set.

Granted there is a certain amount of being able to predict how a rule will react with the rest of the game (thats how Beta was written) but again your example shows the errors of extremes. We saw some classes get massive improvements and now they have been toned down to bring them in line with other classes, the paladin in beta was hardly changed from 3.5 and suffered because of it, the extra damage is welcome at my table and it seems piazos writing staff agree.

To conclude, if you dont like it, house rule it. That keeps the more creative people happy. The rules arent going to change anymore any time soon.

With all due respect, I have a Paladin and Barbarian (both 12th level) in my party now. It's true that the Paladin rocks when facing his preferred opponents, but only than. Also, in terms of raw damage against multiple opponents, Barbarian fares much better (criticals plus higher strength score).

Key points one has to remember when building Barbarian:
- ability bonuses are of morale type now, feel free to use magic items
- use your great mobility to your advantage - Power Attack, Cleave, Vital Strike are your friends
- Strength Surge, Fearless Rage and Clear Mind are there to make sure you don't get eliminated

Given these, it's no wonder that our Barbarian is like a small tornado, dishing between 40 and 120 points per single attack (depends on whether he gets to do a critical). Yes, Paladin can overtake him in a prolonged face-to-face showdown against BBEG, but while dealing with crowds or non-outsider targets, it's the Barbarian who steals the spotlight.

Regards,
Ruemere

Thanks for this report, it shows the issues that paizos website suffers from at the moment, no one is playing the game enough yet to really comment on the changes. Its nice to see the people (above) actual use the rules instead of crying about changes.

At least this is isnt the Cleric forum post, those guys can whine. What is funny to me is the amount of people who a) havernt got the new rulebook yet feel they know enough to comment & b) havernt played the new ruleset yet.

I only have the first on but it was chock full of monsters that never made the cut to 3rd edition from second, they do have a very second edition feel to them too and are very creative.

Went once years and years ago, sadly it will be a fair few years before I can go again unless the location changes.

I will be there for sure, I love big cons but with GenCon being as far south in the UK as humanly possible I am unable to attend that. Should be a good year to butt up with the UK Games Expo.

I'll be putting up a review when I get my hands on it next week, until then I did already do a review of the beta.

www.youtube.com/cptmachine

I wonder how long it will take to incorporate all this new material into the Archives of Nethys?

Not only a minimum character count, but the ancient arts of 'sentences', 'paragraphs', reasonably proper 'punctuation' and 'spelling' would not be too far afield as a reasonable ask.

Just placing a minimum character count will get

........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ..........................................................................

Style reviews that do not help the buyer.

The trick is coming up with something that is easy to program into a system that is meant to detect such things but hard for a human being to deliberately subvert without adversely affecting people attempting to post good faith reviews. I suspect that would be fairly difficult.

Rysky wrote:

Rip Tanner, formerly Desna’s Avatar, formerly Stunt Monkeys (note the extra s), formerly a half dozen other aliases has been banned multiple times from the Paizo forums for repugnant views and attempts to impersonate other posters. They have the telltale sign of spam-liking every single salty or horrible post on the site, unnervingly right after it was posted usually, which definitely feels like bot behavior.

Back when they actually wrote reviews they were blatant in their misogyny, queer phobia, and racism, and would also blatantly lie about wording and events in the books in order to justify their reviews (a common refrain from their reviews was “minus 1 star for Paizo’s usual brand of feminism”).

Good God.

Now the posts I made that they favorited feel tainted.

There is a logical fallacy there. This poster's opinions obviously should be considered worthless (having no information value), not 100% guaranteed to be wrong. Otherwise, I could get anyone following this logic to commit suicide by pointing out that some repugnant person is in favor of breathing, eating, drinking, and other activities that keep a person alive.

is it just me or does that half-orc Dromaar look a bit more elvish than expected?

I think orcs are also supposed to have pointed ears, but the artwork of the orc and the dromaar is inconsistent on that point.

David knott 242 wrote:

Aristophanes wrote:

If it is Asmodeus, was he wise enough to put contingency clauses in all his contracts, or was he arrogant enough to believe he was invincible.

What deity would plan for his own demise? He certainly would not want to make things easier for the survivors if something did happen to him.

A deity who knows (or has sufficient reason to believe) that their demise is unavoidable and has goals they want achieved even if they cannot see it done themselves.

I mean, it's easy enough to imagine a good deity defending some dangerous artifact to put plans in place to have said artifact moved to the protection of an ally in the event of their death, or kept out of reach of those who would misuse it, at a minimum.

If the deity in question is well known as a Machiavellian schemer and they don't have plans specifically designed to go into motion upon their death, then what are they even doing?

I didn't mean to say that Asmodeus made no plans for the possibility of his death -- but I am sure that any such plans would be to screw over the survivors, not ensure a smooth transition of power.

If it is Asmodeus, was he wise enough to put contingency clauses in all his contracts, or was he arrogant enough to believe he was invincible.

What deity would plan for his own demise? He certainly would not want to make things easier for the survivors if something did happen to him.

Of course, a natural thought would be whether consistency with the Starfinder setting would require the removal of Torag and/or Rovagug, as they are the only two deities specifically absent from that setting. But I have always assumed that they went wherever Golarion did and thus are most likely still alive.

Or can dead deities be brought back to life? The loss of power by some of the core deities in Starfinder could be the result of a temporary death.

And a posting that the end of shipping has been delayed could save them some e-mails/tickets. I have gone with (and suggested that others go with) assuming that end of shipping happens on time and thus lack of an order by the end of the last scheduled day of shipping indicates a problem and thus send an e-mail to Customer Service at that time if I haven't received a shipping e-mail. Obviously, if there is a posting in the appropriate thread in the Announcements forum about a delay in shipping, I would hold off on doing that as long as the revised end of shipping date remains in the future.

What's especially curious about this one is the final line, no longer mentioning the OGL or The World's Oldest Roleplaying Game.

Given recent events and announcements, I take it this one might no longer be under the Open Game License (but presumably not under the ORC yet either)?

I seriously doubt that part 3 of an adventure path would be licensed differently than parts 1 and 2, so almost certainly this one would have to still be under the OGL (as I think someone would have said something if part 1 was under ORC or no license).

At least it is predictable now.

IIRC, Michael Moorcock called what is being called "neutrality" here "balance". I like "balance" better in this context. Even after we get rid of "alignment" as a rules element.

The two concepts really should be differentiated. Actively trying to maintain a balance between order and chaos is a very different thing from being indifferent to that conflict.

keftiu wrote:

William Ronald wrote:

Will the panels that some employers are participating in be available on YouTube after Gen Con? They sound very interesting as well.

The VODs are all up on Twitch.

On YouTube as well.

Where are they? I haven't been able to find recordings of any of these three panels:

ORC License—Q&A ft. Erik Mona
Learn about ORC License! We'll explain how game systems are licensed and evolve under the ORC, answer questions about implementation and limitations, and speculate on the future.

WTF Happened With Dungeons & Dragons’ OGL ft. Jim Butler
Journalist Lin Codega and a panel of experts (including Jim Butler and Ryan Dancey) break down what happened with the OGL 1.1 and the fan backlash around Wizards of the Coast.

Everything You Wanted to Know About Tabletop Media But Were Too Afraid To Ask ft. Aaron Shanks
A panel of media creators from both board games and tabletop RPG discussing how we got into our areas, how we work with publishers, and some of the challenges we deal with in the industry. Plus a Q&A.

I have noticed that prior failed attempts to download a PDF can interfere with getting the corrected version even after the problem is corrected. My shipment went out yesterday and I had no problem with the PDFs. What is needed is to somehow break the link to the bad copy, which is the general intent behind all that advice to clear your cache and so on.

Have a ticket in, but have a feeling my watch will be extended with the 'back ordered' ruby phoenix mini's attached to my sub auth :P

That one proved easy in my case, as they got back to me on Monday (I submitted the ticket late Friday) with a corrected order. So you should get a quick turnaround on this one.

Not exactly a book, but this seems to be the closest to the right place to put links to a nice short story about a girl orc who moved into a modern human neighborhood. Or would Off-Topic Discussions be better?

Reddit version

Youtube version, narrated by Agro Squirrel Narrates.

Nishah Lharast wrote:

I have a question,

I just received my Rage of elements pdf and I went to peak at the kineticist before work. The first ability listed is Attribute Boosts, this gives "In addition to what you get from your class at 1st level, you have four free boosts to different attribute modifiers".

I understand this is language relating to the ORC documents but until we see the character creation guidelines in the new Core Rulebook I feel a little lost. Do these replace the 4 free boosts character creation had, moving them to the class entry

I think so, or else it's just redundant language from Player Core 1 reminding people how Attributes work.

It looks bad no matter how it is supposed to work. The class level of attribute generation would then work out to "pick one stat not to boost (which can't be the class's prime stat) and add one boost to all five of the others."

I attempted to review this product but lost it to that nasty "backtracked too far" bug. I will be trying again when I have the time, probably some time tomorrow. Final conclusion: Imperfect but highly recommended for PF1 players, 4/5 stars (would be half a star higher or 9/10 if such an option were available).

As a bug for the authors to fix, do a search for "ClassPotRight". I eventually figured out that "PotRight" was supposed to be a superscript referencing Paizo's Path of the Righteous Player Companion, but in the existing text it is on the same level as the rest of the text around it.

Just purchased your pdf, but I'm having issues downloading. It lists as being damaged or incomplete. As this has never been an issue before, I was curious as to what can be done.

I have had that issue before and had it again with this item. I e-mailed Customer Service about it, and it appears to have been fixed. Click on where it says "Problems downloading this file? Click here" and you should be able to get a good download now.

Don't free RPG day modules usually get a public PDF release like a month after the event?

That is what I thought. Which makes it puzzling that they would be listed in this thread.

In my campaign, a major Melnibonean NPC found his way to Golarion and was quickly captured by drow and held by them for a couple of centuries.

Needless to say, nothing from that campaign will ever be published, for obvious reasons.

One interesting subversion would be to have an adventure set in the Darklands under the Mwangi Expanse where the party encounters pale skinned drow, thereby reversing the light/dark dichotomy we see in more Europe-like settings.

Too bad that Paizo does not have any incentive like they do for physical products (freeing up warehouse space) to clear out PDFs.

So that would mean the only sale we can count on is the annual December-January holiday coupon, which does apply to Paizo PDFs.

Terevalis Unctio of House Mysti wrote:

Interesting. Paizo has no problems using intellect devourers who appear in the D and D movie and are very TSR/WOTC monsters, dating back to at least 1E but no to the drow.

Isn't the ORC version of the intellect devourer a totally different monster? Like it's not a brain on legs anymore at all, just a different monster (I think it's like a big worm) that eats your brain and steals your body?

I don't think people would have liked it if we changed "Drow" into a kind of subterranean troll (like their pre-D&D folklore origins) just so we could have the word "Drow" in the ORC.

Not to mention that a troll would be getting too far away from what gamers think of as drow. There are many other generic names that could be used that would summon up drow-like images. For the Golarion setting, "Darklands elves" would be an obvious choice.

Is anyone else still waiting for their shipping or should I be worried now we are 2 business days beyond the estimate?

Since no one from Paizo has made a post saying that the end of shipping has been delayed, I would recommend sending an e-mail to customer.service@paizo.com inquiring about your order.

AD&D 2E had a solution to the issue of drow skin color that Paizo has already partially implemented.

The Mwangi Expanse has dark skinned elves that are not at all evil. A few elves descended from Mwangi Expanse elves may have descended into the Darklands, where they became the drow. So why didn't their skin color become lighter? If you look at the selective pressure that drove humans to develop lighter skin (giving those humans a better ability to synthesize vitamin D in areas with less sunlight than the tropics), that pressure does not exist underground -- so drow skin color, if it evolves at all, would do so in a more or less random way.

In other words, the drow did not become dark skinned as a result of any "curse" -- they simply retained the skin color of their ancestors. And that would imply that drow in the Darklands under Arcadia or Tian Xia would probably have noticeably lighter skin colors, as their ancestors are less likely to have originated in the Mwangi Expanse or a similar region with dark skinned elves.

There is an error on the "Upcoming products in this subscription" section of this page. It lists several items as "in stock", but as of today all of these items are future releases.

I predict no more easy dipping into Champion for heavy armor and the champion's reaction.

We really need a better way to add heavy armor proficiency to a character than "getting religion" anyway.

Amazing how all edition wars start to look the same, right down to the inevitable "no one is coming to your house to steal your books" straw man.

Given WotC's reaction to somebody who bought Magic cards before the street dates (sending Pinkerton thugs to intimidate him into returning them), we can no longer be sure that even something that far fetched would never happen.

I am hoping that Paizo never does anything comparable to that.

David knott 242 wrote:

I was really looking forward to that Shadowfinder that Owen K.C. Stephens was working on. Maybe Paizo had him stop because something like it was in their future plans?

As far as I'm aware, Owen was never contacted by Paizo to not do Shadowfinder. I think the stall was more about his health, which hasn't been great for a while. He's currently diagnosed with Stage II Colon Cancer and there are two different PDF Bundles (Bundle #1 and Bundle #2) up to help him try and cover the costs.

I asked him a few months ago, and he said he's very intrigued by Starfinder Enhanced and is looking forward to seeing how a new crop of designers moved the game forward.

I had already picked up Bundle #1 and was considering posting about it. Thanks for the heads up on Bundle #2.

Update: It looks like the problem has been fixed.

And it is a buffet that hasn't opened yet. Its value will depend on who publishes things under it, as well as how well they protect the license from being maintained by bad actors.

The OGL 1.0a is also a great buffet that is already open and has a great selection available, but its landlord turned nasty once and may do so again at some future date. But it may be the only choice if you wish to use open game content from a publisher who is no longer in business to switch over to the newer establishment.

Something that should have been mentioned at the beginning of this thread is that hearing aids do nothing at all for people who are completely unable to hear -- they just help people with very poor hearing. Applied to vision, the equivalent question would be "Why do glasses and contact lenses exist when we have Lasik surgery?" As a person who wears glasses, my answer would be that I prefer the slight inconvenience of wearing glasses to do tasks such as driving (and, in the past, reading -- although this seems to be less necessary as the years go by) to the small but very real risk of permanent blindness from surgery or contact lenses. And, of course, many people who might be willing to risk such surgery cannot afford to do so.

In summary: Having a choice of solutions to various handicaps and physical limitations is a good thing. Not everyone will go for the total solution even if it becomes cheap and safe enough that most people would be willing to go for it.

I think AI generated art is in the same position as downloaded music was about 30 years ago, and for the exact same reason: lack of IP protection. Originally, downloading music was considered wrong in general because it was inevitably a form of piracy -- all legitimate music sales were via physical media. Nowadays, most music sales are via legitimate sales of downloads.

So I would humbly suggest that Paizo's current position should not be a permanent and unchangeable policy. Once protections are in place to protect the IP of the source material used by the AI and to establish that AI art generation tools can be made into tools of an artist rather than ways to bypass the creative process entirely, a revisit of that position may be in order. Of course, given the precedent that I cited, it is likely that the time for that revisit may still be years in the future.

Hm. I didn't get a figurine. :-(

Are you sure? That table is pretty small and easy to miss. I actually didn't find mine originally. For my recent shipment, I removed the items I intended to keep and passed the box with its contents on to my GM friend. He found the table mini.

Anyone else have their order canceled? I got the Humble Bundle for Abomination Vaults and figured I would check on my order. Now it has red lettering stating I canceled my order today… I did not.

At the very least, they should have said that Paizo and not you canceled that order.

I probably agreed with much of that posting when it first went up, but for most of January, anything more than a few days old was already out of date. But now things have stabilized, at least until WotC announces their licensing plans for One D&D. And that, now, cannot possibly be worse than the 4E GSL, to which the proper response would be a polite "No thank you" rather than rage at their attempted betrayal.

One way to tell that you are a long time loyal customer of Paizo: Those Humble Bundles are never a good deal for you.

It is a pity that non-customers who want to get into Paizo's latest game system are unlikely to be frequenting these forums at the right time -- but something tells me that this time may be different....

If they still have the Pocket edition of the Core Rulebook and you play your games anywhere but your own home, I would definitely recommend getting that version for convenience.

Excellent news. Of course it'll be interesting to see if the ORC goes anywhere now.

Only the urgency to get something out ASAP should go away. Paizo and its many partners should take the extra time they now have to slowly and carefully put together the best open license that they can.

Paul Ryan wrote:

Good news at this point, but I won't be surprised if this all happens again two more D&D editions down the road...

Copyright law is primarily statutory, and I believe that the statute has the OGL 1.0a expiring in 2035 if not renewed. Since it's a perpetual license all the stuff published before then is in the clear but something would need to be done to let post-2035 material use it I believe.

It is the copyright on the license that expires, not the license itself. That just means that WotC loses a bit of protection against shenanigans that other companies might do with their own slight variations on OGL 1.0a in the public domain. WotC would probably be on better legal ground than they were on their de-authorization attempt to claim that any version of the OGL that did not originate with WotC was never authorized for the purposes referenced in OGL 1.0a. Everyone else wanting to publish their own open license should be on solid ground as long as they do not try to claim that their license has anything to do with that OGL.

I've not had (my brand new renew) subscription shipping email yet, but looking at the Q1 stock announcement, I can see why!

More to the point -- Paizo makes a monthly pass through your subscriptions and sidecarted items to create subscription orders. If you just started a subscription, it would have missed the January pass, and you should be getting some stuff in February. The selling out of this print run of the Core Rulebook shouldn't affect subscription shipping, as the PF rulebook line is well past the point where the Core Rulebook is a current or upcoming item.

If you can't enforce a mask mandate to play, can you instead declare that the chronicles for anyone unmasked get 0 gold and no xp?

I suspect that such a deliberate conflict with the way Gen Con is running their convention is likely to create no end of problems. At the very least, you would want to bring masks to hand out to people who show up without one, and wonder how much protection they provide when anyone coming to your game would have passed through mobs of unmasked people to get to your event.

And an open gaming license is specifically designed to facilitate sharing of game mechanics in published products while enabling the original authors of a gaming book to protect things like setting based IP.

The subscriptions have no monthly fees, and they will not get you the core rulebook now (as they were released a long time ago). Details of each subscription can be found here. You can generally choose whether you want your subscription to start with the most recently released product or with the next product to be released.

In short, if you buy a subscription, you pay nothing immediately. However, once per month, Paizo builds a subscription order for you by going through each of your subscriptions and adding to the order any product(s) from that subscription that is being released that month. They ping your credit card to confirm ability to pay and send you an e-mail detailing what is in your order, giving you the chance to check it for problems and ask Customer Service to fix it if necessary. Then, some time in the next couple of weeks or so, the folks in the warehouse actually bill your credit card and ship your order. For most of the subscriptions, this causes a PDF of anything that was shipped from that subscription to be deposited in your digital content for you to download at your leisure.

thejeff wrote:

Leon Aquilla wrote:

Based on the interview w/ Erik Mona, there will be no clauses in the ORC license itself, but there may be clauses related to such things in the SRD caches that give you permission to use IP from various franchises.

Even that seems like it could lead to serious problems. If there's a mechanism in the SRD caches to restrict use beyond the actual ORC license, isn't that just a way to change the licensing without changing the license?

The more I think about this, the less I like it.

At least with a morality clause in the license, you know where you stand. With this, every publisher gets to add their own morality clause and have it enforced under ORC terms.

You absolutely know some will use this to ban queer or trans content made with their material. Or to block "wokeness" in general.

So let them. I imagine they will have a tough time hiring creative types and/or persuading people to buy their products if they can get them made. If for some reason they sell really well, that would mean that social attitudes have changed radically from what they are today, and nothing we say today would matter in that hypothetical distant future.

Remember, all anyone had to do to tank sales from the nu-TSR Star Frontiers was post excerpts of its racist portions. The free market did the rest.

The main risk to publishers is having their brands tainted by material published by their licensees, but a big requirement of the OGL and probably the ORC as well is the inability to claim compatibility with the source product in the absence of a secondary license that allows it. The place for a morality clause (preferably one that is clear in intent and that can be modified as social attitudes evolve) is in said secondary license.

Agreed about Calistria. I just looked up the deity entry in the Archives of Nethys, and it was immediately obvious that her anathema mostly limits her edicts -- basically, not letting yourself be consumed by the effects of performing her edicts. Calistria never struck me as a deity who believes in moderation.

And it is fairly easy to sort by date added (for when I just bought a PDF or my monthly subscription shipped) or by date last updated (when I know or suspect that one or more PDFs were updated). In all other cases, I would be looking for specific words anyway.

Will Paizo no longer sell Pathfinder 1e if Wizards goes back to OGL 1.1? I know Wizards backed off but I don't trust them as far as I can throw them.

I think Wizards realizes how problematic it would be for them to sue anyone over already published content, and Paizo stopped publishing PF1 content years ago, so I don't foresee any lawsuit between Paizo and Wotc over PF1. So WotC basically "won" because they seemingly convinced Paizo to stop publishing under OGL 1.0a as quickly as possible. As a result, I would imagine any lawsuit over the supposed de-authorization would most likely involve WotC and a small, weak company that they imagine cannot put up a fight but in fact has the full support of Paizo and others.

I am betting that Dead God's Hand will be the final PF2 release before PF3 is announced. The thing that might convince me otherwise would be if Paizo actually offered to take that bet.

There is one way Paizo can be involved: When they created Pathfinder 1e, they realized that they needed art for the new book but couldn't use the art from WotC's D&D 3.5e books -- so they had new art for everything commissioned.

So if you want to use Paizo's art rather than WotC's, Paizo may have something to say about that, and it probably won't exactly match what WotC says about their art.