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On alternate Thursdays starting after Dragon Con (09/04) I will be running a Pathfinder Beta adaptation of the Second Darkness AP. If anyone is interested please contact me at david~at~crosswiredmind~dot~com I am not sure how many seats will be open but there will be at least one. EDIT: we play in King of Prussia and the games typically run from 6:30ish to 11:30ish
I really don't like 3e. Really. I promised I would never play the game again ... ever. I am headed for an epic fail. I love Pathfinder, Galorian, and the Pathfinder Society. I so hate you guys. I really really do. You made a game, a setting, mods, and accessories that are so good and so compelling that I have no choice but to play them. My wife actually yelled at me for spending too much money at my FLGS yesterday. Well, by yelled I mean that she gave me one of those looks. So what did I do to make up for it - I went online today and spent more money so I could wear my faction shirt to DragonCon. You are making spend spousal point like crazy. By the end of this year I will have no cred left at all. And how do I explain this to the folks on the 4e board? How do I tell them that the whole "I hate 3e" really means "I hate 3e unless it has anything to do with Paizo". Y'all just suck for making my life complicated. Oh, and don't stop cause this kind of pain is well worth it.
From another thread ... Let's see.. i think the word I'm looking for is b&@@##*!? What IS it with you guys and the need to lie constantly to 'prove your point' about 4E's greatness all the time? Don't you realize that it just makes 4E look worse overall? I am more than willing to discuss 4e with you or anyone else that wants to post here but I am really tired of being called a liar, practicing intellectual dishonesty, and worse. This board was turning a corner and heading for a much more civil tone when this crap started to fly. Oh, and BTW this insult was hurled at both David Marks and me.
enworld took a huge step up in the moderation of its boards ... So for the next month, to allow people to get used to trying things out, no edition wars threads please. No threads where you justify what you hate about 3e/4e and why 4e/3e is so much better. Especially no threads about "I think that the people (who don't think like me) think (this straw man) and I want to talk to them about it". No advocacy threads where you try to convince "the other side". That sounds like a great idea to me.
The sniping is getting worse. Misinformation, disinformation, 4evil, kewl, munckin, creatively-challenged, MMORPG, sheeple, yada, yada, yada. The signal to noise ratio is dropping rapidly. Any civil dialogue is drowned out quickly. It seems that this board in unwanted by the Paizo community so why not just shut it down?
Another odd sentiment I have heard expressed here is that sales of 4e are inflated because of those folks who, out of morbid curiosity, ordered the books just to see how bad they really are. Given the sales figures I truly doubt that the morbid curiosity crowd is much more that a small fraction of the overall sales. You do not crack the top 10 on Amazon because people are curious about your product.
I have heard from a more than a few people here that Wizards has abandoned their fans with 4e. How is that even vaguely possible given the dramatic pace of sales - outstripping even WotC's predictions. The implication that 4e does not appeal to existing players is not born out by the sales figures an the general enthusiasm on many online fora (Paizo being a clear exception). Heck - my FLGS has a long preorder list even though they are not discounting the books. This remids me of the Dilbert cartoon where the pointy haired boss goes to see Ming the web designer to tell her that everyone hates the website. She asks if he talked to the monks in Tibet. He says no - well he does not like it. Ming replies - so you confused one person for everyone on the planet. Just because a number of individuals here on these boards believes that WotC has abandoned its fanbase does not mean that they have. Sales of 4e are set to surpass 3e and the game has not even been released.
One of the weak points in 3.5 was the ability to stack all kinds of classes together in strange ways. Giving humans a favored class choice at 1st level will help but it seems that there could be some big problems. For example - one of my players looked over the alpha classes and the way skills work and came to the conclusion that every player should start out as a rogue. It gives you eight skills that will always grow no matter what other class you take. A human ROG1/WIZ19 would be more capable than a WIZ20. One idea that we came up with was to create a Level 0 starting package that can only be taken if you create a character in that particular class. That package could contain things like rage, trapfinding, cantrips, orisons, and the like. It would make your choice of 1st level meaningful and it could help to avoid all of the ex-monks, ex-palidins, and ex-whatevers running around because they were frontloaded classes. It would also solve the sudden barbarian syndrome where an otherwise civilized PC suddenly finds their inner child can throw a wicked tantrum. Regardless of how it gets patched I think that this is a flaw in 3.5 even though it is also a real strength - it just needs a tweak IMHO.
One of my players took exception to "sense motive" as a part of "deception". He tends to play NG and LG and dislikes the notion that he would need to learn to lie to be able to spot one. His clerics and paladins typically have both diplomacy and sense motive at decent levels and he uses it as a great vehicle for roleplaying. Perhaps "sense motive" could be a part of both diplomacy and deception.
So I took the alpha to my WFRP game last night to get some impressions from my group. The first thing that someone pointed out as a problem - what is to prevent a cleric from turning when there are no undead present to be turned. Essentially turning attempts are not just mass heals that also hurt undead. His suggestion was to key the heal to the damage done. So when a cleric does X damage to undead creatures it also heals X HP to the living. The second thing he pointed out was more of a pet peeve that a rules issue but why do all clerics turn undead? Do all gods hate undead so much that they give their clerics the ability to turn undead. Shouldn't the ability to channel positive energy have an effect that is more in line with you god and his or her domains? Oh, and why would a neutral god allow you to either turn or rebuke undead? Wouldn't a god have one take on undead and all clerics of that god would follow it?
4E is on its way. You may play it, or you might not. You may love it, or you might hate it. But it is coming, and at some point this forum needs to shift from debate to discuss. I don't see anyone complaining about 3.5 over in the d20/OGL forum. I see a bunch of folk talking about the game they love to play. This place (the 4E forum) needs to shift to that kind of dynamic at some point. So when can we accept that 4E is what it is (like it or not) and those that want to play it deserve a space where they can talk about it freely without the sniping and rancor.
His blog post is quite interesting but it was the bit down in the comments that expressed my feelings about 3.5 and the hope that 4E would fix things: I'm a huge believer in roleplaying. I don't want my D&D to be pure combat simulation. But I've also, after the mechanics glut of 3.5, come to realize that if something doesn't have a mechanical impact, it doesn't need to appear in the mechanics--and that doesn't make it any less real to the character. Roleplayers will roleplay because they want to; people who don't want to RP won't no matter what the rules say. You can read this at EN World or at his live journal
This I like very very much ...
I understand that many people are upset about 4E relegating the gnome to the Monster Manual. I also understand that some people love to play them. I am not interested in a debate about gnomes - I just want to know this ... How many of you have a Gnome PC among you top played characters? My current Living Greyhawk line up: 1. Dwarf - Holy Liberator 16
It seems to me that the folks who do not want to see 4E come into being, or simply do not want to by into it, play with a group of friends on a regular basis and do not play much outside of that group. For them the change is more about a threat to their group dynamics then it is about the actual change itself. I play with a group of friends on a regular basis, but I also play a large number of games in the RPGA ... probably upwards of 40 to 50 times a year (some years even more than that). I play with complete strangers quite frequently. When an RPGA mod is run the players have an expectation that the rules will be followed so that each table is the same rules experience. In home games the rules can change by consensus. House variations can and do crop up all over the place. A great example of this has been the discussion on power attack. Some folks do not see why I think it is a problem. It would seem that they don't play with people they don't know. It seems that the folks that do not see 3.5 as broken are the ones that play in a more intimate setting where the rules can flex, change, or simply be ignored. I tend to play in an environment where all of the rules apply all of the time. That is what leads me to see them as fundamentally flawed in many respects.
I read plenty of posts that say, in effect, 4E is D&D in name only. That got me to wax existential for a moment. What is D&D? What is the essence of D&Dness? Why is 3.5 considered D&D and 4E not? Is it mechanics? Is it flavor? Is it some secret sauce? Thoughts? NOTE: In the spirit of full disclosure I believe 4E is as much D&D as the original 3 books in the little wood grain box ... and yes it was mock wood before it was white. |
