hmarcbower's page

I would love to spend money at the Paizo site when I want to buy a PDF, but you don't accept Paypal. I'm in Canada (you know, that far-away country), so don't tell me the Paypal Debit Card will work, because it won't. Also you don't accept money order or cheques for non-domestic shipping (not a problem for PDFs) or for things that are not physical (there's the problem with PDFs).

So... I guess I ask again - a question that was asked probably in the first week of you guys starting to sell things from your website and several times since, all those years ago... why the heck can't you figure out the Paypal thing? Or find a third-party vendor who has figured it out (like, say, drivethrurpg).

So I'm liking the idea of this mega-adventure but I'm wondering if someone else has already done some work to fit it into Golarion? If so I would love to hear what you've done to make it work in. :)

OK, the running blog is cool, but someone has to take Lisa's camera away from her, adjust the settings, and hand it back to her. Every picture she's posted is somewhere between badly out of focus and nearly unrecognizable. :)

Excellent idea and well executed for the blog during GenCon - congrats to all involved!

Is there something wrong with the RSS feeds the last few days? I'm getting most of mine timing out. I just got them all set up recently and have reconciled this as the only way to actually keep track of the threads I want... but now I can't reliably get the feeds to update. Is there something specific going on, or ...?

Preferrably reverse date order would be useful. And if it could indicate what messageboard section it's actually in, that would also be terribly useful. But having them in date order (or at least having the option to sort by date, instead of... well, I can't see any order at all for them at the moment) would be the most useful. Newest first, of course.

So I'm thinking, as I read through the various threads here, that much of the discussion regarding the alpha rules, and even playtest reports, may be effectively useless until the beta rules are released.

Pathfinder RPG has great momentum at the moment - you have the whole Paizonian community behind you (save a few people who are less than fully gruntled), and we're all gung-ho to playtest and give feedback, as requested. But for the next month and a half, that's going to be mostly useless. Who knows what has been fixed/changed in the beta that was in the alpha? I mean, we heard within a few days of alpha 3 being released that Combat Feats were not going to make it to the beta... that has a profound impact on even bothering to playtest combat where those feats are involved. And since everything is so tightly intertwined in combat, it could render useless any reports that involve the fighting classes who might take such feats.

Now, to the point of my message: I would highly recommend releasing the PDF of the beta rules now. You're going to do it anyway, for free, as you said. I could definitely see waiting for a set release date if you didn't plan on giving away the PDF. But given the situation that exists, I think that more harm could be done by just sitting on this for 6 weeks or so while people are not really sure what rules they're trying to playtest are actually going to still be the same or even exist in the beta rules. Should it occur that a playtest group or three find some serious flaw, or Jason thinks of a way that could greatly improve some section of the rules, there's no reason not to issue an addendum/errata/update after the print beta rules have been released (or concurrent with the print beta rules, whatever).

I just think that the delay will cause a lot of people to just stop paying attention between now and GenCon, and perhaps focus their attention elsewhere while they wait. And I'd hate to see that happen. Obviously you won't lose everyone during this period, but with the gaming industry the way it is right now it's probably best to have as many folks on-board and with continuous excitement as possible without "limbo" downtimes.

Just a thought... what do you think?

Is anyone currently working on this or planning to work on this? We're going to be starting this right after we finish RotRL (which won't likely be until the end of August, I think), and our characters are now pretty much Pathfinderized. It would just take tweaking the encounters and NPCs a bit, but if someone has already done some work he or she would like to share, I'd be happy to share the work I do on this as well. :)

I went merrily along to purchase my Pathfinder Companion subscription and lo and behold it only takes credit cards (and only Visa and Mastercard, at that)... why not PayPal?

There are, undoubtedly, folks from Canada who order things from here. :) I would really like to pick up a subscription to the Pathfinder Companion series that is about to start (I could always just ask my FLGS to order them in, then I don't have to pay shipping and they're generally the same price - this is what I've been doing with other Pathfinder books I've wanted - but I feel like I should give Paizo some of my shekels directly for the great work they're doing with Pathfinder and Pathfinder RPG). However, what I don't want to do is give more money to my government (once they learn the value of a dollar I might change my mind ;). Anyway, on to my question... does anyone who gets things shipped from Paizo to a Canadian address ever have to worry about duty/customs/other border fees? I know these are out of the control of Paizo, so I thought I'd ask some of the faithful Canadian customers what their experiences have been.

Thanks!

I know it's a free product, but I suspect that other products are in the same boat. I have downloaded the PRPG alphas, and printed them out for my group (I have access to a very inexpensive colour laser copier/printer). However, without a spacer page at the beginning the front of the page ends up on the back and the back ends up on the front. I tried to just insert a page into the document and for some reason that is locked down - I can neither extract pages nor insert pages. This seems a rather draconian bit of security on a free product, but I imagine you probably just run them through the exact same process as your non-free material, so I understand. However, for Alpha 3, I'd request that a spacer page be added in (right after the cover) that would allow for printing the whole document without messing up the front/back page issues.

Oh, and I couldn't just print starting at the page after the cover (which would have solved the issue as well) because I couldn't even get it to be the start of the print range. The page was named Table of Contents... and it refused to accept either print range "2-126" (because page 2 was technically the 3rd page of the PDF, but the 2nd page of the publication as the cover didn't count) or "Table of Contents - 126" because it didn't recognize that, somehow.

In any case, I fiddled with it (printed the cover and the next two pages individually with "print current page", ran the 2nd and 3rd pages through the copier in "single-sided to double-side" mode, then printed the rest double-sided). More fiddling than really ought to be required, I think. :)

Anyway, excellent product, just had a b$#%! of a time getting it printed correctly.

Thanks.

In the WotC books, there are a lot of "key words" that are also everyday words that are adjectives or nouns to describe a condition. They are not generally (I think consistently NOT in WotC books) indicated as having special meaning and having special rules associated with them.

For instance, if an entry says something like "any opponent struck by the Ass-Whoopin' ability is stunned for three rounds", then there is no clear indication that "stunned" is a special word that has special rules associated with it.

I think those of us who have been playing a while with the 3.x books have picked up on most of the conditions or keywords, but I know there were many occasions when we first switched to 3e that I didn't realize those words were special.

So my request would be that in the text when you use a word that has special rules or a special entry to define the effects of that word, it is italicised or bolded or in some way differentiated from the normal text all around it so that we know it's special. Spell names, feat names, skills... anything that has a special set of rules associated with it should be delineated thus. That way if someone reads it they know to look it up in the index and read about it.

Thanks for your consideration. :)

I'm somewhat appalled at some of the messages I've read in the last 20 minutes of perusing the Alpha 2 messageboards... Such vitriol I haven't seen since I left the 4e boards the day Pathfinder was announced.

For example, take a look at the post about Sorcerers still being "crippled" - how is that helpful? If I was Jason, I would be highly pissed off and offended. There is a reason this is an open playtest, ALPHA stage production at this point. It's not going to be perfect the day it's released for download.

How about using language and posting things that actually HELP progress the development of the game, instead of ripping the $*!t out of what you're reading without offering any decent alternative?

I just think that some of the posts I've read have been very disrespectful and should be tempered, and redirected into offering suggestions or explaining - logically, not emotionally - why someone might think that it isn't the best way to do it.

Thanks for Alpha 2, Paizo (all involved). Hopefully you aren't too discouraged by the people I speak of above. Now I'm off to read my copy. :)

Scott Rouse (my roommate at the show) and I chatted with Lisa Stevens and Erik Mona from Paizo to discuss 4th Edition plans. We also met with other d20 publishers throughout the show, first to assure them that the OGL would be continuing under 4E, and that we're interested in working with them to iron out things that didn't work so well with 3E. Very exciting!

So... did they ever come back to you after GenCon, Erik or Lisa?