jasonfahy's page

Maybe everyone knows this, but I haven't seen anybody mention it: it seems like all the mutagens are absent from GM Core. They list the alchemical bombs, poisons, tools and all the other elixirs, but no mutagens, and that makes me think/hope they might reappear as an alchemist-only thing...?

If so, they'd be less weighed down by balance worries. Could be good.

The lack of character portraits is disappointing. With the amount of race/class combos available, there should be a LOT more choices for character pictures.

Somebody's already produced a 'mod' that adds eighty additional portraits, mostly from DeviantArt contributors. I haven't seen them yet, but people on the Steam forum were saying the average quality is pretty good.

I saw a YouTube video about Graham's number, which is the upper bound on the solution to a graph theory problem - even arrow notation, invented to describe outrageously big numbers, doesn't even begin to get a grip on it.

In the video, one of the mathematicians said that if you could load all the digits of Graham's number into your brain, the entropy inside your skull would become so low that that region would become a black hole. So you could assassinate someone (more like 'everyone') by dreaming that number into their head. :)

You would, of course, need a loony GM who would let you just say "Graham's number" rather than having to recite the digits...

My counter argument is, why would you play a massively multiplayer game and go out of your way to avoid interacting with the other players?

I would urge you to give other people a chance. They aren't all bad, I promise. :)

It's pretty simple - I play them for the 'Massively' and the 'Role-Playing Game'. 'Multiplayer' and 'Online' are strikes against them which I just have to mitigate/deal with. :)

The 'useless' bit about armor class is that it generally goes up as you level and BaB also goes up as you level. It seems like a zero-sum game sometimes.

You struggle to get your AC to stratospheric heights, only to face monsters who have a +25 attack bonus that will hit you most of the time anyway.

My players were saying this at the end of our Rise of the Runelords campaign recently, as they got kicked around by rune giants.

I think the problem is people focus on the bad guys' first attack which is almost certain to hit, and decide from that that AC is pointless.

What we have to remember is that there can be two or three other attacks after that one. Pushing your armor doesn't mean you get hit zero times; it means you take 1-2 hits instead of 3-4.

In Foxglove mansion, to help the party feel better about walking around eating 'traps', I made a small jigsaw puzzle and wrote one of the family flashbacks on each piece, in chronological order. Whoever got clobbered by a haunt received a piece. (I used foam-core for the pieces - cutting them out was horrible but they connected decently. Heavy cardboard is probably smarter.)

As soon as the second piece came out, they understood and got pumped about combing the house - and when it was over I offered them an XP bonus if they could use the completed puzzle to explain the Foxglove tragedy to me. (They pretty much did.)

Reputation is not divided between player and character in the game. There is only character Reputation. You're confusing the matter yourself by insisting that there is a Player Reputation function in the game.

I don't think Prox is insisting that there is player rep, but it'd be nice if there was. It's a weakness of the system that I can create one character to use for newbie-griefing, gold spamming and antisemitic rants, but the game stops penalizing me for that behavior as soon as I switch over to my paladin. (Intentionally over-the-top example, but I suspect you'll get what I mean.)

Some, but not all, of the chaotic evil characters will be played by real-life sociopaths, and it'd be nice if the rep system could discern between the two types and consistently make one feel less welcome than the other.

From what I gathered in my fleeting experience, you were supposed to learn the ropes in high-security space where the risks were low and predictable, and then move into lower-security (higher reward) areas when you felt ready. Not terribly different from going Northshire - Goldshire - Westfall, or whatever; you're facing bigger dangers and increasingly far away from help.

But then players figured out how to suicide-gank newbies even in high-security space (for teh lulz) and the developers decided rather than interfere with the new phenomenon they'd just call it a feature.

(I don't take this to mean regulation created what Eve has become, or that Eve didn't have enough - it just had ineffectual regulation, and not much will to tweak the regs and get them working decently.)

This all still seems to be more trouble than its worth. The community will naturally police itself. The more we restrict players the less it looks like a sandbox

Really? A group of internet gamers? I think they'll naturally police themselves about || that much. If players are restricted too little, it'll look like Lord of the Flies.

I feel like I have to jump in on the "biggest fool in Golarion" thing, because I'm pedantic.

A guy with 7 wisdom has below-average wisdom, but he isn't spectacularly foolish. If people are roughly on a 3d6 stat distribution, then he's just under 1.2 standard deviations below average. (...for adventurers, and the case has been made that non-adventurers have sub-3d6 stats.)

That's around the 12th percentile, which is low, but not mind-blowingly low. A north american man at the 12th percentile for height would be 5 foot 5 1/2". Is he short? Sure. Do people come from miles around to point and laugh at the short guy? No, because he's not far enough from average to really stand out.

7 wisdom is unwise, and to some of his friends he might be the most unwise person they've personally met - but it's not like he's incapacitated; he's just -1 behind the guy with totally average wisdom.

I have an aversion to dumping myself, but let's not go completely hyperbolic about it.

What the builds showed was the conventional wisdom about other factors were actually fairly wrong.

Something about this worries me - if 95% of people can't get decent performance out of a class, and then you (through extensive system mastery) make that class perform well...that doesn't mean the class is okay. It means most players who try that class are going to have a mediocre experience, and that's a problem. The game should, above all, be balanced for players with typical levels of skill. If it's also balanced for players with very low/high skills that's wonderful, but it makes sense to go for the big group in the middle first.

(I don't mean the game shouldn't reward skill! But the performance vs. skill curve should be fairly linear and not too steep. If most of the community is finding a class weak, which can be ascertained by some pretty basic qualitative canvassing, then the curve is probably too low, and flat. If it spikes upwards at the very highest levels of skill...that isn't a heckuva lot better.)

Ogre pick up line:

Hey Sister!

Just read Hook Mountain Massacre, so this gave me the heebie-jeebies. Damn you.

Ranger pickup lines

Wrong:
I can get through any undergrowth, no matter how thick.

Rogue pickup lines

Bronze Medal:
"I can get up as a free action."

Silver Medal:
"I'm a lot more effective when I'm behind you."

Gold Medal:
"I'm even more effective when I'm behind you and he's in front of you."

PRD wrote:

Special: The character must kill someone for no other reason than to become an assassin.

What else needs to be explained?

evil

They've made the evil orientation clearer in the latest version, especially with the part you're quoting. "I have no idea who he was, and I don't care - I had to kill someone to get into the order, so down he went."

In earlier versions, I found, it wasn't so clear. They'd say an assassin "kills sentient beings, in such a way that the target never has a chance to fight back" - which is the ultimate goal of all military tactics, of course - and then would go on to say "...of course, anyone who does this is evil".

It's kind of the same thing we're talking about in the other alignment thread. There's a theme in heroic fantasy where using poor/no tactics = heroic (because you don't need them; your pure heart gives you the strength of ten) and fighting as effectively as you can = morally suspect. It doesn't work great IRL, but it's a fundamental idea in fiction and especially in swords+sorcery.

And In D&D the Paladins code is not very well defined so players and GMs should work it out between themselves. The problem with Paladins or just alignment in general is one due to lack of communication than anything inherent with the system.

If the Code were the only component mentioned, probably a lot more of them would.

I think the trouble is that the class description stresses adherence to the Lawful Good alignment, so people think that's the code...and the LG description in the books goes something like "is always honorable, always follows the rules, is compassionate, protects the weak, never lies, cheats, never uses violence unnecessarily..." - it's more circumscribed than the 8 alignments combined. (They go to pieces trying to describe CN - half the time it turns into refuting other definitions or some stream-of-consciousness thing as they try to reason it it - but everybody knows what they think LG means: it means "be like Superman, or archangels".)

Which would be great if they stuck with it. But when the "If a monk ever ceases to be lawful..." and "If a paladin ever commits a chaotic act..." lines start coming down, it stops feeling like a loose guideline pretty darn quick.

Legend, which I picked up a couple weeks ago, boils the whole mechanism for paladins down to "You should have a code. Work out the specifics with your DM."

Each and every paladin follows a single set of strictures regardless of their moral beliefs. Like much about the paladin in its modern role, this is simple and clean-cut. It’s also not intended to penalize you for playing a paladin. The only penalty for breaking your code is that almost every paladin will want to bring you down. The Twin Strictures are as follows:

Justice is the calling of a paladin. For some, this drives them to be paragons of law and good. For others, it twists them to seek to mete out vicious and unusual punishments.
One’s creed will demand sacrifices, and they must be made. It may come to pass that a paladin must choose between two acts that are both reprehensible to his or her creed. The paladin suffers no penalties for making a choice in such a situation. Some may thereafter seek redemption or atonement, but this is not a mechanical requirement.
We have left the actual design of an ethical system or driving creed up to the players and the GMs. You know better than we do what will fit your characters and your worlds. Each paladin has a subtly different creed, in all likelihood, even if they swore the same oaths to the same order. Repeated violations of a paladin’s creed may lead to situations where the paladin is at odds with his or her order, league, or simply to his or her conscience. (Kurzer & Campbell, 2011)

Sad but true. I definitely get the sense that DMs see this as part of their duty. "Making a paladin, eh? Better read up on Thomas Aquinas and Augustine and come up with some moral dilemmas that have troubled theologians for centuries."

I've also pretty much stopped caring about alignment as a DM. I pay attention to behavior, as do my NPCs, I give RP awards - especially when a character does something suboptimal or even self-injurious because it's consistent with his personality - but I really see little or no benefit to using the alignment constructs.

If they have a benefit at all, it's for inexperienced players - encouraging them to think about what kind of person their character is.

No, it isn't evil, but it is damned irresponsible, and a bit selfish. Joker is a proven threat to innocent who cannot be stopped by a prison cell, and therefore must die to preserve public safety.

That's turned into a battle of will and stubbornness between the two of them. They're both fully aware that it's insane for Batman to keep hauling the Joker back to the same old institution, and Joker makes a game out of doing the most atrocious things he can think of to try and make Batman crack. Batman personifies order, discipline and adherence to an idealistic code, and it puts him in the position of a cornered politician who's stuck adhering to a principle even when it takes him to outrageous places.

It's a doubling-down phenomenon, and Joker loves to rub his nose in the absurdity of it. "Will you kill me if I kill hundreds of people and promise to kill more? No? How about if I paralyze Batgirl? NO!?"

Extreme cases like those two are a kind of thought experiment that we can use to test ideas, and they keep us away from Godwin's Law territory. :)

What the heck - I'll run my mouth before having all the facts. That's fun. :P

Have fights take place around innocent bystanders. Have them react to the way the PCs fight, and deal with defeated foes. Have the stories get around. (...and not just the bad ones. Come up with something they did right, even if you have to stretch a little, and let an NPC praise them for it later.)

Kids playing knights and bandits in a village can work - you can even have kids playing the same game wherever the PCs go, as a lighthearted commentary device. "I'll be Sir Amithar and slaughter the helpless prisoners!" "Amithar's half bandit himself! I want to be Sir Kellwyn and haul them back to the baron!"

Assign somebody a squire. DON'T make him Jiminy Cricket the Relentless Voice of 21st-Century Idealistic Social Justice; they'll hate that and rightly so. But he can be pumped when the PCs act heroic, and sickened when they act brutal, and if you make him halfway capable he can give the PCs some options: "[Squire], if we chain these four bastards together and give you a bow, d'you think you can get them back to the magistrate and catch up with us in Springbank?"