prosfilaes's page

I'm seeing Bestiary 2 twice on my subscriptions, once as a PDF and once as a physical copy, both of which I'm being charged for. Is separately processing them the new way or just for this one item, and more importantly am I getting charged extra for the PDF or will it be taken off the price off the physical copy when that ships?

Any news on what's going to happen to subscriptions in August? Is it just going to be going to a monthly PF2 subscription, or officially declaring a bimonthly subscription, or will PF2 shake up the subscriptions?

What worries me a little is that since Starfinder is a thing we know that all "world ending" scenarios won't really be the end of the world and that no matter what the players do, the future will end up being "all right".

Will a Paizo author come out and say that PF and SF are each happening in alternate realities to remedy this?

In my Pathfinder game, a flying pyramid landed on the edge of Wati and is currently being used as a casino by a kobold. I doubt that's true in any of your Pathfinder games. In your Pathfinder game, maybe they killed Laori Vaus, or maybe she's wife to a PC and queen of Korvosa. If you insist on thinking too hard about it, any setting with prepackaged adventures is going to have to run in a separate parallel universe for each party.

I'd definitely appreciate any simplification of Pathfinder monsters. I think most of the time I run a battle as GM, the monsters don't end up performing to their full abilities, because I'm not familiar enough with them. I'm sure that GMs that spend more time in preparation don't have as much of a problem, but I do.

I'm beginning to suspect I might actually have to spend the first few ones just to pick up the abilities (such as my cleric's second domain or alchemist's 'Throw Anything' class feature) my low-level character already had in PF1! And to me that'd feel extremely underwhelming and counter-intuitive. I don't think this was done to dismantle constructed class features to enable more freedom or tinkering with each character;

From a design perspective, you can't just stack more and more stuff on top of the 1E class. Why is it underwhelming to start with basically the lowest common denominator of the archetypes and letting you buy the features to add on to that? It looks like it will provide more freedom and tinkering.

High level creatures do dominate, with teleport it is incredibly hard to justify why they have not cleared out all of the adventure encounters from level 5-12. With teleport it is worth your time and effort. Without teleport it generally is not. Without teleport there is a niche for level 5-12 people to get their hands dirty.

Rapid flight is pretty easy to get at high levels. If a high-level party can find all mid-level characters in an area, and want to slaughter them, a lack of teleport doesn't change the fundamental possibility. With or without teleport the high-level characters implicitly allied with the mid-level characters they're killing are going to chase down the high-level murderers and take them out, as well as possibly starting all out war.

Oracle is the spontaneous spell caster for divine. You might not like it, but it is.

In Pathfinder 1E; they haven't even hinted at what might be coming outside of core in Pathfinder 2E. I think it likely to come back, but I would like more careful balancing of the curses.

Better question, what to remove from core?

I'd say the removal of gnomes from the 4E PHB was one of the things that disinclined me to move to 4E. Paizo is probably wise enough not to make fun of it, like one of the transition videos for 4E did, but removing classes and races people expect from the base game is an easy way to alienate people.

But let's face it, they won't be making any additions to classes at this point in time. It takes time to design well.

They still have a good year before having to get the final version to the printer. That's plenty of time to internally playtest a new version of an old class, or even do a PDF drop after the new playtest book is released and have some external playtesting of this additional class. I don't find it terribly likely, but it's far from impossible.

The ones that are popular, in the descending order of popularity. Hence, Alchemist is going core, as it is the most popular non-core class (even more popular than some core classes, such as Druid), next up is Oracle.

Adding a class from, say, Occult Adventures that has gone less noticed because it's a newer book and a big chunk to absorb as a whole may be more productive than taking a class from the APG that's popular largely because it's from Pathfinder's first character option book. Popularity should give way to expanding options and providing good material.

That said, the popularity of alchemists does explain why it's new core, and oracle fills a neat hole without needing a massive amount of new support material like something from the Occult Adventures or the gunslinger might.

I suspect the class list for the Pathfinder 2E is pretty fixed already. However, I was having a discussion about Vancian casting on Enworld, and I came to the conclusion that divine casters need their non-Vancian version in core just like wizards have sorcerers in core. I'm not thrilled with Oracle (instead of being playable but important, too many curses are either crippling or irrelevant), but unless Paizo was willing to create a new non-Vancian divine caster for 2E, that would seem to be the one.

(I don't see alchemist as core, but it seems more likely for another class to join it than for alchemist to not make it.)

So, what other classes absolutely should be promoted to Pathfinder 2E core?

My Cleric of Desna is conflicting with the rest of the party when they ran into Stink the lemure. He wants to kill it; they don't want to kill anything that isn't bothering them. I did make it clear eventually that it was not going to be a punishable offense for the cleric to leave the devil behind, when it became clear that was part of the question.

I figure the Suzerain will try to smack them down when they're in camp, in the dome by Stink's place, and Stink might give them a little warning. He's not the nice guy at least one player seems to think he is, but I don't mind rewarding the "let's not slaughter everything we run into" solutions my players are good at finding.

But fighters with supernatural level of power are common, both in the tropes (like Achilles and his unbreakable skin)

Non-game characters don't have classes; that's an artifact of the game. Achilles is, however, easily modeled as a fighter in Pathfinder, one that has a magical effect on him making him immune except for a certain called shot. His immunity really isn't a class feature.

There's nothing more unrealistic than the intiative system, where characters create bubbles of time while everybody else stands still.

Because there's a distinction between what's real in the world and what's the limitation of our model. Simultaneous combat is too hard to play, but that's clearly the intent of what's going on.

Melee characers surviving 10 miles falls? That's fine.

It is one of the most complained about features of D&D, having filled many pages of Dragon pre-Internet. Ultimately, it gets tangled up in the ever-increasing HP and since that's not getting reeled in, it's virtually impossible to provide an easy fix.

Two points are not a line. They are two points. If you have a line through them, then you know what that line looks like, yes, but there is nothing at all that says there is one in the first place.

Euclid does, in Postulate One of his elements.

I actually wrote a short medical mystery novel with an ammonia-based lifeform as a patient. They used sulfur (which is surprisingly soluble in ammonia!) for respiration instead of oxygen, and so didn't actually need to breath. Tissue was polythiazyl-based instead of carbon-based.

Under what name and title?

You know that we will need Pawns along with this, of course.

Knights of the Dinner Table had similar jokes about candy as miniatures. Probably more feasible would be molding your own miniatures, but a quick search didn't find appropriate trays.

So they announced two campaigning setting books but no player companion books?

They announced the big hardback books instead of the smaller monthly books.

You write 2017 several times in this message. That must be a typo; it's coming out August 2016, and I don't have a whole year to wait, right? Right?

Okay, I am having trouble pronouncing Ptemenib's name.

Is it like this: P'tem-eh-nib
Or is the P silent (like Ptolemy)? And thus Teh-men-ib

The correct way to pronounce Πτολεμαῖος's name is as it is spelled, with an initial Πτ. I presume that Ptemenib's name is similar; people who speak Common might stutter along and drop the initial P, but no speaker of Osirion would look twice at it.

One thing that caught me in this adventure is that it says that the Fire Giants attack from darkness. Given that every illustration in the book makes them look like they're on fire, and the bestiary illustration makes it look like it should glow lava-hot, and the description says "Its hair and beard seem to be made of fire." I wouldn't pull it on my players, and I think it advisable if you do, subtly or overtly establish to your players first that fire giants do not omit light.

The Time Machine has been in the public domain for a long, long time.

The Time Machine is an 1895 work by British author H.G. Wells, who died in 1946. That means it was never in copyright in the US, since the US didn't respect British copyright in 1895, but it is in copyright in the EU for seventy years from his death, or until the end of 2016.

Anyway....I guess my issue is with the system because it breeds this specialist mentality because in most cases specializing can mean the difference between life and death but not always...

Like the time the Enchanter Wizard spent several sessions unable to effectively fight any of the monsters the party encountered.

Then next campaign, the player will plan better. I don't see the connection between planning and specializing here; a character without a plan, who has successfully enchanted everything in her path, is more likely to have this problem then a character ran by a player with plan.

Or the time the Weapon Focused Greatsword Specialized Warrior lost his main weapon at the start of an adventure in a dungeon and couldn't replace it for several sessions.

Was this fun for the player? No matter how much the player plans or doesn't plan, the GM can have his character lose their Strength or be cursed with pacifism or get a cursed ring of antimagic or lose their connection to their god. If it's all fun for everyone, then that's great, but if the player feels the GM is just screwing with them, then it's no fun.

Game-wise, Weapon Focus is a necessity for the fighter. That's just the way the game is set up. Punishing the player for taking a feat is a little mean. Fiction-wise, as others have pointed out, the number of fictional warriors who have gone through multiple weapons is pretty low.

If you want it, it's in the Bundle of Holding, https://bundleofholding.com/presents/LostLands , for another couple days.

I suspect it's as much of a special snowflake thing as a power thing. Drizz't clones are all "I'm a special Drow, against my whole race, outcast on the surface with my angst."

Yes. It's called a backstory, and many players have one. You don't get this response against people who want to play dispossessed nobility or almost any other unique background.

Just the phrasing is problematic: "special snowflake" is a way of being insulting instead of being descriptive. They want their character to be special? Who doesn't?

Gimli clones are like any other dwarf.

You say that like it's a good thing, like having every dwarf be a Gimli copy makes it better.

Were people really imitating Gimli from the books when they made dwarves with axes for decades before the movies came out?

If that and the gruff attitude and the thing with elves is your character, then yes. I think it's worse if it's so stereotypical nobody thinks about the origins. Why is it worse to want to play a certain cool character, instead of just doing something generic?

Moving back from the really bad falling and lava mechanics, a lot of the claims that historical limitations aren't actually accurate are based on one assumption: That PCs have the right to be special snowflakes.

They don't. It's commonly accepted to refuse drow PCs because they don't fit in and tend to be attempts to create a primary protagonist rather than an equal member of a group. A dwarf in Japan or a (non-reskinned) samurai in Iceland -- even if you could prove that the viking reached Japan or the Japanese Iceland in the real world -- is as out of place as a chaotic good renegade drow. That's a spotlight hogging backstory.

In Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, how is Azeem (Morgan Freeman's character) more of a spotlight hog then Robin Hood? Somehow Hollywood has found a way to include people of many races and both genders in its movies, because that diversity is worth more than strict historical accuracy. And somehow despite these characters being spotlight hogging, the lead star almost always ends up being white and male.

GMs have a right to set the tone for their games. But one can want to play a character working against his or her evil background without being a spotlight hogger. (What is it about Drizz't that makes for such vicious attacks on people who want to play clones of him, unlike people who play Gimli clones?) And sometimes people who want to play dwarves and samurai are going along with the group as per setting, but don't really have their heart set on playing there. Instead of accusing them being spotlight hogs, you could let them play their characters, or back off on your strict setting and adopt a setting that will let them play what they feel comfortable playing.

He knows how to land and can survive falling off a 2 mile cliff.

The longest survived fall in history was 33,000 feet. In the 20th century, four people are known to have survived falls of 2 miles or more.

He's had a lot of rough-and-tumble experience and can now beat a rhino to death with his bare hands. Yeah... No...

If you really have a problem with it, call it chi. People in Golarion can tap into the power of the soul in the way that we can't in this world. It's a known part of the physics of D&D-style worlds, and refusing to accept it would make playing melee characters unfun for many players.

So there's

English: http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/ for the official reference document, and http://www.d20pfsrd.com/ for an unofficial collection.

French: The official translation is at http://regles-pathfinder.fr/

German: The official translation is at http://prd.5footstep.de/

Japanese: There's an unofficial translation at http://www29.atwiki.jp/prdj/

I can't find any list of complete official translations, or any online documents for Spanish or Portuguese; then again, I don't have any knowledge of Romance tongues. Are there any more online translations, official or unofficial?

The underground bit rubs me the wrong way. Most reptiles tend to be endothermic and don't do very well in dark and cold conditions. Of course, these could be mesothermic or exothermic, but I'd sill imagine they'd likely prefer conditions that actual crocodiles enjoy.

I guess lizardfolk are specifically not warm-blooded, but I prefer my humanoid races to be warm-blooded; I think it's more realistic to have intelligent creatures warm-blooded, and find discussions of mesothermic to have this feel of arbitrary science intrusion in a world with huge flying lightning-breathing dragons. (I'm sure that argument first happened around 1974.) I'm not sure their underground dens would get all that cold; Cairo, the real-world equivalent of their location, never gets all that cold, and if we do say they're warm-blooded, that could keep cramped conditions quite warm.

Given all you've said, shouldn't they have a -2 Charisma?

"Charisma measures a character's personality, personal magnetism, ability to lead, and appearance." I'm not really sure they lack any of that. (I'm not a huge fan of Charisma in 3E/PF; it's a little hard to figure out what it means at times.) +2, +2, -2 stats are pretty standard, and I like the -2 DEX filling that slot. I could add a note being more explicit about the wide variety of skills they (or people dealing with them) could get a -2 (or -4?) to.

And why couldn't they learn arcane arts on their own or from whatever ancient wizards that used to exist where they lived?

In setting, they are basically a new race, 140 years old, of unknown origin. I don't think anyone can practically learn arcane arts on their own, so they'd need a teacher, and in this setting that would be hard to find. I wouldn't rule out a wizard saba'aeti, but there's none in setting.

What would make them adventure?

Same things as everyone else; wealth and power, or story specific things.

Thanks for giving it a look.

The saba'aeti are a crocodile-like race of humanoids, averaging about
26 inches tall. Despite their size, they are incredibly strong, and
have vicious teeth and crocodile-like skin in various shades of dark
green. They are still a rare race and live in large underground den
cities. They are considered largely inscrutable, and their senses of
humor can come as a surprise to those who consider them emotionless.

They first appear in history as mummy pets in the tombs of pharaohs,
with the few mentions in records treating them as smart animals. They
disappear from history silently, with the last possible reference over
two thousand years ago. They reappeared to the outside world 140 years
ago, which coincides with the age of the oldest living saba'aeti.

The saba'aeti live in underground den cities, often found under
artificial hills. This is not to imply they're communal; spaces in the
city are owned personally and government is frequently less coercive
then that of the nearby human cities. They do have a communal
incubation chamber; on the occasions when that throws ancestry into
dispute, the saba'aeti have various forms of non-magical divination to
establish who the mother is. (Many saba'aeti would privately admit the
ineffectiveness of such tools but declaim the importance of the
question; physical ancestry is but a minor facet at best of family.)

The saba'aeti aren't very emotional; they deal with the world calmly
and patiently as it comes. They do have a strong dry sense of humor;
outside visitors to a saba'aeti city will almost invariably find
themselves invited to a snipe hunt, or on a search for sky hooks. Such
a joke can take hours and involve the meeting of most of the village,
who will participate in their own way. Saba'aeti in a hurry can
usually cut such rituals short, though refusing to play along at least
a little bit will generally rub the saba'aeti the wrong way and if the
(non-saba'aeti) visitors take offense, so will the saba'aeti.

In additional to not being very emotional, saba'aeti don't display
emotions loudly, at least not to non-saba'aeti. A saba'aeti's shaking
that is the equivalent of them rolling on the floor laughing is
detectable, if frequently not understood, but non-saba'aeti will
frequently not notice a deeply offended or enraged saba'aeti, even if
they are familiar with the species. (This is justification for
negatives on most Charisma-based rolls versus saba'aeti.)

To the outside human world, saba'aeti are frequently seen as a source
of labor. They do not enslave well, and many humans consider them
stupid. No saba'aeti has ever been taught arcane magic, and few
mainline churches have much interaction with them. (The saba'aeti tend
to worship the ancient Egyptian gods, anyway.)

Saba'aeti

Typical alignment: LG (LN) Humanoid (Saba'aeti)

Size: Small
STR +2, INT +2, DEX -2
20 foot move
+1 natural armor bonus to AC
Immune to light-based blindness and dazzling effects
60 foot darkvision
1d6 (+Str) bite attack
Immune to normal heat
Needs 1/2 as much water in hot conditions

Starting ages:
Adulthood: 15 years
Intuitive / Self-taught / Trained: +1d4 / +1d10 / +2d12

Height: 2 feet + 1d4 inches; 35 lbs + x2 lbs

This is more of a show-off, then any particular concern. The 1d6 bite is a bit extreme, especially at their size, but crocodiles do have really nasty bites, and while I'm not sure some optimization master couldn't make some super bad monk or something, I'm pretty sure it's not a problem with my group, (especially as I don't have monks, which is a story for another thread, and is not about their power level one way or the other). I've had discussions about the name; knowing a bit about linguistics, it's fine to me (the ' is a glottal stop, vowels as in Italian/IPA and consonants as in English), and I'll let my players mangle it down as they need.

I had the following chunk of text...

The past of the saba'aeti is unclear. For the future, while the
saba'aeti don't have great stomach for organized violence, saba'aeti
communities have plans on growing, and if they can get enough
purchase, they will resort to violence against their more aggressive
neighbors when they can find an excuse. Right now, they are trying to
grow and quietly absorb power and wealth that will hopefully come as a
surprise to the neighbors who consider them weak and stupid.

...but it seems out of place, more part of a writer's guide to a world then a PC race description. I don't know if there's anything important I've left unsaid. Maybe mention that witches (PC class) do appear among them? If I say there's only 340 of them, then perhaps witches are no more uncommon among them while being unheard of among them. Snipe hunt and skyhooks seem slightly out of place, but it's hard to replace them and be as clear about what's going on.

I went through the list of monsters and where their stats are found (so I know which books to bring / which pages to print off the PRD) and which Pathfinder Pawns I need. I still have question marks by Imanish (who doesn't seem to have a token in the Mummy's Mask pawns or the Bestiary 2 pawns his stats come from), Beheaded and Death Dog (don't have Bestiary 4 pawns yet) and Skeletal Jackals. If the Sahuagin and Giant Crab pawns seem weird, that's because they're supposed to be, so they're obviously stand-ins.

The page is here on Google Docs.

Gotta love that two year necro just to take a snipe at someone.

It wasn't really a snipe. Since this is what comes up when you search for Kasatha pathfinder on Google (as I did when the player's guide mentioned them), I figured I'd make a note that that has changed.

Jam412 wrote:

Do the Kasatha have a place in Golarion?

Nope.

Which makes it funny that the Iron Gods Player's Guide says that a small number of them exist on Golarion and that they are important to the story.

Once again, they were speaking draconic. He didn't know a word of what they were saying, only that people who had been fighting a minute ago were speaking a strange language at each other. In a world where speaking in a strange language is a common prelude to a fireball coming out of midair this isn't always the best sign, especially for a character without the "knowledge" of a monster's capabilities, or a decent spellcraft.

If you're going to ask that a wyvern not attack an armored troop of individuals walking through the forest, which is a common prelude to a fireball coming out of midair, I think we can ask that a paladin not attack a creature his party is talking to, in any language.

In any case, that's irrelevant. If the paladin attacks a creature his party is talking to, ignorant or not, if that's known, other creatures will be hesitant to parley.

That's my point. . . the OGL isn't super restrictive for asking you to not do things that you already can't-- the OGL asking you not to use anyone else's IP or PI including places, logos, ect, ect is really just reiterating something that already exists. . .

That assumes something still under argument. I contend that Boneshatter has no protection for pretty much anything but the literal words.

You can use Greece because its a real place, Ruritania, Sherlock Holmes, and Dracula because they are public domain. That's something completely separate entirely, and its not really applicable.

I don't see where the OGL says that. Either it applies only to things that are declared as Product Identity, or it seems rather unbounded.

And you did not check Sherlock Holmes, because he is currently the subject of a US lawsuit about to what degree he's in the public domain. The ultimate result, IMO, will be that the copyright on Arthur Conan Doyle's post-1922 stories will be reaffirmed, but the use of that copyright to control Sherlock Holmes as described in the prior stories (all out of copyright in the US--works prior to 1978 being protected in the US by year of publication, not life of author) will be denied. The estate has a valid claim in the US to Sherlock Holmes as represented by all the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle taken as a whole; does that make him Product Identity and hence off-limits for OGL works? (At least in the US, or does their ownership resound world-wide?)

Besides which the very act of publishing in any form you are essentially agreeing not to use logos, identifying marks, places, locations, "and so on" from ANY content. . .

I can't write and publish Mickey Mouse stories, or stories in Westeros, or use the Coca-Cola logo in my publishing regardless.

Set stories in Greece? Ruritania? Publish Dracula or Sherlock Holmes? Can we not use logos of the SS or the New York World? Everything you mentioned, except for careful use of the Coca-Cola logo, would be prohibited by the copyright and trademark laws of most nations. What's the border line look like?

I would say that people who don't honor parley are likely to not get parley honored. If the bandits are talking to the paladin's party, and he runs up, they have every justification to strike down his party. They invade some neutral cloud giants territory, the fact that they broke parley before will discourage the giants from starting with anything but an attack.

Ghostwalk needs to be treated exactly the same as any copyrighted work, i.e. you need to not plagiarize from it.

Plagiarism and copyright infringement are two different things. You can use ideas from a work in a way that could get you punished for plagiarism at a university, and not be infringing on copyright. You can copy entire books illegally and not be plagiarizing if you give appropriate credit.

Treat Ghostwalk the way you would George RR Martin's SOFI series, or DC comics latest issue of Superman, or the movie "Seven", or the songs of Wu Tang Clan. . .

None of which are closely parallel to the case at hand. Pure fiction has strong protection; game rules has little, and names have none. There's two questions; one, does calling a spell that does the damage it should considering its level Bonerattle amount to copyright infringement? I don't think it does. Second, does it violate the OGL? I don't know. Certainly the OGL goes further about protecting names and stuff then pure copyright law would let them.

Clearly speaking. You cannot tell negotiation, surrendering, or much of anything when you hear people speaking in a language you can't understand.

Really? Because exact posture might change, but the surrendering party not holding weapons, probably having laid them on the ground before them, and keeping their hands where they can be seen strikes me as a classic for good reason. Perhaps some places there's social conventions that make surrendering easier, but not between a wyvern and an adventuring party, and if so, the paladin would have known of them.

Not to mention that these are people the paladin has traveled with 24/7 for months. You're telling me he can't read his party members well enough to tell whether they thought the wyvern posed an active threat or not?

Do you think Bonerattle counts as IP?

Huh? The concept of "IP" is just not helpful here; there's copyright and trademark rights that I went over above, and then there's patent rights (irrelevant unless WotC patented it) and personality rights and whole bunch of things that are completely irrelevant here. What laws are you asking about?

Trademark. You trademark names. To quote the US Copyright Office FAQ:

How do I copyright a name, title, slogan, or logo?

Copyright does not protect names, titles, slogans, or short phrases. In some cases, these things may be protected as trademarks. Contact the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, 800-786-9199, for further information. However, copyright protection may be available for logo artwork that contains sufficient authorship. In some circumstances, an artistic logo may also be protected as a trademark.

I don't think that copyright would ever apply to spell names or monster names or anything of the sort, unless you're going ridiculously long. "bonerattle" is not copyrightable, and I believe that the way WotC has not actively used it in a decade and then only as a small part of one book would preclude them from winning on a trademark claim.

What was the effect of the publisher declaring Bonerattle to not be open game content? If it can be used in a subsequent OGL product anyway what is the difference between open game content and material which isnt open game content?

It protects anything that's copyrightable that isn't open game content. Fiction is pretty classic copyrightable material. Games rules are a lot more hairy. There haven't been a lot of precedent, but I would believe if you take what the players do as akin physics rules, and what the books say as akin to (clearly copyrightable) books about physics, you might get the legal distinction. OGC is also basically non-trademarkable, since you have to exert quality control over your licensor to not lose a trademark you license out.

Personally, I don't think bonerattle has much legal protection; the idea of rattling someone's bones is not original in the least, nor calling it magic and adding on a mechanical damage amount doesn't make it more original. I'd rename it, avoid any literal text and play with the numbers, personally, to stay legally clear.

(And, yeah, amateur lawyer who is not giving legal advice, and I'm more familiar with copyright rules then trademark.)

Or perhaps writers should just save these sorts of stories for a rainy-day-future, a future in which all of humanity finally achieves a reasonable level of common sense.

Were complaints about the Birth of a Nation just a lack of common sense? Or should authors listen to how their stories resonate with the society around them?

Like Ursula K LeGuin's EarthSea books?

I haven't read the Earthsea books, but looking at plot summaries, the plot summary of The Other Wind makes it pretty clear the Kargs are people who can play protagonist roles, not monsters. And having read "The Word for World is Forest", I can't imagine trying to read Le Guin without hearing the cultural echoes, and I think she intended that we should hear them.

JRR Tolkien was heavily criticized for having orcs be dark-skinned with animalistic features. When asked about how this was a potentially racist image, he said something along the lines of: They are ORCS. Not PEOPLE. They are intended to be monsters to differentiate them from people.

Imagine a fantasy epic where all the good races were dark-skinned and the bad guys were pale-skinned, where the author dismissed concerns about the latter as "they are monsters". That would make me uncomfortable, and if I read it, would have to accept it with the racial undertones that were obviously there.

I tried the baseball card storage system, but they didn't work out for me. So I bought a plastic ArtBin box and balsa wood at my local art store and built a container.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/prosfilaes/11846265734/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/prosfilaes/11846086253/

There's about 300 medium size pawns in there, and 25 large pawns. I've decided to keep my bases separately, and I don't have a plan right now on what to do with Small or Huge pawns. Once I get them sorted, it should keep most of the pawns from the NPC Box easily available.

I hear how real world bases break immersion and don't make sense, but I see a lot of D20 fantasy as being a close real world analogue, except that it's a real world analogue of a very localized area. Like... a super-idealized England/Spain/France area with the conventions of a Renn/Medieval festival, occasionally with a vaguely Norse nation somewhere on the borderlands because viking raiders are awesome.

But that's not a close real world analogue; that's three nations and the conventions of a Renn festival hardly correspond to that of any of them at any specific time. Galt corresponds to a very specific decade in French history. If you look at Tien, it's not some super-idealized east Asia area; there are close copies of Vietnam, immediately post-Maoist China, etc. It makes the pieces stand out more and feel less as an organic whole.

(Golarion is not the only place this is problematic, as other D&D settings suffer from this to some extent. A Traveller book called "101 Religions" also very much frustrated me for having Judaism with the serial numbers filed off, Judaism with the serial numbers filed off, Judaism with the serial numbers filed off (yes, three times), Speakers for the Dead (no filing done), worshipers of Levis Repsley.)

I was looking for a god for my cleric; maybe darkness domain, maybe madness domain. Then I found Tsukiyo, which is both. My only problem is that the description in Dragon Empires Gazetteer is pretty terse; there's no much more then http://www.pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Tsukiyo . Any advice on how to play a worshipper of this jade god of the moon and spirits?

One comment after all this hullabaloo? Expecting players of a certain age to RTFM is hardly onerous nor unreasonable.

I'm pretty sure that none of us could ace a serious test on the Pathfinder rules system. Even at a lower level, I can't recall a single college class that's actually made it through a textbook the size of the core rulebook in one semester. That's a heck of a commitment you're demanding from people to play the most popular RPG on the market, and I suspect if people were held to it, it would no longer by the most popular RPG on the market.

This thread really has no more reason to exist for discussion of my actual campaign, but more along the lines of when it is okay for a DM to stop doing his players favors.

What is "doing his players favors"? You should work for the game to be the most fun for everyone. If doing them favors makes the game more fun for everyone, do them favors.

I find that DMs like being hardasses better then players like playing with hardasses. I know some people like to make every victory count, but I think there are a lot of beer-and-pretzels gamers out there who just want to play without stressing out over every tactical detail.

I know that last week, had I as the GM known that our fighter was starting the day down 10 ST, I would have pointed out that the cleric should have memorized Restoration and done something about it. It was the players' mistake and she (and probably he) should have known better, but that didn't make it the frustration it added to play any more fun.

I could see keeping a bunch of lvl 1 monk/ lvl x rogues on board just to fight off such a beast (say, statistically, 20 of them... ensuring that the kraken will be stunned for one round allowing full on sneak attacks until that rogue's next turn).

I think this is one of those cases where acting as if the game rules are the world rules get silly. In game, a 5% chance of something ridiculous is usually fine; outside the table, I think the world has more realistic probability curves, so a 1st level NPC monk has effectively zero chance of stunning a kraken.

In APs, they usually have some stuff in the bestiary that's not in the adventure itself. The Prince in Chains is just one of them. I find him unlikely to show up here, but you can if you want. He is, however, an adventure that's likely to be a lot cooler for the GM then the players, assuming they don't know who or what he is.

On a separate note, the Danse Macbre was less then fun for my party. He dropped half the party through failed saves, so half the people got to sit there and watch the other people in the battle. Save or be incapacitated is problematic.

prosfilaes wrote:

Weirdo wrote:

Quote:

Sam Vimes had just told Carrot that if the Assassins refused to freely allow him into their compound, he was to go away.

Thus Carrot, after politely knocking on the door, informs Dr. Cruces that if he did not let him in, he would be forced to obey his instructions, to the letter.

"What if we resist?"
"That would only make it easier. If it makes you feel better, I would deeply regret it."

I can't buy a paladin where people who know him can't trust his word, where they're forced to parse his statements like they would a devil's. I can accept lying under coercion much easier then technically not lying on a day-to-day, uncoerced basis.

Day to day a paldin would say the truth, nothing but the truth so help him god. Either that or be quiet. The misdirection is saved for when he is desperate, under coercion, has no other option or when the whole truth would endanger or hurt innocents.

Which is not the case in that quote.