rebutle's page

I noticed one in particular, the Obediance for Irez, that requires a "memory"-like game to be played with cards or harrow deck. For that one, do we just roll 2d6's and see if they come up a match, or do players need to bring 12 cards to games with them? The 2d6 rolls will be weighted heavily in favor of a mismatch, not sure how that would compare to the deck of cards without doing the math though.

When matching twelve cards, for the first draw you have a 1 in 11 chance of making a match. You turn one card over, leaving 11 possible and only one that is correct. So 2d6 isn't the most accurate representation at all.

rebutle wrote:

Doug Miles wrote:

People have trouble sticking with a concept. Alignment would be useful if it came with a clearly defined metric, but it doesn't. People like to argue and that's all alignment is good for: starting arguments. It would be nice if characters could voluntarily follow an ethos without the GM constantly asking "What's your class & alignment again?". The bottom line is that the alignment system as it exists is not fun, so it is largely ignored. As a GM I don't sweat it, it's not worth the stress. If the players want to act like they are in an amoral video game and they're having fun, I let them go nuts. In my area, no one cries over dead goblin babies. As long as one person's sense of fun doesn't hijack the game, I don't spend time splitting hairs. Some GMs like to argue with players, but it's not my bag.

In the past I have come down on two classes for ethos violations, but in hundreds of tables it was a rare exception to the rule.

Emphasis mine. Pathfinder is not a game of touchy-feely exploration of an individual's morals and descent from decency to depravity as World of Darkness can be. People who enjoy that will gravitate toward more psych-horror games than a descendant of D&D. Certain classes can be an exception (paladin!), but on the whole, that's not a focus feature of the system.

Why do you feel it's not a focus of the system? Just because it's a statistic listed for every single character and NPC in the game?

I don't expect Pathfinder to be a game of deep moral dilemmas and soul searching, but having players kill, steal and abuse any being mentioned in a scenario is stupid.

With no penalties for their actions, either moral or physical, players likely will devolve into the internet. Players will have an infinite "audience" of NPC's to abuse, with no consequences.

Isn't that kinda the problem the OP's got? People not recognizing consequences for breaking out of their (already incredibly nebulous) alignments?

People have trouble sticking with a concept. Alignment would be useful if it came with a clearly defined metric, but it doesn't. People like to argue and that's all alignment is good for: starting arguments. It would be nice if characters could voluntarily follow an ethos without the GM constantly asking "What's your class & alignment again?". The bottom line is that the alignment system as it exists is not fun, so it is largely ignored. As a GM I don't sweat it, it's not worth the stress. If the players want to act like they are in an amoral video game and they're having fun, I let them go nuts. In my area, no one cries over dead goblin babies. As long as one person's sense of fun doesn't hijack the game, I don't spend time splitting hairs. Some GMs like to argue with players, but it's not my bag.

In the past I have come down on two classes for ethos violations, but in hundreds of tables it was a rare exception to the rule.

Emphasis mine. Pathfinder is not a game of touchy-feely exploration of an individual's morals and descent from decency to depravity as World of Darkness can be. People who enjoy that will gravitate toward more psych-horror games than a descendant of D&D. Certain classes can be an exception (paladin!), but on the whole, that's not a focus feature of the system.

I would also recommend going Silver Crusade as I have not seen a Silver Crusade faction mission that would require me to violate my code. I cannot say the same for any other faction mission.

There's one scenario in season 4 where I can see a Paladin of a certain deity balking at a Silver Crusade mission:

Dust Raven wrote:

I know many feel the addition of nonstandard races take away some of the enjoyment of the game, and I can see why.

[Emphasis mine] What about the non-standard races makes the game less enjoyable? I think I'm missing something that seems to be fairly common opinion/experience.

Because, to people who want a 'realistic' experience for the setting, a tableful of people of races that are supposed to be rare can harm the sense of immersion. In a group of six travelers picked at random, to get three aasimar, two tieflings and your puny human makes you feel as though there's a mis-representation of their rareness.

Most of the Season 4 Silver Crusade missions are pretty safe for various dieties - I can only think of one exception that would offend one particular deity, and not all followers of that deity would necessarily agree.

Oh! I know which mission you mean. My inquisitor of that deity was torn. Though, we split the party mid-mission and the monk of Saranrae ended up encountering the mission goal instead. It was handled.

rebutle wrote:

Honestly, I've been realizing that. Though, due to limited choices of gaming venues, PFS is the best option for me to get any gaming in in the area. I've taken to writing sidestories for my character to get my narrative fix.

(Also, if you ever get a good narr/sim solution, do let me know.)

It might be worth looking into a Play-by-Post...

Thanks for the tip. I used to play on the World of Darkness chats--those were right about the right pace for me--but I hadn't considered looking for an online PF chronicle.

rebutle wrote:

Jeff Mahood wrote:

rebutle wrote:

My local PFS lodge is getting into Season 4 scenarios (at the 1-5 level), and here I sit, biting my nails. We're running 4-11 this Saturday. I haven't even gone through First Steps, or anything in seasons 0-2.

There's a tiny part of me afraid to voice this to leaders in my area because I'm a girl, and I don't want to be seen as wimpy or fearful because of my ovaries, but that's an only slightly related concern.

First, and I cannot stress this enough, I believe strongly that any VC or VL would take a legitimate concern like this and chalk it up to a second X chromosome.

I sincerely hope you missed a word in there somewhere.

Oh, hell. The most important part of my post and I missed the negation in the sentence. That's extremely embarrassing. I've edited my original post above.

For the record, the sentence should read "First, and I cannot stress this enough, I believe strongly that any VC or VL would never take a legitimate concern like this and chalk it up to a second X chromosome."

I suspected as much from the tone of the rest of the post. ;)

rebutle wrote:

My local PFS lodge is getting into Season 4 scenarios (at the 1-5 level), and here I sit, biting my nails. We're running 4-11 this Saturday. I haven't even gone through First Steps, or anything in seasons 0-2.

There's a tiny part of me afraid to voice this to leaders in my area because I'm a girl, and I don't want to be seen as wimpy or fearful because of my ovaries, but that's an only slightly related concern.

First, and I cannot stress this enough, I believe strongly that any VC or VL would take a legitimate concern like this and chalk it up to a second X chromosome.

Mike Brock is very careful when selecting official campaign volunteers, and I know that anyone with an underlying sexism like that would not end up representing Paizo in any kind of official capacity. If your local organizer is not a Venture-Officer, I still would not worry about it. There are plenty of males who don't optimize characters and who look for roleplaying and story over combat prowess, and I suspect your local leaders have met some, so they won't necessarily ascribe that to "female behaviour." (Whatever that means! :)

Second, while Season 4 has a deserved reputation for being tougher, I would still hesitate to call it deadly. It is more challenging, but in my experience, that just means that people can't muddle through and win regardless of their party behaviour. I've still seen tables of non-optimized people roll through a season 4 scenario with little to no difficulty.

Finally, if you're new to PFS and nervous about your character's survivability, may I suggest you approach members of your local community and ask them to audit your character? If you're clear about your expectations ("I don't want an optimal character, I just want a survivable one. Here are my deal-breakers:...") you will often get people offering you small pieces of advice on equipment to purchase, slight changes to stats, and so on, which you can then take or leave. A lot of communities have a web presence, so you...

I may post up my character for an audit or ask for equipment advice. I made a human fighter (out of the desire to play something 'simple' for my first character) and so far, she's had good luck surviving anything she can hit with an axe. I'm just wondering what to do when I meet things that don't respond to that.

rebutle wrote:

*raises hand*

Hi, I'm a new player, and I'm assuming that makes me a non-optimizer by default. How can I voice my fear that "more options for dealing with optimizing players" and "raising difficulty of scenarios" means that I won't have safe ground to grow on, that by not being an optimizer I'm somehow holding my group back? I don't want to play the numbers, I want to play my character, and at the end of the day, this conversation makes me wonder if I'm wrong for having that (clearly narritivist/simulationist, if you subscribe to GNS theory) philosophy in the PFS campaign.

I hate to break this to you and possibly scare you away.

If you're a narrativist/internal consistency fan, PFS is going to be a poor fit.

Not because of the Power Gamers or the supreme specialist players, but because of the general constraints of the system and program.

1) PFS tables are run in 4 or 4.5 hour slots. 5 if you're lucky.
2) You have no guarantee that you're going to have meaningful continuity between sessions and characters. You don't even know who's going to be playing with you from session to session.
3) Missions tend to be very linear, though less so as the seasons progress.
4) Combat (the tactical/crunchy part of the game) takes a disproportionate amount of time...and gets top billing over spending a session roleplaying through the first mission briefing.

It can be fun, and it is fun, but you're not going to get a good narrativist/simulationist game vibe out of PFS. Trying to make a good narr/sim supporting Organized Play system is one of the things I've been pondering for two years.

Honestly, I've been realizing that. Though, due to limited choices of gaming venues, PFS is the best option for me to get any gaming in in the area. I've taken to writing sidestories for my character to get my narrative fix.

(Also, if you ever get a good narr/sim solution, do let me know.)

rebutle wrote:

*raises hand*

Hi, I'm a new player, and I'm assuming that makes me a non-optimizer by default. How can I voice my fear that "more options for dealing with optimizing players" and "raising difficulty of scenarios" means that I won't have safe ground to grow on, that by not being an optimizer I'm somehow holding my group back? I don't want to play the numbers, I want to play my character, and at the end of the day, this conversation makes me wonder if I'm wrong for having that (clearly narritivist/simulationist, if you subscribe to GNS theory) philosophy in the PFS campaign.

You will still have seasons 0-2 to start with. And season 3 is not that much worse in general. Just be aware that season 4 kinda takes the gloves off but power gamers still rofl stomp it like its going out of style.

My local PFS lodge is getting into Season 4 scenarios (at the 1-5 level), and here I sit, biting my nails. We're running 4-11 this Saturday. I haven't even gone through First Steps, or anything in seasons 0-2.

There's a tiny part of me afraid to voice this to leaders in my area because I'm a girl, and I don't want to be seen as wimpy or fearful because of my ovaries, but that's an only slightly related concern.

*raises hand*

Hi, I'm a new player, and I'm assuming that makes me a non-optimizer by default. How can I voice my fear that "more options for dealing with optimizing players" and "raising difficulty of scenarios" means that I won't have safe ground to grow on, that by not being an optimizer I'm somehow holding my group back? I don't want to play the numbers, I want to play my character, and at the end of the day, this conversation makes me wonder if I'm wrong for having that (clearly narritivist/simulationist, if you subscribe to GNS theory) philosophy in the PFS campaign.

Mazel tov! I have high hopes for you.