taepodong's page

I've never actually played or GMed an AP all the way through as written. I wouldn't count the diversion you put in as a drawback, that's good fun.
As far as you feeling things are getting stale, take a break. My group does this as a matter of routine. We have three or four games running on a rotation. This gives each story a chance to age well, because both players and GMs get some time to reflect on past and future events and not just continuously grind story.
Ask the group if someone else wants to take over this or another game for a bit and give everyone time to relax on the main story you're trying to tell.

It is a sad day indeed when the only magic items allowed are those printed in a rulebook.

I hear that.

Yeah, it's terrible.
The book is really cheap, though. I'm probably sending mine to the binder and having it combined with the APG in one volume.
The gorilla glue trick does work pretty well, if you're careful. I have a few books on my shelf that I fixed that way.

Actually, that word came about because I mentally translated the Spanish "aclaración" to English. Doesn't mean that you ain't still victim blaming.

Right on, sorry about the word confusion. I still think you're being overly dramatic.

Sounds like one of three things has occurred:
1) The player of the Fighter is so into playing her character that she will effectively suicide it to maintain consistency.
2) The player of the Fighter thinks the game is built around her, and needs to grow the F up.
3) Both 1) and 2).

Either way, good on the Oracle not budging before the Fighter did. When one person's perfectly reasonable idea of fun is interpreted as a violation of some story stick trust bond BS by anyone else at the table, something is wrong. I will comfortably wager that the problem is the Fighter player's. Hopefully she took something away from the experience and there's some personal growth from the incident. Or hopefully you lose a lot of unnecessary baggage.

I don't subscribe, but I've bought five of the APs so far that I liked. I would go so far as to say that I could not care less if the fiction were just removed and the page count reduced. The fiction is dead space for me. I've tried reading a few of them, and they weren't all that bad, but they didn't hold my interest for more than a couple paragraphs.

If any person tells you that as a GM they were never thrown for a loop in a session, they are a bald faced liar.
I expect to have huge chunks of whatever I planned for ignored or burned to the ground...and still have a moment nearly every session where I have to scramble the jets in my head and keep the poker face on to run damage control.

Stories like these are hilarious, but we all have them.

You never want to rest a book on its spine except while reading.

I am an archivist. My career is caring for books. This is not true.

I personally think all this emphasis on "balance" and the noble GM not wanting to break the game are high minded nonsense.
The bottom line is it is that GM's game and s/he can allow/forbid whatever s/he wants.
That's all well and good, but this GM also sounds like a douche. If said person won't consider adding anything not in a PF book, furthermore won't even glance at the player's creation, they don't sound like the kind of person I want to play with. I'd say half the magic items that appear in our game are created by one of the GMs (we have four that round robin).
I don't play rpgs for the rich interaction of carefully balanced stat blocks fitting together like the well oiled cogs of a machine. I play to have a laugh with my friends and temporarily escape the emphasis on bookkeeping I experience in my real life.
Finally, the notion that the game is some esoteric, high minded construction that most folks can't wrap their heads around enough to achieve the magical equilibrium (re: "balance") folks opine about ad nauseum is absurd. The current iteration of the game has been mostly in its present form for more than a decade. Get over yourselves and your jug of Kool Aid.

If we are only talking about D&D/PF, then out of my top five memories as a player, two involve me dying, and one of the other three involved two other PCs dying.
I never fudge dice rolls, no matter what.
I do make some boneheaded tactical decisions now and again (ie, generally at least once a session) for the bad guys to lighten the load, but I don't have any problem killing PCs. It is just as easy for them to say "I run away" as it is to say "I charge at the thing". A level of kid gloves is always going to be present, but I don't enjoy the added stress from lying that compounds my job as a GM. Plus, I find that if I throw a gimme to one PC during a session, I feel pressured to do the same for the rest in the game, and that gets annoying.
Put me in the "Both" column, with a slight bit more of my body hanging over towards the "Kill" side of the fence.

Remember that it's not adversarial with the BB, just have fun with them.

This statement implies that once you start playing the full on game, it becomes adversarial?

Several of those contradictory statements were actually made by the same person.

What a shock. If it's that big of a downer for you, end or suspend the campaign and force one of them to run something for a while and ride their asses for no reason with contradictory feedback.

I would let any evil alignment be an anti-paladin. Same as I would alowe any good alignment for a paladin. What I found funny when reading through the anti-paladin was that they have a code of conduct but are CE. The big arguement I heard about why paladins are lawful was because of their code of conduct but it seems anti-paladins can have a code and still be chaotic.

That's how I've been doing it for years...when I use alignment at all.

Perhaps the mutilation and display could be an uncharacteristic action brought on by immense rage, and she went to a priest to repent? I really don't want to play a neutral character here.

You don't need to worry about that.

taepodong wrote:

All Inquisitors are Neutral Evil.

Surely you jest!

I have GMed one and played in a party with one, and they both were a Good alignment on the sheet. The way they played in game was Evil in both cases. The alignment shift thing was abused in both cases, and I can't see myself taking the class seriously until I either play one myself or play with one who doesn't abuse the shift ability.

All Inquisitors are Neutral Evil.

I don't know how well Godzilla fits into the CR system of d20.
He would stomp the tarrasque into powder and vomit radiation all over the remains then quietly resume his travels toward a heavily populated area.

Discuss.

In the ten years since 3.x dropped, I've used point buy five times. All of those instances were for organized play. Three times in Living Greyhawk and twice in Pathfinder Society. Every character I made for a private game used 4d6 drop.

RunebladeX wrote:

my lawn my rules...

No, it's not your lawn. The GM doesn't own the game and graciously allow the players to participate. It's everyone's game.

<redacted statement>

1) If the GM never uses the term "Rule Zero," then the players have nothing to complain about.
2) "Fallacy" (yawn) is a word that is used more by 3.x/PF players than undergraduate philosophy students.
3) Rule Zero is the only rule.

I wouldn't necessarily say that's true. The thing is, not all options are created equal. If you have two people choosing options for fun without understanding the powerlevel thereof, you can get people of VASTLY differing power levels. That is generally viewed as 'unacceptable.'

You would be surprised to note that a great deal of us do not give a damn about optimization. I think it's cool as all hell, but it's not why I play or GM.

I'm kind of late to the party here, apparently.
None of the items on that list seem unreasonable. There is a passive aggressive subtext there that would turn me off as a player, though...not enough for me to turn down the game altogether, but I would definitely walk into the first few sessions with my gameface on.
Considering the other thread you posted the other day regarding what went into the formulation of this list, I get where you're coming from. I already mentioned that I think nearly everything in that list is perfectly reasonable.
There are a couple of suggestions I would like to make. I would probably leave out the section about yelling at one another out of the document completely. It is already a long document. Players by and large do not like reading anything more than a couple sentences, and even that is a stretch for many. Adding in stuff about verbal warfare is a big turnoff and implies GM vs Player mentality (the statement at the beginning about that should probably be dropped as well). I would guess that had I included lines like those in a written document and submitted it to players, they would either constantly deride me for the statements, or not even play at all.
Lastly, and again this is just my opinion, the statement about the GM's word is final, no arguments communicates that same adversarial tone I would not want to read as a player. I GM more than I play, and although it is understood that my word is final as GM, I frequently let players override my decision _if it is reasonable and can be accomplished in a timely manner_. I am not afraid to admit when I am wrong, or at least don't have the best answer, as long as the players can calmly communicate whatever is at issue quickly and argue their case without beating their chest. It is, after all, supposed to be fun.
The list is reasonable, though. I would just be careful with the way it is presented.

I've been playing without alignment for over ten years and haven't had a problem with it yet.
Substituted any alignment descriptors with "antagonist" and it has worked fine.

My tabletop groups won't let me do anything without a three page legalese essay about what it is I'm doing.

They sound like jerks.

I have let it happen in games I've run. If anyone tried to argue rules minutiae toward the contention that a petrified person wasn't a person, I would have to shout at them, loudly.

taepodong wrote:

All of the information contained in Alex's quote comes from the Randolph Carter stories. Statement of RC, Silver Key, Though the Gates of the Silver Key and Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath (probably others as well, my dreamlands memories are fuzzy at this point). Nothing he mentioned came from Derleth.

Wikisource

Actual quote about Azathoth ever being intelligent, Azathoth ever battling Nodens, or Nodens sharing any similarity other than name to the Celtic diety?

HA!

Alex Smith 908 wrote:

Azathoth was not always a gibbering idiot god, he didn't always need Nyarlathotep waiting hand and foot on him. Azathoth lost any intellect he once had due to a wound from Nodens, a minor god from Celtic myth. He is an expert hunter served by faceless winged creatures, sounds like a 20th level or so ranger archetype.

Are you August Derleth in disguise? Because none of that is in Lovecraft's Mythos. Most people prefer Lovecraft's version of the Mythos to Derleth's "Good Elder Gods vs Evil Outer Gods for control of the Earth" BS.

All of the information contained in Alex's quote comes from the Randolph Carter stories. Statement of RC, Silver Key, Though the Gates of the Silver Key and Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath (probably others as well, my dreamlands memories are fuzzy at this point). Nothing he mentioned came from Derleth.

Homebrew.

I have played an Illusionist more times than any other class in my days, and never get tired of the Wile E Coyote:
During a pursuit, use a cheap illusion spell to either extend a cliff face to appear like there is more road than there actually is, extend road over a ditch/chasm, place an image of an open gate onto a solid wall, etc.
It doesn't matter how many times I pull it off, it never gets old.

In the three or four times I was ready to whip out Rocks Fall Everyone Dies in my years of gaming, the PCs did it for me by splitting up into factions and killing one another.
All but one of those times were in high school playing D&D. The other time was in a Call of Cthulhu game that ended up devolving into Tommy Gun and dynamite action theater. Good Times.
The one time I played in a campaign that made it all the way to Rocks Fall without a pvp abortion, we all got sucked into a pocket dimension and (realizing we were at the end of the line anyway) took turns drawing from a Deck of Many Things until deck's worth of many horrible things happened to us.
I doubt I ever get into one of those situations again, but if I did, I would probably grant all the PCs multiple wishes and put on the Jerk GM hat for once, twisting their wishes into horrible reality. I've only "screwed" a player on a wish once in all my years GMing, and all it ended up being was him using a wish to achieve something he could have done with a 3rd level spell he was capable of casting (and I warned him a handful of times that he should really step back and think it through before pulling the trigger). Urinating all over a wish is something I want to do at least once before I die.

Online games take about four times as much input to get the same results as games at a real table...in most of my experience. They also tend to stagnate and die on the vine in most cases.
Set a date and tell them to be ready at that time, if they're not, then you need to find more players.

Wow, wishes at level 5. Are you trying to screw them?
Give them something along the lines of what they wished for, no strings attached. They were pretty specific, and weren't greedy IMO.
I don't give out wishes very often, and most of the time, they have to figure out that a "favor" means a wish when they get one. I think that punishment for wishes is great when they try to overstep the bounds of what they should get, but I don't see where either of them did that.

EDIT:
The problem with wishes is that when the PCs ask for something reasonable (which I could argue both asked for), there is the problem for the GM that there is the power level to consider. I don't like the fact that it is tied to level, but in level based games you are faced with the issue of giving them something too powerful for their level. A number of suggestions that weren't punishing in this thread prior to my post are totally adequate IMO.

I find myself somewhere in the middle of the opinions expressed so far.
I don't care what the number is on your sheet in most cases. You are going to have to figure it out for yourself...unless we have hit a brick wall where everyone is sitting around staring at one another blankly. Once in a while, that's a good thing IMO, but more than once every handful of sessions is overkill and will guarantee you less players in the long run. If it gets to gridlock, I generally start giving hints to the players with the higher stats, or letting them make relevant skill rolls to get us moving again.
If it's not fun for over half the people at the table, you're not doing it right.

Level 1 Expert.

Quote:

I thought the person activating the scroll to cast it had to be high enough level to cast the spell. I could be wrong.

Nope. If you meet the other requirements, but your caster level is too low, you have to make a caster level check to use the scroll. But its still possible. A 1st level wizard can cast Wish from a scroll if he wanted to. (Assuming he had a 19 or higher Intelligence, and succeeded on the DC 18 caster level check.)

Right on. I just checked the SRD and noted that I have been doing it wrong for who knows how long. Thanks for the clarification.

I can't lie. I have Imp Init. Unlike most Witch players, I've had the luxury/frustration of having 7+ players in every game I've played in, which means that I don't need to have the full Hex line-up (level 6 and I have neither Misfortune nor Cackle)... I use the initiative to make some game-changing choices first round with my spells and/or move into superior position.

I haven't picked Cackle or Misfortune, either. High Five! I Evil Eye and feed people potions with my hair.

The caster level of the scroll doesn't matter for activating the scroll or copying it to your spellbook. So yes, your 1st level Wizard can copy it to his or her spellbook. However, he cannot prepare it yet from the spellbook until he's capable of memorizing level 3 spells. Alternatively, he or she can only activate the scroll now and use the fireball once -- but then the scroll becomes useless afterward.

I thought the person activating the scroll to cast it had to be high enough level to cast the spell. I could be wrong.

Improved Initiative is really handy. Being able to usually go first is nice when you are a spambot.

Wow, all the hate directed at the rules lawyer (who, admittedly sounds like a jerk), and little to no criticism of the GM. To be honest, the GM sounds like the bigger jerk to me in this case, and I HATE rule lawyers. The GM sounds petty and immature throughout the story, whining and moaning and blowing up on this guy. Granted, his behavior can be conveniently blamed on the rule lawyer, but I would not want to play under a GM who allowed that type of persistent nagging to grind the game to a halt week in, week out. I also think that the conversation you guys had after the last session pretty much means you should give X the boot. It is next to impossible to recover from a situation where one person is trash talked to that degree (a lot of which was petty conjecture, OR poking fun at his Johnny Awesome Cleric that the GM allowed him to create) and resume an equal relationship afterwards.
Point X to the door, and hope against all tenets of human nature that your GM isn't a whiny little weasel and that X was the root of the entire problem.

Thing is, the reason I want a version of the Star Wars rules that is compatible with Pathfinder (or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof), is that I actually want to have the two interact. A bit gonzo I admit, yes, but if Gary Gygax had one of his player's characters teleported to Barsoom, then I can have my characters visit the Galaxy Far Far Away.

In that case, I get where you're coming from. Check out the d20 version, it's probably 90% compatible.

Play whichever one you think you'll have the most fun with. It's a one shot, so you don't have to worry about any long term growth for the character.

I have played every official version of Star Wars roleplaying games to come down the turnpike, and three homebrews based on BRP/Runequest, GURPS and d20 Modern. It's my opinion that Saga was the best implementation of Star Wars in a roleplaying game that has come about yet, and shelling out the twenty or so bucks for the main book on ebay is a way better allocation of time and resources than converting Pathfinder to fit with it.

I played in a 3.x game where we had three classes: Warrior, Spellcaster and Specialist. The names basically tell you what they did. It was not gamebreaking because no one at the table was trying to break the game. A lot of the issue with expanding spell lists is that a lot of groups have that one person at the table whose idea of fun is to do everything all the time better than everyone else. This person is why on any given day there are debates over if the Rogue is a gimp, if the Fighter can compete after level 8, if the Monk is a waste of everyone's time, why the Paladin is so great etc.

Vampire Lord all day long.

I believe we should begin with establishing Batman's alignment.

Bravo.

Yes.

And to think I built this huge tree of organized bookmarks in my browser for everything my witch can do just two nights ago...
This will definitely be handy for GMing and future characters, but I invested far too much time the other night building that thing to scrap it. Thanks for the links. Black dotted.

Nope. In PF you never catch up. Ever. In D&D you got more eXP for lower level, but not in PF.

And due to lower Wealth by level gear, hp, etc you will likely die again staying lower level.

I get that. It may surprise you to know that I didn't really follow that xp chart that everyone keeps mentioning from 3.x. Just handed out flat numbers. I understand how the math works. I don't understand why people keep bringing up the fact that the xp doesn't scale.

Most games I play an and GM we only use the grid in specific situations. Outdoor combats rarely get drawn out. Indoor ones get drawn more, but usually they are only in claustrophobic situations to avoid really bad spellcasting decisions.
Try using it less. I had used one a handful of times prior to 3.x for D&D (there are some games that pretty much require it, like Battletech), so when they encouraged everyone to use the grid in 3.x, we gave it a shot. I think it is overused. It is handy on a case by case basis, but most of the time you don't need it, IMO.
I also think that in most cases the grid makes the people at the table's imagination of the events happening in combat less epic.

Wow...
Pretty amazed that the curve is so high, and furthermore that 20+ is in a commanding lead.
I think there are a number of systems I have played over the years that better accommodate extreme high levels of play, d20 based systems get really cumbersome the higher you get.
To each their own, I guess.
I guess the fact that you _could_ vote any number of times (every time I look at the poll results it prompts me to vote as if I haven't previously), coupled with the fact that there is a push from some people lately to get an Epic ruleset in PF constructed, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the results look like they do.