willrichtor's page

** spoiler omitted **

My question is: How should I deal with her without ruining the fun at the table, which will invariably happen if I ask her not to attend (wherein she will complain to...

Foghammer, before sitting down to have any serious chats with anyone, as really who wants to sit down and have a serious chat about such a whimsical hobby, before you sit everyone down and run the risk of destroying your game entirely, I implore you to exhaust the creative capabilities of your imagination to engage the girl in the game and in the process endear her character to her companions.

There are infinite possibilities here. Baking is no funny business, you know. Bakers have murdered over recipes, rivalries, the favours and recognition of nobility, and have been accomplices to, even masterminds of assassinations and coups. Can I back all this up? No of course not, don't be silly, but think of the ideas that fill your head when you read that. Her simply being IN the group with the sort of character she has got opens you up to a world of possibilities that you probably never would have thought of before.

The fat lord of an impoverished land holds an invitational bake-off to gorge himself on the best pastries he can find, with a hefty reward going to the winner. Various characters approach with ultimatums, offers, and all witht heir own motives, wanting the baker to back out of the competition, poison the entry, maybe even use sly psychological tactics to trick the lord into making a fool of himself by eating the foulest creation to have come from an oven, driven by the assurances of the local people that THESE are indeed the best baked goods to be found.

Or maybe her business starts slacking, and she discovers that a new baker is stealing all her customers with a new, secret recipe. What's the secret? Something sordid, no doubt.

She shows up and plays. Regardless of how she does it, it means she wants to be there. The great boxing trainer Cus D'Amato, handler of such greats like Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson, often said "You can say what you want, act how you want, but what you do, in the end, is what you really meant all along." You can get the wrong idea from someone's talk, but their actions usually tell the truth. She's there. Make her start taking interest by making the other characters start taking interest in her character.

Also, maybe give her a copy of Confessions of a Part Time Sorceress to read.

While this is not exactly messing with the players, it keeps them on their toes. I really like these ambiguous situations where there's never a 'absolute' right choice. All decisions should have both positive and negative effects, in varying proportions, and good choices are good because the (expected) outcome aligns with the party's values and goals.

The idea that "no good deed goes unpunished" has much more potential for abuse and ruining everyone's fun than the mechanics you have expressed a problem with. Ambiguous situations should be used sparingly, or like so many Eli Roth movies, they lose their impact and, in turn, their value. Notice I didn't say "you shouldn't do that, it's not fun?"

I think it's ridiculously idiotic to roll atk and dmg separate, when you can roll them all at once and save the table 30-45 minutes of lost time over the session from having to dig out the dice you could have rolled already. But I'm never going to call anyone out on it and request they do it my way. Whatever gets you off, you know, within reason.

You can go to the well one to many times with any technique. I DM the same way I box. I never show the same punch more than 3 times in a row and then only to make them anticipate the fourth. There are a ton of dirty rotten tricks, and given the right situation, proper discretion and a good amount of creativity, ALL of them are great fun, and COULD BE for everyone if everyone would just let it be fun.

Brian Bachman wrote:

I can agree that overuse of suggestion and charm against players gets old and unfun quickly, but I can't agree that you should never use them. If you take that tack you should just ban the spells from the game completely or you are giving the players a huge, unbalancing advantage. You're also giving the stereotypical dumb as a rock fighter an undeserved reprieve.

Who cares if the players have an 'unbalancing advantage'. You are the DM, therefore by definition infinitely more powerful :) And it's not like fighter's don't need a bit of DM carebear treatment anyway after the first few levels...

The point is the same as with using daze or similar powers - against monster's or npc's they are fine, since the DM doesn't really care. But against players it sucks, because the player has to wait and can't do anything.

If you want to restrict player options, do it via environment. Have them arrested and thrown in a cell. But if you charm them, they will have to do things that, while the character is subjectively (since charmed) ok with it, the player will resent. It violates the player-character bond, so to say.

This is all bull. Players with this sort of attitude: "DMs shouldn't use charm or dominate. DMs shouldn't use rust monsters. DMs shouldn't pickpocket PCs. These aren't fun they're STUPID! Hold my hand, wipe my butt, don't do anything that could set the party back cause it's not FUN! And you know what else? We're getting close to level up and you know if I don't get a magic item soon I'm going to start getting colicky. You're the DM, you shouldn't have fun, that's for us. Where is our pizza and Mt. Dew? Nachos!?! WTF?" bring down the game faster than ANY amount of charm spells ever will.

Lighten up and try to have fun and don't resent the DM for trying to have fun as well. You might enjoy the twist if you actually got into the role instead of metagaming and getting butt-hurt.

Blaze I think that your line of reasoning, if followed, would lead to a lot of false positives or confirmations and that no message would be sent at all to Paizo over dissatisfaction with the product. If the company HEARS compaints, then that is one thing. If the sales figures do not back up said complaints, then how much incentive is there to respond to the criticism?

I don't want to just blindly dump Paizo in a group with other companies, but honestly that is how companies generally do business. You can complain all you want, and they're more than happy to take your complaints, but in the end if you keep buying the product you're complaining about then there is no tangible gain to be made from revision.

I gotta say, I feel kinda duped on this one. The bit of concept art that was up before was really promising and I was looking forward to this set more than anything else in the upcoming months. It feels like a bait and switch to me now.

You guys make awesome stuff and I haven't regretted a single purchase or anything that my subscription has sent me, but this one is really, really lame. The description and artwork that was up before led me to believe we would be getting interiors of enormous monsters for exploration and possible encounters.

I too am considering discontinuing my subscription to bypass this stinker.

I mean when you do boats, did you ever consider just drawing the silhouette of the boat? Conpared to the water around it, it could be argued that the sails, rigging, stairwells, oars and such are pretty distracting too. Why is it even a consideration that the insides of the monster are "too distracting" to the surrounding artwork?

The map pack is "Swallowed Whole" not "Lush environments surrounding the creature by whom you've been swallowed" The point of the gamemastery map packs and flip mats is to have visceral representations of the environments are characters get to explore. Giving us silhouettes of monsters that we could have cut out of black construction paper ourselves for dollar ... it just goes against the very spirit and purpose of the map packs themselves. Where did the concept art come from? Where did it go?