Creative Director
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Not being a big fan of eating something that other gamers at the table have been clutching and hand-sweating all over would be my excuse for not making them.Why does no one make gingerbread dice?
They can be eaten if they roll a 1!
What?!
You actually let others touch your dice?!:)
Are you sure you're human?
Sometimes, and unsure.
Sometimes, and unsure.Not being a big fan of eating something that other gamers at the table have been clutching and hand-sweating all over would be my excuse for not making them.Why does no one make gingerbread dice?
They can be eaten if they roll a 1!
What?!
You actually let others touch your dice?!:)
Are you sure you're human?
Is it possible that you are in fact a member of the Reptile clade of Dinosauria?
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Creative Director
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Sometimes, and unsure.Not being a big fan of eating something that other gamers at the table have been clutching and hand-sweating all over would be my excuse for not making them.Why does no one make gingerbread dice?
They can be eaten if they roll a 1!
What?!
You actually let others touch your dice?!:)
Are you sure you're human?
Is it possible that you are in fact a member of the Reptile clade of Dinosauria?
If only!
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Creative Director
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Have a happy holiday season, James!
And in the spirit of asking questions: what's the primary difference between Abyssal gigas and demodands? Have any other titan species besides the thanatotic created races like the demodands?
Gigas are giants with planar themes, while demodands are a demon/devil type fiend based on gross skin features that have a very tightly focused role. Gigas are something we brought to the game ourselves, so on that hand I'm more interested in them than demondands (which we "inhereted" from the Tome of Horrors and their original D&D legacy)... but the original role for gigas—as a "giant to fit between the toughest classics and the titans" sort of got lost along the way as we continued to just invent more giants in the level 14–20 range. Also, the way they're illustrated and their stats worked in 1st edition made it impossible to fit one on a single page, which combined with the fact that there were SO many types of them implicated out there meant that it was hard to cover them all. At one point I had about a dozen gigases on schedule for Bestiary 6, but that idea got scrapped when it was apparent that this meant that 24 pages of the book would have to be devoted to them... and 24 pages devoted to a stretch of relatively simliar in shape and power and role monsters when those monsters aren't dragons is not really a great way to fill Bestiary pages.
Both of them also had a pretty unfocused creation, with new categories being invented without much in the way of oversight. Their roles both kinda grew organically rather than actually being planned.
Personally, I feel like titans aren't served by having lots of different categories. Each new type of titan introduced as an entire category kind of lessens the awe.
Do you have a favorite type of planar critter - either overall, or specifically as antagonists?
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Are blights (the ooze from bestiary 6, that is) capable of reproduction, and/or could malign magic make more of them? Or were they all spawned by the serpentfolk ages ago, and are now slowly going extinct?
They're capable of reproduction. Magic can do what the story wants, so yes.
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What role did you design blights to fulfill?
I wanted there to be a non-outsider category of evil monsters to test higher level PCs, and also to be Medium so they'd fit well into dungeons, and also to show what an intelligent ooze could do.
So... the Medium non-outsider evil mastermind role, I guess?
Have you finished the Wrath of the Righteous video game?
What did you think of it in general? No spoilers, I just finished the first part (had to buy a new computer to run it).
When you GM and a PC dies, do you usually let the PCs raise them from the dead (assuming they have access to the means) or do you have them just roll new characters?
As a player, is your preference to be raised or start a new PC?
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*laughter* I'm a huge fan of blights, and the design process was exactly what I was asking for. Thanks!
Regarding manasaputras-speaking as a fan of corrupting things: is there such a thing as a fallen manasaputra?
It's possible but not something I've put any thought into.
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When you GM and a PC dies, do you usually let the PCs raise them from the dead (assuming they have access to the means) or do you have them just roll new characters?
As a player, is your preference to be raised or start a new PC?
I let the PC of the dead player make that choice, but also try to ensure that there are always plenty of options to recover from death available. Unless it's a one-shot. As a player, my preference depends on how much I was enjoying the PC and how much the other players were and how well the PC was fitting in with the rest of the group.
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I have, and I liked it a lot.Have you finished the Wrath of the Righteous video game?
What did you think of it in general? No spoilers, I just finished the first part (had to buy a new computer to run it).
What mythic path did you choose? (I really like the way they made them very plot/character driven roleplay choices and not just mechanical things)
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What mythic path did you choose? (I really like the way they made them very plot/character driven roleplay choices and not just mechanical things)I have, and I liked it a lot.Have you finished the Wrath of the Righteous video game?
What did you think of it in general? No spoilers, I just finished the first part (had to buy a new computer to run it).
Azata.
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Have you ever gone through phases where you do extreme rule variations ("no dice, everything is narrative"....or, "we will be tracking calories burned and consumed"...tongue in cheek examples, of course)?
Nope. If I wanna do that, I play a different game that uses different rules.
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What do you like about Bigfoot?
What I like about all cryptids is that they represent the "here there be dragons" parts of the world; reminders that we don't know everything yet and that there are still things that inspire wonder and fear and mystery. What I like about Bigfoot is that he's a cryptid I grew up living in the habitat of. And watching "The Legend of Boggy Creek" as a kid left its mark.
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Why are mindless undead evil aligned?
They are mindless, they have no wants and desires so how could they be evil?Wouldn't it have made more sense for them to be true neutral like vermin, oozes, constructs and (I think) literally every other mindless creature in the game?
Because the forces that create them are so overwhelmingly evil that it stains them, and because the act of creating undead leaves a mark on them. Sort of the same idea of how a place or a spell or an item can be evil even though it's not sapient. It also helps to differentiate them from other mindless creatures, who tend to be a bit one-note when it comes to personality.
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Any advice you'd be willing to share on running/tweaking Gygax's 'Necropolis'?
Use the maps first. Use the flavor text second. Feel free to change out the monsters and traps as you want so that they remain true to the flavor of the adventure. I ran the whole thing without much conversion work, other than to prepare statistics for key NPCs and monsters, some from the book, some I created.
Interesting! Did you keep the level 10-18 recommendation, or adjust it down?
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Interesting! Did you keep the level 10-18 recommendation, or adjust it down?
I kept it, because the whole point of the adventure is to provide an intense and thematic challenge for higher level. Not a fan of forcing high level stories into low level, or low level stories into high level.
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What do you mean by forcing stories up or down in level?
I haven't seen a single story yet except god campaigns, that can't work equally well as 1st level games.
I mean telling stories that work better as high level than as low level ones (like a low level adventure where you slay a dragon or exorcise a powerful demon or defeat a tyrant), or trying to tell low level stories as high level ones (like long overland journeys where teleport and flight would cancel them, or murder mysteries that don't work once speak with dead comes along).
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I guess I can understand wanting to avoid certain spells or abilities, though I can easily deal with any of those.
But why would slaying a dragon, or a demon, be bad at low level? The entire lord of the rings trilogy is low level and that is dealing with a high level tyrant, yet none of the protagonists are above 4th or 5th level, some might claim Gandalf the white as 7th or 8th, but even by 3.x standards which are a level or so lower than Pathfinder I could easily see Gandalf as 5th or 6th. And yet that works.
If being too high level is bad because spells/abilities break the central obstacle, what is the issue with being too low level?
Because it cheapens the story by implying that anyone could accomplish that task.
Lord of the Ring is a good example of something that would work as a 1st to 10th level Adventure path, frankly, with some GM-controlled NPCs who are way more powerful and who keep getting the PCs out of trouble until the GM realizes their mistake and writes in some readaloud text to get the too-powerful NPC out of the party in an arbitrary fight where a falling monster doesn't use its wings to fly away. ;-P
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Why 1-10? The books themselves never come close to reaching 10 even for the powerful good guys. I'd find it difficult to see the hobbits as being more than 2nd or 3rd level even at the end of the trilogy.
Heck, just reaching 2nd level, even as a commoner is a task beyond most people. A 2nd lvl commoner is more capable than the average person.
Is there a reason to boost the power level so far beyond the books?
Because 1 to 10 is the traditional range for our 3 part Adventure Paths.
And that said, the books are not written to comply with any game rules, so it's kind of a pointless thing to try to deep dive into that topic. Certainly I could see an argument for it being for 4 1-3 level characters, 3 8th level characters, and one 12th level character or whatever to play out over what could be a years-long campaign... but that's not a fun way to play Pathfinder, with your characters never leveling up and having such an unfair and awkward spread between player character levels.
There's plenty of other RPGs out there if you prefer to play something more along the lines of Lord of the Rings, obviously. I just mentioned it as an example of a lower level story.
One thing I've started doing to help writers who struggle with this, though, is to advise them that the stories you usually see in fantasy tales are more appropriate for 10th or lower level. Once you get to 11th or higher, a better source of inspiration are superhero movies.
Speaking of cryptids, do you listen to the Monster Talk podcast? Any other podcasts?
Personally, I appreciate the efforts of people like yourself and sympathize, though I can't full understand, the situation y'all have been in. While some decisions feel a little ham handed, I'm not the person who was being hurt, and I can take a little hamhandedness in order to make the game more welcoming and inclusive for other people. I'm sorry those with less empathy are such a visible and vocal group. I certainly hope and assume that they are a small minority of the people who play this game. So I hope you can try not to take it too personally. There are vocal jerks in every industry, employer and customer alike. Good luck, and I hope things improve for everyone involved.
How do you feel about Haunts? Do you think they were implemented well in 1E? Do you think 2E makes them better?
Personally I appreciate the idea of a "trap"/hazard with supernatural or other unusual source. However, when our group first ran into them in Rise of the Runelords and then all over the place it seemed in Carrion Crown, while they initially scared us and left us in concern, as we learned the mechanics, they seemed to boil down to "sitting there and take it, hoping it's not lethal, since you can't reasonably generate enough Positive Energy to stop them and there's no other way to deal with them (rarely there is, but you pretty much never know what it is in advance)" and then heal up afterwards. I like the thematics, but they always seemed more of "something that happens to you" than something you interact with.
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How do you feel about Haunts? Do you think they were implemented well in 1E? Do you think 2E makes them better?
Personally I appreciate the idea of a "trap"/hazard with supernatural or other unusual source. However, when our group first ran into them in Rise of the Runelords and then all over the place it seemed in Carrion Crown, while they initially scared us and left us in concern, as we learned the mechanics, they seemed to boil down to "sitting there and take it, hoping it's not lethal, since you can't reasonably generate enough Positive Energy to stop them and there's no other way to deal with them (rarely there is, but you pretty much never know what it is in advance)" and then heal up afterwards. I like the thematics, but they always seemed more of "something that happens to you" than something you interact with.
I'm quite proud of haunts in 1st edition, since I was the one who invented them. I wanted to build a mechanical hazard parallel to a trap that would be just a customizable, and would lean in to a specific class (cleric) as its focused defeater in the same way traps lean into rogues. There wasn't room to show off the behind the scenes "how to build a haunt" thing in "The Skinsaw Murders" since that was an adventure, and when the chance to do so in GameMastery Guide came along, I was eager to do so... but frustrated by that book's pagination allowing only 2 pages. It really needed a footprint the size of how traps were presented in the Core Rulebook. So haunts kinda ended up being a bit more "generic" than I had hoped there since I had to do the lazy route of "build your haunt as a spooky spell" option in order to make it fit. One of my favorite things to do with haunts (that I'm not sure many other people did) was to use them to tell the backstory of a location so that the players would learn a bit about what happened in the history of the site while facing a challenge... so that in theory, haunts were less "things that happen to you" and more "chances for you to risk harm to learn backstory." The adventure "Malevolence" that came out earlier in the year is the best I've been able to show that off.
I really love how in 2nd edition the designers rolled haunts in to traps and other hazards. I feel a bit disappointed that they abandoned some of the elements that made haunts more susceptible to positive energy, since that pushes them away from being an undead/trap hazard and more toward being just another trap, but at least they're in the core game now and the Gamemastery Guide spends more than 2 pages talking about how to build them!
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8th level characters are way too high when you run the numbers. I know paizo isn't exactly on board with the whole simulationism thing, it's kinda why I stay away from pf2, but that wasn't exactly removed from pf1.
I know lotr wasn't written around a game, but dnd was heavily influenced around it. Some of the core spells clearly are inspired by the books. Even got into a bit of legal trouble for it with hobbits.
I'm curious, how can you accept the argument of lotr characters as being 8 to 12 lvl when the numbers clearly don't support that? Is it something about the emotional content, or the fact that Aragorn is king, or something else?
I'm sorry I brought it up. To tell the truth, I've never been a fan of attempts to portray characters from novels or movies or the like in the form of game stats, because unless youcreate a game specifically to support that story's structure, it's gonna be weird and awkward, in the same way it's weird and awkward to try to assign alignments to real people.
I "accept the argument" because I don't really have much of a will or interest in continuing the debate, I guess. In any event, this line of questioning has strayed far from the original question which I feel was answered already, so... let's move on to a new topic that I can actually answer and not something that'll just fall into another eternal internet debate. :)