EDIT: Trollfood removed.
My personal way of setting up a campaign is to start off small, and work up from there. The characters should feel like common folk at first, and that isn't going to be the case if they are starting with 20,16,16,7,7,7. I like to limit players to an 18 at most (after racial adjustments) and not allow any scores below 10. I find that dump stats are usually put into mental scores, then used as an excuse for stupid, or verisimilitude breaking actions. If you make an idiot PC, no one would choose to adventure with them.
If I have an experienced group, and people are looking to try interesting character concepts, then I would up the point buy a little, and maybe allow a little more flexibility in stats. There would be an explicit understanding from the beginning that every PC is expected to be part of a capable team, not rule it, nor be carried by it.
I also warn players up front that I generally don't enjoy GM'ing against a lot of action denial, or swingy stuff. (some SoS/SoD) If you would feel cheated if I did it to your character, don't make a habit of doing it to my monsters. Also, make a character who can be useful in a variety of situations. Don't make a PC that will be useless half the time and expect me to remove encounters that you are not built for.
i have been lurking this thread for a while. i am starting to regret that thread i made in gamer talk. i was chatting with a few members of my saturday group, reminscing about a past i never experienced and i had a little too much alchohol and sugar to think straight when i made that thread.
i have a few personal questions for Kyrt, unfortunately, paizo doesn't have a private messaging system.
are you still dealing with computer trouble?
do you get charged for mobile messages on MSN?
when do you think we will be able to check in for your campaign?
how is your progress with your house rules?
There is no rhyme or reason to what gets flagged and why. Whole threads persist with obvious baiting towards me, but long and helpful posts are removed for a single offhand comment, or no comments at all. Because editing out the offensive material isn't hard.
But I wasn't looking to discuss biased moderation.
If you would like an explanation for why material was removed, please feel free to email me. My email address is listed on the "Contact Us" page, or on my profile.
As far as removing "long and helpful" posts for a single offhand comment instead of removing just the offhand comment, there are several reasons we don't do that:
1) We don't believe in rewriting history more than necessary. This is the same reason why we don't allow the editing of posts past a small window for fixing typos. The most we're going to change in a post is redacting an unsafe link, fix a broken bold or italics tag, or adding a spoiler tag. After all, you wouldn't want me putting words in your mouth, would you?
2) Editing a post makes more work for the moderators. You might notice that none of the Paizo staff who serve as moderators have "Moderator" next to our names. We have real jobs to do besides keeping tabs on the messageboards. Removing a post is a simple process.
3) By removing offending posts and all replies, we encourage people to not make offensive posts and to flag, rather than reply, to those types of posts. If we simply edited the post, posters would feel free to take parting jabs at one another, leaving someone else (see #2) to clean it up. I'd rather they learn not do it in the first place.
I allow a list of races to be taken if the player takes a lower number of points. Setting my game for 20 points, I let players take one of about 7-8 slightly more powerful races for 5 or 10 of those points. I cost some of the less common races a bit higher to reflect their status. One of my potential players wants to play an effectively +2 veraion of a 'genasi' and is working on details to run by me. It should work out to costing him 10 character points.