Shooting in Orlando. A gunman entered a gay nightclub and killed around 50 people and injured a lot more.
Thank you. I've found out, now, a few details. That's awful. I'm praying for all the survivors and families of the victims - the shooter(s?), too. This is absolutely abhorrent violence.
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Indeed, this was monstrous.
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Darklight Reaver, a twisted luminarian specter.
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VOLTRON IS ON NETFLIX
VOLTRON IS ON NETFLIX
WELP.
(Also, I am now dressed.)
Sympathies and best wishes to everyone in Florida, given what's just happened - hope Amby/TL and all are safe and well.
I wanted to mention that, living in Sanibel, Amby shouldn't have been too near, either. Praying for her as well.
I also wanted to thank everyone for their thoughts and prayers. I'm praying for your friend gtg!
Note to self: look up "Crayola Explosion" or "Color Explosion" or something...
Found it. Wow, that waitress' description was way off!
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Damn. One of my Wife's friend of a friend was killed during the massacre.
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I would give blood...I hear there is a huge need...but I'm currently taking some experimental bipolar medication for a clinical trial and legally can't for a few more weeks.
Any other Floridians I urge to do so. The news is saying it's a huge shortage.
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Damn. One of my Wife's friend of a friend was killed during the massacre.
Sharoth, my deepest condolences.
Sharoth, I'm so, so sorry. I will add you and your wife to my prayers. That is so awful.
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Thanks. I appreciate it.
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Sorry man, that is beyond awful! You and your wife have our condolences.
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Damn. One of my Wife's friend of a friend was killed during the massacre.
Really sorry to hear that, Sharoth.
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The scary part is that if it had occurred a few months from now, it could have been my wife. She was planning on going there when she went to Orlando for a trip to visit some friends.
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Condolences, Sharoth.
And very glad your wife is safe.
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You can't dwell on what ifs. I used to ride the same bus to work every day. Then I quit, two days later some guy splashed a bunch of people with a bucket of gasoline and lit them on fire on the exact bus I would've been taking, in the area of the bus I would've sat.
We all dodge death and loss every day, we just don't know it. :-)
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But it does make us realize just how fragile life is and how quickly it can end.
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Absolutely. :-)
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The scary part is that if it had occurred a few months from now, it could have been my wife. She was planning on going there when she went to Orlando for a trip to visit some friends.
Double damn. I'm glad your wife was nowhere near there, but jesus..that's scary as hell.
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Our garden grows upward and outward, although I think I accidentally took out one of the melon plants in my efforts to destroy a Buckthorn volunteer, oh how I hate Buckthorn! Almost as much as Freehold hates Whedon or Nobodyshome hates Carrion Crown.
The peas are doing weird things. Instead of growing up they're growing sideways, along the ground, very weird.
The Little Tomato Plant of Horrors is now pushing past my waist, the tomato cage looks like a sock now, and I got the biggest cages.
Peppers look great, rest of the melons are growing superbly, with adorable little flowers even.
No more bunny eaten plants (as far as I know, it's hard to tell with the peas) but no waking up to bunny screams, and no telltale claw marks in the earth or tufts of fur. Hopefully The raccoons are keeping order.
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Hey now, hey now. I was just trying to be helpful by pointing out that traveling through Carrion Crown without Death Ward is like traveling through insert favorite sleazy disease-ridden dive here without a condom...
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To be fair, Carrion Crown has some issues that can really get magnified by the GM not compensating (I'm looking at you, lack of treasure and spell caster with a spell he shouldn't have)
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I don't think it's the GM's job to compensate for the party not covering their bases. You know what everyone else is playing. If nobody is playing a spellcaster, that's hardly the GM's fault, and he shouldn't be expected to pop a NPC in there to cast scrolls because none of you could be bothered to play anything but barbarians.
That's just an example, but you get my point.
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I wasn't saying that. Carrion Crown, by design, has almost no treasure. To capture the horror vibe, with no time for crafting. And then a spell caster has an extra caster level that wasn't caught, so he has Circle of Death (even though he shouldn't) which is cause for over half the deaths in the AP.
I agree it's not the GMs job to cover up for poor decisions. But these are design flaws, which can be compensated for, at least somewhat.
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I don't think it's the GM's job to compensate for the party not covering their bases. You know what everyone else is playing. If nobody is playing a spellcaster, that's hardly the GM's fault, and he shouldn't be expected to pop a NPC in there to cast scrolls because none of you could be bothered to play anything but barbarians.
That's just an example, but you get my point.
Nah, Carrion Crown is a classic example of:
Unfortunately, it turns out that "searching for it" means demanding exorbitant payment from everyone you help throughout the AP, wandering off into the weeds to trigger every off-path encounter, etc., etc. Our party was at around 1/5 WBL by the time the GM ran Carrion Hill as a side quest for us, and we were all laughing uproariously at the "ludicrous" amount of treasure Carrion Hill provided. When, in fact, Carrion Hill just provides "normal" treasure as loot drops, rather than as, "Extort the beleaguered village" drops.
Captain Yesterday is referring to a moment in the AP where the party is 8th level and is hit by an almost-totally-unavoidable Circle of Death. So basically everyone in the party gets to make a Fortitude save or die.
I won't even enumerate them all, but off the top of my head I can think of at least 3, "If you do this in any way other than the way the AP intends then you die" moments. PCs LOVE that, too.
Heh.
I'm reasonably certain (almost) every AP has some weird quirks like that.
Just off the top of my head:
- Kingmaker is ludicrously prone to craft-breaking (both in Kingdom building and in general)
- Serpent's Skull is kind of a mess in pacing and character motivations and NPC reactions (and a few stat-blocks are just... strange), not to mention the strange lack of clarified historical artifacts (or history to them) to be found in an ancient city
- Rise of the Runelords has a reputed "TPK" battle in the original version, and a different "TPK" battle in the revised
- Reign of Winter has several encounters that actively ignore rules (environmental rules, class rules, or others) as a pet peeve of Ashiel's
- Council of Thieves doesn't permit you to get the best ending by its own rules that it establishes in its own path
- Maps: DAGGUMMIT, PAIZO, LEARN HOW TO TELL NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, AND WEST. I'M ALREADY DYSLEXIC. DANG IT. ಠ_ಠ
... and so on. That said, I still heart them, thoroughly. I can't wait to finish Kingmaker and head on to another this summer... :D
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I had a blast running Carrion Crown as Harry Potter for nine year olds. With The Harrowing instead of Wake of the Watcher.
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Heh.
I'm reasonably certain (almost) every AP has some weird quirks like that...
EVERY AP has "quirks" or "odd games" or "new rules" or whatever.
Carrion Crown is the *only* AP I've run where, book after book, the "quirk" is, "If you don't do it EXACTLY the way we intended you do to it, someone in the party dies."
It's not so much a railroad as a single-track superliner bent on destroying anything that deviates more than two degrees from its intended course.
Which, as a player prone to actually being, y'know, a visceral, living, thinking, independent being is a teensy bit frustrating...
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Don't forget Skull and Shackles just sucks after book 3.
And seriously WHY DOESN'T ANYONE JUST SAIL AROUND THE DAMN HURRICANE?! IT'S ENTIRELY STATIONARY!!!
I wasn't meaning just new rules. I actually cited moments when the game simply didn't work as intended and ruin a player's (or GM's) day and are broken in a way that requires you to abandon the AP as-written to make it work. CC certainly as plenty, but it didn't seem more egregious in a general way than the other three I've run: just in that way in specific.
I'd suggest different tables adapt to the things (or not) based off their own tendencies. It's a problem, but one shared with KM, S'sS, CoT, and even the exquisite CotCT.
I mean, in CoT, you literally cannot win the AP. It's not actually possible.
Well, okay, it is now, but only by utilizing abilities that didn't exist in PF at the time, and didn't exist until Wrath of the Righteous... and aren't part of CoT, of course.
(You can, I think, do it now with non-mythic abilities, but it's still a stretch. Best case is a 50/50 shot between "nothing changes; it still sucks" and "you rule a city; good luck, suckers" which isn't the best way to "win" an AP: "have exactly this build and party that didn't exist when we published this, or you can't win the AP" - you know. And I love CoT.)
EDIT: it'd kind of be like if in KM, the AP said, "if your PCs win, great! But instead, they instantly lose their kingdom and walk off paupers." or if SS said, "if you manage to win, good job, but you're all secretly assassinated and replaced by snakes in disguise and no one notices" - it's not exactly what you'd hope for after managing to get all that way.
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Don't forget Skull and Shackles just sucks after book 3.
And seriously WHY DOESN'T ANYONE JUST SAIL AROUND THE DAMN HURRICANE?! IT'S ENTIRELY STATIONARY!!!
I will disagree with this forever and ever. The sucks after book 3 part, not the hurricane part.
Skull and Shackles is one of my top two adventure paths. :-)
Bet you can't guess what my other favorite is.
But, to each their own. :-)
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Great, now you got me thinking about my top five adventure paths.
1. Iron Gods
2. Skull and Shackles
3. Hell's Rebels
4. Mummy's Mask
5. Reign of Winter
Wow, that was actually easier than I thought it would be. After that it's splitting hairs and such.
My least favorites are probably Council of Thieves. I do not like anything about the last adventure in it at all. And Wrath of the Righteous, which has the second worst ending module, it just didn't seem like a very epic ending.
There's parts of Hell's Vengeance I don't care for at all, but that's to be expected. :-)
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I didn't like Iron Gods, from what I experienced at least, but it's more that I just am not a huge fan of sci fi mixed in my fantasy. It's why FF4 and 9 are two of my favorites, and 7 and 10 make me yawn.
6 is okay, but that's because the badguys have the tech, and you have to overcome it.
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Also, the plot was really dependent on you giving a s#%* about the people of the Shackles and hating Cheliax, which as a true pirate, I couldn't care less about either. I wanted to let Cheliax attack and take my vast wealth and split.
The more I think about it, the more I think our GM sucked. He was kind of an a%#$@~& after his divorce...
Er... spoiler warning? :D
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I don't think it's the GM's job to compensate for the party not covering their bases. You know what everyone else is playing. If nobody is playing a spellcaster, that's hardly the GM's fault, and he shouldn't be expected to pop a NPC in there to cast scrolls because none of you could be bothered to play anything but barbarians.
That's just an example, but you get my point.
At the same time, if nobody wants to play a spellcaster, the GM needs to be cognizant of that and not expect somebody to bite the bullet and play something they don't want to play. Could be the GM and players aren't a good fit for each other, could be they want to play something much lower magic than Pathfinder, could be that the GM does need to run a game where spellcasting isn't necessary (which may mean not playing that AP), but some decision needs to be made. If the players aren't interested in playing how the GM expects them to play, they need to have a talk about who wants what.
102 degrees. Blech.
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We haven't gotten to the end of Skull and Shackles yet. But they've watched Pirates of the Caribbean so I don't expect any issues there. The one issue I see cropping up
Ship combat is essentially for chases and for when they want to fire off cannons and s!*+ (it is my personal belief that if you don't have firearms and cannons you're missing out).
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Maps: DAGGUMMIT, PAIZO, LEARN HOW TO TELL NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, AND WEST. I'M ALREADY DYSLEXIC. DANG IT. ಠ_ಠ
Oh, dyslexia has nothing to do with it.
Projecting a map onto the tabletop and telling players, "OK, the western door has xxx..." and having EVERYONE say, "Wait a minute! Which way is west? Which way is north?" is maddening.
You have mapping software, Paizo. You can rotate maps into any orientation you want.
PLEASE make it so that "north" is always up. PLEASE!!!!
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102 degrees. Blech.
Indeed, that temperature is flat out wrong.
I know! And then when the text disagrees with the maps... Blarg!
EDIT: ninja'd, but this post works either way!
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102 degrees. Blech.
It's a nigh-ideal 63 and sunny with a light breeze here.
Is it any wonder we've seen the first handful of "under 1000 square feet" houses sell for over $1 million in the last month or two?
(And don't get me started on rent. Our 99-year-old neighbor finally passed away, and her kids are renting the house out until they figure out how to proceed. The rent? $5000/month! Are you kidding me?!?!?)
EDIT: And yes, yes I *am* waiting for my house price to go up enough that I can make a snarky comment on the "Why are you not a millionaire" thread along the lines of, "OK. I made it. But I still have bills and I'm wondering how I'm going to send my kids to college. So what did I win?"
But that'll take another year or two to let the mortgage go down and the house price go up for me to be able to say that I'm "a millionaire" with absolute certainty...
...and take away the real estate and I'm just another schmuck nearly half a million in debt paying for property that really shouldn't be priced the way it is...
...OK, I depressingly looked it up. My current debt load is just over $535,000. THAT makes me "rich"? I guess if I wanted to sell everything and invade Captain Yesterday's vegetable garden I'd be OK...
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It's a downright beautiful 78 degrees here, with only the most photogenic of clouds.
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102 degrees. Blech.Indeed, that temperature is flat out wrong.
The humidity is even worse. :-( I HATE THIS PLACE IN THE SUMMER.
I wanna get a summer home in Iceland. My wife got back and said I'd LOVE it. 50 degrees during the summer, the entire population is about 300,000 people, and everything is pristine.
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I think this is the first time they've wanted to craft or upgrade anything other than wondrous magic items, with an emphasis on footwear and clothing.
But yeah, Pea Bear has been eyeing the Chainsaw since I got the technology guide. Also since she saw me using one cleaning up after a storm.
...Was I the only one who thought that 'chainsaw' was a humorous euphemism for 'magical weapon of unimportant-for-forum-discussion specifics'?
