FAQ request: Does no good deed go unpunished?
Curious as to where you are going with this...
Hum , i dont follow this.
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Five tons of flax.
Curious as to where you are going with this...tl;dr, it precipitated the relative flood of FAQ responses we've been getting lately, which people seem to not want as much as they said they did.
Aahh
i knew that thread title sounded familiar.
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Well, the original thread did a few things:
It made Paizo more careful about the responses individual staff members make about rules questions.
It (seems to have) resulted in a tighter process for official rules question responses.
It caused the creation of the Paizo Design Team forum account.
It (seems to have) caused some Paizo staff to actively avoid casually answering/responding to rules questions.
Personally, I consider the current situation to be... meh. I liked getting unofficial answers from staff, since many of them are extremely experienced with the rules and can be counted on to give a good idea what the rules intent is. On the other hand, knowing that any response made from the PDT account can absolutely be taken as "this is what it means" is extremely helpful when it comes to parsing the rules.
I would be far happier if we (the community) decided amongst ourselves to give differing weight to responses from Paizo staff. Something like:
Highest: PDT account response. These are the rules, whether FAQ or errata.
Next: Design team member response. Sean, Stephen and Jason know what they're talking about. Might as well accept this as "official" for casual play.
Lowest: Everyone else at Paizo. These are personal interpretations, but they live and breathe this game. They know what they're talking about. Not exactly official, but a damn good guide.
Taking that hierarchy of responses, and jointly accepting that unless a higher tier gives a differing response, staff responses are the best guidance we can get, we would get a greater level of input, at the risk of possible changes if a "higher authority" later says something else.
Of course, that takes us back, pretty much, to the situation before the original thread.
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While the opening point of this is unfortunately very true, we have to consider that "we" don't have a "house". The community consists of people from all over the world, most of whom have not even seen each other.
Different groups play the game differently, and while one group is asking for a FAQ on something, the other might never have needed it.
I don't think it's the same people that first ask for a FAQ and then complain about getting one, unless they don't like how it is ruled. But you can't make everyone happy.
Personally I appreciate the effort Paizo has been making to deliver consistent rulings although i think people should simply not have taken staff responses as official rulings in the first place.
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Paizo has been more hands-on with responses lately. Sure, they slip up every now and then. Who doesn't? 99% of the time, whether I agree with the rule/clarification/errata, we're better off for the interaction.
As a whole, we (the player community) have been more demanding, probably because the staff have been more available. There's nothing wrong with asking for clarification, but sometimes the rules forum devolves into an excuse to air grievances in the form of "questions" whose answers are already known to the questioner. Those never ends well for anybody, least of all the design team, who have far better things to do.
And make it six tons. You can never have enough flax.
Nearly year-old thread...
WHO DARES TO DISTURB MY ONE YEAR SLUMBER!?
Necrotic Thread
Ew. That ... doesn't mean what you think it does.
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Well, the original thread did a few things:
It made Paizo more careful about the responses individual staff members make about rules questions.
It (seems to have) resulted in a tighter process for official rules question responses.
It caused the creation of the Paizo Design Team forum account.
It (seems to have) caused some Paizo staff to actively avoid casually answering/responding to rules questions.Personally, I consider the current situation to be... meh. I liked getting unofficial answers from staff, since many of them are extremely experienced with the rules and can be counted on to give a good idea what the rules intent is. On the other hand, knowing that any response made from the PDT account can absolutely be taken as "this is what it means" is extremely helpful when it comes to parsing the rules.
I would be far happier if we (the community) decided amongst ourselves to give differing weight to responses from Paizo staff. Something like:
Highest: PDT account response. These are the rules, whether FAQ or errata.
Next: Design team member response. Sean, Stephen and Jason know what they're talking about. Might as well accept this as "official" for casual play.
Lowest: Everyone else at Paizo. These are personal interpretations, but they live and breathe this game. They know what they're talking about. Not exactly official, but a damn good guide.Taking that hierarchy of responses, and jointly accepting that unless a higher tier gives a differing response, staff responses are the best guidance we can get, we would get a greater level of input, at the risk of possible changes if a "higher authority" later says something else.
Of course, that takes us back, pretty much, to the situation before the original thread.
I feel largely the opposite. If anything, I feel like I haven't seen enough official PDT account posts (although I may just be reading the wrong threads), and still too many dev posts---which unfortunately on both sides often descend into arguments between the community members and the devs. The PDT count is supposed to help avoid stuff like that, because it just is going to state a ruling and go.
I am not saying Paizo staff shouldn't post individually, but the posts I like to see from them are things like "in my home games, this is how I run it," or "I had fun designing this monster because..." or "we had a really fun time playtesting x..." because those are individual personal touches that reminds us the Paizo staff aren't all ninja zombie robots who live only to design games and please us. (No offense intended to the Paizo staff who are indeed ninja zombie robots.)
But when it comes to "official rulings," as I also noted in that long ago thread, I want to see it from one source, and preferably a nameless source, so nobody gets targeted and we are clear that there was a developer consensus before the ruling was posted. The old way led often to the opposite, and in many cases several devs posting conflicting and inconsistent rulings just added to further rules arguments on the boards.
I also want the FAQ to be easier to find and be more obvious to people who are not frequenters of the message board (my players who are not Paizonians have no idea what the FAQ is or where to find it).
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As to the apparent topic of the thread.... there have been a flurry of updates to the FAQ? Why is it NOT easy to notice these things? This should be something front and center and shouted in every corner of the earth. Or am I just somehow missing something obvious?
And as to negative responses to the FAQ by gamers who seemingly were also demanding more FAQ updates is gamers being gamers--we are not a hive mind, we are a very large, very diverse group of people with extremely strong, passionate, and differing opinions on all things gaming and who often outright adamantly refuse to agree to disagree. Whatever you do in RPGs is going to please some and piss off others and the different groups will become vocal at different times. Frankly, I am amazed at anyone who becomes a professional game designer because they are signing up for interacting for an utterly impossible to please or get along with groups. I am proud of being a gamer, but at the same time I accept the fact that by default, most gamers on the Internet are jerks. And because of that, no, we are never in fact going to get our house in order. Sorry, but that's the end of the story.
Also, I don't know about the "flurry" of updates but I do know of one recent update that did cause contention--but that was because the specific answer was a) a suggestion that many gamers took as law even though it was worded as a suggestion, and b) wasn't well thought out and in trying to fix a specific problem accidentally created more. That's not a problem of people updating the FAQ too often, that's a problem of not being sure you are actually fixing the right problem and being too vague. As issues like that are normally the exception rather than the rule, I think hopefully it can be forgiven. ESPECIALLY as the offending FAQ entry has now been fixed.
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Necrotic ThreadEw. That ... doesn't mean what you think it does.
Necrosis = Death of cells or tissues through injury or disease, especially in a localized area of the body.
Necrotic = relating to or affected by necrosis.Not sure how this equals an eww in these circumstances. What word would you have used there?
Not trying to start a fight just curious.
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As to the apparent topic of the thread.... there have been a flurry of updates to the FAQ? Why is it NOT easy to notice these things? This should be something front and center and shouted in every corner of the earth. Or am I just somehow missing something obvious?
Yep, it's easy to miss. Best solution I've found is to subscribe to the RSS feed of the PDT account. From the RSS icons on this page.
Necrotic ThreadEw. That ... doesn't mean what you think it does.Necrosis = Death of cells or tissues through injury or disease, especially in a localized area of the body.
Necrotic = relating to or affected by necrosis.Not sure how this equals an eww in these circumstances. What word would you have used there?
Not trying to start a fight just curious.
Right. A necrotic thread would be one where some of the posts were rotting in a localized and poisonous way.
A necromantically animated thread would be one that woke up and wanted to know who disturbed its slumber. There may be a more clever way of phrasing that than "necromantically animated," but "necrotic" is something else entirely. D:
The necrotic thread alias always makes me chuckle :)
And as to negative responses to the FAQ by gamers who seemingly were also demanding more FAQ updates is gamers being gamers--we are not a hive mind, we are a very large, very diverse group of people with extremely strong, passionate, and differing opinions on all things gaming and who often outright adamantly refuse to agree to disagree. Whatever you do in RPGs is going to please some and piss off others and the different groups will become vocal at different times. Frankly, I am amazed at anyone who becomes a professional game designer because they are signing up for interacting for an utterly impossible to please or get along with groups. I am proud of being a gamer, but at the same time I accept the fact that by default, most gamers on the Internet are jerks. And because of that, no, we are never in fact going to get our house in order. Sorry, but that's the end of the story.
As much as DeathQuaker is right about gamers being diverse, I entirely agree with her on this. More PDT posts! More FAQ visibility! More personal insights and thoughts from developers directly!