Awe. That was an idea that really had potential. It probably should have been a wondrous item, and definitely should have been simplified. But it is more interesting that the Feats in a Can next to it. Up vote!
I really like this item and I want to vote for it, but, it really should be a pair of boots.
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Every time I read Black ravens comments I'm like is that mine, no that might be though, aw crap maybe it's that one.
Tip of the hat.
RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32
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Champion Voter Season 6, Champion Voter Season 7, Champion Voter Season 8, Champion Voter Season 9
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2 Crafting feats in the requirements ? I think it would have been better to choose one and stick to it :-/
If you are talking about a rod or staff that can be used as a magic weapon, it should have Craft Magic Arms and Armor as well as the appropriate Craft Rod or Craft Staff. Not too sure about rings that turn into armor or weapons though, but they should have Forge Ring at a minimum...
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2 Crafting feats in the requirements ? I think it would have been better to choose one and stick to it :-/If you are talking about a rod or staff that can be used as a magic weapon, it should have Craft Magic Arms and Armor as well as the appropriate Craft Rod or Craft Staff. Not too sure about rings that turn into armor or weapons though, but they should have Forge Ring at a minimum...
Congratulations on reaching Champion Voter status again, Thomas! :)
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Wow. I don't know how you guys do that. I feel like I spend a lot of time voting and I'll be happy to get back to Marathon...
Starting to see a lot of trip attack items.
RPG Superstar 2015
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Marathon Voter Season 6, Marathon Voter Season 7, Marathon Voter Season 8, Star Voter Season 9
aka mamaursula
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Another new item, and one that made me look up not one, but two new words. In this instance, I'm not sure they were necessary. Still an interesting item, but there's a limit to the word count. I'm not sure using obscure language when describing mechanics is a plus. Better to err on the side of clarity.
I'm a big fan of using the right word, but at the same time most people don't have that kind of vocabulary either. I guess we should specify to "communicate effectively."
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2 Crafting feats in the requirements ? I think it would have been better to choose one and stick to it :-/If you are talking about a rod or staff that can be used as a magic weapon, it should have Craft Magic Arms and Armor as well as the appropriate Craft Rod or Craft Staff.
I realized this later on after perusing the CRB. Though there are still glaring exceptions such as the Rod of Alertness (also in the CRB) : "This rod is indistinguishable from a +1 light mace". But its requirements only mention Craft Rod.
Both of this round's items allow the wielder to throw them and teleport to the item's location. Really, what are the odds ?
Given that the algorithm is seeking to rank order items, it seems likely that two items that do the same thing would wind up appearing next to one another to be sorted - ceteris paribus, they would be up/down voted with equal frequency, and therefore, inevitably, drift over time into a matchup and stay there until conclusively ranked relative to one another.
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RPG Superstar 2015
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Marathon Voter Season 6, Marathon Voter Season 7, Marathon Voter Season 8, Star Voter Season 9
aka mamaursula
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Both of this round's items allow the wielder to throw them and teleport to the item's location. Really, what are the odds ?Given that the algorithm is seeking to rank order items, it seems likely that two items that do the same thing would wind up appearing next to one another to be sorted - ceteris paribus, they would be up/down voted with equal frequency, and therefore, inevitably, drift over time into a matchup and stay there until conclusively ranked relative to one another.
That's not actually how the algorithm works, if I understand it correctly. It simply matches every item with every other item until all possible combinations are achieved and we unlock the "Get a Life!" badge.
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That's not actually how the algorithm works, if I understand it correctly. It simply matches every item with every other item until all possible combinations are achieved and we unlock the "Get a Life!" badge.
(quietly rolls d20 to disbelieve the algorithm)
That's not actually how the algorithm works, if I understand it correctly. It simply matches every item with every other item until all possible combinations are achieved and we unlock the "Get a Life!" badge.
Huh. I must have misunderstood. I thought the feedback was built into the "which items are shown" part of the system. The rank order is made after the votes have been tallied?
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RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32
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Champion Voter Season 6, Champion Voter Season 7, Champion Voter Season 8, Champion Voter Season 9
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That's not actually how the algorithm works, if I understand it correctly. It simply matches every item with every other item until all possible combinations are achieved and we unlock the "Get a Life!" badge.Both of this round's items allow the wielder to throw them and teleport to the item's location. Really, what are the odds ?Given that the algorithm is seeking to rank order items, it seems likely that two items that do the same thing would wind up appearing next to one another to be sorted - ceteris paribus, they would be up/down voted with equal frequency, and therefore, inevitably, drift over time into a matchup and stay there until conclusively ranked relative to one another.
Hmm. If the item count is at 800, that means I would need to vote 600k+ times...
Hmm. If the item count is at 800, that means I would need to vote 600k+ times...
And if my math is right that would take about 70 years.
Hmm. If the item count is at 800, that means I would need to vote 600k+ times...And if my math is right that would take about 70 years.
Are you sure? At 1 minute per vote, that's 600,000 minutes. Which is 10,000 hours, or ~416 days.
So by the time RPGSS 2016 winners were announced, you'd be done voting for 2015! GO! GO! GO!
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I see a lot of people go on about cpyright and make a tentacle remark.
The myhtos of a certain fan of non-euclidean geometry isn't under copyright, and has been adopted by Paizo with their monster manuals.
Hmm. If the item count is at 800, that means I would need to vote 600k+ times...And if my math is right that would take about 70 years.Are you sure? At 1 minute per vote, that's 600,000 minutes. Which is 10,000 hours, or ~416 days.
So by the time RPGSS 2016 winners were announced, you'd be done voting for 2015! GO! GO! GO!
And all you would need to do is not sleep for 416 days. ;p
And all you would need to do is not sleep for 416 days. ;p
I was assuming thousands of micronaps while the voting buttons were greyed out.
What? It's a perfectly cromulent strategy. Now, if you'll excuse me, I appear to be heading towards another fugue state. Why do those keep happening?!
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Excuse me, but I was told there would be no math!Hmm. If the item count is at 800, that means I would need to vote 600k+ times...And if my math is right that would take about 70 years.
You were mistaken, sir! It was "new math," not "no math."
The whole thing revolves around calculations to the base 64. :)
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And all you would need to do is not sleep for 416 days. ;pI was assuming thousands of micronaps while the voting buttons were greyed out.
What? It's a perfectly cromulent strategy. Now, if you'll excuse me, I appear to be heading towards another fugue state. Why do those keep happening?!
Things were fine at first, in the Fugu State. The fish had cleverly used their poisonous livers to intimidate their political opponents, but seemed bent towards goodness and freedom.
Then, when they cemented their power, things changed for the worse. Oh, how things changed.
Living in the Fugu State, a comprehensive survivors guide to the Fugu-fish Dynasty.
One item tidy but meh...the other inaccurately describes the fundamental purpose of the type of item it purports to be - gotta go with meh.
Now seeing lots of items paired with another of the same type - apples with apples.
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RPG Superstar 2015
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Marathon Voter Season 6, Marathon Voter Season 7, Marathon Voter Season 8, Star Voter Season 9
aka mamaursula
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That's not actually how the algorithm works, if I understand it correctly. It simply matches every item with every other item until all possible combinations are achieved and we unlock the "Get a Life!" badge.Huh. I must have misunderstood. I thought the feedback was built into the "which items are shown" part of the system. The rank order is made after the votes have been tallied?
While talking about it may summon Chris Lambertz and prove me wrong (which is entirely possible), I believe that it is just a tally and then extrapolation. There are over 300k possible combinations (as per someone from Paizo whom I do not recall in some thread from this year, we were talking about Champion voters. Or 600k+ if you think you can trust Thomas LeBlanc's math skills.) We won't get to all those possible votes.
So, it goes something like this: Item A gets a lot of votes, making it way better than Item B. Item C is somewhat better than Item B. So Item A is moderately better than Item C. Again, I could be totally wrong, but as I recall, that is how it worked.
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RPG Superstar 2015
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Marathon Voter Season 6, Marathon Voter Season 7, Marathon Voter Season 8, Star Voter Season 9
aka mamaursula
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Oh, that is so tragic, my item came up and because I was bored I read it. I wish I had edited it differently, it's rather clunky in hindsight.
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I really don't see how that could be a plausible PC throwing and returning weapon.
Just use your imagination...then reach for the brain bleach! ;)
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Oh, that is so tragic, my item came up and because I was bored I read it. I wish I had edited it differently, it's rather clunky in hindsight.
Don't think you are alone. I suspect you, me and probably about 798 others feel the same. It would be interesting to see how many would submit the same item now verbatim if given a 30 second opportunity to tweak it or make some small alteration.
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Syntactically that perhaps the most difficult way to say what need to say. This is why you write down an item, you leave it alone for at least two days and then you come back to it with clear eyes. Still, the actual ability is not bad, so have a vote.
edit: And apparently I hit Marathon. Woohoo!
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RPG Superstar 2015
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Marathon Voter Season 6, Marathon Voter Season 7, Marathon Voter Season 8, Star Voter Season 9
aka mamaursula
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I mean this with no malice, but text lacks tone - I really hope people come to the critique threads, because I would love to understand how they were thinking and help them not think that way. Some of the mistakes seem so deliberate, but uninformed.
Not exactly the most heroic magic item, is it?
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There is so much mithril it's become as common as muck!Well, the dwarven miners are flooding the market right now to depress the price and drive the less cost effective producers out of business.
DeBeards? :)
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(quietly rolls d20 to disbelieve the algorithm)
That's not actually how the algorithm works, if I understand it correctly. It simply matches every item with every other item until all possible combinations are achieved and we unlock the "Get a Life!" badge.
{misinformation:} Al Gorerhythm invented SuperStar.
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You would think it would be easy to figure out the price for a SIAC. Why is your price 5 times too much?
Filigree costs extra.
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RPG Superstar 2015
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Marathon Voter Season 6, Marathon Voter Season 7, Marathon Voter Season 8, Star Voter Season 9
aka mamaursula
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You would think it would be easy to figure out the price for a SIAC. Why is your price 5 times too much?Filigree costs extra.
I think you found the item whose owner I am hoping to speak with about their reasoning.
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I see a lot of people go on about cpyright and make a tentacle remark.
The myhtos of a certain fan of non-euclidean geometry isn't under copyright, and has been adopted by Paizo with their monster manuals.
Not everyone is a fan of that, though. Just because you can use something legally doesn't mean you should. I could legally create a Windmill-bane Lance or a rod that was Long John Silver's peg leg, but I shouldn't.
Also, I sometimes feel like I'm the only one, but I really don't like or care about the Cthulhu mythos. I think it's a terrible RPG and a totally uninteresting, unnecessarily convoluted, and pointlessly depressing cosmology. I like the D&D concept of incomprehensible monsters in the Outer Realm or whatever you want to call space, but the specific Lovecraftian monsters just don't work for me (in no small part because, for creatures that are repeatedly described as "incomprehensible," "unknowable," or so horrific just seeing it will drive you literally insane are described in extreme, and dry, detail).
Okay, wasn't blown away by this item first time around, but the more I see it, the more I like it.
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I see a lot of people go on about cpyright and make a tentacle remark.
The myhtos of a certain fan of non-euclidean geometry isn't under copyright, and has been adopted by Paizo with their monster manuals.
Not everyone is a fan of that, though. Just because you can use something legally doesn't mean you should. I could legally create a Windmill-bane Lance or a rod that was Long John Silver's peg leg, but I shouldn't.
Also, I sometimes feel like I'm the only one, but I really don't like or care about the Cthulhu mythos. I think it's a terrible RPG and a totally uninteresting, unnecessarily convoluted, and pointlessly depressing cosmology. I like the D&D concept of incomprehensible monsters in the Outer Realm or whatever you want to call space, but the specific Lovecraftian monsters just don't work for me (in no small part because, for creatures that are repeatedly described as "incomprehensible," "unknowable," or so horrific just seeing it will drive you literally insane are described in extreme, and dry, detail).
I think that mixing Lovecraft and Pathfinder-style RPG requires a very deft touch, because the two worldviews and narrative styles are fundamentally at odds. Most PF-style RPG is about the heroes triumphing, plain and simple-- and at the core of Lovecraft's horror is the idea that you damn well can't. That, at best, you can survive through luck and ignorance, and probably you will wind up scarred and frightened, convinced of mankind's irrelevance against an uncaring doom, and you'll live the rest of your life with that knowledge and the knowledge you can't tell anyone, because what good would it do, etc...
True horror has nothing to do with the number of tentacles a monster has; it's rooted in psychology, and in Lovecraft's case, in knowledge of helplessness and fear and your own impotence... which usually is just a horrible thing to try and evoke in your PCs when they're supposed to be doing things like overcoming the odds.
If you have them experience the crushing despair, but then have them overcome it and pull off a victory, then you're completely undermining the Mythos's world-rules, which is that mortals can't triumph; if you just kill the party horribly, you're completely undermining the basic world-rule of Pathfinder/similar PCs-have-agency games.
Most of my issue with Pathfinder trying to incorporate Lovecraftian horror comes from a basic lack of grasping this dichotomy, and instead thinking that just adding more tentacles and freakish anatomy to a monster makes it scary. It doesn't. PCs yawn off most aberrations with less attention than they even do a goblin... you can give a goblin a personality, at least; motivations, something for PCs to connect to... or fear... but most aberrations are, by their own write-ups, just 'unknowable horrors' that don't provide anything but a simple "okay, well, let's kill it" reaction from PCs/players.
I read an article once that pointed out that the instant you give Cthulhu stats, you have included the possibility that he can be killed by PCs using stats, which is just completely antithetical to the point of Cthulhu. To a lesser extent, this applies for all the mythos creatures.
Now, there is actually the occasional place where the two worlds combine, and I think you can fish there to good effect if you do it right. I had a moment in GMing Shattered Star, where I decided to play up the lustspawn from their actual tactics block. As written, they do nothing special other than attacking high-CHA characters. What I actually did was...
I'm also running a campaign right now where something has sort of fortuitously given me the chance to destroy a PC-- it's a PBP game where we lost a player, and I've been GMPCing her character ever since. She failed a will save against a Cthulhu-type entity (Nyarlothotep, actually), and since then the entity has been slowly corrupting her and making her act "off" -- the sense of something being 'not right' with the PC is something that is slowly building among the other players, I think to good effect. But this example sort of proves the point: I usually wouldn't want to just throw a PC under the bus like that, and the PCs usually aren't so invested in a 'normal' NPC-- they are in THIS one, because she's 'one of them'.
Anyway, that was a long shpiel to say that I think that, 90% of the time, Lovecraft + Pathfinder is not a great idea. It's really hard to find a balance between horror and heroism.
That said, there is one notable Cthulhu-item in this competition that I keep upvoting and is honestly one of my favorites. It's just so gloriously over the top and a little campy that I really want to see it go far.
eta I also don't actually think that Lovecraft was really a very good writer, period. Most of the stuff from Mythos that has stuck with me has been from later writers who added to it.
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You've both made some great points about Lovecraft, his writing, and the skill it takes to mix it with Pathfinder.
I agree with some but not all.
My point is solely that a voter probably shouldn't downvote an item because "copyright infringement", when that isn't actually happening.
Oh, I really wasn't addressing the issue of voting on IP at all-- I think there's a plenty strong case to be made for Cthulhu-items being a big part of the D&D world already, unlike with, say, the John-Silver-Peg-Leg example. This was just general thoughts on D&D/PF + Cthulhu. :)
