Sounds like the audit was worth something, unless you positively know the guy booted actually did own that stuff. Its pretty easy for some people to justify "I bought it in Hero Lab, I'm not going to pay for it again", or "It's not fair if my friend gets cooler stuff because he has more money and can afford it".
Of course that's one reason I don't play PFS at GenCon, I don't want to lug a bunch of books around with me. If I can't play because I want to follow the rules, why should this guy get to play if he ignores the rules?
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Sounds like the audit was worth something
Was it?
unless you positively know the guy booted actually did own that stuff.
Or owned some of it. And isn't going to say (#*#$*$ this company or..
Of course that's one reason I don't play PFS at GenCon,
... leads to that. How the hell can you say the audit is a good idea when it keeps you from playing.
This is why they had to allow people to show a receipt
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Because he is choosing to follow the rules, making an informed decision about what he is willing to do in order to play?... leads to that. How the hell can you say the audit is a good idea when it keeps you from playing.
If a policy means that people are avoiding a seminal event and not participating even if they've met both intents of the rules (keep the lights on at paizo and be able to show the rule from somewhere), thats a serious problem.
Its a lot better now that you can show a store receipt, but stickler raw means you're SOL for anything you've already bought (minus printing up a shipping invoice yourself) but you can probably justify a photo of the source in your room or something.
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last I knew if you run hero lab prints with full descriptions you could use "My downloads page" of your paizo.com account if everything was digital
but we are WAAAAAAY Off topic
and I hate to be the pushy one here but we are now a Month out waiting for this ruling and there are Many PC's (I myself have 4) which are currently unplayable waiting for a ruling ... do we have any timetable on this ?
Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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This comes up every week now about the Clear Spindle.
GM: "So the old one was replaced right?"
Me: "Not quite yet.. until they publish the new one on the PRD you can use the old version, and if you only have the old source, then that's actually the only version you can use"
The half-life is a bit of a cloud hanging over things.
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I was wanting to play my lore warden/monk in the All for Immortality series, in which we play the third scenario friday. However, the uncertainty on when it would be changed by posting the Adventurer's Guide on the PRD prevented me from starting the series with him. Now, it turns out, I likely could have played with him. *Grumble*.
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I'm still playing my lore warden, and I hope that I get to at least finish his non-seeker career before anything goes on to the PRD. When the PRD eventually gets updated I hope that we get grandfathering, but in the meantime I'll keep playing him.
Same goes for the clear spindle and dusty rose prism resonance effects. I have two PCs affected by those changes. I'll keep on playing them as they are until the PRD is updated.
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It's a highly contentous book that has caused people to loose trust in the company and/or products, put many people on edge, and is making a lot off fans angry. ("A lot" is hard to quantify, but the overwelming idea I hear onlone and in my area is we would just be better off without the book existing, and sure, stuff about vocal minority blahblahblah, or hyperbole).
Call that an opinion if you want, but if people thought the Lore Warden was/is OP, I'm highly concerned that things like the Herald Caller, or other option that technically fail this rediculous criteria will be nuked as well.
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It's not hyperbole to say that Adventurer's Guide has damaged my confidence in Paizo's product line.
Clearly I am not alone in thinking this way. Whilst other people obviously have different opinions, mine is not unique. I rather agree with DM Beckett that it would have been better not to go down the rabbit hole that AG is leading us down, and therefore choosing not to implement AG in PFS would be preferable.
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Clearly I am not alone in thinking this way.
Yes, the same two people have favorited your post, as you have favorited theirs. A bunch of people in this 300+ post thread have also chosen to not favorite the post, from which we can begin to deduce the relative proportions of the two sides. Repeating the same point doesn't make it true.
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Regional Venture-Coordinator, Central Europe
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Correct me if i get this wrong:
You don't like the few (maybe 10) changes to existing stuff and therefore noone should be allowed to use the many (maybe 100) new things in it that are unrelated to the changed stuff?
Is this some sort of "if i am unhappy noone else is allowed to be happy" thing?
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The Adventurer's Guide isn't my favorite book, but I definitely wouldn't say it's damaged my confidence in Paizo.
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The demonizing is not for a speed run for fun here and there. The demonizing is for the blatant disregard and disrespect for campaign leaderships leniency and request for reasonable action. And that isn't about badwrongfun, but rather selfishness that leads to fellow players not being able to have nice things anymore.
Look, this is an outright lie, and misinformation like this really needs to be killed off. What actually happened was that PFS Leadership decided to remove the Aasimar and Tiefling races from play, allowing for people to get some grandfathered in by having hit level 2 before a date. THEY ACTUALLY SUGGESTED STOCKPILING. People innocently asked, multiple times, what a good number would be, not knowing if the races would become Boon options later or if they would just be essentially off limits thereafter, and PFS leadership responded, with something like 10-20 was fine.
They even explained that while they knew some folks would want to stockpile that many, in all reality it wouldn't matter, because with the rather limited number of scenario's available, they would in reality only have the option to level up a small handful of those stockpiled, and it might sound excessive, it just wouldn't really matter.
Sounds reasonable. Now, something to keep in mind here, these where the first two non-Core races to be allowed for play without a Boon, which where pretty hard to get much of the time in those days. There was no Online Campaign, and there was also a large amount of hoarding them for Gen Con only type conventions. Another massive factor worth considering was that at the time, following the rules from 3.5, Spell-Like Abilities could allow you to count as a Spell Caster, and in particular allowed people to access the Mystic Theurge Prestige Class in time to actually benefit from it. It was still rather sub par, but it was basically the only viable option, and there where a few other corner cases along those line, (generally in the same boat, it allowed it to be a viable option, but not a great one).
Another massive consideration we need to keep in mind is that a lot of people purchased the Blood of Angels/Fiends books specifically to allow for options to be made legal, and essentially pulling out the rug from under us really felt cheap, but also had absolutely nothing at all to do with the ongoing storyline within the campaign's seasons.
So, back to the history lesson. Once again, people had reasonably asked for more clarification, and the answer had been given, specifically that while 20 or more was expected, it had already been considered in full and there was no real worry about it. And then, all of the shit hits the fan after some group, (singular here, not plural), "brags" about doing speed runs to get their lodge a stockpile of Aasimar and Tiefling characters, mentioning that at some point (assumed later into the over the week run) they had even gotten to the point of doing Master's of the Fallen Tower in under half an hour.
I mean, to me, that honestly sounds like said group should have been commended. It really come off to me as though a few DMs put in a lot of work to help multiple people out when there was a lot of confusion of the subject. Ultimately, though, what really happened here was that PFS leadership essentially stabbed people in the backs, saying one thing and then condemning us as a whole for a tiny portion actually doing it.
From there, it has essentially been this ongoing lie that Players can not be trusted, because PFS leadership gave them an inch and we took a mile, even if it was very, very small minority of us. Now, there are also a lot of folks that personally disliked the two races, A.) because in introduced something they like to call the "cantina effect", which is frankly a way of accusing others of having badwrongfun because humanoids should outnumber everything else, <You might also notice how absent this argument has become with some of the clearly not human-like races out there, Kitsune, Tengu, Elemental Touched, etc. . ., and it is not that hard to tell what the real motivation behind this was>, and B.) the false notion that Aasimar and Tieflings are too good, which has been disproven multiple times in comparison to just straight Humans, which granted, is somewhat subjective.
Now, keep in mind, this was also the first time that for many, many people that a Non-Core Races was ever an option, so it makes sense that there would be a sudden influx of the races in play.
Since then, the unofficial rule had been that new races would be in circulation for two seasons and then swapped out, but, essentially excluding only the Aasimar and Tiefling, they have all been now designated as indef and likely not to be removed. Some of this was due to the argument that Blood of Animals had recently come out, (which sort of spilled salt on the wound for Blood of Angels/Fiends).
So that is what actually happened, and as I recall, those individuals that had done the "speedrun" had actually done so over an entire week, (not weekend) putting in extra hours to get folks at their lodge a chance to have one or a few Aasimar or Tiefling options before the deadline, which eventually got to the point of running the module like 30 mins, (and lets be honest, Masters of the Fallen Fortress is not a long Module, shorter than many scenarios minus the maps). I'm sorry, to me that seems both innovative and very much like people trying to help others out that is very much in the scope of what PFS is about. I do not remember the speedrun table incident that well, but I do remember being pretty ashamed of the way PFS Leadership and some of the more vocal haters acted towards it. I mean heck, I feel like that with The Confirmation, and would love to speed run through it like 20 times just so I don't have to sit through it again.
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Clearly I am not alone in thinking this way.Yes, the same two people have favorited your post, as you have favorited theirs. A bunch of people in this 300+ post thread have also chosen to not favorite the post, from which we can begin to deduce the relative proportions of the two sides. Repeating the same point doesn't make it true.
I don't know about you, but I can agree with a post without favouriting it.
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Correct me if i get this wrong:
You don't like the few (maybe 10) changes to existing stuff and therefore noone should be allowed to use the many (maybe 100) new things in it that are unrelated to the changed stuff?
Is this some sort of "if i am unhappy noone else is allowed to be happy" thing?
No. For me, ultimately it comes down to precedence. A great deal of the material in that book is individuals trying to change aspects of the world that I think they personally do not like and forcing it on us as official retcons. I do not know this for fact, but, that is what it felt like sort of reading between the lines on a lot of things. Or the changes to things that really had no need of being changed, or at most could have just used a very minor tweek.
Additionally I found the inclusion of certain groups (I don't want to spoil things for people playing various APs, Modules, or Scenarios, mainly APs) to be in very poor tastes as they either spoil them or undermine the PC's choices and actions by codifying what happens.
Ultimately, though, in my opinion, the book as a whole just does too much harm for what good it may bring. Which is not to say that there is little good in the book, but comparatively I don't think it will be worth the cost.
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Correct me if i get this wrong:
You don't like the few (maybe 10) changes to existing stuff and therefore noone should be allowed to use the many (maybe 100) new things in it that are unrelated to the changed stuff?
Is this some sort of "if i am unhappy noone else is allowed to be happy" thing?
That's not what I'm saying.
It's the rabbit hole effect that bothers me. AG sets a bad precedent. It radically rewrites material that has been in play for years, apparently on the grounds that softcover content didn't get edited as thoroughly as hardcover content. If this is Paizo's publishing policy now, I can't have confidence in the body of work any more.
On these grounds I think AG is bad for the campaign. It may have some nice stuff in it, but the policy it signals is a damaging one.
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Look, this is an outright lie, and misinformation like this really needs to be killed off.Beckett, we've been over that.
Facts don't matter if you're loud enough!
The only public post I've seen on this was the original blog post by Mike and John, where they acknowledged that people could go out and run a scenario 10 times just to get a bunch of aasimars, but they hoped people wouldn't be that unreasonable.
If there is a post that says, "go ahead and speed run 20 aasimars," I would love to see it. Clearly there is, so hopefully someone can show us the post.
(For reference, even though one of the speed runs occurred in my Lodge while I was V-C, I didn't give out commendations.)
EDIT: The quote: "To answer your question, yes, you can make 10 aasimars and play The Confirmation an equal number of times, but we're trusting you'll exercise some good taste and respect a decision made with the larger community in mind."
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It's a highly contentous book that has caused people to loose trust in the company and/or products, put many people on edge, and is making a lot off fans angry. ("A lot" is hard to quantify, but the overwelming idea I hear onlone and in my area is we would just be better off without the book existing, and sure, stuff about vocal minority blahblahblah, or hyperbole).
Call that an opinion if you want, but if people thought the Lore Warden was/is OP, I'm highly concerned that things like the Herald Caller, or other option that technically fail this rediculous criteria will be nuked as well.
A lot of fans also are extremely happy with the changes.
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Since you wanted those people who haven't spoken up to do so, I will go ahead and raise my voice. I was there for the entire Aasimar/Tiefling debacle and I do not remember things being ANYTHING like you are describing. There was abuse, clear and simple, and now we are reaping the consequences of said abuse.
Back to the argument at hand: As implemented, with previous sourcebooks guaranteeing access to whatever item has recently been modified for good or ill, I do not have a problem with changes being made to items or classes. And by and large, the folks in my little corner of the world do not have an issue with it either.
How you are presenting yourself in this argument does not endear me to you or your position. I can understand your position, but I certainly do not agree with it.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Massachusetts—Boston Metro
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It's the rabbit hole effect that bothers me. AG sets a bad precedent. It radically rewrites material that has been in play for years, apparently on the grounds that softcover content didn't get edited as thoroughly as hardcover content. If this is Paizo's publishing policy now, I can't have confidence in the body of work any more.
I love how your logic is that by Paizo's own admission that their books having poor copy editing and writing and are trying to fix it is a bad thing.
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Clearly I am not alone in thinking this way.Yes, the same two people have favorited your post, as you have favorited theirs. A bunch of people in this 300+ post thread have also chosen to not favorite the post, from which we can begin to deduce the relative proportions of the two sides. Repeating the same point doesn't make it true.
To be fair, "favorite counting" doesn't really say much. Indeed, by the time I'd read it, supervillan's post had a favorite count of 4, and Lamplighter's a favorite count of 2.
One should not draw conclusions from this.
If a post gets a favorite count in the 30s or higher, then I would say that's a suggestion that the post has hit on a vein of opinion within at least the forum community. Otherwise, it's just a random matter of who felt like favoriting a given post. The counts say nothing about who agrees with what.
Myself, I understand all the unhappiness about the Adventurer's Guide. I share a fair amount of it. I had actually been looking forward to it. However, I'm a wee bit grouchy that as much of it is reprints as it is. Still, that's not that big a deal, since some of the reprints are quite old. From the point of view of a PFS player, though, it makes me quite unhappy. There are a lot of rule changes in it; three things in particular affect me, including two archetypes that have changed substantially. My reaction to that, and to knowing that the design team doesn't really pay close attention to the Campaign Setting and Player Companion books, is that if you want to have some confidence that your character isn't going to suddenly have all its rules changed, you should only make characters using rules from the hardback line, and even then, only ones that have been around long enough that you're reasonably confident that reprints and FAQs won't change the rules substantially.
In a home game, this is not a big deal. House rule grandfathering. In PFS, the "house rules" generally are keep up with the latest versions of RAW, and stop using things that new books change. If Pathfinder is too much of a "living" system, then the lack of stability for the rules governing our PCs becomes intensely frustrating. This has happened before, but arguably the Adventurer's Guide is the biggest scattershot example of that, at least recently. The additional fact that the AR says "you will have to retrain in a way that is not yet defined when the PRD is updated", and it's very difficult to guess when the PRD will be updated (it's not implausible that it will be a couple of years! but it could be days), leads to an irritating patina of doubt and uncertainty.
Does everybody feel this way? No. Do lots of people feel this way? Yes. Is it a significant effect? Dunno. But I know I feel this way, and have heard a number of others agree. Regardless of whether or not most PFS players care, at least in my opinion the Adventurer's Guide situation is putting a bit of a damper on my PFS enthusiasm.
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THEY ACTUALLY SUGGESTED STOCKPILING. People innocently asked, multiple times, what a good number would be, not knowing if the races would become Boon options later or if they would just be essentially off limits thereafter, and PFS leadership responded, with something like 10-20 was fine.
Citation needed.
Given that your memory of this is in direct conflict with what pretty much everybody else remembers, it's a good bet that this is just objectively wrong -- both about the reasonable number (10-20? really?), and about the suggestion of "stockpiling". (Making sure you start a character or two so you can play a race about to retire is different from what most people would think of when using the word "stockpiling" in this context.)
In fact, if you quote the original blog post:
Does this mean you can create several new characters, play a scenario with each, and have several native outsiders waiting for when you need them? Well, we debated long and hard whether to require 4 XP per character, as at that point one is past the free rebuilding stage. However, we also recognized this as unnecessarily punitive to casual players who may only be able to play once or twice in the next month. To answer your question, yes, you can make 10 aasimars and play The Confirmation an equal number of times, but we're trusting you'll exercise some good taste and respect a decision made with the larger community in mind.
They're saying that there's no strict rule prohibiting stockpiling 10 aasimars... but they also very clearly indicate that they think that is abusive. What they're saying is: "Yes, you could do this, but we're trusting you to exercise good taste and not do something like this that would be clearly abusive."
At the very least, stop spreading the misinformation that they suggested stockpiling, and that they said that 10 (never mind 20!) was reasonable. Better, go back yourself and see what was really said, and realize that your memory is wrong.
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I love how your logic is that by Paizo's own admission that their books having poor copy editing and writing and are trying to fix it is a bad thing.It's the rabbit hole effect that bothers me. AG sets a bad precedent. It radically rewrites material that has been in play for years, apparently on the grounds that softcover content didn't get edited as thoroughly as hardcover content. If this is Paizo's publishing policy now, I can't have confidence in the body of work any more.
Two bad things, really.
1, Paizo are saying (as rknop describes above) that the Design Team don't agree with longstanding softcover content. They've admitted that the softcover product doesn't get the same level of quality control as the hardcover product. This is tremendously bad for a publishing company, because it signals the company's own lack of faith in its body of work. It is tremendously bad for PFS, where we make everyday use of softcover content and reasonably expect it to have the same weight as hardcover content.
2, Revisions to genuine mistakes need to come in early, not after 6 or 7 years. Again, for PFS (because a home campaign can just houserule at will) this is a bad thing because the longer an option is in legal play for the more use it will see. Change a feat or archetype after three months when campaign play demonstrates a genuine problem, OK sure that's probably the right thing to do. Change a feat or archetype after 7 years of play by a growing community that hasn't pointed to a problem, well that's disruptive and unhelpful.
Myself, I understand all the unhappiness about the Adventurer's Guide. I share a fair amount of it. I had actually been looking forward to it. However, I'm a wee bit grouchy that as much of it is reprints as it is. Still, that's not that big a deal, since some of the reprints are quite old. From the point of view of a PFS player, though, it makes me quite unhappy. There are a lot of rule changes in it; three things in particular affect me, including two archetypes that have changed substantially. My reaction to that, and to knowing that the design team doesn't really pay close attention to the Campaign Setting and Player Companion books, is that if you want to have some confidence that your character isn't going to suddenly have all its rules changed, you should only make characters using rules from the hardback line, and even then, only ones that have been around long enough that you're reasonably confident that reprints and FAQs won't change the rules substantially.
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The lack of design continuity across all product lines is a huge problem. The lack of both a keyword bible and ability style writing guide by Paizo also is a huge problem.
I canceled my subscriptions to the soft cover lines almost a year ago because of this.
So this is why I'm extremely happy to see the design team finally paying attention to problematic soft cover choices. I'm not thrilled it took 8 years for some of them. I'm also not thrilled that the potential precedent is that soft covers will continue to be badly edited for rules continuity and that we may see another hardback do this to another slew of older popular soft cover choices.
I'm also grateful to those few who jump all over a previous post so that I didn't have to overreact to being called a liar.
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Im looking for the info. Its been years, but I have a feeling I know where to find it.
But, something I want to point out is that, reading the exact same blog, you walk away with "10 is outrageous", and I see "10 is fine". Just for the record, I had 2 Aasimar, and no Tieflings. I ran one table for others to get one.
And I absolutly agree, I think for some people facts don't matter, it's all about shouting over others, case in point.
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Im looking for the info. Its been years, but I have a feeling I know where to find it.
But, something I want to point out is that, reading the exact same blog, you walk away with "10 is outrageous", and I see "10 is fine". Just for the record, I had 2 Aasimar, and no Tieflings. I ran one table for others to get one.
And I absolutly agree, I think for some people facts don't matter, it's all about shouting over others, case in point.
I'm honestly baffled that you can read the blog and come away with the interpretation that "10 is fine". Did you stop reading halfway through the sentence?
It doesn't help that you have your facts wrong about the requisite experience for grandfathering. Aasimar and tieflings did not need to be level 2, they only needed 1 XP on a character.
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I'm honestly baffled that you can read the blog and come away with the interpretation that "10 is fine". Did you stop reading halfway through the sentence?
No. You apparently tead it as saying, "One is ok. 10 is rediculous". I read it, and see, "10 is fine, but lets not do, <50>".
It doesn't help that you have your facts wrong about the requisite experience for grandfathering. Aasimar and tieflings did not need to be level 2, they only needed 1 XP on a character.
You are right, I made a simple, though not pertinent mistake. Was tracking it was 1xp and I typed the wrong thing. Thank you for pointing it out.
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I read we will allow 10, but if you do this, it is bad taste, aka BADWRONGFUN.
But we will not forbid it, just shame you for doing it :-(
NOTE : I think they got better at the Leadership job :-)
I'm with Schopmeyer on this one.
Saying, "We understand its possible to do X, but please be reasonable." Is not in any way tacit approval to do X. It really boggles my mind that this is what people are comprehending from that.
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I read it, and see, "10 is fine, but lets not do, <50>".I have no idea how you got that out of "you are capable of doing this* but please be reasonable".
*this being "stockpile 10"
We don't want to put a strict limit on things, so while this* is technically within the rules, please be respectful of leadership and your fellow players.
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I read we will allow 10, but if you do this, it is bad taste, aka BADWRONGFUN.
But we will not forbid it, just shame you for doing it :-(
NOTE : I think they got better at the Leadership job :-)
I'm with Schopmeyer on this one.
Saying, "We understand its possible to do X, but please be reasonable." Is not in any way tacit approval to do X. It really boggles my mind that this is what people are comprehending from that.
And still it happened in good faith :-(
Blaming people for what they understood in good faith is not fair IMO
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And still it happened in good faith :-(
Blaming people for what they understood in good faith is not fair IMO
Saying "I did this in good faith", interestingly, does not mean that the speaker did the thing in good faith. It is possible to say one thing and mean another.