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Yawgmoth posted:Said no GM ever Judge Schnoopy posted:So I had my group's first session yesterday. How in the gently caress can I break these characters from their pacifist backgrounds that they all independently wrote for themselves?
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Sep 26, 2017 19:05
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Countblanc posted:*clears throat, taps microphone* That bad? Alas.
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Sep 26, 2017 19:06
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i've never actually played it or even heard of it, I just felt deep in my soul, in the depths of my being, that I needed to make that post
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Sep 26, 2017 19:07
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Sorry, I meant good GM.  
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Sep 26, 2017 19:19
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And yet even while being reluctant to kill they still murdered three men. Combat is kind of inevitable when most major games give it a whole chapter in the middle of the book right after a big equiment chapter (with multiple tables of guns or swords) and before GMing advice.
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Sep 26, 2017 19:21
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Y'know, Jason Blair wrote Little Fears back in 2001, a game about young kids going into a spooky "closetland" netherworld to battle monsters, and it had seven Nightmare Kings each of which was based around one of the seven deadly sins which means yes, there was a King of Lust, the Defiler. And yes, that more or less means exactly what you think it might. Blair did a lot of reading and research into things like child abuse and childhood trauma when he was writing Little Fears which in large part informed a lot of the game's themes and tone. And it was all handled fairly respectfully and not exploitatively, it wasn't an opportunity to pick up a sweet skill bonus and some wicked sex spells, from what I recall Blair even stated up-front "hey, this is some pretty heavy poo poo, maybe don't drop this out of nowhere on your group." That was 16 years ago. I don't really think Paizo has an excuse for running with the same general idea but worse in every respect in 2017.
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Sep 26, 2017 19:27
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Little Fears sounds like that Wraith book about Auschwitz: even if / though it miraculously managed to handle the subject matter with the appropriate gravity and restraint, who on Earth is going to actually play that game?
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Sep 26, 2017 19:33
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Blair also left out all aspects of the Defiler in the latest edition of the book, at least in part because he wasn't sure it should have been included in the first place.* So even doing due diligence with all that research and making absolutely sure he was treating the material with the respect it was due, he still wasn't sure he made the right call and walked it back later. (The latest Little Fears also takes a very different tone than the original, and imho suffers for it, but that's entirely besides the whole Defiler issue.)
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Sep 26, 2017 19:37
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That Pathfinder thing reminds me of that villain from the Book of Vile Darkness that wore babies attached to his armor, an attempt to create a villain who is unambiguously immoral Except instead of so dumb it becomes endearing, it's just creepy and would be really awkward in play. You can do that kind of villain easily without that Magical Realm crap.
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Sep 26, 2017 19:39
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Kai Tave posted:Y'know, Jason Blair wrote Little Fears back in 2001, a game about young kids going into a spooky "closetland" netherworld to battle monsters, and it had seven Nightmare Kings each of which was based around one of the seven deadly sins which means yes, there was a King of Lust, the Defiler. And yes, that more or less means exactly what you think it might. Blair did a lot of reading and research into things like child abuse and childhood trauma when he was writing Little Fears which in large part informed a lot of the game's themes and tone. And it was all handled fairly respectfully and not exploitatively, it wasn't an opportunity to pick up a sweet skill bonus and some wicked sex spells, from what I recall Blair even stated up-front "hey, this is some pretty heavy poo poo, maybe don't drop this out of nowhere on your group." Also iirc that particular dude was cut from the rerelease.
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Sep 26, 2017 19:40
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The rerelease of Little Fears was kind of a different game in a lot of ways, yeah, it aimed more for a Goosebumps sort of approach to "kid horror" than the much heavier tone and material of the original. I think a number of the Kings were cut from the game along with the idea of "the Nightmare Kings" in general, some were repurposed into other sorts of monsters, but yes. I don't think it was so much that Blair regretted things in retrospect so much as that he simply decided that was no longer the game he wanted to make.
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Sep 26, 2017 19:47
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Kai Tave posted:the same general idea but worse in every respect Lightning Lord posted:That Pathfinder thing reminds me of that villain from the Book of Vile Darkness that wore babies attached to his armor, an attempt to create a villain who is unambiguously immoral
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Sep 26, 2017 19:55
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If he got shot the armor magically redirected the damage to one of the child slaves
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Sep 26, 2017 19:58
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Lightning Lord posted:That Pathfinder thing reminds me of that villain from the Book of Vile Darkness that wore babies attached to his armor, an attempt to create a villain who is unambiguously immoral
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Sep 26, 2017 19:59
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It's been a long time, but I recall Blair discussing critiques of Little Fears on RPG.net long ago, and the impression that I got was that he was getting second thoughts about his approach to some of the material. The Defiler was the big one, but also in general the way he made the game represent adult fears for children rather than childrens' fears. You can see that come through with the second edition. Like I said, it's been a long time so maybe my memory of the discussions isn't accurate. Again, though, I think the original was a better game. Not that the Defiler had any appeal to me, but it's a game I really would have loved running - I always had an idea of doing a mash-up between It and Friday the 13th centred around an awful kids' summer camp that the PCs kept getting sent to every summer, with each session focusing on a different summer. Never felt like I had the right group for it, though. The new edition just kinda lacks much bite for me, I never really got an urge to run it. It's possible I'm just disappointed by the lack of the original game's rules for magic teddy bears, though. 
Falstaff fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Sep 26, 2017 |
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Sep 26, 2017 20:00
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That was a common complaint at the time, I remember - that it wasn't about children, but about adult perceptions of them. And since F&F covered Return to Innocence in Black Tokyo the bottom of that particular well has pretty much been found.
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Sep 26, 2017 20:38
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Evil Mastermind posted:But with Pathfinder, since NPCs are built the same way as a PC, anything that's a NPC option is a PC option, just as all the PC options are NPC options. They’re actually not. There’s some pretty big differences between how PCs and NPCs are constructed in Pathfinder, and there always have been. There’s been a lot of NPC/PC differences over the years, and Folca and other powerful beings like him use a superset version of another NPC system (the demon lord traits built off of mythic NPC rules.) What Folca would be usable for as a PC option is as a deity, so you could be a priest of unmarked vans with candy. Just to clarify: I don’t think Folca’s a good idea. If I did I wouldn’t have posted to mock him before. I merely agree that Paizo wasn’t specifically catering to pedophiles as an audience by including him. Really bad idea, different from actual child porn. My memory from reading the F&F is that Little Fears was much better.
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Sep 26, 2017 22:15
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Yawgmoth posted:The could/should be the Paizo company tagline. He was a spell caster, that had some bs exception that allowed him to cast in armor. If I was running it he would have been a weapon master with Exotic Weapon Mastery: Spiked Chain Children
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Sep 26, 2017 22:16
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Rip_Van_Winkle posted:"My players just won't kill anything! I keep trying to give them better and better reasons to kill things, or make things more and more abhorrent and evil to encourage them to kill something, anything, but they just won't do it!" I think I may have told the story before, but my group played a close-to-pacifist run of the Gates of Firestorm Peak; we killed some duergar early on, as well as a few other encounters where there were no other options, but we negotiated the living hell out of that dungeon otherwise. We parleyed with a giant spider, goddammit!
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Sep 26, 2017 22:53
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The artist behind Kill Six Billion Demons made an RPG you can have for free. I haven't looked at it yet, but it clocks in around ~250 pages. I was expecting something much, much smaller. Link to the PDF.
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Sep 27, 2017 00:48
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Arivia posted:They’re actually not. There’s some pretty big differences between how PCs and NPCs are constructed in Pathfinder, and there always have been. There’s been a lot of NPC/PC differences over the years, and Folca and other powerful beings like him use a superset version of another NPC system (the demon lord traits built off of mythic NPC rules.) What Folca would be usable for as a PC option is as a deity, so you could be a priest of unmarked vans with candy. Except that the PC option of using Folca as a diety encourages you to stalk and torture children.
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Sep 27, 2017 01:01
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Tasoth posted:The artist behind Kill Six Billion Demons made an RPG you can have for free. I haven't looked at it yet, but it clocks in around ~250 pages. I was expecting something much, much smaller. Note that this is an alpha release. He co-wrote it with a pal of his and they're looking to get feedback and playtesters so they can revise it before they start looking for illustrators. Incidentally he's got a Patreon with this, the KSBD RPG, and (soon) his dungeon crawler RPG and that plus the comic is worth kicking him a few bucks. Plus you can come hang out with us in the Discord.
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Sep 27, 2017 01:05
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Reene posted:Note that this is an alpha release. He co-wrote it with a pal of his and they're looking to get feedback and playtesters so they can revise it before they start looking for illustrators. I don't have the time or group to do a proper playtest but I've been reading over this since it got linked yesterday and while it's real cool there's a lot here that could probably be reorganized for better clarity, i.e. the fact that I had to skip all the way to the appendix to find how drones are supposed to function in combat. Nothing about it seems overly difficult, it's just very "flip back and forth to find what you're looking for."
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Sep 27, 2017 01:19
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senrath posted:Except that the PC option of using Folca as a diety encourages you to stalk and torture children. Actually, the obedience/boon packages are specifically noted as not being meant for PCs, and that if you do want to use them like that in your game, you should change them.
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Sep 27, 2017 02:38
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Yawgmoth posted:The could/should be the Paizo company tagline. Like Plutonis said, his whole gimmick was to be ~le epic troll~ to PCs. He'll walk/ride around towns with child slaves chained to him while he sells random magic poo poo. Naturally, PCs attack him to free the emaciated children. When he gets hit, half the damage gets channeled down into the kids, who will start keeling over because they're abused children. And since this is 3e he's obviously a level 20 spellcaster. He also has a magic ring that only exists to allow him to cast spells in full plate, so long as he kills at least one humanoid of 10th level or above in the past day. The BoVD doesn't even give him a character motivation besides "he's evil and insane but in a clever way" and maybe he does strange magic experiments in his fortress on the ethereal plane.
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Sep 27, 2017 03:00
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Arivia posted:James Jacobs’ reasoning in the product thread is that this dude is another form of evil for players to sword in a book of evils for players to sword. Which I buy. I don’t think Paizo is actually appealing to pedophiles, the dude isn’t presented as good or attractive. It’s just an incredibly gross, inappropriate thing in the game they’ve set up. One of the issues with d20 is that there's such a reduced divide between player-facing and gm-facing material. So while I'd definitely agree it isn't intended for PCs, a lot of this stuff runs into the issue that while there's a thematic distinction in what's intended for NPC use, there's often no mechanical distinction... particularly once it hits something like the unofficial SRD. Ed: was clarified, nevermind this. Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 03:24 on Sep 27, 2017 |
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Sep 27, 2017 03:22
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Nuns with Guns posted:Like Plutonis said, his whole gimmick was to be ~le epic troll~ to PCs. He'll walk/ride around towns with child slaves chained to him while he sells random magic poo poo. Naturally, PCs attack him to free the emaciated children. When he gets hit, half the damage gets channeled down into the kids, who will start keeling over because they're abused children. And since this is 3e he's obviously a level 20 spellcaster. He also has a magic ring that only exists to allow him to cast spells in full plate, so long as he kills at least one humanoid of 10th level or above in the past day. The BoVD doesn't even give him a character motivation besides "he's evil and insane but in a clever way" and maybe he does strange magic experiments in his fortress on the ethereal plane. Someone should compile how many "gently caress you" morality traps are there for Paladins and Clerics on 3.5/PF
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Sep 27, 2017 03:24
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Arivia posted:Actually, the obedience/boon packages are specifically noted as not being meant for PCs, and that if you do want to use them like that in your game, you should change them. Really? That's surprising, given that every other obedience/boon system they'd done previously were for PCs.
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Sep 27, 2017 03:29
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Nuns with Guns posted:And since this is 3e he's obviously a level 20 spellcaster. He also has a magic ring that only exists to allow him to cast spells in full plate, so long as he kills at least one humanoid of 10th level or above in the past day. The BoVD doesn't even give him a character motivation besides "he's evil and insane but in a clever way" and maybe he does strange magic experiments in his fortress on the ethereal plane. One of my favorite bits of d20 3PP was the d20 translation of the classic City-State of the Invincible Overlord by Judges Guild for OD&D. In the original, he's a level 20 Fighter. In 3rd Edition, he's ... a level 20 Fighter. Who only has feats and abilities from the core PHB. Granted, he has a bunch of magical poo poo like Bracers of Armor +8, Ring of Protection +5, Unholy Vorpal Longsword +3, and is immune to psionics, but his Reflex save is only a +9, and his Will save is only a +11 The downgrade in relative power just doesn't come close - you could beat this guy up with a level ~11-14 party if you really wanted to. Alien Rope Burn posted:So while I'd definitely agree it isn't intended for PCs, a lot of this stuff runs into the issue that while there's a thematic distinction in what's intended for NPC use, there's often no mechanical distinction... particularly once it hits something like the unofficial SRD. You run into this "problem" too with poo poo like that Arcane Calculus feat that always gets brought up as an example of either a 'joke' ability, or an ability so overwrought that it's a joke to try and actually use at the table. It then gets pointed out that this feat is buried in some Adventure Path and is meant to be used by some kind of Baba Yaga-type spellcaster ... but stripped of all context in the d20pfsrd, and without any standard flag of "not for player use", it gets muddied.
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Sep 27, 2017 03:51
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Well it looks like FFG are making a new edition of the L5R RPG. It will be interesting to see what direction they decide to take the rules in.
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Sep 27, 2017 04:25
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FFG generally have pretty good systems, right? I like the idea of Legend of the Five Rings but the things I've heard about it mechanically aren't super-inspiring.
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Sep 27, 2017 04:27
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Entoloma posted:Well it looks like FFG are making a new edition of the L5R RPG. It will be interesting to see what direction they decide to take the rules in. As someone who got real deep into 4e: loving finally
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Sep 27, 2017 04:33
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L5R is one of those things I remember loving as a kid but is actively embarrassing looking at it now, specifically the depths of orientalism in the "this is what John Wick thinks of Asia" sense. Whether its hilariously inappropriate language/slurs being borrowed, "realism" that is anything but, or artwork that mostly looks like white people in cosplay, it just comes across as skeevy to me now in a way that wasn't apparent ~15+ years ago. FFG is probably going to be a bit better with it than AEG, probably.
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Sep 27, 2017 04:37
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:FFG generally have pretty good systems, right? Their systems usually workable and have a lot of effort made towards variety and interesting mechanics, but they also usually have at least a few really critical problems. Considering literally all their RPGs are popular here, I'd say they can be overcome, but they're still something to be aware of.
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Sep 27, 2017 04:47
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:FFG generally have pretty good systems, right? Kiiiiiiiiiiiiiinda. They do a lot of interesting stuff, but like fool_of_sound said they also have a number of problems, FFG is very much the epitome of a game publisher where each new release gives you something else to go "oh hey this is cool" in the same breath you go "but this is pretty dumb." That said the previous L5R RPGs weren't flawless masterpieces either and FFG isn't a step down, it's not like they're Mongoose or anything. I still think they should go ahead and put together an Android RPG at some point, but I figured an L5R RPG from them was inevitable once they got the license.
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Sep 27, 2017 05:02
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I would say FFG systems have pretty big holes but never so big that it really impacts the fun of the game, or at least that's my experience with them from the 40k games and Star Wars. Just, you know. Get ready to house rule some poo poo.
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Sep 27, 2017 05:03
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senrath posted:Really? That's surprising, given that every other obedience/boon system they'd done previously were for PCs. Apparently they originally started with Book of the Damned Volume 2 and those weren’t player facing. (I suspect you, like me, were really introduced to them by Inner Sea Gods, a later evolution.) But yeah, there’s a section saying these aren’t designed for player use and are for NPC diabolists/etc. It even points out the power levels aren’t good for PCs. They are organized into sentinel/exalted/I forget the third category again choices. However you’re only supposed to access them through diabolist or whatever - the ISG categories are there for compatibility and offering different choices. You just pick which one to use as a diabolist. To make it all fit, there’s new boons in the sections for Asmodeus and Lamashtu.
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Sep 27, 2017 05:26
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Nuns with Guns posted:Like Plutonis said, his whole gimmick was to be ~le epic troll~ to PCs. He'll walk/ride around towns with child slaves chained to him while he sells random magic poo poo. Naturally, PCs attack him to free the emaciated children. When he gets hit, half the damage gets channeled down into the kids, who will start keeling over because they're abused children. And since this is 3e he's obviously a level 20 spellcaster. He also has a magic ring that only exists to allow him to cast spells in full plate, so long as he kills at least one humanoid of 10th level or above in the past day. The BoVD doesn't even give him a character motivation besides "he's evil and insane but in a clever way" and maybe he does strange magic experiments in his fortress on the ethereal plane. I want to say we decided we liked the idea that he was an Emperor Norton-like figure that everyone humored. The "children" were all paid halflings and everyone was just told to keel over if he started wiggling his fingers at you.
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Sep 27, 2017 05:39
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Alien Rope Burn posted:One of the issues with d20 is that there's such a reduced divide between player-facing and gm-facing material. So while I'd definitely agree it isn't intended for PCs, a lot of this stuff runs into the issue that while there's a thematic distinction in what's intended for NPC use, there's often no mechanical distinction... particularly once it hits something like the unofficial SRD. Yeah. A lot of the problem in 3e times was Wizards’ insistence that everything should contain player content and be player usable to sell more copies. That’s literally how you end up with Pun-Pun: not a player intended book by anyone except for the poor WotC dude who had to fit in two yuan-ti hunter prestige classes. And yet it’s got a player options bullet on the back and CharOp got their hands on it and there you go. It’s a really reductive view of the system that still affects how people talk about it today. Paizo’s products are better. They’re happy to let GM-only products be just that and not force them to be otherwise. Book of the Damned itself has nothing for players. And there’s plenty of other products like that in their lineup. It’s not perfect - they could do a better job specifically signposting optional systems/ideas so that someone doesn’t blindside you with Sacred Geometry like gradenko said - but it’s much better than 3e. Note that Folca will never hit the d20pfsrd, which is where a lot of the confusion comes from. He’s purely Product Identity, and they can’t put that stuff up. Archives of Nethys might, but that would be in a dedicated section for the Daemon Harbingers - so no ones going to stumble across it.
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Sep 27, 2017 05:44
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Man after 5 years doing only online stuff with foreigners I am starting to get back on the local TRPG scene and I'm pretty surprised. Thought the hobby died due to stuff like libraries cutting their RPG sections in favor of Board Games and the local comic/anime cons having the TRPG section lose space to board and CCGs but there's still a lot of diehards here in my city, it's just they moved to different places. Guess this weekend I'll start going again and start a table or something.
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Sep 27, 2017 06:01
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