#restarted a pathfinder campaign

[infriga]

Rain World gives you the ability to tame lizards but then makes it virtually impossible for you to take them anywhere without them dying or getting stuck.

[itsracc]

The pathfinder campaign I'm a player in is taking a while to restart, I'm boutta start acting like my character irl soon. The withdrawals are hitting harder and harder as the days pass by.

[jeremy-ken-anderson]

Room for Shenanigans

So, there's this not-perfectly-solvable problem for game design, which is how to make room for players to Get Up to Some Shit.

You want players to experience the joy of crafting something busted. You also want them to experience something that feels challenging, for some portion of your game. And if you want to make money selling your game you probably want players who don't have the time or wherewithal to put together a Ridiculous Build® to still be able to get through it okay.

There have been all kinds of solutions to this. Roguelikes' popularity are owed largely to being one possible solution: You let the player design a build from scraps they don't control, allow them to revel in their build's bustedness for the remainder of One Run, and then the run ends and they restart. This stops players from declaring The Definitive Build online, stops the player from boring themself by making an engine that practically plays on its own, and allows plenty of space below that busted high point for The Regular Game Experience.

Slay the Spire does this, the Kobolds & Catacombs expansion of Hearthstone did this, even more abstract stuff like Loop Hero does it to an extent.

It's particularly hard in campaign game settings, like D&D, Diablo, Pathfinder, Path of Exile, and so on. PoE has a LOT of creativity possible, but likewise has trouble with a) having players comprehend the possibilities and how to get to them and b) upon reaching a solution, having that design game basically be over? It's a game that lets you pick how you play, but unlike some other games like M:tG I don't have the same itch to keep fiddling with the machine once I feel like I've got something decent. This may be a case of people's mileage varying WILDLY depending on their preference or dislike for certain kinds of analysis, though. That is: Maybe it's just me?

I do think there's something messy and foolish about the largely non-refundable passive skill tree. Like. Just let people refund at will. All you do by saying no to that is force a bunch of your community to theorycraft out their whole build from level 1, and then clumsily cross-reference it. The tree wouldn't be so intimidating and such a turn-off for players if it weren't full of Permanent Consequences on TOP of the difficulty of comprehension.

[threecephalopodsinatrenchcoat]

I’m going to hang out with my friends later, and the Pathfinder campaign I’m in is restarting tomorrow

soosossoso much negativity at the moment so umm tell me TWO GOOD THINGS! it can be about your day or your interests or literally anything!!!!! positivity yayayyy

for me:

1. theres a david attenborough documentary film coming out in cinemas next week and im gonna go see it with my bf hopefully

2. triangles exist !!! ∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆

@yourlocalbadgerscales @yourlocalxiaosimp @dracosleftarsecheek @forensic-b1tch-aiden @names-confuse-me @goatgoddesss and open tagsss

[mcmissileproof]

jesus fucking christ the past two months have been insane. if the Things Happening would slow down just slightly that might be cool

[pyrot3ch-nick]

Me when players ask me if they can reroll stats at character creation because negatives.

[thedungeonofbaddecisions]

Edge of Ecirah is back! Sort of.

We’re trying to reboot the online Pathfinder campaign that fell apart a while back, but this time in Pathfinder Second Edition. We have some new players, a lot of conflicting schedules, and only two definite characters. The campaign itself is essentially doing a soft restart, with our old characters having nebulously existed and done their shit, but being currently unavailable due to plot reasons.

So, without further ado, this is the cast list so far:

Michaela, the DM

Me, as Rusalka, dwarf fighter

Taylor, as Thea Kaitwen Stonesorrow, dwarf paladin, in love with the moon, self-described as “thique”

Other players are Devon, Alice, and new guy, Michael, who’s character may or may not be named Declan, who knows. Devon is probably playing a goblin sorcerer, no name as of yet. G0d only knows what Alice is up to.

The campaign tag remains #edge of ecirah. The following quotes are from the first attempt at a session zero/group character creation, as we struggle to learn Pf2, and mostly consist of me and Devon being assholes at each other and the world.

[carionto]

Ooh, there's an idea - future civilization discovers a trove of ancient data centers, countless entries on everything imaginable (they imagine), but it's all in this indecipherable code.

Even if they manage to get some basic emulator-like thing going, their hopes are dashed when something called a .dll is missing somewhere, the text is all in garbled cyrillic, and worst of all - Clippy offers to help. And they trust it!

For months the alien researchers struggle to recreate a functional Windows 2000 OS, but then the drive doesn't even appear when connected because they used Ubuntu as the basis for reverse engineering it.

Finally, a heavenly angel descends in the form of a retro-themed space truck and some guy named Buck who sells them a PC with Windows 17 his grandad inherited from his dad's failed restoration business.

All seems good, the classic tune plays, it tells them to 'Please wait, we're getfing everything ready for you'. So they wait. To this day they are waiting. Even if they knew the secret of force restarting a computer that crashed in the background, what awaited them in the files was a lifetime's worth of Pathfinder 4e character sheets, DM notes, custom enemy stat blocks, planned campaign outlines, and innumerable attempts to get a session going, all doomed to fail as one has college, another got a boyfriend, a third joined a grunge band, and a fourth just kinda doesn't feel like it but is too awkward to outright leave so they make up excuses half the time while still being active in the group chat.

We fail alone, we excel together

Formations are a staple of effective drills, training, and practice in every military across the Galaxy. They are a showcase of unity, leadership, trust, and loyalty. And fancy outfits. Gotta go for a style victory when actual wars are quite uncommon.

Humans are pretty good at this sort of thing. Not the best, as there is always some inconsistency, somebody doing their own thing, or improvising a solution to a fumble. Honestly, theirs are one of the more interesting to watch. It takes a lot of effort for some to conform to a herd style behavior, and it shows.

One time, a soldier tripped and was about to drop their knife, but thinking quickly, they began to juggle it, along with an ammo magazine and a sidearm they quickly pulled out. Aside from surprising everyone with their juggling skills, the surrounding soldiers noticed immediately, and, without a word, began to juggle with the same items as well.

But it wasn't chaotic - first, once the first loop was done, the soldiers in front, behind and to the sides of the first one started juggling in sync, and with each completed loop it spread the same way, creating this beautiful expanding diamond effect.

Not everyone was equally skilled, of course, and some ripples started to appear. However, since they all knew how long until the current parade music ended, the soldier in the center of the formation, not the original one, stopped juggling, and with each loop the inner layers also stopped. When the final corner soldiers put all the items in their place, the song also came to an end and a new one took its place.

Afterwards, we heard the colonel of that battalion issued an official reprimand for not following the rehearsed performance. Unofficially he praised them, as he himself had been approached by a general about this "surprise addition" and admired his "unorthodox thinking" and "proactive decision making". The colonel obviously lied and gleefully (well, as gleeful as a gritty military veteran with lofty ambitions can get) accepted the praise and promised to deliver other surprises in the future when they would prove most effective.

Big nonsense exchange of words that simply meant the soldiers doing all the actual doings would now have to actually prepare some kind of new and impressive feat. If there is one thing you can rely on, is higher ups turning everything you do into more work...

[viridiandnd]

Zorag (orc barbarian I had played in various forms for several years) didn’t have an official name until I had to use a premise half orc barbarian in a pathfinder campaign at a church camp. Ironically though, that would also be the last game where I played Zorag as a half orc barbarian, which is interesting because everyone I had played with still now thinks of it as ‘Zorag’

You played d&d at a church camp??? Thats crazy to me 😂

My half-orc character was named after my skyrim character, Ravis.

Though she was named Vashvir but I accidentally deleted her (cried for a few days in mourning) and when I restarted I had forgotten her name 😫! But even though I now remember the name, I've ended up liking Ravis more so I stuck with that.

[indigodice]

START AT THE VERY BEGINNING, A VERY GOOD PLACE TO START

i’ll probably edit this gradually out of this being too much to read in one sitting maybe that means this should be more than one post what a mistake i’ve made its time to iron out some kinks in this blogging thing

For us the beginning was probably in high school. On and off games of Traveller and Shadowrun which weren’t overtly terrible, just unmemorable. I can only remember a handful of moments but they largely weren’t tied to a particular narrative. They were very singular drops in an ocean of wasted time. Maybe they were terrible after all. From early on there was a sense that combat was taking up hours while actual role playing was taking up minutes.

The most memorable thing in Shadowrun was the infiltration of a mansion by circulating rumors of a rave and party supplements. The plan had two parts, a coordinated dispatching of the mansion’s guard and relocation of the guards that hadn’t arrived yet. It was a largely successful, noisy, but bloodless smash-and-grab. We had time for another module which the GM then randomly generated using the random generation rules. We tried to replicate this plan with moderate failure, destroying a wyvern’s eggs then turning in look-alikes.

This form of random generation was most of what we did in Shadowrun, and probably the reason the experiences were unmemorable. We gathered to role play, and ended up wargaming. As things go on we have particular problems separating role playing from wargaming and expression becomes narrowed down to mechanics decisions on our character sheets. Compounding this problem is the lack of even binary choice in the narrative. When Mr. Shadowrun says we have a mission, it’s a single mission instead of a selection, so the extent of our choices are constricted within that predetermination. We’re our character sheets. And that means players rebel. Given our not-a-choice my character convinces another character that its suspicious a Mr. Johnson found our HQ so quickly, so we explode our HQ and have to find work elsewhere.

When Mr. Traveller is pushing us through events, we’re only given what he comes up with to work with, the narrative didn’t care about what our characters cared about. Eventually those games wound down as that groups’ GMs disappeared. We met someone willing to GM consistently, only we weren’t aware of his mental instability. And when we became aware of it, most of us recognized we weren’t equipped to handle such a someone. I didn’t share that thought because I was naive, but luckly I went with the group decision to cut him out and maybe we’re the better for it.

I might have brushed that aside, but that mentally unstable GM hosted an AdvancedDND module, Caverns of Chaos, which was meant to be an introductory look at ADND. During which we added players which the GM accepted in word, then rejected through gameplay. The game was a party and everyone was invited. Our complaints of the game moving slowly were responded to by accelerating rewards through a sentient reward room that responded to our whims. As my whim was suspicion it became a curse room. Our complains of the slow momotonous wargaming became an accelerated wargame where they were revealed by a wizard to be the machinations of a mind flayer. Then the wizard to transported us to another place where our skills were arbitrarily needed. Maybe a day had gone by in the game. But outside, months had gone by.

Then a combination of player drama resulted in the GM’s mental instability reaching a breaking point through rather violent expression. And so the group was reformed. Following that we had a few attempts to salvage that now lost campaign. Each player was given a chance to GM to salvage the game, and eventually we decided on restarting, scrapping the old characters for new ones. We picked up a new system called Pathfinder. Before our first moments role playing we’d looked at 3.5 books and heard Pathfinder was supposed to be better supported. So we began.

This worked for a while, as the new GM brought us though the Crypt of the Everflame. We reached the next town after a few months out of game. Crypt of the Everflame was intended to be a few sessions. The GM was experiencing burnout and never told anyone. From a personal standpoint I resent how that was handled, since it resulted in the group meeting, playing maybe an hour of combat, then everyone splitting off to do something else. Sometimes we wouldn’t be informed until arrival that nothing had been prepared, or that the GM wasn’t feeling up to it. Due to circumstances, this GM reached his own breaking point and was going through a kind of personal transformation, and dropped out of the group.

Those that remained tried to continue on. We hosted more one-shots trying to continue from those Pathfinder characters. After reaching the next town SEPIADICE creates one of my most memorable moments. The town had reached a breaking point because one of the partymembers was hellbent on creating mischief. Another decided the problems within the town were because of their systems of governance and took to trying to rally them against their leadership. The de facto town leader didn’t have the strength of his knights that usually kept the peace. We’d been sent here to retrieve them. He’d been trying to maintain the peace with martial law. And so he banished our party fearing more mischief. My character was infuriated that the de facto leader transgressed a rule of hospitality as he’d been on the road because of his own town’s leadership, and so my character confronts this town’s leader. He was steadfast in his decision since we were outsiders to him. We’d gained entrance because of a squire’s word. The fight first in words comes to blows. Another party member supported me with her magic, and the squire comes to the leadership’s aid. At that moment the fighting stops, and we make our escape.

The casters of the group splinter off, while those that remained travel presumably with the squire to retrieve the knights. The game ends and is never picked up again. We have a round of one-shots and eventually we decide we want a consistent game. We vote on the next GM. Notably I voted against SEPIADICE because the other would be GM was the more experienced, and I was hoping for something sustainable. So she wins four to three. It turns out her game has the same problems all the prior GMs had. Eventually SEPIADICE gets his turn to GM and does an adequate job. And I realize where I wanted to build on the other GM’s experience, she didn’t actually have the potential to change. While the muddle of one-shots never became anything particularly memorable. Sometimes we’d make decisions that felt meaningful, but then the one-shot would end and we wouldn’t get to witness the outcome of those decisions.

If SEPIADICE had continued I’m sure his game would have been enjoyable. As a GM he’d produced most of the memorable moments I enjoyed. But he’d become frustrated because I hadn’t managed to leave the headspace of the character I was playing, and consequently decided on playing that character in his setting. Causing two other players to also choose prior characters that had been there with him. So it became a cascade of insolence that I both didn’t see and didn’t dissuade by not seeing it. The difference was that I had asked and they hadn’t, but the result was the same. Old characters with old ties that didn’t fit the requirement he’d set down for character creation.

From the start of pathfinder up until the very end theres this looming question about what makes unable to role play, or why we’re bad as a group. There are answers ranging from “our group is too big” to “we’re probably just bad” to “its the ruleset we’re using.” Actually I’ve cherrypicked the ones I believe. I don’t remember the rest. From beginning to end our groups tended to be too large which muddled other problems. It was hard to role play because everyone needed some time in the spotlight and it was easy for us to get distracted either by the many bored players. Realistically the GMs shouldn’t have used combat as a crutch to stretch the time we were playing. It wasn’t fun. But it didn’t help that we were playing in a game that revolved around combat and the flow around actual role playing was snuffed out both by needing wait for long stretches of time for anything cohesive to happen. Things got gradually better after the Crypt of the Everflame because players started losing interest. But at the core we didn’t as a group understand what made role playing games good.

They certainly had potential, but most of what we did was wargame, and frankly video games were better for that. We couldn’t tap into what made role playing games good. Except for that moment where SEPIADICE banished our party. That was a damn good moment because that was a man with his back against the wall trying to give himself some more space, only he accidently makes things worse. The conflict they had against each other was not something they could resolve, it wasn’t either of their fault, and they both refused to bend. So they fight. And they fight because they refused to bend, and that’s how violence happens in reality. And so much of the violence in our role playing games has that weird circumstance of oh they show up while you’re travelling so you have to fight now. That’s not giving violence any respect. And any expression during that kind of violence falls flat when there’s nothing tangible at stake. Sure you could die, but you’re not really dying if you don’t have any connections to anything. Dying because you have too much pride feels better than the nothing of a random bear encounter. And to be honest SEPIADICE you should have died when you encountered that bear, instead you bit it and it ran away because the GM thought we would run, but adventurers aren’t reasonable people.

So maybe that’s one of our problems with role playing. Adventurers aren’t reasonable people, they encounter unreasonable things, and are expected to act unreasonably to resolve unreasonable things. Oh god there are so many paragraphs now and why is there only personality at the end who the heck is going to read all of this?

[cheesedoodlesurprise]

Pathfinder Campaign take 2

So my group is finally trying to restart Pathfinder after a members finally had her kid and has gotten to a safe place to where we all can get back together and we are going to tackle the intro campaign again. This time though, the GM realized he was running a much more difficult game than a bunch of people who never played together were set up for, so he is starting us at 3rd level and opening up the expanded races. And since I have been wanting to play an Alchemist from jump, I rolled up a tiefling alchemists, 2nd level, with 1 level I'm rogue because I don't want to leave out squad utility for the GM to exploit.

Though the main reason I picked one was because I wanted to explode shit,I didn't realize I accidentally meta games the thing. See, while being known as the bomb class, alchemists also have access to mutagens, which can increase, at start, one physical stat by 4 at the cost of one mental stat by 2. You also get 4 natural armor. So, I am running around with a character who can down a flask, have an even sicker stealth score than I already have(tiefling get +2 stealth) but since I took finesse, my sneak attack will hit harder and I get some sturdy was resistance to damage for that whole hour at the cost of 2 fucking wisdom.

Also, with brew potion(and my goddamn +11 craft alchemy) I can easily create copies of all of my spells as long as I have the money for it because a 1st level spell has a dc of 7 and I would have to roll a -5 somehow to fail(his game doesn't work with 1s being auto fails) so I do not even have to roll. Just churn out potions for days.

God, I can't wait to see if I headshopped this sweet, sweet boy good.

[tipsandtraps]

How to start Pathfinder or Dungeons and Dragons

When I started I had myself and a handful of friends who wanted to play but none of us knew how. 2 of these friends are the smarter ones of the group and I know they would have made good DMs but they were too self conscious to start a game or write a campaign. So even though I wasn’t the ideal DM I took the initiative (haha) and started it myself and invited everyone over and did the research on how to make the character sheets but oh dang did we miss a lot.

When we started we didn’t understand saving throws, spells, hell we started at level one and only leveled up twice before restarting with a bigger group. You’re gonna be bad at the start. It’s taken me easily 30 sessions of both being a player and a DM to become a satisfactory player who knows enough of the rules to know how all the parts of character sheets work.

TL;DR If you wanna play dungeon and dragons or pathfinder start a game, get your friends to come over and start, and it’s gonna be bad for at least a year or two if you’re all noobs. But it gets so much better.

[starlightfae]

OH MAN I JUST REMEMBERED THIS REALLY AWESOME DETAILED AU I MADE PATHFINDERSTUCK the human kids are all playing pathfinder but most of the actual story is their actual campaign, with brief pauses for real life bickering between players i made character sheets and everything omg when i get home i should look for my stuff hope i can find it bc i worked really hard on that shit shit now i want to restart it omg

[terryblount]

Anno 1800 Update 4 releases on July 30th, will improve camera zoom out, will optimize performance

Ubisoft has announced that a brand new update for its latest strategy game, Anno 1800, will release on July 30th. According to the team, game update 4 will allow players to zoom the camera significantly further out, will bring performance optimizations and improvements, and will feature a new and improved minimum stock system to the Trading Post.

Ubisoft has also reworked and rebalanced Expedition rewards to make them feel more rewarding across all difficulty levels, and improved the usability of the trade routes menu by adding a text filter and a toggle for other ships displayed in the trade route menu strategy map. In addition, the team has reduced the notifications spam for low threat incidents.

It’s also worth noting that patch 4 will sport some balance tweaks. For instance, the quality of rewards granted by resident quests has been rebalanced, the rewards for a variety of activities has been improved, and the moral value for difficulty level three expeditions has been rebalanced.

UPLAY will download this update once it becomes available next week, and you can find below its complete changelog.

Anno 1800 Update 4 July 30th Release Notes

Highlights

You can now zoom the camera significantly further out, giving you a better overview of your majestic islands (which you can activate in the Gameplay options menu).

We have further improved and optimized game performance, leading to smoother gameplay across most graphics settings. As part of this, users will now also note an improved viewing range.

A new, improved minimum stock system has been added to the Trading Post. In order to replace the old system, we need to remove the old settings from all your existing trade routes.

We have reworked and rebalanced Expedition rewards to make them feel more rewarding across all difficulty levels. New expedition reward tiers per difficulty are now: Easy => only uncommon or rare rewards. Medium => Only rare or epic rewards. Hard => Only epic or legendary rewards.

We have improved the usability of the trade routes menu, adding a text filter and a toggle for other ships displayed in the trade route menu strategy map. You can also select these ships to add them to your trade routes from the strategy map. Hovering over a trade route entry will now immediately show the trade route on the map. Finally, trade routes are now sorted alphabetically to make them easier to keep track of.

We have reduced the notifications spam for low threat incidents. Incidents such as small fires which are no major threat will no longer trigger a notification.

After several bargaining rounds, we have convinced the workers responsible for loading and unloading oil onto your trains to work faster, resulting in these operations happening twice as fast.

Incoming trade ships will now make full use of all harbors on an island, trying to avoid lengthy traffic jams in front of one harbor while others remain unused.

Architectural expos in your world fair will now reward you with more than three ornaments at a time.

Previously defeated pirates will now bring a small fleet instead of a single ship upon their return to the game. It now takes them 30 minutes to rebuild.

The multiplayer chat has been completely reworked.

Balancing

Rebalanced the quality of rewards granted by resident quests.

Generally improved the generation of rewards for a variety of activities (quests, drops etc.). This can lead to some items appearing less often, while some previously very rare items will appear more frequently.

Rebalanced the moral value for difficulty level three expeditions. The morale bar should now fill up faster.

Bug Fixes

Quests:

Fixed an issue with missing objectives for “Open Book 2” voluntary quest provided by George Smith.

Fixed a missing icon in quest tracker/book for Princess Qing’s voluntary quest “Shadow Puppets: Part 3”.

Fixed the “jump to location” button for Princess Qing’s voluntary quest “Shadow Puppets: Part 3”.

Fixed the “Hostage Rescue” campaign quest where buyable frigates would fight Pyrphorian ships.

Items:

Fixed the specialist items “Actor” and “Sarah Bartok” which previously had an invalid effect for the Theatre building.

Fixed the “Poster of the Leader” item not having any effects (it now provides additional workforce and a bit extra happiness, but reduces taxes).

The “Footman” specialist item now provides more taxes.

Fixed items increasing the maximum residents being inactive after loading a save file. The item effects are now also calculated slightly different than before. Affected items are “The Withdrawal Amendment”, “Contraception Regulation”, “Papal Paper of Prenatal Preservation”, “Jakob Sokow, The Charitable Banker”, “Louis P. Hecate, Arm-Puncturing Pioneer”, “Chief George Doughty, Smouldering Hero”, “Saint D’ Artois, Vision of the Valley”.

Multiplayer:

Fixed an issue where a player could not be re-invited to a saved multiplayer match if they were not on the Uplay friend list of the player loading the save file.

Fixed the cancel invitation button having no icon in the “Invited Friend” section of the multiplayer lobby.

Added an error message for the client if the host leaves the multiplayer lobby.

UI:

Fixed an issue with the electricity icon being shown in the World Fair’s Foundation menu before electricity is needed.

Fixed text input in the trade route menu being reset if the player didn’t press the ENTER key.

Fixed “session transfer” or “expedition assigned” text overlapping the cargo slots in ship menus.

Fixed truncated text in ship menus when transferring to another region.

Fixed debug text being shown in trade menu tooltips if the camera was moved to another island in the background.

Fixed an UI issue in the charter route setup that occurred when dragging the amount slider out of the box, which could accidentally close the goods selection window.

Steam ships and sailing ships now have different icons to make them more distinguishable in the trade route menu.

The edit screen of the newspaper now shows the currently available influence (previously the publish button would just be greyed out when the cost exceeded the available influence).

Fixed an issue with overlapping icons in the marketplace menu when only artisans, engineers and investors were present on an island.

Fixed the working conditions menu sometimes not remembering values if the player would change the productivity by typing in the text field instead of using the slider.

Fixed the construction menu not remembering the category sorting when loading a save file.

Graphics:

Fixed an issue with flickering dirt roads while zooming the camera.

Fixed firework effect persisting after loading a save file

Localization:

Fixed a typo in the German localization of “Die Amazonen” expedition screens.

Fixed a German localization issue with Margaret Hunt’s reaction to one of their buildings being destroyed.

Fixed a typo in the English localization of the “Iron Dragon” expedition event.

Fixed English text shown in the German localization of the ship object menu if the player would send a ship to another session.

Misc.:

Oil ships should now approach the correct coast when multiple oil ships are assigned to a trade route.

Improved visualization of ships traveling between sessions on the world map.

Fixed ships moving at their individual fastest speed even if the “grouped” option was selected.

Fixed an issue with defeated pirate ships still being shown on the mini map.

Improved display of highlighted buildings when using the demolish tool.

Added three new filters for notifications when ships set on a trade route encounter a problem.

Fixed buffs granted by animals in the Zoo staying active even after the main building of the Zoo was demolished.

Fixed an issue in the newspaper after a war declaration where the player’s name was shown instead of the name of the AI declaring war.

Fixed several misleading tooltips in the World Fair menu.

Fixed visitor pathfinding around the Bank building.

Fixed the “Load Game” entry in the main menu being visible without a save file being present.

Fixed an issue where the last playable game profile could not be deleted without restarting the game.

Anno 1800 Update 4 releases on July 30th, will improve camera zoom out, will optimize performance published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/