Forum: Public Forum

John,

Yep, I shamefully forgot to mention this point in my sarcastic post above.

Basically Paizo's business model for Pathfinder, although officially denied, was to attract the old-timers or players above the age of 30 who were perfectly happy with Third Edition (3.0/3.5) and had a huge collection of D&D reference books. Ironically, the "Pathfinder RPG" product was not in the original plan. The idea was to carry on with 3.5. and write adventures for it. It just happened that Paizo has built up and gathered a large enough customer/fan base to make this "let's fix D&D 3.5" project worth pursuing.

The adventures are definitely grimmer.
The Falcon's Hollow story arc is the shining example: the oppressive Lumber Consortium that the PC must just live with, teenage girls resorting to prostitution, lives not really worth living for the common peasant/lumberjack, etc.
Disturbing storylines like an incestuous ogrekin family in "The Hook Mountain Massacre", all these would never have been produced by WotC.

However, not everything is great in my opinion, the political correctness of Paizo transpires at times too heavily in their modules, this tends to spoil my enjoyment of D&D. Being the GM is still about running an adventure as one wills, so one can always excise the somewhat forced (and barely hidden) homosexual side storylines.

Also on the negative side, the typical Paizo staff or freelancer writes in lazy American English, and again at times it becomes painful to read about "two stories houses", "then" and "than" being used interchangeably. Having the subject alternating between "he" and "she" when talking about a character class, just for the sake of gender neutrality is grating. Cannot these stupid Yanks know that when one does not want to use gender, one uses: "One" and "they"? Using the plural blends the gender in the English language for Heaven's sake. Gygax is definitely missed, he was able to write in American English (with "z" and all), yet without abusing grammar.
They also use Wikipedia style of "research" a bit too much for my taste and tend to make hilarious mistakes at times.

Laurent,

No longer attending as its all looking at bit vbaue and am doing family stuff instead now.

Hi Laurent,

Looking a bit sparse for the afternoon, or have I misunderstood the calender? Should we maybe just run an evening session? It may bring focus to proceedings.

Bruce

Bruce,

From experience, those who attend the evening session usually turn up earlier for the Social and the Afternoon Session.
So, I guess the calendar shall stay as it is and we can decide what happens when people show-up. Last time I merely brought "Hollow's Chronicles" forward, and I guess this is what is going to happen this time too. Hopefully Len and Co will show-up halfway through the afternoon.

There is the off chance that John will run something during the afternoon, then again, not many people are signed in to show.

In any case, I shall be there on Saturday. So if nothing happens I propose we discuss kicking Len out of EMRPGG. We might still want him around to run the website though, so we will need to find a way to convince him to ban himself from the site while still running it.

Laurent,

Dear Big Meet attendees,

Just in case you do not know, I nearly went home around 2.00 p.m. First I was there around 1.00 p.m. and could not see anybody - I had forgotten to check the Boardroom! Then I went for a walk to the local shopping centre and dropped by again to check. Luckily I saw Charles ordering a drink from our now ordinary gruf publican.

Pretty tense and annoying game-sessions to run at the Big Meet for me as you might have guessed from another thread. However, considering the unusually low number of people signed in for the listed events, I guess the Big Meet was reasonably successful.

Let me state that I was surprised and impressed at the formal review of the week long gaming session you went through. I tend to discuss my "Rise of the Runelords" game at the end of the session too though not in such details.

Because of my impressive command of the TikiWiki calendar, in no small part due to my being the holder of a Ph.D. from UMIST , I have taken the liberty of setting-up the three events for the September Big Meet. A new thread has been opened for the September Big Meet too and you are invited to post there to discuss the games on offer.

Those willing to run games are strongly advised to post them as soon as possible. As per the August Big Meet, just drop the description of the game in the thread and I can always generate the game-page for you.

Laurent,