My Rogue is Being Replaced...by Everyone

Just a strange observation...nothing to see here.

I've been playing a rogue in my weekly Pathfinder game, and its a lot of fun, but I'm noticing a trend: I'm not really that useful. When I say useful, I mean in the way that I originally envisioned myself being useful...you know...as a thief. 

Halflings of Golarion

Does this guy look familiar to anyone else?

Flourish and Blotts for the Pathfinder in all of us

I was directed to a great site the other day TheGM.org has a great utility called Perram's Spellbook, that allows you to print out spells on cards of varying sizes that are easy to take with you and eliminates the constant page flipping that all you wizards and clerics out there do.

You can print them out as 3"x5", 4"x6" or playing card sized that fit nicely into those Magic: The Gathering card sleeves. Granted, there are a few spells that have extra long descriptions that require multiple cards to get the whole thing, but its still a really inventive and handy utility.

Also, it has the option of inputting your own spells to create your own cards. It looks like it's catered directly for Pathfinder, but I don't see a problem inputting the few spells that may be different between Pathfinder and 3.5. 

And don't even think of using Bigby's Inappropriate Hand, I already have the copyright.

Too Much Detail?

I was flipping through some adventures the other day and I noticed what seems to be a trend with Pathfinder products...

There is A LOT of detail in those things!

My group recently finished, or rather abandoned (for a completely unrelated reason to the length of the series), the Rise of the Runelords series so I decided to go through the modules just to see what sort of stuff we, the players, had missed. I was surprised to see how dense they were. The first adventure "Burnt Offerings", for example, is a 96 page monster of an adventure. Now, we did run through this for a few sessions, but that seems excessive for the amount of time we spent playing. I assumed that we had just missed a lot of what was in there, but as I scanned it I realized that we didn't. We hit nearly everything in there but it was still a huge book, so I decided to read a little deeper. What I found was there is an extraordinary amount of detail put into them. 

Short Changed...again

A couple of weeks ago I had an unusual experience in a Pathfinder game...

The DM started off our gaming session by telling us that he should have been giving us more treasure throughout our adventures and he wanted to "reward" us by having the God of Good Fortune and Winning Lotto Tickets grant us extra treasure to bring us up to what we should have for our levels.

His basis for this was on page 399 of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook. Table 12-4: Character Wealth by Level. After reading through the "rules" for this, it's clear that its a guideline for starting character's that are above 1st level so they have equipment that will give them the best chance of survival against encounters of that level.

Return to the Temple of the Elemental Blogger

I'm Back...in case anyone noticed that I was gone to begin with. 

Quite a few changes in the real-life have caused a serious decline in my hobby life. Nothing serious of course, just life getting in the way of fun. But I'm back now and I'm gonna try to post a little more regularly. (As if once in 4 months in regular)

So I've been playing a lot of Pathfinder lately. And by "a lot", I mean once a week when I can make it. And I'm noticing things that I'm not really crazy about. 

Before I rant a little, let me preface by saying that the guys over at Paizo have done a really good job of picking up the ball that WOTC dropped when they went to 4th edition. Don't get me started on 4th Ed, that's another post all together. 

I like that they cleaned up a lot of the mess that was 3rd and 3.5 (rd?) edition and really ran with the ideas. They've come out with some good supplements like the  Advanced Players Guide and the Game Mastery Guide to expand on their already hernia-inducing core rule book. They have interesting new classes and they game itself flows fairly well...for a while.

And now begins the rant(ish) section...

Pathfinder: The Next Generation

 So I joined a new group of gamers a few months ago for some good ol' fashioned D&D 3.5, cuz none of are even remotely interested in 4th Ed (more on that another time). We were having a lot of fun with it, but we've all known for a long time that it's a dying system now that 4th Ed is out so we were looking for something new, but similar at the same time when one of the guys suggested Pathfinder RPG. I had seen their products before but assumed that it was just expansion modules and supplements for 3.5. Turns out they picked up the 3.5 ball that Wizards of the Coast dropped and decided to run with it. Well, we all bought the core rule book and turns out that it is an outstanding product. From the cleaned up rulebook, to the expanded (but not overdone) feats and combat system, all the way down to the art work is top notch.