Paizo employee attempt to unionize and new store

[mondblut]

The problem is that Paizo isn't making money and the calls to unionize will end up sinking the company. That's how unions work these days. In the end, everyone is unemployed and broke

The problem?

 

[JamesDixon]

The problem is that Paizo isn't making money and the calls to unionize will end up sinking the company. That's how unions work these days. In the end, everyone is unemployed and broke

The problem?

You caught me actually giving a damn about SJWs... lock me up.

 

[Ismaul]

We'll see what comes of it

Terminal cancer.

They'll hire a die-versity officer, yet that won't appease the workers as they see it as a first step in "changing the company culture", and you'll get even more intestine fights.

Is that another fat joke?

In that context, "intestine" means "internal". As in, within the company.

 

[Ebonsword]

We'll see what comes of it

Terminal cancer.

They'll hire a die-versity officer, yet that won't appease the workers as they see it as a first step in "changing the company culture", and you'll get even more intestine fights.

Is that another fat joke?

In that context, "intestine" means "internal". As in, within the company.

I think you meant "internecine". But intestine fights are probably a lot more amusing.

 

[Ismaul]

I think you meant "internecine". But intestine fights are probably a lot more amusing.

No, look it up.

FFS must I do everything myself:

Intestine:
n. often intestines
The portion of the digestive tract extending from the stomach to the anus and, in humans and other mammals, consisting of two segments, the small intestine and the large intestine.
adj.
Internal; civil: the intestine affairs of the nation.

 

[Suissant]

1596 Shakes. 1 Hen IV, i. i. 12 The intestine shocke, And furious cloze of ciuill Butchery.

 

[Suissant]

1596 Shakes. 1 Hen IV, i. i. 12 The intestine shocke, And furious cloze of ciuill Butchery.

Shakespeare is brilliant. He's using both terms "intercineatically".

 

[Suissant]

Here's the definition of intestine, adj. by the oxford english dictionary:
[ad. L. intestīnus internal, f. intus within. Cf. F. intestin (14th. c. in Littré).]

Internal, belonging to the interior.

1.1 Internal with regard to a country or people; domestic, civil: usually said of war, feuds, or troubles, also of enemies.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

So doctors are lazy fucks that basically named our internal digestive tracts as internal thingies? Yeah, I can believe that.

 

[Ismaul]

So doctors are lazy fucks that basically named our internal digestive tracts as internal thingies? Yeah, I can believe that.

Hey man at least it's descriptive.

Better than something a fantasy designer would think up like Int'sxt'zwyïn.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Better than something a fantasy designer would think up like Int'sxt'zwyïn.

Yeah, or the labyrinth of stomakhos.

 

[Morblot]

This is the person behind the union, btw, from the union's own website
https://twitter.com/spellsinsugar

Shay Snow
Shay (they/them)
Agender

WORKERS UNITE AT THE CAFETERIA!

Imagine being so fat you give up on ever finding your junk again.

The upside is that people can always lose weight.

The downside is that I'm not sure they qualifies as people.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

The upside is that people can always lose weight.

The downside is that I'm not sure they qualifies as people.

Size like that we are hard pressed to qualify them as an individual person, might as well make it plural.

 

[Ismaul]

Better than something a fantasy designer would think up like Int'sxt'zwyïn.

Yeah, or the labyrinth of stomakhos.

Sounds like a fun dungeon crawler.

 

[Melan]

I wish. That would imply summary executions on site which would only improve things over there.

Oh, it will be a lot of fun to watch, trust me. Everyone working at Paizo at this stage is a colossal lefty, and this will be the beginning of a lot of juicy SJW-on-SJW violence as the purity spiral kicks in and employees realise they have incentives to rat each other out. Watch for updates as they devour first each other, then the company.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

as the purity spiral kicks in and employees realise they have incentives to rat each other out.

This already happened.
Paizo getting accused of various things just a short while before this happened wasn't a coincidence.

 

[Sarathiour]

holding their IP in their cold dead hands until no one cares anymore.

Why would anyone want to buy the IP ? It's only be know for being Not!D&D and the worst fantasy kitchen sink.

 

[catfood]

holding their IP in their cold dead hands until no one cares anymore.

Why would anyone want to buy the IP ? It's only be know for being Not!D&D and the worst fantasy kitchen sink.

Worse, it's known as at-least-it's-not-4e.

 

[mondblut]

Size like that we are hard pressed to qualify them as an individual person, might as well make it plural.

How do you think they/them pronouns came into prominence?

Schizophrenia coupled with a body mass of 2 or more people.

 

[Ismaul]

holding their IP in their cold dead hands until no one cares anymore.

Why would anyone want to buy the IP ? It's only be know for being Not!D&D and the worst fantasy kitchen sink.

Worse, it's known as at-least-it's-not-4e.

4E's better, actually. If I want to play 3.5e, I got 3.5e already. 4E did other things, some things well and some less, Pathfinder didn't do anything new. In fact, Pathfinder added powercreep and shitty art.

But really, the Pathfinder IP has worth if only by association to D&D. Why did Owlcat use Pathfinder, rather than the 3.5E OGL? For the name recognition, and premade design (ther adventure paths they're adapting). That's enough, especially if the IP goes for cheap.

 

[mediocrepoet]

4E did other things, some things well and some less

I get the overall point of your post, but I'm curious about this point: what do you think 4E did well?

 

[Nathaniel3W]

4E did other things, some things well and some less

I get the overall point of your post, but I'm curious about this point: what do you think 4E did well?

Adapted World of Warcraft to a tabletop setting.

 

[catfood]

4E did other things, some things well and some less

I get the overall point of your post, but I'm curious about this point: what do you think 4E did well?

Adapted World of Warcraft to a tabletop setting.

4e plays more like WoW than the actual WoW P&P game does.

 

[Ismaul]

4E did other things, some things well and some less

I get the overall point of your post, but I'm curious about this point: what do you think 4E did well?

Ahhh, not this shit again lol.

Just for background, I ran 2e, 3e, 3.5 and 4e for years. And I ran homebrew, often house-ruling stuff. Also, I hate MMOs.

There are some things 4E did much better than any previous edition: notably accomodate the DM.


Designing NPCs/monsters
3E had this simulationist approach, where if you wanted to build a monster, an NPC, or god forbid build a monster with class levels, you had to build them like a PC, with levels and classes and things they gain at each level, because "that's how it worked in the world". Simulationism meant using the same rules for all characters, monsters and NPCs alike, because they were rules of the world, not of the game. It was a fucking hassle, and mostly useless, as most of the abilities you'd have as a result wouldn't even be used at the table. Build a monster with spellcasting or spell-like abilities, and you'd have such a large and unwieldy list of things.

4E did away with that: rules were designed to be useful, to have the maximum impact on gameplay for the least amount of fiddly bits, rather than to simulate a reality that worked with a single set of rules. So you had simpler rules for monsters and NPCs, made for DMs. The system also had a much more sound mathematical system behind leveling and monster stats, and you could boil it down to a formula. For level Y, NPCs have on average +X skill, +X attack, +X defense, which you'd then modify with racial attributes, any individual deviation from the monster's race, and combat role. That was really useful for a homebrewer, as you could improvise stats on the fly, and get a consistent challenge level. For skills, you didn't have to allocate skills points, you'd start with the attribute bonus + a fixed level bonus (same for everything) + competence or not, and off you go. If something wasn't prepared, you could just do it on the fly, you could also easily adjust the level of monster in the manual to fit your game. For tactical abilities, again, you'd define what is useful at the moment you'll use the guy, not get a list of all possible things he could do like a massive spell list. So you could focus on 4-5 of interesting tactical things, and forget about the rest that you wouldn't use anyways, and instead focus your design time on strategy and tactics.

So that's one thing: it was really easy to build an effective combat adversary that worked well. You went directly from concept to designing impactful tactical abilites, rather that going through the levelling process.


Designing encounters
The second thing is also tactically related: it was much easier to build encounters, and they were more fun as a result. Challenge ratings in 3E were shit: they assumed a party of 4-5 would fight one monster, so the CR of a monster was meant to convey its challenge for a full party. But who wants to pit a whole party against a single orc? That's not a fun tactical encounter. But if you pitted your party against 4 monsters of a lower CR, the math would fuck up and it would be really easy for the players to hit and kill them, while monsters/NPCs would have such a low attack bonus that the PCs became almost invulnerable to them. Total shit situation.

4E balanced encounters around having 1 monster/NPC per player. That made much more sense, and with the math behind it, it made it much easier to evaluate the challenge of any encounter you've designed. Plus, the assumption of having multiple adversaries per fight made it much easier to make varied and tactically interesting encounters. They added enemy roles (brute, soldier, skirmisher, controller, artillery, lurker); this might look MMO-like, and it is, but it helped building enemies for their tactical role on the field. Now that the system didn't assume the fight was against 1 character, there was place to think about the tactics of the monsters, and how complementary they acted. Roles changed the base stats (defenses and attacks), so for example a brute had high physical defenses, high damage, but low reflexes and bad aim, and so on for all roles. And their combat abilities were meant to exemplify their roles: skirmishers had abilities that gave them advantages or activated when they attacked from either stealth, positioning, ganging-up; controllers had AoE abilities that usually made things harder to maneuver for the PCs. You had leader roles which buffed other NPCs, triggered stuff when they got hurt or died, drove the group's strategies. You also had, in addition to combat roles, types of monsters such as minions, 4 of which were worth 1 regular monsters, or bosses which were worth 4 by themselves. Many compositions were made possible.

Not only that, but now that NPCs/monsters didn't have that many tactical abilities, those were tailor-made to reflect not only their tactical role, but their race and personnality. Hobgoblins for example all have the "Phalanx" ability, that gives them +2 AC when adjacent to another hob. That drives how they play at the table, the tactics, while also saying a lot about who they are and how they fight. Kobolds all have the ability "Shifty", which mean that each turn they can take a step and reposition. This way of designing things is great, because it brings together tactics and world-building. And those are just the smallest racial abilities. As a homebrewer, I applied this to all I did.

4E also had a much greater focus on positioning, movement and terrain. It made it hard to play without a grid, for sure, but it was much more dynamic. Every character and NPC/monster had movement abilities, that made the fights much less static than before. And terrain effects were very easy to design, which made fights seem very dynamic. I even had destructible terrain, fights with terrain changing, or you could also easily design monsters with phases, for example a shapeshifter that shifts when he's hurt enough and becomes a much more powerful version of himself. 4E was very flexible, very hackable. I even managed to make work having players fight enemy companies (each designed as 1 character) seamlessly, sometimes with their own troops.

Anyways, in no other edition did we have more tactically interesting fights. The flexible maths allowed me to do a bunch of fun stuff. It's a shame there was no TB RPG using 4E, as it's the best D&D system for it.


Other good/bad things
Now, there are many other things that are great about 4E, notably more tools for handling non-combat encounters, and much better DM advice for those who need it. I also liked the approach to setting being to make it very usable in-game. For example, instead of having a plane of fire, where if you go therre you just burn to death, you have an elemental plane, that has all the elements in chaos, but is survivable and maybe an interesting place to visit. The plane of fire is conceptually interesting, but does fuckall at the table. The introduction of rituals, spells that take a long time to cast very nice. They were mostly used out of combat, but protecting a ritualist while he's finishing a ritual was a nice setup. It worked well.

The place where 4E was weaker, is in PC builds, and that spelled the system's fall. The way of presenting every ability as a "power" that's written in a samey way made well, everything seem samey. That and the at-will/per encounter/daily power structure. But in practice the powers were vastly different even if they looked alike, they played very differently. The real weakness for me was that the powers were purely tactical in nature, they were written, almost all of them, as combat abilities only. That's a serious weakness, but nothing someone with a little imagination (or knowledge of past editions) can't solve. As a homebrewer, we used powers out of combat often, when it made sense, so we avoided a bunch of 4E's problems.

Anyways that's already a long tl;dr, I'll stop there.

 

[Sarathiour]

The real weakness for me was that the powers were purely tactical in nature, they were written, almost all of them, as combat abilities only.

Yeah besides obvious one like invisibility and the like, it's pretty glaring. I think they tried to somewhat balance that by introducing ritual, which were basically very long casting spell ( it's been quite a while since I took a look at the rule, but think at least a few hours) which included things like teleportation, divination and a lot of non-combat things.
You could easily homebrew lots of cool spell of 2nd edition into a ritual for the 4th.