Paizo employee attempt to unionize and new store

[Morblot]

They can not create, only desecrate and destroy

Well, yeah. They even happily admit it, they just call it deconstructing. WE MUST DECONSTRUCT <THING>!

 

[JamesDixon]

Soul is offensive as some beings like g*rmans do not have one, please use a different word.

I wonder how JarlFrank feels about him ranking equally to a Ginger.

iirc he's bulgarian or hungarian or somesuch living there

He's German that wants to move to Bulgaria as far as I know. I've been friends with him for 6 years now and he's always wanted to move out of Gaymany.

 

[Tacgnol]

Soul is offensive as some beings like g*rmans do not have one, please use a different word.

I wonder how JarlFrank feels about him ranking equally to a Ginger.

iirc he's bulgarian or hungarian or somesuch living there

He's German that wants to move to Bulgaria as far as I know. I've been friends with him for 6 years now and he's always wanted to move out of Gaymany.

Are the feet better in Bulgaria or something?

 

[Melan]

Def. hairier.

 

[JarlFrank]

Soul is offensive as some beings like g*rmans do not have one, please use a different word.

I wonder how JarlFrank feels about him ranking equally to a Ginger.

iirc he's bulgarian or hungarian or somesuch living there

He's German that wants to move to Bulgaria as far as I know. I've been friends with him for 6 years now and he's always wanted to move out of Gaymany.

Are the feet better in Bulgaria or something?

The taxes are lower, the living cost cheaper, the culture less retarded, the laws less restrictive, and yes, the women cuter.

I also have distant Bulgarian ancestry along with Russian and Czech. There's overall more Slav blood in me than Germanic if we go back to my grandparent generation.

 

[Bohrain]

They should've renamed them to menorahs.

 

[Caim]

It still amuses me that with Pathfinder 1e Paizo successfully catered to the grognards who hated that the next edition of D&D made all their expensive books outdated and no longer supported, only for Pathfinder 2e doing the exact same thing. I wonder who's gonna pick up the slack next.

 

[Twiglard]

PMC unions aren't real unions. They're just there to push SJWism and other activist bullshit on their employers. They even cast their own members out and side with the bosses if given employee isn't woke enough.

Pathfinder is about to get even more woke.

No, the real problem with the Alphabet Workers Union is that it’s not a union. It’s rather a “minority union”—essentially an employee pressure group, formed through the Communication Workers of America (CWA). The traditional organizing process through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) requires majority approval, a long, fraught, and fragile process, but one that results in actual bargaining power with management. A minority union, by contrast, can be formed by a very “small activist base”. According to the Wall Street Journal, the “Alphabet Workers Union is composed of fewer than 800 workers among Alphabet’s roughly 250,000 employees and contractors, some of whom are technically employed by completely separate entities, some of which are already unionized.” And their formation as a “union” does not give them any negotiation power, though they do pay dues to CWA.
[...]
The demands described in the Times article certainly seem quite different from the traditional bread-and-butter workplace demands. Tech workers gravitate toward things like banning Trump from their platforms and gender and racial equity within their companies, two demands to which many Silicon Valley executives are probably quite sympathetic—unlike, of course, higher wages, the imposition of “just cause” for discharge, a binding workplace grievance procedure, contractually mandated shop-floor rights, and ultimately more democratic control over the workplace. In the case of demands for informal and extralegal tech censorship over ideologues like Trump, insofar they result in the narrowing of the space for the exercise of civic liberties as a whole, one might even deem this expression of workplace “antagonism” a kind of class collaboration.

https://damagemag.com/2021/02/10/the-pmc-gets-organized/

 

[Tacgnol]

It still amuses me that with Pathfinder 1e Paizo successfully catered to the grognards who hated that the next edition of D&D made all their expensive books outdated and no longer supported, only for Pathfinder 2e doing the exact same thing. I wonder who's gonna pick up the slack next.

I honestly have no idea what they were thinking with PF 2e. It's literally the worst parts of 3e, 4e and 5e combined.

They had a pretty well carved out niche with their 3.75 stuff. They could have kept making content for 1e for decades to come and still made a comfortable profit.

I guess greed gets to all these companies, instead of being satisfied with what they have they chase the elusive "wider" audience (who are all playing 5e anyway).

 

[Greek Anime God]

PMC unions aren't real unions. They're just there to push SJWism and other activist bullshit on their employers.

Social progress, racial justice and LGBTQ+ issues are what real unions are all about. Those poor people unions that don't do this are for racist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic, black supermacyphobic, Trudeauphobic and even jewphobic losers. They're basically just a bunch of nazi white supremacists pretending to be leftist while they abuse their kids by misgendering them and promoting illegal hatespeech.

 

[Eldagusto]

Rejoice for this Union will ultimately result in Woke-wrought doom to a mephitic cadaver of an industry!

 

[Bara]

Well here's the latest from paizo

Paizo Leadership Team Update

Spoiler

Over the last six weeks, Paizo's Leadership Team has attempted to better listen to and understand the challenges faced by its workforce, customers, and community. We want to take a moment to update you on a few important developments that have emerged from those conversations.

Before we begin, it's important to note that this update does not address requests regarding salaries, adjustments to the current work-from-home environment, or other matters that are now subject to negotiation with the United Paizo Workers union during collective bargaining.

We’re still searching diligently for a candidate to fill the company’s Human Resources Manager position, and plan to begin interviews very shortly. As this is an incredibly important hire, we want to make sure we find the right candidate with experience leading initiatives related to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) and working with a union. We are continuing to gather resumes as the search continues.

We’ve hired a company called Energage to complete an employee engagement survey on behalf of Paizo. This survey is designed to allow employees to provide anonymous, unfiltered, and honest feedback to the company that will help Paizo establish priorities for improvement planning. It will also serve as an important benchmark against which to measure the results of future surveys, allowing us to develop a baseline to measure against. We expect employees to be able to access the engagement survey sometime this week.

Discussion in the past several months has resurfaced two instances in which a Paizo executive mishandled user data when replying to message board posts, resulting in allegations of doxxing. These actions were contrary to Paizo policy, and corrective actions were taken to ensure that this does not happen again.

“This was a huge mistake on my part and I am deeply sorry for any issues that have arisen from these actions. This was not the right way to treat our customers and I apologize,” said Paizo President Jeff Alvarez. “As President, I know I need to hold myself to a higher standard.”

Paizo takes issues related to discrimination and harassment very seriously. We have hired the law firm of Moritt Hock & Hamroff (MH&H) to investigate allegations of discrimination against trans employees and sexual misconduct before reporting back to the Leadership Team. Investigators from the firm will reach out to members of Paizo’s staff and others that made claims on social media. Cooperation with the firm is voluntary, of course, but we remain committed to investigating these matters thoroughly to ensure a safe and respectful workplace.

We chose MH&H upon the recommendation of a consultant with expertise in matters of DEIB. MH&H has a team of attorneys that specialize in these issues, and we’re confident they’ll be able to provide an impartial analysis of the facts that we need to move forward with any corrective actions.

Because the results of these investigations are private personnel matters, Paizo will not be able to make them public. Corrective actions will be taken against any employee (including managers and executives) found to be guilty of these allegations.

It has never been Paizo’s intention to discriminate against any employee when making decisions of who to send to industry trade shows, but we see now that our room-sharing policy was based on outdated interpretations of gender, was not friendly to transgender employees, and could contribute to a perception of transphobia at the company. Paizo’s Leadership Team acknowledges the pain this caused, and we understand that we need to be better at recognizing issues where such decisions could have unintended results. We also recognize that such actions do not align with Paizo's core values, the values of its staff members, or the sentiments of diversity and inclusion expressed in Paizo products, and as such, have disappointed, angered, and confused members of our community. We believe these mistakes are not representative of who we are, or what we want the company to represent. We need to do better... and we will.

“As the person in charge of trade shows, I want to apologize to anyone that felt marginalized as a result of the convention decision-making process,” said Jeff Alvarez. “It was not our intent to discriminate against anyone, and I’m sorry.”

As previously communicated, Paizo has adopted a one-employee-per-room travel policy moving forward. Regardless of gender identity, couples will be allowed to share rooms during travel as long as both parties request it.

Paizo remains committed to maintaining a diverse, safe, and fun workplace where our employees are treated fairly and look forward to creating awesome Pathfinder and Starfinder products for many years to come. We hope that this update helps communicate that we, the Leadership Team, are doing our best to listen to and address the concerns of our community members. We believe in creating a better Paizo, and believe that transparency, communication, and accountability will be instrumental as we move forward. Thank you for your continued support of our company and our products.

Paizo Leadership Team
David, Erik, Jeff, Jim, Lisa, and Mike

 

[Melan]

RPGs?

 

[ERYFKRAD]

RPGs?

Helveczia!

 

[Morblot]

Imagine burning all those dollars on "DEIB" consultants and hiring law firms to investigate your workforce and whatnot just 'cause some tranny hurt xir feelings or something. :D No wonder their products are so damn expensive.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

I'm guessing they have a few gross trannies working there who wanted to go to these DnD cons etc. as the official face of the company and Paizo executives said no.

This is dumb. Paizo was always chock full of SJW garbage, but the 375E stuff was fun, and I did like their Thassilon related AP's ALOT. I think I have all of them or something. I can't remember.

They lost me with the 2nd edition garbage they pumped out and so I haven't looked at them in years really. They are now getting devoured by their own because they prized their own wokeness over profitability. As a result, you have a weak management and a main staff at odds one another very negatively, plus a non-FTE contractor group at odds with both.

Overall result - Chaos reigns and nothing gets done.

 

[Storyfag]

There's overall more Slav blood in me than Germanic if we go back to my grandparent generation.

You always *did* seem decent. Now we know why.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Anyone have updates on this shitfest?

 

[Gyor]

I have to admit that 4e encounters were fun and easy to put together. An adventure would be 3-4 combat encounters, 1-2 skill challenges, and a boss fight. You could make the combat encounters plus or minus one or two challenge levels for your characters. Add more 1-hp minions and dangerous terrain to give your controller a fun encounter. Add more brutes to give the defender and striker a fun time. The boss fight would usually end up being a slog, so I'd reduce the boss' hp a little so I would stop delaying the inevitable. As much as we love to complain about 4e, I had some good times with it.

One of my complaints about 4e is how obvious the optimal builds are. Prior editions had allowed for crazy builds and surprising freeform emergent gameplay. 4e was pretty strictly the format I described in the paragraph above, so the game became the metagame of optimizing your characters to beat the game, and every level-up and every combat round came with an obvious "right" choice of what you were supposed to do. And it felt like if you made a suboptimal character, you were just slowing down the adventure.

Also, it's always a good time to tell people how much RPG.net sucks. This discussion right here would have banned everyone for multiple reasons if it had occurred under the thought-police RPGnet mods. Fat-shaming, gender realism, and disparaging unions would probably get us all banned. Even discussion of D&D edition pros/cons is forbidden because it reignites "edition warring."

Oh, and just so you know: You. Yeah, you personally. You. Your favorite edition of D&D sucks. And you're fat.

This is why I come here, for the free speech, yeah it means dealing some ignorant racists, but that is better then the thought police.

 

[ㅤㅤㅤ]

yeah it means dealing some ignorant racists

It's well worth it to get in touch with the well educated and knowledgeable racists and hear their takes.

 

[MiguelSerranoFan]

In the case of demands for informal and extralegal tech censorship over ideologues like Trump, insofar they result in the narrowing of the space for the exercise of civic liberties as a whole, one might even deem this expression of workplace “antagonism” a kind of class collaboration.

I'm surprised to learn that PMC unions actually confer them any benefit whatsoever. I always figured it was performative thing. I guess it still is, it's not like Paizo's management is going to object to more poz.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

So how long before Paizo shutters its doors?

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Been a while. Any updates on this dumpsterfire?

 

[Major_Blackhart]

So it's now June. Any updates on this or anything else?

Is 2e still considered a dumpsterfire or did it catch on? I see too many apologists online to actually determine if it's true or not.

 

[Bara]

You seem really invested in this?

As for anything with actual facts we got nada. Would need financials to actually be able to determine anything but Paizo a private company.

Last I heard PF2 is half or less the population of PF1 games on roll 20. But thats old data and when I hear people talking about playing the game online its through Foundry so how useful that old information is remains suspect at best.

The only thing that could suggest that how much the union costs are affecting Paizo is that they've released Pathfinder for savage worlds a while back ago and announced their releasing some of their PF2 modules for 5e now instead of just trying to promote their own system.

As far as I'm aware no ones been let go just more projects to try to reap more revenue.

Whether that's to offset union costs or just the regular drive to make money is anyone's guess outside the company and thats likely all your getting in terms of details over the next few years unless something major happens or a product line really fails.