d20pfsrd.com Updates and General Pathfinder Ramblings

d20pfsrd.com
The site is up to 71 collaborators plus myself now. A few collaborators are contributing vastly more than others, which I suppose is to be expected.

Of particular note is McCaul Bagget. This guy is a machine. He has probably spent almost as much time on the site now as I have. Everytime I look he's online fixing one thing or another. Great work McCaul.

Other collaborators of note:

Shadow Lord - The General FAQ and APG Playtest FAQ's are getting a ton of hits and Tim is doing a bang-up job compiling the various rulings and decisions made by the Paizo folks. Great work Tim!

Treantmonk's (honkalac) Guides - These are new additions and seem to be very popular on the Paizo boards. Lot's of people like reading about the best way to make the best spellcasters. Great new addition to the site Treantmonk!

Hailey Martin - Haily is methodically working to convert all of the monsters from the various Adventure Path's pre-PFRPG and her work is quite popular. This is a very happening section of the site at least according to Google Analytics. Lot's of people are linking to these pages and using them in their games it looks like. Great work Haily!

rixius - Rixius is a new recruit and one with some developer/programmer background. He's already demonstrating great value by providing me a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that really helps when editing the site. He has a second version of the Greasemonkey script forthcoming that will help even further by automatically highlighting links that need to be changed. Great ideas and great time-savers. Its good to see there are some folks who can think on their feet and be proactive when it comes to these sorts of things :)

General Information regarding the site
We are still actively testing a tool provided by Google to automatically export and import the site so that we can do site-wide link changes via script. So far the tool has been too scary to use on the real site so we've been testing it on a backup/testing version of the site. Its still too buggy to risk on the main site though unfortunately.

Rant Time
So in this thread James Jacobs reveals that a very major change was done to the summon spells via how the celestial and fiendish templates work. At first he stated the change was intentional until various people remarked how much that totally ganked how things work. The next response was "well you should rule however you think makes sense". I had to exercise a great deal of self-control in my response because I really wanted to go off (which I'm still doing here). It's this sort of thing that just shows that certain changes needed to be thought out a bit more (or playtested?) before getting into the big 500+ page book. Just sayin...

There are many examples of this sort of system change that really should have been discussed and/or tested more. However, it is what it is. I'm hoping an errata will clean a bunch of this crap up.

I guess that's all for now.

d20pfsrd.com Update

News of the Week

New Collaborators
We added three new collaborators this week and they each seem to be taking off very well. Welcome Cindy Hawkins, Jonathan Yeung, and Richard Hunt.

Site Updates:

FAQ
Tim Shadow (ShadowChemosh on Paizo) has been diligently updating the FAQ page even though we have to work around the annoying archiving system on the Paizo boards. Paizo automatically archives old posts and threads after 60 days and then just plain deletes threads and posts after a point. We had made a point of citing the original post from Paizo people where they answered an FAQ-type question but these links frequently break. At this point we're probably going to give up on citing the source with a link and just site who said it. This was, afterall, Tim's original plan since he was aware of the archiving problem before I was.

Link Patrol
We have been diligently fixing broken links or links that point to the PRD when they should point internally. All of the Basic Classes and major "portal" pages (combat, spell lists, etc) should be good but please do report on the messageboards if you run into anything that isn't working quite right.

We've also (well mostly Jonathan and Richard) have been adding new links to places where they didn't exist before, such as linking keywords in feats and spells. This is going to be a long process but at least they've gotten started. These things are not linked at all in the official PRD.

Collaborator Notes and Guidelines
I finally created a Collaborator Notes and Guidelines page with some tips and requests for new collaborators. Previously I was basically typing all of that to each new collaborator in an email each time we got a new one. You'd think I would have learned well before we hit 40 collaborators to maybe just make a page and point people to it but no, I'm slow sometimes.

Misc. Cleanup
I've been cleaning up pages as I come across them. For example, previously we used embedded google spreadsheets for various tabular data but now I am moving away from those towards just standard html tables. This was discussed a lot early on and I wanted to take advantage of some of the cool features of the embedded google spreadsheets but its just turning into more of a pain than its worth. I'll revisit the idea sometime in the future.

There's a ton more little updates but nothing substantially interesting so I'll leave it there!

Forum Fight!

Yesterday I got into it on the Paizo boards with some folks over the fact that there are no rules for defining line of sight in Pathfinder. I was not the thread starter on that subject but only jumped in after the fact to try to defend the OP from several sarcastic replies and to agree with him that it seems like it should have been in there.

Now this may seem odd coming from someone claiming to be a "hardcore grognard", needing a definition of "line of sight" and all. I mean, its pretty obvious, line of sight is what you can see. If you can't see it you don't have line of sight. Leave it to your D/GM to let you know if you have line of sight.

However, Pathfinder is not generally a "GM-call" sort of system. Its a very rules heavy system. It has rules for virtually any scenario. If this were Castles & Crusades I wouldn't have even thought twice. C&C is supposed to be rules-light and assumes a lot of GM calls. Pathfinder however, is by no means rules light. Lacking a definition for "line of sight" when it is a mechanical term that is used frequently throughout the rules is a mistake in my opinion.

So now we have to question "why is the rule missing?" Possibilities include:

• It was determined to be unnecessary.
  
• Oops. It was left out by mistake.

After a later post from the OP on that thread, it appears to be more like the latter option. It looks like the 3.5 rules (as well as several other d20-based systems) included definitions for line of sight but in 3.5 it was embedded within a diagram in the PHB that was not included in the SRD and therefore not included in Pathfinder. With that said, I am guessing it was not intentionally left out and later statements saying it wasn't necessary was a CYA sort of deal.

With that said, I grow tired of dealing with Pathfinder. The forums particularly bother me.Originally the Pathfinder forums seemed to be filled with generally polite and helpful people but now it appears to have devolved somewhat. There's a lot of derisive commenting going on over there now.

I think I'm going to take a break from d20pfsrd.com and pushing Pathfinder for a while. The site seems pretty self-sustaining at this point anyway. Traffic grows every day, getting between 1500-2000 visits a day. A half dozen or so people are regularly updating it (though not what I'd always like to be updated) so I'm guess I could drop out of the picture altogether at this point and the site would be fine.

This just gives me more time to focus on Castles & Crusades I guess :)

Issues with Pathfinder/3.x

Greater/Improved/Better/More/Lesser/Superior You Name It
I really hate how everything in Pathfinder/3.x scales by adding various words to the title. For criminies sake just name the ability Weapon Focus 1, Weapon Focus 2, Invisibilty 1, Invisibility 2, etc.

Combat Feats/General Feats
I wish there were just "Feats".

Saving Throws
3 Saving Throws is too few. I really like how Castles & Crusades does saving throws.

The Development Method

1. I may be completely wrong, but my perspective says that Pathfinder was basically completely developed by Jason with a bit of input from a few people. I would have preferred a much, much, more team-based development phase.
2. The "Open" Playtest - While I applaud the idea my general opinion is that it was a cluster-bleep. X-thousands of people randomly playing with no focus or direction and then randomly posting their half-ass opinions on dozens of forum threads that the developers (ie Jason) had to keep track of somehow. What a mess. That should have been MUCH more organized with some much more "directed" or "organized" testing groups.
3. Going through X amount of playtesting in Beta and then randomly coming up with stuff for final that had never even been quasi-tested. Who adds new features between the last test phase and the final production phase that get no testing at all?
4. Errata and Editing... This is just a side-effect of the "industry" but there were X-thousands of people beta testing the product. Why not identify a couple hundred specialty groups who sign NDA's and help find typos or errors? Artifice domain does not grant Arcane Mark yet multiple things in the domain depend on Arcane Mark? WTF?
5. The Fans... OMG. Now considering I started and am the primary driving force behind perhaps the largest non-Paizo rules source site, and considering that I am actually a fan, I have to say that there are some real psychos out there sucking down the kool-aid like crazy.  To these people Pathfinder is a literary artifact on the level of the United States Constitution or a work of art on the level of a Michelangelo. People need to relax a little.
   

Ok that may all sound harsh, but consider it comes from someone who plays in a Pathfinder campaign every other weekend and can't wait for the next session. Not to mention, I ran a Pathfinder Beta campaign with characters in the low-teens levels so I have some experience with it and do like many (most) of the changes.

Community Game Design

So I have this dream that a dedicated group of individuals can come together and either perfect an existing system, or create a new one, which is then released free to the world. The open community would continue to work on and perfect this system until there are no grammatical or spelling errors, all logic is consistent, and people genuinely enjoy the way the system works.

I am currently working on a few different endeavors, some more grandiose than others.

KinnexRPG
This is probably the largest project. I have started an entirely new game system with the goals of it being cross genre, class-less, and level-less. I've gotten a few bites from people willing to help work on it but haven't really gotten any substantial amount of help with it. If you'd like to get involved let me know.

Castles & Crusades
I'm, in many ways, gutting the system. I'm keeping some core concepts but even they are up for review. For example, the Prime/Secondary system... I plan to go with bases of 12 and 15 instead of 12 and 18, for various reasons. I'm rewriting pretty much every class, adding some new classes, and cleaning up various inconsistencies in the rules. If you'd like to help with this, please let me know.

Pathfinder
I started d20pfsrd.com (and am still the largest contributor to it by far). The site now has over 30 separate collaborators registered to edit it and various people are working on different areas. However, the site needs basic, non-glamorous, boring, grunt-level work, such as fixing broken links and correcting typos and errata. If you'd like to get involved in d20pfsrd.com, please let me know.

What it is!

So I decided to start a blog dedicated just to my gaming related activities and for posting things I find online of any interest.

Why Hardcore Grognard?
While I am certainly a grognard, I am not JUST into old-school games. I'm a big proponent of Pathfinder as well as other old-school games, most specifically Castles & Crusades.

I'll post some more in a bit, specifically news on the status of d20pfsrd.com as well as info about Orlandia (my Castles & Crusades world and current game design project).