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.

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.

Issues with Castles & Crusades

Primes
I have found that the 12/18 system, while nice, is too difficult on the high end, meaning the 18 is too hard to hit. If you are attempting to do something against someone with the same HD as your level (or less) you are almost guaranteed to succeed (or fail, depending on the situation). I am changing this to bases of 12 and 15.

Redundant Class Abilities

1. One class has Scale. One class has Climb. They both do the same thing. Why are they called something different?
2. One class has Birthright Mount. One has Divine Mount. They're basically the same thing. Why are they called something different?
3. Many classes have multiple dead levels and then get several things all at the same level. Why not spread those things out a bit?
4. C&C seems to use several 3.5 basic ideas but some have been greatly improved in Pathfinder. I will be using the more modern versions.

The "N" System
In my Castles & Crusades site I am rewriting basically all class abilities and one thing you will see a lot of is references to " N". What this means is that the N is a replaceable number that usually scales at various levels. For example, the Archer class gets an ability called Deadly Aim N. At various levels N is 1, then 2, then 3, etc. In the case of the Archer, the bonus from Deadly Aim is whatever N is at that time. The Knight also has an N ability, Fealty/Tithe. Knights have to give fealty to their Lord equal to 10% of all treasure earned/gained. In the case of Fealty, N scales from 1 to 5 and reduces they amount they are expected to pay by a percentage equal to N. Paladins have the same class "ability" but in their case it is due to tithing to their church.  Archers also have "Extra Attack (ranged) N" and in that case N is a number of extra attacks they get. If N is 3, they get 3 extra attacks.

More later...

I HATE ITUNES

I don't know how people tolerate this piece of crap. The UI is horribly designed and its slow as crap. I just don't get it. This thing sucks.