https://www.humblebundle.com/books/paizo-pathfinder-bundle
For those who like or would like to try table-top Gaming, Humble Bundle is offering a "mindblowing" pay-what-you-want offer for digital copies of the PathFinder roleplaying game, a fork of AD&D rule 3.5, I believe... and it also helps charity [takyon: the two charity options are Extra Life/Children's Miracle Network Hospitals and Camden's Concert via the Tides Foundation].
This was my first post for an advertisement, don't hate me, but I thought some might be interested.
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A Worthy Soyvertisement? Humble Bundle is Available for RPG PathFinder Manuals and Scenarios
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @11:51PM
Soyvertisement disguised as a soyvertisement? Quick, somebody put out a psych study!
Don't worry, rest of you lot can put out papers debunking that and then each other, and so on.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday March 04 2016, @11:58PM
(open, DOI: 10.6969/huuururururrrhgg)
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday March 05 2016, @12:39AM
That vid was a total sausage party -- it needs more women or more roofies. Or a third camera placed strategically under the table.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Tork on Saturday March 05 2016, @12:22AM
A Worthy Soyvertisement?
Here's a funny thing about tech news... 99.9% of it is about products we can all go out and buy. Any news story is, in some form, an advertisement. The reason Slashdot doesn't get away with it is because there's a big difference between their readership saying "this is cool" and an article written by marketing peeps.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Saturday March 05 2016, @12:30AM
(compare to original submission)
I put mindblowing in quotes, so it's ok!
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hairyfeet on Saturday March 05 2016, @04:28PM
Well if we are gonna plug the bundles I picked up the FX2 Pinball bundle [humblebundle.com] and I have to say the tables? Fricking AWESOME. Lots of challenges and mini games with a TON of killer animations, from building Vader into his suit at the end of Revenge of the Sith to having Carnage break out of the middle of the play table to battle Spiderman and Venom, hell even the soccer table has a top table that feels almost like Foosball, just a real blast.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Capt. Obvious on Saturday March 05 2016, @12:25AM
Pathfinder is a fork of D&D 3.5, not AD&D3.5
Pedant away!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2016, @04:15PM
The & is code for H.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dyingtolive on Saturday March 05 2016, @01:03AM
I have all those books (well, all of them that I care about) from that collection. It's not a bad set though if you want to take the plunge and get started. Well, and don't mind PDF for sourcebooks. It's certainly gotta be the cheapest way to legally get those books, if that's a thing for you. Speaking of which, note that they usually watermark their PDFs.
Personally, PDF is okay if you're making the character and then playing. If it's something you have to refer to often, (like lengthy spells or DM materials) I almost always would rather have some sort of paper copy either in a book or on cards or something. About the only exception is my own DM notes, which I take in Evernote. The laptop also doubles as a DM screen.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday March 05 2016, @03:33PM
I have them in legacy and ebook format. All are watermarked and that makes downloads slow. I guess over 50K sales is killing their hardware right now.
On one hand the watermarking is a pain.
On the other hand they are very understanding about supplying everything in all four combos of full/chapter files and fancy full color / blah. Mostly I use full color and chapter files.
And on the third hand, they don't really have a system wide naming convention. So I store in a directory hierarchy and rename a lot of files.
Note that all (I think?) of their PDFs are searchable. You can pull up Ultimate Magic, search "eldritch fever" click next a few times and there you are looking at the writeup for the eldritch fever spell. I just did this seconds ago to verify.
Also I cloud my ebooks (owncloud over a VPN) and reading them is option #4134135 for sitting there in the waiting room. Hmm I'm gonna get level 4 next week which means I gain access to what exactly? In legacy format you can verify you're looking at 1 to 2 linear feet of bookshelf.
Artistically I like the paper books. They look nice.
The whole system feeds into completionist disease. So I have more books than I really need. Selling stacks of ebooks might give noobs the false idea they need more than the core rulebook (if that) to start. The addons are nice, but are optional.
I like the ROTR-re-release in one updated giant book. I wish they did that for all paths after a few years. It brought back pleasant memories.
Pathfinder is cool.
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Saturday March 05 2016, @03:52PM
Is it the watermarking or just the sheer volume of traffic trying to download from their site right now? I'm getting dialup (20-30Kb/sec) speeds on the file transfers.
(Score: 1) by Demose on Saturday March 05 2016, @01:22AM
Would anyone recommend for a fan of Daggerfall and Morrowind or are tabletop R.P.G.'s to different from early Bethesda games to be enjoyable?
(Score: 2) by Hawkwind on Saturday March 05 2016, @01:39AM
ask your Game Master
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2016, @04:43AM
This is like error messages referencing "your system administrator"
For which most people immediately think "Who?" followed by "Hey, that's me! I don't know what this means..."
Meanwhile.. err... who is my Game Master?
(Score: 5, Informative) by mth on Saturday March 05 2016, @02:31AM
The largest difference is that tabletop RPGs are played in a group. Critical Role [youtube.com] is a video series of a group playing D&D; this should give you some impression of what it's like. (Audio of episode 1 is broken at about 12 minutes in, but fixed soon after.)
I wouldn't recommend an 8-player group though; in my experience groups of about 4 players + 1 game master works best. One reason is that with more players it can take too long for a player to get the attention of the game master when the group splits up. Another reason is that with a smaller group, every group member will have a unique specialization, while with larger groups there will be more overlap in skill sets and some characters might feel redundant.
D&D has a strong combat focus; some other RPGs put more emphasis on story and social situations.
(Score: 3, Informative) by gman003 on Saturday March 05 2016, @01:51AM
If you've ever wanted to get into pen-and-paper RPGs, the Pathfinder Beginner Box is a pretty good way to do so. It comes with everything you need for a basic game - including several prebuilt characters and a premade dungeon, but also dry-erase map grids and tokens and dice and everything, you literally just need a bunch of players and some pencils and you're good to go. To make it easier to pick up, it trims the rulebooks down to the bare minimum - it only covers up to level 5 (full game goes to level 20, with expansions for epic-levels - but IMO, levels 2-7 are the best part), and so it can cut out 75% of the spells and monsters and items... and then it cuts down some more. It also skips rules for things like "crafting items" or grappling, which rarely come up (and, because there's a human running the game instead of a computer, you can just improvise some rules if needed and probably do fine).
And if you turn out to like it, it's compatible with the full game. Characters can come over easily, just copy over to a new character sheet with less reminder text and a few more spots for gear and skills. All the rules you learned in the Beginner Box still apply, so there's no wasted effort.
This bundle has the Beginner Box as a $25 physical reward, which I think is about what it costs normally, if not less. So you can grab it, and then immediately have digital copies of all the full-game books to refer to once you've gotten the hang of it.
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Saturday March 05 2016, @03:17PM
The bundle price does not include shipping for the physical box. Be sure to check the shipping rates to your particular locale before purchasing.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday March 05 2016, @04:05PM
This bundle has the Beginner Box as a $25 physical reward, which I think is about what it costs normally
$35 list. The humble bundle is $25 plus shipping, FLGS probably asks list plus sales tax, amazon sells for $29 or so, plus possible tax, but free shipping if you have prime.
The alternative of starting with the core rulebook is you'll probably be confused by many hundreds of pages, and it lists for $50 MSRP.
Its interesting how the paper gaming world has embraced subscription and crowd funding. Most of the boxes in my cave come from GMT's P500, or DVG kickstarters, or Paizo's numerous subscription offerings. I got a barbarian class deck for PACG last week and GMT finally shipped COIN liberty or death last month or so. Been awhile since I ordered a gaming product.
Cheapest way to get started would probably be to visit your FLGS, look at the bulletin board schedule, and come back when a group is playing. So call it $0 plus or minus gas money for the car.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Saturday March 05 2016, @02:50AM
Humble Bundle is among the first steps away from the old and very broken business model of exploiting monopolies on an artificially constructed exclusive "right" to make copies. Crowdfunding is the way forward. There's a lot of work to be done before a majority is convinced that crowdfunding and patronage are viable, and copyright is harmful, unfair, unnatural, and best abandoned.
At heart, copyright is fundamentally anti-education. Why do we still spend vast amounts of taxpayer money for our children to each be provided with their own copies of dead tree textbooks these days when it is far, far cheaper to provide access to a digital edition and save on all the costs of printing, reprinting, distribution, replacement of damaged or lost copies and previous editions, and storage? There are all kinds of entrenched interests anxious to keep copyright alive and kicking so they can maintain their rackets. If schools could go paperless, could also do away with lockers and heavy backpacks and the associated back problems that can cause. The school library can change into an Internet access facility. Textbooks have sunk into a huge giveaway to sleazy publishers we do not need and who do worse than suck blood. They pass on diseases in the form of biases and slants to the knowledge, stuffed with right wing propaganda, advertisements, and nuggets of little private agendas intended to advance some very narrow interest. When the science textbook has a section that presents Intelligent Design as if it is a scientific hypothesis on par with Evolution, and the history textbook presents the US Civil War with a very pro-Confederacy bias as a Lost Cause and a battle over States Rights, and Huckleberry Finn gets banned, again, it's a sign that things need to be changed, and control wrested away from the small unrepresentative group of fools who once again abused their excessive power to screw with our children's education. Once publishers were fairly respectable, but what did they do when confronted with the disruptive change of digital media and distribution? Take the high road? Nope! But then, there are very few people of such high principles. The business world has earned a well deserved reputation for amoral, irresponsible, and ultimately shortsighted and foolish behavior.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dltaylor on Saturday March 05 2016, @03:18AM
I don't have any objection to an announcement for a product/service that the SoylentNews editors value, as long as there is no attempt to disguise it as "news for ....".
Haven't played D&D since last century, but a summary's worth of space on the browser EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE doesn't bother me.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday March 05 2016, @06:04AM
The current name-your-own-price Humble Books bundle [humblebundle.com] is the Pathfinder comic book series in PDF/CBZ format, as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2016, @06:41AM
yeah both are available
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Saturday March 05 2016, @02:56PM
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Monday March 07 2016, @04:48AM
Despite not having played D&D since second edition . . . .