terminalmancer

Hey, a problem I constantly deal with! Printing! So, in a perfect world you'd take it to a print shop and they'd just print it. The page sizes in the PDFs are generally correct! But almost nobody has 24" x 30" paper, and when you have page size mismatches, the default print behavior in most PDF readers is to scale to fit. You can kindly ask your print associate to not do that and print without resizing, and maybe it'll work. If you're printing at home, you can also try poster mode in Acrobat, which I hear works pretty well nowadays. It's not super configurable, so it's not an especially popular option among those of us who do this a lot, but for a one-off print it will probably be fine! Me personally, I tend to extract the image and toss it at spreadsheet software, which gives me more control over how it prints. Set your cells to 1" square, resize the image to match the cell size (compare vs. the row and column labels), and print. Of course, I'm weird--I set my squares to 1.1 inches to give the minis breathing room. 1" square is just an arbitrary number anyway. One complication with this method is that newer (last 5 years or so) versions of Excel have some dark magic going on where, on print, the application dynamically resizes things. As a result, you should probably avoid Excel. I use LibreOffice Calc instead--1" actually means 1" in that application. Another popular option: you can also use software specifically designed to convert big images into posters. Posterazor is the most widely used. That'll let you print with overlap and gives you a ton of control over how you're splitting things up. Any of the "you print yourself" methods also lend themselves well to printing to PDF. If you print to PDF instead of paper, you can take the resulting PDF to that print shop that wouldn't print your map the right size, and then have them print the "posterized" version. They don't usually screw up sizing on 8.5x11 or A4 or whatever paper size is the local standard. Preservation! If you've got a single big sheet, you'll want to roll it up and tube it for storage, of course. Honestly, most of these don't last very long, but they're nice in a pinch. If you have smaller individual sheets, what a lot of us map-printers do is laminate the individual pages. That way you can put any sort of marker on the map and just wipe it off when you're done. My specific insanity: I trim the whitespace off, laminate the individual pages, trim the excess laminate, and then use packing tape and rudimentary origami skills to make durable foldable maps out of my laminated pages. That way, I'm not at risk of losing an individual page, I don't have to spend much time setting up a map, and I can reuse 'em almost as many times as I want. Other things Bigger page sizes save you time if you're trimming and taping. Some folks go and buy plotters for this, which I always thought was a bit nuts. If you want to extract the image but aren't sure how, the easiest thing to do is that you can send the PDF through one of the nigh-infinite number of PDF image extractors on the web. There are a few other ways to do it--right click save image doesn't typically work well, but sometimes it does. If you know how to open up a PDF file, you can copy the raw image in a PDF editor, although that's something I won't get into here. A final option: you can also open the PDF in GIMP or Photoshop and save the result as an image.

Hmmmm. They have a lot of ideas there! And I have... not enough time to read them all, not tonight. I can't find the post in question, so just to talk about adding damage in the way you've described: Pathfinder is... interesting in how the spellcasters and the martials compare. Spellcasters tend to be powerful not because they do bucketloads of damage (although they can, it tends to be one of the weaker approaches) but because they have answers, particularly at high levels, and martials don't get many answers--they just get increasingly more damage, without too much ability to affect problems that their damage can't fix. An archer, for example, can take feats that increase the damage they do--rapid shot, deadly aim, manyshot, and so on. A high-level spellcaster, on the other hand, gets fickle winds. Fickle winds is a 6th-level spell that surrounds a spellcaster with wind that essentially makes them immune to arrows and other projectiles that aren't made of magic. It's an answer for the archer's entire approach. Looking at another class comparison, fly lets a spellcaster hang in the air and rain destruction or irritation down on the barbarian from above, and frankly throwing a javelin is not the best use of a barbarian's time. The barbarian needs to rely on someone else to solve the problem for them--there's not a lot they can do. You can dig into the list of spells and see how many different solutions there are in the spell list--a hard thing for a martial to compete with. And seeing as spell lists are known to expand over time (and with publications), the problem usually gets worse later in a game's lifecycle. It's a hard thing to deal with. Damage, by itself, doesn't do it (although it might reduce the reliance on power attack, removing power attack also has other implications) but this is only one part of their approach, it seems. They have a lot of promising ideas that I can see, like the rebuild of full attacking--so there's a lot of promise--but I don't think this part of it is the important bit for solving the overall problem. Of course, the dedicated spellcaster players can argue that the wizards deserve to be better late because they're terrible early, and most of the game is played at the levels where they just can't compete. And they're not entirely wrong--the vast majority of the game is played before level 5, and unless your spellcaster has really gotten the hang of their color sprays and glitterdusts and sleep spells, they're just not going to be very good. So it may not be something you want to overfix, which is one of the concerns that's been brought up with respect to second edition. Oh! And my wife brings up a good point--Starfinder is already testing this out, and it does have a small effect, but the big balancing factor in Starfinder was limiting all of the casters to six levels of spells. Which... means that you don't have any full casters, which does solve the problem, in a way. It also, partially by virtue of the setting, mean that technology can provide a lot of the answers for a martial character that a spellcaster would provide in a more fantasy setting. More to chew on, I suppose.

Woo! Good luck with the plan! The ring looks great.

Paizo is contractually obligated to hold its Free RPG Day offerings for thirty days before they release them. That includes the digital releases. It also means that those of us who are volunteer coordinators need to wait until 30 days after release to schedule sanctioned games (unless they're scheduled in the store that bought in.). It's not ideal, but Free RPG Day is meant to support the game stores who took part. (So yeah, the August 25th date should be roughly accurate!) The other offerings were pretty awesome too. The Roll20 coupon, when I redeemed it, went a little wonky though--so watch out for that one!

I seem to remember you running it in 2014... maybe 2015? At whatever point I learned of it, it was already an established pattern!

becoming a tradition?

Whelp, sounds like you're stuck with me! https://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/92164-pathfinder-and-starfinder-society-at-reapercon-live/ Let me know if you've got any requests or suggestions!

Hey all, It sounds as though I'll be organizing our PFS and SFS escapades this year! I'm Alex, an itinerant member of the Reaper community who has tried to attend every reapercon since 2015, but has not met with resounding success. I don't paint as much as I used to, but some of the regulars might recognize me. Anyway, I wanted to check in with you all to see what you wanted. You don't need to answer all of these, but answer what you can! Any information will help. How many 4- or 5-hour games do you think you'll play? Do you prefer Pathfinder 1, Pathfinder 2, or Starfinder? Do you think you'd be interested in a multi-table interactive special? (And which system? PFS1, PFS2, SFS?) Would you prefer to pick your own games or have us slot you into a schedule we've created? (We'll have a mix of both, but we can change the exact ratios.) When I've attended Reapercon in the past, we've generally volunteered to run a certain number of slots, and the coordinator has told us what games we're running. What timezone do you plan on joining us from? Would you like more lower-level content or higher-level content? Anything else? Thank you! P.S. Thanks to our usual organizer, @Rapheal, for handling this convention for us so many times in the past! (And also in the future, I hope.)

Nothing official to report--but I do want to mention that things are moving in the background. The investigation continues and I should learn more (and be able to talk about it) soon.

Just wanted to let folks know that I'm currently investigating the status of Society play at Reapercon. It's been a few days since I started asking around and I haven't heard back from anyone yet, so the investigation might go more slowly than I was hoping.

Thanks!

I'm sure they're working on it and I'm also sure it's going to be a lot of work to figure it all out...

Wife and I got ours. Next up... swag bags!

Sounds lovely to me! It's not incredibly easy to set up, but it takes a lot less time to figure out than a lot of the mini stuff. As long as it's on the list I won't worry about it.

Thanks, everyone! Those summaries were really helpful. @ReaperAHawk, you get all your Reaper colleagues thinking about what to do about the gaming yet? :)