Moments in your gaming career that should have told you....

[Prak]

something is wrong as if screaming at the top of one's lungs with flashing neon visual aids.

For mine, two moments in one:

I once played a 3.x monk who had started using a greataxe, because it did more damage than his fists, and a nonproficiency penalty was not a significant additional hindrance on top of the inherent suck of the monk class.

This should have told me how inherently shitty the monk class was.

The DM actually took the axe away from me, completely arbitrarily, by having it stick in a wall such that I couldn't pull it out, rather than having a rust monster or darkstalker eat it, or having someone sunder it, because it wasn't an appropriate weapon for a monk to use, or something.

This should have told me my friend was a terrible dm.

[Maxus]

A DM had a group of seven people win initiative against a six-person party. That is, all seven of them go first.

Then hijacked one character with no save and was going to have the character drown himself in a river.

Then the DM got pissy when a few of us demanded an open re-roll of the dice and declared he didn't need to justify himself to us.

So, me and a few others quit the game.

On the good side, reading the Tomes made me realize how limited the SRD's options are. I noticed a friend liked to make shield rushers or spiked-chain-trippers, and that struck me a bit weird. If I have to play a specific build to be effective with my character, something is wrong.

Now, mind you, having to pay a -little- attention isn't bad. If you take a Tome Skill feat, you had better have that as a class skill. But someone laying out all the feats I -must- take if I want my character to keep up with the group and the challenges? Something is wrong with tyhe game.

[Leress]

Playing World of Warcraft d20.

[Prak]

hey, when I've got a goblin tinkerer walking around with a shotgun blowing bullete's to hell in a single blast, life's good.

broken, and DM cock-suckery (I was running, had just bought the book), but good.

[DragonChild]

When the DM admitted his computer wallpaper was of a naked woman who looked like one of the NPCs.

[Koumei]

The time my TWF Fighter lost one of his swords to a Rust Monster. This was the Urak' Guy, so Str 30. With steampunk bracer things that add 4 Str (so now 34) and basically give Powerful Build. So he wielded a Greatseword and Longsword, plus a useless Bite attack. The Longsword got rusted.

We fight some knights, the DM completely forgot we had not healed or anything (as well as calculating multipliers wrong for critical + knight charge lance thing) so the useless Cleric/Wizard became slightly more useless by exploding in a spray of gore. I had only one weapon so figured "Oh, in that case... so I don't take a -2 penalty for wielding two weapons because I'm not... that hits. For... $TEXAS damage."

It was then that I realised that, having invested 3 feats into TWF (Ambidex - this was 3.0 - TWF and ITWF), I was still better off using one weapon two-handed, which required zero feats. It helped that this was the Karmic Strike + Knockdown build, but still. Hell, it's not like I was getting two-weapon AoOs. Out the box, my two-handed fighting was outdoing the -feat TWF. And that was fucking stupid.

It was then that I asked if I could take proficiency in trees and just smack enemies about with those.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

The game: Rules Cyclopedia D&D

The DM:

1. Wouldn't let my wizard know any weapons but a dagger. This was his prerogative; back in those days anything other than dagger was optional, but see #4. Keep in mind that he said if I even touched or carried a weapon that wasn't a dagger, my wizard would lose all his spells.

2. Kept dictating my characters actions (For example, if I was casting anything other than Fireball, he told me I wasn't allowed to and tell me I had to cast fireball.) Any time I cast a utility or SoD, he told me that I couldn't cast it. If the monster made their save, fine. I knew the deal. I just would rather fail on my own then have my actions dictated to me.

3. Would randomly curse my character with a rather annoying curse. In that anything I attempted would be reversed (Spells could be reversed in those days). I then announced I was casting Bestow Curse on myself, which my 17 int tells me should reverse into Remove Curse. He had my character die.

4. Had a DMPC wizard that was allowed to have all the optional weapons wizards had in those days (Staff, Sling, Blowgun, etc), at grand mastery level. At twice my level. Then kept telling me my wizard sucked.

5. Had all the NPC's bully me, encouraged the other PCs to bully me in game, gave me an EXP penalty for meta-gaming when the PC fighter saw I was Neutral and kept threatening to "cut my lying tongue out", and I responded "Alright, name ONE TIME my character ever lied to you EVER."

I believe I am the only person in the world to be bullied by the D&D nerds when I was 14. It took three sessions for me to find some friends and start my own game. My early adventures sucked, but in awesome ways (if that makes sense).

[hogarth]

I was in a 2E AD&D campaign in university when it suddenly dawned on me that every fight would start edging towards a TPK, then either the enemies would suddenly surrender/run away or we'd get our asses saved by an NPC.

Games should be a mix of easy, medium and challenging encounters. If every encounter involves just barely surviving (or only surviving due to DM pity), that game sucks.

[TOZ]

I had a DM who tried to have a harpy fall into a lake to deprive the party of her loot. This DM also rolled a troll for a random encounter when the new player's 1st level Druid (which had taken all session to roll up) was on watch. Who, being new, sounded the alarm and charged. Claw claw rend and she needed a new character. I wonder why she never came back?

Also, had a DM who wanted to run a low magic campaign. First warning. As an 'ice breaker' he read 'DM of the Rings' or whatever that awful book was to the group. Second warning. You can read the aftermath here.

[Roy]

I'm pretty good at identifying the warning signs before my time is actually wasted. So I don't have any 'I should have known' stories.

But I do have a list of filters you should apply if you don't want your time wasted.

1: Stay away from low magic games. They're an automatic strike 1. If it is both low magic and D&D that's 2.5 strikes automatically. The only reason it's not the full three is to give them one final chance to redeem themselves.

2: Level 1 or 2 D&D games are worth at least a warning, for the simple reason you tend to just randomly fall over and die at these levels. If the DM doesn't seem to have a clue, it's 1 strike material.

3: A core only game is worth a minimum of 1.5 strikes, because it's the same as limiting you to one of three classes. And you can't get away with that shit unless you're as awesome as the creators of Diablo. Hint: You're not.

4: Custom campaign settings are worth a strike, for the simple reason 99% of them lack the proper detail, and is basically a license for the DM to jerk you around with bullshit instead of what you do and do not know about the world you live in being clearly defined.

5: Rules that are not clearly defined ahead of time are worth half a strike per occurrence, minimum and therefore pile up very quickly against inconsistent DMs. Note, using the default rules is not a violation of this. Using house rules is not a violation either provided those house rules are clearly detailed ahead of time. But if you go to do something, and the DM says 'oh yeah, that doesn't work that way' it's a violation. Yes, this means any 2nd edition grognards will get themselves 3 strikes in as many minutes. Purely intentional.

6: Watch the DM carefully. Does he seem to have at least a decent grasp of math? If he does, you're fine. If he doesn't, you're going to have a long series of problems, as he continuously does things that are pointless or counterproductive believing that they fix some problem or another. If it becomes a pattern, fuck any three strikes you're out rule. Just leave. Yes, this means every Paizil will insta ban themselves. Again, this is intentional.

Now if you follow these and some other common sense outlines for avoiding shitty games, you'll find that you'll encounter very few, if any shitty games. The downside is that most games are shitty, so you'll be spending a lot of time not gaming at all.

[Doom]

I'm playing 4e, a group of level 16 characters, I'm GMing.

I pick up a monster.

"Hold on, I want to interrupt that move."

"Wait, I've got an interrupt I want to use, too."

"Me too, but you guys go ahead."

(monster action interrupted, after a minute or two of discussion as to who gets to interrupt, and if more than one interrupt is going off).

I pick up another monster, move it, take a swing.

"Wait, I've got an interrupt."

"I wanna use MY interrupt this time."

"Hold on, I have an interrupt that only goes off if a player gets knocked to zero, let the swing happen already!" Another few seconds of discussion for that.

I pick up another monster and make an attack.

"Ok, my turn for an interrupt."

"No, wait, let mine go off first."

And that's about when I realized that the game is probably flat out unsaveable, above and beyond all the other issues.

[souran]

Playing World of Warcraft d20.

Other than the random boost to prepared spell casters that destroyes the entire concept of the spontaneous casters and the wowifed spell list there really isn't anything that should put the wow d20 on this list.

Honestly, it probably one of the best products S&S press produced. Also its classes are at least interesting and generally just have MORE (although not always better) stuff that they get compared to the standard D&D classes.

Seriously, all the polymorph fuckery could be fixed by using the wowified version from the wow d20 rpg.


Anyway Here are mine:

I had a friend who liked to make 3.0 classes based on final fantasy video game characters. They were very stupid and both incredibily underpowered and handicapped in some ways and in others they were overpowered (for example a "dragoon" 20 level prestige class [all your levels converted over to dragoon levels when you entered the prestige class but you got to keep all the abiltiies of your previous class] that could just its "jump" attack to kill greater wyrm red dragons at level 1 with no save. He was always trying to get people to play these classes and he would introduce npcs with them to try and show them off much to the parties frustration.

Anyway, he was the sort that if you didn't go the the right place would try and scare the party with encounters with level 20/20 ranger/mage assassins. He loved to dm but couldn't actually be bothered to read the spell list so he would just MAKE UP NEW EFFECTS FOR EVERY SPELL ON AN NPCS SPELL LIST BASDED ON THE NAME. He also would never remotely fairly adjudicate the spells that your own wizard might memorize instead having them hand wave fail or otherwise do something that was not their descrption.

This might sound like D&D being played by 10-14 year olds but this was when we were in high school, he was 17.

So short version: If the DM immediatly shows you a bunch of childish elements to their game its probably not worth your time.


Rules strict DMs can be just as bad as DMs who are pulling shit out of their ass all the time.

I played a D20 modern game and we were in an X-Files esque campaign setting. So we all had investigative abilties but none of us had real considerable "outdoorsman" type abilties. Our first case leads us out to an abandonded mineshaft in the middle of the woods. We investigate the mine and our phones and flashlights stop working, so we decide to head back to our hotel rooms. The gamemaster has us roll survival rolls to try and find the car in the dark. As nobody has any survival we quickly end up "hopelessly lost". The game master then had us spend 20 minutes rolling dice trying to get the three 18+s in a row that we would need to find our way back.

After 20 mintues of dicking around with this I ask the DM if there are any encounters in the woods, if we are really at any risk of dying in the woods and if getting lost in the woods is at all releveant to the events of the story. He tells us that he doesn't have any forest encounters but now that we are lost we have to roll to become unlost before we can move on with the game.


In college I was introduced to buffy the vampire slayer/angel by a roommate and I introduced him to rpgs. He had a bunch of (all female) friends that he tought rpgs too. They picked up the buffy/angel rpg and offered to let me play with them.
After my good vampire, teen werewolf, revenant returned from the dead for one final mission, and a teen wizard character all got rejected I made a min-maxed normal human Uber-ninja who they let me play...until they found out I outperfromed all the supernatural characters at combat at which point they curtailed all my combat abilties and I never played again.

[Juton]

I tried playing in a Darksun game a while back. I wanted to play a Scout, but that choice was banned, not because the Scout is too powerful or wouldn't work in the setting, just because it wasn't on the pre-made allow list, which hadn't been changed since 3.0. Our DM tells us it will be impossible to get a hold on metal or magic equipment (for a level 5 character), but you can still use psionic weapon because everyone got psionics and PsyWarriors and Psions where allowed in the game. To this day I don't know if he wanted to run a low magic game, and failed, or if he was a little too zealous in how he ran Darksun. After an hour and a half to finish our first encounter it took the players 35 minutes to enter the loot into a spreadsheet on their laptops, they collected all these useless bone weapons even though there was nothing to buy with the loot.

[Leress]

Other than the random boost to prepared spell casters that destroyes the entire concept of the spontaneous casters and the wowifed spell list there really isn't anything that should put the wow d20 on this list.

My mistake, I was meant to say Everquest d20.

[Neurosis]

I'm pretty good at identifying the warning signs before my time is actually wasted. So I don't have any 'I should have known' stories.

But I do have a list of filters you should apply if you don't want your time wasted.

1: Stay away from low magic games. They're an automatic strike 1. If it is both low magic and D&D that's 2.5 strikes automatically. The only reason it's not the full three is to give them one final chance to redeem themselves.

2: Level 1 or 2 D&D games are worth at least a warning, for the simple reason you tend to just randomly fall over and die at these levels. If the DM doesn't seem to have a clue, it's 1 strike material.

3: A core only game is worth a minimum of 1.5 strikes, because it's the same as limiting you to one of three classes. And you can't get away with that shit unless you're as awesome as the creators of Diablo. Hint: You're not.

4: Custom campaign settings are worth a strike, for the simple reason 99% of them lack the proper detail, and is basically a license for the DM to jerk you around with bullshit instead of what you do and do not know about the world you live in being clearly defined.

5: Rules that are not clearly defined ahead of time are worth half a strike per occurrence, minimum and therefore pile up very quickly against inconsistent DMs. Note, using the default rules is not a violation of this. Using house rules is not a violation either provided those house rules are clearly detailed ahead of time. But if you go to do something, and the DM says 'oh yeah, that doesn't work that way' it's a violation. Yes, this means any 2nd edition grognards will get themselves 3 strikes in as many minutes. Purely intentional.

6: Watch the DM carefully. Does he seem to have at least a decent grasp of math? If he does, you're fine. If he doesn't, you're going to have a long series of problems, as he continuously does things that are pointless or counterproductive believing that they fix some problem or another. If it becomes a pattern, fuck any three strikes you're out rule. Just leave. Yes, this means every Paizil will insta ban themselves. Again, this is intentional.

Now if you follow these and some other common sense outlines for avoiding shitty games, you'll find that you'll encounter very few, if any shitty games. The downside is that most games are shitty, so you'll be spending a lot of time not gaming at all.

Wow. Tolerance much? I mean, seriously, low magic games and custom campaign settings being strikes?

In general I'm surprised at the level of vitriol and disgruntlement here. In all the years I've been gaming, I've never come across a totally unsatisfactory GM (although I've done almost all the GMing myself) NOR have I ever had a player (that I know) entirely dissatisfied with my GMing. Perhaps I have just been blessed.

[RobbyPants]

I prefer generic custom settings to published settings, but really specific custom settings can be just as bad. Basically, I'd rather the DM leave some stuff open for exploration/development than feel nailed down to everything being a certain way. When you get that, you tend to get DMs who don't want to let the PCs interact with the world at all. And that's bad.


My biggest warning sign was joining a game was when the DM:
- had a fairly long world history she wanted us to read.
- said that magic worked different, and the normal spells didn't exist. You'd simply tell her what you wanted to have happen, and she'd tell you what happened.
- had really generous ability generation, but was supposed to be almost a pure RP game.

I stuck around one session.

[Maxus]

Wow. Tolerance much? I mean, seriously, low magic games and custom campaign settings being strikes?

In general I'm surprised at the level of vitriol and disgruntlement here. In all the years I've been gaming, I've never come across a totally unsatisfactory GM (although I've done almost all the GMing myself) NOR have I ever had a player (that I know) entirely dissatisfied with my GMing. Perhaps I have just been blessed.

Roy's a low-tolerance fellow. I'm willing to cut someone a slack on the custom campaign setting. It usually turns out to be "D&D, on a planet/continent with a funny name". I do it myself, more often than not.

I can -sort- of see his point on low-magic D&D. D&D needs the magic to keep up. If a DM cuts it back for players, he should damn well cut it back from the monsters, too.

But I've had two unsatisfactory DMs. One was the aforementioned jerk. The other and I just had big differences in what we expected a game to be. When how he was running the campaign kept throwing me for a loop (not a bad thing) and prevented me from enjoying the game (yes, a bad thing), I left amicably.

[Roy]

I'm pretty good at identifying the warning signs before my time is actually wasted. So I don't have any 'I should have known' stories.

But I do have a list of filters you should apply if you don't want your time wasted.

1: Stay away from low magic games. They're an automatic strike 1. If it is both low magic and D&D that's 2.5 strikes automatically. The only reason it's not the full three is to give them one final chance to redeem themselves.

2: Level 1 or 2 D&D games are worth at least a warning, for the simple reason you tend to just randomly fall over and die at these levels. If the DM doesn't seem to have a clue, it's 1 strike material.

3: A core only game is worth a minimum of 1.5 strikes, because it's the same as limiting you to one of three classes. And you can't get away with that shit unless you're as awesome as the creators of Diablo. Hint: You're not.

4: Custom campaign settings are worth a strike, for the simple reason 99% of them lack the proper detail, and is basically a license for the DM to jerk you around with bullshit instead of what you do and do not know about the world you live in being clearly defined.

5: Rules that are not clearly defined ahead of time are worth half a strike per occurrence, minimum and therefore pile up very quickly against inconsistent DMs. Note, using the default rules is not a violation of this. Using house rules is not a violation either provided those house rules are clearly detailed ahead of time. But if you go to do something, and the DM says 'oh yeah, that doesn't work that way' it's a violation. Yes, this means any 2nd edition grognards will get themselves 3 strikes in as many minutes. Purely intentional.

6: Watch the DM carefully. Does he seem to have at least a decent grasp of math? If he does, you're fine. If he doesn't, you're going to have a long series of problems, as he continuously does things that are pointless or counterproductive believing that they fix some problem or another. If it becomes a pattern, fuck any three strikes you're out rule. Just leave. Yes, this means every Paizil will insta ban themselves. Again, this is intentional.

Now if you follow these and some other common sense outlines for avoiding shitty games, you'll find that you'll encounter very few, if any shitty games. The downside is that most games are shitty, so you'll be spending a lot of time not gaming at all.

Wow. Tolerance much? I mean, seriously, low magic games and custom campaign settings being strikes?

In general I'm surprised at the level of vitriol and disgruntlement here. In all the years I've been gaming, I've never come across a totally unsatisfactory GM (although I've done almost all the GMing myself) NOR have I ever had a player (that I know) entirely dissatisfied with my GMing. Perhaps I have just been blessed.

Absolutely. Have you seen the people that do those things?

Low magic is the way of telling people that can read between the lines 'Hey, I'm a control freak.' And if they do it in D&D, where that sort of thing just doesn't work at all they're saying that, and that they are completely fucking clueless. Put a clueless control freak behind the wheel, and you get a car crash. It's that simple. So if you're smart you won't get in and go along for the ride.

Custom campaign settings would be fine if the average person was capable of rendering a fully detailed world. But they aren't, which is the whole reason why published settings sell. 99.9% of the time, what you'll get is something that is woefully incomplete. So if say, you make a character that's supposed to be really knowledgeable, he doesn't know what the fuck to tell you you know about the world because he hasn't thought of that. Or maybe he deliberately doesn't want you to know, even though you should. On the extremely unlikely chance that person actually can produce a detailed world, they're basically telling you to read and memorize a bunch of material that is absolutely useless anywhere else but this game, so if the guy says screw it, game over for any reason that's quite a lot of wasted time and effort. Whereas with a published setting, you can easily just find another game in that setting, so the effort spent learning about that world isn't a waste.

Being able to observe many games without being a part of them gives you a good idea what does and doesn't work. And tabletop gaming is a lot more narrow than people make it out to be. So you can joke about a lack of tolerance all you want, but ultimately if you don't refuse to tolerate bullshit you will be overwhelmed with it. So you can either adopt a series of filters to keep the fail games away from you, or be bombarded with fail games. Choose one.

[Prak]

I'm pretty good at identifying the warning signs before my time is actually wasted. So I don't have any 'I should have known' stories.

But I do have a list of filters you should apply if you don't want your time wasted.

1: Stay away from low magic games. They're an automatic strike 1. If it is both low magic and D&D that's 2.5 strikes automatically. The only reason it's not the full three is to give them one final chance to redeem themselves.2: Level 1 or 2 D&D games are worth at least a warning, for the simple reason you tend to just randomly fall over and die at these levels. If the DM doesn't seem to have a clue, it's 1 strike material.

3: A core only game is worth a minimum of 1.5 strikes, because it's the same as limiting you to one of three classes. And you can't get away with that shit unless you're as awesome as the creators of Diablo. Hint: You're not.

4: Custom campaign settings are worth a strike, for the simple reason 99% of them lack the proper detail, and is basically a license for the DM to jerk you around with bullshit instead of what you do and do not know about the world you live in being clearly defined.

5: Rules that are not clearly defined ahead of time are worth half a strike per occurrence, minimum and therefore pile up very quickly against inconsistent DMs. Note, using the default rules is not a violation of this. Using house rules is not a violation either provided those house rules are clearly detailed ahead of time. But if you go to do something, and the DM says 'oh yeah, that doesn't work that way' it's a violation. Yes, this means any 2nd edition grognards will get themselves 3 strikes in as many minutes. Purely intentional.

6: Watch the DM carefully. Does he seem to have at least a decent grasp of math? If he does, you're fine. If he doesn't, you're going to have a long series of problems, as he continuously does things that are pointless or counterproductive believing that they fix some problem or another. If it becomes a pattern, fuck any three strikes you're out rule. Just leave. Yes, this means every Paizil will insta ban themselves. Again, this is intentional.

Now if you follow these and some other common sense outlines for avoiding shitty games, you'll find that you'll encounter very few, if any shitty games. The downside is that most games are shitty, so you'll be spending a lot of time not gaming at all.

Wow. Tolerance much? I mean, seriously, low magic games and custom campaign settings being strikes?

In general I'm surprised at the level of vitriol and disgruntlement here. In all the years I've been gaming, I've never come across a totally unsatisfactory GM (although I've done almost all the GMing myself) NOR have I ever had a player (that I know) entirely dissatisfied with my GMing. Perhaps I have just been blessed.

Absolutely. Have you seen the people that do those things?

Low magic is the way of telling people that can read between the lines 'Hey, I'm a control freak.' And if they do it in D&D, where that sort of thing just doesn't work at all they're saying that, and that they are completely fucking clueless. Put a clueless control freak behind the wheel, and you get a car crash. It's that simple. So if you're smart you won't get in and go along for the ride.

Pretty much. I've got one friend who thinks magic should be rare, especially at low levels. He promised that there'd be more magic once we hit some higher levels and got into more of the world, but as this was also the guy who took away my rogue's ability to sneak attack while flanking because of some bullshit facing crap, and about half the time was the other player/s talking about all the cool shit their old characters did in that world that we now have to fix.... yeah, I bowed out.

Custom campaign settings would be fine if the average person was capable of rendering a fully detailed world. But they aren't, which is the whole reason why published settings sell. 99.9% of the time, what you'll get is something that is woefully incomplete. So if say, you make a character that's supposed to be really knowledgeable, he doesn't know what the fuck to tell you you know about the world because he hasn't thought of that. Or maybe he deliberately doesn't want you to know, even though you should. On the extremely unlikely chance that person actually can produce a detailed world, they're basically telling you to read and memorize a bunch of material that is absolutely useless anywhere else but this game, so if the guy says screw it, game over for any reason that's quite a lot of wasted time and effort. Whereas with a published setting, you can easily just find another game in that setting, so the effort spent learning about that world isn't a waste.

I tend to run fairly open custom campaign settings, but this is very much true. Hell, right now, one of my players (40 or so years my senior) is basically teaching me how to run a custom setting after each session. I just don't have the background to know much about crafting an actual world.

[Juton]

The coolest custom campaign settings are the ones where every player contributes a city or nation and it evolves from there. I've only seen that once though, which is a shame, because from what I could tell it had a very unique feel and the players actually cared enough to learn about the setting.

[virgil]

It doesn't matter whether I use a custom or published campaign setting, because none of my players will read/retain any of it, so they're going to be clueless regardless. If they ask for information I haven't detailed yet, I'll make it up right there and expand the details by the next session (they generally ask stuff that won't pertain until then), so it works for me.

Besides, published settings are usually filled with crap. The only times I've seen Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance used is when the DM has Elminster/Raistlin whip our their penis and start slapping the PCs in the face with it.

[FatR]

It doesn't matter whether I use a custom or published campaign setting, because none of my players will read/retain any of it, so they're going to be clueless regardless. If they ask for information I haven't detailed yet, I'll make it up right there and expand the details by the next session (they generally ask stuff that won't pertain until then), so it works for me.

Besides, published settings are usually filled with crap. The only times I've seen Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance used is when the DM has Elminster/Raistlin whip our their penis and start slapping the PCs in the face with it.

I saw them used a few times when the DM had no desire to invent things for a couple sessions-long game. Of course, they could have been easily replaced with a generic DnDLand, as to interact with shit that makes FR recognizable as FR you need to be, like, level 15, unless you have managed to rape the CR system. I heard from people I respect about games in published DnD settings that actually were good, long-running campaigns, but never actually saw such in person.

Also, yes, players tend to not give a fuck beyond basic knowledge of whom they should or shouldn't stab. They will only learn anything about the setting if you bother to build it up during their actual adventures.

[FatR]

Roy, your "filters", except for #5, are overgeneralized, just stupid or say nothing at all about the DM's virtues or lack thereof. We all can guess, that you aren't welcome in actual games, at least since Paizo boards drove you mad, anyway, so stop threadjacking just to remind us about this.

[Prak]

My issue with published settings is that they all kinda suck. Eberron least of all, but it still has it's issues, like a fucked up cosmology and no high level anything, and that whole wtf with dragonshards and shit....

[Archmage]

Yeah, most published settings are full of so much bullshit that I'm kind of surprised anyone on the Den would take issue with custom settings. At that rate I'm not sure what kind of game you actually intend to play when you're playing the game instead of theorycrafting on message boards.