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So, the PRD states that it's a standard action to use a Cleric domain ability unless otherwise noted.

Speak with Animals, the level 1 Animal domain ability, says you can use it "for a number of rounds" based on your cleric level.

Does that mean you have to use a Standard action each round to use it? Or does the "for a number of rounds" clause count as being "otherwise noted?"

Keeping in mind that I am presupposing how long my character will survive and how many high-level adventures she'll be able to participate in here ...

I wanted to go summoning Cleric for Pathfinder Society, with detailed notes on each summon and plans for how to use them ahead of time. Augment Summoning is pretty much mandatory for this build, and requires Spell Focus. Fortunately, Wizard gets Spell Focus instead of Scribe Scroll in PFS, and also has a Conjuration school ability that increases duration of summons so the level's not totally shot.

Here are the relevant variables:

* 14 Intelligence (I wanted the skill points for Knowledge skills)

* Non-human character (can't just take both feats at level 1)

* Deity does not grant Rune domain (and Separatist build does not interest me)

Is a 1-level dip in Wizard worth it, for the bonus feat and for the ability to basically UMD without taking the skill? I was considering taking the Magical Knack trait for Wizard as well, so I'd be able to use 2nd-level scrolls without making a caster level check.

Speaking of which, can you take 10 on the caster level check to use a scroll, if you're not in combat? And does a Wizard's prohibited school thing apply to Cleric spells also, i.e. would I have to use two Cleric spell slots to prepare a Wizard prohibited spell? If not, does the Conjuration school ability that increases the duration of summons apply or not?

Step 1. Pick up a copy of the Pathfinder Player Companion: Blood of the Moon, at your friendly local games store. It, another softcover Player Companion, and the contents of the Beginner Box are the only Pathfinder books that you own.

Step 2. Discover the Lunar mystery for Oracles. Decide that it looks neat. However, it’s for a class that your books don’t cover, and it grants a lot of weird spells.

Step 3. Discover the following paragraph right at the start of the book, prominently displayed in legible font right under the table of contents:

This Pathfinder Player Companion refers to several other Pathfinder Roleplaying Game products and uses the following abbreviations. These books are not required to make use of this Player Companion. Readers interested in references to Pathfinder RPG hardcovers can find the complete rules from these books available for free at Paizo.com/prd.

Step 4. Go online and get the rules you need to play your character. Show up at the Pathfinder event your friend told you about, at your local games store, with a Lunar Oracle.

Step 5. Confess that you’d much rather be playing a Kitsune.

Step 6. Find out that Kitsune do in fact exist, and are in fact a legit choice for Pathfinder Society. However, you need to have a “boon,” which is essentially a signed permission slip from your parents, I mean the Venture-Captains, saying you’re allowed to play a fox instead of a crow. The only ways to get these are to go to a convention in another state, which you wouldn’t be able to afford unless you sold your own body parts, or to go to a certain thread on the Paizo forums to trade a different boon for the Kitsune one.

Step 7. Remember that you have an honest-to-Daikitsu signed “get out of death free” boon because you participated in the Beginner Box Bash a few years ago.

Step 8. Offer it up for trade, and get a response surprisingly quick.

Step 9. Receive, via US mail, a sheet of paper that looks suspiciously like a photocopy or computer printout, which contains the following sentence:

This Chronicle sheet must be the first Chronicle sheet for the given character, and you must bring a copy of one of the above-listed rulesbooks (the Advanced Race Guide or the Dragon Empires Gazetteer) to all sessions in which you play this character as if access to this race selection were granted by the Additional Resources list.

Step 10. Ask yourself, “WTF is the Additional Resources list?”

Step 11. Oh.

Step 12. Read the following sentence from that link:

In order to utilize content from an Additional Resource, a player must have a physical copy of the Additional Resource in question, a name-watermarked Paizo PDF of it, or a printout of the relevant pages from it, as well as a copy of the current version of the Additional Resources list.

Step 13. Track down all the books that you need to duplicate the content relevant to your character from the Pathfinder Reference Document, which is an official resource published by Paizo itself and explicitly endorsed by a prominent paragraph on page 1 of Blood of the Moon, which says that those books are not required to use it.

Breakdown of expenses:

• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook. Rules for creating and playing a character. Not required; your GM is assumed to own a copy.

• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Bestiary. Game stats for the animal companion one of your revelations grants, and for creatures that your spells can summon. Not required; your GM is assumed to own a copy.

• Advanced Player’s Guide. Game stats for playing an Oracle, and for three of the spells in the Lunar mystery’s list. $40 for a new hardcover, $30 non-mint, $10 for PDF.

• Advanced Race Guide. Game stats for playing a Kitsune, along with the awesome Magical Tail feat. $40 for a new hardcover, $30 non-mint, $10 for PDF.

• Ultimate Magic. Game stats for four of the spells on the Lunar mystery’s list, the first of which you obtain at level 2 after three sessions of play. $40 for a new hardcover, $30 non-mint, $10 for PDF.

• Ultimate Combat. Game stats for one of the spells on the Lunar mystery’s list. $40 for a new hardcover, $30 non-mint, $10 for PDF.

Step 14. Realize that you have to pay a minimum of $40 to play a character you like, using rules that you bought and paid for and contained a large notice from Paizo itself telling you where to fill in the blanks. These PDFs would contain a prominent watermark with your email address, which is not information you want to disclose to men that you're casually acquainted with. Adding insult to injury, the PDFs themselves would be basically worthless for tableside reference, because it’d take much longer to look up rules text in them compared to in the PRD, on your phone. Even though that is the stated reason why you have to bring them on the Additional Resources page:

... we cannot assume that every Game Master will have the products listed below. As such, it's up to players to bring these items in order to familiarize their Game Masters with the rules.

Step 15. Realize that if your Kitsune character ever dies, you’re going to have to go back and repeat the whole process of finding another boon, if you want those $40 worth of PDFs that you don’t want to buy to do you any good.

Step 16. Go on the Paizo.com messageboards, to see if there’s any sign of the PRD being added as a legit “additional resource.”

Step 17. Find a ton of people like (and like-ing) this guy, who condescend to people who asked about it, dictate their own priorities to them, blame Paizo’s mixed messaging on them, ignore the fact that Paizo’s policies burden some players a lot more than others, and in general infantilize and insult them even more than Paizo already does by requiring things like signed permission slips.

Step 18. Give up and play other games instead, using books that you bought at the local games store that welcomes you and treats you like a person, instead of PDFs that you bought online from a company that doesn’t.

This is only a partly fictionalized account. I already knew about Kitsune and the Additional Resources list going in. What I didn’t know was that there’s a boon trading thread (i.e. that I had any hope of playing a Kitsune ever), and that newer Pathfinder Player Companions were explicitly telling people to go to the PRD to fill in the blanks, instead of burying the reference in legal text like they used to. So I tried to imagine what it would be like, for a newb to go into it this way.

Also, I’m still playing in Pathfinder Society, and buying Pathfinder Player Companions that I think are cool and want to use for my character (like the Animal Archive,) instead of selling my Pathfinder stuff on eBay.

Why?

Because my PFS GM lets me use the PRD.

To recap in case there's anyone who dun know what we're talking about, the Advanced Race Guide and the guidelines for using it in Pathfinder Society games just got released. The Advanced Race Guide details rules for how to play 30 races not already in the Core Rulebook. The number of these races playable in Pathfinder Society games without special permission is 0.

The way to get this special permission is to receive a campaign boon from attending other Pathfinder Society events, usually those held at conventions. This results in numerous players who want to play a certain race but aren't allowed to, and a tiny handful of players who are allowed to play a certain race, many of whom probably don't want to. For some reason, this is seen as okay, and the people who've pointed out that this is inequitable are seen as spoiled and entitled whiners.

The justification for why this is okay partly involves game balance issues, but mostly centers on how people don't want the PFS to be like Mos Eisley. The assumption is that if ARG races are allowed, all of a sudden PFS will be swarmed with them.

This is screwed up on multiple levels.

First off, let's take that assumption at face value. At your next PFS game, everyone's playing Kenku Bards, Kitsune Summoners, and Catfolk Rogues who say "nya." I don't know how you'd describe this, but I'd call it a flipping spectacular success for the Advanced Race Guide.

My FLGS got 11 copies in today, and after I bought mine they were down to three. What does that tell you about what Pathfinder players want? I personally know at least one person other than me who'd go back to playing PFS if they were allowed to play an ARG race.

Yet this is the way things are right now, by design. If you want to play a character you can identify with, and that character's race isn't in the half-dozen or so that've existed since 3.0 came out, you have to first create a different character, put in your time, and pray. This despite the fact that the choice of class affects gameplay a heck of a lot more than race does, and there are OVER 9000 class archetypes on offer, many of which (Gunslinger, Synergist) are extremely different from everything else.

Here's the elephant in the room.

The "we don't want Mos Eisley" argument is loaded with more unfortunate implications than the Order of the Stick has metagaming. Let's look at the ways to interpret it, from the most to the least charitable.

1. We want to preserve the Golarion setting.

Golarion is a world dominated by HEDGHogs (humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes, and halflings). HEDGHogs comprise nearly all of the characters in the lore. It is very HEDGHy. Allowing non-HEDGHog characters compromises the creative vision, and will make the world seem less like Golarion and more like the (unbelievably successful) Star Wars series.

Problem: This argument is self-refuting. If anyone feels threatened enough by the prospect of a large number of ARG race player characters to need to invoke Mos Eisley against them, that demonstrates that enough people want to play non-HEDGHogs that "preserve Golarion's racial purity" is not a priority for the player base.

2. We don't want weird player characters hanging around.

HEDGHogs have been around since the start of 3.0 and before. Ergo, they are not weird like Tengu and Kitsune are. Weird stuff should either be disallowed altogether, or only allowed with special dispensation from on high.

Problem: This doesn't make any sense at all unless you accept the premise that "weird is bad." Which is dangerously close to "diversity is bad", especially when you factor in players who don't want to play "normal" races but do want to play "weird" ones. Which brings us to the most unfortunate way to interpret that argument:

3. We don't want weird players hanging around.

There it is, the big anthropomorphic elephant stomping all over the rulebooks.

Tieflings are disallowed because of the stereotypes of the kind of people who play them. Aasimar are disallowed because of the kind of people who play them. Catfolk and kitsune are especially disallowed because of who wants to play them. Anything else, talk to the hand, because we don't want your kind either.

The Geek Hierarchy joke is funny because it's true. No one wants the damned furries ruining the game with their damned furriness. Because all furries and all furry characters (including Abel) are sex-crazed maniacs, and the existing rules against R-rated stuff at the table are somehow inadequate at keeping their fur-fueled libidos at bay. This is so self-evident that we have to tell people not to use half of the $40 book they just bought in droves, rather than test the hypothesis.

Well, I'm a furry. Hell, I'm an otherkin. And I've GMed Pathfinder for all-furry groups before, where all the players except my significant other were completely new to Pathfinder. These are new players who got exicted about the game, going out and buying Reaper minis and dice and everything, because it let them go on D&D style adventures with their furry characters.

But PFS doesn't want us there, because somehow the idea of playing a HEDGHog does not interest us. And frankly, I think there are a ton of other unfortunate elephants lurking there in Mos Eisley. How about teenage anime fans? Paranormal romance readers? Goths? Tell me who you'd freak out about if they showed up with their favorite character, and I'll tell you what your prejudices are and whose money Paizo is losing.

Yeah, this is overblown. Yeah, I'm another person whining about nothing. But I and my friends also aren't showing up to our FLGS to play PFS and spend $$$. Instead, my significant other and I go to D&D Encounters, where the DM allows them to play a Gnoll Swordmage. And if that's the way everyone wants it to be, just keep on doing what you're doing.

I'll keep working on forking Pathfinder. You wouldn't believe how enthused my players are about it.

This is about the idea of making more stuff in the vein of the Beginner's Box. There are a couple of problems I'm seeing Paizo face here.

One, a direct sequel won't work.

Something like "levels 6-10" necessarily limits it to people who've "beaten" the Beginner Box. Take a look at the Pathfinder products Paizo makes: Basically every book can be used in a wide range of levels, including for creating new characters. You don't have to buy them in any particular order, either. After you've got the Core Rulebook, you can just buy whatever interests you.

This is probably how Paizo wants it, and this is probably why there's so much in the Beginner Box that's designed to funnel people towards the Core Rulebook. Everything else it makes follows from that.

Two, the Core Rulebook is unbelievably clumsy.

It's a 576-page small-print doorstop. It's the book Paizo had to make to get the ball rolling, but Paizo seems to have chosen to err on the side of "comprehensive" rather than "fun" for it, or even "legible." It's my personal feeling that it serves as more of a reference for players who already know how to play 3.5, rather than an introduction to a new game. It does a good job as the former, but a terrible job as the latter, especially for RPG newbies.

That's why Paizo had to make the Beginner Box. Starting out, there was a ginormous pool of dissatisfied 3.5 players to poach for a new game. But at some point that wound down, so now they need to bring in new blood. 4e did that with the Essentials line, but that was controversial for many of the same reasons 4e was.

Paizo, in contrast, made it a priority not to alienate its existing players, so with the Beginner Box it again erred on the side of "comprehensive." This time around, though, the old classes and rules were given a fresh coat of paint, and a presentation that was designed to appeal to new players and ease them into the game. It's the same game; Paizo's just starting to think about player acquisition instead of retention, and how it'd appeal to newbies.

That's why we need more products like this.

The market of people who are dedicated enough to slog through thick hardcovers designed for last century's sensibilities is only going to get smaller. There's no reason that market can't still be served, and Paizo has shown that it's dedicated enough to keep doing so. But just like it's selling the new Pathfinder Battles prepainted minis at the same time as Reaper sells do-it-yourself figs, these new Beginner Box style products -- which are classier, better designed, easier to get into, and just plain more fun, at the expense of not being as concise -- also need to be made.

The question isn't whether or not they'll get made, the question is who's going to. Here's hoping it's Paizo, and that it stays classy and continues to value its existing customers.

My prediction?

A "Core Rulebook 2.0" or similar alternate presentation of the main rules, designed to be streamlined and tasteful but not significantly altered. Maybe along the likes of 3.5 compared to 3e, at most, and with classes like Magus and Summoner built-in. Paizo's learned a lot about how to design and typeset since it started this Pathfinder thing. Sooner or later, it'll be time to put that experience to work.

Just a reminder.

Paizo is not a publicly-traded corporation. It has no shareholder obligations. It can have goals other than "make as much money as possible," like "make the coolest games possible." And it can look to a horizon beyond the next quarter. Moreso than Certain Large Competitors, it recognizes that it's made up of actual people, and it has made a name for itself by letting them pursue their passions and building relationships with its customers.

Whether you're talking about what Paizo should do or is likely to do, keep in mind that Paizo's not likely to stop being awesome. Also keep in mind that for Paizo, "being awesome" and "making boatloads of money" have gone together so far.

One of the big things that's set Paizo apart is that nearly everything they publish -- besides the "crown jewels" of Golarion and their stockpile of fantasy artwork -- is OGL-licensed, making it basically the gamer version of open-source.

So I'm asking this: Is Pathfinder Online going to be federated or open-source in any way?

Is it going to be like Neverwinter Nights, where we can start our own servers and bring characters between them?

Is it going to be like Saga of Ryzom (or Pathfinder Off-line) where the code's open-source but the setting and story are Paizo's?

Is it going to be like Second Life and OpenSim, where people can create their own addons for it?

I'm not saying we need to be allowed to cheat and/or break the shared world. But one reason Pathfinder -- and RPGs in general -- has done so well is because you don't have to be just a player. You can basically become a game developer as well, and create your own scenarios and share them with your friends. Or even make money off of them, especially with OGL-licensed content.

Is Pathfinder Online going to send us all back to being just players again?