scenarios database / API


Pathfinder Society

Scarab Sages 3/5

Hi everybody, I'm willing to develop a web-application making the process of organising a pathfinder society table easier, as well as helping GM to choose a good scenario regarding the present players.

But to make so, I'll need a way to keep my database updated, so all the new scenarios will appear in it. is there something as an API, RSS feed or whatever that would allow me to make this as scheduled and automated task?

otherwise I'll have to make it manually each week, what can be a hassle!

thank you and have a glorious day, fellow pathfinders!

4/5

We've looked at this a bit in our region, and here's what we've found.

There are only a couple of scenarios published each month, so the actual list of available scenarios won't be that difficult to keep up.

The biggest trick is getting the list of scenarios that people have played so you can determine who can play which scenario. Unfortunately, that's going to have to come from the players themselves, since the only "official" tracking of what scenarios players have played is their chronicle sheets. (The online scenario reporting is a useful resource, but it's not always up to date, and only players and Paizo admins can see the records.)

The second biggest trick is getting a list of characters by level. This will also have to come from the players themselves. Technically, if you can track the scenarios played down to the individual character (instead of just player), you could estimate what levels different characters should be, but there's always the issue of GM credits.

Our experiments resulted in a scenario tracking database where players can keep track of scenarios played by character as well as scenarios GMed and GM credit applied. It's a tool for the players, mostly, though, since there's not enough data in there (and consistently updated) to be useful for the store coordinators. Our area also does a lot of demos at conventions, so we end up with a lot of new players/walk-ins through convention season.

There are several different options for mustering tables:

We currently use a message board system to sign up for tables in advance: GMs post what they are ready to run about a week before, and players respond with what table they want to play at and which character(s) they have in tier. (Also, our GMs tend to include the list of their "always ready" scenarios in their signature lines, and long-time players who have limited scenarios left tend to include their list of "haven't played yet" scenarios in their signature lines, which helps to get things organized before game day.) Then, on the evening of the game, the store coordinator just has to handle walk-ins and players who had multiple options for tables (or sometimes no options for tables).

I know other groups use Warhorn and have good experiences with that, but we haven't had the best luck with it at our stores that have a high percentage of walk-ins.

I've also seen one group that uses Facebook events to schedule their games, but I don't know exactly how they handle their table mustering.

4/5 *

We've also looked at this, but it all depends on the players keeping their individual listing up-to-date, and as such, it falls apart. Adding new scenarios is a minor task compared to updating all the games played and GMd, in both Core and regular PFS, by every player, who might be playing at different events ...

Sovereign Court 4/5 5/5 ** Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden

In the Netherlands we use a googlegroups for discussions, Warhorn for table mustering, and a googledocs spreadsheet for keeping track of who's played and GM'ed what.

A centralized spreadsheet that anyone can edit ("mess up") isn't ideal, but in general spreadsheets are a decent tool if you have players X, Y and Z signed up for a table and you want to find a scenario that they can all play together.

Grand Lodge 4/5

You might also want to check out the setup for the Australian online PFS group, as they have a scenario/module tracker on their site, which includes search functionality.

I don't have the link at work, and I seldom get game announcement emails, since I have so few games left...

Liberty's Edge 3/5

In brief - nope, there's no API that I'm aware of. It'd be easy enough to scrape using curl or wget or something. Regardless, it's only two scenarios a month, so it's not a big deal, and I'm sure you could get volunteers to help with data entry.

GM Lamplighter wrote:
We've also looked at this, but it all depends on the players keeping their individual listing up-to-date, and as such, it falls apart.

This. I've taken a look myself at writing a matchmaking/tracking web app, even prototyped a database schema and had things working on the server side (via console, not web interface), but the core issue is needing universal buy-in and I don't see that happening. Chicken and egg problem, unfortunately.

From a computer science perspective, the challenge of taking n players, each with a unique set of played scenarios and finding a working set of tables or scenarios to run is very fascinating (although NP-hard, I suspect), and the general utility of having a better reporting and scenario tracking system is easy to see, but unless Paizo sponsors it, I don't see it catching on.

That said, I heartily encourage your efforts and I'm interested in seeing what comes of it. =)

Sovereign Court 4/5 5/5 ** Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden

DrSwordopolis wrote:

In brief - nope, there's no API that I'm aware of. It'd be easy enough to scrape using curl or wget or something. Regardless, it's only two scenarios a month, so it's not a big deal, and I'm sure you could get volunteers to help with data entry.

GM Lamplighter wrote:
We've also looked at this, but it all depends on the players keeping their individual listing up-to-date, and as such, it falls apart.

This. I've taken a look myself at writing a matchmaking/tracking web app, even prototyped a database schema and had things working on the server side (via console, not web interface), but the core issue is needing universal buy-in and I don't see that happening. Chicken and egg problem, unfortunately.

From a computer science perspective, the challenge of taking n players, each with a unique set of played scenarios and finding a working set of tables or scenarios to run is very fascinating (although NP-hard, I suspect), and the general utility of having a better reporting and scenario tracking system is easy to see, but unless Paizo sponsors it, I don't see it catching on.

That said, I heartily encourage your efforts and I'm interested in seeing what comes of it. =)

I'd come to the same conclusion myself. Between Warhorn, registering played games on paizo.com and then keeping up with yet another website, I think we're asking too much from players. It's too much bookkeeping in too many different places.

Ideally you'd want some sort of interface to Paizo's database of games played, so that you can store all data once and hopefully keep it up to date, rather than trying to keep duplicate data sets synchronized.

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