Cottonseed Lodge (PFS2)

Game Master Redelia

Interesting question came up in a home game. Interested in PFS Legal solution.

If a Universalist Wizard cast "Hand of the Apprentice" Focus Spell, and used "Bespell Weapon" Wizard Feat, would the extra Force damage apply to the HotA attack?

I wouldn't think so since it says "Requirements: Your most recent action was to cast a non-cantrip spell." so it would take effect after the weapon returned.

Side note: would using a staff for the HotA default to 1d4 or could you declare the attack is using 2 hands like normal melee?

I believe the lvl5 Ezren pregen sheet lists two handed staff damage as an option for HotA.

If you wanted to bespell weapon your HotA strike I think you would need to cast a different spell first. True Strike is great for that

If a Universalist Wizard cast "Hand of the Apprentice" Focus Spell, and used "Bespell Weapon" Wizard Feat, would the extra Force damage apply to the HotA attack?

I believe your interpretation is correct. Hand of the apprentice resolves completely — attack, damage, weapon returns — then Bespell Weapon resolves.

HotA is resolved and then you can use the free action Bespell Weapon. So it wouldn't impact the HotA.

For the last question, here's a thread that discussed it. Personally I'd take "On a success, you deal the weapon's damage as if you had hit with a melee Strike" to allow 2-handed damage if you were holding it 2-handed previously.

This should probably be continued in the Rules Forum, so as to not clog up the Cottonseed Lodge.

Hey Folks! Organized Play Foundation is looking for some data on encounters comprised of skill checks and how they're playing out online specifically. We have a brief survey for both players and GMs that should take no more than 10 minutes of your time; if you'd take some time to fill it out, we'd greatly appreciate it!

Please take a moment and fill it out to help improve our community.

Survey (Link)

You may want to put in a few more multiple choice options to guide people towards categories of answers. Asking what style people like as an open-ended question is going to be difficult to tabulate at the end.

This survey is not from the VO team but rather Paizo's Organized Play team.

Okay. I did my best.

Hi guys, I just made my first character (Tawny Deer) and checked him in at the lodge. I'm not a newbie to PF2, but I am new to PbP, so hopefully I will be able to join a game soon to get my feet wet. But in the meantime: I read the stickied posts on PbP, but I also noticed that many people have some rather elaborate stats posted in their profile, some even in the header used for their posts. Is there a general etiquette for this that I should be aware of?

Etiquette? Be respectful and polite.

Most games do require a header so the GM can reference it easily.

Otherwise, he's a link to the template I use: LINK

Thanks, should all be in order now. :) Ready to sign up to stuff!

Painted_green, would you be interested in playing a quest to try out your PbP legs?

Thanks, should all be in order now. :) Ready to sign up to stuff!

Welcome aboard! It's really fun & easy. I'm in my fifth game so far and loving it. I like how I have several hours to make a decision or write a post. I use a notepad app since I type reeealy slow.

Painted_green, would you be interested in playing a quest to try out your PbP legs?

I'd like to join too, if I haven't played it or it's replayable. :)

Painted_green, would you be interested in playing a quest to try out your PbP legs?

I'd love to!

Is there a general etiquette for this that I should be aware of?

The general rule is that you should make it easy for your GM to find important information.

Most useful: Your AC, HP, and Perception are referenced often enough so that almost any GM will request them in your tagline. Non-obviously, for PbP, your preferred pronouns should be in the header. It's something that GMs will reference nearly every post.

Pretty useful: Most people will additionally include gender (as a proxy for preferred pronouns), ancestry, class, level, Fortitude, Reflex, Will.

Sometimes useful: alignment, default exploration, active conditions, spells remaining, etc.

--For what it's worth, I personally include everything above this line--

Borderline useful: listing every skill, background, attack modifiers, etc. The danger is that you may create a block of text that swamps out the more important information.

Not useful: anything that you only need to reference once, like your PFS number or Day Job. Leave these in your full profile.

Remember that you can change the header easily. So if you end up in a Diplomacy-heavy scenario and end up referencing your Deception and Diplomacy modifiers every post, you can always put it in your tagline for that scenario, and then remove them after the scenario is finished.

GM Blake wrote:

Painted_green, would you be interested in playing a quest to try out your PbP legs?

I'd love to!

Great! I will post the recruitment for the other 4 slots after I put the kids to bed tonight. What quests, if any, have you already played?

Excellent! Welcome aboard Painted Green. If you have any questions at all about setting anything up let us know. The community is very helpful and will get you rolling in no time.

Non-obviously, for PbP, your preferred pronouns should be in the header.

Good point, I updated my header to include this.

Great! I will post the recruitment for the other 4 slots after I put the kids to bed tonight. What quests, if any, have you already played?

I haven't played any quests yet, so everything is fair game.

Excellent! Welcome aboard Painted Green. If you have any questions at all about setting anything up let us know. The community is very helpful and will get you rolling in no time.

Thank you very much! I'm sure I'll have more questions soon.

Painted_green and roll4initiative, I've decided to run Q2, since I've prepped and run it, so I can focus more on the players than the rules of the adventure.

Here is the link to the recruitment thread: LINK

You two have reserved seats. If you've already played, roll4initiative, just let me know and I'll open the seat.

Everyone else can follow that link to apply. I will be reposting in Recruitment.

For those new to PbP and/or PFS2, here is a set of slides I made for some other new players. They do not cover everything and some may be superfluous to your needs, but they may help with some of the details. I am sure GM Blake will guide you through the rest.

Has anyone tried the Rolegate format of PbP games? Over the years, I've really only seen Paizo Boards, Discord, and Boardgamegeek.

Has anyone tried the Rolegate format of PbP games? Over the years, I've really only seen Paizo Boards, Discord, and Boardgamegeek.

We also have a lodge on Mythweavers.

I am unfamiliar with Rolegate but will have a look.
Have you tried it?
What do you think?

Oh right, I forgot mythweavers had one.

From my quick skimming it seems like a great platform for the game although it's in-app map system doesn't seem very useful.

I'm considering running a game on it to test it out but I'm going to skim through it some more first

Has anyone tried the Rolegate format of PbP games? Over the years, I've really only seen Paizo Boards, Discord, and Boardgamegeek.

I've been lurking on it for about a year. Pretty cool and easy to use. I would always get email alerts for new games based on my preferences but never joined in on one. The terrible spelling and grammar drove me away.

I have not tried it but since you suggested it I installed the app. I'm very intrigued for what advantages it might offer over discord.

I have discovered RoleGate a few months ago when I was looking for an alternative to Discord. I am now running my second game there. I really like it so far, despite a few weak points. My main goal was to find a medium that would remind me of a game progress in a non-intrusive way that doesn't get drown out in tons of unrelated notifications, easily allow me to review overnight progress on my phone during morning commute, accept posts of several paragraphs without much hassle and a chance of losing the information in progress, and facilitate faster play when I happen to be available at the same time as the players (which is not often, me being in Europe). So far it has checked all of these boxes for me.

I'll start with the minuses of RoleGate first:
1) map functionality is barely useable and not worth spending time on really. Thankfully, Google Slides or other VTTs can help there - my VTT of choice is currently Tableplop.
2) Some of the cooler immersion features like game backgrounds or avatar art are paywalled (not too expensive - $5/month gets you most of them) and even paid ones are of not too high quality (I dislike pixel art).
3) I still am not fully used to the inline roller syntax and it doesn't have a way of keeping the roll history while editing the posts like Paizo boards do - so mistakes mean rerolls.
4) Minor annoying bugs pop up here and there - like the post editor pop-up frequently closes while I am highlighting the text with the mouse. Thankfully, it doesn't lead to any loss of data, unlike the infamous Paizo Post Monster.
5) For whatever reason, Paizo-style recruitment is not popular there - you can do closed games but then you need to do the recruitment via other channels first before inviting chosen players to RoleGate. If you leave the game open then it's first-come, first-serve. RoleGate discord doesn't allow to recruit players without a ready game link for the strange fear of the main dev about "poaching" players.

Does it have pluses to outweigh those? Yes, it does!
1) It is fully playable for free! The paywalled features are nice-to-haves, but none of them are required to have a good time.
2) Notification system is EXACTLY what I've been looking for, between small push notification on the phone and larger summaries via email. It allows me to concentrate on 1-2 faster games instead of gradually losing myself in 5-10 slow ones as it inevitably happened on Paizo.
3) It doesn't have a ton of other servers or topics that greet you and distract you from your game like Discord tends to have for me. It's a dedicated space for your PbPs only.
4) It has rollable character sheets and built-in reference pages for PF2, created by the community.
5) The campaign is organised into several pages for different type of things like characters, notes etc. (like Paizo, unlike Discord).
6) The overall design of the site is very well adjusted for both PC and phone usage (at least on my 6+ inch phones), on par with Discord in terms of equal ease of use and MUCH better than Paizo on mobile.
7) It has nifty features for better narrative like chapters, speech tones, markdown support. It is trivial to break long posts into several and it even offers to do it automatically if you type in a post which has quoted bits for direct speech. It is trivial to create a ton of NPC aliases, unlike Paizo where GM posts from a single alias. All aliases belong to the game, not the poster (as it should be). Better than Paizo and in a whole different league from Discord for ease of reading/writing posts.
8) The dice roller supports secret rolls by default, and there is also a nifty feature of requesting rolls from other players with a timer. For example, you can give your player N hours to roll perception for a trap, if they don't respond then it rolls automatically and you can proceed with describing the effect.

Thanks CyberMephit! I find the notes and stuff a little clunky but I definitely like it being mobile friendly and how the characters can chat. One of my favorite features is the languages and that it can auto translate for players fluent in the appropriate languages. I haven't found the timer feature for rolls but that sounds awesome as do secret rolls.

Would you be interested in joining my quest 2 on it as our expert to help us along with features?

Thanks cybermephit. I will be looking for an opportunity to try it.

Have already played quest 2 though.

What's the policy regarding playing multiple PbP games simultaneously with the same character? Given that it might lead to some issues with enduring conditions or, Gods forbid, character death.

You cannot play in multiple games with the same character. They must be with different characters. Also those characters are locked from playing in another game (Including irl games) until that PbP is completed.

That's what I figured, just wanted to make sure. Guess I will be using mainly pregens for doing other games then until inspiration for more characters of my own strikes me.

Characters are completely rebuildable until the first time you play them at level 2.

As such, you have the ability to make experimental or crazy builds you don't know will work, or are tangentially curious about. Think of it as an opportunity to build something and have it turn out to be terrible, with zero long term consequences.

In a PbP forum, the only thing that is locked is your character name - so create a placeholder character to reserve the PFS number, and then run your pregen / crazy character with an alias. As long as you don't make 10 posts with the placeholder, you can change the name too.

That's why I built this Alias. Note it is different from characters. It's kid of garnet or wine colored. You create them in My Account. The Messageboard Alias section should be on the left under Messageboard Settings section.

No, definitely assign a new PFS number instead of creating an alias. How else are you supposed to get the 2,000 PFS1 characters you need to create before you're allowed to play PFS2?

No, definitely assign a new PFS number instead of creating an alias. How else are you supposed to get the 2,000 PFS1 characters you need to create before you're allowed to play PFS2?

Hey, just 700, you need 1300 Starfinder characters after that.

No, definitely assign a new PFS number instead of creating an alias. How else are you supposed to get the 2,000 PFS1 characters you need to create before you're allowed to play PFS2?

In case Watery Soup's joke went over anyone's head:

Yes. You should assign a PFS number so the credit can be accurately logged.

You can use the Alias function to avoid locking in a name to a given pile of credit when playing on PbP, since 10 posts locks the name.

I have a few where I've decided to change their name later and use it in game but officially, they're "So-and-so" because I played a PbP game with the first name I chose.

Watery Soup's Shoulder Demon wrote:

No, definitely assign a new PFS number instead of creating an alias. How else are you supposed to get the 2,000 PFS1 characters you need to create before you're allowed to play PFS2?

Hey, just 700, you need 1300 Starfinder characters after that.

You only need 300 Starfinder characters, the 500 ACG characters, then somehow 500 Playtest characters. Good luck with that last bit, though.

Would you be interested in joining my quest 2 on it as our expert to help us along with features?

Thanks for the offer! I don't really consider myself an expert yet after only 1.5 scenarios and I currently have only one PFS2 character which is in play so I won't be able to join, unfortunately. Holding my breath for the APG in hopes it will give me inspiration to create more characters...

Is it weird that I wish I could turn in some of my 500 potential playtest characters for MORE starfinder characters?

NOTE: Three years into Starfinder, and I still only have ten SFS characters. At this rate, tt will take me a while to get to my limit of 300!

Given 24 scenarios a year.. if you played a different one on each character, it would take you... well, longer than the lifetime of PFS1 to use up all those SFS slots.

Yes, yes, you could make new characters for each time you played an evergreen, but really... why would you?

Exciting Announcement!

When the Advanced Players Guide is released in a couple of weeks Kobolds will now be an always available Ancestry for Pathfinder Society play!

Link to the Blog Post

We also have a lodge on Mythweavers.

What's the address for that lodge? I am on Mythweavers, but was not aware there was a PFS lodge there.

GM Numbat wrote:

We also have a lodge on Mythweavers.

What's the address for that lodge? I am on Mythweavers, but was not aware there was a PFS lodge there.

Pathfinder Society: The Official Myth Weavers Chapter

How have things been around here lately? I'm kinda new to PbP, already participated in a couple quests, but it's quite hard to settle in a character I like...

I think I finally find one I want to play and make, but I don't know how active stuff has been around here. I'm still in lockdown (living in Brazil) and I'm already missing roleplaying so, so much.

Welcome Arudato! This is a great place for the lockdown blues! There have been a lot of games being recruited lately so keep some close eyes on the Recruitment tab. And agreed it can take a while to settle into a character you like. If you didn't know already then you're able to do free character rebuilds up until you play your first session at level 2, so if there are some things you want to change then that's a great way to do it. If you have any questions just ask!

Cheers

Hello, Arudato. I hope you find a game to help distract and entertain you. Just call out if you have any questions. We are all here to help.

Welcome Arudato! I have had very little issue finding a game to be in on here. Keep an eye on the recruitment tab. If you are looking for something specific let the group know and most times a GM will step in to run it for you!

If you have any questions let us know.