Big Pathfinder/Starfinder Reference Document News!

WHHHHHAAAAAAAT?! YES! Absolutely awesome! My favorite site on the 'net is not going away and is in fact Pathfinder's (well, Starfinder too, but I'm not interested) official RD!

Congrats to Blake and all who assist him with AON!

AON/Blake, you do intend to keep all classic Pathfinder content available when 2nd ed PF kicks off, correct? It's so rich in flavor and options that I will not be making the switch. Love classic Pathfinder.

Most definitely. PF1E will be kept around even after PF2E launches.

Hey folks, we hear your feedback about the immediate change/lack of access to the legacy site. I'm taking this feedback back to the larger group behind these decisions today to see how we can address it.

And this is why we like Paizo.

As others have said, I love AoN, but I did use it and the PRD differently (they were two of just the handful of sites I made room for in my bookmark toolbar). I think until AoN can get all the rules that we had available on the PRD, it would be great if the old version remained up.

ogmius wrote:

I looked at the mirror that was posted above, but that is in weird code I dont understand how to read...so thats useless to me as well.

It's just html, if you're interacting with this forum you know how to use html.

You can grab a copy of that archive, save it to your hard disk and open the file index.html with your internet browser of choice.

visit this URL https://github.com/Mekkiss/pathfinder1.1
click the big green "clone or download" button.
click the download zip.
save the zip file
unzip the downloaded file
explore the unzipped file
click on the index.html

then click on the link that says "Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Reference Document"

That should give you your own copy of the PRD.

yes the tech-savy neighbor kid came over and got it to download for me.. thank you. However to be honest, while our campaign is obviously still possible, I fear it has gotten a lot less convenient. cannot send links to specific rules to the GM for approval, no searching, ect.

Congratulations Blake!!! This is awesome!!!

I'm surprised nobody has anything to say about this:

"Nothing is changing with regards to how the Archives generates income for hosting expenses."

I don't know how I feel about this. On the one hand, I'd love to jump on the "congratulations, Blake" bandwagon, because AoN is awesome and he's deserving of praise. On the other hand, this reads as Paizo offloading the expense and responsibility for maintaining and making available this content onto the shoulders of a community member. On the gripping hand, if someone volunteers, they volunteer, I guess.

I'm surprised nobody has anything to say about this:

"Nothing is changing with regards to how the Archives generates income for hosting expenses."

I don't know how I feel about this. On the one hand, I'd love to jump on the "congratulations, Blake" bandwagon, because AoN is awesome and he's deserving of praise. On the other hand, this reads as Paizo offloading the expense and responsibility for maintaining and making available this content onto the shoulders of a community member. On the gripping hand, if someone volunteers, they volunteer, I guess.

Here's Blake's Patreon btw!

I'm surprised nobody has anything to say about this:

"Nothing is changing with regards to how the Archives generates income for hosting expenses."

I don't know how I feel about this. On the one hand, I'd love to jump on the "congratulations, Blake" bandwagon, because AoN is awesome and he's deserving of praise. On the other hand, this reads as Paizo offloading the expense and responsibility for maintaining and making available this content onto the shoulders of a community member. On the gripping hand, if someone volunteers, they volunteer, I guess.

I've run the Archives at my own expense for the first few years of its lifespan. Since then I ran it using ad revenue and Patreon (plus misc donations) to offset the costs.

While the statement is correct, nothing is changing with regards to how I generate income, the main change is that the Archives will now see more traffic. More traffic means more potential ad revenue, potentially more Patreon subscribers.

Ultimately, my world doesn't really change at all, and myself and my team now get faster support from Paizo with regards to early access books, quick answers to PFS/errata issues, and more.

I'm happy with the arrangement we ended up at, and want to assure everyone that thinks I'm being treated unfairly that it is definitely not the case. I wouldn't have accepted the deal if I wasn't happy with it. :)

Cool.

I would like to say congrats AON for being "official". I always loved to use your site to theory craft characters with what I think is a robust search engine. Do you want to look for all feats that have somethings to do with the keyword finesse? Boom you got it all. No offense to Paizo but the only time I have ever used the official PFSRD was when it happened to be the first link on google, lol. I know you mentioned this before but are you still working on pre-errata/FAQ versions of things? Some people like to have a history of changes, others like the old versions of things also. Other than that, congrats again on the big up!

I can't find any functional info on this other site.

Awful timing, especially servers down for two weeks in the middle of GameDay VII, followed up with more dysfunction.

I believe the best approach is to simply keep the old PRD with a disclaimer and link to AoN or the new PRD. This is a standard practice for API design and legacy content meant to be an enduring document. Nothing is more frustrating than having a permalink auto-redirect to a homepage.

I especially got irritated with WotC's old D&D website for this. The site had an insane amount of content with developer blogs and erratas and was meant to be a long lasting archive. First they broke the URLs and eventually wiped out all of it.

For the past few years I've been including links to the PRD in my game notes and prep sheets for NPC stats, spells, items...you name it. Suddenly all of those links are dead and my campaign is basically broken unless I take the time to replace them all with the new site's links.

Of course Piazo is free to do with its content what it wants but I wish they would have considered scenarios like this before pulling the plug on the prd so suddenly. A little warning that this was going to happen would have been appreciated.

I'm super bummed by this and will probably have to scrap a campaign that my players have been investing time in for years. Either that or spend a lot of time going back and trying to fix all the broken links in my notes - not even sure where to start with this new site. Don't @ me but it looks like its from geocities.

Bummed man.

And AON appears to be down...don't remember this happening before. Too bad, I spend A LOT of time there. ;-D

For anyone who needs to access the old version of the PRD but doesn't want to make a local copy, you can browse the GitHub html as a webpage using this link: htmlpreview.github.io/?https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Mekkiss/pathfinder 1.1/master/paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/index.html.

And AON appears to be down...don't remember this happening before. Too bad, I spend A LOT of time there. ;-D

Looks to be up now - I've seen a few small blibs in the last few days to the news, which I expect to stabilize, but I haven't seen an outage last longer than a minute or two yet.

Fourshadow wrote:

And AON appears to be down...don't remember this happening before. Too bad, I spend A LOT of time there. ;-D

Looks to be up now - I've seen a few small blibs in the last few days to the news, which I expect to stabilize, but I haven't seen an outage last longer than a minute or two yet.

Thanks!

For anyone who needs to access the old version of the PRD but doesn't want to make a local copy, you can browse the GitHub html as a webpage using this link: htmlpreview.github.io/?https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Mekkiss/pathfinder 1.1/master/paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/index.html.

Thank you. You've brought a tear to this old Grognard's eyes.

Can we get some smarter redirects? Because right now, every link that Google brings up sends you to the front page of AoN. If you don't see the blog post, it can feel almost like a hijack.

Also, can someone at Paizo float some money towards an accessible redesign?

Can we get some smarter redirects? Because right now, every link that Google brings up sends you to the front page of AoN. If you don't see the blog post, it can feel almost like a hijack.

Also, can someone at Paizo float some money towards an accessible redesign?

Any redesign is all at my feet at the moment, not Paizo's, and as I've said previously, the way my site gets income hasn't changed. I do have a number of QOL improvements I want to make, so change is coming, rest assured. Mobile functionality, improved search, and minimizing the menu image are the main ticket items.

Hosted mirror. I'll get a better domain name tomorrow

Now I just wish for more robust filtering options on the tables, something closer to excel or calc.

Wow, congrats to Blake! I've used Archives for a long time, and though I liked having the choice between the two websites to get my Pathfinder information online I'm glad that this one is the new 'go-to'!

Congrats to Blake and I also welcome having AoN as my new go-to for Pathfinder/Starfinder information :)

(Though I do quietly agree with others that the transition should've been gradual rather than sudden.)

On the gripping hand...

A shout out to my fellow Motie.

I'm a little confused by this. I think Archives of Nethys is a fine site for some PF players, but it doesn't address my needs or uses very well. The absolute biggest thing I use the PRD for is the global bestiary index, because for some bizarre reason Paizo has never printed combination environment+CR tables in any of the six Bestiaries. Paizo's site has a great set of filters for monsters, while AoN's is very primitive.

Even as a player, I rarely go to AoN. Pathfinder power creep has been absolutely insane ever since ACG was printed and for this reason most DMs I've played with have heavy restrictions on what content is allowed. AoN is a lot more comprehensive that the PRD and that counts for a lot, but almost everything it has that PRD doesn't is banned by most DMs anyways. Even when it's not, sometimes the indices don't indicate what book an ability is from.

I'm glad that Paizo made a plan to keep PF1e material easily accessible, instead of pulling a WotC and removing all links to OGC from the main site. I just wish there was also a plan to make these amazingly useful filter tools accessible.

Eh. As much as I like AoN, its format leaves something to be desired with respect to long complex rules descriptions. As a more immediate concern, in the course of this transition, every existing link to a specific part of the PRD on the forums--indeed, on the entire Internet--is now broken.

I'm not terribly excited by this. It doesn't seem like a player-centric move. The opposite, in fact--it feels like Paizo just didn't want to have to deal with it anymore.

(Edited for clarity.)

Eh. As much as I like AoN, its format leaves something to be desired with respect to long complex rules descriptions. As a more immediate concern, in the course of this transition, every existing link to a specific part of the PRD on the forums--indeed, on the entire Internet--is now broken.

I'm not terribly excited by this. It doesn't seem like a player-centric move. The opposite, in fact--it feels like Paizo just didn't want to have to deal with it anymore.

(Edited for clarity.)

And quoted for truth.

Thanks to all who have done so much to replace as much lost material as possible!

For example:

I have a new player.
They want to buy a weapon.
They can use simple weapons.

The new site lists all simple weapons on one page.

I look and see something on there called a "stingchuck".
…
Ahh... it's an item from "Adventurer's Armory", not one of the basic books.

Now I can no longer tell my player "Any weapon on this list from this page is available" because they'll be buying a freakin' human head to throw at people IN A HUMAN TOWN!

I don't want this item in my shops!
I don't want my players having this!

And I can not simply and easily send them a link to SIMPLE WEAPONS that does NOT include this item.

Do you really not see the problem here?

I would think it's pretty simple to say "if you see a weapon on that list that you like, check the source. If it's a Player Companion, pick something else." As for what's available in shops in your game, you are in effect the shop owner for all shops, so just tell 'em "sorry, we don't carry that."

As a PF newb I have to say I found the d20pfsrd site to be a better choice for me overall; more hyperlinking, better filters, and overall responsiveness, which for me is a big concern. The AoN site takes me anywhere from 8 to 10 seconds in real time to bring up most pages (not a search result, just a page) and when you're looking up a few different things it gets unbearable after a while, I have no idea why responsiveness is so much slower there than the other PF sites I use.

What's going to happen with what I assume is a huge increase in traffic? I read a post saying not much in changing monetarily from the AoN end, which sounds like Paizo offloading their job onto a community member, which is.. flattering, perhaps; but if Paizo isn't going to be kicking in actual money to help with hosting and the site can't keep pace financially dealing with an uptick in usage the site will be even slower than it is now.

This is probably an unpopular opinion, since I've not seen a single post criticizing this move, and I'm not knocking AoN, it looks great and it's got a lot of useful info, and clearly a lot of effort was put into it, but to be completely honest but I just feel d20pfsrd is more usable for a player or DM looking up info quickly on the fly during a game.

Anybody else have an opinion on this? Why does it seem like the overwhelming majority of folks on this thread prefer AoN over d20pfsrd? Am I missing something here?

More and more that friendliness is disappearing to be replaced by coldness.

Sorry to have to disagree with you Euan, but that's nonsense. The people at paizo who've been there a while haven't changed. They're still trying just as hard as ever to deal with stuff, IME. Yeah, there's new people but not enough to change the company's attitude towards what they do.

The new people are pretty cool too.

As a PF newb I have to say I found the d20pfsrd site to be a better choice for me overall; more hyperlinking, better filters, and overall responsiveness, which for me is a big concern. The AoN site takes me anywhere from 8 to 10 seconds in real time to bring up most pages (not a search result, just a page) and when you're looking up a few different things it gets unbearable after a while, I have no idea why responsiveness is so much slower there than the other PF sites I use.

What's going to happen with what I assume is a huge increase in traffic? I read a post saying not much in changing monetarily from the AoN end, which sounds like Paizo offloading their job onto a community member, which is.. flattering, perhaps; but if Paizo isn't going to be kicking in actual money to help with hosting and the site can't keep pace financially dealing with an uptick in usage the site will be even slower than it is now.

This is probably an unpopular opinion, since I've not seen a single post criticizing this move, and I'm not knocking AoN, it looks great and it's got a lot of useful info, and clearly a lot of effort was put into it, but to be completely honest but I just feel d20pfsrd is more usable for a player or DM looking up info quickly on the fly during a game.

Anybody else have an opinion on this? Why does it seem like the overwhelming majority of folks on this thread prefer AoN over d20pfsrd? Am I missing something here?

I don’t use these kinds of resources, but the advantage I hear cited most often is that AoN uses the Community Use policy and can therefore use Golarion lore and actual names.

As a commercial user, this isn’t available to d20pfsrd. There are feats listed on d20pfsrd (as I understand it) which are renamed - thus making them one step removed from the source (though identical from a mechanical perspective).

Alright, so! I have some news: the legacy website is now up at legacy.aonprd.com. It does not contain the search functionality. If you notice anything majorly wrong with accessing the legacy website, please go ahead and post.

I've also updated the blog text to reflect this.

I'm happy with the arrangement we ended up at

Okay. There you've told me how I should feel. For which I am thankful.

Congrats, Blake. It's kinda darned neat to have a personal pet project turn into a corporate-endorsed tool.

That's great, Chris!

YAYY!!

The new people are pretty cool too.

Yeah, they are.

Alright, so! I have some news: the legacy website is now up at legacy.aonprd.com. It does not contain the search functionality. If you notice anything majorly wrong with accessing the legacy website, please go ahead and post.

I've also updated the blog text to reflect this.

Thank you. I appreciate that Paizo listened to our concerns and addressed them.

The Archives of Nethys wrote:

I'm happy with the arrangement we ended up at

Okay. There you've told me how I should feel. For which I am thankful.

Congrats, Blake. It's kinda darned neat to have a personal pet project turn into a corporate-endorsed tool.

You're telling me!

Alright, so! I have some news: the legacy website is now up at legacy.aonprd.com. It does not contain the search functionality. If you notice anything majorly wrong with accessing the legacy website, please go ahead and post.

I've also updated the blog text to reflect this.

Thanks so much, Chris, and everyone at Paizo who had something to do with making this happen. I already use AoN when I'm searching for specific feats, spells, archetypes, and other player options, but when I'm looking for straightforward rules text as a GM, I go to the PRD and its by-book organization to quickly check the wording on something.

Thank you, Chris. Thank you very much.

Alright, so! I have some news: the legacy website is now up at legacy.aonprd.com. It does not contain the search functionality. If you notice anything majorly wrong with accessing the legacy website, please go ahead and post.

I've also updated the blog text to reflect this.

Awesome! I'm happy now.

Wonderful, the best of both worlds.

I'm quite happy with this move, if not the execution. Congratulations Blake. You deserve whatever money and/or acclaim you get out of this, for all the hard work you do (and have done) for us all.

Now, you just need to make the site responsive and a good bit more efficient/faster. I absolutely agree that those two things should be made a priority. At the moment, it is very mobile UNfriendly, and that's going to make it completely useless for a lot of gamers on the move.

As an aside, those people complaining that they can't filter out the books they disallow at their table don't have much of a leg to stand on.

What's this right here? Oh, it's all of the rules and player content from Alien Archive. Now not only do I not have to search through the book trying to find specific player options scattered everywhere, but I can simply set up a series of bookmarks or a similar online linking system for each book and direct my players to that.

Oh wait, Blake ALREADY DID THAT. That right there is all of the main Pathfinder RPG line's rules and content all in one place, sorted by book. You just need to go to the SOURCES link in the left sidebar of the Archive. It's near the bottom.

It's been that way for ages. People complaining about this stuff clearly haven't spent that much time in the Archives.

So thrilled and thankful that the legacy site is up!

You have no idea the depth of my gratitude. It is as if oxygen has returned to my world ;)

Thanks for making this happen!

Alright, so! I have some news: the legacy website is now up at legacy.aonprd.com. It does not contain the search functionality. If you notice anything majorly wrong with accessing the legacy website, please go ahead and post.

I've also updated the blog text to reflect this.

Thanks so much. This helps a lot! :-)

William Nova wrote:

As a PF newb I have to say I found the d20pfsrd site to be a better choice for me overall;

...

Anybody else have an opinion on this? Why does it seem like the overwhelming majority of folks on this thread prefer AoN over d20pfsrd? Am I missing something here?

I don’t use these kinds of resources, but the advantage I hear cited most often is that AoN uses the Community Use policy and can therefore use Golarion lore and actual names.

As a commercial user, this isn’t available to d20pfsrd. There are feats listed on d20pfsrd (as I understand it) which are renamed - thus making them one step removed from the source (though identical from a mechanical perspective).

Steve is correct about one of d20pfsrd's major weakness. On the other hand, it has very useful, albeit "unofficial" supporting material you can't find on the PRD, such as the grapple flowchart found here.

Sometimes AoN is the better resource, and sometimes I use d20pfsrd. It all depends on what I'm looking up.

Big congrats Blake. AoN has been my go to for years now, and I look forward to having the rules right there too.

It would be cool if there was a checkbox for "core rules line only" in the search, like the PFS legal one, but I can believe that might be trickier under the hood than it sounds.

I can't seem to find the Soulfire fusion from the Armory anywhere in the AoNPRD. That's kind of a big deal for soliarians. How did it possibly get overlooked? That makes me wonder what else might have been overlooked. :(

As an aside, those people complaining that they can't filter out the books they disallow at their table don't have much of a leg to stand on.

What's this right here? Oh, it's all of the rules and player content from Alien Archive. Now not only do I not have to search through the book trying to find specific player options scattered everywhere, but I can simply set up a series of bookmarks or a similar online linking system for each book and direct my players to that.

Oh wait, Blake ALREADY DID THAT. That right there is all of the main Pathfinder RPG line's rules and content all in one place, sorted by book. You just need to go to the SOURCES link in the left sidebar of the Archive. It's near the bottom.

It's been that way for ages. People complaining about this stuff clearly haven't spent that much time in the Archives.

You are trivializing folks real concerns, and real either loss of function or incorrect information.

Examples:
"legacy" Pathfinder PRD FEATS
"new" Pathfinder PRD CRB Which feats are General, which are Combat, which are Item Creation, which are Meta Magic.

"legacy" Pathfinder PRD SPELLS CRB, APG, Bard only
"new" Pathfinder PRD (same as above URL) CRB Which are Bard. I can not show all CRB & APG at the same time.

"legacy" Pathfinder PRD ROGUE
"new" Pathfinder PRD (using "new" URL from above, click on Rogue) ROGUE I did not realize that PFS, Ultimate Wilderness, Advanced Race Guide, etc. were part of the Core Rulebook.

While I hope that Blake works on restoring the lost function, splitting out various books rather than everything lumped together, till he and his team does that, it is still LOSS OF FUNCTION, INCORRECT INFORMATION.

Now, many (most?) folks following this know the difference, newbies will have problem, and all of a sudden PbP games, as well as Home games have a lot more 'splaining to do.

-- david