One of the biggest strengths of the organized play programs is the community it fosters. As with all hobbies, that community grows when we provide open and welcoming spaces and clear directions for getting involved. This week, we turned the keyboard over to the Organized Play Foundation’s Onboarding Task Force team and asked them to share an update on their project: welcoming new players to organized play.
Kia Ora from Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud, home of Hobbiton, Xena, and both of the Conchords, my home: New Zealand! I am Paul Trani, one of the Venture Captains of this exquisite place, and just like you, I have seen my role-playing game practice change dramatically this past year, in both how and why I game. With respect to the latter, I am so grateful for the Organized Play (OP) community, both in-person and virtual, for preserving (slightly) my sanity, and when the opportunity to give back came around, I critically failed my Will save. On purpose.
And so I find myself the chairperson of the Onboarding Task Force, a newly-created volunteer group of venture officers working to help new players discover the world of Pathfinder Society (PFS) and wow! am I both excited and humbled by the talented people that populate this group. The taskforce team is made up of Daniel Baker, Douglas Hahn, Katrina Hennessy, Kevin Baumann, Kristin Wilhite, Michael VonHasseln, Peter Nalepa, Nicole Heits, Kiela Butson, Kara Kramer-Rapp, Dustin Knight, and Joel Hager.
But Paul, you ask, doesn’t New Zealand have an official wizard? Yes, he lives in Christchurch - you can look it up, but I’d like to tell you about what the Onboarding Task Force has been doing in the course of the past four months
We started work with a specific request - reduce the barriers to entry for new players. In the current mostly-digital world, that translated to finding a way to transition the chronicle sheets to allow for treasure and scenario rewards to be tracked differently. We created a format that can be used either physically or electronically and we’re continuing to look at more ways that this can be tracked even more simply. You can find the tracking tools here.
Since that time, we’ve been asked to do a few more things. We’ve been working extra hard on helping you to take characters from that cool new Pathfinder Beginner Box that you or a loved one got for Christmas and played all the way through. We’re publishing a guide that will help transition characters built with Beginner Box rules into full-fledged Pathfinder Society Characters. You can find the guide here: Beginner Box conversion guide.
We’ve got lots more in the pipeline that we’re working on, which will post to the Organized Play Foundation website when finished. We’re really excited about our new projects and can’t wait to show them to you.
Our team is here to help the community get involved in organized play. Got a suggestion? We’re always open to new ideas. You can send them to me at we.be.dunedinpfs@gmail.com.
It’s a pleasure to be helping bring the new generation of Golarionites to the Starstone, as it were, and we on the Onboarding Team wish you all the natural 20s that are coming to you.
Cheers!
Paul Trani
Onboarding Task Force Chairperson
Update time! We uploaded sanctioning documents for Pathfinder Adventure: The Slithering.
Check back next week for the monthly scenario preview. With the backlog from January, we’ve got six new adventures waiting for you!
Until then, Explore! Report! Cooperate!