Unleash More Heroes: Official Pathfinder 2nd Edition Character Tools Open Beta Is Live

When people are talking about sounding entitled it due to the framing of the argument focusing on price.

Demiplane has to cover the costs of development for a lot of systems and products that won't sell well but still need to be there for completion sake. Some will take more effort than others, but it is hardly like the industry is huge for folks who can't get a bit of the D&D pie.

Suggesting that someone has to buy all of the products is not reasonable either. IF you are looking for a character creator the cost is significantly lower than $2k.

Now I won't be buying anything for their character creator, I pay for enough as a GM and would rather support paizo, battlezoo and foundry directly. But come on, complain about something concrete... Think about what they offer in a vacuum rather than comparing them to free or essentially free services that we are lucky to have.

Think of it in terms of "good for me, bad for me" rather than "good, bad".

If you just discovered Pathfinder in late 2022 or early 2023, and if you were interested in buying all the PDFs for the Adventure Paths, Adventures, Rulebooks, and Lost Omens line, it would cost you $1910 (I got ~1640, but I'll trust VestOfHolding's spreadsheet).

$1625 might look like a good deal, especially if you were used to using such a tool in a previous game that you played. And even more especially if it granted you a 25% discount for future materials.

If you already owned all those PDFs, it might or might not make sense to replace the ones you use most frequently. I have no idea what the discount is for already owning the PDFs from Paizo.

Essentially it brings the ~$2000 pricetag down to ~$900, or at least that's what it says for me, and I own every PDF save for a one or two.

I’m not even in the realm of splashing around a thousand dollars on RPGs. I have bought a bunch of PF1 books, and own three PF2 books. I use AoN and used d20PFSRD back in the day. I wasn’t a fan of Demiplane/Nexus when it was first announced, and my position hasn’t changed. I’m completely uninterested in a character builder that has more than a nominal fee. Free is best. For me. I am obviously not the target market.

Sounds fun for people with too much money to throw around, but I was really hoping yall wouldnt follow the "buy everything thrice" route dnd had taken even with a discount. Personally theres no way im paying 20 bucks to use the stuff ive already bought but I might just not be the target audience, and thats ok too, ill just stick to my old way of playing pf2e bc I still really enjoy the game itself.

At this price point, this is an amazingly hard NO.

I left Hero Lab for a reason. But I fear the writing I see on the wall. This is the beginning of the end of the "free ride" for Archives of Nethys and Pathbuilder. Its also the beginning of the "math creep" to go with the "feat creep" that is already in full swing. At least in PF1, you could make fun characters that did amazing things. Sure, it was a bunch of work, but the math wasn't so absurdly limiting that it sucked all the fun out of the game.

The pricing on this is basically unrealistic for those who already own digital copies of the books via a linked Paizo account.

I would much rather a pay either a bigger one-time or annual scription for the service itself, rather than re-purchase my already owned collection on a specific service.

Purchasing new material I don't own in my Paizo account via the app? Sure, sounds like a handy way to get new material. Paying full price to to unlock owned content is a pure non-starter for me.

Paid out? Ok time to leave the RPG aside and keep waiting Tarisland lol. I stick with Pathbuilder anyway.

This is the beginning of the end of the "free ride" for Archives of Nethys and Pathbuilder.

Perhaps. I guess that will depend in part on what’s covered under ORC, right?

And on the opposite end of things, both Archives of Nethys and Pathbuilder have Patreon if you’d like to support them for all they do for the community ^w^

People seem fixated on the $1000+ price point, as if you're required to spend all of that, and I'm not sure why. If you did want to jump on board with Demiplane, just purchase the content you're actually currently using and no more.

Or, take advantage of their $5/month membership and split the cost across your entire party.

Or both.

And people are still wrong about having to rebuy their books. This is new work. Really rude to treat the developers work here as so ephemeral. Makes me want to stop volunteering for the Foundry PF2e module since apparently all that automation and data entry work is of no value.

EDIT: And let's be clear here: If you look at this and say, "I'm not spending money on rebuying books I already have", I'm not exaggerating at all by pointing out that what you're saying is all the work to build a character automation tool out of the content from those books is adding nothing, and is just the same "book" you already have. That really hurts and blows my mind.

This feels like you guys looked at everything wrong with services like D&D beyond and learned absolutely nothing. I can respect that you aim to fairly compensate your developers, but the fact that I would have to buy my books twice to use your tool and can't add the books I've already bought means that the cost of entry is just way too high for whats being offered. If there was a way to pay a small fee when buying a book to also have it added to this tool, I think I would find that more palatable.

The problem is the principals from dnd beyond think they can do the same biz as before. Except with more prolific publishers, who do not dominate the market and who do not lock up rules in exclusive licenses and with fewer apps and people. With their previous biz they did not have to compete with free rules and free tools as their license made those illegal piracy. It is like state owned monopoly company trying to succeed in free market.

Foundry is doing well from selling tools with free systems and rules. People would be ok if they even got charged a 10% or even 20% service fee for the pdfs to unlock tools but $20 is too high. DndB got away with full price digital books because free tools, tools and pdf was illegal.

The value economy is very different for paizo and others and they should have used a different biz model.

I think possibly a large part of the feeling of shock at pricing is because even if someone already owns the pdf they're still paying around 50% of the full cost of the rulebook to now access it on Nexus. Is the value of what Nexus provides as much as half of the effort and time that goes into developing an entire rule book? Only each person can answer that for themselves. It may not be an entirely fair comparison but it's a very clear one that people are going to make without even thinking about it in many cases.

For many, many people if the cost comes down to "I can get two rulebooks and their content on Nexus vs three new rulebooks" (regardless of any other external support options or free content) then they're going to plumb for more stuff and make do, that is a business fact that has to be dealt with and factored in if they plan to be successful (and I very much hope they are!).

Frankly people (politely) expressing why they feel the pricing isn't ideal for them is a good thing for Nexus, free market feedback they can access alongside actual sales data to make future decisions.

People seem fixated on the $1000+ price point, as if you're required to spend all of that, and I'm not sure why. If you did want to jump on board with Demiplane, just purchase the content you're actually currently using and no more.

Or, take advantage of their $5/month membership and split the cost across your entire party.

Or both.

And people are still wrong about having to rebuy their books. This is new work. Really rude to treat the developers work here as so ephemeral. Makes me want to stop volunteering for the Foundry PF2e module since apparently all that automation and data entry work is of no value.

EDIT: And let's be clear here: If you look at this and say, "I'm not spending money on rebuying books I already have", I'm not exaggerating at all by pointing out that what you're saying is all the work to build a character automation tool out of the content from those books is adding nothing, and is just the same "book" you already have. That really hurts and blows my mind.

While I get this seems personal to you, you have to understand the value proposition for this tool is basically “Pathbuilder but prettier”.

It doesn’t matter to a consumer how much hard work gets put in, if at the end of the day, they return a product that has a price-point vastly higher than its alternatives for relatively little gain.

Superior products lose to inferior ones all the time, because those “inferior” products fill consumers demand at a price point they are willing to pay to fix it.

But, even besides that, it’s the pricing structure people are against, not paying for the product.

Charge a monthly subscription and link the service to your Paizo account for book ownership.

The current pricing model is totally bonkers.

Not only DNDB had a much stricter license, it also had less content produced by an order of magnitude. So owning all official 5e content ever produced costs "just" 850 dollars compared to 2K in only about 1/3 of the PF2 lifecycle!

A subscription model, like others said, is MUCH better. I would have thought streaming services, apps and MMOs have taught marketers something. It could have tiers linked to the number of built characters or their max level, instead of content books.

Going into the other direction, this product is more than a Character Generator and more robust, it seems, than other projects out there. I myself would like a return to an Etools program that could do just the character generation and leave the reader program to the Amazon Fire.

I tried making a character again on it. Failed again. There is a question of looks good vs works good. This just looks good. Does not work. When I can't even create a full character I'm not going to buy a bunch of books I already own. If the character creator is this buggy I can't imagine how clunky the vtt is. The problem is at the design level.

Did you send in bug reports?

This is an open BETA, not the final release.

If someone isn't interested in purchasing the new re-master books, will this program still support the original version of the classes/rules? Or will everyone be expected to buy all the remaster stuff to use the program?

I just went to use the tool and made a basic level 2 half elf fighter multiclassed to wizard for a spellcasting flair.

My thoughts... are that the value proposition for this tool is absolute garbage. It is WAAAYYYY too expensive for what it provides. There is also no subscription option. The only way to access all options is to spend thousands of dollars.

You also can't even SEE what an option IS when you try to select it without buying the supplement first! That is ridiculous! The entire ruleset is online for free! I can look up any of these options for free in another tool like AoN to at least SEE what it DOES.

The tool as presented is pretty, and that's about the only feature it has that is superior to the competition. There are a number of features not implemented yet as well that I won't complain about because it IS a beta, so I will give them that.

They need to take a hard look at the available alternatives. AoN, Pathbuilder, Wanderer's Guide, Foundry VTT, ect. These tools are written in many cases by a tiny number of devs. All implement the same data and/or functionality (mostly) and at a vastly cheaper price. In many cases free.

I'm NOT saying the whole thing should be free. The presentation is nice and deserves compensation for that alone. It does not deserve more money than you pay for the actual document sold directly from the publisher.

This tool SCREAMS subscription model. It's deafening how badly it needs it. Most players in my experience are very cheap. they will not spend more than a few dollars a month on the hobby. They *might* spend some up front on the core book to feel better about supporting the hobby.

This thing needs something like a 5$ /mo subscription to make characters, or something like 25-30$ /mo to run a campaign and let your players make characters for free that a DM can pay for.

That would be the equivalent to selling a new rulebook every single month to a gaming group for as long as they play, sometimes a month or 2, sometimes YEARS. This is the path to making a decent profit from such a tool/service.

Massive up front costs to just use the tool in the same manner you can already use vastly cheaper alternatives is a quick route to a canceled product.

As long as they are selling the ability to use rules content that is available online for free, this is disgustingly anti-consumer and I refuse to support it. This is a cool looking tool and I'd be happy to pay for it if it wasn't inherently a scam. This is genuinely gross to me and I expect better from Paizo and their partners than this.

So Paizo charging for books and PDFs they sell is a “scam” as well?

So Paizo charging for books and PDFs they sell is a “scam” as well?

No, because you can use that content outside of the context of their website, and they also aren't charging you to put the character options from those books onto your character sheet if you don't own them. This is like me not owning Guns & Gears but making an Inventor only to have Paizo send an agent to my house to demand 20 bucks or they start crossing things out on my character sheet.

It is not at all like that. Nobody is demanding you do anything. If you want to use this service to build a character, you have to pay money to unlock the options. Just like you do in Herolab. Not everything can be free, but nobody is forcing you to pay for this either.

Rysky wrote:

So Paizo charging for books and PDFs they sell is a “scam” as well?

No, because you can use that content outside of the context of their website, and they also aren't charging you to put the character options from those books onto your character sheet if you don't own them. This is like me not owning Guns & Gears but making an Inventor only to have Paizo send an agent to my house to demand 20 bucks or they start crossing things out on my character sheet.

Okay you're legitimately operating under the impression Paizo is threatening you if you don't use this, right....

Also you're conflating Paizo with WotC.

As long as they are selling the ability to use rules content that is available online for free, this is disgustingly anti-consumer and I refuse to support it. This is a cool looking tool and I'd be happy to pay for it if it wasn't inherently a scam. This is genuinely gross to me and I expect better from Paizo and their partners than this.

Do you feel the same way about the Beadle & Grimm Complete Character Chronicles?

Is it disgusting when a 3rd-party game company produces and charges for anything that is better than what Paizo offers for free? Is that automatically "anti-consumer"? Where do you draw the line?

It sounds like that anything that is an enhanced version of what Paizo offers is a 'scam' and 'anti-consumer'. You do realize that Paizo neither knows nor cares whether or not you buy this product. So there's no way they're going monitor what character sheet you use to create your characters.

I think he is more saying that the current structure of the app and the way it generates revenue effectively sells access to something that is already available for free.

It's the same complaint people have when ISPs try to charge premiums for full speeds to websites. The core technology provides full speeds anyways, and you are already paying for the connection. It is an artificial barrier erected solely for the purposes of generating revenue.

I don't mind paying a subscription to a service that lets me make characters in a cool, pretty format that is easy to use, because that is the product I wish to pay for: access to a nice, pretty, convenient and easy to use character build tool.

What I am not looking for is a free tool that I have to remember to plop down another 30 bucks for every time a new book comes out despite the content being available for free online.

This pricing model is anti-consumer because it is trying to annoy you into spending all of the money up front to gain access to information that has no inherent cost or barrier to access.

When this is the strategy, there is little incentive to make the content you bought actually good or accurate. The content you buy could be riddled with small errors and bugs and there is not much reason to spend resources fixing the issues because they already have your money.

Compare that to a subscription model, where the investment is continual, and the consumer can stop the flow at any time if the product is not providing the quality expected.

Look at what happened with DNDBeyond in January. The majority of the user base does not buy content, they buy a sub. When that revenue stream was threatened, wizards PANICKED and did a 180. This is the power I want to wield with my dollars when I spend it on a service. I don't want to be left holding an empty wallet as Demiplane goes off doing whatever they want to squeeze money out of the next whale that buys all of the books, because I already did so like a sucker and they have no reason to listen to me anymore.

I think he is more saying that the current structure of the app and the way it generates revenue effectively sells access to something that is already available for free.

That's true for a lot of 3rd-party Pathfinder accessories. (See Beadle & Grimm, above).

What I don't understand is the animosity toward a company based on fear and on experience with an entirely different company.

With any product, some companies create inferior verisons and other create luxury versions. As long as there is also a free version available, why spew hate and hostile verbiage toward a company you've never had any dealings with? Why the instant vitriol? Why a pseudo product review of a product you've never used?

If you are just posting your own anxieties for all the world to see, perhaps a website that offers therapy or support for your issues is a better place to post them, not the product announcement page for a product you're not interested in.

So I created an account so I could check out the open beta. Started creating a character, got to "class" and went to select "Ranger". Nope. That one costs twenty bucks. Open beta, my ass.

Novem wrote:

As long as they are selling the ability to use rules content that is available online for free, this is disgustingly anti-consumer and I refuse to support it. This is a cool looking tool and I'd be happy to pay for it if it wasn't inherently a scam. This is genuinely gross to me and I expect better from Paizo and their partners than this.

Do you feel the same way about the Beadle & Grimm Complete Character Chronicles?

Not quite the same, but eerily similar.

Dragonbane999 wrote:

I think he is more saying that the current structure of the app and the way it generates revenue effectively sells access to something that is already available for free.

That's true for a lot of 3rd-party Pathfinder accessories. (See Beadle & Grimm, above).

What I don't understand is the animosity toward a company based on fear and on experience with an entirely different company.

With any product, some companies create inferior verisons and other create luxury versions. As long as there is also a free version available, why spew hate and hostile verbiage toward a company you've never had any dealings with? Why the instant vitriol? Why a pseudo product review of a product you've never used?

If you are just posting your own anxieties for all the world to see, perhaps a website that offers therapy or support for your issues is a better place to post them, not the product announcement page for a product you're not interested in.

Firstly, the first thing I did was test the tool before forming an opinion. Secondly, if the product announcement page for a product, which allows comments, is not the appropriate place to provide feedback about said new product, then I'm not sure where exactly one SHOULD put their feedback?

I have no personal qualms with Demiplane. I have issues with their pricing model for this product, which otherwise looks quite nice and would be something I might be interested in if it wasn't a god awful money pit.

The pricing model of having your users purchase source material is outdated. It presumes your primary revenue stream is going to be wealthy GMs that buy hundreds or thousands of dollars of content for their groups. A subscription model generates recurrent revenue per user, and is not only a smarter business move, but also more consumer friendly for the type of product they are trying to provide.

The current pricing model just doesn't make any sense. It's also incredibly ballsy to charge full price for content for a beta with missing features. It's not a good indicator as to how they perceive their customer base.

So I created an account so I could check out the open beta. Started creating a character, got to "class" and went to select "Ranger". Nope. That one costs twenty bucks. Open beta, my ass.

Open beta does not mean all options available for free my guy.

Removed some off topic/spammy posts and quotes

Ed Reppert wrote:

So I created an account so I could check out the open beta. Started creating a character, got to "class" and went to select "Ranger". Nope. That one costs twenty bucks. Open beta, my ass.

Open beta does not mean all options available for free my guy.

An Open Beta should specify what the limitations are. They didn't do a very good job of that. And I'm not your guy.

Another conversation recently had me thinking about this and I think it would explain a lot, whether or not it was the initial idea, with the fallout of the OGL debacle it feels like Nexus is positioning themselves as the D&D Beyond of Pathfinder. “We” (current, invested players) aren’t really their main target audience, the people and groups leaving D&D who used Beyond for their characters and campaigns are. They’re already predisposed to using and paying for something similar, they don’t own many if any PDFs and are essentially the perfect audience.

If there is enough of a user base there to support Nexus then it’s clearly the right choice for them, whether that’s true or not who knows atm. And honestly, that’s a good thing, for a lot of people who’ve only ever played D&D even PF2 can be daunting, having a very Beyond like app to help ease them all in and stay with the system is a great way to ensure growth as a whole and get more people playing Pathfinder and buying stuff which means more books for everyone!