Anguish's page

We tried some PF2 in its early days. Two things made it a fail for us.

One: insufficient material. When it was first released there was basically no content unless you were playing the first AP. We burned through the first module and then... what? None of us had the time to create playable content. Experiment ended.

Two: the experience. Part of the whole point with PF2 was a realignment of the math. To this day the mantra is that "the math makes it so you can't 'win' during character creation by optimizing". True. But the moment you make a character and find it underwhelming and post to the forum, you get told "you chose wrong". Point being that while you can't make a character that is more than mediocre, you sure as heck can make a character that is a failburger. Personally I don't find a lot of joy in doing a bunch of research to avoid all the trap options that are flavorful but definitely the wrong choice.

Smaller companies do it with 3P warehouse and distribution. While that may not have made sense in the past for Paizo, with >100% tariffs, it is a no brainer.

It's interesting.

The proposal is to shift shipping and storage for non-US customers to a non-US facility. Labour and money that would have been enjoyed by US employees of Paizo would be shifted to non-US workers.

This will also make shipping easier for many destinations - for the customer. Which again means at least some of the first-mile shipping that would have gone through US courier employees' hands would no longer.

In this scenario Paizo has split logistics, having to handle multiple locations and supply-chains. Costs go up in many ways.

Manufacturing of the actual product in the US has been - I recall - looked at many times and has been impractical due to pricing being astronomically higher in the US. Given inflation and increased costs all around, it's highly unlikely that US manufacture will suddenly become cheaper than it is today. Tariffs on Chinese print runs make them more expensive, not US print runs cheaper.

I don't know how this whole thing works out better for anyone except - maybe - non-US customers.

As a Canadian and someone who maintained subscriptions for a long, long time until the PF2 cutoff, I'd just like to wish Paizo, it's staff, and its freelance contributors the best in this turbulent time.

Anguish wrote:

I'm DMing Legendary Planet. Players are at 16th level. This one goes to 20.

How is it?

I've been considering giving it a read-through but haven't had time yet.

It's fun.

That said, it's slightly less polished than a Paizo AP. For instance there's no actual documentation for the timeline that the historic events took place in. Thousand years ago? Ten thousand? A million? Dunno.

The second-last book just... starts, without really any transition from the previous. It's up to the DM to go "um, you hear about this thing you can do, somehow, and here are the details I figure you need."

But overall it's very, very playable. I don't mean to turn you off of it, just let you know that where Paizo tends to include large blocks of text the PCs will never know about, this doesn't.

I've now got three PF1 campaigns.

I'm DMing Legendary Planet. Players are at 16th level. This one goes to 20.

I'm playing Tyrant's Grasp. We're 11th level.

I'm playing Wrath of the Righteous. Just started. This is a new, small group. One player is also in Tyrant's Grasp, as is the DM.

Total unique human count: 14.

I am playing an incredible tank character in our Tyrant's Grasp campaign.

Spheres, my friend. If you're not familiar, just Google "pathfinder spheres" and there's a wiki full of what you need.

My character is a prodigy (class), and the two key ingredients are the berserker and guardian spheres.

Berserker gives an ability similar to rage, which generates temporary hit points every round. There's your durability.

Guardian gives an ability called "challenge", which incentivizes but does not force enemies to attack her instead of her allies.

Go deeper into those two spheres and the survivability goes up while the incentives to focus on her do also.

If you take a gander and are interested, I'll try and offer some explanations and suggestions.

It depends on what you think mythic's purpose is.

If you think of it as "more rules, especially for high-level play, like 3.5e epic", oh yes, it's so very, very broken.

But if you think of it as "more rules, for telling the tales of legendary characters whose deeds will be told for centuries", they're very functional.

Challenging mythic PCs or making them feel threatened is difficult, yes. But if you're okay with the interesting bit being using interesting over-the-top abilities, without the constant threat of character death... it's fun.

Likely nobody's doing anything yet. Tariffs have to be legislated, meaning very carefully worded and designed. That takes time. During which, some people will point out it's not as easy as "let's just do this"; there will be retaliatory economic action coming right back. Basically... this is likely to be a bunch of sabre-rattling and negotiation. Simply put, protectionism is understandable, but doing what's been promised as-is will destroy US citizens' buying power and the jobs it's supposed to encourage will take decades to build, and by definition they'll be poor-paying jobs (else they wouldn't be off-shore). People who understand economics will point that out. From there... we'll see if it's another Mexican wall situation where a fraction of what was promised happens, or if... well... bad things happen.

But likely right now... it's wait and see.

My Friday group (I DM for 5 players) has probably another year or two in our Legendary Planet campaign and will likely stay PF1 when it's done.

My Saturday group (I play in a group that has grown to seven players) is just under half finished Tyrant's Grasp. We've got a couple PF1 campaigns planned when that wraps.

We're starting up a second Friday group (currently 3 players) that's an experiment bringing in (yet another) new player.

All told, in the last year or so the table I host has gained four new players.

That said, mostly I visit here a few times a week just kind of waiting. There's a lot of PF1 money just lurking in wallets and it's not impossible someone will decide they want it after all. Unlikely, unprecedented, but not impossible. So yeah, nostalgia.

Sorry, but I can't take you seriously when you throw "Ha$bro" in there. Not once, but multiple times. Businesses are businesses, in the business of making money. That is not an unusual trait; it is the central purpose for a business. That you feel it is necessary - or helpful - point out the money-centric nature of Hasbro strongly suggests you think other businesses are not money-centric.

If you want to pitch a business model, be professional about it. Cutesy monikers like "Micro$oft" have never gotten anyone taken seriously.

I mean this in a friendly and helpful manner.

Anguish wrote:

Mark Moreland wrote:

Ravien999 wrote:

This is a great move, but what about 1e content on infinite?

Today's announcement and action relate to the Community Use Policy and Fan Content Policy. We are continuing to monitor community feedback to changes to our other licenses and will share what information we can when it is available. Thanks for your patience and dedication to the Pathfinder and Starfinder communities.

So... still extinguished?

I mean, I don't know what further feedback from the community there could possibly be for Paizo to continue to monitor so, this pretty much sounds like a dead topic.

I mean... kudos for walking back the CUP changes. But fooey on sticking to your guns on accelerating the death of the things that aren't the new shiny.

I think that's a bit of an apocalyptic stance to take. People are still mentioning it. You're still mentioning it. I simply think Paizo is rolling out the responses piecemeal, which definitely seems like a wise move to me after dumping multiple controversial ones at the same time turned out... Well, quite badly. I have faith they'll at the very least put out a written response to the OGL question, even if in the end they decide to go through with that change.

Per Mark's comments, let's break down how this plays out.

1} The community - us - accept this and move on. This is the most likely scenario. The current level of complaint has been achieved and rendered no retraction of the changes that impact PF1/SF1 on Infinite. Less complaint stands realistically no chance of impelling future change.

2} The community - us - maintain the same level of complaint. This is unlikely, but possible... though I'm sure it'll get those complaining written off as cranks if it hasn't already. Thing is... the current level of complaint is still unlikely to impel future change.

3} The community - us - suddenly start complaining a lot more. This is... highly unlikely, but who knows. Maybe there's a pocket of PF1/SF1 writers out there who just haven't heard the word or are standing by to see if miracles happen. This scenario could impel change, but again... is super unlikely to ever happen.

So yeah. Apocalyptic. PF1/SF1 on Infinite are extinct, or at the very least unable to breed.

There's no reason given Mark's "we're going to monitor community feedback" comment to think that means "and then suddenly do some more stuff that we just don't want to do at the same time as re-enabling CUP because... oh... reasons."

I don't pretend I'm a writer directly impacted by this. The closest I come is being a purchaser of some content that was going to be made available to me via Infinite and that author had to scramble to make alternate plans because surprise! license change announcement. But again, this does impact future purchasing plans.

Paizo's expenses have very likely risen quite a bit in the last few years. There really isn't much room for reducing expenses either. They likely were already using the cheapest print shop that produces acceptable quality, for instance.

Let's not forget that their staff just recently unionized. Improved working conditions don't reduce costs. We haven't seen a bunch of terminations, so payroll is likely on the rise.

I vaguely think I saw something about them eliminating the office and being down to warehouse space, but even if that did happen, that's a drop in the bucket.

I'm sure the changes in product lines and frequency is about all they can do for "efficiency".

I've never had the impression that Paizo has been raking in undeserved YPMs (yachts-per-month). They're not gouging, I'm confident. That doesn't make products more affordable to more people, but ultimately these are the dollars required to a} pay the wonderful people who make the products and b} actually print and ship the products.

Ravien999 wrote:

This is a great move, but what about 1e content on infinite?

Today's announcement and action relate to the Community Use Policy and Fan Content Policy. We are continuing to monitor community feedback to changes to our other licenses and will share what information we can when it is available. Thanks for your patience and dedication to the Pathfinder and Starfinder communities.

So... still extinguished?

I mean, I don't know what further feedback from the community there could possibly be for Paizo to continue to monitor so, this pretty much sounds like a dead topic.

I mean... kudos for walking back the CUP changes. But fooey on sticking to your guns on accelerating the death of the things that aren't the new shiny.

Folks, talking to lawyers about revising language takes time.

Not making unwanted changes doesn't take talking to lawyers.

Yes, yes, I realize that's overly reductive but at the heart of it if they wanted to just not revoke CUP, they could by the simple act of saying so. Well. I mean... it would've been if they'd a} not said "effective immediately" and b} no, there is no 'b'.

I just don’t think the endless cycle of negativity is helping anyone when right now waiting is all you can do, but again, you do you, I’m just a stranger

I'd disagree. The continued expression of dissatisfaction underlines that this isn't an issue which will quietly go away.

"We'll think about it."

If the community lets Paizo get away with that statement and just... quiets down, it can easily turn into "we thought about it and well, don't feel like doing anything about it."

If the voices - and more importantly the word - continue to spread and speak and complain, the scope of the impact grows and continues. Paizo is doing this because Paizo wants to do this. Because this has been determined to be the most beneficial (read: profitable) path to them. Until they are disabused of that notion, nothing will change, and the only way that happens is if it's clear to them the profit-impact of this move outweighs the benefits to them.

Don't trust. What would've happened if everyone had trusted WotC to just... back down? Nope. It took sustained bad PR to trigger that move. And that is why I personally think this is all overblown. I just don't see WotC risking that happening again in the next decade or two when they know what will happen, and yet Paizo is urgently forcing license deprecation - committing a WotC - because WotC.

My groups were mulling over trying PF2 again once we run out of PF1 material we want to run but this event has us revisiting that. Because how Paizo behaves matters to us.

Since our licensing update on July 22nd, we’ve been listening to your feedback on the potential impact of these licenses on community tools and websites. Paizo is grateful to these creators and spaces for the immense value they add to our brand and player community. We are committed to adding options to ensure that a range of community projects are protected by the license.

With Gen Con on the horizon, we can’t offer an immediate solution, but we are working to reach one that is both sustainable for Paizo and supports the community we love. As always, thank you for your feedback—we hear you and are working to address your concerns as swiftly as possible.

Respectfully, I'd suggest that the best option to add is the one where you don't remove options.

An immediate solution: the announced changes are hereby paused until we can rethink this. Zero effort required. Just don't do it until you're back from GenCon. Nobody's out here going "no, no, you MUST do this thing nobody knew was coming on the very abrupt date you've announced."

That said, Jonathan, you've been stellar in this thread. Genuinely.

Anguish wrote:

I remember a different company playing games with licenses not so long ago and being declared The Bad Guy.

You don't make more restrictions and get to be The Good Guy.

I think it i a bit "damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of situation.

Doing nothing would meant that they still had entablements with the OGL and where still somewhat dependent on WotC goodwill.

I hear you BUT... no. They wouldn't have had entanglements with OGL. The people putting out the material would. If WotC were to about-face again - highly unlikely given the massive backlash from the last time - it's the publishers who would have product out of compliance. Worst that happens would be Paizo would pull OGL product from their storefront. That's something this move doesn't prevent.

In the long term this would be a very bad descission as WotC (or better Hasbro) has shown that they don't really respect the customers.

I disagree. They've shown that they do respect the customers. When the customers say "we're done supporting you because you're evil", they backed down. The bean-counter who decided "hey, let's use a license change to extinguish product we don't want to exist" was overruled and it all came to an end.

There's really no reason to think that the OGL drama will repeat itself. The lesson has been learned.

Or has it?

Because that's what's happening here. Paizo is extinguishing OGL-compliant product. It's literally the same result as if WotC hadn't backtracked, except historic product isn't being pulled. Yet.

Paizo has allways been more open with their licences and the fact that AoN exists - and as Mark has posted is in now way affected - shows that they continue that way.

Yeah, that's not my take. They could happily continue to allow OGL-compliant PF1 and SF1 material to be produced. Excuse me... to be put on Pathfinder Infinite. In theory OGL-compliant material could be produced and sold on DriveThruRPG still, but a} Paizo is taking their marbles home in terms of their setting and b} Paizo is taking their marbles home in terms of them being the most obvious place to get Pathfinder/Starfinder material.

Yes, it will be bumpy for a few month for sure, but this not so good decisssion seems to be better then the alternative.

The alternative is: leave legacy licenses alone. << Literally the lesson WotC successfully learned.

Sure, if you want to simplify things, offer improvements. But saying "no, man, you can't produce SF1 material with rules" is... not cool.

I bought a PF2 product this week. Despite being a PF1 player/DM, I'm still occasionally a customer, just not a subscriber. This does not have me wanting to support Paizo anymore. This is pretty clearly "we only want to allow the latest shiny thing", same as WotC. And claim that the intent is different faces the uncomfortable truth that the result is the same. And they're okay with that.

I remember a different company playing games with licenses not so long ago and being declared The Bad Guy.

You don't make more restrictions and get to be The Good Guy.

Just to be clear... I didn't mean my comment to be critical or snarky. Just literal. Sometimes tone doesn't translate well.

Anyway, that doesn't change the point I made some posts ago that more experimental AP formats make getting characters from 1 to 20 harder for GM's, who already have a lot of work on their plate.

Your point is interesting but...

"Feedback so far from all sorts of angles (financials, customer feedback, internal process, ease of compilation, ease of licensing issues, etc.) has been pretty universally great for this switch."

Financials, customer feedback you're trying to disagree with, financials, financials, financials etc.

James is awesome, but he's telling you why things are the way they are. Those are the things you need to change if you want change.

Rule of thumb: if you want to do it to an enemy, it's almost certainly going to break invisibility.

Cast cure light wounds on an ally because they're hurt? No problem.

Cast fly on yourself so you can get away? No problem.

Cast flesh to stone on your target so they're screwed? Not allowed.

Cast black tentacles around your target so they're screwed? Not allowed.

The closest thing to allowed is stuff like casting wall of stone between them and you. Yes, you made it so they have to around it to get to you but you didn't do anything to them.

Glad you at least tried it so you could put that nagging doubt aside.

Don't let the results stress you too much. Let's face it... PF1 was fun. PF2 is fun. D&D 3.5 was fun. Any game is better than no game, and liking or preferring one system over another isn't a crime. Even if it's irrational, I'm a Burger King person not a McDonald's person.

My group tried PF2 in the early days and there were some things that were nice and some things that were annoying. Our experiment mainly failed because Paizo hadn't put out enough playable material so when we burned what existed, we... resumed consuming the human lifetime of PF1 material we have.

Maybe someday we'll try PF2 again but given the recent release Pathfinder Second Edition Second Edition, it'll probably be PF3 by then.

PF2 is a good system and it would've been fine if you shifted to it, but sticking with PF1 isn't the end of the world as long as you're having fun.

there's very real data that suggests lower level Adventure Paths simply sell better than higher level ones... but a part of me wonders if that's a self-fufilling prophecy by not publishing as many high-level Adventure Paths as low-level ones.

Sales figures can be misleading, which may be part of what you're alluding to here.

Let's take some isolated hypothetical situations.

1} You publish two 1st-level adventures. You sell 10 copies each.
2} You publish a 1st-level adventure and a 10th-level adventure. You sell 15 copies and 5 copies each.

If you just look at the sales numbers for either scenario, they tell you to publish 1st-level adventures. But the second hypothetical is hiding a (mostly speculative) possibility... that high-level adventures increase low-level adventure sales. Disregarding that high-level material is harder to write than low-level, both of those two scenarios net identical product sales but you'd easily conclude high-level adventures are a bad choice.

I can tell you that my module purchases in the past... I only bought the glut of low-level material because it meshed with the higher-level material. If you hadn't published the level-10-plus stuff you did, I wouldn't have kept my modules and adventure path subscriptions running as I did. I bought 100% of what you offered. But only because it was diverse.

Full disclosure: my groups didn't follow y'all on the PF2 fork in the road. After the first two adventures, we went back to PF1. So I'm not really your target market anymore.

Fuller disclosure: but I bought the Fists of the Ruby Phoenix hardcover. Because it's high-level material. Despite it being for an edition we don't play.

So... real-world experience with me: you've made more money off me by publishing high-level material than low. And I'm telling you that if I was playing PF2, you'd only be selling me low-level material to support high-level material. That's something the sales figure can't ever tell you.

Every game evolves and I like the way this team has decided to do it.

Aaron, I was thinking to myself, "Aaron Shanks, Director of Marketing... of course he'd say that."

Then I parsed it a little differently.

Aaron Shanks, Director of Marketing.

You've been a highly visible voice of honesty and reason here for a while now so I wanted to let you know that while I normally believe marketing is an evil, evil undertaking not unlike electro-shock therapy, your integrity is so consistent and conspicuous and you're such a genuinely invested and helpful guy that... well... maybe you're just a sleeper agent in the ranks of Hell, making changes from the inside.

Just wanted to take a compliment you on being such a stand-up guy.

When I have respect for the dude whose job is - at least in part - to convince me to buy stuff I don't otherwise want to buy, well, that says something.

Announce they're reverting to PF1 and melt the forum servers.

Bonus points for actually releasing a PDF and seeing what the sales would be like.

It's an idea that's been proposed for years.

Problem is that it would undercut their partnership with WizKids. Even if WizKids themselves were to produce and release those models, they'd be undercutting their own prepainted mini sales. Even if the two offerings together netted a market increase, dividing that market into two products wouldn't be worth it.

It's an undertaking that Paizo themselves don't have the expertise to handle, so it'd be another licensed product, which isn't their primary focus.

Worse, STL files don't have DRM, so whoever did this wouldn't have a real way to prevent their product from immediately being widely distributed without pay.

Good idea but reality doesn't allow it.

Maybe don't advocate for premature actions then.

To be fair, I think that's kind of... wrong.

Most importantly, people should be free to advocate for whatever they want to see. I understand your intention, but in fact you're suppressing harmless expression.

Of lesser concern, there's a little hubris in concluding the idea is premature. And assuming the OP should've been able to recognize that. It's pretty much like saying "maybe don't express ideas I think are bad." The person wanting to express them clearly didn't think the idea was bad.

But, assuming that's just a pre-coffee post or something, there's still some thought to be given here. We're closer to four years since PF2's launch date, but... remember there was a pretty long play-test cycle, and it was understood that Paizo had been working on PF2 internally for a couple years, partially in parallel to Starfinder. Point being that the decision to work on a new edition may have been in the realm of seven-ish years after PF1 release. By that history, PF2 may be more than halfway to triggering a similar decision.

But wait, there's more. A few people have invoked the Great WoTC OGL Snafu of 2023 and the "we sold out eight months of PF2 Core in a couple weeks" thing. Well, that's an event that is entirely external and can't be counted on to repeat. It's not a sign of a fiscally healthy system. While some of those purchasers may have become long-term customers, it's more likely most of it was hype-buying and tire-kicking.

Finally, there's no particular reason to assume PF2 can or will have the same lifespan as PF1. RPGs inevitably decline in popularity, and we simply don't know what the curve looked like for PF1's relatively massive 3.5e fan-base. Sure, PF2's honeymoon phase made Paizo happy. Which means booting the new edition put subscriptions above where their PF1 figures were at. Great. But we're completely clueless what the numbers look like today. Different product, different curve. Subscriptions could be declining faster then PF1's curve, or slower.

My collective point being that it's not a ridiculous thing to think "hey, maybe it's time for a new edition". As in, the idea is not deserving of ridicule.

Feel like they don't understand the process of making art? It feels kinda disdainful of the process.

This I found interesting.

I have a hopefully thought-provoking response. My counter to this is that perhaps it's worth considering the process of making independent of "making art".

I get it that you're not intentionally putting "making art" on a pedestal above mere "making", but you might be, accidentally.

I'm not... visually artistic. I'm a verbal creative. Anything visual is a blueprint to me. I grasp angles and lengths. Blueprints feel good to me while sketches and paintings feel insane. I don't see shading and curves the way painters and drawers do. I... can't.

But I do "see" things in my mind. I imagine scenes and people and places and events. I can describe them with my mouth. I can describe them in written word. I can couldn't describe my co-workers... or my wife to a police sketch-artist to save my life. But I could describe things I imagine.

So just a thought... I can't currently make what I imagine except the few bits that are blueprints. But... if you take the infringing problem out of AI visual art generation, you'd empower me to make. On my own.

Sure, sure, I could pay or just ask an artist, and verbally describe what I imagine. But... that denies the ability to iterate or refine. With an AI tool to illustrate what I imagine, I could make.

While you might differentiate between the process I describe and the process of making art, I submit that making using AI tools could be just as valid and creative and important and special as what people whose heads are wired a little different from mine have been doing for millennia.

Put another way, imagine a machine that can read the neurons in my head, and "draw" what I'm "seeing" in my head. My hands can't do it for me. So... would I be any less an artist were my imaginings brought to paper by that machine? What if it was Van Gogh hooked up to that, not me?

TLDR: maybe... just maybe... everyone is failing to understand what "the process" should be. 'Cuz some of us would like to be creative but don't currently have the tools to be creative the way you think we should.

Again the biggest problem is the actual theft of other's work. Until that is resolved there can't be an ethical path forward for AI art. Period.

Quoted for truth and insight.

Robot fruit-pickers, robot packaging machines, robot car assembly devices... all put deserving, hard-working people out of jobs. The key difference is that they didn't do it by appropriating the property of those workers.

Not okay.

Even the day that people prefer to watch android football players (now, with no concussions and brain-damage!), we won't have this problem because creatives are the only people who (frequently) retain control over the fruits of their labour while simultaneously making it available.

On the one hand, these new tools drag the jobs of creatives into the same category as those of so many others: threatened to become obsolete by technology. That's... life.

On the other hand, most/all of these new tools are trained using existing material that wasn't licensed for the purpose, so it's likely almost anything produced by them infringes the original creator's rights. That's bad.

To me that makes Paizo's decision the right one for now. But unless we bomb ourselves back into a stone age, the future where a child asks their Alexa-like personal assistant "tell me a bed-time story nobody has heard before" and it does is coming. The list of jobs technology can't perform is steadily shrinking and while that sucks for every single person who loses their job to tech, it sucks for all of them equally - manufacturing, creative, whatever - and is realistically inevitable. Some day we may arrive at a state where everyone is unemployed and people pass days however they want... be that writing stories (creatives) or home woodworking (manufacturing) or bird-watching, but these are the days in between.

For now, while these tools are (probably) infringing, good call Paizo.

Kudos to Paizo for going beyond the terms of sale, while simultaneously being berated by a caustic customer.

Hello Anguish, thank you for joining me and the opinion. :)

The thing is (as I am mentioning above) that in 5e SRD there is no written description of the monsters (nor an image), so I am not sure if it is that simple as you stated.

Maybe someone directly from Paizo can bring some light to this matter as they have direct experience with this?

My apologies. I didn't see anything referencing 5e in your original post. (And honestly I still don't.)

But given that's your interest, I don't think you're going to get a response from Paizo giving you legal advice regarding how to use their competitor's material properly.

Still, best of luck.

As the OP stated " if I were to add the PDF to a FoundryVTT Journal Entry without him having access to the actual file (can only view the PDF, not share)", they are not actually sharing the file. The file is not available for the viewer to save to their pc, and it can only be viewed while they are in the VTT instance with the owner of the file.

This seems like a long-distance way of passing a book across a table, with one exception... You don't have to worry about them running off with your book. Close the VTT and their access is gone.

Technicality, at best. So what... I set up a Remote Desktop Server and expose it to the Internet, allowing anyone I want to access it and use Adobe Reader to view all my Paizo PDFs, but disable the clipboard so the source files can't be extracted? Nope.

It's playing the same game as "I'm not sharing the DVD of {movie}... I've just put a camera in front of my TV and built a robot so you can press the DVD player's buttons."

If someone is accessing the content, they're accessing the content.

Physical book access works differently because you're not buying license to the book. You're buying the actual physical book, and your rights basically follow the physicality; what you can physically do, you can physically do, including giving it away.

License versus purchase. The question was about legality, and while I'm not a lawyer, it's pretty clear that file sharing of any sort is a license violation. It remains a question of what might be consider reasonable rule-bending. Sharing a file with your spouse? Seems a no-brainer even if it's illegal. Room-mate? Probably. But all still license violations.

IMHO, question asked and answered.

Pretty sure the answer is that you can't legally share the PDF.

Think of it like a download of a movie. You're licensed to consume it. If there are other people in the room with you when you consume it, that's acceptable use; you're not sharing the file, you're watching it and other eyes exist. Blah, blah public performance excluded. The moment you provide access to the movie while you're not consuming it, you're violating license. Someone who is not the licensee is consuming it, and not even as a simultaneous hanger-on.

Even loading a tablet/laptop and loaning the hardware out is providing access to the file that is digitally licensed solely to you.

That said, it's kind of a don't-ask-don't-tell environment. I buy all the materials for my groups. If I'm a player and my DM wants to borrow the books for an AP to prep it for me, I hand over the books. If they want a copy of the PDF to extract art or hand-outs, I totally don't provide them a copy, wink wink, nudge nudge, know what I mean know what I mean?

Paizo will never state that they're okay with that kind of sharing because it's literally against the license. But they're also realists. If you are 100%, unreservedly confident that your DM won't share your PDF further and that they can be counted upon to remove it from their device(s) immediately so they can't "lose it", I would suggest that a wink is as good as a nudge to a blind bat. Know what I mean?

And as for those who are recommending various web sites with PRD content... come on guys. Those sites are excellent for reference and look-up, but they're not the right format for learning a game or casual perusal. Hardcover is king there, with PDF secondarily.

A given product (Bestiary, for instance) will document what contents are product identity and can't be used without license. For instance, the trade dress of a book (and therefore art), and specific place-names and NPC names.

Typically monster descriptions are not product identity. That makes them typically fair game for you to create original artwork to match their description.

I am not a lawyer, but that is my understanding of how this has worked for decades now.

Anguish wrote:

Sure. You can roll dice outside of a VTT.

Sure. You can use a paper character sheet and then start typing stuff into an online roller outside of a VTT.

Both of those are annoying. Annoying products aren't used as much as convenient products.

What proportion of D&D/Pathfinder players use VTTs?

I'm not asking that sarcastically to minimize the issue. I'm honestly wondering. I've never used a VTT in my life, and it didn't seem to me like something that was that ubiquitous, but I first started role-playing more than forty years ago so maybe I'm kind of an old fogey out of touch with current ways; I'm getting the impression VTTs are a lot more popular than I realized...

Understood. I don't - obviously - have numbers, but they're not trivial. They're enough to support multiple VTT products that have base features free. As in, enough people pay money they don't need to, to make a profit.

I too am a long-time RPG player. And I don't see shifting off the table for us. But for over a year we moved for pandemic playing and you know... it's way better than no game. And - like someone else here mentioned - we now incorporate VTT at the table. Primarily it's a nice tool for displaying/revealing maps to players... who then build what they see on the battlemat. It's... a neat DM time-saver. (But admittedly this use doesn't need character sheets or rules.)

Anyway, VTT is a viable market and the portion of its paying playerbase that uses OGL rules want to. Losing the OGL gamers isn't going to be good for any of the VTT companies.

VTTs with direct rules integration sure.

Character sheets are a huge part of making VTT usable. Without them, frankly the environment is too cumbersome to expect market adoption to be high.

Sure. You can roll dice outside of a VTT.
Sure. You can use a paper character sheet and then start typing stuff into an online roller outside of a VTT.

Both of those are annoying. Annoying products aren't used as much as convenient products.

Here's another angle regarding the linkage between errata and book printing that hasn't been mentioned: layout.

It's easy enough for a rules-writer to look at something that's been written and figure out how it should change. Then there's the bit where the changes are checked to make sure they don't break anything else.

But part of writing the changes involves ensuring the changes can actually fit in an almost identical space in a physical book. With "web errata, book to follow", if you skip the desktop publishing page layout stage, you could release errata you can't fit in a reprint.

My point is: I'd think every errata likely needs to be digitally inserted into page layout before it can be released to the public, or you risk having multiple versions and wordings of the same errata.

Publishing is not easy.

Anguish wrote:

Many of us want more. Same goes for a number of product lines. But like PF1 content*, this line is probably gone for good.

DO NOT WANT

It turns out it's possible to simply not buy things you don't want, instead of crapping on people who do want them.

The party has taken plenty of prisoners. They often use nonlethal damage on animals and other things too pathetic to be taken seriously. I don't associate myself with horrible people, so the players at my table(s) are generally pretty decent. They are all very aware of exactly how thin of a line separates their actions from the actions of their enemies. The classic example of what does a Paladin do when presented with a nest of evil goblin babies... except they were mites, not goblins... and the party took the baby mites to the friendly neighborhood Kobold tribe for safekeeping. That same Kobold tribe owes its very existence to the mercy of the party, as yet another example of the party demanding surrender rather than killing them all.

Offering surrender is something I am very used to seeing from the party. I am more than accustomed to having epic encounters ruined by Diplimacy. I am actually tired of having enemies they exile return, just to see what the party will do. I have to be careful giving certain enemies alignments that can reasonably be converted towards good, because the party is almost guaranteed to at least try [convert their enemies]. They have an annoying habit of turning bad@$$ enemies into friendly NPC's... all my hard work building something to actually challenge the party is now helping the party take on future challenges. I've even had enemies I built gestalt end up freaking married to members of the party.

Sick and tired of all their kindness and redemption and $#!+... I should run an evil campaign... see what they do then...

That's interesting in a number of ways.

My current player campaign is War for the Crown and we just hit 13th level. The number of living opponents we have killed is precisely zero. We've destroyed some undead and a couple constructs, but nothing alive has been made dead by us. We offer surrender regularly and have a reputation as such.

That said... while we do try to rehabilitate NPCs, the vast majority are remanded to a unspecified "NPC jail". In the early days we asked the people employing us to arrange for incarceration. As we gained resources and reputation, we're understood to be funding a proper prison.

But here's the thing: the NPCs we've rehabilitated are now story elements, not power elements. For instance, we recently needed someone trustworthy to watch over an important dog. That dog is in fact an NPC that is suffering from incurable dementia due to age who we've baleful polymorphed so they can live out their few remaining days as a happy and harmless dog. Well, we turned to a previous NPC to do this for us. We've told him who the dog is, and why this is important, and why we're asking him. Pure story. No using these against the GM.

The game is cooperative, and while we are all experienced powergamers and our characters are very, very good at not getting dead, we're not looking to destroy the story by trotting out a bunch of former opponents turned allies.

In your case, if you run an evil campaign I suspect your players may just start to enslave NPCs.

I just find it a very weird ruling that's been completely overlooked for decades.

Surprised no game developer ever considered this.

I'm afraid this has been discussed many, many times since (at least) third edition was released. And I'm sure designers have considered it.

It's just an edge condition that hasn't been necessary to address.

The rules don't say that spells drop, and the rules don't actually say that your type changes, so honestly, most of the arguments for having spells go away are based on people trying to apply logic to the rough simulation. But as-written, I'm not aware of anything that's actually written that would cause them to drop... so they don't.

With the SRD resources being ubiquitous I don't see any reason to share PDF's with my players.

That's because you added "with my players" to this particular part of the discussion. Try removing it and see what happens.

Here's a hypothetical. I am the person in my circle of RPG enthusiasts who has the most disposable income. I subscribe to adventure content. I sometimes sit at the table as a player, and sometimes as a DM.

Does it make legal sense that when I'm a player my DM has to buy a redundant copy of the PDFs to prep at home (copy & pasting / changing text, printing hand-outs, reading material on a tablet) while I can legally loan them my physical books? Yes. Does it make logical sense? No.

So there's a reason.

That said, I don't see that there's any need or benefit or means to change the file-sharing rules without completely nerfing any ability to discourage rampant piracy. Right now it's the threat of loss of access to future and stored content that keeps fence-sitters from dumping their collection in public. If you say "you're allowed to share with your group" and content is found in public, you can just say "one of my group must've had their computer stolen".

Meh. As-is is fine.

To clarify, as others have said, I just want the module. I'm happy to see a mark up on it so Paizo gets their piece. I don't want the bundle because I'll have no use for the PDF's. I'll only be running the module in Foundry and I'm happy to access the content via the journal entries there.

I think basically everyone gets that, but are trying to explain the reason why it is the way it is.

You're saying "I just want the car, not the sheet-metal and plastic and rubber and wires."

Paizo pays human beings to invent, write, test, edit, draw, and map an adventure.

Additional human beings are paid to translate that content into VTT.

The cost to make it possible for you to play the adventure in a VTT environment is the wages of both sets of human beings... put together.

As Tumorseal has mentioned, the work being done to make VTT-usable game content is non-trivial. It's really, really labour-intensive even when you're just doing mechanical translation without creating anything new yourself.

Further, none of this is huge volume. It's not like there are tens of thousands of people buying the VTT adventures to drive the profit-per-hour-spent up. Imagine it takes 100 hours to convert an adventure and you sell 100 copies. You're making $1/hour.

My point is that nobody - nobody - is getting rich making this stuff. That should be the indicator that the pricing isn't out of line, even if it's more than you want to pay or can justify paying. Things cost what they cost.