Avatar-1's page

Can I just add to this; while I didn't experience any bugs, the UX of the checkout is very questionable.

I used to use this site very frequently years ago, stopped only to visit maybe twice a year since then, and came back to buy the new core rulebook for 2E.

First, finding the core rulebook is a bit odd; the first set of rulebooks I was shown led me to only the 1E rulebook. It defaulted to the pre-order tab. I went to Store > Pathfinder > Rulebooks to get there, and the only thing that shows up is "First Edition" bizarrely.

I was a bit stunned and then found the Recent tab, found what I was actually after, and added it to the cart and went to checkout. This was fine.

Then it shows me what's in my cart, I click Proceed to Checkout. "Continue Shopping" as the alternative is always a bit awkward here, but never mind that for now.

The next page is the strangest bit. I have what appears to be 4 buttons - Remove, Save for Later, Remove All, Update Quantities. Well, what? How do I check out? I don't want to do any of those things. I read the buttons over and over trying to think what I could have missed here.

It wasn't apparent that those 1/2/3 buttons were actually buttons at all.

There's no Next or Continue button.

If I wasn't more tech savvy, I could easily have seen myself having given up at this point. That would have been a shame, so here's some feedback for you. The most ideal way to do a checkout is in one page if you can, but at a minimum, those buttons need to be clearer and/or you want a continue button with those other buttons.

Carrying boons over would just mean extra accounting to do for characters in PF2. Less accounting = more fun, so go clean slate for those.

Option 2 sounds fairest for the GM stars. Really dislike option 3. GMing is hard work and recognition is important.

If a public game ends early (especially at cons), should GMs be subtracting rewards - even though it's not the player's fault?

The guide doesn't directly mention this at all, and this is table variation that shouldn't exist. The closest thing is Step 7 in filling out a chronicle sheet, but this isn't specific. The next closest is under "Creative Solutions" where "players should find the item elsewhere". This all needs to be simplified and clarified.

The section on Table Variation has never been explained well enough and reading half of it has led a lot of players and GMs to read the section on "run as written" as gospel without reading the rest. This section needs to be cleaned up, probably in dot point form, to talk about what kinds of things need to stick (like the numbers) and what kind of things can be bent, and in what kinds of situations.

It doesn't have to be pure black and white, and it shouldn't be because that's not how GMing works (even in Society), but it should be specific enough about that as well - to the end that people don't think "Run everything 100% as written no matter what" is gospel.

Leaving this open in the guide is creating a never-ending argument akin to the paladin alignment issue.

Every year there's newbies who don't understand exactly what the items on the chronicle sheet means, but there's a very simple way to explain it:

The items on your chronicle sheet get added to your list of "Always Available" items for your character, forever.

The guide doesn't say this directly though, it uses a more convoluted way to explain the same thing. Why? Always Available items is a PFS-specific term, and newbies always understand what that means. Good, simple wording, matters - across the board.

Will there be a preorder for the PDF-only version?

There is a lot of importance in having the players listen to and appreciate Chief Hiryla's story (read it slowly, and at a good volume), as it explains a good bit about the events in the first 2 parts of the series, and prepares them for the stakes of the final battle of the trilogy.

Sometimes GMs fall into the trap of rushing through walls of text, but you'll want to make certain that doesn't happen here.

Sounds like GM inexperience.

The trick here is to trust the players most of the time, and only stop to check a rule if something really doesn't sound right. That's why the player has to own their resources.

If the GM is really keen to learn the rules for other classes, point him towards the PRD to pick up what he wants to know.

This is the internet, it's international !

You've explained this in a very confusing way.

What was the character before and what does the character want to become?

It's worth mentioning, if you're planning on using multiple nicknames across different servers, register your account with whichever nickname you plan to use as your "main" nickname, and then change it to whatever you want once you connect. Once your main nickname is set, you can't change it, and this does affect a few things.

I'm not sure why it would really be an issue. If you hand out a re-roll, that's one you don't have for yourself.

It should either encourage that player to buy a shirt/folio for next time, or the initial player may have already spent the extra $$ on behalf of others. Everybody wins.

For an online game, this sort of thing relies completely on trust, so while I'd still allow passing along a re-roll, I'd limit it to one re-roll per player regardless of how many shirts/folios that player had purchased, otherwise it'd open the door to cheating too easily. In other words, if you "pass along" your re-roll, you don't get one yourself.

If the answers so far are anything to go by, this is harder than it looks.

Without rehashing many great posts in this thread, I have to say it seems like the don't be a jerk rule would get around a lot of the issues if we were to allow co-operative reimbursement.

Agreeing to pay someone back would happen on a player level before it happens on a character level.

Feather fall is an immediate action. It interrupts falling.

This is a pretty good example of a physical non-magical interrupt that everyone can imagine (height of the drop notwithstanding).

The real issue that we need to keep in mind is that presumably some actions give you a moment to do something to interrupt (like falling a fair distance), and some actions are presumably either instantaneous or unnoticeable-until-it's-too-late (and effectively instantaneous). The rules almost never seem to make a distinction.

It seems to me that the answer to this is going to be an errata similar to how free actions work - that it's up to GM discretion with some general guidelines, and there's never going to be a full list of possible things that qualify or don't.

This is very much an organised play-specific issue, and not even a new one.

Campaign leadership should make a decision on how to handle this, and the ruling should be in the PFS guide.

Here's a complete guide on how to extract and print maps.

There's a point being mostly missed here that I think BNW was originally trying to make - that the style of these new rules, when used in PFS, become tools for inexperienced (or problematic) GMs to abuse.

With good GMs, they are not a problem at all. Mark's point is correct, they will not affect those games. That's not the point of this thread.

It's only when you're playing with a GM who knows these feats exist and says well now you can't do x because y feat exists for that. That is the only case we're talking about.

In other words, rules like these become a tool for GMs to inadvertantly cause strife for players in PFS, because they want to play as closely to the rules as possible, and these new rules suggest - rightly or wrongly - that there's things you cannot do the original way. And that kind of thing can drive people away from playing with that GM again at best (and that's what's been the recommended solution in the past for that kind of experience), or it can drive people away from PFS at worst.

I mean, does the PFS guide need to be updated to talk more about this kind of thing? What's the solution?

Not gonna lie - noise has badly affected games enough that it's turned me away from playing and GMing at those venues forever, even (and maybe especially) if they're popular.

She's an absolute dream!

wraithstrike, I just wanted to say I love your example. Very entertaining; true to life.

But how will you roll perception to find it?

GMs really need more help on how to make maps for their games (as part of learning how to GM, or how to GM better).

Personally I was so stumped at the techniques others were using to make maps, because the solution is usually either to find some way to export it then print it (and that's putting it very simply), or to just buy a blank flipmat and draw it (which is what I see most people do).

As a result of that, I researched it and wrote up this guide which I've posted before, but I can't remember where I put that - somewhere in Pathfinder Society GM Discussion, because that's the most appropriate place.

Then there are threads like this asking for (and getting) advice, which will eventually disappear over time as well.

Is it possible to add a hardcoded section to the site somewhere with these guides? Link to your map product pages so that it increases sales while you're at it - we want to buy them along the way. You guys will know how to deal with exporting and using maps from PDFs (your map-packs, PFS scenarios etc) for games better than we do.

Avatar-1 wrote:

Might be worth making that short story long for this one.

No, it wouldn't. The player has decided to stay and play and is asking for build advice. Elucidating the conversation would only further entice people to offer non-solicited advice for the OP to dump the game and that point is moot.

The player is being forced into it. To suggest that this very strange request shouldn't be questioned at all and only build advice should be offered is a very submissive approach.

The GM might have a very good reason or it might be toxic - we have no idea and there's nothing to suggest either way. Either way, people are already suggesting they should dump the game and we have no idea if that is a bad suggestion or not.

Basic starting gear

Gear for messy situations

Nobody's asked yet - why aren't they invested in their characters?

Sounds like your perfectionist tendencies are getting in the way. You've already put an enormous chunk of work into the game and your players love it.

Stay cool, you're already doing more than most. You're already doing great. Let knowing that steer your confidence. Don't get caught up thinking maybe you're not good enough.

Get caught up thinking of the amazing experience you're giving those players.

This is the greatest piece of awareness raising of online play that I've seen since getting VOs for online play, or maybe the Online Play forum.

One thing missing, and I always see this, is a lack of mention over timezones - there's usually 3 reasonable sets (usually America around UTC-6, Europe around UTC, Australia around UTC+10).

A look over the Aethercon site and its tiny Warhorn link, and I can't see any games set up, but the blog post doesn't mention any wait times, except to check the Grand Lodge Online Play forum, but there's nothing there for realtime games. Are they ready for signups and/or am I looking in the wrong spot?

All these details are important; the online experience has to be spelled out as simply as possible. We'd get even more people playing.

We don't have any plans to include either of those functions on our forums.

Terquem wrote:

well, we already have a "like" system, but, yes they will probably never install a "Dislike" system.

This isn't *quite* accurate. Favorites can be used to curate/list posts for valuable information (this is why we avoided calling them "Likes") and can be seen when viewing your own profile.

Maybe we should have a Like and a Favourite system to cover both. Positivity overwhelming !!

Players are responsible for their characters’ actions. Killing an innocent, wanton destruction, and other acts that can be construed as evil by the GM may be considered alignment infractions. “That’s just what my character would do” is not a defense for behaving like a jerk.

It shouldn't be an exact science that you need to get checked and re-checked by other people. Get a 20 point buy and distribute your points as evenly as you can across the stats for whatever you think fits you best.

If your int becomes 16 because you know you're pretty quick (14) because you're pretty sure you're smarter than you are quick, it doesn't matter that you're not a world renown genius.

Don't bother questioning stats and whatnot. Set it up and play the "character" to have fun with it.

Thanks for all the fish. Take care Mike!

I would roleplay my high-wisdom cleric by occasionally googling quotes for a topic that reflected a value of what was happening in the moment, such as "courage" or "bargaining", and then roleplay the quote as if I was Confucius, if only to appear sagely.

Nobody picked up what I was doing and just thought I was really clever. It was hilarious.

pennywit's comment is 100% on the money.

When you do get a new group together, don't run it for more than 3 or 4 people. Split it into two groups if they are all keen (which they aren't). Let them have a go at GMing.

Time management is a skill all GMs should learn to pick up. That's unlikely to work with the issues you're having simply because it sounds like your players don't really want to play. Maybe I'm wrong, you tell me.

It's easy for a 7 player table to fall out of the loop because the way table division works while playing is almost always like this:
- 1 or 2 "leaders", who are doing most of the work
- 2-3 "followers", who support the leaders a little bit
- 2-3 "stragglers", who will do whatever the others want them to do

In a 3 or 4 person table, the players are forced to take initiative or the game doesn't move. There's less distractions, and it's much easier to keep things moving by saying "okay, what do you do next?"

You say sooner rather than later, but 12 characters later and that just hasn't been the case yet. I've been playing PFS for years now; over half of those characters are high level now, two seekers.

I've been killed by deeper darkness, by trample, by a lance wielding maniac on horseback, by overwhelming attacks of opportunity, by being dropped below 0 in the surprise round and by being eaten alive on the floor... but never by a failed save.

I don't even really have a go-to item to replace it, except for maybe a Cloak of the Mountebank (1/day dimension door, yes please!). But if I don't have a shoulder item yet, I can be confident the next bad guy will have a cloak of resistance that nobody else will want.

Slightly unrelated, but might address the "let's go back to core races only" concern.

I think it'd be cool if you could unlock a race after receiving x amount of XP among all your characters.

So after you receive, say, 50 XP, you can roll up one of: a nagaji, tengu, grippli, oread or undine. At 100 XP, you can roll up another one from the previous list, with ifrit, wayang, etc added to the list.

This would get around the requirement of having to go to a con to get a boon (which could still be available for con-goers) and would encourage people to play/GM more sweet, sweet PFS.

I can't be the only one who got completely, completely confused by the clarifications in this blog post.

This post actually seems clearer. I think.

Pretty sure the solution to this kind of scenario is to let the person use what they need out of the core rulebook to make a character, and when they can afford the books, they can take on extra options.

The core rulebook is OK in that regard because it's part of the core assumption. Newbies (and people who can't afford the books, presumably) get that much leniency.

For kinevon's case, add a line:
If all the PCs are between subtiers, let them choose to play up or down.

I wrote up a guide on printing maps, from start to finish.

I've been meaning to post this for a while, but hadn't confirmed everything's kosher - so it's here if anyone wants to check it out.

Feedback is welcome.

I'd be very surprised to see anyone give a great answer to this question.

I've never bought a cloak of resistance or ring of protection.

If I'm GMing, I don't want anyone to buy me anything :)

If you're a player getting involved in playing without waiting for people to ask you what you're doing (and yeah, being quiet during box text), you're doing it right.

Bonus points if you roleplay your character to pieces or getting worked up over something in the game that results in more comedy for the table (my favourite is "okay, I aim for the big guy in the back and... (drop dice) MISFIRE! dammit!").

A GM that can't handle 6 players isn't much of a GM. Period end of sentence.....

Sorry, but that's really unfair. Everyone's got different comfort zones and has their preferences, and that's fine.

There's no hard rule on it, but you can't force anyone at a table to play or run at a table they don't want to play or run on. It's not unfair for a GM to set limits on what they're comfortable with.

At a con or game store, the GM will generally agree on something with their event organiser first, though if you feel like that's not the case, you can bring it up with the event organiser (usually a Venture Officer).

Online games aren't public games just because they're taking on "anyone who wants to play". The common rule is that the GM sets up a game, sets up any rules for signup, and confirms with those players that they're good to go. GM's don't have to make any arrangements with an event organiser in the same way a game at a store would work, because they are the event organiser.

Consider taking Heighten Spell to get Preferred Spell, which will be even more useful since you're the only spellcaster.

If time runs out in a time-limited slot, such as a convention slot (and assuming the game can't be continued later), do the rules for having to complete at least 3 encounters or else receiving reduced credit still apply, or should the remainder of the game be quickly storyboarded and the players given credit as if they completed the remainder successfully?

I don't think this has ever been covered, and I've seen variation from being as punishing as possible (no primary prestige, no secondary prestige if it was in the missed encounter, subtracted gold from the missed encounters, items crossed off) to being as lenient as possible (full credit, except for a secondary success condition that was clearly no longer achievable).

Avoid derailing the thread guys.

Sounds like the deity issue might be worth a new thread if you want debate its role in PFS or Pathfinder.

Dropping the duration of the "1 minute/level" spells to "5 minutes" means that the spell is obviously intended to be used in a specific single combat and its immediate aftermath (or preparation).

Extending the "10 min/level" spells to "4 hours" means that you'll only need to cast them once (or possibly twice) in a given game-day, which would allow the PCs to explore at leisure without a self-imposed ticking clock.

This is probably one of the few great changes 4e sort-of did: at-will, encounter and daily durations.

Quick question...What the heck does physical mean.

I would have thought it meant slashing etc, but they use disintegrate as an example.

I think answering this question is key.

I'd interpret a "physical effect" where disintegrate as an example, is an effect that produces something tangible (on a specified number of targets) - like disintegrate, or scorching ray, or magic missile, or acid arrow.

It's not immune to burning hands or flaming sphere, because those are physical effects that have no limit on the number of creatures.

But Smite doesn't produce a physical effect at all. It enhances the weapon's attack, and any attack with a weapon works. Using that logic, there's no reason Smite shouldn't either.

... I am happy, but quite surprised, that those fancy checkboxes... don't require any kind of GM oversight or even an initial.

The sooner Society can get into the habit of not requiring GM initials on sheets, the better. The honour system has always worked best, without the headaches. It's a game.