EvilAardvark's page

If you own the pdf, then there's a module for Foundry:'PDF to Foundry' that will extract the maps and set them up for you with walls/lighting etc.

Thank you for all of your work here, Phoenix, it is wonderful and will be a great help for me!

EvilAardvark wrote:

Will stuff without maps have maps?: No. You'll need to create those by hand.

Thank you, EvilAardvark!

That had been my assumption, which is why I hadn't bought it yet.

The creatures will be in the local bestiary (almost all the time) and maps are easy to buy/upload, so it isn't a massive deal. But it is a bit annoying.

Good clarification, thejeff! When you buy an AP, you get all of the stats for all of the monsters that appear on the maps. You don't need to buy an additional Bestiary.

(I've been switching to Foundry, too. Different, but as many, things bother me, so I'm not sure if the change will stick.)

To answer both the questions:-

What do I need to buy?: The only content you'll have access to on roll20 are the books you explicitly buy. If you want to be able to drag-and-drop stuff to your character sheet, you need to buy it. You can type most of it in by hand, or just roll dice and do everything manually so it isn't fatal to not have it. Also, just because it is in a book you've purchased on roll20 doesn't mean they'll have included it, or that it will work properly.

Will stuff without maps have maps?: No. You'll need to create those by hand.

…has anyone been “disappointed and frustrated” with Strength of Thousands? I’ve pretty much only seen glowing praise.

It depends what you/I/we mean. Everyone who heard "Magic School AP", when it was announced, and was excited to play a Harry Potter-esque game, was disappointed by the reality. Not because it is bad, but because it isn't what they thought it was going to be.

Don't get me wrong, everyone in the groups I play with are glad it exists the way it does - representation is important, but nobody actually wants to play it.

One thing I noted from this conversation, is that we've talked a lot about the theme of APs, but I think there's (at least) three different characteristics that people mean:

* The genre: horror, investigation, dungeon-romps, rebellion, kingdom building, pirates, vigilantes, magic school.
* The environment: generic-city, generic-wilderness, tour-de-Golarion, Absalom, The Magambya.
* The point: unmask the villain, get rich, save the city, eliminate the killer-cult.

Every AP has all three, but some lean hard into one particular aspect.

I think that people get disappointed and frustrated when the pitch:

* Doesn't give you enough to care about: Age of Ashes - Dragons, Strange Aeons - Cthulhu
* Suggests the authors are leaning into one when in fact the game is about something different: Council of Thieves - not about building a thieves guild, Extinction Curse - not about being a circus, Strength of Thousands - not Harry Potter, Ironfang Invasion - not about being Robin Hood, Agents of Edgewatch - not a buddy-cop movie.

I think that every PF2 AP, with the exception of Abomination Vaults and, perhaps, Fists of the Ruby Phoenix fell into one of these two traps.

In counterpoint, popular APs are (mostly) were what they seemed to be, so players knew what they were signing up for and could get excited about it.

Will this be included in any subscription or do we need to order it individually?

I attended the GM 101 class last night and I highly recommend this. Our instructor was organized, demonstrated features well, and answered a TON of questions. I'm looking forward to other classes in the series.

Do you know if any of the classes are going to be released as youtube videos?

EvilAardvark wrote:

Chaosium do their own work for roll20 and the Call of Cthulhu support is great.

Cubicle 7 do their own work for roll20 and WFRP support is pretty good.

Evil Hat do their own work for roll20 and their support is great.

Can you say a bit more about this? What work are you referring to? (And where did you read about them providing this support?)

Roll20 have a marketplace where anyone can sell content. All those companies make RPGs, they then make their own matching content for Roll20 and sell it in the store. They're not alone there, lots of companies do it - like Pinnacle and Son of Oak. Lots of indy developers do it too, selling 5E supplements and add-ons.

The products that these companies put out are what you need to play their games on roll20.

Roll20 doesn't do this work for them. There's lots of documentation in how to do it, and in fact, if you go onto the roll20 forums you'll find that there are people there who do work for hire creating and converting content. Paizo and WotC **seem** to be unique in that they rely on Roll20 to do it for them. Roll20 do a great job for WotC and a poor job for Paizo.

I have no insights into sales, contracts, agreements or if these companies make any money out of this. Maybe it doesn't make sense for Paizo to do this. They're experts in their business, not me. But, it doesn't make sense for me to give them $3000 per year for books, figures, maps and cards I'll never use. When they're calculating the cost of doing this work, I'd hope they'd include the cost of not doing it. Maybe that's why these other companies invested time and money in making their games available online. I honestly don't know.

I am also in severe need of work ;P

I hope things get better for you soon, buddy.

;P Should I be insulted?

Hey, I'd be happy to do Paizo's and Roll20's job of adapting modules to roll20, if I was paid for it ;D

I guess I can see how battlemaps would increase prep time a lot yeah

It is all tied together. It is a lot of work, if it wasn't Roll20 or Paizo would just bash it out quickly. Being a lot of work, it is going to need someone(s) to put in a lot of effort, and they should be paid for that effort. Fair is fair.

If someone does that, I'll buy it from them.

Tying back to the title of this thread: the people who use Foundry and point at the SRD - how long do you think that's going to continue if nobody pays Paizo for their products?

The RPG industry is brutal, and there aren't many, independent, companies at Paizo scale who've survived for long. I can't think of any other companies who're as big as Paizo, right now, who aren't owned or have their IP owned, by multi-national conglomerates like Hasbro or Topps. Conglomerates who'll take the worlds and ideas you love and do a canon crossover with Rick and Morty.

Not everyone can afford to buy a lot of stuff. That's perfectly fair. But optimizing for that isn't going to work out for anyone in the long term.

What I meant is that a GM playing D&D 5E would be sharing D&D Beyond and any physical/digital books from WotC, and I think it's a similar cost to a GM playing PF2e sharing Roll20 compendiums and any physical/digital books from Paizo.

But I could be wrong on the pricing scheme of D&D Beyond. I don't deny that it's likely easier than sharing compendiums on Roll20.

I don't think we disagree. But a few thoughts:

WotC don't allow pdfs of their books, so DnDBeyond is one of the few ways to share the actual content as a readable book. For online play, sharing physical copies obviously doesn't make sense.

Having bought both, 5E products are generally more expensive than PF products, particularly when you factor in the paizo link discount. I paid $10.60 for each of the Edgewatch modules, and $49.95 for Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden. Now, there are six Edgewatch modules, but each of them has more than half the content of Frostmaiden. In real terms, 5E products are, at a guess, twice the cost, on average, but there's no shortage of people paying for them.

Keeping the PF price lower isn't leading to high volume sales and an incentive to convert more, or there would be more PF products on roll20.

Pathfinder is cheaper and doesn't sell as well so... the investment from Roll20 goes elsewhere. Roll20 even put out their own game that competes with Starfinder - Esper Genesis - and around the same time publicly stated that they had nobody is working on Starfinder for them and they don't plan to have anyone.

I want Paizo to succeed; I love their products, I love the values the company espouses, I love Golarion and the Pact Worlds, and - when I hear them being interviewed - I love the people. I want to give them money in exchange for products I can use so I can have fun and they can be a profitable business. "Products I can use" now requires really solid online support, particularly for games as crunchy as the ones they produce.

I'm bit confused by your post which is umm... Bit rambling and not really sure what is your "the other option" you mentioned?

Like if your issue is "why should I subscribe to paizo when all other systems work just as fine for my group" well that is valid point assuming your group doesn't want to go back to 2e pathfinder. But the thing I'm confused by is that some of those systems you listed are MORE complicated than 1e pathfinder and none of them have roll20 modules either so umm...

...If you are fine with prepping call of cthulhu, rogue traders and traveller campaigns in roll20, why wouldn't you be fine with 2e considering that is easier system to prep?

(I also get feeling you are asking why paizo isn't investing more to roll20 when they arrangement is that roll20 is the one who does work into roll20 stuff. So its more on roll20 if they don't adapt adventures on schedule)

The world is filled with two types of people: those who can extrapolate from incomplete information.

Having actually played those games on roll20, they're not more complicated. 5E is much better supported, the others are more "theatre of the mind" games and are much less crunchy. They don't require anywhere near the same level of effort.

Call of Cthulhu is well supported too, which is probably why that roll20 stats show that twice as many people play it as PF1, PF2 and SF combined.

Roll20 don't invest in Pathfinder, because people do what I'm doing and play something else. They don't lose customers, because people still want to play.

Chaosium do their own work for roll20 and the Call of Cthulhu support is great.

Cubicle 7 do their own work for roll20 and WFRP support is pretty good.

Evil Hat do their own work for roll20 and their support is great.

Free League publishing do their own work for roll20 and support for Alien and Kids on Bikes is... <please extrapolate from a pattern and incomplete information>.

Paizo rely on roll20 who do a half-assed job on their behalf.

Staffan Johansson wrote:

thenobledrake wrote:

Where I am confused is that it seems like they are saying playing D&D 5e on Roll20 is less effort than playing PF2 in Foundry...

One advantage of 5e over PF2 on Roll20 is that even if you haven't bought the books on Roll20, you can use D&D Beyond plus the Beyond20 plugin to do the mechanical interfacing for characters and monsters, and D&D Beyond's functionality is WAY beyond what the PF2 charactermancer can do.

This is true, but aren't people paying for D&D Beyond paying twice for books in a similar way that someone playing Pathfinder 2e would be asked to pay for the books from Paizo and then the books from Roll20?

And you can share physical/pdf/Roll20 books.

You can share content on DnDBeyond with players, actually better than you can share content on roll20.

When you have Paizo pdfs you get a discount for the matching roll20 content if you link your account. There's no such thing with DnDBeyond or with 5E books on roll20, that I'm aware of.

Where I am confused is that it seems like they are saying playing D&D 5e on Roll20 is less effort than playing PF2 in Foundry... and in my experience that isn't the case

I wanted to play 5E. I bought the WotC roll20 offerings for 5E, which are all (or close to all) available. I had a character builder with all the options, fully populated adventures with maps, creature stats, lighting and everything I needed to play every official 5E adventure in under 10 minutes. My players didn't have, and didn't read, the 5E rules, but the roll20 tools gave them enough to get playing and let them read up on specific topics as they needed them.

10 minutes and I could play any WotC adventure, fully configured, with all the WotC character content.

Pathfinder, Pathfinder 2 and Starfinder on roll20 get you part of the way there. The modules they have are great, and let me get up and running straight away. But, most are missing, they have very little of the character content, and the character builders - where they exist - are very poor.

Pathfinder players discussing which VTT is best doesn't produce an answer because all of the choices are poor, so everyone is right when they point out the flaws.

There are people who are looking for different trade-offs. You said you won't buy the PHB on roll20. That's a fair choice, but it isn't one I want to make. I want to swap money for time and effort. You don't. That's OK, we're not the same.

Some thoughts:

* I've bought all the Paizo content on roll20. I've bought Foundry and FGU. And they're all... deeply unsatisfying.
* Roll20 content, when it is available, is the best, but it is patchy and getting worse.
* My gaming groups - there are 4 - are never going back to in-person play again.
* I've been a happy "everything Paizo produces" subscriber for almost a decade.

In this thread, people have been debating the merits of various VTTs, but nobody seems to be discussing "the other option". Roll20 content is only patchy for (Path|Star)finder but... there are other choices.

I'm down to 2 Pathfinder games, and I'm playing a 5E game and a WFRP game. One is well supported by roll20, one is poorly supported but for that game it doesn't matter. We have just as much fun, but with a lot less effort. We've played several other games - Call of Cthulhu, Rogue Trader and Traveller, on roll20 and they were fine too.

When the two Pathfinder APs I'm playing come to an end, I expect that'll be the end of my group playing Paizo games. There's a lot of other great games that don't need the same investment of time and effort. I might prefer Pathfinder but... I prefer gaming to prep more.

I'm already looking at my Paizo subscriptions and thinking "what's the point, I'll never use any of it?"

Until now, I've had a hope that that Paizo will step up and make the investment needed to so they're a practical choice for people who want to trade $$$ for effort in the future. That's kept me around but.. I'm approaching done.

Looking at the figures from the latest roll20 report [ https://blog.roll20.net/posts/the-orr-group-industry-report-q1-2021/ ], I don't think I'm alone in these feelings.

I've been gaming for almost 40 years, and I play in 4 games a week: two I DM for free, one has a DM who is a friend that doesn't charge, and one is with a professional DM that I pay, and who has now become a friend.

I've paid to play games for several years, with different GMs, and I'm incredibly happy with it.

* When it comes to online games, paying to play entails a commitment from players and whittles out the unreliable. I've never had a paid game fizzle because of crappy attendance. If I'm taking on a multi-year commitment to play an AP, I don't want it to collapse.

* When problem players manifested, they were dealt with immediately because the GM has a vested interest in protecting the majority from a toxic individual. In an ideal world, this wouldn't be necessary, but playing with internet randos requires moderation.

* When someone does have to leave - voluntarily or not - the GM is incentivized to find a way to continue the game, rather than letting it fade.

* The GM charges us (more than the GM who started this thread), but he also streams the games and puts them up on youtube, adding extra revenue streams for him. Doing this and running 8 games a week enables him to make an, adequate, living. He only publicly shares games this way, if all the players are happy to do so.

* The GM has a discord group for current and past players, and this has become a warm and inclusive community where I've met a lot of nice people. They've all been through the filter of being stable members of this GMs games.

I'm sure there are poor pro-GMs out there, but they're not a problem: you know after a session if someone will align with your personal needs and style.

Without this, I'd still be playing, but I'd be playing less often and I'd have fewer friends. I am grateful for the service he - and other professional GMs - provide. I would heartily recommend that path to anyone who can afford it, wants another game they don't have a group for, and doesn't want to subject themselves to too much game-fade.

I'm planning to start running CoT in the next few weeks, and I was wondering what supporting resources people would suggest looking up now that we're a decade on from original publication.

I'm interested in anything that'd add depth and color - source books, modules, PFS scenarios... whatever you think is interesting and worthwhile including.

Greetings, junior colleague.

I'm not an optimizer, but I'm not sure you really want to play a fighter class. Your character idea seems to be someone who is skilled in both melee and social skills.

That's a perfectly sensible goal, but trying to get a fighter to fill that role will be hard. You've got so few skill points that you'll have to sacrifice everything to try to be even half-way competent and you're still likely to end up being poor at social skills or poor at fighting. There are other classes that you could play that might help you create a character that aligns more closely with your concept.

Bard, Rogue, Skald, Swashbuckler and Slayer might all be better ways to express your ideas.

Brawler with Shield Champion archetype is a fun thrown weapons character and you can double-hand throw shields. You do have to wait until 5 before it really comes on line but it is still fun before then.

It is nice, in that you are also a pretty good melee combatant. That removes the full-attack or movement quandary - you get full flurries of attacks each round whether opponents are in melee reach or not... they're fair game.

By level 8 you can also have toppling bash, so you get free trip attacks when you hit things.

May not be the most optimized build out there, but it is a lot of fun to play.

This build is largely independent of stats and equipment:

https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/41778/how-to-build-a-blaster-damage -wizard-or-sorcerer-in-pathfinder

How about a Human Vigilante (Warlock) who floats around using Magic Trick (Floating Disk) blasting people with TWF touch-attack Mystic Bolts and spells.

When you have to move you have a pretty good AC, when you stand still you can open up with a barrage of bolts and when you feel like it you can use spells like grease to mess up terrain in ways that don't affect you whilst you're on your hover-board.

Elven Branched Spear can use dex to hit.

Spear Dancing Spiral, from the Weapon Master's Handbook lets you Weapon Finesse with a spear.

Samy wrote:

I will rather stop gaming entirely than be forced to go back to bleeping elves and dwarves and halflings.

I want my tiefling, I want my changeling, I want my catfolk, I want my ganzi, I want my shabti, I want my android, I want my lashunta, I want my samsaran.

I have a game system with them. Maybe 2e will have them someday -- then I'll take a look at it.

I think that can be part of the problem though. People look at Pathfinder currently and all the options that a group demands people be able to use and simply shrug their shoulders and give up.

They then see that 5e only has 1 PHB required, and at most only the PHB and one additional rulebook allowed and that is FAR more digestible to a new player than needing to get the rules in the CRB, the APG, UC, UM, ACG, and others.

By reducing the buy-in to a new CRB, Paizo automatically makes it easier for a new player buy-in to the game.

I think it is safe to say that the situation where there will be only a single book will be, at most, a temporary condition. Unless we believe that Paizo are moving to a business model where they release dramatically fewer books than they do today. Which is possible, but seems unlikely.

FWIW I'm in the "I wish they weren't doing this" camp. I don't expect that to have any effect on the situation, though. Paizo want to do this, and they're perfectly entitled to do so.

I play Pathfinder because I want an old-school system with useable mechanics and a stream of high quality products to keep my attention. Yeah, there are warts. No I don't really care. If I want a modern game, I've got a ton of great choices and an updated version of Pathfinder isn't going to be one of them; if it is recognisable as Pathfinder - as we're told it will be - it can't be, the gulf between Pathfinder and a modern game is too large.

So what does that leave us with? I have 98+% of the books published for Pathfinder both physical and PDF copies, and they're about to become obsolete for a notional chance at better mechanics. That's not something that makes me happy.

Why do I say notional? They'll definitely be different. To some people, they'll be better, to some people they'll be worse. How many people will fall into each camp? Only time will tell that.

I'm sure I'll hear, "your existing books won't stop working, you can keep using them" and that's true. But the energy of new releases is part of what sustains my interest. Now, I can have that stream of releases, or I can have the game I enjoy today. I can't have both.

We've heard a lot from Paizo over the last couple of years: business is better than ever, we've only been cutting back on product releases because of Starfinder, Pathfinder is doing great. If all that's true, I find the situation bewildering. Are Paizo really betting the company on the idea that a reboot and some improved mechanics will transform an already, allegedly, healthy bottom line? We're not privy to the underlying financial story, nor do we have any right to be. But I'm sure there must be more going on than we can see.

I regret that this decision has been made, and I will be using the cutover as a point to decide if I should jump off the subscriptions that I've got; it does make a nice clean break-point. I don't know if I will, I'll need to see how I feel at the time.

I think the people at Paizo all seem like kind, decent, thoughtful people. I hope they don't regret it as much as I do.

Fear the Boot is very good.

BearSwarm is terrible, but still entertaining; mostly because it is a 'cast by gamers for gamers.