Online Guide Team Lead - JTT's page

Okay, OFFICIAL clarifications per discussion with the design team-

Pathfinder Lore and Pathfinder Society Lore are the same thing and should be treated as such. If you took the Pathfinder Hopeful background and then took the Pathfinder Agent Dedication, the Pathfinder Society Lore you gained from the background would be bumped to Expert by the dedication.

RE: lores- You cannot have a lore about an extant nation; the largest this category can be for modern-day knowledge is a settlement, such as "Magnimar Lore" or "Xin-Edasseril Lore". This would mean that "Thassilon Lore" and "Thassilon History Lore" are functionally the same thing, because to have a lore category that encompasses an entire nation, that nation would need to be one that doesn't currently exist. Similarly, you could have "Ancient Osirion Lore" or "Jitska Lore" but not "(modern) Osirion Lore".

Marking to add to guide.

We are still waiting on an update.

Your reading is correct.

That will be a balancing act that scenario writers will need to address. I believe one or more scenarios had a scaling block for skill checks, but I could be misremembering.

We plan to address dead and broken links as next weeks project.

Ws would like people's feedback on the challenge point rewrite of the guide. Does it make things clearer? Are there ways it can be improved?

We are aware of the rules ambiguity that arises when a scenario uses CP scaling, but then mentions number of players. (Such as "they need successes equaling half the number of players" or "they start with a number of points equal to the number of players."

This has not been addressed in the latest revision because we have not yet gotten clarification from leadership on what the correct answer is.

This has been addressed in the character options section of the latest guide.

Following

Added to the list of guide clarifications.

Quote:

Any equipment listed on your character’s Chronicle sheets with an item level equal to or less than your character’s level + 2. Some items found on Chronicle sheets are available for purchase only a limited number of times. Weapon and Armor found on chronicle sheets can be upgraded following the normal rules for upgrading.

I don't understand how upgrading would work through PFS as the traditional rules require the formula in addition to higher crafting skills. Does this imply that we'll find formulas in the future? Or will it be a variant of rune transfer such that as long as we have access to a +2 weapon or armor we're assumed to have the formula and can pay the cost for upgrading and let the specialist perform the upgrade?

As per the rules in the "Runes" section of the rule book, most (if not all) runes can be upgrade to any improved version of the Rune by paying the difference in the cost.

All this is saying is that if you find, for example, an Aldori Dueling Sword (an uncommon weapon) on a chronicle, you could have a +1 potency rune engraved on it without needing to have access to a +1 Aldori dueling sword on a chronicle. You could later upgrade that rune to a +2 potency rune, without needing a specific chronicle for a +2 Aldori Dueling Sword.

Zachary Davis wrote:

I am still not quite understanding one of the new rulings.

Guide to Organized Play wrote:

If the scenario you are running references challenge points directly in the encounter scaling, those override and replace the instructions here. Determine if your table is playing high tier or low tier and reference the appropriate scaling instructions in the scenario. You can then skip to step 5.

So do we still use the table in the guide to determine what is low vs high tier or do we strictly look for the CP total in the encounter section and play the tier the CP matches?

The exact cutoff for when a 16-18 party plays up or down is currently an unanswered question. I am hoping to have an answer shortly. In the mean time, I would suggest people use their best judgement.

I now have an answer, from Linda Zayas-Palmer:

"In Scenarios where there is a 16-18 scaling in the low tier, a group of 5+ PCs plays in the low tier. A group of 4 PCs is in the high tier."

For a glimpse of what this will look like, the following 16-18 tables will play high tier. All others will play low.
4, 3, 2, 2
4, 4, 1, 1
3, 3, 3, 3
4, 3, 3, 1
4, 4, 2, 1
4, 3, 3, 2
4, 4, 2, 2
4, 3, 3, 3
4, 4, 3, 1

This will be reflected in the next guide update.

That will probably have to be spelled out somewhere in the Guide.

I have added this to the guide team's list for review.

I am still not quite understanding one of the new rulings.

Guide to Organized Play wrote:

If the scenario you are running references challenge points directly in the encounter scaling, those override and replace the instructions here. Determine if your table is playing high tier or low tier and reference the appropriate scaling instructions in the scenario. You can then skip to step 5.

So do we still use the table in the guide to determine what is low vs high tier or do we strictly look for the CP total in the encounter section and play the tier the CP matches?

The exact cutoff for when a 16-18 party plays up or down is currently an unanswered question. I am hoping to have an answer shortly. In the mean time, I would suggest people use their best judgement.

The reason I had not yet come in here to announce the update was that I was hoping to give a couple people a chance to look it over for errors and omissions before I started a bulk rush to download / pdf it.

I had considered making the changed text a different color, like the old Additional resources guide did. But I was worried that green or red text might be seen as placing a rules influence on it. Whether or not to do this is a discussion I would need to make in consultation with the team and the campaign leadership. But *if* we decide to do this, what color would you prefer?

I will discuss our options for releasing a more detailed changelong with the team.

Sometimes we create and use nomenclature that is not necessarily common knowledge and forget others don’t know what the hell we’re talking about. Honestly, I had to look what RIP was myself. Checked the glossary first, no luck. So I scanned down the player basics page until I hit Retail Incentive Program And realized, yeah, I know that one. :-D

Thanks for the catch. That should be added to the Glossary.

Doing a quick look over of the changes:

Unrelated, but on Org Play Basics, under the list of tags, 'Metaplot' should be added as its being used on some scenarios.

GM Basics section on Challenge Points -- I think the second paragraph under point 4 of calculating the Challenge Points, should be bolded and/or given special emphasis in some other way.

Thank you. Both of those things are useful feedback, I will make a note of them.

I hope to have the RIP in the online guide by end of Monday.

More Monday Presents

We have gone through with the help of the Skittermanders and clarified the Boons System a little bit. As of now, all the rules for boons are contained on the player page. Only the rules that apply specifically to boons purchased using fame are now on the faction boon page (such as your first champion boon being free.)

We added some Special: tags to certain boons as reminders of special rules for those boons. (Such as only one promotional boon at a time.) While we recognize that this is redundant, it is a useful reminder if people are printing out their characters boons.

We have also removed the dangling "such as" from the Promotional Vestments boon. I hope to get a clarified list from the OP coordinator, until then, GMs should use their judgement and err on the side of generosity. As noted by others, it is a relatively minor boon, and should be easy to qualify for.

A word on Monday Presents.

I am trying to keep updates to mondays to make things easier for our brave compilers who are pulling together PDFs and so on. I can't promise there will be an update every monday, and obviously if it is something critical, I will have it up as soon as possible.

But I will try to give people a bit of joy every monday if I can.

This is the strangest feedback I've given on something like this in some time, but: the sans-serif font used is for some reason displaying lowercase "i" as an uppercase, which looks like a sans-serif "l", leading me to read things like "Radlant Oath" and "Herolc Insplratlon."

It's super weird?

It is something we are aware of, and are looking into solutions. In the mean time, as a (unpleasant) work around, the problem seems to resolve if you enlarge the page by 10%.

We do not yet have any control over the font choice, unless we want to start hand coding content.

And no one wants us to start doing that...

Note that PF2 boons have neither types, nor tags. Like all PF2 game options, they have traits.

(Yes, I am aware the guide table said "Type." That appears to have been a copy paste error. It should say Trait, and now does.)

Correction.

Only faction boons can be slotted in the faction slot. You *cannot* slot a generic boon in it.

The simplest statement would be:

1 Faction boon slot, that can *only* hold a boon with the faction trait.
4 additional boon slots.

No more than 1 Boon with the "Advanced" trait
No more than 1 Boon with the "Promotional" trait

Question.

Guide > GM Basics > Challenge Points wrote:

Some adventures have only one subtier. For these adventures, use the challenge point system to determine any adjustments. If the table would direct you to run the high subtier, instead run the adventure with the level bump and the 6-player adjustment.

If an adventure has only one subtier, say 1-2. Are the L2 characters "second-lowest" (3CP) or "highest" (6CP)?

A table of 6 L2 characters would be either 18 or 42 CP. The text then goes on to say that if you get pushed to high tier (which doesn't exist) instead you should go 6-player adjustment and a level bump, which seems exactly right for 6 PCs who are all a level higher than the ground floor.

With 18 CP you would end up exactly at "high tier", with 42 CP you'd get "6 players, level bump, high tier". Which is not actually doable because you can't apply the 6-player adjustment twice and doing two level bumps to the adventure also doesn't make much sense. So I'm fairly sure you should be using the "second lowest" CP value.

But it would probably be good to be much more explicit about that.

The table is based off comparing the PCs to the lowest legal tier. Pretty clearly, it should be second lowest. Otherwise 2 level 1, and 2 level 2 would play with a level bump and a 6 player adjustment, which is obviously not the intent.

We are currently working on clarifying language.

Skittermanders

I would like to also announce that we have recruited a team of helpful team of skittermanders to assist with this endeavor. They are currently engaged in checking links, proofing content, and ensuring that the new, improved version of the site will be as fully accessible as possible, including cross device, cross browser compatible, as well as compatible with assistive technology, such as screen readers.

As you can imagine, this involves quite a lot of work, in some cases very specialized work, and I would like to publicly thank those who have donated their time and expertise.

Monday Presents!

Hi everyone. I know we have been pretty quiet for the last few weeks. Our team has been busy working with the goblins at paizo, negotiating how we are going to transition parts of the site over to our control. There has been much bartering of birds and shiny objects.

In the mean time, we have also been listening to requests. While we wait to hear back from the server goblins, I have gone through and dealt with one of the things that has been most bothering me, and some of you as well. The Faction Boons Page has had a major formatting update.

Other Stuff

I would like to second the request to keep arguments out of this thread. It is hard enough to keep up to date with.

I plan to go through and do some minor updates to the rest of the pages dealing with things like the Fiji misspelling in the next few days. But I have to work that in around the rest of my schedule. So please be patient.