Rakka Bloodbone's page

A couple of things that stood out to me:
1)

Your scenario can include custom creatures and hazards created specifically for the scenario, with the stat blocks included in your adventure. Your scenario can reference

creatures, hazards, equipment, spells, and other content from the following sources.

Pathfinder Society Infinite Scenarios can additionally reference:

The typesetting in that opening paragraph makes it look like there's meant to be a common/shared list of PF/SF resources that has been omitted, followed by the two specific lists. The extra line breaks between "can reference" and "creatures" is also odd.

2)

Pathfinder Society Infinite Scenarios can additionally reference:

Creatures and hazards of any rarity from Pathfinder Second Edition products that have been released under the ORC license from Paizo, such as Pathfinder Monster Core, Pathfinder Monster Core 2, Pathfinder NPC Core, Pathfinder Howl of the Wild, Pathfinder Hell’s Rebels Adventure Path, Pathfinder Society Scenario #7-01: Intro to the Year of Battle’s Spark: Enough is Enough, Pathfinder Quest #27: Within the Glacier, and more. (emphasis added)

That's a 1e adventure path, I assume Hellbreakers was intended as a sample PF2e adventure path.

3) Same section and others in regards to how the allowed content is being scoped "released under the ORC license from Paizo" -- I understand the intent here, but I know Paizo has been very, very careful in the past to indicate how ORC and Infinite do not mix. I'm not sure of a clearer way to communicate "First Party/Paizo produced content that was simultaneously licensed to Infinite and ORC" -- in order to exclude first party legacy PF2/OGL content, without implying that the content used in Infinite is under the ORC.

4) Following a bit on the ORC versus Infinite distinction above: from the Logo & Artwork FAQ supplementary page, it is fairly clear, IMO, that commissioned artwork (with full/sufficient commercial rights transferred from the artist to the author), can be used both within the Infinite (including Society Infinite) programs, and outside the Infinite programs by the license/rights holder. (Subject to the late clarifications that the artwork is setting-neutral and not of named locations/NPCs of Golarian.) However, its not as clear to me if custom creatures/hazards fall under the same possibility of dual-licensing. As the author I would have the legal authority to license the stat block under both licenses. And while the ORC AxE does suggest fully dual-licensing a complete work to be a complexity to avoid -- and I believe the Infinite guidelines explicitly forbid such a dual release of a complete work -- I can't tell what the policy would be for a setting-neutral stat blocks.

5) Opening paragraph of the help page, regarding the requirement to read the PFI/SFI guidelines as well -- this should be hyperlinked to the guides. I also think you might want to inline some of the most important guidelines, while directing people to the help pages for nuance. I suspect a lot of people will miss the extra guidelines.

The WBL charts assume you spend some gold on consumables, rune transfers, etc so some gold is "sunk" along the way while leveling, hence the difference between organic total wealth while leveling, versus starting at a higher level. It is possible due to some of the free consumables, that some of that "waste" gold is avoided in society in the first place though.

I haven't kept up with some of the recent seasons, so its possible these already had a sequel. However, I was always looking forward to a sequel to
1-04: Bandits of Immenwood and the fate of the artifact.
1-05: Trailblazer's Bounty and further adventures of the NPCs (the adventures/explorers-in-training)
3-03: Echoes of Desperation (fate of the Song'o halflings)
3-10: Delve the Pallid Depths (while the special was a sequel, it didn't continue the story. we had the open issue of the impressive forge or the necormancer to follow-up on)

Some of these might require Paizo to share reporting condition results?

It does seem like you might have an OSR-inspired preference in gaming at the moment with some of your complaints, and I think that's important to notice. Nothing wrong with that, but if you're currently in the mindspace of liking OSR, PF2e will suffer in comparison.

For instance in your relationship between players and character paragraph. I feel Paizo has intentionally moved away, in general, from players (rather than characters) solving problems. That's why there would be an unprompted perception check (or in a non BB setting, a unprompted check for anyone Scouting/Searching in exploration mode). There's still a lot of room for player/role-playing expression, but avoiding some of the OSR "gotcha" style play of "you didn't say you checked the roof for traps, hahahaha" is I think one of the philosophies of Paizo style adventures.

The previous rant on combat as last resort in OSR is similar, but I still agree with the problem of "instant initiative/fight to the death" is used too often. Likely mostly due to page count limitation, adding more complexity does add a lot of words. I know posters over on reddit were discussing a drinking game based on "fight to death" in Paizo APs and decided it was probably too dangerous to attempt.

And I actually love the Q&A format, I find the authors (this is in general not in regards to unlit star in particular) do a pheromonal job of capturing dialect, accents, expressions in their answers that I find it much, much easier to continue improvising in the same vein. Simpler, bullet point style presentation (even if they include a phrase or two in the character's voice) have never been as effect for me.

In general I would have preferred the two-three axes to be separated.

A) World building focused -- unsure if you even need uncommon/rare style subcategories within this bucket. This serves double duty though in also helping things like unconventional weaponry, or similar cross-region access be easier to adjudicate.
Regional: <Regional Label> -- Regional: Cheliax, Regional: Varisian, Regional: Saga-Lands

Factional: <Faction Label> -- Factional: Hellknights, Factional: Lastwall, etc

B) Potential Campaign Disruptive
Disruptive: Teleport, Disruptive: Divination -- These categories are tough, and you often need to distinguish between harmless teleport (something like the laughing shadow magus focus spell, and long range teleports). I think it is valuable to try to give the one-word category for why disruptive and not just use a monolithic label.

C) Character building "hack" -- Focus spells being uncommon, for instance, to block other people from getting the spell without the feat. Its either an elegant hack of the system to some, or a misleading abusive of the rarity system to others. Personally, while I think it was an elegent solution, its still a solution that complicates rarity in a way that isn't helpful for people exploring the system. Not sure what the solution should be, but I think it should be workshopped.

(I was the poster that Jim was responding to in that QA, but I think the initial quote chain in that post got a little corrupted)

In addition to the rules versus lore/setting aspect, Infinite has more restrictions on where you can sell. (Ie you don't see Infinite adventures direct on the Foundry Marketplace, only as keys through DTRPG). Infinite takes a higher cut. Infinite has more art available. Infinite makes it much harder to make a collectors box set or a print (not Print on Demand) product (if even possible).

Most of the Infinite downsides don't matter as much for PFS -- you need the setting IP in the first place. And digital first/only is less of a problem. I think absence from the Foundry Marketplace is a slight downside for marketing to outside the PFS circles, but DTRPG Infinite sub-store dwarfs the non-Infinite section, and people have good awareness of it. Plus it sounds like Paizo was planning to promote Infinite more directly in their store at some point.

I've published one ORC-licensed adventure; it was short and I would have liked the better visibility that I think the Infinite DTRPG pages have. However it was a setting agnostic adventure I had pulled out of a larger campaign I'm writing. If I had published under Infinite, it would have made it extremely difficult to pull the adventure back into a longer explicitly non-Gelation full campaign down the road. These trade-off/restrictions make sense to me, and both offer good options base on what someone wants to do, but they have more subtle differences that take a lot of time to understand. I was excited to see ORC mentioned by Jim in that post, since its what I've learned to use, but felt fairly confident he didn't actually mean ORC for PFS and that was clarified. I would love to see Paizo promote some 3p PF/SF ORC stuff, but honestly given their current financial position I can't see that happening until things are better for them.

NielsenE wrote:

I think you're painting yourself into a bit of corner. Wanting as RAW as possible, but excluding official, but optional rules from counting as RAW, that exist to solve your problems. I generally applaud new GMS for sticking to the baseline to learn the system, and that does mean limiting the number of optional rules, until you find a good reason for them. But here you are, finding a good reason.

Fast/Slow Track XP is still RAW. And I think is the simplest solution when you either want to curate a written adventure with either the removal or addition of content in a methodical fashion.

Milestone Leveling is still RAW.

You've defined a problem and then defined away all the good solutions, and then say it hurts your soul.

Actually, adding XP-worthy sidequests to an AP is not RAW. As in the encounters and XPs within the bare AP have already been designed to keep PCs on the adequate RAW level track.

Deviating from this by adding extra XPs will only play havoc with the formulas underpinning the RAW.

Adding/removing content from an AP, to me, is a bit different than a RAW argument (unless using the old PFS Run As Written guideline). I think most people think its best practice to adapt an AP to better fit your table, whether that's adding character specific side quests, removing encounters the GM feels are time wasters or repetitive.

So I can understand the OP's "Pure RAW, but I'm also adding content, how to deal with XP and stay appropriately scaled" framing of the question. Adding side quests doesn't make you not RAW and in some ways is best practices/preferred. But the game gives official guidance (milestone,Slow/Normal/Fast advancement speeds, etc) as ways to deal with this.

I think you're painting yourself into a bit of corner. Wanting as RAW as possible, but excluding official, but optional rules from counting as RAW, that exist to solve your problems. I generally applaud new GMS for sticking to the baseline to learn the system, and that does mean limiting the number of optional rules, until you find a good reason for them. But here you are, finding a good reason.

Fast/Slow Track XP is still RAW. And I think is the simplest solution when you either want to curate a written adventure with either the removal or addition of content in a methodical fashion.

Milestone Leveling is still RAW.

You've defined a problem and then defined away all the good solutions, and then say it hurts your soul.

Assuming you don't like Milestone leveling, there's two main options:
a) if you plan to have a reasonable consistent amount of side quests, switch to Slow XP leveling (1200 xp per level)
b) If you plan for more sporadic side quests, skip the XP, but give other bonuses -- bonus treasure, an bonus feat, unlocking an uncommon/rare option

Ran into an example of the design problem last night in Kingmaker. Staying spoiler free, there's an iterated skill check that needs to get ~7 successes before one fail. Pure binary ( no crit successes/crit failure states). On failure you have to start over, so time is the only penalty, but no real ticking clock. The PCs are likely to only attempt this after they've cleared the location. The DC is high enough that even with buffs it's not trivial, so 7 before 1 is a very rare outcome, but still feels like the assumed outcome

Might be derailing a bit, but following up on the Chase (and I've seen similar problems in infiltration, less so in influence/research), is players and GMs often have a harder time narrating their action choice/success in a way that makes sense for continued attempts at the same obstacle _on success_. The feeling of successfully leaping over a barricade and being ready to continue the chase, only to need to spend another round at the same obstacle helping other people over. So I can see where the Kaava Quarry style (or honestly the default PF2 ritual rules effectively) allow for a non-iterated resolution at each obstacle. And I think that brings up back on topic -- non-iterated resolution using fail-forward is often a better fit for a lot of longer skill challenges. Something is always happening (good or bad), not simply a lack of progress and repeat.

I know PFS2 (at least early seasons, I haven't be playing/running recent ones), often had non-chase, chains of obstacles. Everyone rolls, but with individual damage/debuffs on fails, and possibly global debuffs/opponent buffs if fewer than half succeeded. This did show the fail-forward design in action, and I think often was a better solution --it kept the intensity up.

IMO, you can never aim for completeness when writing for a game system the 1p is still supporting. So doing so in the first place shouldn't be a goal. Instead plan your content/page layout assuming new content will be added.

Describes countries/areas general philosophy (acceptance/resistance of particular ancestral looks/traits, approaches to types of magic or technology, etc) in ways that a GM can make an informed ruling on additions that came out after your supplement. If you aim to be completely exhaustive, it can often be harder for a reader to infer the underlying rules, when something comes along that wasn't foreseen.

Leave a couple of undefined/mysterious areas on maps that could accommodate an unforeseen concept, if its important to a given tables choice of rulebooks.

Hello, I'm happy to announce my first published adventure for the Pathfinder Second Edition system, "Breath of the Jotunlord". Its an adventure for seventh level PCs, set in a remote mountain cave complex that I've tried to ensure can be dropped into most game worlds. The story sees the PCs tasked with investigating and stopping a creeping ice age. While the story is designed to be self-contained, there are hooks and possibilities for how some of the NPCs could drive further adventures.

In terms of content, its between 2/3rd a level of XP and a full level of XP, mostly depending on how much your table values random encounters while travelling. It is intended to be roughly 8-12 hours of play. Two custom maps, nine custom creatures, two custom hazards. The adventure makes use of a ticking clock to maintain a sense of urgency once the party is in the blighted zone, while still allowing some rests, and encouraging negotiation with a couple of NPCs for safer rest areas (or a tougher fight to clear them out).

Parts of it might be a touch too complex -- I wanted to explore an option for more dynamic, but plannable, combat environments with a pulsating wind mechanic. Playtest groups were a bit split on it; I simplified it, but still left it in under the theory that its often easier for a GM to cut something they don't like. Likewise some of the custom creatures might have 1-2 more abilities than they truly need to tell their stories. Definitely a place I'll need to fine-tune my
adventure crafting on the next product.

The PDF offering comes with two version -- w/ and w/o a decorative background as well as both maps as standalone files. The Foundry version has styled journals, scenes pre-walled and lit, all the custom actors pre-staged. Both Foundry and PDF versions have embedded reference pages for the common traits used in the encounter areas, and one-page quick references for each floor of the dungeon -- these dungeon quick references are an experiment and I'm curious to see if folks find them useful at the table.

There's a PDF version available on DriveThruRPG and a Foundry premium module at the Foundry Marketplace. Either version is priced at $9.99.

I am working on a longer levels 1-6 adventure as my next endeavor.

Yes the italic versus non-italic formatting is the distinction Paizo uses for separating the page number list, from the book title. Once you know it, it works, but it is a very frequent point of confusion -- especially in all the elite/weak references since people assume the comma is separating the book title from the page, and don't even think it could be a page list.

Most of the solutions I can think of add a bit too much of extra characters, and over the course of a book could put pressure on their pagination, so I understand why Paizo went with the simplest/most compact approach.

The cleanest option I think, would have been to name each Bestiary with its number spelled out, or in roman numerals, including bestiary one, e.g "Bestiary I", "Bestiary One". This way its obvious that a number in the title (roman/spelled out) is different from a page reference. But this can add a number of characters, and requires a renaming of the first Bestiary/Monster Core.

Using bold, or underline instead of italic for title names could also work, while looking worse, IMO, and being "incorrect" from a general typography standpoint (which Paizo tends to care a lot about). But on the plus side it has the smallest impact on line width/pagination.

Using a colon, ":", between the book title and page list could also have worked, as a colon is often used to introduce lists, so I think would still be standard enough/correct use of typography. But it does still introduce one extra character per book reference, and that adds up.

And the most clear "Bestiary pages 6, 114" requires 6 extra character for a multipage reference, 5 for a single. Using abbreviations "pg/pgs" can reduce that to three/four extra characters Which tends to beat the roman numeral/full spelling option in characters, but I think starts to look a little off for general reading from an aesthetics standpoint.

(Cross posting from reddit after investigating for a user there):

There's no way to buy the Hellbreaker's PDF. The Digital subcategory doesn't exist under Adventures > Hellbreakers, so there's no entry for the PDF on the store. Searching for it directly doesn't find it, nor browsing the complete list of products.

However it is in my Library (since I'm a subscriber) so the product does exist, just can't be obtained, by non-subscribers.

I'm glad you're revisiting this. While we need better clarity of some of corner cases, I don't think anyone expected such a complete shift of the meta in a way that felt antithetical to most of the rest of the system design.

Please, though, focus on actually defining the term(s) first. Then give a couple of examples showing the definition and procedure in action. The now-rolled back errata acknowledged the lack of a definition, but still didn't attempt to provide one, only to define by example in a way that still left about as much confusion as before.

I don't feel the quality is getting worse, but I'm not really accepting the excuses any more. When there's always an excuse, even if its always different because of whatever is happening, that ceases to be a one-off event, and exposes a pattern of planning that can not survive the craziness of the real world.

When used in moderation I like it. I like it when parties need to flex to deal with different threats and adopt different strategy and tactics. But I think too many creatures have precision immunity, especially when compared to say a "prone immunity", that I feel is often more thematic/less build impacting, but was basically removed in 2e compared to 1e. I also like the Critical Hit immunity and how it negates the extra damage, but still allows riders on the attack. I also think precision immunity should have more guidelines for decreasing total HP, or other changes to defenses to balance it, different from more vanilla IWR advice.

However I think any given "puzzle" fight shouldn't exceed about 5-10% of the encounters in a campaign. Characters should be able to use their skills and class kit. Ideally (and this is likely asking too much for a published encounter/adventure), if you've taken away a key bit of a class kit (precision immunity), you should ensure that the monster is still susceptible to something that that category of character can likely do. For instance, precision-based classes are often skill-classes as well, so if the creature has an exploited weakness from some skill (it is auto-fascinated by Performance/Acrobatics?), or is alongside a hazard of some kind to be disabled, I have less problems with the immunity taking the character out of the fight.

Precision immunity I find to be a bit worse than mindless -- most builds that run into the mindless trait causing problems tend to have a broader range of tools in thier arsenal and can come up with alternate ways to contribute. Precision immunity tends to be more core to the build and is harder to work around.

I always love the Airlift spell (two action, 60foot fly for you and all creatures in a 10ft emanation). It is fourth rank, so not available early on, but for an evac type maneuver I've found it useful a number of times. Especially if you have another caster who can either repeat it to chain further away, or a wall or cloud spell to break line of sight/stop pursuit.

From the Subscription-Manager page, selecting more options for one, Cancel, cancel, try to click on a radio button, but if you slightly miss the button, the pop-up closes.

You should have to hit the submit/confirm or the cancel button to close the dialogue; and the active/focus area of the click should be the text and radio button.

I understand the upsell/double cancel prompt even if I think its a customer-hostile, standard industry pattern, but the close the box because of a click slightly off the target is definitely an extremely hostile user experience.

Please investigate alternative ways of structuring the Library.

I find the paginate by date, but apply the group by category within the page to be particularly unhelpful. I'd really love to have the view by category, but the complete list of that category (possibly split across pages if needed), without being mixed in with other categories.

I can see both sides in this discussion.

I've been working on a three different campaign settings. Two are fairly easy from a mechanical integration with PF2; one is challenging. Its probably telling that the challenging one was started before PF2; while the other two are more recent creative efforts of mine, after I've been experienced in PF2. There's also a difference if its designed for publication versus simply a homebrew campaign. You can get away with a lot more build on-demand in the latter, when it comes to deities/pantheons for instance. Of course when your world only has a small number of deities that's easy/a different story.

But the challenging one has some similar issues to what you're talking about -- the local world is emerging from a dark age. Learned magic/alchemy and similar intellectual pursuits should be more rare than a baseline world. But is expected to be rediscovered as the campaign progresses. I didn't just want to say those two classes (Wizard and Alchemists) become uncommon/rare. At least on the magic side, the non-learned/instinctive style arcane casters, not to mention the high overlap with primal/occult means there's almost no change in people's perception and experience of magic in that case, and I wanted more. And it wouldn't tell the story I wanted to tell. I've played with a couple of options (its been a while and don't remember which option I like best at the moment), but generally exploring bumping the rarity of every spell that has arcane trait, unless it has 3 magical tradition traits. Effectively removing Arcane spells from Primal/Occult as well, so many classes get hit -- and losing the "learned magic in decline" feel. Its a larger blast radius than I wanted, but I think its the easily described rule, without having to go spell by spell and adjudicate. This is a place where I think the tradition/essences are simultaneously a very useful, but also an fairly restrictive concept when world-building as its baked in a narrative concept into the mechanics in a hard to disentangle way. Because nearly every spell ends up on multiple lists, its hard to pick a primary list, which sounds like your current dilemma. My first instinct in that case is to simply let it be governed by both/multiple deities. Perhaps its part of the tension between the gods, perhaps it helps to identify differences in doctrine in how those spells are seen and used -- this is trying to find the simple mechanical implementation that then leads into unexplored options for the world building.

But in general, I think this is a place that the game/GM books can't solve your problem for you, and I don't think we should expect them to. Most people's homebrew worlds are going to be unique in hard to predict ways. What works for one theme won't work for all. But its great to ask for help here; I would suggest avoiding bashing the system when doing so, people will get defensive/distracted from helping. Its also important to try to outline any/all primary design criteria so people don't feel like its 'whack-a-mole' with every suggested countered by a non-articulated further constraint on the world.

If you're having fun with the non-combat, I think one of the solutions is to cut as much combat as you can. I find often there's about 1/3rd of the encounters that are fairly easy to cut.

You still lose something -- those are often interesting "show the unique things that live here" or "make the complex feel well populated" or even "throw in a super easy fight to let the heroes feel like heroes". But if combat is the source of the slow down, and the non-combat is working. Then the solution is to cut the combats you can. There will still be enough remaining, IMO, for most combat-fans to enjoy the game. Its not completely eliminating them.

I would also look into slapping the weak template on almost everything, so to help combats run a little faster, yes you're making things easier, but each round will tend to accomplish more. if you want to be fancy, apply a semi-weak template that only drops the defenses (AC/saves) by 2. The party will move the needle more often, while the out-going threat would remain the same.

I value the society scenarios, and I value the convivence of not having to manually add them to my cart and apply a gold discount to them.

I'm not currently running society scenarios, outside of random one-offs tied to a side story in an AP/homebrew. So if we lose the convivence aspect, I probably wouldn't deal with the monthly. I definitely wouldn't bother with the SFS scenarios. Maybe this means I get to spend my gold on more useful things to me, but it feels bad and like I need to micromanage. It feels like I might drop some of the hit-or-miss subscriptions for me to free up non-auto-purchased things so I have something left to spend gold on. But in reality that probably means I'm spending less and getting less. Unless there's a way to auto-apply a gold balance towards regular subscription payments.

This seems very awkward for people who typically get most of the subscriptions. What's left to spend gold on? I used to sometimes buy an extra copy of a book to donate to a convention give away. And I guess I can still do that, but this really feels like its actually discouraging the superscriber.

This really looks like a much worse system for me and will probably lead me to drop some subs.

I absolutely hate having to manually manage/apply the discount to the society scenarios.

My group is 5/6ths of the way through the negotiation aspect of book 1, while they've been doing a very good job with all the delegates, the Nirmathas/Molthrune issue is causing me issues trying to figure out what makes sense.

Specifically, they've gotten Molthune maxed out on influence (including 3 non-Nirmathas to agree to articles 2-4). Nirmathas has not been excluded from the treaty as a whole, or article 1 specifically. (And I think all the clauses/conditional only refer to article 1).

So my understanding is that Multhune would still not sign article 1, but would sign articles 2-4, at least as listed -- since the requirement is listed as 3 non-Nirmathas, not no Nirmathas and 3 at least three others). While I could plausibly understand Multhune looking the other way on Nirmathas being part of the mutual aid or being involved in the offensive efforts against Tar Baphon; I don't see why they would resist the non-aggression pack, but accept the mutual defense.

Ie I can imagine them not signing 1 & 3, while signing 2 & 4. But as written it sounds like no-1, yes-2,3,4 is a possible. Which gets us into the state that they've free to attack Nirmathas, but immediately trigger war with the rest (and are expected to fight themselves).

It didn't sound like you had to exclusively sign the articles in increasing order. Is the push to exclude Nirmathas meant to from the alliance as whole, not just in regards to Article 1? Is there some other interpretation on "No on one, yes on three?"

-----------------------------------------

And now some more general thoughts on this negotiation/influence mini game. Its definitely been complex, we've been at it for about 4 hours, with one more small council meeting to go. It hasn't dragged on though, and we're having fun. However, I think there's some aspects that I think are little awkward.

1) The number of influence rounds turns feels about right, but the batching into small councils I feel is a little problematic. We basically have to abstract away the going back and forth between factions that feels like the more natural approach to negotiation. People might not know to ask about other-faction's demands when they visit someone, and I don't think the intent is to make people waste a second small council with one faction just to seal a deal.

2) I think some opening statement, maybe its still non-public so its not part of the opening ceremony, of the Influence 0 position and key extra thing they want to negotiate. This helps the players form a mental picture of the landscape. And I think there would be an initial flurry of activity at an even like that, before settling down to the personal discussions.

3) I tend to feel that influence games work better when you can split the party and work on different NPCs in a given round. This tends to help keep players engaged since they can more easily find a NPC that matches their personality/interests/good skills. In this case it also would have helped with the flow of initially talking to everyone finding their demands, and then concentrating on places that feel like sticking points, and then the "will X accept Y" style conditionals emerge and evolve more naturally. However style of more free form (4 influence rounds per day, can swap freely between people (maybe still excluding Clavance until special evening slots), does have problems co-existing with some of the more scripted small council intros, that wouldn't feel as good when done solo or repeated on each character's first visit.

4) Now this idea might over complicate things, but I think possibly having 1-3 influence tracks for each delegate -- 1 for what articles they'll agree to, 1 for lessening their extra demands, 1 for what concessions they'll make to others. It would feel a little better when a players discussion/debate is more along the lines of accepting the higher markup from Druma, but instead the next tier has no change in that aspect.

When we have a very long influence/negotiation game, I really would love to see useful scene setting art and aids for running it including in the Foundry mod. Now they haven't been doing that, because its not in published book to start with, at least that's what I've seen mentioned in the past. So while I think in-person games might not need the aid as much and that makes it a harder sell to include in the book for all thee reasons James lists.

I typically like to create a scene that has artwork for each of the individuals that can be influenced along with the discovery skills listed, and then fog-of-war to reveal the influence/weakness/resistance/etc that could be discovered. Sure it might make it a bit more worker-placement style game, but I've found in APs and PFS scenario on VTTs these kind of aids help ensure you're not repeating yourself a ton of times when trying to run these scenes. I feel like a 1/2 size map, that's this type of aid, and then a 1/2 size map that was a chapter intro artwork that's close enough for the scene would typically fit. Of course its not quite right, since the chapter intro is normally an action scene with the iconics, rather than the influence scene, but it might still be close enough without adding extra art. So its more about finding an approach that the Foundry module creators think makes sense for them.

Its a little harder in the remaster with the more player-facing question/answer, since they may ask for something that's harder to adlib. However your list is still a good starting point. A couple of points:

For creatures
When dealing with IWR, I often find its easier/more believable to flip an I/R <-> W. Ie, Fire immunity/ resistance <-> cold weakness. For me this at least is easier to present without triggering my 'I'm obviously lying voice'

Having a reaction to say a creatures has (even if its just Reactive Strike) when they don't have one is another thing that's worth having in your backpocket.

I try to always do:

at least one traversal/escape skill Athletics or Acrobatics
at least one knowledge skill (Arcane, Primal, Religion, Occult, Society)
at least one social skill (Deception, Diplomacy, Intimidate)
at least one puzzle solving skill (crafting, thievery, survival)

Medicine, Performance, Stealth don't fit as well into those buckets and tend to be much more based on the character concept making it an auto-pick if relevant. All three don't quite fill their respective bucket, but are often more about enabling a particular ability/playstyle.

I do lean into intelligent/crafting characters more often than not, even if its not natural for that class. That means I tend to have extra skills so its easy to cover all those categories, and often add an extra knowledge/puzzle skill.

I tend to lean away from social characters -- Intimidate has probably become a little over-represented in my social skills bucket just because demoralize is something I think to use more often than the other skill actions.

I'll try to answer but the why (what you asked) and how to deal with it (what might be more useful).

Why:

Often its newer people to the community; they may still have some anxiety about attending a new event and just bail. And then feel too embarrassed to reach out.

People double book by accident and forget to deal with it; either because they don't realized there's a waiting list and its polite to cancel or because they forgot, or they just don't event think about it.

A real life emergency happens.

More for on-line games than in-person: people book the same scenario multiple times at different events/lodges, maybe trying to find a game that runs sooner, and forget to drop their original one/backup one they kept in case something fell through.

A person just forgets about it. Especially if they don't have a semi-regular schedule and only plays sporadically. There are times when you have to book so-far ahead, that if you only play once a month, they time between booking and playing can get quite long.

There's probably more reasons but those are the main ones I've seen.

How to deal with it?

1) If you have any form of broadcast announcements (emails, discord announcement channels, blogs, etc) that your community uses. Just include a reminder about the sign-up etiquette expected. Include this on a join event Warhorn signup page.

2) Try to reach out to last-minute no shows, avoid blaming, avoid too much criticizing, just remind them of the expectation. Let them know its costing other people the chance to play and/or possibly causes the table to fail to fire for everyone. If its online, and these are random drive-by (no-show) attendees, maybe reach out to some of the online VOs to document persistent issues who don't really have a home lodge to build cultural norms.

3) If you're having trouble with tables failing to fire as a result of no-shows, see if you can have any "standby" players. Either a perennial online person, or someone who lives close to the venue who can just come over last-minute to make sure the table fires, to avoid alienating the people who did show up.

Congrats on the Order of the Wayfinder award, Lucas!

The way I like to try to thread the needle on these types of party comp/optimization discussions, especially when pulling together a group of strangers is to ask the following two situations:

1) Describe to me how your party could set up your perfect turn for you

2) Describe to me how you can setup your party members for a perfect turn, if your go-to isn't viable in an encounter.

I've been finding that this framing avoids pre-supposing any particular roles/classes, but does highlight the importance of teamwork and of the give-and-take. It also highlights the need to be flexible and not locked in to only one strategy.

Yes its a _good_ thing that the developers of the Foundry modules have a channel to get corrections in a timely manner, as forced by the release schedule. All too often these types of questions just kinda pile up in the GM thread and only sometimes get Paizo developer attention.

Yes, its also bad that they are either not always posted, or not posted in a manner that's consistent with the Guide on what posts can be viewed as official. This means that Foundry-produced scenarios are different from pdf-based scenarios, which isn't a good state.

It feels like all this takes is some process tweak -- whenever Paizo is responding to the foundry dev's with these clarification to cut & paste the Q&A portion of the email into a specific thread -- ie make it easy just have a "Season 5 Correction Thread" not tied to each particular scenario. If keeping it Paizo side is unworkable from some reason, then add one of the Foundry dev's to the list of approved people to post corrections, and probably require an alt "Official Foundry Scenario Correction' voice (like the Guide Voice) for them to post as.

The closest thing to auto-miss is the guidance from the gliminals:

Violent Healing:
"There aren't default rules for a creature choosing to be hit (to avoid exploding from a gliminal's healing), but you can allow an ally to improve their outcome by one degree of success against a willing target or allow the target to worsen the result of their saving throw by one step"

So the rough guidance is to still require a roll, but allow the character to worsen the result one step (either on a to-hit, or for a save)

And similarly, if you're writing an adventure, campaign, etc try to avoid AoO/RS on enemies in your first couple of encounters.

After telling people it's not universal, so many intro type things put an AoO on an early opponent and make players think they can't trust that advice or that the GM was playing gotcha.

It keeps the manipulate trait. Nothing says it loses it.

Its part of the trade off for getting the increased damage -- either you already know the creature doesn't have reactive strike, or you've had someone else soak it for you, or you're risking it.

Basically what I've learned from lots of PFS2 is that you need to be particularly careful when you have characters on opposite sides of the level 4 boundary -- but the same is true even in a non-mixed level party when you're designing fights. The jump from martials w/ and w/o striking runes is extremely noticeable. Monsters for above that tier have more HP as a result. So if the party is punching up, across that tier before they get their striking runes, the fights go longer than expected (and are already tough fights). if you have a mixed level party, the one-two combo of lower to hit, and 1/2 damage when you do hit, can be extremely disheartening. And the PFS level bump system doesn't help a lot -- but runic weapon can be a huge help -- especially if you're a 3rd/4th level caster whose 1st rank slots are less useful -- using that to help the lower level people catch up is extremely useful.

Most of the other damage increases (property runes, weapon specialization static boosts, bonus precision damage) phase in in ways that don't feel like an almost pure doubling and the jump in opponent HP feels more "diluted" as a result.

And if none of those work, you should be able to reach out to your region's VC for further help.

You don't need to split a split level chronicle into multiples sheets. Just annotate something like
10 TB at Level 2, 20 TB at Level 3 = XXX in the notes section
8 days downtime at level 2, 16 days downtime at level 3, etc

You can't split reputation on an AP chronicle in the first place so that's not an issue.

In pre-remaster I'm pretty sure it was possible. Haven't looked deep into the remaster rules yet to know if that changed.

But given than the +1 run is about half the price of the striking rune, it tends to never come up.

For a single anecdote about an encounter using this more lethal interpretation of the rules:

Last night we had an encounter, that knocked my character to dying 2 in the first round. The party healed me, I retrieved my weapon, stood up, and stepped away. (Under the old rules I probably would have struck). I had a reach weapon so with the step I could still attack next round, while forcing the opponent to spend an action to come to me (or more, likely, attack my closer allies since it appeared to be mindless.

Next round it put a lot of damage on an ally, but didn't drop anyone and we got some healing out. I missed with a spellstrike, used a hero point (had one remaining after this), still missed.

Next round it dropped our second frontliner (only dying 1).

Our primary healer was now out of spells, our secondary in-combat healer was down. We knew were in trouble. We also knew the enemy was getting low and had a weakness I could trigger.

Next round, I tried another spellstrike, missed, committed to winning the fight or dying, used my last hero point (lower). Second front-liner made the recovery check, so safe, but unconscious. Boss knocked out a third character.

We tried kiting the boss, stole two of its actions for one of ours each, but it still crit me, so dying 3. At which point the bard managed to finish it off. But we have no stabilize, no healing, no consumables (miscommunication about what we could purchase in the first place/lack of loot), no one up who was trained in medicine.

So we had one dying 3, one dying 1, and one unconscious. The dying 1 stabilized on her own. I passed my first recovery roll (dying 2), before we had any ability to help. By the next round we were debating having the bard try to administer first aid, untrained (spent the previous round getting the healer's tools off one of the downed combatants). (So my DC 12 flat check, versus her DC 17 @ +2, IIRC) We decided on my flat check. I made it -- dying 1. Next round same idea, but I failed --- Dying 3. Next round we decided to risk her DC 18 check. Since I would need three passes in a row and if either of the first two failed it was death. Felt roughly equal odds and wouldn't drag things out. She succeeded.

It definitely felt higher stakes. It still felt fair (and I'm someone who didn't like the new interpretation ahead of time). it highlights some lack of healing redundancy in the party, which I think was the greater problem than this version of the rules.

Historically, PFS1->PFS2 did not unlock any additional options in PFS1. T

Races were more locked down in PFS1 -- mostly only available via GM boons or convention rewards. ACP was an designed to help make ancestries a bit more available for people who couldn't attend conventions as a reaction to that system.

We've only had one edition change in Paizo's organized play campaign to compare to, so its hard to make any concrete predictions.

But for PFS1 - PFS2 ->
-- no new scenarios, with a deadlier final multi-table special to encourage heroic send-offs.
-- PFS1 older scenarios can still be run/reported
-- conventions can still get PFS1 boons (since PFS1 never had ACP and it wasn't retrofitted to it)
-- Some minor unlockable backgrounds for use in PFS2 based on playing enough scenarios for different PFS1 seasons.
-- A number of season 10 scenarios had hinted at hooks/ (legacy) boons that might have some effect in PFS2. Not all of these have been followed-up on, or had as much impact as people maybe expected though.
-- The Season 10 PFS1 guide was the final version, not updated going forward.

If we had 3-4 edition changes it would be easier to see what patterns have emerged, but with only one edition change, we can't really tell. There's also been a fair bit of staff turnover at Organized Play at Paizo so there may be a lot of new/different opinions on what they want to try when its time for SFS2.

That already exists on the Boons page, with all the normal ACP boons:

"Pathfinder Society (second edition) Replay Gain 1 replay, usable on any Pathfinder Society (second edition) scenario by any character.
40.00
Achievement Points - PFS(2ed)"

I believe immediately, means upon street date of the books dropping, not today.

See this post

Check the guide for the order of operations when applying credit

When a chronicle is applied, the following things happen in order: earn adventure gold, complete Downtime, then earn XP. Downtime occurs before leveling up, which affects alternate Downtime options including crafting. Items may be purchased at any time when not playing an adventure, so characters can level up before making purchases, which affects what items are available.

I believe in 1e there was a special note taking/monster knowledge boon that allowed inter-scenario tracking of that nature.

In a home game, I wouldn't consider it metagaming, but in PFS2 without some tracking (or having it directly mentioned in the summary) I can see the controversy. We don't know if you successfully recalled knowledge, we don't know if the party saw the special ability/weakness.

I think mine was a bit under 3 hours, (close to 3.5 total, but significantly more issues getting characters ready to go in foundry than usual that ate up about 30 minutes)

I'm trying to prep this one and running into more things that are confusing to me than normal:

A) On the briefing and Maze itself:
1) The briefing mentions only "giving a guided tour of the maze", doesn't mention Galt/Woodsedge as points to see along the guided tour.

2) The question/answer portion implies that the Maze is physically in Galt, rather than the extra-dimensional space I think its usually presented as.

3) The Q&A then says you're going through the Maze to get to Galt to enter the Maze.... It feels like we're being warped to far end of the guided tour and then coming back, which seems a little odd. Had we simply been teleported to Woodsedge under the guise of having a "normal journey back to the Grand Lodge through the Maze" that would have felt more clear I think.

B) On the Familiar Faces/Making a A Getaway bit: It feels a little odd to call out predominantly high-level scenarios -- Revecka and Waterfall are all from scenarios that are too high for the characters to have encountered. I know the sidebar calls out player, not character, but this is awkward from a "ask about a ton of different scenarios, across all the player's chronicles, and then it might not matter at all". Usual heavy callback scenarios are limited to a smaller number of relevant scenarios that are often signaled by Metaplot tags.

C) Mechanics
1) Navigate the Maze of the Open Road: 1 PC, all PCs? I think I've seen scattered reports of 1 PC being the answer, but adding it for posterity.

2) Napsu-Sign: IIRC all PCs have access to it, but would still need to spend a language selection on it. Additionally all PCs are expected to know a small subset of the language even without knowing the whole language. Is Taiwalei's usage here expected to be within the "freely known signs" (more akin to squad tactics hand sign signals) or is this something that PCs might not understand?

3) Robber Novices: Combat Pickpocket: Which restrictions is it intending to relax on the underlying Steal ability? I'm assuming its intended to bypass the automatic failure for in combat. Does it also bypass the Negligible bulk only restriction? Does it bypass the -5 for in a pocket/closely guarded?

4) Treasure Bundle checkboxes, sum to 16 treasure bundles, not the usual 10. I'm assuming the second line-item with the three check boxes should be "1 TB each time..." not "3 TB each time"...