Oh, in that case, no, and you should contact customer service. My order has both the Starfinder playtest rulebook and the playtest adventure (though the order has not yet shipped).
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I am confused. I got my email for the order of the Starfinder Playtest Adventure but I have not gotten the email about the Playtest Rulebook yet. Are they sending them out separately? They are releasing playtest rulebook PDF for everyone simultaneously. There was an announcement up thread as well as an email that said:
This ended up being pretty wrong for the main piece material to the actual issue (timing of ticket), and question 4 (other steps needed) wasn't addressed at all. Here's the relevant part of the reply I got from customer service: Thank you for reaching out. If you are wishing to get the hardcover of the Seven Dooms for Sandpoint instead of the softcover version, we are asking customers to please preorder the hardcover book and to then email in customer service when your subscription order for the softcover is populated/ created. That way we can cancel your softcover edition and then your hardcover, once its ready to be shipped out, will be shipped to you instead.
If we want to have our Pathfinder adventure path subscription include the hardcover version for the Seven Dooms of Sandpoint adventure instead of the softcover version, what is the best approach to address that?Emailing CS or create a ticket in the Customer Support Portal Thanks - that's certainly a couple of ways to do it, but I was really looking for the kind of specifics that would spell out the overall best approach. I.e.:
Additionally, by posting the question here I was attempting to prompt them into giving that kind of guidance so it would be specifically available for everyone.
If we want to have our Pathfinder adventure path subscription include the hardcover version for the Seven Dooms of Sandpoint adventure instead of the softcover version, what is the best approach to address that?
I'll DM you.
I came here to post this, basically. I even picked the same class symbol on the same page as my point of comparison (against the Thaumaturge in the Dark Archive). PDF sizes have been all over the place and hugely bloated lately, and really needs to be addressed, but not like this.
For some reason, the PDF for this is enormous - it's 192 MB. By contrast, the core rulebook is about 80 MB. The entire Kingmaker AP + the Companion Guide together weigh in at about 160 MB. Most individual AP volumes weigh in between about 20-50 MB. Can someone please fix the PDF? It's large enough that it's actually inconvenient - it looks like Gatewalkers 3 has a similar (but not as bad) issue, as does the new Starfinder Drift Hackers volume (109 MB). Starfinder Adventure Path PDFs have had similar issues in the past, too.
Also, the mod team has had a significant amount of changes in the last 18 months or so. Any events prior to that aren't necessarily reflective of the current mod team's sensibilities. While I'm not familiar with the post in question, it would, at least, surprise me if no action would be taken by the current team if we saw something like that reported. As described, it would likely at least be a violation of rule 2: Be Kind and Respectful. That said, we also don't get into specifics on moderation actions taken with other users. If you see objectionable content, please report it.
The timing is coincidental, for the record. Planning started many months ago and it was always intended to highlight third-party creators.
I think Support must have been mistaken when the emailed me. They told me it’s already been updated to include the west wing but it clearly has not.any updates on this? also noticed issues with map labels not showing up on the maps but under them.I emailed support about the west wing. I was told they are fixing it and we should get an update soon.I cant find the west wing in the interactive maps. Am I blind? I can confirm that it has been, now. The "Date Download Last Updated" shows it was updated October 25th. You may need to click the Problems downloading this file? Click here link to regenerate it.
Paizo really needs to stop being the outlier on "buying the book doesn't get you the PDF". Even if just through your own store and not universally like through Bits and Mortar. They offer this as part of their subscription benefits, and they have for...13 years or so? I got my launch PF1 core rulebook with a free PDF and kept that subscription active through all but 2 rulebooks, I think. My Kingmaker 1e books came with PDFs with the subscription, too.
I'm surprised Starfinder rulebooks aren't called out. Are they staying at $9.99 or was their omission an oversight?
They mostly can't use alternate skills as direct substitutions. The one really reliable way is with Magic, using the Supernatural Solution action. Scholarship has Creative Solution, but that makes you reroll the same check with a bonus. You can also use Exploration to Hire Adventurers to end ongoing effects. For alternate approaches (like trade) there are ways to avoid agriculture or wilderness to get food on the regular, but establishing farms scales in a way that buying food doesn't. And that's just one example, the real danger is someone running the rules as-is, getting to level 8 or so and having their kingdom essentially fall apart due to ever-increasing failures on every random event. I would much rather spend my homebrew energy on more events or kingdom feats or skill actions that do new things instead of spending it patching the number of skills or adding a network of alternatives for each skill outcome my players can't achieve. Fixing the fundamental math frees up all that design space, because there aren't so many paths to failure to worry about. As a quick run through how I guessed my players might make their first kingdom based on the options, without first reading what everything did. I ended up with a -1 modifier with a Culture of 8. As I looked over the rules afterward, I realized I would have instead focused on getting Culture to 18, because Magic is truly the most important skill if you want to compensate for untrained skills later. Like, as-is you could totally justify throwing every point you could into Magic, including keeping Culture maxed despite the opportunity cost to other skills, and your kingdom would probably be better off for it. I just don't want the best solution to every problem in the kingdom to be "a wizard did it" (unless my players choose that route anyway - it will still be pretty good).
Thanks for pointing at James's take. I had read it before, actually, and decided I needed to make my own post. I think I came at the issue from a different perspective - it's systemic with the design, and not something that is best solved by tweaking the number of trained skills. PF2e's untrained proficiency math is best understood through the context of its playtest. It was really important for a few system design pieces in the original playtest (like always using skills as DCs for maneuvers and the basics of the +10/-10 crit rule) that no one was ever well below achievable results with their proficiency. So from the outset, an untrained proficiency bonus was equal to the level of the character -2. This was really important. But some people hated it. They didn't want their high-level wizard to be able to effortlessly climb a cliff or grapple mid-level foes just because their wizard was level 17. The designers tried making the untrained proficiency bonus level -4, but that was not enough for folks who had a specific character idea that depended on selective incompetence. And so for the release version, level to untrained proficiency was removed, a few important tweaks were made, and things went fine outside of a few specific pain points where level-based DCs reign supreme (like recall knowledge). They made sure things almost exclusively target AC/saves, because everyone is guaranteed to be at least trained there (barring wearing the wrong armor). This isn't that, though. It makes no sense for a kingdom to gradually lose the ability to establish a farm, just because there are more people. When there are tens of thousands of people, it should be easier to find someone capable of succeeding on the basic tasks to maintain a kingdom, not literally impossible. This is a surgical change that brings the numbers into a playable band (regardless of level), keeps the benefits of proficiency by allowing choices to still matter, and keeps every skill viable, though not necessarily reliable. Untrained skills will still be scary to roll, because crit fails will still be very easy. Just not almost guaranteed. Things like supernatural solution remain extremely powerful, but not literally the best option for half or more of your skills, with 95% percent of rolls for those skills otherwise resulting in a fail/critical fail for more than half your levels. As written, there's not the safety net of "another PC" having the skill you're trained in, because there are no kingdoms. You can't trade being good at skills with having fantastic hit points, or attack rolls, or anything, because kingdoms only have skills. Kingdoms are different. But the math isn't, and so this isn't a new fix. It's the very original approach, and it's just the simplest approach to balance everything for most GMs. There's no real downside to using it. Unless your players really, really want their kingdom to auto-fail boating rolls or something.
It would add more work in that you'd need to manually convert all the building construction DCs, and consider adding arbitrary level limits on when you could build them.Structures already have levels independent of their construction DC and can't be built until a Kingdom is at least that level. I wasn't 100% sure this was the case (from memory), but thanks for confirming that's built in and would still be fine if level was removed from DC.
Another option is to use the option of removing Level from DCs and skills. That's true, and it didn't occur to me despite literally checking the Proficiency Without Level alternate rule to see what the Untrained penalty was there. It might be preferable for players in 5e, using the 5e conversion Bestiary or something. The lower DCs would be more familiar for those players. Ironically, you might also want to still add the -2 for untrained just to make a bigger difference between untrained and trained, as recommended by the Gamemastery Guide for Proficiency Without Level. It would add more work in that you'd need to manually convert all the building construction DCs, and consider adding arbitrary level limits on when you could build them. But the control DCs would be a quick conversion, since you only need to rebuild the table once. I'll likely stick with scaling skills, but you've given me something else to think about. For armies, I'm not sure I want to mix/match the impact of level differences in characters versus the level differences on armies. I think at least some consideration will be in what tools I eventually use to track/automate things. Just scaling proficiency is likely going to be the more surgical approach.
I plan to change the proficiency bonus of Untrained Kingdom skills from a flat 0 (at all levels) to Level -2 instead.
some of the factors that make this a helpful approach:
Kingdom rules are kind of like an alternate PF2e universe where: - There were only 4 attributes - Each one tied to 4 skills, for a total of 16 skills - Every check uses one of the skills - Almost every important check was tied to a DC based on the PC's level (almost, but not exactly the table in PF2e's default level-based DCs) - There was only a single PC in the party, so no way to get someone else to cover the skills - The single PC got 6 trained skills, but could give up feat slots or skill increases (gets 9 of each) to become trained in more And as a result: - Untrained skills gradually become catastrophically bad, and at higher levels gradually become guaranteed fail/crit-fails. The PC is forced to become trained in those skills, giving up feats or other proficiency increases, or accept terrible results on 10 of 16 skills. I did some quick math, assuming the use of control DC, that size bonuses to those DCs increase (at levels 5, 10, 14, and 18), with the maximum attribute bonus (+4 to +6 at 20), with full status bonuses from leaders, with maximum item bonus for level (often not even possible, since they tend to be for specific uses of a skill), with no circumstance bonus, and with no penalties of any kind.
I would strongly recommend GMs tackle this in one of a few ways:
- The simplest to implement (and what I plan to do) is to change Untrained to scale with level, e.g., "level -2." DCs scale faster than level, so untrained skills will still gradually get harder to succeed with but generally still be possible under good conditions. They'll still lag behind trained (effectively at a -4), and will still be unable to do anything that requires trained. It's also very slightly worse at level 1 versus the base rules (proficiency gives -1 total instead of 0), but that's very minor. - A harder approach would be to manually determine which specific kingdom skill use cases should use non-scaling DCs (there are a few in the story, but really the only thing in the kingdom rules that doesn't is construction of specific buildings). This would also have an impact that higher-level kingdoms basically autosucceed at stuff that was possible for low-level kingdoms. - Somewhere in the middle is granting extra trained skills (maybe one for each leader role filled simultaneously), which still has catastrophic outcomes for some skills later, but just those specific skills (I'm not really a fan of this). - Add an alternate use for fame/infamy points, maybe for a guaranteed success - Add ways for the party to deal with the problems outside of the kingdom turns (which is called out for on a bunch of events as areas where the GM could add a quest) Some side effects of level -2 to untrained skills:
- The players are less likely to spend kingdom feats/skill increases on new trained skills. This seems fine, generally. It's still going to be tempting as the jump from untrained to trained is still +4. - The players might want more feats to pick from - they get 1 free, can pick 9, and there are only 17 in the book, so I might homebrew up a few more. - The kingdom is more likely to have a couple of skills it's just great at, as the players can spend them boosting skills up to legendary if they want. This mostly just keeps them at the same spot on the treadmill they were at level 1 if they were trained in the skill, anyway, due to the increased scaling for DCs. There are also a few mitigations possible for the party to tackle through optimization:
– They could spend a bunch of kingdom feats/skill increases on getting skills trained, but it feels almost forced. Probably mostly burning feats is the smarter call (even if it takes nearly all of them); since DCs scale, the only way to keep your top skills as easy at endgame as they were at the beginning is by boosting them up toward Legendary. There's also a bunch of buildings that require trained/expert/master to build at all. - They can do a lot of "Focused Attention" to get +2 circumstance bonuses. This is basically "aid" without penalty for failing the initial aid roll. The DC stays at 20 so it can become very reliable for trained skills. The Cooperative Leadership feat makes the benfit a +3, and when the kingdom reaches level 11 you can't crit fail at the aided check. - They could get a few other feats that make dealing with bad skills easier, like Practical Magic (making it cheaper to hire adventurers to solve problems + letting you roll magic for engineering) or Pull Together (flat check to turn critical failure into failure, not quite as effective when you're critically failing checks often). - They could embrace Magic and Supernatural Solution as the cure to all issues, prepping those in advance for skills that you know you'll roll, and trading Resource Points for competence elsewhere. This is still really good with non-catastrophic Untrained proficiency, but not as necessary. Some related challenges with skills: - Feats tend to give status bonuses of +1, despite it being trivial to start even your first Kingdom turn with +1 status bonuses to all skills (from 4 invested leaders across one role for each attribute). So for a lot of feats the math increase is useless out of the gate; it's probably worth changing those to circumstance bonuses - Kingdom size DC increases mostly negate the automatic increases in status bonuses from invested leaders - Assurance mostly won't succeed against control DCs due to DCs outscaling trained proficiency and size DC increases affecting the DC, not the roll - Kingdom events almost exclusively require a single skill to resolve (there are basically two story ones that have alternatives) - For random events, they're basically not going to benefit from item bonuses (from structures) because they won't be the specific skill use - Random events are also harder to plan for, since you didn't know they were going to come up so you probably didn't use Focused Attention or Supernatural Solution for the skill earlier in the kingdom turn. - Event DC modifiers range from -1 to +2 for random events, but are almost all +0 or +1 - Story events change the Event DC modifier range to -2 to +4 (!!!) but are more likely to have alternate resolutions (like "go do a thing") - Even a single point of unrest gives you a -1 penalty to every kingdom skill check; if you're at war, for instance, you get these every turn - Bad things that happen tend to give unrest/ruin, making further bad things more likely, so presumably kingdom roll penalty death spirals are a real possibility - Random events can give circumstance bonuses if a specific leader is a PC - for a party of 4, it can be a little better/worse than 50/50 depending on which 4 roles are filled by PCs - A bunch of buildings require trained/expert/master to build (none require legendary), so spending skill increases on just "trained" can cut off some options - Skills aren't created equal, but some of this is hidden from players (for example, 4 of the 16 skills are not used by random or story events)
Will Adventure Path subscribers be able to get a PDF included with their purchase of the physical book? I'm guessing the answer is no, but you know, wishful thinking!While it is our normal for us to offer subscribers a complimentary PDF if they preorder, we are not doing that this time due to the crowdfunding origin of this product line. I'll just say that, as a crowdfunding backer who has received both my books and my PDFs (who also has a lot of subscriptions): It neither benefits me nor takes anything away from what I have to give non-backer subscribers PDFs for pre-order. Just like it didn't take anything away from me when Paizo gave the crowdfunding backers PDFs for the original Kingmaker AP issues, despite doing nothing for me due to the fact I already had both physical and PDF copies from my subscription during the original run a decade + ago. I'd encourage your decision-maker on that point to reconsider.
I think they've mostly fixed the pricing, which was apparently showing as $29.99 for people who had the PDF. There was a comment on reddit that mentioned there was an error that they were addressing. I have the PDF (AP subscription) and the price for me is $19.99, which I believe is the intended price in that instance. If you don't already have the PDF, it's $29.99 to get both the PDF and the module. That is less of a discount than they were doing before, where the PDF price was entirely removed. The PDF by itself is $18.99. It makes it slightly less of an amazing deal if you already subscribe to the APs, but $20 for the amount of prep these take is still a great price for PDF owners, and $30 for both is extremely reasonable. But...I'm running Kingmaker next, so I'm mostly left hoping they actually tackle that one sometime in the next couple of months.
I am also a big fan of Sumatra Reader on PC, and the only thing I don't like about Xodo on Android is the subscription pricing model for the full features and the inability to set a fully black background without it. But yeah, inconsistent compression and the Starfinder AP issues being weirdly huge really needs to be fixed. They eat storage on portable devices in a really unpleasant way.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I do believe the developer behind the Kineticist has stated at one point that they have every intention of bringing the Kineticist over as a Full Class in 2e. That may not be what happens, but the intention seems to be there. Between that and fan desire, I'd be surprised to see it as anything less. Two points: - The folks who build new rules (and particular classes) are the designers at Paizo, not developers. The developers largely "develop" those rules and whatnot into adventures.- As I recall, Mark Seifter did the main design on the original kineticist for Paizo. He's also someone who is very careful not to speak in absolutes about future plans that aren't announced and cleared. I would be very surprised if there was a statement along the lines of "every intention of bringing the kineticist over as a full class in 2e." That said, there's certainly been commentary from Paizo staffers (including from Mark, during his time there) that it is a frequently requested class, and that if there's an opportunity where it makes sense it's entirely possible it reappears. Sadly, as Mark Seifter has left Paizo, it's much less likely that he leads the design effort in particular. Classes aren't something that Paizo is going to generally use a freelancer for, but maybe it would be a nice exception for at least the initial pass. The PF2e design team is still great and would do a nice job, but having the original PF1 class designer would be a nice touch for kineticist fans.
I agree that this is kind of a pointless question on the surface, as it's really just the standard disconnect of level in universe. But it's not new and is largely inherent to any system with levels, and very much subject to the adventure you're running. That said, I feel like this comes up more often with PF2e (subjectively, but this could just be a recency or sampling bias in my recollection). I wonder if the actual problem is that Pathfinder 2e high-level play is so viable and functional that more people are doing it and therefore end up running into the disconnect where previously they might have just started a new campaign.
It's been 3 full weeks since this post. Are there any updates? I don't wan to buy plane tickets if there's a decent chance my convention ticket won't be usable because you've oversold and there's a lottery or something to decide who can attend.
This whole blog is great, but the Robe of Feathers Fall is my favorite and Jon Morgantini deserves some extra kudos.
Sounds like the spirit that haunts the web servers working overtime to keep this thread appropriate for the "Website Feedback" forum.
Alas, I believe street date is the 26th or thereabouts, so you will not be able to use it. Nice! Alas, I'm picking up a PDF copy, so I will not have the same luck, but it will be super cheap at normal Starfinder rulebook PDF prices all the same.
Note that I think it's super neat when you go to a museum or something and see people actually cleaning fossilized dinosaur bones or whatever, but *man* I would hate that if it were me trying to do my regular job with randos watching. I remember going to the Smithsonian Zoo and going in the panda building where there was a room with several zoo folks watching monitors and pointing at it while talking. I have zero ideas what they possibly could have been talking about. All the pandas were in full-on sleep mode. I swung by again before I left the zoo and the pandas were still sleeping but the panda zookeeper "exhibit" was also empty. Anyway, pandas are hugely disappointing. The CS team is not, even if we no longer get to watch them work.
The other thing that was super weird about posting issues in the forum was that their order was changed if someone posted a thing in response. So when the CS team started on oldest to newest, some random other person could set a post back to the "end of the line" just by adding a comment like "I am also curious about this." It also meant friendly posters could answer the question if it wasn't something that CS specifically needed to address, but that was mostly useful when there was a huge backlog and sadly the person who often did that in a helpful way requested their account be deactivated (which I only know because it was public, on the forums - just an "interesting" observation). Anyway, I think it's clear that there were many good reasons for consolidating communications channels and funneling them to a ticketing system. Duplicate issues like that must have been such a nightmare. Whatever community effect is lost by not seeing the tickets worked in real-time like we're watching the CS team work behind a big glass window is worth the reduction in workload by having to correlate issues across multiple systems. I also agree that customers getting an automatic notice that the ticket exists is a no-brainer, and am surprised it wasn't set up that way already.
Alas, I believe street date is the 26th or thereabouts, so you will not be able to use it.
It puts the onus on the CS team to actually announce known issues, with a consistent place to check. There's nothing about the plan that strikese as inherently regressive in terms of quality of customer interaction, but like anything, it's a matter of execution. I mostly check the subscription threads to know what's going on, but a lot of times issues end up being discussed on product threads (PDF errors and whatnot) or other random places. Having one place where they get aggregated/announced once tickets start showing up on their internal system would actually be an improvement.
Mine covered the outside of the lighthouse section with bedrolls rigged up to block the light. It's been fine so far...
Any way that oft-requested image could be posted to the GM forum for the AP or something? It would be immediately helpful for those of us actively running the existing volumes of the campaign.
I saw this, wondered about my own copies, and ended up hunting this down a bit. Page 80 has an error in the *next* volume (book 4, Secrets of the Temple-City), not this one (book 5, Hurricane's Howl). The monster has the same name tag for the image as the page 80 monster in this one (Golgopo). Page 92 in this one (book 3, Hurricane's howl) has the preview for book 5 (Doorway to the Red Star) instead of the preview for book 4. It appears to match the preview in the next volume (which is correct) exactly. Both mistakes appear to be in my PDF and printed copies. I assume every copy is affected. Both are very minor and do not bother me in the slightest.
Anyone else seeing the word Golpogo on the creature art on page 80 of their PDF? Looks like it was copied from the previous volume somehow. Yes, I have the same thing in both my PDF and printed copy. Doesn't bug me, since I extract out the images anyway so it won't have that label, but interesting error.
My experience matches Zaister's. Page 80 has an error in the *next* volume, not this one. The monster has the same name tag for the image as the page 80 monster in this one (Golgopo). Page 92 in this one has the preview for book 5 instead of book 4. It appears to match the preview in the next volume (which is correct) exactly. Both mistakes appear to be in my PDF and printed copies. Both are very minor and do not bother me in the slightest.
Hey, xNellynelx, there's a pretty easy way to get images out of Paizo's PDFs, which also solves the weird transparency issues that sometimes occur with the "save as" method. I wrote a post about it a year and a half ago: Ignore the thread topic, this was a specific issue with some of the maps. Big thing there is use TokenTool, which has been updated to include exporting to webp format and to export all the images at once. I can confirm it reads the Night of Gray Death map image on page 9 just fine, and because the text isn't actually part of the image, that is not included in the extract, just like you want.
Hey, there's a pretty easy way to get images out of Paizo's PDFs, which also solves the weird transparency issues that sometimes occur with the "save as" method. I wrote a post about it a year and a half ago: Ignore the thread topic, this was a specific issue with some of the maps. Big thing there is use TokenTool, which has been updated to include exporting to webp format and to export all the images at once. I can confirm it reads the Night of Gray Death map image on page 9 just fine, and because the text isn't actually part of the image, that is not included in the extract, just like you want.
Sorry, I didn't realize that the question was unfriendly. My English is poor. Please forgive it. Your English is fine, and there is nothing to forgive. You just had the misfortune of asking the same question as a bunch of trolls for whom kindness is a second language. Those folks like to start with supposedly innocent questions and then use out-of-context answers in arguments. Welcome to the forums.
Hello James. Does the reply here represent the official attitude of Paizo or your personal opinion? I'm going to assume this is being asked in good faith. James answers a lot of questions on a lot of topics. I doubt Paizo will ever have an official position on Mario movie casting. I'd encourage you to take a look through the history of this thread to get a sense of this, but James offers his personal opinions and does not try to speak for Paizo as a whole. There is rarely an "official attitude of Paizo" even for Paizo content, since Paizo's work is made by people with diverse viewpoints. For questions aimed at James, your best bets are stuff that align to his role as creative director and things he's personally worked on. Even things like the lore of Golarion, for which he is and has been a driving force since the beginning, is built from contributions of many different people. Sometimes he has final say on Pathfinder lore stuff, sometimes not. Additionally, the answer to a lot of questions is and will be expected to vary in home games, because a lot is left to the GMs. Beyond that, he is a source of good gaming advice generally. Edit: of course, he beat me to replying anyway.
The parts that I think are really important:
Whether that does anything to address the specific situation that led to the CS team departures is beyond my capacity to evaluate.
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