Sebastian Hirsch's page

It's worth mentioning, that players might already have some experience with RPGs or even PF2 and SFS before they discover that organized play exists.
And while I think that they are likely not the best entry point into org play, they certainly are popular ^^

The description sounds neat, I am quite excited.

I was hoping that we get some scenarios that interact with Drift Crisis, I am already quite excited for the special and that storyline ^^

Honestly best to say in communication with your VC, it's faster than it used to be but depends on a couple of factors that are not a good fit to be discussed here.

It worked for me as well

Not to focus too much on the specific suggestion, but yeah we need a more expansive way to change characters.

Org play is unafraid to allow a lot of those things with PFS2 so we should dare to enable players in SFS as well.

Great blog I am looking forward to how the team is integrating the Skeletons into the Society with season 4. Thank you for that very thoughtful blog entry.

The discount for owning the pdf does seem broken at least if you just watch it on the site.

The faction looks neat, and yeah I share the pain of all the others that faction logos are not as available as they should be.

I think Royo is just stuck on another planet sorting some old books.

Congratulations Vanessa, to be honest, I was not aware of the staggering volume of products you have already authored - and to start with a standout scenario like "From Under Ice" (I have run this a fair number of times and always enjoyed it).

I think I'd like to have a go at Foundry, but one of our players uses a Chromebook.

Will a Chromebook be able to cope with Foundry's resource requirements?

You could always suggest to the player to try out using the character generation server graciously provided by one of the developers of PF2 on Foundry.

Foundry Character Building Server
For anyone wanting to try out character building in Foundry, there is a server accessible by all, specifically for building PFS PF2e characters, set up here: https://pfs-pf2e-builder.munsie.ca/

Note: You can leave the 'access key' area blank when logging in.

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And if the person is interested, they can find a decent number of org play games online that are offered on Foundry.

Leaving things behind seems quite reasonable and as GM Hmm, Pip Hig Horraya and Bailiff the Dog have mentioned, mounts are an option.

I am very happy about this announcement and hope that it will be a great experience for everyone involved.

My characters mostly hit people with manifested or physical weapons... maybe that's a good fit as far as the factions are concerned.

Another scenario from Isis, color me intrigued ^^

I very much appreciate that 100% of this bundle goes to charity, classy move.

I am very excited for those two scenarios and the fact that they are written by Rigby and Dennis, is a huge reason for that^^

Good luck wherever your carriers lead you ^^

As soon as you can access the formula for the item I would assume? Though even if you get the formula on a chronicle sheet, the craft DC might be somewhat channeling.

Is there a specific item you want to craft, we might be able to give you advice?

A spell in your repertoire is clearly not a Skill Training or Feat.

I believe FLite was attributing it to a "selectable class feature," which it certainly is, when he proposed 28 days.

PFS might want to decide how long they want retraining a spell in a spell repertoire to take (7, 28, something in between). 28 days of Downtime is 1.3 levels worth of advancement, which means you can swap out a spell sooner than you can retrain it in PFS, assuming that you only want to swap one at your next level-up.

From the Errata, which does not seem to have made it into the second printing

Page 481: Retraining. It wasn't clear how long it took to retrain spells in a spell repertoire, but it should take just 1 week. Add ". Some, like changing a spell in your spell repertoire, take a week." to retraining class features.

I very much approve you promoting this program and giving advice ^^

You could just stop talking about it, to avoid feeding the narrative that people wrote you a faction based on favoritism.

I am with Rich on this one, whether it is a copy or heavily inspired, I think it is a very bad idea to attach fictional characters to real people like this.

Guess I should have done more Starfinder recently as this is a bit of a spoiler for me, but at least Ziggy seems fine that is the most important bit.

I am very much looking forward to what evil thing John Compton has brought us these days

And yes that early sanctioning is really neat.

It is very rare that a chronicle sheet unlocks access to a spell, most of those will be gained via the ACP store.
To be frank, any spell from a book that is not listed in an ACP boon is very unlikely to appear on a Chronicle sheet.

Looking forward to another scenario by Jenny ^^

Thank you, Joe, this solution is very much appreciated.

Congratulations Tim ^^

Seems like a promising setup for the next year.

Congratulations to all ^^

I tend to agree with Kate that seems perfectly reasonable

ThaX is making an interesting point, narrower level bands might be something to try a bit more, though considering my experience with that level range in PF2 APs I feel like it is mostly fine (though anything that helps authors and developers is a bonus in my book and finding monsters that work over 4 level seems more challenging).

I can see an argument that ancestries and versatile heritages that have been available for ACP could become slightly cheaper as time passes on, particularly since we now have more non-ancestry options players can purchase.

The rarities are already set by the designers writing the books I would not want to deviate from that too much, though kobolds were a good opportunity reason to do so.

Leshy have already become available and they have been one of the first ACP options, I feel that discounting older material could work, as it kees the incentive of GMing and being able to access a cool new ancestry sooner.

We likely could have started with something like this, but now PFS2 org play already has a fair number of layers and systems (Pathfinder training, factions, boons etc.) so adding a system like this would make things even more complex.

It's fine for APs but it's worth remembering that APs are usually written for 4 players, a bit more flexibility in a fixed size group has different effects than adding this type of system to mixed groups of mixed sizes.

So you want the race that just takes the most iconic abilities from Kasatha, lashunta, Shirren, and Halflings, makes them better, and gives a negligible drawback? I really dislike these little blue mary-sues.

I very much agree with James here, and re Kobolds.. sure just make them cost twice or three times as much as the PFS2ACP boon.

I would not worry to much about this, and after all, you can still RP during combat that you are hoping/pleading with them to stop... unfortunately your enemies are not likely to listen. It can feel worthwhile to get a non-lethal weapon, it's ways easier to give people a chance of redemption if they are not dead ^^

Some history and insight into the moderation of the Paizo forums may be helpful here.

Forum moderation has not always been a thing customer service (CS) did. Long long ago it was done by a person who had a Community Manager title. That person had a lot of other responsibilities though. Forum moderation/community management has never been a position all on its own. And it should be. Moderating the forums is a full time job, and is a full time job for more than one person. When that person left the company their responsibilities were divvied up to other people, mostly to one other person. That person didn't just have a lot on their plate, they had about a dozen plates. When they later left the company their position was filled, but especially in having to figure out their job description, which at that time amounted to "do everything" some of their responsibilities were divvied up. Forum moderation became a CS responsibility.

One of the more frustrating things in CS was how much we were a dumping ground. If the powers that be didn't know who should be responsible for a thing it became a CS thing, and if a manager didn't want to deal with a thing it became a CS problem (one of the ones I vent about the most is when someone accidentally canceled all of the GenCon vouchers right after GenCon and it became CS's problem tracking all of them down and reactivating them, the second time they did it we pushed back on how much of our time that had wasted and that person had to do it themselves and to my knowledge it never happened again). We had an internal jokes, "this shouldn't impact customer service", because we were often told that. But everything the company does ends up impacting CS and more often than not becomes our problem. That was the case with forum moderation. None of us had any experience with any kind of community management or moderation. And none of were really keen on doing it (one of my colleagues full on refused as it wasn't part of our job description, "If the job description had included this...

Thank you for the fascination/horrifying insight into how messed up the situation is for the hard-working CS staff, and is likely going to stay until someone realized that cleaning up the forum is an awful job, that deserved recognition and sufficient time allotted to the task.

Having to juggle which responsibilities/colleagues to abandon more or first is bad for your mental health and I am always impressed how you managed to do this while still never being anything but perfect when it comes to actually communicate with customers.

To quote Stefanie Sterling "Crunch is not a triumph of the workforce, but a failure of the management. "

I am in the same boat as Nicole, having people who have been shaping the game for quite some time on the stream is very appealing to me (it's rather early in my time zone and I just woke up for this stream) but to be fair I already enjoy watching Thurston and Jennys Twitch streams. It has been quite some time since I had the pleasure of seeing some others like John Compton GM on stream.

Unfortunately, I just checked Paizo's Twitch page and this upcoming stream is not even listed on the stream schedule (which was the first place looked, wanting to avoid checking time zones).

To be fair I was never super happy with that boon and how it worked out with Ehu and the others, and that selection progress had some parts I personally disliked. There is a longer version of this, but essentially it felt like inviting fan fiction and that was not a positive aspect to me, as I enjoy other parts of this campaign.

I am very much looking forward to this stream ^^

Whenever you are GMing there is always some room for interpretation, for example, if your group consists of new players and our kids, it's perfectly reasonable for the GM to not always choose perfect tactics.
Most scenarios are also not super prescriptive when it comes to monster tactics, personally, I am a big fan of showing off all the weird monster abilities, instead of going to the option that causes the highest DPS.

Regarding Hero points, try to follow the guidelines in the CRB but also consider that there might be reasons to deviate from that (such as 6 player tables, the game seems to assume 4 players in most areas).

Regarding "thing someone heard in passing at a convention" I would personally ignore it until you get more details, or preferably until you get something in writing. Conventions are a busy time, and sometimes people make mistakes.

Awesome news, I feel like the Union will be great for everyone at Paizo ^^

Give it some time, someone might bring her back as an eidolon ^^

Love those kinds of blogs, and I am really keen to get my hands on some of the wonderful things in this book.

I think the current setup generally is pretty good at introducing items to players and letting players earn the occasional advantage during the scenario. It can be a bit awkward for some classes like alchemists, or wizards in the case of you finding scrolls, but in general, it still seems reasonable, and you likely will not find enough items for the whole party.

EDIT: There is also the consideration that locals or dead adventurers should have something that makes sense for them to have while in that area.

Welcome Jessica ^^ I hope the Canadian takeover of org play will be a lot of fun ^^

Alternate adjustments are certainly something to consider, though GMs could also consider just listing the scenario as "Scenario Name Tier 1-2", after all a lot of online conventions also do this for their specials.

Of course, that works better online than offline.

The art is nice, though I find it hard to match it to the playtest class, this seems to include more parallel evolution and not one big one, but I am looking forward to an improved version.

We appreciate all the hard work and super fast sanctioning Alex.