Sebastian Hirsch's page

Congratulations to the new campaign coin holders and 5 Nova/Star GMs, without dedication like yours this campaign would be a pale shadow of what it is today.

Best to give this one a couple of days/weeks until people have recuperated from Paizocon.

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.

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 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 ^^

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.

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.

Congratulations Tim ^^

Congratulations to all ^^

I tend to agree with Kate that seems perfectly reasonable

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.

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).

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 ^^

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

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.

Considering his previous body of work, and the always super professional communications I had with him when I needed help with an order, I am very much looking forward to Starfinder Society #4-08: Precious Cargo, and his future body of work.

All of these sound amazing, but I am really looking forward to Nicole's scenario since I very much enjoyed her bounty.

Leshy are free these days as far as ACP are concerned, so no new races until you finish your greens (i.e. reach level 20)

I could add a "share pictures of your food to make Tineke envious" channel if you like ^^

Thank you to Alex, Mike and everyone else that made this possible ^^

Which anime is that with the period drama watching dragon?

Since you and Jared asked the name is

TSUKI GA MICHIBIKU ISEKAI DOUCHUU also known as Tsukimichi: Moonlit Fantasy it recently got an anime adaption... for which I spoiled myself by reading the entire manga (which is not finished yet).

Edit:

To actually add some actual points, I am mostly for an easy way to get everything that avoids having to deal with culture or region, this might be a very personal thing but the choices you make and how you want to express yourself matter more than where you are coming from or how you grew up.

(I mean, the mere fact that people are saying "I can't have a samurai without my Katana" when Katana were *not* the iconic weapon of the samurai, (they were primarily and famously horse archers) does a pretty job of illustrating this...)

To be fair that might be a history buff argument, many players might have other sources of inspiration. I just read a manga where an "ugly" Isekai protagonist explained some katana and wakizashi facts to their "Samurai" who is actually a dragon that changed her shape after watching memories of Japanese period dramas... the point I am making badly is that one person's interpretation of something can be shaped by many things.

I guess reframing the argument slight does help, it's less "I absolutely need this weapon for my character" but rather "I would like this option for my character, that is in the book I have purchased, how can I get it, and if it is hard, why?"

EDIT: Also, Jade Regent Book 6 does have a fair number of katanas and wakizashi and naginata, though those characters also had longbows so everyone kinda has a point

I think one reasonable solution, that might be viable from both sides of the argument is to just give us another boon that can unlock most items because the Society in Absalom should like be able to access or craft it.

Honestly, even if there is a single character in there with legit access to the weapon, letting others inspect it and create a formula, that seems very much in the spirit of cooperation, even if a smith might have to spend some ACP to get access to the formula or the item.

I think for nonmagical equipment... scenario access should be an alternative option that is essentially free for the character that has received it.

Honestly, the main issue is that while org play is using this rule, it is supposed to be a general rule, not one made for org play, or at least that is my understanding. Basically, this isn't an org play rule and likely could use a FAQ at some point.

I personally ignore this rule and a lot of the access rules in my adventure mode home games though.

At this point, the drawbacks are a major reason why I am not even particularly keen to test the class. I have some other issues, but it seems like a lot of work and points juggling for no real benefit as far as gameplay is concernend.
It feels a bit like the class wants you to have more and more EP, wants you to spend them, wants you to get into combat, but also wants you to punish you for getting into combat.

It seems unclear if or when the Evolution Points reset. Options might include:
at the end of combat, when the combat no longer includes a significant enemy, after a 10-minute rest, after resting for the night...

This seems to be pretty important since it might open up some out-of-combat use for those abilities. Unfortunately giving players an incentive to extend combat duration, does seem at least a bit problematic.

I am not so sure about the danger of flooding people with good advice, I came back to Painlord's guide several times over the years. Unfortunately, forum posts are not always super easy to update.

I have fond memories of using Painlords suggestions, and while the system has changed I do not see the ones in the opening post in a negative light, they seem to be good-natured suggestions for new players, combined with a couple of best practices.

Giving new pointers some potential ways how they can improve, and positively affect the table is not a bad thing.

I agree with BNW and pretty much avoid it when possible (if requested I can run a scenario with it and make it entertaining, I think the GM really has to at least try to make it fun, but as a player I avoid it).

Unfortunately, that has lead to me missing some important scenarios, and kinda damaging my interest in SFS. If to slog through something I personally do not enjoy to get the whole experience, I am not sure that the experience is worth having (for me).

Some sort of GM opt-out of having to do it (ideally in a way that can be communicated before the game so everyone is on the same page) might be a solution. So the players and GMs that want to use this minigame can come together and have a great time.

I like a lot of things about Starfinder and SFS, but losing 30-60 minutes doing something I do not enjoy is not really super attractive. And that is before you consider the issue of Starship boons and other ship frames (which takes up time when you start and makes it tricky for the GM to prepare ship stats and run a smooth game).

Paizo is producing a lot of content these days, and even though the changes will be unpleasant for some, protecting your employees from burnout is absolutely the right call.

Nefreet just asked how the other side of the argument looks like, so I tried to explain what another interpretation might be (though I did not do that very well).

I do not have a horse in this race, I just wanted to explain that once someone has made up an interpretation about how something works (likely based on the first printing) it can be tough to change that.

And as far as rules discussions are concerned, they are usually not worth having during the game.

Stellar work, I was already looking forward to get back into SFS properly but now I am really getting excited ^^

A guide on "how do do nepotism right" sounds lovely ^^

I think the ACP cost for ancestries is fine, mostly because it motivates players to GM and to attend conventions, more importantly, everyone can earn everything through participation in org play. Nobody is locked out by their proximity to certain big physical conventions, their own mobility, or their preferred type of play (live, online, pbp, pbd etc.).

I have been running a fair bit online and will continue to do so even after in-person gaming picks up again ^^ The opportunity to play with people from all over the world is just too great ^^

Unsurprisingly that Leshy illustration is absolutely stealing the show, looking forward to the new scenarios ^^

I am pretty happy not having to deal with Asmodeus on the player side.

I would be in favor of an option that removes an effect without having to roll, particularly for curses etc.

I personally have mixed feelings, while I would not attend a convention without masks (until we are in the high 90s as far as vaccinations are concerned) I would not spend much time there or GM... it's just a bit too rough on me... if I speak for more than 10 minutes with a mask, I am close to losing my voice.

Players being able to select text is a feature, not a problem, I came to that conclusion after thinking about how people that need to use screen readers might be able to read their chronicle sheets. Of course, it also offers other benefits, for example, players can copy the text of boons into their online character sheet (though that is admittedly rare with recent releases).

Of course, you can always add additional security, but I find it hard to justify it these days.

Nefreet wrote:

Online Guide Team Lead - JTT wrote:

Those seem to all be relevant to the search term?

None of them were.

I don't know if I'm the only person who does this, but I'm hyperlink happy, and I like to link directly to everything from feats to equipment to spells and anything related to my character so I can reference it quickly during a game.

Having seen one of his Roll20 characters, I can attest to the fact that Nefreet needs professional help for his hyperlink addiction.

:)

Honestly, while there are diminishing returns, it's not a bad practice.