Tehanaru's page

Bit late to the party, but Wizard getting Magical Crafting at first level and being able to use Arcana instead of crafting for arcana trait magic items would be a nice bump and help differentiate them from other arcane casters. A lv10 feat for two scrolls just doesn't cut it, I think.

Also, a third focus spell, because the feat to give someone ELSE a focus point feels like a slap in the face for the class that can't get a third one without multiclassing.

Maybe putting focus spells in the spellbook, and making them subject to the Learn a Spell activity? They'd still have to be Arcane, of course.

I like the idea suggested near the beginning of the thread to remove curriculum slots. They end up being clunky and bad. I made a War Wizard and at higher levels being forced to put attack spells in my level 1-3 slots meant that slot basically didn't exist.

I'd love to see all 4 slots used for whatever the player wants - but keep the curriculum spells. Give the Wizard the bonus proficiency that Fighters get, but only on their curriculum spells. Just like Fighters specialize in a single weapon group.

That gives Wizards the class fantasy of "master spellcaster".

Feats and Focus spells need serious love as well, as has been said several times in this thread. Some of the feats or thesis should become class features. Spell Substitution is too good compared to other thesis, IMO. Make it a class feature and give yourself more design space to add other arcane thesis.

Honestly this compromise is fine! I was very upset about the initial kerfluffle, but as far as things go now I'm satisfied.

I assume there was some good reason for Paizo having to make changes, and I imagine this version gives them what they need, while also respecting their 8 year relationship with the amazingly dedicated fans that make up the AoN team.

I would love for the next company policy announcement to be one that doesn't spark community rage. Paizo has done those! I loved their handling of the establishment of the Union.

Here's to many years of great games, and a very healthy Paizo that has a great relationship with its fanbase.

While I appreciate Ronald's content, him being a lawyer adds institutional believability to his statements which, IMO, isn't really supported by what he actually then states in his video.

His video is an opinion piece, from a very pro-AON viewpoint. His methodology seems to be coming more from an activist standpoint rather than what I would a lawyer expect to state, i.e. try to cite points from both sides with an equally open mind, and then corroborate them from a legal IP protection standpoint.

He still brought things well together at the end of the video, but as someone who has worked for a patent attorney for the last seven years, I was a bit irritated by his one-sided delivery in the middle of it.

He wasn't in a courtroom. I've had lots of conversations with lawyers where they just state what they consider to be the most likely legal opinion / fact, even if there are nuances - because they think the likelihood is very high that the opinion they're stating is true.

Also, his main commentary as a lawyer was about process, not law. His main legal comments were about his opinion of how long it would take to perform the tasks that Jim was talking about as "costs" for keeping AoN's partnership.

Like many people knowledgeable in business here, he agreed that it didn't seem like a big time sink.

AFigureOfBlue wrote:

If there is a subscription available for physical product line, shouldn't all* that's theoretically involved in making a subscription available for digital ones be to have another such subscription option, at a different price point and which doesn't charge shipping?

Noting I am NOT an expert on online stores, inventory management, custom coding, or much of anything else involved in answering this question, and I have been out of the internal loop at Paizo for 7 years, I have run into weird limitations with what game company storefront can and can't do (purely as a layman exposed to this stuff secondhand in team meetings for various companies over 26 years).

I don't know if it is still true, but 7 years ago one of the issues Paizo faced was having their storefront, shipping program, warehouse maintenance program, royalty to 3pp program, blogs, and subscription management all be integrated. Selecting items for subscriptions and when they got sent out manually gets both really expensive in terms of labor-hours and has an annoyingly high error rate.

So you need subscriptions to track who has a thing coming, set up the order to send it, generate a shipping label, track when it was shipped, and add any pdfs going with it, remove the physical item from listed inventory totals, all automatically. I know what programs (or pieces of programs) you use for all this can have a huge impact on what the end integrated system can do.

From what I have been told over the years, if you had to start with a system designed exclusively for shipping physical goods, because it was what you could afford that did everything you needed for physical product--and you could add a system that added sending an email with pdfs for any appropriately tagged physical book order--that system might NOT be able to automatically send pdfs monthly without having physical books connected to them.

And changing that may not be fast or simple, especially after layoffs.

This sounds depressingly plausible from corporate shipping systems I've worked with.

I still think it's ridiculous that in 2025? 24? when the store launched, that a pure PDF subscription wasn't baked into the original spec for the new site. Especially post-covid.

I love physical books, but my players and I are spread over three continents! Physical media is less important to us, and as others have said, good luck getting Paizo products shipped internationally.

You'll pay double AT BEST. This isn't Paizo's fault, but it's not mine either.

Tehanaru wrote:

To paraphrase someone's elegant statement from reddit...

If Demiplane has no haters, send my mother flowers, for I am dead.

Haha! That was literally me! I'm glad you appreciated it! x'D

Very much so!

I think the "this is fine, leave Paizo alone" crowd is downplaying how brutal it would be to be in AoN's position.

You work for 8+ years on a passion project for a company and game you love. Evenings and weekends spent and gone.

Your work is rewarded with unending praise from fans and the company has such confidence in your efforts that they inscribe your website in indeleble ink in their books.

Then, out of the blue, you receive an email from John Paizo letting you know that your agreement is terminated TODAY, and a lawyer is about to confirm that and remind you of all the terms of your agreement ending.

Shellshocked, you express disappointment and ask for clarification on what you can do going forward.

Your clarification questions are not answered. You are given some fluff about a different agreement, but nothing concrete to go on.

Can you blame them for feeling stung and wanting to be out of their obligations to Paizo ASAP?

I'm genuinely impressed at their maturity in not only keeping the site up, but also keeping all their subscriptions going. I would not have been that generous.

To paraphrase someone's elegant statement from reddit...

If Demiplane has no haters, send my mother flowers, for I am dead.

Tehanaru wrote:

toby.kind wrote:

Tehanaru wrote:

toby.kind wrote:

NA Palm wrote:

1. Unexpectedly give them 1 month to do an enormous amount of work scrubbing every image off their website right when you are about to be gone on vacation and be unable to answer emails.

Nethys said in the video FAQ only posted in their patreon that Paizo gave them 6 month grace period and it's actually a single hour's work to remove the images from the website. It was AoN's choice to remove all of the images immediately as the partnership ends. It wasn't Paizo's expectation or demand.

Watch the FAQ and don't spread misinformation

They also explained in the FAQ why they didn't want to use the 6 months.

One of the primary reasons being that they were fed up with the whole ordeal. This has certainly damaged the relationship between Paizo and AoN, which is sad to see.

Yes, 'ripping the band-aid off' was part of the explanation as well, which just seems to aggravate the impact of it on the community, would be nice to have the art for 6 more months, you know.

I wonder if it has to do with having a bigger reaction to what happened?

I'm guessing it has a lot to do with selflessly offering their time and effort for 8 years, only to be tossed aside with same-day notice and then ghosted.

Might have had something to do with a desire to completely separate from Paizo as quickly and completely as possible without taking down the archives.

I think they have every right and I wish we knew that in their statement: "We had 6 months to do it but actually we will do this immediately because of our emotions in the matter"

IMO that was given in the emotional tone of the video. However, I know that not everyone can read that. I have several friends and a spouse that would have missed that cue entirely.

steve0105 wrote:

I'm just saying, hundreds of angry posts from everyone involved calling for any kind of extreme action like boycotts, canceling subscriptions etc without even knowing the entire picture, within 24 hours of any issue occurring is not a good thing, no matter who you support.

Ypu aren't personally doing it, fine, but there are people who see any post, take it the wrong way, and pour vitriol out.

Cancelling subscriptions doesn't have any immediate harm until subscriber day rolls around. But unlike the spending that AoN drives to Paizo, it's an easily quantified number. It shows that people are upset about it, and that community sentiment has business implications. The way this decision is being presented by Paizo is that the numbers in a spreadsheet added up to a negative number. That ignores all of the additional revenue that AoN has contributed by existing, especially in its current form. Cancelling subscriptions puts a number on the price of ending the agreement. Whatever extra money they expect to make from this action will have to outweigh that. Sometimes the only way for change is for a mob to start sharpening their pitchforks.

I waited to cancel 5 of my 8 until after I read the blog post. It doesn't justify how stealing assets will be changed without that art being on AoN, and the tone further hurts my perception of the company (especially in the last paragraph). Having now watched the AoN Patreon video, their initial announcement was quite generous in excluding parts that are embarrassing to Paizo.

Personally, it's also embarrassing for me to see Paizo acting like Hasbro. Not wanting to support the latter, I was able to convince my group to play Pathfinder 2e instead of 5e (after complaining about the OGL fiasco, attempted rug pulls, etc.). And I was only able to actually convince them to play (and therefore justify my continued buying of most of Paizo's books) because of AoN. It feels hypocritical to keep buying from Paizo after anti-community...

I'm also deeply worried that Demiplane will be the new PRD.

And if it is... then my bigger fear is that this is the end of AoN. Not today, of course. Probably not even in the next 5 years.

But I'm an old gamer and I've seen stuff like this go down before. First a partner loses official support, and then the general licensing deal worsens, and then all of a sudden there's only the "official" avenue allowed, even though that option is far worse than the fan version.

I really, really hope that won't happen. But that's the fear that's been in the back of my head this whole time.

When Jim Butler wrote (paraphrasing) "we're dropping our partnership with AoN because they haven't made us enough royalties" - I hear, "So we're finding someone who will."

Tehanaru wrote:

toby.kind wrote:

NA Palm wrote:

1. Unexpectedly give them 1 month to do an enormous amount of work scrubbing every image off their website right when you are about to be gone on vacation and be unable to answer emails.

Nethys said in the video FAQ only posted in their patreon that Paizo gave them 6 month grace period and it's actually a single hour's work to remove the images from the website. It was AoN's choice to remove all of the images immediately as the partnership ends. It wasn't Paizo's expectation or demand.

Watch the FAQ and don't spread misinformation

They also explained in the FAQ why they didn't want to use the 6 months.

One of the primary reasons being that they were fed up with the whole ordeal. This has certainly damaged the relationship between Paizo and AoN, which is sad to see.

Yes, 'ripping the band-aid off' was part of the explanation as well, which just seems to aggravate the impact of it on the community, would be nice to have the art for 6 more months, you know.

I wonder if it has to do with having a bigger reaction to what happened?

I'm guessing it has a lot to do with selflessly offering their time and effort for 8 years, only to be tossed aside with same-day notice and then ghosted.

Might have had something to do with a desire to completely separate from Paizo as quickly and completely as possible without taking down the archives.

Offering a "Deal without details" is nothing.

And it doesn't seem that AoN particularly wants to make deals with Paizo right now. I don't blame them!

NA Palm wrote:

1. Unexpectedly give them 1 month to do an enormous amount of work scrubbing every image off their website right when you are about to be gone on vacation and be unable to answer emails.

Nethys said in the video FAQ only posted in their patreon that Paizo gave them 6 month grace period and it's actually a single hour's work to remove the images from the website. It was AoN's choice to remove all of the images immediately as the partnership ends. It wasn't Paizo's expectation or demand.

Watch the FAQ and don't spread misinformation

They also explained in the FAQ why they didn't want to use the 6 months.

One of the primary reasons being that they were fed up with the whole ordeal. This has certainly damaged the relationship between Paizo and AoN, which is sad to see.

I don’t disagree with anything you quoted though. That’s not some spooky out of control anger, that’s me being reasonably upset and disappointed with how they’ve handled this and why. And I still am. The negotiations, to the minor extent they even turned out to be real given they’re alleged to be one or two emails with vague offers, weren’t conducted in a fair or sincere manner and the situation everyone is in is still a direct result of Paizo rushing to pull the plug on volunteers out of nowhere.

This whole mess could have been avoided, to the extent they ever had to do it at all (which still isn’t clear), had Paizo communicated properly with anyone at AON before ending the contract and ghosting them. There’s no secret info we haven’t got that can possibly justify Paizo’s botched handling of whatever they’re trying to do here. All it can do is help explain it.

So I’m not sure what you’re trying to prove with that post. I’m not one of the ones calling for boycotts, nor did I in that post.

Very much this. I'm not calling for Paizo's destruction, nor do I want it to happen.

But I am supremely annoyed with the company right now. It also makes me wary of ever working with them in the future, should I want to become a content creator or the like. It's something I've considered, but right now working with Paizo looks like a headache I don't need.

YuriP wrote:

Even though AoN is free—featuring images and receiving rules updates relatively quickly, yet being neither a physical book nor a PDF—it drives sales for the system's actual books, supports games for players who don't own the full library, expands Pathfinder's reach, and attracts new customers to Paizo.

Please give me some non-anecdotal evidence. I am not being dismissive, I have not seen any proof of this apart from "Oh, my table and everyone I know says this".

I could be completely wrong about this, I just want something that is concrete and in numbers.

So far there's been a huge outpouring of these stories from people on this forum and on Reddit. The stories are all very similar, people instantly recognize the experience of those others with the same kind of introduction to the game.

No, this isn't a scientific study, but it certainly points toward a large body of people for whom AoN was the thing that brought them to Pathfinder. And I think if you added up all the money those folks that made posts spent on Pathfinder, even without seeking some broader percentage of the total fanbase, you'd come up with a hefty sum!

It's going to be very difficult to get concrete numbers about this without doing an actual consumer/sociological study, which I don't think anyone has the resources or inclination to do right now.

Asurasan wrote:

Just to ask a question on this(and in good faith), but it's something I've never seen said before. Are you implying AON was compensated financially and contractually by Paizo for their partnership over these past 8 year? And I mean this in Paizo is paying them for the 'service' of hosting the PRD? That nuance hasn't been stated in anything I've seen so far.

My general understanding was that AON has a 'commercial agreement' through their 'license' which allowed them access to assets and resource that they used to host a community site.

If Paizo has been paying them(someone at AON) for this service, it makes sense that they would have a 'cost' they are cutting.

I am not saying that.

I am saying the contract was a legal business arrangement, not AoN doing Paizo a favor. And AoN sought that contract when Paizo had an open call about it.

To the best of my knowledge, Paizo did not give AoN any money. But I don't know ANY of the terms of the contract. I don't BELIEVE Paizo was paying AoN money. But I also do not know what AoN felt they were getting from the contract that made them seek it out and sign it eight years ago.

It sounds like the main benefits were early access to pdfs and images, so that they could make a better archive. Clearly there was no money flowing to AoN since Paizo was seeking royalties iff any money got made by AoN, but not expecting that to happen.

I don't know what AoN could possibly have otherwise gotten out of the relationship. And it also explains why they're not keen on the deal Paizo is offering. They're losing what they wanted in the first place, and in return Paizo is offering them something they already get from their own personal subscriptions to Paizo products.

AsheIsAmazing wrote:

I suppose that's fair, but I'm willing to give AoN leniency given they're volunteers. I think Paizo gets a lot of free-to-cheap labour from them as it is.

Paizo and AoN had, until now, a comerical license. The relationship between AoN and Paizo is not one of volunteers.

Now, are there volunteers doing things for AoN? Very clearly yes, and I love them to death.

But they aren't volunteering work for Paizo. Indeed, In think it would be illegal for them to volunteer to do work for Paizo. They volunteer their work for AoN, and AoN has a business contract (now ending) that spells out the legal duties of each side.

I understand why AoN thought the ball was in Paizo's court. I understand why Paizo thought the ball was in AoN's court. I, personally, would have reached out again if there were any unanswered questions about negotiations, before I amde a public announcement. I also would have told Paizo, who are AoN's business partners until the 24th, before I made a public announcement.

This WHOLE thing sucks. But I don't feel EITHER side was as proactive about communication as they needed to be under professional standards.

Look, Paizo had the legal right to do everything they did. That doesn't make it morally right, or the best thing to do for their relationship with the community.

There are plenty of people in these two threads - myself among them - who are okay with changes to the Paizo / AoN relationship. If things have to change for business reasons, okay.

But what we're not okay with is what we feel is a tone of dismissal of AoN's efforts from Paizo, and Paizo's lack of communication. That lack of communication which is becoming a pattern.

Certainly, there are different perspectives all over this thread. But I think there's a big chunk of folks who are saying - necessary or not, this was very badly handled! And we keep seeing things handled badly, and we're going to go ahead and voice our concerns about that.

Which is totally okay! I've said earlier that I'm going to keep buying Paizo products, as have other people. I'm very much not calling for a boycott against Paizo. That doesn't mean I have nothing to criticize about their behavior.

I don't want them to become the kind of company that runs roughshod over community partners, and when I see something that looks like that behavior, I'll say something.

Tehanaru wrote:

To the point that I think it's fair to say that Paizo looks like a completely different company without that 8 year partnership. And it would be good to see that acknowledged

Okay, I GET you don't feel Paizo is valuing the relationship strongly enough, and I am fully noting that I cut your very clear description of your desire to see more of that from the quote above.

But, as to the separate issue on acknowledgement, does this honestly NOT feel like an acknowledgement of how great AoN has been?

Jim Butler wrote:

Archives of Nethys is one of the most beloved and widely used resources in the Pathfinder and Starfinder communities. It has helped players learn our games, explore new ideas, build characters, and share their excitement with friends around the world. We are deeply grateful for everything Archives of Nethys has done.

The dedication, care, and passion that AoN has brought to its work has made it a pillar of the Pathfinder and Starfinder ecosystems. Their efforts have supported countless tables, inspired new players, and strengthened the connection people feel to our worlds.

If it was at the end of the blog post, yeah, I would agree with you.

Instead, it was at the beginning, and the blog post ended with a snipe against the volunteers running the site, while the body content included a bunch of information about how this website that we all agree is cool is just too dang expensive right now.

So instead of sounding like an endorsement of the value that AoN has brought to Paizo and Pathfinder/Starfinder, it sounds likes Jim is saying, "These guys are cool and all but..."

Frankly, Paizo is incredibly lucky the AON crew are are magnanimous and fair as they are, cause they could easily just go "you don't think our free labour is making you enough money to give us the bare minimum our partnership requires? Cool, then AON is shutting down and you can see first hand just how vital we were to your game/business functioning well. Then you can scramble to host, hire people to build, and pay people to data input and maintain a PRD resource like ours. Maybe then you'll appreciate just how cost effective and priceless officially supporting us in full was for you".

I wouldn't really be able to blame them if they did tbh, catastrophic as it'd be for my group's ability to play the game as smoothly as we do. Which, yeah, that's exactly what I'm getting at.

Indeed! AoN is spending their own time to create a resource that Paizo used to do in house and make it far better than Paizo did it.

They're bringing people into the hobby.

People are acting like AoN existing is a universal fact of the world, but it isn't! As volunteers they individually and collectively have a breaking point. Hopefully we're not anywhere near that point, but there absolutely is a point where they decide it's not worth all the extra effort and bail.

And when that happens, both the community and Paizo both lose hugely... and the AoN people get their weekends and evenings back. (and also lose as members of the community)

Anything that moves us closer to that circumstance - which from the AoN communication certainly seems like their enthusiasm has been dampened - is really bad! And that's why people are so upset at Paizo.

Like, this window called AoN is really important to the house we all live in! We agree that you didn't break the window yet, but could you please stop punching it?

We've had a few questions already about this part, so I wanted to address it here:

Quote:

When we first broke the news to Archives of Nethys that we were going to end the license, we offered a marketing agreement to make the change less impactful, but those conversations were not concluded before they chose to publish their notice. We remain open to discussions with Archives about ways to support the site in a manner that is less resource‑intensive and more protective of Paizo IP going forward.

When we first were told about the partnership dissolution on 6/24, Jim did suggest that we could do some marketing agreement that would allow us to keep the art up for longer and make it easier on the AoN team to remove. We were never told the details of this agreement beyond the offer being made. I emailed them again on 7/1 to confirm some other answers to my questions about the partnership dissolution, but got a response from Jim that he was out of office and we could discuss a marketing agreement on the following week. Perhaps I misunderstood and the intent was for us to lead that discussion, but from my perspective I was waiting on more details about this potential offer. As it stands, we never did hear anything further from them until after our announcement yesterday on 7/14. With only 10 days left before the dissolution date, we did not feel like an announcement about the changes could wait much longer.

Paizo has since followed up with us today with more details about a possible agreement, involving a way to potentially keep some art (but not all) along with PDF access at subscription time (not earlier). Having visited this with the team, we are not that interested in what has been offered so far. Having partial art (rather than all/none) is not a great look for our site and would just result in more user questions we'd have to field. As for the PDFs, most of the team already maintains their own subscriptions and wishes to keep it that way.

We will have a more clear FAQ on our website soon with...

I'm sorry this has been dumped on you, twice now.

You and your team do awesome stuff for the community. A community that would be much smaller and with much more clunky rules access without your work.

Thanks for being amazing!

Reovyn wrote:

Dr. Aspects wrote:

VerBeeker wrote:

Not sure exactly how to feel, but at the end of the day I’m keeping the subs. I don’t want to see these games die, though some people seem markedly keen for it for some reason out there.

I don't want these games to die, but frankly I have enough content to keep games going ad infinitum.

Paizo are the ones who chose this course of action, and they are being openly hostile to members of their own community working on a passion project that only benefits Paizo.

I have other companies I can support. I have other games I can play. I gave paizo my limited time and cash and if this is the game they're playing, instead of the one I signed up for? Then they'll either do fine without me, or they'll apologize and back off.

And what if the point about AoN is true? Obviously I do not see AoN being malicious about this, but is the idea of a volunteer team jumping the gun to make an announcement out of anxiety towards their community. without mentioning possible ways of this being worked on towards a solution BTS, THAT impossible?

A solely volunteer team working at a loss is in no way shape or form obligated to keep quiet when they see no path forward in the allotted time. They get more grace because they have no motive but fear.

Exactly this last point. The AoN team is down to 9 days to make huge changes to their sites. They probably are up against the wall in terms of who on their volunteer team can put in the necessary hours in the timeframe they have.

If AoN wasn't doing the incredibly good work that they're doing, Paizo would have to maintain that online rules repository.

How does THAT stack up against those lawyer and accountant hours? How many hours does Jim think the AoN team collectively spends on crafting their archive?

What a disappointing response from Jim, that utterly fails to understand the value that AoN brings to the community, while making a petty snipe at them at the end.

The post was SO disingenuous. You don't need an entire accountant to enter the license royalties. That's going to be handled by your current accountant. The person who already handles hundreds of invoices and statements every week.

A company Paizo's size surely either has a lawyer or a firm that they retain. Checking up on a license agreement every year or few years is not a massive drain on that time.

To me the post read like Jim thinks gamers are idiots who have never worked in business. I've held assistant administrator, executive director, and business office manager titles. None of what was said sounds like a plausible reason.

And even if it all were true, even if there was some small, noticeable drain on Paizo's resources - the incredible work that the AoN team does, completely for free, would outweigh that. Both from a marketing standpoint and a digital footprint standpoint.

Can you clarify or elaborate on "expected us to feel bad for their employee bit".

As far as I'm aware, there's been no official statements from Paizo staff on this, aside from some (limited) communication from Maya.

I don't think anyone at Paizo was expecting us to feel bad for Maya, though as a community we do. And I think generally our threads on this topic have been respectful and expressing our disappointment with the company in about as good a way as we can.

However Paizo has dropped the ball and didn't get out in front of the topic, which is obviously not great because it leaves all of us speculating.

An employee made a post on Bluesky asking for mercy for Maya and asking us all to stop using the official customer service email. That employee didn't give out any other emails to use, and disabled all comments on their bluesky post.

Paizo let this blow up without any announcement on their end and then expected us to feel so bad for the employee they threw under the bus that we wouldn't comment.

It's really disappointing communication from what is supposed to be a well established company!

The text of the letter I sent Paizo, in the very likely case that it doesn't get read in their email inbox because of the flooding.

---

To Paizo Executive Team,

Hi, I'm a GM, a player, and a fan of Pathfinder 2e. I'd like to speak up in defense of the Archive of Nethys, because without that website, I wouldn't be a fan or a customer of yours.

My gaming group is in Japan, USA west coast, and USA midwest. I myself have just moved to Spain. We cannot, obviously, play in person.

When our group was forming, we were looking at playing either D&D 5e, or Pathfinder 2e. There was some confusion at the time with the remaster newly coming out for Pathfinder 2e, but overall we were won over by Archive of Nethys.

I want to stress that I visited the Archive of Nethys site many, many times before I ever landed on Paizo.com. I owned a Player's guide, 2 Lost Omens books, and the Beginner Box on Foundry before I ever landed on your website.

If AoN had not existed, and Demiplane had been the only alternative - we would not now be playing Pathfinder. I understand that Paizo is having tough times financially, but I think you underestimate the value that AoN brings to you as a marketing tool.

The story of my group's purchases is pretty typical for a role playing group. We are not whales. I own several books, as the primary GM. Our well-heeled friend owns one book. My player who is thinking of getting into GMing is now buying books.

I want to support Paizo, and will continue to do so. I have to buy PDFs now, instead of physical books because of the shipping costs to Spain, but I'll do that, even though they feel very expensive for digital products. I buy them anyway because I know the value isn't in if the product is physical or not, but because I know that all the work that went into that product has huge value.

It's the same with AoN. You have a dedicated team of volunteers providing a service that is frankly not available to any other TTRPG publisher that I'm aware of. It is a priceless marketing tool and makes online play possible. More than that, even if I have a physical book on my desk - as I often do - I will go to AoN because of how well laid out things are, and the excellent data collections in their tables.

I would love to see you partner with community groups more closely in a time like this - especially super valuable partners like AoN - than pull away from the community and move toward a walled-garden approach. Pathfinder does not have the D&D name recognition, as much as I think it deserves it. You need dedicated fans like AoN.

Hoping to play Pathfinder for decades to come,
- Sofia