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Seconding the RSS for the blog. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but for those of us who have a lot of different things to keep on top of, not having an RSS feed is a huge deal. But, not only does it mean I can't follow it in my RSS reader, it also means I can't have a discord bot share new Paizo blog posts in Discord news channels!
I've been able to do that in some cases. The Wayback Machine had a lot of trouble crawling paizo.com, though, and often didn't get past page 2 of the blog, product, and forum threads even when it did crawl things. So while it's a possibility for some percentage of the lost clarifications, it doesn't eliminate the broader class of lost clarifications.
Hi! I stepped away from PFS a little while back. I'm starting to look at migrating some of my PFS1 reference content to a new domain/site and discovered that a bunch of the rules and clarifications that were in the old product page threads and blog post comments have been lost in the recent store migration, plus some of the older blog posts (I think) have been entirely misplaced or removed. That makes me sad! I hope I have a copy of the missing conclusion for Heroes for Highdelve somewhere. But the question I've got: does anyone have any up-to-date knowledge of what we should do with the lost clarifications? [em]I[/em] generally know what was going on with the links I was relying on, but I'm not sure if there's any official approach to dealing with the rules entropy. If you're having a hard time wrapping your head around this you're probably not my target audience, but here's an example: PFS1 #10-16 What the Helms Hide is a quest-pack. In the PDF there's text saying that it's replayable at any level, but this apparently wasn't intended. (A common problem with those quest packs.) The clarification saying that it's replayable only at level 1 was on the product page, and it doesn't exist anymore. A legalistic approach would mean it's replayable at any level since that text in the PDF overrides the specific rules in the guide that's never getting updated. Pretty sure that's not the way to go, but maybe it is. Why do I care? Eh, I don't entirely care, to be honest, but a lot of people still use my PFS1 references. Good reference material only works so long as it's clear and accurate, and some of those details have suddenly become markedly less clear. If it's easy for me to preserve I'd like to preserve the utility of the work.
Interesting! Perhaps I misremembered...but I could swear I encountered the stance I described in a forum thread years ago. Who knows, though. You didn't misremember, I remember James saying that as well. It's maybe less of a formal policy than just a good idea. Just because we post a thing here, that doesn't guarantee we have the right to actually sign away rights to the idea. So the legalese Zimmerwald quotes is helpful, but still not a ton of protection in the event they want to use an idea they find posted. For all they know we're accidentally remembering an obscure novel or the plot of an old Shadowrun mission or something. Best to be careful.
Thank you, Mark, and everyone at Paizo. This is immensely appreciated. I'm still saddened about the loss of Paizo Infinite as a venue for 1e Pathfinder and Starfinder content, but that's far easier to understand (even if it remains challenging) than the revocation of the CUP.
I appreciate the clarification, and I will check back in after the FAQ is updated. IANAL (seriously, definitely not a lawyer), but just to clarify: My point of concern with this response is that in my experience, personal use has generally been construed to mean "not in public where other people can get it" and posting things on the internet has been seen as "publishing" them. I think "product" and especially "publish" mean a thing in the RPG publishing industry context that is different than the legal context and I'm nervous about the collision of those two worlds in the language of the policy and its FAQ. On the bright side, it's a policy and not a license! So at least the text of the policy doesn't have to be 100% perfect so long as you enforce it the way you're describing...
That's the thing - this is something that demands action from those of us with content that will be impacted by the deadline, not zen, and every day spent waiting is a day wasted. I don't know the process of getting something into Infinite but I suspect it's not nothing. The frustration isn't an especially useful reaction, no, but it's not unwarranted or unearned.
I don't think that's the question though. I think the question is about putting the organized play rules (PFS1e) up on a publicly available website. Even if their group is the intended audience.Second, as I'm such a grognard, I'm splitting off a local group to run PFS1e adventures using mostly PFS1e rules (sans reporting, don't worry VOs!)--but we have to make some changes to enable sustained play. If I put those up on a website for everyone in my little home group to read, am I running afoul of the updated rules?What you and your own group do for your own games in your own little circle is never, and never has been, of any concern of anyone or any company. (And don't ever let anyone try to convince you otherwise.) Yes, exactly - that's a nicely concise wording of the bigger-picture question. "Where does this leave Organized Play aids from the OGL times?" I'm no longer a VO so this kinda has to be my venue for asking. Everything we've done for org play (and I don't just mean for myself) has typically relied on the CUP.
Two questions from a PF1/SF1 grognard: First, I have some organized play references I've made for Pathfinder 1e that exist on a website that may or may not be changing form. The website's made use of the CUP so far in a way that means I don't ever have to worry about what I'm doing so long as I'm not charging for it. Since the site may be changing form significantly or migrating some of those references to another site for long-term archival storage, what happens? Do I have to all of a sudden spend hours and hours digging through, say, a list of languages on Golarion to figure out what the heck is OGL and what's not? Even if I do (and I don't have the time to do that, I'm pretty sure), a simple list of PFS-legal languages is going to be significantly less useful if I can't simply write out the languages in question. Is that really what's intended here? Second, as I'm such a grognard, I'm splitting off a local group to run PFS1e adventures using mostly PFS1e rules (sans reporting, don't worry VOs!)--but we have to make some changes to enable sustained play. If I put those up on a website for everyone in my little home group to read, am I running afoul of the updated rules?
I just ran this for the first time yesterday, and I blundered into an unasked and unanswered question: how on earth are the PCs supposed to get into the reliquary in A7? There aren't any doors into it, let alone airlocks, and if you cut your way in the thing is going to flood. You're too low-level to (reliably?) have any of the flash teleport abilities. Am I missing something? (My party had the serpents crack the glass, which led to five or six rounds of me inventing mechanics as they attempted to drain the room of water, which let them eventually break their way in. Which I think is an acceptable outcome, but it's clearly not the intended path!)
Thanks for sharing your take on #2, makes me feel a little better about having run it that way. I definitely under-prepped; three cheers for convention schedules! Regarding your own Q: it's implied and not explicit, but: 1. My read is that the planetoid is hollow and there's at least one very large chamber inside it that is basically the entire adventure, which is reached via the stairs inside the pyramid, and 2. A9 is arrived at from the stairs exiting area A7 to the east. The stairs lead right up to A9. (See the box text for area A7.) It's the same complex, you don't need to head back outside to get there, etc.
This was not the Rasheen scenario I was expecting! (It's short on crocodilians, among other things.) Noting some things as I come across them. 1. Hey, a good use of in media res for the intro! Sort of. Maybe not technically. 2. DR/wound? I guess bypassed by a weapon with the wounding critical hit effect? Hrm. I'm not familiar with a rule as to whether it's any weapon with the wound property, or on an attack that creates a wound, which would usually be a crit. I'm thinking any weapon with the property? 3. The sphinx's makeshift haste circuit is "broken." By using up a swift action as normal, but forcing it to only last one round (as abnormal), it means that she really only benefits from the increased movement speed. She doesn't have a swift action to use for her full attack, so she can't move and full attack in the same round like you would expect as someone benefiting from haste. Smells intentional to me, but I'm not 100% sure. 4. Keystone's mentioned (a possible victim of the editorial process?), but it sounds like they're supposed to be lumped in with the four other AIs that are working in the background and go undescribed.
I have no explanation for the poor kobold, but I turned the alchemist into a recurring character who would set up shop with slightly overpriced consumables in dungeons throughout the adventure path. A little bit of a timeworn trope, especially if you've played too many JRPGs, but Mimips has turned out to be really popular anyway! I made Dagio quite a bit more powerful but didn't really play around with the immortality bit. It seemed way too difficult to really communicate to the players, and the circle bit was probably the more important bit for them to latch onto.
I agree with John on that one. I suspect the Starstone Compass wouldn't work either, but I'd probably invent something about it spinning wildly before settling in a direction, and then spinning wildly before settling in a totally different direction. Unrelated: nobody at Paizo seems to have caught onto the whole "it's not a light particle beam, light particle beams don't exist in Starfinder, it's a light particle cannon" thing. I guess it's time to bring it up...
Hey, new authors! Woohoo! I'm excited to see what everyone put together. I was going to start with a question about page 5: PCs who rolled less than a 20 on their check feel an odd tingling around their heads as they recall these facts; this sensation is a manifestation of Myrrium’s assistance, as the orrery helps the PCs remember relevant information. It's very confusingly worded, but I think I just put two and two together: the "actual" DC is 20, and the orrery is giving the PCs a +2 bonus which is already reflected in the DC, so if the orrery is responsible for the PCs succeeding at the check, then and only then do the PCs' heads feel fuzzy. I don't think that whole head-fuzziness-thing is supposed to happen if the PCs fail, but that particular bit didn't make it into the text. I dunno, maybe that'll help someone else puzzle through it.
Just to let you all know: we are currently experiencing an unplanned, extended outage of organizedplayfoundation.org, which is the website for the Organized Play Foundation. It also hosts the Pathfinder Society Second Edition and Starfinder Society guides. We are actively communicating with the hosting service, who are working on restoring access. Unfortunately, we do not have an ETA on when the website will be available again. As part of restoring access, we have taken steps that may cause the guides to remain unavailable until Monday morning. We will provide more information as we receive it. We apologize for the disruption, and thank you for your patience!
Just to let you all know: we are currently experiencing an unplanned, extended outage of organizedplayfoundation.org, which is the website for the Organized Play Foundation. It also hosts the Pathfinder Society Second Edition and Starfinder Society guides. We are actively communicating with the hosting service, who are working on restoring access. Unfortunately, we do not have an ETA on when the website will be available again. As part of restoring access, we have taken steps that may cause the guides to remain unavailable until Monday morning. We will provide more information as we receive it. We apologize for the disruption, and thank you for your patience!
I think your desire to make your point is twisting up your logic here. You're using two different definitions of the word "public," and only because you change the definition mid-stream is your argument coherent. If advertising to a small group is advertising to the public, why would the definition of public change to be broader when determining who is then allowed to sign up? It doesn't sound like it's the public part or the RSP part that sucks for you. Rather, it's a terrible experience using the Warhorn search and finding games you like that aren't open to you?
It's interesting how different folks have such different preferences. I like having one resource pool and multiple options. Giving each option its own resource pool, even if it's a 1/day style thing, sounds awful to me! 100% agree on full BAB. Giving up your EP progression just to have full BAB doesn't seem like a win. An evolutionist without their EP progression compares very poorly to a soldier. VERY poorly. At later levels it improves because you start with 2 EP/round, but it's still not good.
If we didn't need to punch someone to get EP, that might be more appealing. Starting with 2 and retaining the ability to convert RP to EP might be one way to address it. That would be a very different approach than what the class currently boasts. That said, any sort of out-of-combat utility would be a very different philosophy than what we're seeing so far. So that's not necessarily an obstacle.
I'm not a huge fan of putting it on the player to remember their drawback--that's the exact opposite of how I'd like the incentives to work. I'll be trying to keep them in mind, but with as many concussions as I've had, I know I'll be forgetting them! Having a plausible frontliner with 6 sp/hp per level and light armor and drawbacks that frequently result in them taking more damage is also a very weird decision to me. We'll see how it playtests, but I suspect that they're going to be pretty squishy.
Evolution point question--it looks as though evolution points just stick around until you spend them on something, or until you dump 2/4/6 of them as a move/standard/full-round action? I'm not able to find anything that says you lose them at the end of combat or after a ten-minute rest or at the end of a day or anything like that. Reading some of the other text makes me think that's PROBABLY intended, but we all seem to be reading it in a slightly different way. Help?!
Specifically, the policy reads:
Qualifying Event: Any public event at a qualifying location. To build on some of the things that have already been said, the word "public" in English is a very ambiguous one. When you say something is public you could mean: ...among other things. My current public library lets anyone get a library card, but my last public library limited library cards to local residents. They're both considered public libraries, though. We often think that "anyone can run for public office" because it's "public" but in truth there are usually restrictions on who can run, like minimum ages or residency requirements. Even if we let anyone play from anywhere, there are still restrictions--having a character of the right level, sometimes. Being able to connect to the services we use to play. Even knowing the language the game is being run in. We can argue about whether the restrictions we have in place are the right restrictions, it's true. But using the word "public" does not automatically mean restriction-free.
What, Mosquito Witch hate?? It's my favorite! Okay, so you have to run it very differently from most PFS scenarios. The ending's in a very different style. If you're expecting your typical PFS romp, it's not for you. But mystery! Horror! Laid out in a way that you can make it work well in PFS! (I might be a dork.)
I'm not hugely thrilled with the reduction in Starfinder scenarios, since I don't play much PFS2 - and with (seemingly) more of the One-Shots going Pathfinder 2's way, it doesn't seem like there'll be as much to make up for what looks to be a more drastic reduction. So, I'm disappointed. But constant crunch isn't crunch anymore, it's a workload management problem. We've all been able to see the problem for a long time, and it's not a good place to be. Something's gotta give. You either need to do less work or hire more people, and it looks like it's the former. Considering that and reacting to a long-standing problem is a really, really good thing, and I'm glad something's being done. I don't want to jump too far ahead, but maybe in time you'll all be able to hire someone new and bring the total scenario count back up to where it was--with less psychic damage this time.
Much less important, but maybe helpful for consistency for those who care--it looks like Paizo grabbed the art for the CR 12 paraforan, rather than the CR 6 paraforan fragment. The fragments are these cute little crystalline bird things. (Which, I guess, is not far from what the larger paraforan is supposed to look like!) The correct art for the fragment is on page 77 of the Alien Archive 3, hiding on the second page of the paraforan entry. (Yes, they got put in the opposite order of how they appear in text. It's no wonder someone grabbed the wrong one.)
Hmmm, something to keep in mind is that the fancy high-res map that's included in the .zip file is actually slightly different from the map included in the scenario itself. It looks like someone got a tile flipped around in the wrong direction and didn't notice! Shame it's the tile with the elevator on it, that might be important.
I was hoping they'd open up some of the options that were reserved for chronicle sheets, myself, but I think we're out of luck. We might be anticipating "No" answers on those, based on: We anticipate that this will be the final version of these documents, barring any major issues So, aim to play them for a home game, I guess!
Hey Wei Ji! We got this figured out in Discord, but now that I see you asking here, I'm posting my response here, too, for posterity. At least as of this writing (the Season 4 guide, in 2021), it's in Player Basics, right near the top: https://www.organizedplayfoundation.org/Lorespire/sfsguide._.Player-Basics# Purchasing_Guidelines The rules haven't changed, though, so all of the above is still true.
I would just like to take a moment to appreciate the MC Escher work that is the ground floor of Waterhill Manor. Very fitting for an immortal madman's occasional abode! Would have been nice if I didn't have to photoshop some steps in between the dining room and the kitchen in order to avoid a random 6-foot drop somewhere, though.
It's worth specifically noting for posterity (and future thread necros) that the VO corps recently received some updated information, and the post linked to above is currently out of date. Maybe it will be updated or included on another page soon! In the meantime, Alex gave us permission to share the updates publicly. I've been keeping the Pittsburgh region's "stars and table requirements" reference up to date, and for the moment it seems to be the only updated public resource. For Pathfinder 1e, the changes in the most recent batch are:
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