Venture-Agent, Colorado—Colorado Springs
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Where, how, who?
I have a friend I play with every other weekend with our local PFS group who says he plays mostly online. I'm familiar with a few VTT sites, but I have no idea how to find a PFS game on them, let alone how one is managed in regards to looking over chronicle sheets and receiving one at the end of a session. Is there an existing online resource for playing PFS online?
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Online Recruitment for play-by-post (and occasionally Roll20.net or maptools games) right here on these forums! Some games are PFS, some games aren't Pathfinder at all, there's a mixed bag (and often a lot of people applying). I'd suggest you look on the forums for "play-by-post etiquette" or something like that so you can see how to format your posts/character sheet so-as to be accepted into games.
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Online sources for PFS Online:
Fantasy Grounds, subscribe to the PFS Game Announcement thread.
Subscribe to this thread
It should be fairly obvious, these folks use Fantasy Grounds 2, a purchasable VTT, for Pathfinder Society play online.
Pathfinder Society Online Collective
This group uses a variety of VTTs, most free, depending on the tastes of the GM.
VTTs:
MapTools
Roll20 in a Google+ Hangout
Combat Assistant with IRC chat
OpenRPG
Voice:
Skype
Ventrilo
TeamSpeak
I am not going to say that is list is either exhaustive or complete, I could easily be missing VTTs and/or voice clients.
Some VTTs are better enabled to handle PFS/Pathfinder RPG than others.
FG2 has this wonderful language extension, that, when used properly, shows you messages in languages your PC knows in readable format, but shows you various fancy fantasy fonts for messages in languages your PC doesn't know. It also does a fair job with handling PCs and mechanics, although it could be better.
MapTools has a fairly good & easy-to-use (IMO) macro engine built-in to help mechanize a lot of PC actions. It can also, when the PCs & NPCs are properly built, be used to help automate some of the parts of combat.
Set a target, roll an attack for a weapon entered into the lmarkus framework correctly, and it will determine hit or miss, and critical threats, including handling rolling the confirmation check, and damage as applicable, and sneak attack damage, etc.
Haven't played using Roll20 yet, so no opinion yet.
Been a long time since I played using OpenRPG, so I don't remember it.
Have only played a partial game, at this time, with Combat Assistant, and I wasn't impressed with it so far. In FG2 and MapTools, players can move their own tokens, and their tokens can even track hit points, status effects, etc. CA doesn't seem to be that player-friendly.
Where was above, in the links.
How was the list of VTTs given, sorry for my editorializing.
Who is a bunch of us. Join the list, subscribe to the thread, and just keep your eyes open for game announcements.
The GM should announce the scenario or module name, the tier, the date & time (including time zone), and where/how to sign-up to play.
For the PFSOC, be ready to jump into the list quick, games can fill up fast. Don't be discouraged if you wind up as an alternate, a lot of times people ahead of you on the list get real life rearing up and keeping them from playing, so one or two alternates can often get into the game.
Sometimes the final list of who actually played doesn't look much like the list of who signed up.
And, yes, there are a group of frequent players, and a group of people who frequently GM, so names will become familiar as you watch the lists.
After the game ends, most of the GMs will email you a chronicle for the game, and a special boon chronicle if applicable. Some are scanned in as JPGs/PNGs, others are fillable PDFs. Usually you can print them to attach to your paper copy of your PC for local play...
Hope I haven't gone on too long for you...
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There is a very active PFS community HERE at Myth Weavers. Myth Weavers also has very good online character sheets.
Where, how, who?
I have a friend I play with every other weekend with our local PFS group who says he plays mostly online. I'm familiar with a few VTT sites, but I have no idea how to find a PFS game on them, let alone how one is managed in regards to looking over chronicle sheets and receiving one at the end of a session. Is there an existing online resource for playing PFS online?
There is also http://rpggeek.com/guild/1329 on RPG Geek. Primarily play by forum, but there are some VOIP games mustered there.
All the paperwork is the same, you just work with pdf/tiff copies of chronicles frequently.
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I use two free programs for Maps and Chronicle Sheets (PC, not sure if it works on Mac).
PDF24 allows you to take individual pages from Paizo's books and create them as PDFs. I just take the Chronicle sheet page, and save it, then open that with Adobe and use the Comments Tools to insert all the player info, saving them individually (as Read Only). From there, I upload all the individual player (and my DM) Chronicle Sheets to a Google Drive folder, and give the players the link to print out.
Foxit PDF allows you to take your purchased Scenarios, and copy the maps from it to something else like Paint. The cool thing is that it copies layers, which Paizo uses, to doing this will only copy the straight map, but not include a lot of the little DM only markers on it (like Secret Door here). From Paint (save as JPEG), you can add whatever you need. I use Google Drive again, but I'm pretty sure you could upload these to Roll20 or Maptools if you wanted. (If not, try saving it in other formats as appropriate to the system). Once you have uploaded the picture of the map, (with any permanent edits you might want, like the compass that usually does not copy), you can use Google/Roll20/etc. . . to make temporary changes as appropriate to the system. In Google, I add in Shapes like black boxes to cover the rooms and areas the players can not see yet, and just delete them as the players get there. You can also hide monsters and npcs "beneath" the map, so when they get there, bring them to the top, (which basically just allows you to do a lot of prep up front).
you can also check out two pages here on Paizo that have open recruitment.
THIS one has a list at the top for games in general, where you simply add your name in with some notes, but you can also look through the posts and DMs will randomly come in seeking players.
While THIS one essentially does the same, but focuses on lower level play.
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DM Beckett wrote:
What's really surprising and disappointing are the complete lack of Mac tools for doing this.
There is a mac app called PDF Extract Image that actually works well. The app is not free but reasonably priced and is available on the mac app store.
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I believe that the programs that automatically come with Macs allow this, but Im not sure. But if you need, let me know and I can email you the blank Chronicle PDFs. I had started to upload them to the Sharred PFS folder (which is another good link worth posting, but Im on my phone at the moment).
Also misquoted above. :P
My bad! Sorry about that. Cut and paste fail. In any event, I did forget to mention that mac has a default option which allows you to print to pdf.
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Register yourself on pfrpg.com.au and you'll get emailed invites to games as they're scheduled.
On that page, you can also click on the Pathfinder Society link up the top to tick off any scenarios you've played; you won't get invites for those scenarios. If you ever get sick of getting the invites, you can turn them off or back on from your account settings.
There's also a chat room link on that page; if you tell anyone in there that you're keen on playing, what levels of characters you've got and what timezone you're in (don't just say "EST" - this means different things depending on where you are - use UTC instead), we'll tailor games to you when we're looking for which scenario to run.