Venture-Captain, Missouri—Columbia
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If you want to have this argument, maybe come from a place of compromise or, better yet, detail the advantages and reasons of such instead of ad hominem attacks based on your experience with students.
We're not your students. We're adults. Some of us still use paper-and-pencil character sheets. Some us still track our purchases by hand on chronicle sheets and ITS. And some of us prefer paper over technology.
As you wish, Joe. It is not an attack. It is a simple statement of fact. My experience with college students and my doctoral research into e-textbooks has shown me that there really is no justification for the avoidance of the digital world. Those that avoid it do it because they choose to do so. All of the surveys I have conducted for that research indicated that.
Now I will say there are exceptions to that with some people who live in remote areas. However, those are few and far in between. If someone can post on these forums, they have a form of Internet access.
As for the advantages and reasons for using digital means? It would make it quite easy to track character growth over time for players and allow for easier audits when necessary. It would cut down on paper usage (always a good environmental reason). That would cut down on waste and space usage.
For those of you who prefer a paper copy, nothing stops you from having one. The idea I am advancing is to store the data online. Players can print out the Chronicle Sheet if they desire. I think that would be absolutely necessary for places where Internet connectivity is spotty or slow, or just simply convenient.
It is true and it is documented that there is a group of people who do not wish to use digital means and prefer paper. I've read those quantitative and qualitative studies in my research. It is not that they cannot use digital means. It is that they choose not to. Fair enough. That group is not decided by age either. The digital divide based upon age is a myth and once again the research proves that.
I think we can do better than what we do now via digital means. As for some of my comments, I stand by them. If you do not want to use digital means, that's a choice. Fair enough, but I do not see why those of us who use digital means (and yes, we are a majority) cannot do so.
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I think one of the things you are missing, Xathos, is the amount of work required to do what you are asking. While I am no expert on pathfinder or paizo's employee structure, I am an expert on web development. I have been doing it for a living for the past 15 years.
What you are asking, while certain feasible, isn't something you can just throw together. It requires some decent servers, purchasing of database software (or knowledge of free databases), solid database programming (SQL), web servers, web development (especially for mobile, which is specialized skill in itself), and then continuous maintenance. And that isn't including upgrades and modifications.
This would require at least 1 full time web developer (although it would probably take 2 or 3 to get it up and running in a reasonable amount of time) and at least a half time database administrator. Both of which are costly to employ...especially considering paizo is getting no real benefit from it.
Because, let's be honest, while it may be more convenient for you and/or other players to have everything digital, what is paizo getting from it? They are business. They have to worry about sales, salaries, and profit. So, what are they getting out of making all these chronicle sheets digital and creating the "great online experience" you are demanding? Players are still going to play. The lack of chronicle digital support isn't going to push many players away from their products.
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It is a simple statement of fact. My experience with college students and my doctoral research into e-textbooks has shown me that there really is no justification for the avoidance of the digital world.
Two conventions i know of block out wifi access unless you buy the hotels.
Pathfinder Society is played around the world
I have never seen a fill in form that let me do everything I would need to do with an ITs.
People trying to maintain charged devices on a table starts a twisteresque scramble for seating and wire crossing as it is.
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Xathos, what demographics were you looking at with your research? You obviously know your research better than I, but based on my past experience working in digital distribution to a diverse group of users, I suspect your research may have ignored some possible demographics. There are any number of reasons why someone may not be able to access the internet at a given point in time:
1. They might not be able to afford reasonably-priced internet access
2. They might not have reasonably priced internet available (for example, satellite might be the only option available locally)
3. They might be in the military, stationed overseas, on bases that have limited or no internet connectivity
4. The existing internet access might be disabled in some way, for example via power outage or internet outage
5. There might be other technical issues bringing the internet down on a regular basis*
6. The players might not live in a first-world country where internet access is widely available
If Paizo wants to support a broad spectrum of users, whatever system they build should probably support most or all of these use-cases, and the simple, easy-to-implement version doesn't meet those requirements.
That's not to say that someone couldn't build some sort of a hybrid system that addressed all of these issues! That is absolutely true. However, this system is going to need significant investment. This sort of thing isn't easy; it's expensive.**
Is Paizo going to be the ones who build it? I'm skeptical. They've got a big challenge in front of them just keeping the lights on for their aging, creaky website. (Yeah, they have a node.js front-end, but their node server is still serving WebObjects.) Basic functionality continues to break and they haven't had time to address most of it yet. And they don't seem to be ramping up to take on any special projects, especially those that don't provide a significant increase in revenue.
Can it be done? Yes. Can Paizo do it? Hypothetically, yes. Will Paizo actually build it? Almost certainly not.
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* for example, in a very heavily urban area I used to live in, the internet was unavailable daily from 5:00 PM to 10:00 PM because the only available connection was a cable connection, and when everyone got home and turned on their televisions, the cable signal strength dropped below the minimum necessary to provide an internet connection. Comcast wouldn't fix it.
** consider how many employees Google has assigned to Gmail. (About a hundred, as of 8 years ago.) Gmail, for all intents and purposes, is quite a simple application from the user's perspective. Paizo would need fewer of those because the audience is smaller and the data is less overwhelmingly huge, but it's still not a negligible effort. And on top of this the number of FTE equivalents (a measure of employee bandwidth roughly equal to that that could be provided by a single full-time employee) that Paizo's tech team has available for a new project appears to be in the negative numbers.
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Venture-Captain, Missouri—Columbia
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The bottom line is they can do it if they choose to do it. Will they do it? I don't know. What I do see is a bunch of people throwing up any barrier to progress that could take place. Okay, that's your opinion and your preference. I disagree with all of you about it.
What you do forget is that this is about more than a few bucks. It is about market share and reaching a larger audience. Take Pathfinder 2.0 for instance. Paizo could keep on with 1.0 and watch 5e dominate the market which would mean Pathfinder would be a niche market game over time. Or it could make a product that appeals to a broader market.
The same is true of digital means for record keeping. More people are using digital means. It is a digital world. Those who do not accept that are falling behind. I think that Paizo should adapt to the larger market. I don't know if they will. Personally, I think if they keep the way they are with the current system, it may not necessarily restrict growth for PFS, but they would miss a larger market.
Alex, those reasons only impact a limited number of people.
Big Norse, I would not use it at a convention. I would use it for permanent record keeping. As for digital devices, you would download the information prior to coming to an event. But you would and should bring the binder or folder with the information you need to a con.
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Venture-Captain, Missouri—Columbia
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The rest of the world has access to the Internet. I live in rural Missouri and I have access to the Internet in a town of 150 people when family come to dinner on Sunday. My son lives 10 miles outside of town and has access to the Internet. Netflix is their favorite streaming site.
As you well know, we have contact with people across the world via the Internet. Why do you keep trying to say Internet access is a problem? It is not a problem for practically every Pathfinder player.
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The bottom line is they can do it if they choose to do it. Will they do it? I don't know. What I do see is a bunch of people throwing up any barrier to progress that could take place. Okay, that's your opinion and your preference. I disagree with all of you about it.
While I applaud your idealism, there's more to a business case than idealism.
I would love nothing more than to see a fully-fledged web-based and mobile reporting system that supports 99% of the PFS audience leap fully-formed from Vic Wertz's forehead. (Vic, if you're getting a headache, I'm sorry. It really has nothing to do with me, I swear.) I am just extremely skeptical that Vic is hiding Reporting Athena inside his skull.
There are a million reasons why you wouldn't want to start this project; we've discussed a number of them. There are more; whenever you examine the business case for a proposed project, there are dozens of red flags you might see. Is it outside the core competency of your team? (Check.) Is it happening in parallel with another big project? (Work on the new website plus PF2 plus PFS2? Check.) Does the failure of this project have significant negative implications for your ongoing efforts? (Check.) And so on. I am also a professional web developer and I have seen more big projects fail than I would care to admit. And when a big project fails there are consequences. (And no, I don't mean firings or layoffs, although those are possibilities.) Teams get burnt out and stop working as effectively; managers leave for greener pastures; other tasks go by the wayside and you build up a backlog.
In sum, Paizo's best move is to make sure that they're focused on the important things they can do well. While I would love to see this system built, the Paizo of today is probably not the company to do it.
Saying so does not mean that we are impeding progress. We'd have to be on Paizo's board to have a shot at that. It just means we've been here before, and we think you're overlooking some serious red flags.
But who knows? Maybe it'll happen. I could be wrong. If it got us a spiffy new reporting system I'd be thrilled to be proved incorrect.
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Alex, question for you:
Leaving aside the issue of internet access for a moment (I’m 100% in agreement with you BTW), how difficult do you think it would be for a team of volunteers to implement an optional online chronicle system?
Simon Kort and his Dutch cohort have already put together the wonderful PFS session Tracker. I am NOT a web developer, but I think I can see the outlines of the structure a chronicle tracking/printing system would need. Individual accounts, the ability to authorize another account to temporarily edit (when your GM is reporting), and of course the input fields of the chronicles themselves and the ability to print them. There are many other “nice to have” features like running totals, but that’s the bare bones.
I have no idea how difficult that would be, but it seems like after the initial effort the day-to-day FTE needs would be minor and not need nearly as much technical depth. A few administrators to deal with the inevitable errors and lost passwords and a corps of volunteers to section each new chronicle into the correct fields.
Not asking about the legal or financial (webhosting) hurdles yet, just curious how long you think it would take a dedicated team of 3-4 volunteer web designers to make such a thing.
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Venture-Captain, Missouri—Columbia
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There's a lot more reasons to make this happen and they all involve dollar signs. The digital market is growing and continues to grow. Online gaming is not a niche market. In fact, the Online PFS region is a vibrant and growing sector with a lot of players. Keep in mind those players also play live PFS games.
Alex, you say there are a million reasons for not doing it. I disagree.
I think Kevin is making a pretty good point.
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Alex, question for you:
Leaving aside the issue of internet access for a moment (I’m 100% in agreement with you BTW), how difficult do you think it would be for a team of volunteers to implement an optional online chronicle system?
Simon Kort and his Dutch cohort have already put together the wonderful PFS session Tracker. I am NOT a web developer, but I think I can see the outlines of the structure a chronicle tracking/printing system would need. Individual accounts, the ability to authorize another account to temporarily edit (when your GM is reporting), and of course the input fields of the chronicles themselves and the ability to print them. There are many other “nice to have” features like running totals, but that’s the bare bones.
I have no idea how difficult that would be, but it seems like after the initial effort the day-to-day FTE needs would be minor and not need nearly as much technical depth. A few administrators to deal with the inevitable errors and lost passwords and a corps of volunteers to section each new chronicle into the correct fields.
Not asking about the legal or financial (webhosting) hurdles yet, just curious how long you think it would take a dedicated team of 3-4 volunteer web designers to make such a thing.
I haven't listed out what we'd call user stories or requirements yet so I'm not feeling hugely confident in my estimates. But I think chronicle sheets are actually the hardest thing to completely digitize to the point where you could conceivably replace them.
First, to be clear, this is pretty involved. It's closer to what Xathos is thinking of than it might be to what you were thinking. The reason why I'm going full-service here is because if all you want is something to take a photo of a chronicle sheet and track xp/fame/prestige/gold, you can use Google Sheets and Drive for that without any of us needing to build you an application. We can show people how to use a feed scanner, have a Sheets template everyone can copy, and you don't need any of this mess.
But if you want to automate some or all of it, you're probably looking at custom development. Here's my quick run-down of what I imagine would be in a full-service solution:
Step One: you'd want to enable reporting and tracking.
In essence, session tracker++. People create accounts and characters and sign in for a game on some digital thing. (For example, an app or a web application passed around on a tablet would be the ideal.) At the end of the session, the GM confirms the players and notes xp, gold, prestige, fame, and a few other things (like infamy for SFS).
This provides you with a few things, most importantly authorization (the sign-in on the roster sheet). Although we're just starting on our quest for chronicles getting handed out by GMs, we have also accidentally built a reporting tracker and a great framework for a sessions-played tracker at the same time. Adding a couple of features for each (for example, a bookmarklet to paste in a reporting string from the application and change it to match Paizo's website) gets us fully functional in a couple of avenues that would already be a big improvement to the gameplay experience. You could even have player and GM ratings since you already know who's playing with whom. A major complicating factor is if you want to enable offline reporting of games--you could do this (allowing for some significant complications) as a web app but it's probably best done as a pair of native mobile apps (Android and iOS). We can expand on those mobile apps later to show off chronicles and sessions played and stuff, but handling reporting well across a number of different technical and connectivity situations is hard. Not least because of users.
Making this step optional makes it even more complicated, of course.
Step two: managing chronicle sheets
So at this point we already have a list of scenarios. We're looking at actually tracking the chronicle sheets, now. We probably already wanted the reporting in a non-relational (NoSQL) database but if we didn't before, we do now. (This makes development more complex but saves us trouble in the long run when supporting systems with different requirements, like PFS2.) Each chronicle sheet has a variable number of fields, from subtiers to subtier rules to out-of-subtier calculations to unique items. The easiest thing, perhaps, would be to build a list of items opened up on the chronicle sheets following the current PFS rules.
That's easy, right? Well, it probably still is, but don't forget that we as GMs need to be able to cross off individual items and entire subtiers (which turns this from a simple thing into a whole interface where we provide lists with checkboxes on them for a GM to confirm or remove access to an item) plus we need to have support for custom items and custom item rules as well as limits. Not to say that this is impossible, but each of these turns what could be a supremely simple thing into something that would require time and investment to get right.
Then we get to gold and prestige and fame and things. This should be easier--you figure, throw an error if the totals go below zero--but if you're importing old chronicle sheets, it turns out that digitizing things like ITSes means that you're essentially doing an audit. And if you're like me, there's a distinct possibility that you overspent in your pre-digital days and the Bank of Abadar had been accidentally loaning you money for levels 5-7. Now, just a chronicle sheet audit isn't going to catch as much, but it will catch some, and in these cases we as GMs would prefer to have some note or alert indicating what's going on, yes? That suggests that we'd want a notes field. Possibly version control.
Oh, speaking of notes, a lot of GMs like to write little fun flavor things onto the chronicle sheets. We should probably have a field for those.
Then we get to the real challenge: managing the chronicle sheet boon fields. We have some things with no checkbox, some things with multiple checkboxes. Some things with a checkbox that needs to be checked if you earned the thing. Of course, everything needs to be crossed off or not crossed off depending on the vagaries of the GM and the scenario and the tier and your faction and all that. Oh, and we have the pregen/GM situation--if you mark down a chronicle to 500 gp, you get the items, but not the boons on the chronicle until you hit the original level.
Then there's the various chronicle sheets allowing full rebuilds (okay, maybe not so hard), custom races (I think we could support these), and then all of those things that say "Make a copy of this chronicle sheet and keep it with the character."
And of course the usual problem of providing flags on particular scenarios still exists--evergreen scenarios being the big one. GM Star replays. Specials GMed for those of us tracking that. 2+ level plays of evergreen scenarios except on the 3-7 replayables.
All of those are doable, but time consuming. But the biggest challenge would simply be getting all of the existing data into the system! We're looking at hundreds of chronicle sheets that would need to be coded and tested and brought into the system to be used.
Oh, and if we wanted to have any of this available on those mobile apps, we'd need that written, too.
And after all of this the chronicle sheets still wouldn't quite meet the standards many people have for being auditable because we haven't mentioned any controls on user editing of these sheets. At the very least we'd want to collect a changelog just to ensure compatibility of our system with as many GMs and regions as possible. But this doesn't make it a complete system--we could add an ITS tracking sheet for each character. Compared to the rest of the stuff in part 2, this would be the easy part.
Part 3: Maintenance
You said "Not asking about the legal or financial (webhosting) hurdles yet [...]" but I'm going to talk a little about them anyway.
If we want to ethically develop this application we're going to need to at least try to keep this data private except as intended by the users who entrust it to us. Ignoring the GDPR requirements, that means we would need to stay on top of vulnerabilities and exploits in the products that we're using. We'd need to be able to upgrade them on an as-needed basis. We'd want backups and redundant storage. (Easier with NoSQL solutions, but not something to ignore. We don't want to pull a Myth Weavers.) There wouldn't be a lot of active development, but once or twice a year something would come up that would force us to work on the application code again. We'd get upgrades for our infrastructure and we'd want to comprehensively test our functionality prior to running those upgrades. Test-driven development would make this easier but it's still work and it still requires redundant infrastructure.
Keeping up with new chronicle sheets would be much easier assuming we built a system for importing them. Probably one or two people would be involved, costing an evening or two a month. A challenge is that with most things using scenario data like Gencon listings, Simon Kort's excellent tracker, or Warhorn, they only care about the existence of a scenario. They need the product page. We actually need the scenario to be published (or the module to be sanctioned or whatever) which means that those things become available for play almost as soon as we get access to them. We'd probably want at least a few people who could jump in and add new chronicle sheets in case the primary point of contact is unavailable. Additionally, if we're going the mobile app route we'd need to keep those under active development simply to keep them compatible with new (and old) devices.
Summary
So, uh... there is a huge range of possible costs and complexities here depending on how much of this you want to build out and how much you plan ahead. If you want everything, you're probably looking at several months of work (assuming full-time; longer if not) for 4-5 volunteers to build this out, you're looking at some server costs (with lots of storage if we wanted to host images, if you wanted pictures of paper or PDF chronicle sheets). If you wanted to take a stab at making this universal and supporting offline reporting you're looking at a couple months from an Android developer and an iOS developer. Those might be the same person, they might not be. And, optimistically, a week or two for the team coding up all of the chronicle sheets.
For Paizo, to get the developers and servers and expertise to make this work--plus all the usual burdened rates, like health care and other benefits, computer costs, support costs, etc.--this might be a literal million dollars.
Of course, the usual caveats apply. I have very low confidence in those estimates so it's probably +/- 50%. I haven't actually done the work of formally estimating out the entire project; this is off the top of the smallest part of my head. Someone doing a good job estimating using established methodologies could be much more accurate. I don't have comprehensive expertise on all of these things so I could have underestimated (or overestimated!) the difficulty of any given component of this.
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One thing you missed in Step 2:
The items that are single purchase only (limited charge wands, poison doses, etc.). There would need to be a check-box for checking that item off a charactger/chronicle's list once its been purchased. This would likely add just one more layer of complexity to the available items part of a chronicle making them almost as complex as boons.
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It would probably drop our store back down to one table (from three). And we have Internet there.
I agree. Just based on how many players at our store that utilize paper records, we'd lose at least 50% of our player base.
"Hey, D&D doesn't require us to do all of this complicated online stuff? Time to switch over."
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Ugh, reporting errors. Two little words, but lots of things that can go wrong.
1. User inputs fundamental data incorrectly into their account (How do we confirm that their PFS ID is correct? Based on some preliminary back-and-forth, I don't think we can.)
2. GM reports the wrong scenario for a game they GMed
3. GM nixes things that should have been on the chronicle
4. GM fails to nix things that shouldn't have been on the chronicle
5. GM puts wrong information on the chronicle
6. GM fails to put required information on chronicle (we might be able to validate some of this)
7. Player puts down wrong character number
8. Player discovers that the character was out of the scenario's tier
9. Player is assigning credit to a GM credit baby (-0? -99? etc.)
10. Player accidentally assigns credit to a character in the wrong campaign (CORE vs. Standard... alternately, assigning a PFS chronicle sheet to your -701...)
11. We have offline reporting that doesn't get reported AT ALL
1. Can the player fix it themselves? This can include crossing things out, sometimes it includes un-crossing-things on the chronicle. The basic stuff we let players fix. Since we (almost) never audit chronicles now, most of us, this goes unremarked-upon.
2. Other problems with a chronicle including a missing chronicle. We rely on VOs to address these, including reissuing chronicles.
3. Broken reporting, missing reporting, etc. on paizo.com. We rely on VCs to fix this.
Automating a large portion of this process would address a number of possible errors, mostly of the "I put in the wrong information" type. If we go full chronicle sheet tracking, it would probably also help prevent some characters getting played out of tier for the scenario.
At the same time, the PC isn't going to have a paper sheet sitting there to scribble on in this endeavor--it could be a lot more "locked down" in some hypothetical implementations. So now you're looking at problems where you're trying to set policy for your data--who can change it, and when? Is there a formal appeals process? Who are the volunteers involved? If you're building a third-party system (as opposed to Paizo managing it) you can't guarantee that every VC is going to be involved, which means you will need a policy to handle complaints of bad data in regions where the VC won't take care of it. You could probably ask some VCs to step up and help, which requires some more granular account settings. It also adds some maintenance because you'd have to keep your list of VCs up to date with what's available on Paizo as well as deal with the inaccuracies that frequently pop up on that list which is not fun.
There's also the legal challenges of granting volunteers access to "customer" personal data including timestamped geographic information.
We could reduce the impact by giving more power to the players, but this means the sheets would be less auditable. Granted, this isn't a new problem; we rely on chronicle sheets that are easy to forge as it stands*. If we're willing to continue using the honor system we give ourselves more leeway, and we could reduce the support load on the volunteers. As a community I think we would need to discuss what the auditability requirements of a global chronicle sheet system are before we could really have an answer to this, though.
* Unless you emboss them or print them on unique paper, and keep track of what color/type you used--THEN a GM could authenticate their own chronicles. Outside of that, we don't have much. And yes, for those of you in the online region, you can "lock" a PDF. Open-source PDF tools will also unlock said PDF with a single command, making it editable once more.
It's a bit more than two cents, but that's my take on it. The more I think about it the less I like it. Creating a system to completely replace physical chronicle sheets, and doing it right for the existing campaign, would be a huge freaking project.
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Two more words... System Security.
Who has authority to edit/create/delete data, and when?
Is it Hackable?
What happens when someone for fun/profit/revenge/kicks, hacks the system to delete your profile? Or worse yet, marks your PCs as dead in a game you didn't play?
All legitimate complications. I've touched on them in posts up above.
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Venture-Captain, Missouri—Columbia
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Reporting should be at 100% with no exceptions.
I think some of you think I am saying to do this at the store during games and that is not what I am saying. I am saying this should be in the reporting process online. I don't report my games until I am at home. Then I go online and report them.
But I really think we should have a mandatory online reporting mandate with the current set-up for PFS right now.
I'll touch more on the longer list of stuff that has been brought up which is good once I get home. (Monday and Wednesday's are classroom days). That's some good discussion material there to begin working with. So, thanks for discussing it in a meaningful manner.
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I think some of you think I am saying to do this at the store during games and that is not what I am saying. I am saying this should be in the reporting process online. I don't report my games until I am at home. Then I go online and report them.
And this is my biggest personal objection to mandatory online reporting. I posted this earlier in the thread but it's worth repeating.
Right now if you report an event, you put in each character number, name, faction, and fame gained, along with up to four boxes for scenario tracking (choices the PCs made). (With a checkbox for "dead" that is rarely used.) If I wanted to completely report a current PFS chronicle, here is all I would need to enter:
- Character Name
- PFS Number
- Faction
- Fame gained
- Scenario reporting boxes (A,B,C,D)
- Dead?
- Gold gained
- Gold spent
- Day Job result
- Any chronicle-specific boons gained/not gained.
- Scratch out all equipment on the chronicle that was not found.
- Notes for allowable carryover conditions (permanent negative levels, ability drain, nonmechanical effects.
Many of those things can vary from PC to PC, even in the same party. So you are going to require me to copy all that information for each player at the table, then put it in when I get home? That's a lot of time for a GM to dedicate.
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Venture-Captain, Missouri—Columbia
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Not in the system I have in mind. I like the idea of less is better. It's all about having the data for a sheet already in the system. So when you report the character # and prestige in the scenario, the system computes that data so that the player can print out or download a chronicle sheet. With 100% data, the system would generate the up-to-date information. We could require a tracker # so that when characters are in multiple sessions via a con, it puts the data in the correct sequence.
I myself use a logo for my name on sheets for the sessions I run. For my House of Xathos sessions I use a logo for it as well. I would have it so GMs can create an electronic signature or logo that goes on the sheets too and is remembered so that it is put on the sheets and downloads.
Really, this is about reporting information, having the system do almost all of the work, and generating results that create an accountability system superior to what we have now. If Paizo does not want to do it for PFS 1.0, I understand. It would be a matter of diminishing returns.
However, for PFS 2.0 it would be a matter of making something that is currently minimally acceptable into something that is vastly superior.
Now, let's consider what we can do to change the Chronicle Sheet and pretty much the other things we don't like about them for PFS 2.0. Same thing for the character sheet and inventory tracking. What can we do to make it better?
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I think some of you think I am saying to do this at the store during games and that is not what I am saying. I am saying this should be in the reporting process online. I don't report my games until I am at home. Then I go online and report them.And this is my biggest personal objection to mandatory online reporting. I posted this earlier in the thread but it's worth repeating.
Many of those things can vary from PC to PC, even in the same party. So you are going to require me to copy all that information for each player at the table, then put it in when I get home? That's a lot of time for a GM to dedicate.Right now if you report an event, you put in each character number, name, faction, and fame gained, along with up to four boxes for scenario tracking (choices the PCs made). (With a checkbox for "dead" that is rarely used.) If I wanted to completely report a current PFS chronicle, here is all I would need to enter:
- Character Name
- PFS Number
- Faction
- Fame gained
- Scenario reporting boxes (A,B,C,D)
- Dead?
- Gold gained
- Gold spent
- Day Job result
- Any chronicle-specific boons gained/not gained.
- Scratch out all equipment on the chronicle that was not found.
- Notes for allowable carryover conditions (permanent negative levels, ability drain, nonmechanical effects.
Not to mention, a good sized convention with 16 tables a slot over 7 slots is 784 entries including the GM credit entry. That takes about 3 to 5 hours to enter as it is set currently. Make me enter 15 more things per entry and we are talking 15 hours minimum.
Imagine Gen Con at 1200 tables.thats 8,400 8ndividual entries. With the 9+ months it took for 2017 Gen Con to get fully reported...
Yeah, all this extra reporting is great in theory (assuming the tech issues can be resolved) but the pure man hours it would require would make this a complete non starter for most organizers.
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Reporting should be at 100% with no exceptions.
But it very clearly is not.
You absolutely cannot base a system off of what you WANT other people to do, especially when you have near zero control or influence over them. What are we going to do, track them down and give them very stern glances?
Every week someone pops up on the forums or online and asks "my game wasn't reported online does it still count?" If it actually WAS a big deal venture critters would be inundated with people trying to verify games played and whatnot.
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Venture-Captain, Missouri—Columbia
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Not if you do it the way I stated in my latest post.
There are other electronic means available to deal with the Gen Con reporting as it is now. It's really just a question of selecting the technology and adapting the code to accept the data coming from it.
I find it amazing how we are in the 21st century with all this technology available to us and we're still stuck in an antiquated mode of data entry as if it were 1990.
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I really don't see you offering anything but a handwave of "make it happen" "it should be this way so it will be this way" and "do it good"
That is not a plan. It's a wish. I don't think every badly designed or hiccuppy website out there (i'm looking at YOU warhorn) went fubar just because people decided to do it for the lolz... its because doing this stuff is hard and tedious.
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"selecting the technology" *involuntary twitch*
If you're looking for a simple but mandatory system, what do you think the causes are of the low reporting rate and what specifically would you like to see done to address them?
I myself would like to see more games reported. 50% seems very low to me.
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Venture-Captain, Germany—Bavaria
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I have been trying to follow this thread, but there is a very limited amount of extra data event organizers will be willing to enter.. I already have to fight the tremendously bad handwriting of some GMs and players.
Of course, I could see ways to make this happen, assuming every GM has a smart device with a QR code scanner, and players had codes for their characters etc... but I still have GMs without smartphones, and frankly we have locations where phone signals are not all that reliable.
A change like this would have to reduce the workload of everyone involved rather than increase it, since we currently don't even have a firm requirement to report at all... I think we are years away from any significant change.
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Not in the system I have in mind. I like the idea of less is better. It's all about having the data for a sheet already in the system. So when you report the character # and prestige in the scenario, the system computes that data so that the player can print out or download a chronicle sheet.
I'm not understanding how this system would function. And how it could possibly be less work.
How does, for example, the system "compute the data" to know that the players didn't find the wand of magic missile (CL7) and that it should be crossed off unless the GM manually enters that?
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Reporting should be at 100% with no exceptions.But it very clearly is not.
What I do believe, however, is that something should be done to try to close the current gap today between what gets reported online and what doesn't.
While I don't agree with the "100% report everything online and get rid of physical sheets" scenario that Xathos is suggesting, I think steps should be taken to help get PFS tables closer to 100% reporting online, even if we don't change a thing about chronicle sheets. Myself, along with several of the players in my area, utilize our profiles on Paizo to double-check scenarios that we've played/GM'd or to make sure our character is at the right level (which happens fairly often with newer players who aren't accustomed to proper paperwork tracking).
In the store that I'm a VA for, I make sure every table is reported online in our event code. The easiest way I do this is the RSP program. If a GM wants me to initial a box on their boon sheet, then that table needs to be reported online.
I know the mentality is "physical paperwork trumps online reporting", and I do believe that's a good policy. But, we should try to do more to bridge the gap with tables being reported online.
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Do you have your GMs do their own reporting? One way to ensure reporting happens, is the organizer reports everything. Of my over 300 play credits, I only have three unreported tables, one of which was out of area from Paizo Con 2017.
So if the organizers do the reporting, it ensures less people chances of being lazy, too busy, lose the reporting sheet, etc.
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Venture-Captain, Missouri—Columbia
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I dislike the mentality that "physical paperwork trumps online reporting." It's a horrible policy in my opinion.
I do realize there are those that will attempt to find fault with any attempt to institute change, but with PFS 2.0 coming up, it's time to look at what is wrong and take steps to fixing things. The failure to report games is a glaring failure and that needs to be addressed. I think Paizo has to step up on that and putting in this system I've suggested would be a good way to do that.
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One way to ensure reporting happens, is the organizer reports everything.
This is what we do, and it works very well for us. It changes the problem from "Is the GM reporting?" to "Did the GM remember to give the organizer the reporting sheet?" That's a much easier problem to solve for.
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I dislike the mentality that "physical paperwork trumps online reporting." It's a horrible policy in my opinion.
I do realize there are those that will attempt to find fault with any attempt to institute change, but with PFS 2.0 coming up, it's time to look at what is wrong and take steps to fixing things. The failure to report games is a glaring failure and that needs to be addressed. I think Paizo has to step up on that and putting in this system I've suggested would be a good way to do that.
We are all trying to figure out what this system is you're recommending, though. There are noble goals involved, to be sure--but how do we achieve them? "Build a system" isn't enough. We're past that point. We're well into "How do we design a system to do this?" territory.
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I dislike the mentality that "physical paperwork trumps online reporting." It's a horrible policy in my opinion.
It's one that reflects the reality that we have to deal with.
I do realize there are those that will attempt to find fault with any attempt to institute change, but with PFS 2.0 coming up, it's time to look at what is wrong and take steps to fixing things. The failure to report games is a glaring failure and that needs to be addressed. I think Paizo has to step up on that and putting in this system I've suggested would be a good way to do that.
You haven't suggested a system. You've suggested a goal.
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Do you have your GMs do their own reporting? One way to ensure reporting happens, is the organizer reports everything. Of my over 300 play credits, I only have three unreported tables, one of which was out of area from Paizo Con 2017.
So if the organizers do the reporting, it ensures less people chances of being lazy, too busy, lose the reporting sheet, etc.
Yes. Every single one of the GMs at the store is a reporter for the event code. And at worst case, I'll take the physical reporting sheet and report it for them if they cannot for some reason.
Liiiike?
That's the big question, and I'm not sure what answer is going to fly. I can offer two suggestions that I know aren't exactly ideal:
1) Have the VO chain enforce reporting somehow. But, that means putting pressure on volunteers and could potentially alienate other VOs.
2)You could also make auditing a more mandatory process, and use those checkpoints to compare physical sheets to online reported sessions. Those I personally don't like the idea of "mandatory" auditing.
Maybe if there was something similar to GM101 for players. Something along the lines of a 2-3 hour session walkthrough where GMs and VOs sit down with players and review good policies for active paperwork upkeep, how to maintain all of your records, and how to escalate a situation where you have a physical chronicle sheet but don't see it reported on Paizo.com (because I've found that just reading the Guide to Organized Play can be somewhat daunting for newer folks).
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Venture-Captain, Missouri—Columbia
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It's one that reflects the reality that we have to deal with.
Is it a useful reality? No. It is a reality based upon laziness. It's time to change it. In the Online Region, reporting is mandatory. If there is a GM running online who is too lazy to do the reporting, I do not want to play in their games.
So if the Online Region has it as a mandatory thing, why can't the rest of the regions or PFS as a whole require it?
To be honest, this seems to be nothing more than the usual resistance to change. PFS 1.0 is going to end and PFS 2.0 is going to replace it. There are not going to be unlimited replays so those that are complaining about that need to get with the program. It's time to put in changes as we move to the new rules.
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Venture-Captain, Missouri—Columbia
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We are all trying to figure out what this system is you're recommending, though. There are noble goals involved, to be sure--but how do we achieve them? "Build a system" isn't enough. We're past that point. We're well into "How do we design a system to do this?" territory.
We would have to work with the computer programmers on that.
I just think if Paizo linked the scenario data into the reporting from the GMs and then exported that data to the player section we would see better results. The only piece of information the GM would have to enter other than what they enter now would be the character chronicle number for that session.
The player would then be able to go into their account and see the chronicle sheet. They could download it or print it out.
For that matter, a spreadsheet entry sort of like a ledge could be in place there for the player to see the numbers as totals. Inventory tracking could be done via this method as well.
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Is it a useful reality? No. It is a reality based upon laziness. It's time to change it.
When you ascend to godhood let me know. Until then mere mortals have to deal with the reality that we have in front of us. We have an entirely volunteer market with almost no leverage, and you're asking people who already put in the most work to put in more and not to dial back on their participation as a result.
Change reality so my system will work! is not good system design. its fairy dust. Yes, peter pan based travel would solve a lot of our nations road congestion and CO2 emissions problems. No, its not an actual solution.
In the Online Region, reporting is mandatory
And thus always happens riiiight?
If there is a GM running online who is too lazy to do the reporting, I do not want to play in their games.
Well good luck sorting those out. Along with the ones that transpose a number, players that enter unlegible handwriting, players that put in the wrong character, lost session sheets, paizo system snafus.
To be honest, this seems to be nothing more than the usual resistance to change.
No.
You don't get to blame your complete, total, and utter lack of actual depth on the stubbornness of other posters. IE, you can't ad hom the rest of us for pointing out the woeful inadequacies of your plan or thinking that "and then everyone does what i want" is not a valid step in a plan.
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One way to ensure reporting happens, is the organizer reports everything.This is what we do, and it works very well for us. It changes the problem from "Is the GM reporting?" to "Did the GM remember to give the organizer the reporting sheet?" That's a much easier problem to solve for.
Absolutely it is. I must have misunderstood your initial comment.
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Various Dilbert strips and the Seven Red Lines sketch are both perfect examples of why we are not just "resisting change."
You:Hand-Wavium Totalus!
PFS Base: Yes, we will now report 100%
Paizo: Yes, we will build your complicated data base
VOs & Organizers: Wait, What? We have to put in 3 to 4 times as much work now? Screw That.
You: Hand-Wavium Totalus!
VOs & Organizers: No. Get outta here.
Paizo: We built it, you use it.
VOs & Organizers: We Quit.
PFS Base: DOH!
You: Hand-Wavium Totalus!
Everyone: Goodbye Felicia!
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We are all trying to figure out what this system is you're recommending, though. There are noble goals involved, to be sure--but how do we achieve them? "Build a system" isn't enough. We're past that point. We're well into "How do we design a system to do this?" territory.We would have to work with the computer programmers on that.
You have at least two programmers here, possibly more, who are attempting to work with you to decipher what your plan is. It turns out that trying to nail down the details of your plan is quite challenging!
I just think if Paizo linked the scenario data into the reporting from the GMs and then exported that data to the player section we would see better results. The only piece of information the GM would have to enter other than what they enter now would be the character chronicle number for that session.
Even with that simple box you seem to be forgetting that it's not that easy. Say I get a couple of boons and decide to apply them to the character--now I'm up two chronicles past where the system had me before!
This does not include the other components that you may have forgotten about. For example, day jobs and gold earned from the scenario. Those two things would also need to be entered, because they are both variable. People miss stuff in the scenario all the time. Plus we'd need to know the levels of the characters as well as the subtier played in. And for GM chronicles if the GM character was out of subtier their list of items depends on the subtier run, even though the GM character isn't involved.
This doesn't count extra work for the GM in terms of checking or not checking boxes on boons, making sure the right faction boons were made available, that all the items on the chronicle sheet were unlocked...
So the thing that you think is one extra box turns out to be at least four or five extra boxes minimum, and up to 45 extra boxes right away.
And at no point has this actually begun to address the potentially low rate of reporting--instead it's just making the rate of reporting worse because we're adding more barriers to entry.
Do you see why your "Just make it so!" plan is being met with skepticism? You seem to be overlooking even the simplest of complications in favor of assuming that you can handwave that which would comprise of the bulk of the work and challenge.
The player would then be able to go into their account and see the chronicle sheet. They could download it or print it out.
For that matter, a spreadsheet entry sort of like a ledge could be in place there for the player to see the numbers as totals. Inventory tracking could be done via this method as well.
At least the spreadsheet is realistic, although replacing Google Sheets would not be high on my list of priorities for Paizo.
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And thus always happens riiiight?In the vast majority of cases yes, yes it does.
How close would you need to get to 100% for a system that relied solely on online reporting to be workable?
You're also looking at the DM sitting in front of a computer as the game happens, that makes it MUCH easier to report than writing numbers on a
piece of paper or napkin that happens at some game days.
Last week i went and reported a game using the wrong spreadsheet. Because it was online and the geekiest of geeks, someone looked for the session and didn't find it. They pm'd me and i fixed it, but that sort of thing works online. it doesn't work trying to find "that big dm with the huge beard" who's name is..." looks at chronicle sheet" scribble scribble scribble 5565442
I know you like to claim that only about half of games ever actually get reported but as far as I can tell this is a nonsense number plucked from the air
To a fair degree yes. (or pulled from less savory places)
You're looking for a hard number on something you by definition can't have a hard number for. Guestimating is inevitable and admitted to, but
I have had to go through reported sessions with people trying to figure out what levels people were or when a bucket of of incomplete chronicle sheets without dates and held credit added up to the character being level ?
Almost everyone was missing sessions somewhere. Now, the only way i can do this is "here sign in check your history and " and I am an absolute weirdness magnet so I'm not going to try to claim it's a representative sample, but when you couple that with the flood of new guys saying their games weren't reported I don't know if reporting is at 50 or 75 or 90% But I know its FAR short of what you'd need to use it in place of a paper chronicle system. Even if it's 99.9 percent imagine venture critters having to correct .1% of chronicle sheets.
Now imagine they have to do that not just for this character played this game, but for every time someone accidentally gave someone 11363 gold instead of 1363 gold or 534 xp instead of 534 gold or every other error i've done seen **whistles innocently**
which bears no relation to reality for me or any of the many players and GM's I have spoken to and played with.
How often do you see someone showing up and saying "I have a chronicle sheet but its not reported what do I do..."