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So, there's a growing problem with Pathfinder 2 Society Scenarios.
Several times in the recent past we've had scenarios with mechanical issues, especially regarding subsystem/scaling math.
In each of these cases a non-Campaign Leadership forum member has passed on changes present in the Official Foundry module
Are these changes/clarifications official? Who made them? Why are they behind an additional $150 product and not present on the product pages or GM discussion threads, or updated PDFs?
Instead of reading a clarification/errata from a source I know to be official, such as the Developer of a Scenario or an OP official. I have a forum poster, claiming that foundry claims, that Paizo told them. (I have no reason to disbelieve the poster, or Foundry, but no way to confirm either)
Let me be clear: This is a problem.
Venture-Captain, California—Sacramento
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Instead of reading a clarification/errata from a source I know to be official, such as the Developer of a Scenario or an OP official. I have a forum poster, claiming that foundry claims, that Paizo told them. (I have no reason to disbelieve the poster, or Foundry, but no way to confirm either)
While I don't believe the forum poster(s?) or foundry are trying to decieve anyone, I have seen plenty of situations over the years where someone misinterpreted an unofficial comment or even a contradiction as "This is official confirmation of what I believe."
Too many for me to accept that any of these changes are official.
I agree this is a problem that needs to be fixed.
Official clarifications need to be announced officially as stated in the guide to organized play. Any unofficial change in foundry from a pdf needs to be identified as such.
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Any unofficial change in foundry from a pdf needs to be identified as such.
I can at the very least comment on this part. Any unofficial changes in foundry from the pdf are identified as such, because there are no unofficial changes.
Everything that is changed during the process of making the module goes through Paizo and is vetted by the PFS team. I hope that these clarifications find a way to the public outside of just the module. That said, both the PDF and the module should be recognized as legitimate and I don't think either has to somehow prove it. Both are made by Paizo internal people collaborating with contracted people and then published by Paizo.
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That said, both the PDF and the module should be recognized as legitimate and I don't think either has to somehow prove it. Both are made by Paizo internal people collaborating with contracted people and then published by Paizo.
Sure but one of those things is not like the other.
While each version is legitimate, perhaps Paizo can try to communicate changes from campaign leadership in a way everyone can access.
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I agree that discrepancies between an official PDF and official VTT module are concerning. I do not think Foundry content should ever automatically be considered as normative – not just because of access issues, but because it's always possible an error snuck in during the conversion! I'd rather see the PDF + some form of published errata be normative.
Has Paizo ever done errata for PFS scenarios, though? Is this new ground we're getting into?
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That said, both the PDF and the module should be recognized as legitimate and I don't think either has to somehow prove it. Both are made by Paizo internal people collaborating with contracted people and then published by Paizo.
I don't think it's a question of legitimacy, but a question of what is the "source of truth". Multiple sources of truth for a single thing is a recipe for exactly the problem Rob describes here.
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Has Paizo ever done errata for PFS scenarios, though? Is this new ground we're getting into?
PFS2 1-10 was updated and rereleased after it was discovered that the math for the scoring system didn't work as intended. (It also had some other errors like incorrect fame/rep that were fixed.
In most cases, there's just a Dev post mentioning the error, such as the erroneous Repeatable Tag in 1-05
Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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I appreciate the devs have a lot of work, and that Foundry really really needs answers to be able to implement scenarios.
But in the good old days clarifications also were made in this forum. I don't want to lose that. I'll happily take a rough copy-and-paste of any answers that were given to Foundry people.
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One piece of paid software taking up resources to the detriment of other resources (publicly accessible forums, other VTTs) is almost never a good recipe for the community. Guess it's about where the $$ is though and who can blame Paizo.
While I operated my own Foundry server for quite a long time I do miss the days when we could find scrappy simple PFS games on Google Slides and it's one of the reasons I stopped playing online.
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I'd rather us not get into the weeds on the merits of one VTT or another.
I think we're virtually all in agreement that there being 2 different and conflicting sources of scenario text is a problem. (Doubly so when one source is not publicly visible, except through hearsay.)
My preference is just that errata/clarifications get shared in an official and public way, such as in the GM thread, or Product page or updated PDF by an appropriate staff member. (Or a new FAQ page or whatever)
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Venture-Captain, Massachusetts—Boston Metro
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One piece of paid software taking up resources to the detriment of other resources (publicly accessible forums, other VTTs) is almost never a good recipe for the community. Guess it's about where the $$ is though and who can blame Paizo.
While I operated my own Foundry server for quite a long time I do miss the days when we could find scrappy simple PFS games on Google Slides and it's one of the reasons I stopped playing online.
Where is this stupid conspiracy coming from? In my ten years of Organized Play Paizo was never the best at communicating information.
This is a minor roadbump in what I've seen.
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Guess it's about where the $$ is though and who can blame Paizo.Where is this stupid conspiracy coming from?
I don't think a conspiracy wasn't necessarily implied there. In a world where Paizo's resources are limited and there's a high-priced, high-quality product they want to deliver, it's possible for entirely non-conspiratorial reasons that they would focus on one instead of the other.
That doesn't line up with my limited understanding of how these VTT modules get made, though. I think it just as likely that these are issues that a sharp-eyed contractor caught and got fixed in their work, and no attention was paid to recording those clarifications for PDF users. Nothing about money, then, just opportunity.
I also don't think it would take a ton of effort or cost to address. With any luck, merely calling attention to the issue is most of the work done right there!
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Venture-Captain, Massachusetts—Boston Metro
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Guess it's about where the $$ is though and who can blame Paizo.Where is this stupid conspiracy coming from?I don't think a conspiracy wasn't necessarily implied there. In a world where Paizo's resources are limited and there's a high-priced, high-quality product they want to deliver, it's possible for entirely non-conspiratorial reasons that they would focus on one instead of the other.
Right but what makes you think that Foundry is the priority? We don't know what the priority is. It's just rampant speculation that just comes off as a passive aggressive attack.
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Hi there,
The concern is not a "conspiracy"; Drental commented about "Paizo internal people collaborating with contracted people" to vet Foundry modules.
In other words, Paizo people are spending work time fixing issues in one version and not another. That's great, but seems to be creating different branches of content because those changes aren't being broadcast to the community.
Whatever the case here, I do hope Paizo can leverage the effort used to create high quality Foundry modules find a way to keep things in stride for the whole community.
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Yes its a _good_ thing that the developers of the Foundry modules have a channel to get corrections in a timely manner, as forced by the release schedule. All too often these types of questions just kinda pile up in the GM thread and only sometimes get Paizo developer attention.
Yes, its also bad that they are either not always posted, or not posted in a manner that's consistent with the Guide on what posts can be viewed as official. This means that Foundry-produced scenarios are different from pdf-based scenarios, which isn't a good state.
It feels like all this takes is some process tweak -- whenever Paizo is responding to the foundry dev's with these clarification to cut & paste the Q&A portion of the email into a specific thread -- ie make it easy just have a "Season 5 Correction Thread" not tied to each particular scenario. If keeping it Paizo side is unworkable from some reason, then add one of the Foundry dev's to the list of approved people to post corrections, and probably require an alt "Official Foundry Scenario Correction' voice (like the Guide Voice) for them to post as.
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Venture-Agent, Ohio—Columbus
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I’m far too exhausted after running 10 slots at Origins to get into this too much, but this has been a source of much frustration for me for some time.
The poor editing of scenarios this season exacerbates the issue, there are simply more problems to fix. The fact that the Foundry module team has access to get answers to the problems that make it through development and editing, while users of the PDFs do not, means more and larger discrepancies between the two.
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Venture-Captain, Massachusetts—Boston Metro
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Hi there,
The concern is not a "conspiracy"; Drental commented about "Paizo internal people collaborating with contracted people" to vet Foundry modules.
In other words, Paizo people are spending work time fixing issues in one version and not another. That's great, but seems to be creating different branches of content because those changes aren't being broadcast to the community.
Whatever the case here, I do hope Paizo can leverage the effort used to create high quality Foundry modules find a way to keep things in stride for the whole community.
Right but the weirdest part out of all of this is they didn't fix all the issues. The changes in 5-16 are apparently missing an equally important change which maybe was deliberate but also looks like they just were listed in alphabetical order. But maybe they were changed but who knows????
That's why I'm on the wait and see boat because even if they are doing the changes it seems weirdly haphazard.
Also, sorry this is such a bizarrely volatile subject for people and its so confusing.
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Venture-Captain, Massachusetts—Boston Metro
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I'm not sure where you are finding volatility. Any confusion can be cleared up by clearly documenting changes across versions in a way the most people can access.
This is the third iteration of the conversation Ive seen. Also, technically speaking at least one of the changes looks more like someone accidentally misread a stat block and the error wasn't caught.
That's why I'm a little hesitant to just jump on the assumption that they are fixing the scenarios full stop.
Contributor
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Here is my summary of what is happening:
1) A sharp-eyed Foundry Module Developer is spotting potential problems in scenarios (especially Season 5, where the editing has been a bit spotty.) - Yay!
2) Paizo has offered some guidance for those issues to Foundry. - Yay!
3) Foundry has helpfully posted those clarifications in its modules. - Yay!
4) Helpful Forum posters who have Foundry subscriptions have shared those clarifications in the GM threads. - Yay!
So far, all of that is GREAT. The real issue is in number 5.
5) Foundry is a paid resource, and we should not have to rely on posts from helpful online GMs to get these clarifications as well. It would be nice if when Paizo makes these clarifications they also copy them over to a public resource, whether it is GM threads or an official Season 5 scenario clarification thread.
Don't get me wrong. I am over the moon that we are getting these clarifications. That's wonderful. I'm just hoping that we can get them in a more straightforward manner. I am GMing almost exclusively in person or PBP, but have been considering budgeting for Foundry purchases just so that I can get these clarifications... and I should not have to do so.
Hmm
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I’m far too exhausted after running 10 slots at Origins to get into this too much, but this has been a source of much frustration for me for some time.
The poor editing of scenarios this season exacerbates the issue, there are simply more problems to fix. The fact that the Foundry module team has access to get answers to the problems that make it through development and editing, while users of the PDFs do not, means more and larger discrepancies between the two.
Thank you for posting several of the changes/clarifications I linked to by the way. Without your posts I don't think this issue would have come to my attention. (And likely my games would have been worse due to not having access to those notes).
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Why am I finding the PFS scenario errata under the digital products for Foundry? I'm grateful that it's linked from the Lorespire page, but why is this not in the PFS Forum? For example:
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs5i80m?11272024-Pathfinder-Society-Year-6
indicates "scaling has been fixed", but if I'm running from PDF, I have 0 idea how it's been fixed.
I guess I simply don't understand why these things are found here, and the fixes aren't revealed.
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Why am I finding the PFS scenario errata under the digital products for Foundry? I'm grateful that it's linked from the Lorespire page, but why is this not in the PFS Forum? For example:
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs5i80m?11272024-Pathfinder-Society-Year-6indicates "scaling has been fixed", but if I'm running from PDF, I have 0 idea how it's been fixed.
I guess I simply don't understand why these things are found here, and the fixes aren't revealed.
I was ready to get out the pitchforks for that one, but it turns out the Foundry Module just had to the wrong scaling, and was fixed to match the scenario.
The two are in agreement here.