Having our "home games" be PFS, and my first forays as a PFS GM

[Markuus Brightsteel]

A common story: we're all older, we used to play regularly when we were in our 20s, now that we're in our 50s, the overhead of a campaign doesn't fit into our daily life. We're lucky to do one-shots. Using the vast PFS pool of (essentially) one-shots fits the bill for our group. And since we're all of us living in about 5 cities around the country now, we do it via Zoom, Owlbear Rodeo, etc.

But I have some "mechanics" questions on how to do this, as a GM. (We're playing PFS1e if it influences the answers to any of these questions)

* Should I be setting up a new PFS "Event" for each of our fortnightly sessions? Or should I have one Event ("Some nerdy name for our group's gaming") and just a single table scheduled every other week as part of that event?
* There's no reason to do those little half-page sign-up sheets, right? Chronicle-sheets I understand yes, obviously a hard requirement, but if we're using something like rpgchronicles.net to do "sign-up" and chronicle-sheet generation, that half-sheet thing is just to make the GM's job easier at a table full of people they don't know, and to take it home with them after the session, to do the reporting afterwards, right? There's no expectation that the GM has some box of those they've kept around for every session they've run, to audit THOSE or something?
* I "know" (as much as anyone knows since there seem to be a couple different methods) how to track purchases of gear for PCs on the Inventory Tracking Sheets, but was there ever an expectation that *initial gear* (ie, session 0) purchases would be logged on that sheet as well? In theory they'd have to be in order to do a fully-accurate-to-the-copper-piece audit, but I can't picture logging on there "4 torches", "1 backpack", "3 sheets parchment" or whatever. It seems mostly intended for "items with three digit costs or more that you're buying from chronicle-sheets or based on your fame". Maybe I'm wrong.
* How do other people handle trying to get "clean" maps for VTT purposes when it's a scenario-custom map, and it's got GM-privileged info scrawled all over it? Are people recreating those by drawing them by hand? Is there some hard-to-find source for "cleaned up custom-map content" [and if not, dear god, could there please be?]
* Does anyone else just have general-purpose pointers in this space for things that worked well/badly for them?

Thanks!

[Pirate Rob]

Markuus Brightsteel wrote:

* Should I be setting up a new PFS "Event" for each of our fortnightly sessions? Or should I have one Event ("Some nerdy name for our group's gaming") and just a single table scheduled every other week as part of that event?

Totally up to you. I recommend just sticking with the same event, there's no benefit to splitting them up. I have an event for my personal games that's well over 10 years old at this point.

Markuus Brightsteel wrote:

* There's no reason to do those little half-page sign-up sheets, right? Chronicle-sheets I understand yes, obviously a hard requirement, but if we're using something like rpgchronicles.net to do "sign-up" and chronicle-sheet generation, that half-sheet thing is just to make the GM's job easier at a table full of people they don't know, and to take it home with them after the session, to do the reporting afterwards, right? There's no expectation that the GM has some box of those they've kept around for every session they've run, to audit THOSE or something?

No need to use or keep those. You could get people's info on a napkin, or RPG chronicles or whatever, they are just there, so that there's a default something.

Markuus Brightsteel" wrote:

* I "know" (as much as anyone knows since there seem to be a couple different methods) how to track purchases of gear for PCs on the Inventory Tracking Sheets, but was there ever an expectation that *initial gear* (ie, session 0) purchases would be logged on that sheet as well? In theory they'd have to be in order to do a fully-accurate-to-the-copper-piece audit, but I can't picture logging on there "4 torches", "1 backpack", "3 sheets parchment" or whatever. It seems mostly intended for "items with three digit costs or more that you're buying from chronicle-sheets or based on your fame". Maybe I'm wrong.

In theory you have to record all your purchases, that said nobody is going to care about a few coppers here and there. I've never felt the need to make sure somebody has properly recorded or even purchased a bit of chalk or parchment. May I suggest the Adventurer's Pack. It's cheap and it covers the basic supplies an adventurer needs. I think I own one of those on every single PFS character I have. PFS is not a gritty survival archeological adventure where every quill and scrap of parchment is precious and in short supply.

Markuus Brightsteel wrote:

* How do other people handle trying to get "clean" maps for VTT purposes

They are mostly complex pdf layered images, with most maps and most pdf readers you can click and copy the map and get just the base layer without all the notes etc.. Not 100% though and every once in awhile it takes a bit of finagling to get what you want.

[Markuus Brightsteel]

Pirate Rob wrote:

Totally up to you. I recommend just sticking with the same event, there's no benefit to splitting them up. I have an event for my personal games that's well over 10 years old at this point.

I think that's probably what we'll do then. Have one group "event", and just have sessions upon sessions in that event.

Pirate Rob wrote:

In theory you have to record all your purchases, that said nobody is going to care about a few coppers here and there. I've never felt the need to make sure somebody has properly recorded or even purchased a bit of chalk or parchment. May I suggest the Adventurer's Pack. It's cheap and it covers the basic supplies an adventurer needs. I think I own one of those on every single PFS character I have. PFS is not a gritty survival archeological adventure where every quill and scrap of parchment is precious and in short supply.

I don't think there's an Adventurer's Pack for PFS1e unfortunately. We had something like that as a homebrew item for our campaign, but it doesn't look like a 1e thing. :-(

Pirate Rob wrote:

They are mostly complex pdf layered images, with most maps and most pdf readers you can click and copy the map and get just the base layer without all the notes etc.. Not 100% though and every once in awhile it takes a bit of finagling to get what you want.

My experience with the scenario I used was that the PDFs seemed to be very hard to break apart like that. I may have to give it another go with some different tools. For the scenario we just ran (5-08 The Confirmation) it was somewhat easy because the "spoiler bits" on the single custom map were just going to have to have character/mob tokens laid on top of them immediately anyway, so it I just screenshotted it and uploaded the screenshot. But figuring out a better way would be good.

Thanks for the info!

[Hilary Moon Murphy]

There was at least one season (I think 6 for PFS1?) where it was almost impossible to extract the maps from scenarios. Sometimes I had to force them out with a tool that would extract all the images in a scenario just to get the maps free.

I recommend experimenting with different tools. You might also want to talk to the VTT community at PFSchat.com to see if anyone has a VTT table you can borrow for that scenario with the maps already extracted. We're a very friendly and helpful community.

Welcome to the PFS community!

Hmm

[Pirate Rob]

For PF1 especially there are a lot of helpful resources that people have put together over the years on my website: pfsprep.com. Things like statblocks, improved handouts, trackers etc (Scroll down to PFS - GM Prep or just 'find' the adventure name or number you're looking for).

HTTPS is currently broken unfortunately so modern browsers likely throw warnings before letting you download things. (I'm years behind in maintenance since improved Adventure layout/production for Starfinder and PFS2 have largely made the site irrelevant).

[Hilary Moon Murphy]

Oh... the PFS Prep site is back! It is good to see it back, Rob!

[Markuus Brightsteel]

Pirate Rob wrote:

For PF1 especially there are a lot of helpful resources that people have put together over the years on my website: pfsprep.com. Things like statblocks, improved handouts, trackers etc (Scroll down to PFS - GM Prep or just 'find' the adventure name or number you're looking for).

HTTPS is currently broken unfortunately so modern browsers likely throw warnings before letting you download things. (I'm years behind in maintenance since improved Adventure layout/production for Starfinder and PFS2 have largely made the site irrelevant).

That site looks awesome. Side note since this isn't really the "PFS Prep Tech Support Forum", but I created an account and never got the confirmation e-mail to complete the registration. :-(

[Pirate Rob]

Markuus Brightsteel wrote:

Pirate Rob wrote:

For PF1 especially there are a lot of helpful resources that people have put together over the years on my website: pfsprep.com. Things like statblocks, improved handouts, trackers etc (Scroll down to PFS - GM Prep or just 'find' the adventure name or number you're looking for).

HTTPS is currently broken unfortunately so modern browsers likely throw warnings before letting you download things. (I'm years behind in maintenance since improved Adventure layout/production for Starfinder and PFS2 have largely made the site irrelevant).

That site looks awesome. Side note since this isn't really the "PFS Prep Tech Support Forum", but I created an account and never got the confirmation e-mail to complete the registration. :-(

There's a manual step I have to take to approve new accounts, which I took care of this morning. Fighting the spam bots is a never ending war.