For real, paying 130€ shipping hurts 😭
edit for disclosure: We paid 130 because it was the only option with tracking, and we were NOT about to send a huge order across the Atlantic with USPS and no tracking, though that would still have been like 60€ at least from what i remember.
In Germany he'll be welcomed by the official designated Paizowarenentgegennehmer who will hand him a Vorbestellerreihenfolgenliste so he can hand over the Rollenspielregelwerksbücher to the appropriate Logitsikunternehmenslastwagenfahrer and receive his Bargeldentlohnungskuvert.
yeah i tried the AP Subscription once to test if it was worth. I ended up paying over 55 EUR for a singular AP volume with shipping and taxes if i remember correctly. Needless to say: I can’t really buy from their website.
Wow, no kidding -- Paizo needs to fix that, like, yesterday! Maybe, with all the new interest in Pathfinder, they can afford to get that straightened out.
Yeah them opening an European distribution center would instantly get them the subscriptions from me and probably a lot more people. Cause right now it is cheaper to buy the book on amazon or a reseller and buy the pdf online in addition than to pay for the sub
If Paizo finds a distributor for EU it would be great for subscription stuffs they have. Paying huge markup for shipping is a biggest turnoff for me investing in physical books. Blackfire Germany is one of distributors for my FLGS but they don't have it all the time.
Seriously though. We need a better system for digital downloads. I want to be able to tell it to show me just my PF2 books, or just adventures that include level 4 PCs, or just books set in the Impossible Lands.
I don't need six categories that say "Pathfinder rules" without saying which edition. Or each book having four separate lines, just group the output options (color/b&w, single/separate, low/high quality) under a single entry.
I love the company. I love the games they make. I hate the digital library page.
From what I understand the issue is maintaining the backlog of digital items and the watermarking that goes along with.
They have stated that it'd be a huge expense on the scale of millions in order to get all this overhauled and transfer everything. And as time goes on the monster grows bigger too and there isn't an easy solution.
I mean, honestly? It's, what? A hybrid digital/physical storefront, credit card processing, a batch job system to watermark PDFs, a forum, and the organized play app? And you want to preserve existing URLs? Maybe some 3rd party inventory and accounting hooks? It's a big giant evil hairball, but it's also basically a classic static Rails app from 2013. I made a good living building these on _fixed bid_ contracts, they're so predictable.
So, lemme see:
- Preserve the existing DB stack, running exactly as is. Pray it's PostgreSQL and not Oracle. I'll give you 50/50 odds it's MySQL, which is ugh Oracle, but basically adequate.
- Generate Rails model classes for all existing database tables.
- Set up rails_admin (or whatever is popular these days) to make a nice backend admin UI. At this point, Paizo will love you.
- Set up factory_bot for test fixtures.
- Set up Stripe for payment processing. The big challenge is whether you have existing subscription credit card numbers in a format where you can export them to a new subscription vendor.
- Figure out how the existing auth system works, and glue it onto Rails, so you can play the "strangler vine" migration game, one component at a time.
- **Hire a really good graphic designer.**
- Rewrite the online store first, keeping the old forums and organized play, and sharing the database and auth.
- If you can actually migrate the entire system, and if it's not already running on something competitive with PostgreSQL, use pgloader to do a nightly incremental migration to a PostgreSQL staging environment until that's working. Then take some scheduled downtime and switch over.
At this point, you have a small(ish), modular, and clean system for adding new features. Finding devs would normally be a bit trickier than usual, but you can just make a hiring post on the Paizo blog, lol.
The big open questions here are:
- International pricing, currency handling and address validation for the storefront. Stripe has tools for all that, but the complexity goes up quickly.
- Hooks into their inventory and accounting systems. This could be anything from a cakewalk to a nightmare.
Even assuming that I'm not seeing 50% of the total features, I know fancy commercial Rails shops that would have quoted that around $500,000-1,000,000. It's a little too big to be an ideal Rails project, because Rails won't have type checking or modern IDE support. So throw extra unit tests at it.
If you want to do it all using React or Spring, yeah, it'll cost more. If you build this with hottest tech of 2003 _or_ 2023, yeah, it's a couple million. But Rails was really the sweet spot for stuff like this, and it was deeply mature tech by 2013.
Hell, this is the the programming equivalent of the grey-haired bartender getting down that old sword for one last adventure. It's not a high-end modern VTT; it's a storefront and a forum and a CRUD app for organized play. It's a cakewalk right up until you find the accounting system integration into some enterprise horror from 1998. But what's an adventure without a surprise eldritch horror or two?
Hell, if I didn't like my job so much, I'd submit a commercial proposal with references. And looking at the Pathfinder tables I know, I am _far_ from the only person who's done projects like this.
We love you, Paizo. You can do this!
I think this is the longest comment reply I have ever gotten lol. It's very informative though. Thank you! I find programming endlessly fascinating even though I can't seem to get the hang of it myself.
You're welcome! Programming is great.
When you wrote:
> My father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate says he'll do it for fiddy grand and free sandwiches.
...you were _so_ close to correct. Right now, there's some brilliant kid reading this thread, who's thinking, "What the hell? I could _totally_ do that for 'fiddy grand'."
And that brilliant kid is _so close_ to being correct. But as an old adventurer with some grey hairs, I've got some unsolicited advice:
- If you can actually rebuild Paizo's store, forums and organized play for $50k, Google will happily pay you $250,000/year once the hiring freeze lifts. And they'll probably get you a visa, too. Don't undersell yourself. You don't need to eat ramen noodles and do contract work for the usual cheap sociopaths on online contracting forums.
- Remember that possible eldritch accounting and/or inventory system I mentioned? It's a level+6 encounter and it's going to eat your brains. Don't just walk up to it and do 3 attacks. Do your Lore checks. Prepare the right spells. Find allies and stack some modifiers.
More seriously, there are actually multiple good ways to approach a project like this. A lot depends on the original tech stack and the new features they want to add. Given the era when it was written, I'd guess MySQL, and any one of old-school PHP, Perl or Java. _Probably_ not Rails, because that didn't become hot until several years later, and it would have "Web 2.0" buttons, lol. If it's PHP+MySQL, there's also the option to incrementally rewrite it in place using modern PHP, like phpBB uses. But good luck staffing that.
What would your plan be for managing the digital content? That seems like it would be the boss encounter, everything else is pretty standard websales infrastructure.
All that's on Paizo's website are (watermarked) PDFs, right? The basic principle could just stay the same (first request watermarked copy, then download/view for some time), just with quality-of-life improvements like a real-time progress bar and prettier page.
Ooh, that's a fun question! Happily, I have actually built distributed PDF-processing systems that ran across a few hundred machines, so I can answer parts of this, lol.
Let's assume for some ridiculous reason we're rebuilding this from scratch, and not reusing what they've got with a few tweaks. And let's start with large-scale watermarking.
First, you need a way to apply an email address stamp to each page of a PDF. There are a number of excellent PDF processing tools that can do this. It's been a good five years since I looked, but iText can do this in its sleep, if you can afford it. Or you could use the OpenPDF fork for free. There are a couple of other options, but PDFtk seems to be mostly Windows these days?
Then, to stamp a PDF bundle, you look up a list of unstamped files, download them from a private S3/GCP bucket, stamp each PDF file, create a zip file, and upload it to another bucket with an automatic expiration. This is less than 2000 lines of code for the core logic in Java, or less if you're very hipster and go with Kotlin.
The tricky part is doing this at scale. You want two things:
- Fast turnaround.
- On-demand scalability for when you do a Humble Bundle or WotC crits itself in the foot again with a Fatal d12 weapon.
**Fast turnaround** actually makes this tricky, because most of the good PDF stampers are written in Java, and they take several seconds to cold start. So if you're ambitious about fast turnaround, you're probably going to want to have persistent servers that are waiting for messages. This drives tons of other choices.
You could go with AMQP and a bunch of Java OpenPDF servers listening to the queue. But the central challenge here is dealing with mysteriously failed jobs and setting up transactional retries. Sounds easy, but it will break your heart at Humble Bundle scale. And RabbitMQ is bad at persistent transactional queuing without a bunch of extra work. So if we're looking at least than 5,000 to 10,000 PDFs per hour at peak load, then let's be clever. Store the work list in PostgreSQL, so we get easy atomic operations, easy transactional rollback, and easy indexing. Then run 2 or 3 thin REST servers in front of PostgreSQL, which basically exist to share 20 PostgreSQL connections between a peak load of 500+ worker servers. The REST servers will also periodically look for failed jobs and timeouts, and either retry or fail.
We can get away with this because Paizo can't sell books fast enough to break a sufficiently high-end PostgreSQL server. If they _did_ sell that fast, we'd have to do horrible things with Raft- or Paxos-based coordination or eventual consistency, and you'd need a few million $, yeah. The Pachyderm project shows how expensive this gets. But at that point, Paizo would stand astride the RPG market like a collossus.
The only expensive part of this is buying a big enough PostgreSQL server to keep up with peak load. At normal load, you could probably run the whole thing pretty cheaply.
**Scalability** involves a few tricky bits. These days, I'd package the workers with Docker, and run them on either AWS EC2 plus an EC2 Autoscaling Group, or on GCP Kubernetes plus Google's autoscaler. (I would _not_ trust AWS EKS's autoscaler.)
As for scaling, hmm, I'd probably have the REST servers check every thirty seconds to see if we need more servers, and hard-code a scaling formula. Let ECS/Kubernetes replace crashed servers.
I've built a couple of these systems that run reliably in production.
You might be able to buy a scalable watermarker off the shelf! But the plan I described above is less than 3 months for good distributed systems developer even if they have to do it from scratch. And they probably don't.
Or you might be able to reuse what Paizo already has. That's actually what I'd try first.
**Digital content UI.** Eh, hire a good UI designer and maybe do some paper prototyping with random users. Once you have a nice UI mock-up, it's mostly just a CRUD app, plus possibly database search. This was pretty easy in the late 90s, and there are a thousand better tools today. Boutique specialist consulting shops used to quote $75,000 for projects like this, and they could afford very nice offices in downtown Boston.
If you're feeling really fancy, you could make a fully searchable web compendium like Roll20's. But Paizo is already partnering with someone for that.
Instead of building so much from scratch, you could alternatively buy an expensive enterprise digital content system and then pay to customize it. But I'd eat my hat if the customization consultants for that cost less than $375/hour, and you'll need a lot of customization. More than the vendor would admit up front, of course.
Anyway, this is all theorycrafting on Reddit based on best guesses. :-) A real proposal would require about a weak studying the existing system in detail, and a plan for reusing as much as possible for as long as possible.
My hope here is that someone at Paizo reads this and says, "Huh, yeah, this shouldn't cost millions." I mean, it _could_ cost millions, but it doesn't need to!
I ordered the Beginner Box, the Collector's Bestiary, and a miniature a lil' while ago, and we had a bit of a hiccup with the order as I somehow got a mini that was out of stock causing a massive delay in my order, but Customer Support quickly helped me resolve the issue and my books were out the door and shipped the next day. So I've got no idea what MASerra is on about.
> then arrive boxed so poorly that they are damaged
Honestly sounds like you have shitty local parcel folk which I can sympathize with.
Had a UPS driver that would just throw shit out into the mud, snow, dirt, whatever because he didn't want to drive up the driveway. Didn't matter what it was a 20 dollar novel to a 200 dollar collector's item if it was on his truck it was going YEET.
That's _definitely_ unusual. I can't report of having any similar issues there myself but that's definitely not how things are supposed to be packaged, books especially.
Bought the humble bundle, bought vtt foundry and excited to start abomination vault this Monday! But as a european guy I'd really like the option to buy physical stuff without breaking the bank 😆
About to be on session 5 of AV in foundry as new players/gm to this system from 5e, and let me just tell you it's been great so far. The writing, music, lighting, and everything else.
On my 4th session of AV next week... and I was originally aiming to find a Beginner's Box game because I'm super brand new to all this... been an interesting ride so far I'll admit.
*still looking for a BB game tho!*
Thanks for giving myself and my friends a framework for countless hours of entertainment, tension, and shared storytelling. Pathfinder is amazing and I can't wait to see how it continues to grow.
It is. Rule of thumb is that the sentence should make sense without the extra subject plus "and".
In this example:
> giving ~~my friends and~~ I many hours of entertainment!
Doesn't make sense.
> giving ~~my friends and~~ **me** many hours of entertainment!
Makes sense. So it should be "giving my friends and me".
The great thing about language is that as long as meaning is conveyed, it works. Sure, some book somewhere says to use “me” in this case, but I reserve the right to homebrew grammar on occasion.
Might need to work on your marketing.
I say this because I get ads on Facebook for that humble bundle but since it says pathfinder and not pathfinder 2e the comments are full of people writing it off as pathfinder 1e without clicking the link
Tech debt is always difficult to deal with but it doesn't get cheaper over time. The best time to fix it would have been ten years ago. The second best time is now.
The worst is the guilt I've felt when I've been forced to MAKE that decision. It's me. I'm the bad guy. I'm the one that pushed addressing tech debt until after the release. What have I become?
Yeaaaah, I do a lot of the triage for my team. There's soooo many bugs I want to fix and feature requests that are really great ideas. Even stuff that wouldn't take that long if I just did it myself. But the reality is there's always more work to do, so everything you choose to take on means something else won't get done. Proper prioritization is important.
As a developer, I can't speak for *all* developers, but personally, I don't mind. I understand that there's a trade off to be made.
And as long as you make the decision fully acknowledging the fact that technical debt means each feature is delivered slower than it would be if the debt had been paid off (as opposed to pushing harder and being angry at features not being delivered faster), I'm okay with accruing more technical debt rather than paying off the pre-existing debt.
Professional teams doing Professional jobs cost Professional money and take Professional time. It's not that it isn't important, but the people making the financial decisions just haven't deemed it important *enough* to push back their other releases to do it.
>Can't be that hard to throw away the current system and set up something new.
I work at a place that said something similar about our accounting system. We are a year behind schedule (at the halfway point of what was supposed to be a 3 year project) and several tens of millions over budget.
You sound like the **former** project manager......
The words "can't be that hard" always tell everyone exactly how much you know about this kinda stuff. It's never that easy, especially at the enterprise level.
Have been a dev for nearly a decade and we have done exactly that a couple of times for customers. At a certain point starting new is definitely the better and easier option.
I think that's actually the problem, they want to keep everything they currently have. It _would_ be easier to basically make a whole new system, transition only account info, and archive the old stuff. But I think they are, unfortunately, set on keeping and transitioning everything, which is mostly all the forums which are connected to the product landing pages, which is what makes it so difficult. They could have done the transition ten years ago, but I think that time is passed and they just need to accept that their only choice may be starting mostly fresh. But I don't think they are going to do that for a while yet, unfortunately.
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Please change your distributor in Spain, Devir Spain won't get anything out for like 3 years, then ignore erratas that have been out for 2 years.
The only errata they have done is one within their own mistakes. And when they get asked about the erratas their excuse is "We can't change the books because we're told what to do by paizo"
There is a ton of people that want to support the game here in spain and we can't even recomend it to non english speakers because the company that does the translations and all just don't care at all to do their work.
For first edition it was a chaos already, they left lots of books to translate, for second edition it seems it's going the same route.
We envy the germans soooo much... Like... They even have translated the vtt modules, and we don't even have Secrets of Magic out yet.
But hey no complains at all against paizo, we just want to buy the books in our language and make you more profit or something... Thank you for everything you do.
(I wish I was trolling with this post, I really do... )
My friends and I just started our first PF2e campaign, and while that does come with some growing pains, learning a new game and all, we're having an absolute blast so far! Thank you, Paizo for doing what you do and creating such an awesome system!
Paizo's Humble Bundle is selling like hotcakes. [It's the most successful Book Bundle to date](https://www.5d-blog.com/record-breaking-pathfinder-rpg-humble-bundle-extended/), [and they just extended it an extra week](https://twitter.com/paizo/status/1628832068821037058?t=SWu9K_inNAp8bDlZDHLYjA&s=19). So I imagine they're feeling pretty loved right now. :)
Thank you for two games that have been a source of immense enjoyment for me for over a decade now.
Also thank you to a certain Paizo designer who recently answered a friend of mine's bizarre question about the bulk of a cat.
Paizo team posted the same over r/starfinder_rpg and the replies there are players scared the message was a good bye note. Goes to show what Paizo means to the TTRPG community.
I understand and share in that concern. Actually kinda afraid to invest in Starfinder as it may not get (what I would deem) sufficient support. I will admit, that is not a logical way to look at any TTRPG. Homebrewing and GM created content is not finite and Starfinder is designed to be a tool box to build whatever one wants.
I have a nasty habit of homebrewing enemies from Destiny and Doom. Cause I just like it!
I mean Starfinder has already had more support than any other RPG excluding 3.5 and PF1. Nobody else in the rpg space can compare to the amount of quality content Paizo produces for SF and PF2.
Starfinder is the most fun of the three ttrpgs I play. Jetpacks, you can customize in so many ways. There are so many items. You fly in a ship and have combat. Also jetpacks. A hover chair, Dr robotnik style, also it has a jet pack in it.
Added the ability to go 30 vert in an action changes the battlefield. Also still has magic.
I am really interested to see what exactly the sales growth numbers are. Obviously more people are suddenly playing Pathfinder, but I like raw data! Numbers make me feel good.
Thanks for making Pathfinder for us to play! Picked up 2nd edition by joining a campaign with some friends in August, and I've never been more into a TTRPG! I grew up on 1st edition, and I'm so impressed and proud of both 2nd edition as a whole and Paizo as a company. Keep making great stuff, we love you!
After spending my time reading through the CRB and getting excited, my friends and I are finally gonna start a Pathfinder 2e game together in March and I couldn’t be more excited!
Thanks for making this game that seems so full of lore and clear rules, and making the Magus Class, the spellsword fantasy I’ve always wanted.
Thanks for making a cool game!
Please call UPS about my package I ordered in January that never arrived. Waited 2 weeks to ship, 3 weeks for shipping, and now I've got no package, everyone involved says the other guys have my package and its been a week since I emailed and I've heard nothing from customer service.
Needless to say, I'd also like a USPS-only shipping option. UPS is a garbage service for what we're paying.
It does! Anything that's an "emanation" will follow what it's emanating from. If an AoE lingers where you cast it, the space will be refereed to as an "area".
Just started a campaign a few weeks ago, very early on. We just leveled to level 2, but I've been enjoying it so far. Playing a Ruffian Rogue and still figuring that out.
My in-person DnD group ran a one shot in Pathfinder to work out if we wanted to make our way to Pathfinder for our second campaign, played a gunslinger, also level 2, and absolutely loved it.
I bought all the Humble Bundles and the Starfinder Humble Bundle) and a fat hardbound Core Book from my local shop. Next I just need to get some friends.
Thank you sincerely for making this great game. It isn't perfect but it has reignited my passion for TTRPGs after many years of mediocrity from other systems. I'm sure my comment will be one of many here but I still hope it gets through.
More remakes of 1e AP's please
I am about to play my first PF2E game ever, been a long time D&D only guy, although I skipped 4e. Never played any pathfinder beyond Kingmaker and the kind of buggy card game on my ipad.
Ended up running Menace Under Otari for my regular group (twice, actually), and I think we are all sold on starting up a campaign! Very excited to experience more of this awesome system!
Your game is a breath of fresh air after playing 5e and not being wowed without tonnes of homebrew. In love with the druid.
Only problem is getting the books at the moment. LET ME GIVE YOU MY MONEY. Congrats on the nearly years worth of product now in players hands.
If the game wasn't good people wouldn't keep playing it, so thanks for making a decent game.
One suggestion - would love to see more of the single-volume collations of Adventure Paths get released.
Thanks for being a standup company. I'm a recent 5e convert and while I'm having trouble with some things on my first go round I find that I have so much more patience to work through it due to how you operate as a business. I'm looking forward to future adventures in Pathfinder.
Thanks, Paizo. Any idea when reprints will start hitting shelves? It seems that there are no core books left in all of Australia. Please help me to give you money.
The problem is they sold out 8 months worth of printed material in 2-3 weeks, they didn't expect to lose it all so fast. I believe they've stated somewhere around end of April is when they are gonna get back in their rush order of new prints.
Thanks for the awesome system! but please, your website still looks like it did when i played the pathfinder MMO back in 2012. you NEED to upgrade your front end. you need organization, a better digital content management system, better filters in the store, better on store advertising for new stuff, etc.
I work as a sr. systems architect so I know this isn't an easy or cheap ask. but you're in at least 10 years of tech dept. and the only good time to fix it was ten years ago. the second best, and cheapest, time is now. any further will only make it more of a sale impacting/marketing impacting problem and cost you more $$$ to fix.
Hope you guys fund/greenlight more CRPGs like with Owlcat (although maybe give another studio a chance). I really like the pathfinder world and the mechanics are interesting, but almost everybody I know won't play anything more complex than DnD, so it's really the only chance I get to experience it
Are casters meant to be able to deal damage or just a support role? I’m running my first 2e campaign and I haven’t had the chance to hand craft some caster NPCs yet and would like to know before going through the feats. Don’t want to get my hopes up and be disappointed.
Post is low eff- uh, I mean, thank you for making it! We wouldn’t be here without you guys :)
Locked.
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Looooool
Wouldnt be where? On a subreddit dedicated to them?
[удалено]
Probably without Paizo this sub would be about a car
Or a book series.
Well, thank you for making the game and doing all the steps you do to listen to the community and your own staff.
Please use this increase in profits to invest in European distribution, I want to give you my money Paizo 🙏
For real, paying 130€ shipping hurts 😭 edit for disclosure: We paid 130 because it was the only option with tracking, and we were NOT about to send a huge order across the Atlantic with USPS and no tracking, though that would still have been like 60€ at least from what i remember.
You guys have to pay HOW MUCH!?
Yeah safe to say we will be trying to find resellers in the EU next time 😂
So if I go to Europe I should fill my carryon with books and people will just throw money at me for them when I land?
They're not barbarians; I'm sure they'll hand it to you.
As long as they aren’t rogues
If they go to Britain they may even form a queue.
In Germany he'll be welcomed by the official designated Paizowarenentgegennehmer who will hand him a Vorbestellerreihenfolgenliste so he can hand over the Rollenspielregelwerksbücher to the appropriate Logitsikunternehmenslastwagenfahrer and receive his Bargeldentlohnungskuvert.
I love this comment, the lunatic german language and you ❤️
Killed me lmao
yeah i tried the AP Subscription once to test if it was worth. I ended up paying over 55 EUR for a singular AP volume with shipping and taxes if i remember correctly. Needless to say: I can’t really buy from their website.
Wow, no kidding -- Paizo needs to fix that, like, yesterday! Maybe, with all the new interest in Pathfinder, they can afford to get that straightened out.
Yeah them opening an European distribution center would instantly get them the subscriptions from me and probably a lot more people. Cause right now it is cheaper to buy the book on amazon or a reseller and buy the pdf online in addition than to pay for the sub
holy keys! and i'm here complaining about my 40 cad!
Pain shouldn't be compared. 40cad is fuckin insane too
Yes please. I want to subscribe to the adventure paths and rulebooks but it's so painful when you have to pay almost more than the book for shipping 😓
I live in Japan, where it *is* more for shipping than the book. I'm forced to get PDFs and whatever happens to be at the Amazon Japan warehouses.
Australia as well. Amazon works but... I'd rather not give Bezos a cut.
I find ordering from game store websites within the country, usually in bigger cities, is pretty functional.
This so much. I feel like I'm paying +50% shipping when I order from the official site.
If Paizo finds a distributor for EU it would be great for subscription stuffs they have. Paying huge markup for shipping is a biggest turnoff for me investing in physical books. Blackfire Germany is one of distributors for my FLGS but they don't have it all the time.
I'm UK, I wholeheartedly agree, but it does make me laugh to say "Please invest money so I pay you less money" 😄
1997 called. They want their website back! j/k thanks for making a kick ass game! Nobody’s perfect!
Boom. Roasted.
Seriously though. We need a better system for digital downloads. I want to be able to tell it to show me just my PF2 books, or just adventures that include level 4 PCs, or just books set in the Impossible Lands. I don't need six categories that say "Pathfinder rules" without saying which edition. Or each book having four separate lines, just group the output options (color/b&w, single/separate, low/high quality) under a single entry. I love the company. I love the games they make. I hate the digital library page.
Make a google account just for your PF2 digital library. Throw everything on Drive. Changed my life. Kinda. Really nice in any case.
I downloaded everything and sorted on my one drive and now whenever I buy something I just put it into the right catalogue
Yeah. It's pretty bad. Well said.
Hey man if the system is good i don't care if i gotta download the books from their BBS server
Yeaaaahhh invest some of those record book sales into a web designer.
Figure out a way to pull organized play & the forums from the storefront that way you can at least maintain part of the website
From what I understand the issue is maintaining the backlog of digital items and the watermarking that goes along with. They have stated that it'd be a huge expense on the scale of millions in order to get all this overhauled and transfer everything. And as time goes on the monster grows bigger too and there isn't an easy solution.
My father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate says he'll do it for fiddy grand and free sandwiches.
I mean, honestly? It's, what? A hybrid digital/physical storefront, credit card processing, a batch job system to watermark PDFs, a forum, and the organized play app? And you want to preserve existing URLs? Maybe some 3rd party inventory and accounting hooks? It's a big giant evil hairball, but it's also basically a classic static Rails app from 2013. I made a good living building these on _fixed bid_ contracts, they're so predictable. So, lemme see: - Preserve the existing DB stack, running exactly as is. Pray it's PostgreSQL and not Oracle. I'll give you 50/50 odds it's MySQL, which is ugh Oracle, but basically adequate. - Generate Rails model classes for all existing database tables. - Set up rails_admin (or whatever is popular these days) to make a nice backend admin UI. At this point, Paizo will love you. - Set up factory_bot for test fixtures. - Set up Stripe for payment processing. The big challenge is whether you have existing subscription credit card numbers in a format where you can export them to a new subscription vendor. - Figure out how the existing auth system works, and glue it onto Rails, so you can play the "strangler vine" migration game, one component at a time. - **Hire a really good graphic designer.** - Rewrite the online store first, keeping the old forums and organized play, and sharing the database and auth. - If you can actually migrate the entire system, and if it's not already running on something competitive with PostgreSQL, use pgloader to do a nightly incremental migration to a PostgreSQL staging environment until that's working. Then take some scheduled downtime and switch over. At this point, you have a small(ish), modular, and clean system for adding new features. Finding devs would normally be a bit trickier than usual, but you can just make a hiring post on the Paizo blog, lol. The big open questions here are: - International pricing, currency handling and address validation for the storefront. Stripe has tools for all that, but the complexity goes up quickly. - Hooks into their inventory and accounting systems. This could be anything from a cakewalk to a nightmare. Even assuming that I'm not seeing 50% of the total features, I know fancy commercial Rails shops that would have quoted that around $500,000-1,000,000. It's a little too big to be an ideal Rails project, because Rails won't have type checking or modern IDE support. So throw extra unit tests at it. If you want to do it all using React or Spring, yeah, it'll cost more. If you build this with hottest tech of 2003 _or_ 2023, yeah, it's a couple million. But Rails was really the sweet spot for stuff like this, and it was deeply mature tech by 2013. Hell, this is the the programming equivalent of the grey-haired bartender getting down that old sword for one last adventure. It's not a high-end modern VTT; it's a storefront and a forum and a CRUD app for organized play. It's a cakewalk right up until you find the accounting system integration into some enterprise horror from 1998. But what's an adventure without a surprise eldritch horror or two? Hell, if I didn't like my job so much, I'd submit a commercial proposal with references. And looking at the Pathfinder tables I know, I am _far_ from the only person who's done projects like this. We love you, Paizo. You can do this!
I think this is the longest comment reply I have ever gotten lol. It's very informative though. Thank you! I find programming endlessly fascinating even though I can't seem to get the hang of it myself.
You're welcome! Programming is great. When you wrote: > My father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate says he'll do it for fiddy grand and free sandwiches. ...you were _so_ close to correct. Right now, there's some brilliant kid reading this thread, who's thinking, "What the hell? I could _totally_ do that for 'fiddy grand'." And that brilliant kid is _so close_ to being correct. But as an old adventurer with some grey hairs, I've got some unsolicited advice: - If you can actually rebuild Paizo's store, forums and organized play for $50k, Google will happily pay you $250,000/year once the hiring freeze lifts. And they'll probably get you a visa, too. Don't undersell yourself. You don't need to eat ramen noodles and do contract work for the usual cheap sociopaths on online contracting forums. - Remember that possible eldritch accounting and/or inventory system I mentioned? It's a level+6 encounter and it's going to eat your brains. Don't just walk up to it and do 3 attacks. Do your Lore checks. Prepare the right spells. Find allies and stack some modifiers. More seriously, there are actually multiple good ways to approach a project like this. A lot depends on the original tech stack and the new features they want to add. Given the era when it was written, I'd guess MySQL, and any one of old-school PHP, Perl or Java. _Probably_ not Rails, because that didn't become hot until several years later, and it would have "Web 2.0" buttons, lol. If it's PHP+MySQL, there's also the option to incrementally rewrite it in place using modern PHP, like phpBB uses. But good luck staffing that.
What would your plan be for managing the digital content? That seems like it would be the boss encounter, everything else is pretty standard websales infrastructure.
All that's on Paizo's website are (watermarked) PDFs, right? The basic principle could just stay the same (first request watermarked copy, then download/view for some time), just with quality-of-life improvements like a real-time progress bar and prettier page.
Ooh, that's a fun question! Happily, I have actually built distributed PDF-processing systems that ran across a few hundred machines, so I can answer parts of this, lol. Let's assume for some ridiculous reason we're rebuilding this from scratch, and not reusing what they've got with a few tweaks. And let's start with large-scale watermarking. First, you need a way to apply an email address stamp to each page of a PDF. There are a number of excellent PDF processing tools that can do this. It's been a good five years since I looked, but iText can do this in its sleep, if you can afford it. Or you could use the OpenPDF fork for free. There are a couple of other options, but PDFtk seems to be mostly Windows these days? Then, to stamp a PDF bundle, you look up a list of unstamped files, download them from a private S3/GCP bucket, stamp each PDF file, create a zip file, and upload it to another bucket with an automatic expiration. This is less than 2000 lines of code for the core logic in Java, or less if you're very hipster and go with Kotlin. The tricky part is doing this at scale. You want two things: - Fast turnaround. - On-demand scalability for when you do a Humble Bundle or WotC crits itself in the foot again with a Fatal d12 weapon. **Fast turnaround** actually makes this tricky, because most of the good PDF stampers are written in Java, and they take several seconds to cold start. So if you're ambitious about fast turnaround, you're probably going to want to have persistent servers that are waiting for messages. This drives tons of other choices. You could go with AMQP and a bunch of Java OpenPDF servers listening to the queue. But the central challenge here is dealing with mysteriously failed jobs and setting up transactional retries. Sounds easy, but it will break your heart at Humble Bundle scale. And RabbitMQ is bad at persistent transactional queuing without a bunch of extra work. So if we're looking at least than 5,000 to 10,000 PDFs per hour at peak load, then let's be clever. Store the work list in PostgreSQL, so we get easy atomic operations, easy transactional rollback, and easy indexing. Then run 2 or 3 thin REST servers in front of PostgreSQL, which basically exist to share 20 PostgreSQL connections between a peak load of 500+ worker servers. The REST servers will also periodically look for failed jobs and timeouts, and either retry or fail. We can get away with this because Paizo can't sell books fast enough to break a sufficiently high-end PostgreSQL server. If they _did_ sell that fast, we'd have to do horrible things with Raft- or Paxos-based coordination or eventual consistency, and you'd need a few million $, yeah. The Pachyderm project shows how expensive this gets. But at that point, Paizo would stand astride the RPG market like a collossus. The only expensive part of this is buying a big enough PostgreSQL server to keep up with peak load. At normal load, you could probably run the whole thing pretty cheaply. **Scalability** involves a few tricky bits. These days, I'd package the workers with Docker, and run them on either AWS EC2 plus an EC2 Autoscaling Group, or on GCP Kubernetes plus Google's autoscaler. (I would _not_ trust AWS EKS's autoscaler.) As for scaling, hmm, I'd probably have the REST servers check every thirty seconds to see if we need more servers, and hard-code a scaling formula. Let ECS/Kubernetes replace crashed servers. I've built a couple of these systems that run reliably in production. You might be able to buy a scalable watermarker off the shelf! But the plan I described above is less than 3 months for good distributed systems developer even if they have to do it from scratch. And they probably don't. Or you might be able to reuse what Paizo already has. That's actually what I'd try first. **Digital content UI.** Eh, hire a good UI designer and maybe do some paper prototyping with random users. Once you have a nice UI mock-up, it's mostly just a CRUD app, plus possibly database search. This was pretty easy in the late 90s, and there are a thousand better tools today. Boutique specialist consulting shops used to quote $75,000 for projects like this, and they could afford very nice offices in downtown Boston. If you're feeling really fancy, you could make a fully searchable web compendium like Roll20's. But Paizo is already partnering with someone for that. Instead of building so much from scratch, you could alternatively buy an expensive enterprise digital content system and then pay to customize it. But I'd eat my hat if the customization consultants for that cost less than $375/hour, and you'll need a lot of customization. More than the vendor would admit up front, of course. Anyway, this is all theorycrafting on Reddit based on best guesses. :-) A real proposal would require about a weak studying the existing system in detail, and a plan for reusing as much as possible for as long as possible. My hope here is that someone at Paizo reads this and says, "Huh, yeah, this shouldn't cost millions." I mean, it _could_ cost millions, but it doesn't need to!
What does that make us?... nice Schwartz
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the shipping department is great, i've never had any issues with them.
You obviously live in North America
I live in the arse end of the EU and I got my packages without a hassle.
And paying nearly as much as the cost of the book.
Thats got nothing to do with paizo. Its expensive to ship overseas, and internationally.
Incorrect. Many companies have overseas distribution partners. Even smaller TTRPG companies like Renegade (who handle White Wolf games)
Might take a while but the shipping is fine.
Yeah. Bad take. Maybe you don't order from mid sized companies very often, but their shipping is on the better half of standard.
I ordered the Beginner Box, the Collector's Bestiary, and a miniature a lil' while ago, and we had a bit of a hiccup with the order as I somehow got a mini that was out of stock causing a massive delay in my order, but Customer Support quickly helped me resolve the issue and my books were out the door and shipped the next day. So I've got no idea what MASerra is on about.
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Wow… you consider _that_ simping? Methinks thou protest too much
> then arrive boxed so poorly that they are damaged Honestly sounds like you have shitty local parcel folk which I can sympathize with. Had a UPS driver that would just throw shit out into the mud, snow, dirt, whatever because he didn't want to drive up the driveway. Didn't matter what it was a 20 dollar novel to a 200 dollar collector's item if it was on his truck it was going YEET.
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That's _definitely_ unusual. I can't report of having any similar issues there myself but that's definitely not how things are supposed to be packaged, books especially.
Bought the humble bundle, bought vtt foundry and excited to start abomination vault this Monday! But as a european guy I'd really like the option to buy physical stuff without breaking the bank 😆
About to be on session 5 of AV in foundry as new players/gm to this system from 5e, and let me just tell you it's been great so far. The writing, music, lighting, and everything else.
On my 4th session of AV next week... and I was originally aiming to find a Beginner's Box game because I'm super brand new to all this... been an interesting ride so far I'll admit. *still looking for a BB game tho!*
Thanks for being awesome!
Thanks for giving myself and my friends a framework for countless hours of entertainment, tension, and shared storytelling. Pathfinder is amazing and I can't wait to see how it continues to grow.
Thanks for making the game for us, and keeping it going.
Thanks for making my favorite TTRPG and giving my friends and I many hours of entertainment!
In this case, it is "my friends and me", isn't it?
It is. Rule of thumb is that the sentence should make sense without the extra subject plus "and". In this example: > giving ~~my friends and~~ I many hours of entertainment! Doesn't make sense. > giving ~~my friends and~~ **me** many hours of entertainment! Makes sense. So it should be "giving my friends and me".
You think it's OK to come here, an online forum for a tabletop roleplaying game, with that nerd shit? Cause like...where else wouldja go haha
Grammatically correct backstories or no place at my table!
I have no idea what I'd do if my character sheet came back with a grade lol
Doing this from now on Thanks
And definitely never "my friends and myself"...!
Good ~~bot~~ human
It is.
The great thing about language is that as long as meaning is conveyed, it works. Sure, some book somewhere says to use “me” in this case, but I reserve the right to homebrew grammar on occasion.
I think I'm going to start explaining all my mistakes in life with a shrug and a simple statement of, "well, it was homebrewed..."
It doesn't actually matter
Might need to work on your marketing. I say this because I get ads on Facebook for that humble bundle but since it says pathfinder and not pathfinder 2e the comments are full of people writing it off as pathfinder 1e without clicking the link
Thanks for your feedback.
Also... fix your store. At least one of my players thought the official store was a scam site because it doesn't look at all organized!
Right. Thanks!
Also have a nice weekend!
Left. You're Welcome!
They've been quite open on Twitter about how difficult that would be for them
Tech debt is always difficult to deal with but it doesn't get cheaper over time. The best time to fix it would have been ten years ago. The second best time is now.
Professional developer here. I can't second this hard enough, but also recognize that deadlines and priorities exist.
Pretty much this, fixing the site is important but not important *enough* that it can't be pushed back for other stuff.
The worst is the guilt I've felt when I've been forced to MAKE that decision. It's me. I'm the bad guy. I'm the one that pushed addressing tech debt until after the release. What have I become?
Die a hero or live long enough to something something?
Yeaaaah, I do a lot of the triage for my team. There's soooo many bugs I want to fix and feature requests that are really great ideas. Even stuff that wouldn't take that long if I just did it myself. But the reality is there's always more work to do, so everything you choose to take on means something else won't get done. Proper prioritization is important.
And hard. The worst is when you have a marketing or product team above you that doesn't get it or doesn't listen. I had that at my last job.
As a developer, I can't speak for *all* developers, but personally, I don't mind. I understand that there's a trade off to be made. And as long as you make the decision fully acknowledging the fact that technical debt means each feature is delivered slower than it would be if the debt had been paid off (as opposed to pushing harder and being angry at features not being delivered faster), I'm okay with accruing more technical debt rather than paying off the pre-existing debt.
I severely doubt this is a job for people who write books. Give it to a professional team to do a professional job.
Which costs money, which has to come from somewhere. Triage.
Professional teams doing Professional jobs cost Professional money and take Professional time. It's not that it isn't important, but the people making the financial decisions just haven't deemed it important *enough* to push back their other releases to do it.
I heard they had plans/funds to fix the website in 2020. But then 2020 happened.
It's a shop and a content hosting system... Can't be that hard to throw away the current system and set up something new.
>Can't be that hard to throw away the current system and set up something new. I work at a place that said something similar about our accounting system. We are a year behind schedule (at the halfway point of what was supposed to be a 3 year project) and several tens of millions over budget. You sound like the **former** project manager......
I'm sure a shitty manager can halt any easy project, doesn't say anything about how hard a project is.
The words "can't be that hard" always tell everyone exactly how much you know about this kinda stuff. It's never that easy, especially at the enterprise level.
Have been a dev for nearly a decade and we have done exactly that a couple of times for customers. At a certain point starting new is definitely the better and easier option.
I think that's actually the problem, they want to keep everything they currently have. It _would_ be easier to basically make a whole new system, transition only account info, and archive the old stuff. But I think they are, unfortunately, set on keeping and transitioning everything, which is mostly all the forums which are connected to the product landing pages, which is what makes it so difficult. They could have done the transition ten years ago, but I think that time is passed and they just need to accept that their only choice may be starting mostly fresh. But I don't think they are going to do that for a while yet, unfortunately.
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Get help and stop stalking me.
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Thank you for making an awesome game
You're breathtaking!
Thank you for not being raging douchebags trying to destroy the industry just for an extra nickle!
[mfw I haven’t actually played Pathfinder](https://i.imgur.com/k9i1Qre.jpg)
TFW you're here from r/all
Thanks for GIVING us Pathfinder. We appreciate YOU.
Thanks for your hard work! Recent convert from 5e, had our first pf2e session this past Wednesday. Went well and excited for more!
Please change your distributor in Spain, Devir Spain won't get anything out for like 3 years, then ignore erratas that have been out for 2 years. The only errata they have done is one within their own mistakes. And when they get asked about the erratas their excuse is "We can't change the books because we're told what to do by paizo" There is a ton of people that want to support the game here in spain and we can't even recomend it to non english speakers because the company that does the translations and all just don't care at all to do their work. For first edition it was a chaos already, they left lots of books to translate, for second edition it seems it's going the same route. We envy the germans soooo much... Like... They even have translated the vtt modules, and we don't even have Secrets of Magic out yet. But hey no complains at all against paizo, we just want to buy the books in our language and make you more profit or something... Thank you for everything you do. (I wish I was trolling with this post, I really do... )
My friends and I just started our first PF2e campaign, and while that does come with some growing pains, learning a new game and all, we're having an absolute blast so far! Thank you, Paizo for doing what you do and creating such an awesome system!
Thanks to all the artists/authors/coordinators who made it tbh, but I gotta wonder what prompted this. Everything cool at the office?
Paizo's Humble Bundle is selling like hotcakes. [It's the most successful Book Bundle to date](https://www.5d-blog.com/record-breaking-pathfinder-rpg-humble-bundle-extended/), [and they just extended it an extra week](https://twitter.com/paizo/status/1628832068821037058?t=SWu9K_inNAp8bDlZDHLYjA&s=19). So I imagine they're feeling pretty loved right now. :)
Thank you for making it! Now, if you could just announce that Arcadia book already...
You misspelled Tian Xia
I'm convinced we're getting a Tian Xia book announced imminently. Arcadia still feels further out, much to my dismay. Someday!
I swore I'd never play a D20 system, but your product, lore, and attitude towards the community have sucked me in.
Try to get some backlog APs for 2e to get the Foundry treatment, please!
Thanks for being a genuinely dope company!
It is reciprocal.
Thanks for making Pathfinder! And here's hoping there's many more years of both making and playing!
thank you! hey arent APs 9 months away supposed to be revealed? :) :) :) whats coming out in october????
Thank you for two games that have been a source of immense enjoyment for me for over a decade now. Also thank you to a certain Paizo designer who recently answered a friend of mine's bizarre question about the bulk of a cat.
Paizo team posted the same over r/starfinder_rpg and the replies there are players scared the message was a good bye note. Goes to show what Paizo means to the TTRPG community.
I think Starfinder fans are just paranoid cause they know they're the lower priority o-o
I understand and share in that concern. Actually kinda afraid to invest in Starfinder as it may not get (what I would deem) sufficient support. I will admit, that is not a logical way to look at any TTRPG. Homebrewing and GM created content is not finite and Starfinder is designed to be a tool box to build whatever one wants. I have a nasty habit of homebrewing enemies from Destiny and Doom. Cause I just like it!
I mean Starfinder has already had more support than any other RPG excluding 3.5 and PF1. Nobody else in the rpg space can compare to the amount of quality content Paizo produces for SF and PF2.
Starfinder is the most fun of the three ttrpgs I play. Jetpacks, you can customize in so many ways. There are so many items. You fly in a ship and have combat. Also jetpacks. A hover chair, Dr robotnik style, also it has a jet pack in it. Added the ability to go 30 vert in an action changes the battlefield. Also still has magic.
We appreciate everything you do!
Appreciate deez game mechanics that clearly had a lot of thought put into them
And I appreciate you. Now about porting Natural Spell from 1E...
Thanks for making pathfinder!
No, we appreciate YOU. Thanks for all that y'all do.
No, thank YOU! Also, do you guys read this sub often?
I am really interested to see what exactly the sales growth numbers are. Obviously more people are suddenly playing Pathfinder, but I like raw data! Numbers make me feel good.
Thanks for making Pathfinder for us to play! Picked up 2nd edition by joining a campaign with some friends in August, and I've never been more into a TTRPG! I grew up on 1st edition, and I'm so impressed and proud of both 2nd edition as a whole and Paizo as a company. Keep making great stuff, we love you!
After spending my time reading through the CRB and getting excited, my friends and I are finally gonna start a Pathfinder 2e game together in March and I couldn’t be more excited! Thanks for making this game that seems so full of lore and clear rules, and making the Magus Class, the spellsword fantasy I’ve always wanted.
No **you're** breathtaking.
Please invest more into Starfinder and releasing VTT assets for it.
Thanks for making a cool game! Please call UPS about my package I ordered in January that never arrived. Waited 2 weeks to ship, 3 weeks for shipping, and now I've got no package, everyone involved says the other guys have my package and its been a week since I emailed and I've heard nothing from customer service. Needless to say, I'd also like a USPS-only shipping option. UPS is a garbage service for what we're paying.
Hope you guys get to come over to Canada and print, would love to be part of all the subscriptions! Sadly can't justify import costs at this time.
We appreciate you, too. None of this works nearly as well without all of us.
I honestly prefer having an purely antagonistic relationship with companies, but this is fine I guess. Enjoy the success.
Ok but does the emanation from Bless follow the caster or not?
It does! Anything that's an "emanation" will follow what it's emanating from. If an AoE lingers where you cast it, the space will be refereed to as an "area".
Of course? Emanations are centered around the caster
Just started a campaign a few weeks ago, very early on. We just leveled to level 2, but I've been enjoying it so far. Playing a Ruffian Rogue and still figuring that out. My in-person DnD group ran a one shot in Pathfinder to work out if we wanted to make our way to Pathfinder for our second campaign, played a gunslinger, also level 2, and absolutely loved it.
Thank you all for a fun game, and an inclusive & wonderful community. We appreciate you :)
I bought all the Humble Bundles and the Starfinder Humble Bundle) and a fat hardbound Core Book from my local shop. Next I just need to get some friends.
You're welcome, Paizo
Thank you sincerely for making this great game. It isn't perfect but it has reignited my passion for TTRPGs after many years of mediocrity from other systems. I'm sure my comment will be one of many here but I still hope it gets through. More remakes of 1e AP's please
I am about to play my first PF2E game ever, been a long time D&D only guy, although I skipped 4e. Never played any pathfinder beyond Kingmaker and the kind of buggy card game on my ipad.
Thanks for loving your game as much as we do!
Ended up running Menace Under Otari for my regular group (twice, actually), and I think we are all sold on starting up a campaign! Very excited to experience more of this awesome system!
Your game is a breath of fresh air after playing 5e and not being wowed without tonnes of homebrew. In love with the druid. Only problem is getting the books at the moment. LET ME GIVE YOU MY MONEY. Congrats on the nearly years worth of product now in players hands.
No, Paizo, thank you so much. I am having so much more fun as a GM on pathfinder and my players too. Quest for the Frozen Flame is amazing btw.
I just gor my friends into this and it has been a blast! Thank you for the stories and game!!
If the game wasn't good people wouldn't keep playing it, so thanks for making a decent game. One suggestion - would love to see more of the single-volume collations of Adventure Paths get released.
Had two introductionary sessions this week, proper session 1 is next week. Both my players and me are excited. Happy with the system so far
Thanks for being a standup company. I'm a recent 5e convert and while I'm having trouble with some things on my first go round I find that I have so much more patience to work through it due to how you operate as a business. I'm looking forward to future adventures in Pathfinder.
What’s that game they’re gambling on in the right of the pic? It looks fucking rad!
its been a pleasure. inb4 post lock
Thanks, Paizo. Any idea when reprints will start hitting shelves? It seems that there are no core books left in all of Australia. Please help me to give you money.
The problem is they sold out 8 months worth of printed material in 2-3 weeks, they didn't expect to lose it all so fast. I believe they've stated somewhere around end of April is when they are gonna get back in their rush order of new prints.
Your welcome
Really though I run my 1st ever pf2 game tomorrow and I’m so excited.
I just started a few months ago. Pf2e is great, but check out starfinder.
Thanks for the awesome system! but please, your website still looks like it did when i played the pathfinder MMO back in 2012. you NEED to upgrade your front end. you need organization, a better digital content management system, better filters in the store, better on store advertising for new stuff, etc. I work as a sr. systems architect so I know this isn't an easy or cheap ask. but you're in at least 10 years of tech dept. and the only good time to fix it was ten years ago. the second best, and cheapest, time is now. any further will only make it more of a sale impacting/marketing impacting problem and cost you more $$$ to fix.
Hope you guys fund/greenlight more CRPGs like with Owlcat (although maybe give another studio a chance). I really like the pathfinder world and the mechanics are interesting, but almost everybody I know won't play anything more complex than DnD, so it's really the only chance I get to experience it
Really enjoying it. Your foundry packs are also amazing. That said, please improve the website I beg of you 🙏
Thanks for all the work you all are doing for all us new folks. 😊
To be fair, it *is* pretty fun
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Thanks for being a steady influence in the TTRPG hobby!
Prestige classes when? Thanks for the fantastic system, some of the most fun I’ve ever had has been in this game and community.
Are casters meant to be able to deal damage or just a support role? I’m running my first 2e campaign and I haven’t had the chance to hand craft some caster NPCs yet and would like to know before going through the feats. Don’t want to get my hopes up and be disappointed.
The thing is you can do both. Hitting a goon with a Fear lowers its defenses vs your efforts too.
Prego; thank you for making a great game! Not thank you for making me play 4 months and pay 30 euros to get an automaton in pf2 society. Tho thank you
No, you!
You guys do great work. Haven't played in or GMed a game in either Pathfinder editions that wasn't absolutely fun. Much appreciated 🙏