The other option is to take field commissioned agent which gives you extra downtime days but no additional items. Field commissioned agent is situational, it usually isn't beneficial to take it over the schools.

I would also venture that scrolls/spells/swords is situational as well, just less so than field commissioned agent. You take those if they have a skill/feat offering that aligns with your character, or if there are specific items that you want.

If none of that jumps out at you, then generalist is probably the best option (in my opinion it is the best school and I almost always end up taking it unless there is something really completing offered by one of the others).

There is no real downside to taking a school/field commissioned, the downside would be if you decided not to take any of them.

Remember, you can retrain your school, it just takes time or Acp.

Mostly flavor, but some mechanical. You won't be casting wish in combat any more.

From the Ritual entry on AON (emphasis mine to highlight the changes from Wish as a spell):

A ritual is an esoteric and complex spell that anyone can cast. It takes much longer to cast a ritual than a normal spell, but rituals can have more powerful effects.

When you take charge of a ritual, you are its primary caster, and others assisting you are secondary casters. You can be a primary caster for a ritual even if you can’t cast spells. You must know the ritual, and the ritual’s spell level can be no higher than half your level rounded up. You must also have the required proficiency rank in the skill used for the ritual’s primary check (see Checks below), and as the primary caster, you must attempt this skill check to determine the ritual’s effects. The primary skill check determines the tradition. Rituals do not require spell slots to cast. You can heighten a ritual up to half your level rounded up, decided when the ritual is initiated. A ritual always takes at least 1 hour to perform, and often longer. While a ritual is a downtime activity, it’s possible—albeit risky—to perform a ritual during exploration with enough uninterrupted time. A ritual’s casting time is usually listed in days. Each day of casting requires 8 hours of participation in the ritual from all casters, with breaks during multiday rituals to allow rest. One caster can continue a multiday ritual, usually with some light chanting or meditation, while the other casters rest. All rituals require material, somatic, and verbal components throughout their casting time.

Considering that Wish is supposed to be the end-all-be-all of spells, it makes sense that it would be a ritual rather than just a quick "wave my hands and say mumbo jumbo" cast as an afterthought. It now takes at least an hour, requires gathering other spell casters, multiple checks, and it fits the description of a ritual in that it can have more powerful effects than a normal spell.

Edit to add: I may have misunderstood your question. The adjustment I was referring too was the change from a spell to a ritual, not that rituals had been adjusted.

Paizo originally wanted to get rid of ability scores and just use modifiers with 2nd Edition, but they were afraid of a D&D 4th Edition schism happening and didn't make the change when they were releasing it. Now they have the perfect opportunity to make the shift without angering the playerbase.

What I have heard is that they haven't quite finished working out how the change from attributes to modifiers will be implemented, but it is something being handled with the official changes of the remaster. What they have said so far is that we will still have the ability to raise ability modifiers above 18, we just don't know how it will work yet.

Honestly, I think that makes more sense now that Paizo has proposed the adjustment.

No offense taken; I was lucky enough to come into a really good lodge that is great with new players but I know that definitely doesn't exist and it's a difficult barrier to entry.

Instead, I see it as an interesting challenge. Perhaps we, as a community here, can work on creating a guide with different people contributing their own regional knowledge. Due to how decoupled all of the regional lodges are, I doubt it will ever be finished, but it might at least give new players a fighting chance.

I can say, as a half-hearted attempt at explaining why this problem exists, is that there was some friction between the Organized Play people and Paizo as a company that had to do with wages/volunteer hours. It was before my time, so I only know bits and pieces, but Paizo had to completely separate the Organized Play part off from the company, so that's why Pathfinder Society is so fragmented and different; it's completely run by volunteers with very little input from Paizo as to how individual lodges should work.

It's true that PFS is pretty hard to figure out, especially if you don't have a well established and consistent lodge near you.

Each region definitely has it's own style of doing things, and even playing in different regions can yield vastly different experiences. I occasionally play in a different state when I head into my jobs main office, and while the base game is still the same, it's not the same experience as when I play with my home lodge.

The best advice I can offer you is to google "<local area> pathfinder society" and figure out what they use to do signups. A lot of places use warhorn, but I've also seen BBS systems and even meetup.com.

If you have specific questions, I can try to answer them, or at least get you in touch with the VC (or one of the VAs) at my lodge and they might be able to help you out.

In addition to what @LiquorFan@pathfinder.social said, we also have !pf2homebrew@pathfinder.social and !pf2adventure@pathfinder.social that I'm hoping will be more geared towards GMs rather than players.

Possibly. I am out of town at the moment but should be back Saturday and can look into it sometime on Sunday.

I am now. I need to set up a feed that lets me know when new releases come out.

Normally I run PFS at our local lodge, so not that interesting.

I am working on getting Foundry set up to run Beginner Box -> Troubles in Otari -> The Slithering, with some quests and bounties thrown in randomly with an old group that all moved to different regions. I want to follow that up with Abomination Vaults (new characters), and then possibly do something homebrew. I'm starting a masters program in the fall, so pre-built stuff, rather than homebrew is probably what I have to stick with while I juggle school and work.

I want to use the official adventures to work on my improve, storytelling, voices, etc., so that when I do have the bandwidth to build a homebrew campaign, I'm already well practiced at those skills.

The Pathfinder Society will automatically take care of this for you during your downtime. You can see the rules on it in the Organized Play Guide.

The Pathfinder Society takes care of its members by removing most ongoing nonpermanent negative conditions and repairing agents’ damaged gear to the condition it was in at the start of the scenario.

The following conditions are not automatically removed and must be cleared from the character before the end of the adventure or the character ceases to be available for organized play:

• Death
• Permanent negative effects, including polymorph or petrification
• Curses

Note that repairing damaged gear does not include resupplying consumables such as ammunition, potions, or talismans.

That's a great idea. I had thought about posting in one of their announcement posts, but messaging them directly might be a better route.

Thank you for joining; happy to have you here and happy to be able to provide something back to an awesome community.

Yeah, fitting into buildings and dungeons was my first thought. Having the extra reach is going to be balanced pretty well with either carrying around shrink potions or always dealing with squeeze mechanics.

So I checked out Calckey this morning and it looks really nice. I'll add both to my list of projects.

I could put up a Matrix, I'm not sure when I'll get to work on it, and I have some cleanup work I need to do on this instance, but I might be able to look at it on Monday.

For Mastodon/Clackey, I use Mastodon for my other fediverse account, which is more public facing and doesn't have anything TTRPG related (all connected to this account), so I wasn't thinking about setting it up, but I might consider putting one up, sometime after the Matrix instance goes up.

Glad to have you as part of the community!

I've recently started a battle oracle in PFS, but that really seems like the only one that is viable. Ancestor sounds really cool, but the idea of having to roll flat checks every time I do something seems incredibly burdensome to the table. Many of the others also make me feel like they would impact the fun of other players as well.

I actually generally run in person with a hardcopy of the PDF. I was considering making the switch to a tablet of some sort, but wanted something that I could mark up and make notes in the margins. That does make me think that I would probably lose my color-coding highlighting.

Normally I would say that it would be up to the community and make a post about it (I'm not trying to be a dictator) to let the people who use this community decide.

However, in reviewing the modlogs and talking to a couple of other admins/mods that I know, the behavior of at least a portion of their members does not fit the rules of this community, nor does it align with the views of Paizo, so it is blocked moving forward.

I am happy and available to discuss this decision if anyone has comments, questions, concerns, or complaints.

ETA: I did review the reports and another mod had resolved them before I saw them; just wanted to make it known that I am watching those, even if I can't be around to handle them all the time (shameless plug for looking for mods advertisement).

I haven't run either one as well (planning to start this fall with BB -> Troubles), but something easy to throw in are quests and bounties; one is specifically The Road From Otari, and some of the others could probably be worked in pretty easily. They take about an hour to run, so they won't fill up a whole session, but might be something you can incorporate to flesh out the town.

The PFS scenario Bandits of Immenwood also takes place between Otari and Absalom, it should take about 4 hours to run; it's balanced for levels 1-4, so it should fit anywhere in those two.

You could also look into Abomination Vaults, which takes place in and near Otari and maybe set up some hooks. There is overlap in levels between those two, but you might be able to set up some rumors or other minor events that allude to the other and then run AV after you finish this game.

That is a little disappointing. Setting and story might still keep me interested.

I just really hated coming across a cool rogue/thief/assassin-like weapon (like kukris or a kris) on another character and being like "This would be great for my rogue" and then checking and realizing he wasn't proficient.

I forgot about the interact action on bandoliers; I actually just picked it up for my magus so I can hold multiple bolas for tripping (in addition to a windlass bola), so I need to remember that when I get a chance to play that character again.

Awesome, I appreciate you posting this.

I think the two biggest things for me are the rogue martial weapons (because they should have had that all along) and some of the class revamps. I know Champion is probably getting redone because of the alignment changes, but I felt like it was overall a pretty good class to start with. Oracle and witch, though, really needed some help, so I'm looking forward to those getting some changes.

I run a throwing magus, so somewhat related, and the biggest two things I can point out are action economy and MAD. I'm not very familiar with thaumaturge's action economy, but with magus having a 2 action mechanic that is essential to it's operation makes deciding what my third action is very tough. I took the rogue dedication as well, for the same reasons and it definitely helped out.

I don't think you can adjust much with your stats, and I'll point out that you are getting the +4 in dex and your class attribute, so you're already better off than the magus I have. Spells with saves are tough for me to use with a lower int, but you shouldn't have as many problems. I will say not to reduce your constitution modifier any more because operating within the 20-30 feet range means you're one move action or less away from most things, you will get hit, and it will hurt a lot.

On the weapons, I'd suggest throwing a couple of bolas in there, especially if you can take assurance on athletics. They're cheap, provide nonlethal and bludgeoning, and have ranged trip. Get more than one because even with a returning rune, if you use them to trip, they do not return unless you miss. You've got a couple of thrown weapons that can be used to threaten at melee range in there, so remember that if you can't avoid close-quarter fights, you can still set up flanking to help out your party members.

I'm not sure how much the ruleset is going to translate to an ARPG, but I feel like they did say it was based on the PF2e ruleset, not the PF1e rules. I'm pretty sure basing a Pathfinder game off the D&D ruleset is not in the realm of possibility, given the current friction between the two companies.

The progress spinner is a known issue that has been brought up to the Lemmy devs; if you try to log on where an account doesn't exist, or if you try to create an account with a duplicate email or username, Lemmy doesn't give any sort of error, or even stop, it just sits there.

@DmMacniel@feddit.de covered the rest of your question; you can create an account on both communities, but it's really not necessary because of the federation. Hopefully the ActivityPub and fediverse developers make some QoL improvements to this in the future because it is a little clunky coming from something that's been in development for over a decade.

Thanks for the link; I have played something like this. I think I'm still interested in wasting some time with it, but less excited about this one now. AV looks like it's more of what I want in video games haha.

When I spun this instance of Lemmy up, I think there were only two other communities out there. Most of them were inactive, I think the high number of communities on this instance and the timing of it are what got us the increased visibility. I'm happy to work with admins/mods/users of the other communities on aggregating here, or at least facilitating cross-posting and sharing of resources.

Looking at the Feddit Community browser, I see these communities that aren't a part of this Lemmy instance, they all look pretty inactive so far:

• !pathfinder2e@lemmy.ml
• !pathfinder@lemmy.ml
• !pathfinder@lemmy.wizjenkins.com
• !pathfinder_kingmaker@sh.itjust.works
• !pathfinder1e@lemmy.wizjenkins.com
• !pathfinder_rpg@sopuli.xyz

Side Quest Sesh is PFS 1e or PFS 2e? If it's 1e, then that would be awesome because I'd really like to go back and fill in my gaps of what happened in the first years of organized play, but my local group has no desire to ever touch 1e again.

So far it seems good; when I get a chance to mess with Postfix, I'll let you know. I made you an admin as well.

I'm looking forward to trying out it and their take on Abomination Vaults. While I do really like the format of the existing PF games that we have now, I really like the format and direction they're going with AV and Gallowspire. I think AV makes much more sense as a co-op ARPG, whereas something like Kingmaker would barely pay tribute to the source material if it were done as an ARPG.

I never played Vampire Survivors, so I have no idea how this game will play out, beyond that it's a roguelite (which I also enjoy).

I've added the Yoga to my list of computers to consider, based on your recommendation. Any suggestions for the Pen or does it not matter as much?

That's awesome; I'm running foundry in Nomad on a Raspberry Pi cluster, do you run into any speed/responsiveness issues with it when you get all the players in and the game started?

I just got Foundry running in my homelab last night, so I'm going through your list of modules this evening.

Laserpointers are a great idea; we play at two folding tables pushed together, so reaching can cause issues sometimes.

I don't know if I want to tackle learning emacs just yet, but maybe Vim has some plugins that can emulate the featureset you're using.

How do you juggle the laptop and the iPad on the table at once?

I'll keep the iPad in mind; I usually eschew Apple Devices just because I don't need to add another ecosystem to my brain, but I do admire how well they work for things.

I played on Foundry for the first time at PaizoCon this year and was blown away by how polished I thought it was. The next day I ended up playing a game on Roll 20 and it was just nowhere in the league as the PF2e offering from Foundry, so I'm excited to get started using it. I finally got that part of my homelab spun up last night, so now I can finally start building out the short campaign I want to run for some old friends that have split up across the country.

While I'd love some new content APs, I also missed a big chunk of the PF1 APs and wouldn't mind them officially converting them to 2e, in the same way that they did Kingmaker.

Anything involving Pharasma would give me an excuse to pull out my Sylvia Plath "Everyone is Dying" Cloistered Cleric concept.