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.

Yep, we have had some issues recently (some exacerbated because I have been travelling and dealing with a sick toddler), but I've recently made a few changes on the server and hopefully this helps.

Edit to add: I'll pin a post later today giving an update on what's going on.

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 @[email protected] said, we also have [email protected] and [email protected] 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.

I think the closest thing that exists currently in PF2e official APs would be Blood Lords. I haven't played it, so I don't know how close to gothic horror it is, but it's the only really undead-themed one out right now.

There is also Malevolence and Night of the Grey Death, which are both horror themed. Based on the descriptions, Malevolence is more haunted house themed and Grey Death is more culty-themed. I haven't played either of these as well.

You might also look at the case files in Dark Archives; while not a full blown adventure path, they do hit on more of that Cthulu-esque dark fantasy.

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.