Why is Pathfinder the red-headed step child of Fantasy Grounds?

[Willot]

after my current AP is done, I plan on switching to PF2e

You will love it. Its a great system. Word of advice, pay close attention to tracking stuff. Timing of things is very important in PF2e.
Expiries, cooldown on effects, onsets and stages of diseases etc
The calendar is your friend here, stay on top of it.

[theadept024]

No, they don't "hate" any players of any system.

Development of products and rulesets is primarily done by community developers. For products they get a very, very small commission - never enough to reach anywhere closed to even minimum wage for the time put in, and for the ruleset that would be even less as it's not a paid product. The willingness of community developers is what drives the availability of products and changes/improvements to the ruleset. As far as product availability, there's actually been a surge this year in availability of the "hard back book" products - there's a lot more of these around than there was a year ago. But from a ruleset coding perspective there isn't, to the best of my knowledge, an active community developer for the PFRPG/3.5E ruleset.

As has been mentioned, if there are specific issues with specific product (in terms of incorrect/mis-formatted information) then the community developers of those products are usually very quick in responding and fixing issues. This is the thread to report issues with purchased DLC: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...-Report-Thread

Is Pathfinder 1e the "red-headed step child"? Maybe it is in some respects, because this is purely driven by community interested. But definitely not from available DLC - there is currently 105 official Paizo Pathfinder 1e products in the store - 105! And more are being added all the time.

Moving this from the Pathfinder Society forum to the 3/5E/Pathfinder forum. The Pathfinder Society forum is for Paizo's Organized Play campaign.

THANK YOU, Trenloe! This is the answer I really was looking for. Understanding that this is a community based development makes so much more sense as to why it was done in such a half-baked way. So, this isn't a professional product, this is more like a Linux Open-Sourced product, development by the LCD... (Sorry, that part is a joke, I equate it with both Lowest Common Denominator and Linux Community Development, hehe)

As has been mentioned, this is not really bug fixes, but really laziness on the part of the community developer. Maybe it's because the commission is so small, they just wanted to get a good enough product on the books in order to get what little payment that they do get.

I find that the AP's are generally put together a little better than the core books are, which would make sense based on this information. There's less content for them to go through, therefore they are willing to put in the extra effort or they need to in order to pass muster.

As I said, there are SO MANY THINGS that were not done with the books that I do not want to be a free copy editor. Maybe if there was a commission in it for me, then it would be something I would be interested in fixing. 50 bucks a piece may not be a lot to some people, but it is to me. So when I pay that amount of money for a book, I generally expect it to be complete.

[theadept024]

You will love it. Its a great system. Word of advice, pay close attention to tracking stuff. Timing of things is very important in PF2e.
Expiries, cooldown on effects, onsets and stages of diseases etc
The calendar is your friend here, stay on top of it.

Well, we're on AP4 of the Shattered Star, so it's likely going to be a while yet, but I am excited! Thanks for the heads up though!

[bmos]

As someone who has spent many hundreds of dollars on the official modules, I do understand where you're coming from, but I'd like to point out a couple things that I think are important to keep in mind.
I know that as consumers of mass market products like Windows, Photoshop, many AAA video games, etc, we get used to $60 going a long way in terms of value per dollar. Unfortunately, FG doesn't sell nearly as many copies as these developers do and they still have to put in a lot of work developing their game engine, paying community devs to convert modules and rulesets, and they even have to give a significant portion of each module sale to the copyright holder (such as Paizo in this case). I agree that there is a lot of automation missing and sometimes incorrect data in many of the books, but I doubt FG is actually left with very much of the purchase price of those modules. Niche products are rarely both affordable and great, and FG is certainly somewhere in between. More than close enough to play with, but (especially at high levels) in need of a lot of tweaking and optimization (especially when playing through APs if my experience with Return of the Runelords is anything to go off of).

I hope 1e gets a ruleset developer again eventually and I urge you to report the issues you find in the bug reports thread (as I frequently do). They're usually fixed within a week as the community developer is motivated (just not motivated enough to read through ever single pf1e module to check for errors which would take an absurd amount of time):
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...-Report-Thread

EDIT: Regarding spell formatting, I actually reported that a month ago. Hopefully, it gets improved eventually as the extra line breaks can be very distracting.
EDIT 2: I just posted an extension to fix this in FGC (and improve it in FGU, although they have improved it over FGC already).

[theadept024]

As someone who has spent many hundreds of dollars on the official modules, I do understand where you're coming from, but I'd like to point out a couple things that I think are important to keep in mind.
I know that as consumers of mass market products like Windows, Photoshop, many AAA video games, etc, we get used to $60 going a long way in terms of value per dollar. Unfortunately, FG doesn't sell nearly as many copies as these developers do and they still have to put in a lot of work developing their game engine, paying community devs to convert modules and rulesets, and they even have to give a significant portion of each module sale to the copyright holder (such as Paizo in this case). I agree that there is a lot of automation missing and sometimes incorrect data in many of the books, but I doubt FG is actually left with very much of the purchase price of those modules. Niche products are rarely both affordable and great, and FG is certainly somewhere in between. More than close enough to play with, but (especially at high levels) in need of a lot of tweaking and optimization (especially when playing through APs if my experience with Return of the Runelords is anything to go off of).

I hope 1e gets a ruleset developer again eventually and I urge you to report the issues you find in the bug reports thread (as I frequently do). They're usually fixed within a week as the community developer is motivated (just not motivated enough to read through ever single pf1e module to check for errors which would take an absurd amount of time):
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...-Report-Thread

As a person who tries to live on a budget, I don't take 60 dollars lightly. I don't generally have 60 to spend on a AAA title video game and generally wait until they're on sale because I just can't. Now, that being said, I understand what Trenloe said previously. These books are not ACTUALLY produced by FG or Paizo, but by some community person (people) that apparently did the minimum amount of work to get this okayed by Paizo and FG and get it rolling. If I find something that is an actual bug then I will surely report it, but I simply do not have the time to report ALL of the many and varied ways that the Abilities, Spells, Feats, etc. could have been edited or coded properly. I've just been introduced to a new website that I am hoping gives me more insight to coding things so they work properly. Hopefully. I was curious why it was the red-headed step child and now I know. It's not, just the people who've been allowed to code the books for PF1e did just enough to get it published. And Paizo and FG are cashing in (in whatever capacity they can) on their slacking. Now it's up to me, the consumer who paid for it, to have to act a free labor in order to get a proper product that we should have been given in the first place.

[Trenloe]

There are a number of misconceptions here:

1. I *never* said that community developers are lazy. In fact I said quite the opposite - the work they put in gets them way less than minimum wage, and it's sometimes a pretty thankless task. A conversion of a hardback book takes in excess of 100 hours. It's quite a laborious and boring task. And it's frequently done at the raw data level - a WYSIWYG interface is not used to enter and format all the data. So, it's understandable if correct formatting and data presentation here or there is missed. As has been mentioned - if the developers are made aware of an issue it is usually fixed ASAP. If they're not made aware of the issue, then it will obviously remain unfixed.
2. Nowhere is it stated that every ability, spell, feat, etc. are coded with automation. There is obviously a misconception here about what exactly the official products are designed to give you. Earlier in the thread you mentioned that 5E has everything coded, that is another misconception and I will comment on that below.
3. The official products present the raw data within Fantasy Grounds. Making the information available at the fingertips (mouse pointer) of the GM and all of the players. How you implement that information is entirely up to you. Pathfinder is not some MMO RPG where the code limits what you can do, it's a freeform RPG where the players and GMs imagination are the limits. Sure, there are rules, but how those rules are used and applied to an infinite number of situations is up to the interpretation of those involved.
4. FG provides the means to enter all of the data you need manually. If you feel that the cost of the product you've purchased is not warranted, and you can save money by entering all the data yourself, then SmiteWorks provides a no questions asked 30 day refund policy. This is very generous and allows you to essentially try and buy to see if the products give you what you want. Most users find the convenience of having all of the product data at their fingertips, and the amount of manual data entry time it saves, well worth the cost of the product. Only you can make a decision of how much your free time manually entering data is worth and decide if you can save money by doing so.
5. Fantasy Grounds provides ways for people to handle automation themselves - these are actions and effects. Other areas in the ruleset provide data based rolling (saves, skills, attacks, BAB/CMB/CMD, etc.) but these require the right data (bonuses/penalties) to be checked and entered correctly, with effects providing a means of intelligently modifying these actions.
6. As point 5 mentions - effects are your main way of automating situational modifiers to rolls. These need to be setup and applied by the player/GM. There's also the modifier window to manually apply correct situational modifiers before making a roll.

"Coding" of actions/effects - 5e vs PF 1e
You state earlier that 5e has all the spell effects "coded" while PF doesn't. It is not a case of each spell being coded in the 5e data. Both rulesets don't have any FG effects or actions coded into the spell entry. What happens is that when the spell is added to the PC (or NPC), parsing code within the base ruleset runs against the description of the spell and attempts to identify standard wording the maps to FG actions/effects. This standard wording is used to create a "best guess" as to the cast action and effect/s to make available to the user through the FG interface, i.e. adds actions to the spell entry within the character sheet.

WotC have made a big effort to have repeatable wording for their game mechanics, which makes it a lot easier to make a "best guess" with a relatively high level of accuracy. Unfortunately, Paizo hasn't done the same in PF 1e or 2e. The ruleset still attempts to parse out actions when a spell is added to the PC sheet, but as the wording doesn't follow a standard it frequently doesn't get this right, sometimes not populating any actions for complex spell descriptions (like grease and enlarge person). Could this PF parsing be improved upon? I'm sure it could, but it gets to a point of diminishing return, with new parsing code designed to indentify an edge case potentially breaking previously correct parsing. But this is one of the places where an active community ruleset developer would help - being able to try to fine tune the in-depth, complex ruleset coding. As I mentioned, PF 1e doesn't currently have an active community developer, but I believe SmiteWorks are looking at ways to address this.

It is also during this parsing process that, in PF 1e, the formatted text of the spell is converted to plain text. Moon Wizard and I identified an issue that causes the grease spell formatting you mention earlier in this post. As the screenshots from Moon Wizard in post #4 show - the spell outside of the PC sheet is formatted correctly, but once the spell is added to the PC sheet, certain formatting (italics in this case) cause an issue. Hopefully SmiteWorks will get a fix for that soon. Thanks for reporting the issue. But, this specific instance also supports my argument that the content developers aren't lazy - this is a software bug - thanks for drawing it to our attention so that it can get fixed.


Summary

• FG community developers aren't lazy. It's a laborious task to enter hundreds of pages of raw data.
• Sometimes during that data entry, formatting is missed in the raw text.
• Any data issue that are reported in the bug reporting thread are addressed by the community developers ASAP.
• FG provides the data of the official products, and the means to use that data through the FG interface, and actions/effects.
• FG is not a MMO where every single thing done through the interface has restrictions and hard-fast rules coded into the interface. FG provides the ways and means for users to carry out RPG based actions as they wish. The interface, actions, effects and modifiers help to automation a lot of that process - but they still need to be verified, edited and applied as and when needed.
• For spells, FG makes a "best guess"effort to extract actions/effects from the spell description. These are not hard coded into the spell.
• This "best guess" is not as good a guess as those in D&D 5e because Paizo doesn't use repeatable standard text to present game mechanics in the spell descriptions.

Hopefully all of this helps to clarify exactly how FG data is produced and works. I hope it addresses some of your conceptions and expectations, and helps to set a more realistic level of what you actually get in Fantasy Grounds. And also explains why the PF 1 ruleset and data doesn't seem as polished as the D&D 5e ruleset and data.

[theadept024]

There are a number of misconceptions here:

1. I *never* said that community developers are lazy. In fact I said quite the opposite - the work they put in gets them way less than minimum wage, and it's sometimes a pretty thankless task. A conversion of a hardback book takes in excess of 100 hours. It's quite a laborious and boring task. And it's frequently done at the raw data level - a WYSIWYG interface is not used to enter and format all the data. So, it's understandable if correct formatting and data presentation here or there is missed. As has been mentioned - if the developers are made aware of an issue it is usually fixed ASAP. If they're not made aware of the issue, then it will obviously remain unfixed.
2. Nowhere is it stated that every ability, spell, feat, etc. are coded with automation. There is obviously a misconception here about what exactly the official products are designed to give you. Earlier in the thread you mentioned that 5E has everything coded, that is another misconception and I will comment on that below.
3. The official products present the raw data within Fantasy Grounds. Making the information available at the fingertips (mouse pointer) of the GM and all of the players. How you implement that information is entirely up to you. Pathfinder is not some MMO RPG where the code limits what you can do, it's a freeform RPG where the players and GMs imagination are the limits. Sure, there are rules, but how those rules are used and applied to an infinite number of situations is up to the interpretation of those involved.
4. FG provides the means to enter all of the data you need manually. If you feel that the cost of the product you've purchased is not warranted, and you can save money by entering all the data yourself, then SmiteWorks provides a no questions asked 30 day refund policy. This is very generous and allows you to essentially try and buy to see if the products give you what you want. Most users find the convenience of having all of the product data at their fingertips, and the amount of manual data entry time it saves, well worth the cost of the product. Only you can make a decision of how much your free time manually entering data is worth and decide if you can save money by doing so.
5. Fantasy Grounds provides ways for people to handle automation themselves - these are actions and effects. Other areas in the ruleset provide data based rolling (saves, skills, attacks, BAB/CMB/CMD, etc.) but these require the right data (bonuses/penalties) to be checked and entered correctly, with effects providing a means of intelligently modifying these actions.
6. As point 5 mentions - effects are your main way of automating situational modifiers to rolls. These need to be setup and applied by the player/GM. There's also the modifier window to manually apply correct situational modifiers before making a roll.

"Coding" of actions/effects - 5e vs PF 1e
You state earlier that 5e has all the spell effects "coded" while PF doesn't. It is not a case of each spell being coded in the 5e data. Both rulesets don't have any FG effects or actions coded into the spell entry. What happens is that when the spell is added to the PC (or NPC), parsing code within the base ruleset runs against the description of the spell and attempts to identify standard wording the maps to FG actions/effects. This standard wording is used to create a "best guess" as to the cast action and effect/s to make available to the user through the FG interface, i.e. adds actions to the spell entry within the character sheet.

WotC have made a big effort to have repeatable wording for their game mechanics, which makes it a lot easier to make a "best guess" with a relatively high level of accuracy. Unfortunately, Paizo hasn't done the same in PF 1e or 2e. The ruleset still attempts to parse out actions when a spell is added to the PC sheet, but as the wording doesn't follow a standard it frequently doesn't get this right, sometimes not populating any actions for complex spell descriptions (like grease and enlarge person). Could this PF parsing be improved upon? I'm sure it could, but it gets to a point of diminishing return, with new parsing code designed to indentify an edge case potentially breaking previously correct parsing. But this is one of the places where an active community ruleset developer would help - being able to try to fine tune the in-depth, complex ruleset coding. As I mentioned, PF 1e doesn't currently have an active community developer, but I believe SmiteWorks are looking at ways to address this.

It is also during this parsing process that, in PF 1e, the formatted text of the spell is converted to plain text. Moon Wizard and I identified an issue that causes the grease spell formatting you mention earlier in this post. As the screenshots from Moon Wizard in post #4 show - the spell outside of the PC sheet is formatted correctly, but once the spell is added to the PC sheet, certain formatting (italics in this case) cause an issue. Hopefully SmiteWorks will get a fix for that soon. Thanks for reporting the issue. But, this specific instance also supports my argument that the content developers aren't lazy - this is a software bug - thanks for drawing it to our attention so that it can get fixed.


Summary

• FG community developers aren't lazy. It's a laborious task to enter hundreds of pages of raw data.
• Sometimes during that data entry, formatting is missed in the raw text.
• Any data issue that are reported in the bug reporting thread are addressed by the community developers ASAP.
• FG provides the data of the official products, and the means to use that data through the FG interface, and actions/effects.
• FG is not a MMO where every single thing done through the interface has restrictions and hard-fast rules coded into the interface. FG provides the ways and means for users to carry out RPG based actions as they wish. The interface, actions, effects and modifiers help to automation a lot of that process - but they still need to be verified, edited and applied as and when needed.
• For spells, FG makes a "best guess"effort to extract actions/effects from the spell description. These are not hard coded into the spell.
• This "best guess" is not as good a guess as those in D&D 5e because Paizo doesn't use repeatable standard text to present game mechanics in the spell descriptions.

Hopefully all of this helps to clarify exactly how FG data is produced and works. I hope it addresses some of your conceptions and expectations, and helps to set a more realistic level of what you actually get in Fantasy Grounds. And also explains why the PF 1 ruleset and data doesn't seem as polished as the D&D 5e ruleset and data.

Thanks again, Trenloe. I didn't mean to imply that the potential laziness of the community developers was an opinion of anyone but me. It seems the longer this thread goes, the more information I get on how the application really works. Everyone who has replied has been helpful, in one way or another.

When I say lazy, I am speaking relatively. It seemed like they were doing the minimum amount of work to get the books past muster.
Apparently, the formatting is missed a lot for the PF1e books
It has been repeated that these items are addressed if reported as a bug. However, it is worth noting that when I broached the idea that Powers should be added to the PF1e ruleset to accommodate things like the powers granted by Mythic Paths, which are not coded at all, I was told just make it a spell group. Which you can do, but is not quite right.
FG provides the data from the official products for a premium price, almost the cost of the book itself, which most of us have already paid at least once. I don't think I'm being unreasonable that if I just want to play rules as written that I and my players should have to learn a confusing scripting language just to use it.
FG is not an MMO, I never said it was. What I did say was what I said above. As the consumer, if I am paying a premium price, I should be able to expect a premium product. I do not think that is too much to ask. Having a scripting language is good for those who want to do it, but some people just want to play. And stay with me here, quick scenario, you're a DM who is playing a game with generally non-technical people. They are creating their characters, we now have to go through everyone's characters and code the plethora of stuff so that the FG plays the way it should. We have to do this because having non-technical people switch back and forth from using FG the with the targetting and dice rolls affecting the targets, and everything to having to figure it all out on their own is REALLY confusing for some people.
This extraction information is completely new to me and does help explain some things. I don't know why anyone had not mentioned it before in the thread. It still could have been done better, since they know (presumably) how this trigger coding works, the authors should have included it so the spells would work properly.

I guess what it amounts to is that, in paying 50 dollars for a book, when the physical book is 60 dollars (even if it weren't, 50 dollars is a lot of money), I expect it to be a complete product. Now I have a better understanding of my original question of why it is not. However, I still think that for the money it should be. I hope anyone who reads this can understand my reasoning why I feel this way.

[Trenloe]

Like I said - there's a misconception/misunderstanding of what the products actually contain and what it is designed to do. You expect more than is actually advertised. Nowhere do the PF 1e products say that all of the abilities, spells, feats, rules, etc. are automated.

You paid for something and you're entitled to an opinion. But, that opinion is based off an unrealistic expectation - whether you just assumed everything was coded like a multi-million dollar MMO (I know you haven't compared FG to that, but you're expecting that level of coding), or you mistook some comment somewhere, or maybe even read some community info that was incorrect or, as you say, you just expected more for the money. As I have explained above - the PF 1e implementation is *not designed to have all the automation you expect*. Saying someone has done "the minimum amount of work to get the books past muster" is simply incorrect, because neither the conversion goal, nor the system design, exists for what you're expecting.

SmiteWorks are very open about this. And they very generously offer a 30 day no questions asked refund. I'm sorry to keep mentioning that, but as your expectations of the product don't match what they are designed to do, then you're obviously going to be disappointed. For whatever reason, the products you have bought don't meet your expectations (even though these are unrealistic based off the system design) - if you're truly not happy with what you've purchased then please email [email protected]. I'm sorry, you may just think that's a "if you don't like it get a refund" response, but I honestly don't see how you're going to be happy here - you expected something that isn't there, wasn't advertised and wasn't developed/designed - you made assumptions that were incorrect and your whole discussion and requests are based around those incorrect assumptions. I'm sorry, but that is the long and the short of it - if the product isn't designed to do what you expect, then it can't meet those expectations. If there are actual defects based off what the system is designed to do, then please report them in the bug report thread so that they can be fixed for you and for others.

[Kelrugem]

It has been repeated that these items are addressed if reported as a bug. However, it is worth noting that when I broached the idea that Powers should be added to the PF1e ruleset to accommodate things like the powers granted by Mythic Paths, which are not coded at all, I was told just make it a spell group. Which you can do, but is not quite right.

But why is this not quite right? Because of the rules of Mythic and not all of them are accommodated, or simply because that thing one has to click is called "spell class"?

About the spells: Yes, of course, it would be certainly nice when all of them are hard-coded and do whatever automation is possible, without the need of manual adjusting it. But, as Trenloe pointed out, making modules for the store is a big load of work, really a lot of hours need to be spent doing so. Whenever you will manually create the effects etc. of spells then you will probably realize that this is also an extreme workload (depending on the number of spells of course). You say that 50 dollars is lot, yes, for us individuals it can mean a lot, but how much does the creator get? How many people are buying the module? With at least 100hr for the creation (which is even way more when also the spells are automated), just assuming a very small minimum salaray of 10$/hr would still mean a lot of money, but are enough people buying this module?

We are speaking here about D&D3.5/PF1, played in the internet, played on FG. That is a niche of a niche of a niche of some small market for fantasy gaming. Here is not lot of money running around. The problems you're speaking about are in my opinion not a problem related to FG, SmiteWorks or the community developers. It is simply a problem of missing money to afford all the work needed to do what you want to get.

The same holds for the automation of the ruleset. You may have seen my extensions, and, though I didn't code this whole ruleset, these small things I coded took an extreme amount of time. I mean really really extreme. Who should code the wanted features of the ruleset, while also FGU needs to be developed with all the new image features? Who pays this developer?
That's the reason why I told you that you should simply use spell classes for the mythic stuff. I once wanted to implement a power group in form of an extension, but I realized that such a "small" thing is difficult to do (difficult in sense of that I need to figure it out and I have never done such a thing before) and it needs a lot of my time to do so, and not just any time, I spend my free time for coding this (as many community developers, too). So, I realized that this is maybe not really easy, but also that a separate power group is also just a trimmed-down version of the spell group. Hence, why coding a separate thing when you can already do everything with the spell class? Therefore I added all my other automation to the spell class instead even though the automation was directed to such "powers" rather than spells, was way easier and then also spells can make use of that additional automation Thence, in my opinion, a power class would just add to the workload, also in form of maintenance, while you'd not really gain anything than something aesthetic. (Though it is of course somewhat nicer to have a separate trimmed-down version of the spell class in 5e; but I had so many powers in 3.5e which acted like spells such that a power class in 3.5e will be probably not really that much different.. But I may be wrong here because I do not know anything about Mythic and their mechanics)

Of course you could simply completely rely on the community, but it shouldn't be the standard to expect the community doing everything for free.

So, in my opinion, the real problem are simply missing ressources in form of money and workers. To change that we'd need to increase the community of FG and of 3.5e/PF1 in particular

[Kelrugem]

and about the comparison with 5e: I am always a bit sad to read about that 3.5e/PF1 has not so much automation than other rulesets. Actually, it has a ton of automation, we even have an action tab for NPCs while 5e hasn't, we can use spell points while 5e does not have a separate spell class for that. And there are a ton of effects and similar automations as in 5e

In my honest opinion (I now play in 5e as a player, too, so I know 5e now a bit), the level of automation of 5e is not really that much higher than 3.5/PF1. The parser has an easier job there, as Trenloe pointed out. I was even a bit "disappointed" because I so often hear about the much higher automation there, but it doesn't really feel all that different at all

But do not forget, 3.5e/PF1 has way more rules and situation-specific things and bonuses/penalties than 5e. So, even when 3.5e/PF1 and 5e would have the same automation, 3.5e/PF1 would still have a bigger lack of automation compared to the total amount of existing rules and material out there. Thence, be aware of that your thought about that "3.5e/PF1 is the unbeloved step child" can simply be caused by that the amount of rules for 3.5e/PF1 is really big while the level of automation compared with other FG rulesets is really not that small at all 3.5e/PF1 is a complicated ruleset, achieving 90% of automation there is not as "easy" as for 5e