Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 129 - Pathfinder Nexus

Episode Date: June 19, 2022

Listener Peter sent an email asking about Paizo's planned Pathfinder Nexus so I went digging through the archives and recorded interviews from PaizoCon to discuss the latest I could find. In this episode I also ask someone to bring me Jason Buhlman but not literally.  I just want to talk to him about adventure ideas.  This isn't a "bring me the head of my enemies" kind of thing. Maybe I don't need to record or write descriptions until I'm off the pain meds...

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. It's a searchable database, a collection of art assets, a digital character builder, and something that you can use to maintain your campaign. It is currently very much in its infancy as its D&D beyond for Pathfinder. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning in to episode 129 of the Taking 20 podcast, this week all about Pathfinder Nexus. This week's sponsor, dancing. It's not easy to dance as you transition from one floor of your house to another one.

You've got to find the right steps. Don't forget our contest, sponsored by Brenton Galbraith at 3D Crafts and Curios. All you have to do is send an idea for an accessory that you either use around your gaming table or would like to see 3D printed for use around your table. Send that idea to contest at taking20podcast.com to enter to win the

beautiful Artificer's Dice Tower. Finally, head over to 3dcraftsandcurios.etsy.com and use the code TAKING20, that's TAKING20, for a 10% discount on any single item during the months of June and July. Thank you again, Brinton, for sponsoring, and best of luck to everyone who entered. Okay, first and foremost, and before I get started on this episode, I apologize for no new content last week. On Tuesday last week, my wife woke me up because my doctor had called her to let her know that they had seen a buildup of air and fluid that indicated I likely had an infection in my brain. In case you didn't know, and I sure as hell didn't before these events unfolded, brain infections are lethal,

before these events unfolded. Brain infections are lethal, or have damaging side effects an alarming percentage of the time, even in the best situations with the best care. She rushed me to the ER at the advice of my doctor, and they reopened my skull in an operation with a neurosurgeon and an infectious disease specialist, making a new incision directly on top of the previous one. They cultured everything they found,

and the great news is it wasn't an infection. And of course, the bad news is my body was rejecting the artificial brain mesh they used to replace the section that they had taken out in the previous surgeries. They did cultures of my cerebral spinal fluid, the fluid around the mesh, and the external wound, and probably the stuff coming out of every orifice of my body.

Six days later, and many hours of antibiotics, they finally sent me back home, but that was Sunday night and it was too late for me to release an episode. All this to say, I am so sorry for the missed week, but I do have a really good excuse. Usually I have a backlog of episodes in the can to survive a week like this, but the long absence previously during my earlier other surgeries and that it exhausted all of my backlog and that left last week completely empty. To those who sent well wishes, thoughts, prayers, and in the case of one listener who's actually local and a friend of the family, Jimmy, a wonderful meal made by him and his lovely wife. Believe me when I say the food was absolutely amazing when I finally made it home. You were too kind and thank you all for everything. So this week's topic comes from a listener,

Peter, who wanted to know my thoughts and predictions on the service Pathfinder Nexus. Thank you for the topic suggestion, Peter. Let's dive right in. So preface, I don't work for Paizo. I have no inside information. I couldn't get anyone to agree to an interview on this topic. I did watch a lot of the Paizo streams and the good news about being trapped in a hospital for six days. I listened to the interviews and the podcasts and all the discussions, even spent some time on the Paizo Discord servers during the time that I was kind of incapacitated, and there was surprisingly little new information about Nexus, and I was really disappointed by that.

Also, in the interest of full disclosure, Pathfinder 2nd Edition is probably my favorite gaming system out right now. It's not perfect, but it has a tremendous amount of variety, and most characters and archetypes are viable for most campaigns. So while I do not have a vested interest in the success of Paizo, I am rooting for them very, very hard to succeed with Pathfinder 2E. Fifth edition in Wizards of the Coast, I love it. It's an unqualified success. Pathfinder First Edition, it's really crunchy, but it was close to what I played a lot when I was younger. I don't see 5E or Pathfinder 1e going away anytime soon.

So rooting for them is like rooting for the, I don't know, the New York Yankees or Real Madrid. Nothing wrong with being a fan, but they're going to be around, competitive and probably towards the top of the standings almost every single year. So I'm rooting for things associated with Pathfinder 2e to succeed because I want that game system to stick around for a while. So let's go back to some of the announcements that did come out. What is Pathfinder Nexus supposed to be? Nexus was supposed to deliver Pathfinder 2E's trove of sourcebooks, character

options, and adventures in a convenient and easily accessible way. It's a searchable database, a collection of art assets, a digital character builder, and something that you can use to maintain your campaign. It is currently very much in its infancy. Effectively, the best way I can describe it is it's D&D Beyond for Pathfinder. Now, for those of you that don't have a lot of experience with it, D&D Beyond has been an unqualified success for Wizards of the Coast. A lot of people spend a lot of money and there's millions of dollars being made by Wizards of the Coast on that platform, but there's a clear difference between D&D Beyond and Pathfinder Nexus. When it comes to 5th edition, D&D Beyond is just about the only game in town when it comes

to digital support. There's not a lot of community-driven character and campaign builders that supports new content as it gets released for 5e. 5e has some spreadsheets and some small webpages that's out there, but they're slow to adopt the new material. They're very scattered. They're not connected to one another. So D&D Beyond really has a monopoly on new content as it comes out. Later this year, when Spelljammer and Dragonlance release as far as campaign settings, about the only place to build characters with these new rule sets

will be D&D Beyond for a period of time. I think Pathfinder Nexus is Pizer's attempt to create a very similar experience. They saw D&D Beyond's success and they said, hey, we'd like some of that too. So they made a similar product. You know what? I'm underselling it. I'm sorry. Not only did they make a similar product, but if I'm reading this right, D&D Beyond and Pathfinder Nexus were both co-founded by the same person, Adam Bradford. It looks like he worked on D&D Beyond and then left to move to Demiplane, the company who's making Pathfinder Nexus, and all the functionality, the user interface, etc. is very similar between the platforms.

So, let's talk about Pathfinder Nexus and the good of it. It is a clear sign that Paizo is going to support the digital tabletop, and I think that's a wonderful thing. It is so convenient to have access to your digital books, your adventures, and content you purchased from a single source. It's great to be able to create characters using source material that you've purchased on a digital character builder that's supported by the actual company that's writing and maintaining the game system. I love the idea in theory. I can't tell you the last time I built a character with pen and paper. God, three years? Four at this point? When compared to having an electronic character builder that auto-calculates a lot of your character sheet for you, it makes a lot of the

tedious parts just kind of go away. The thought of doing it again manually just, eh, I mean, I could do it, but I don't think I'd be all that happy about it. Once it becomes a mature product, I think Pathfinder Nexus can become that for Pathfinder 2e characters. But at this point, the product isn't mature. Pathfinder Nexus, there really hasn't been

a roadmap published that far out, so I'm left with more questions than possible praise for the product. There are some problems, by the way, with its current implementation. It looks like a straight-up clone of D&D Beyond. And I'm just going to be polite and say D&D Beyond doesn't have the best user interface or user experience. The site is slow, it's sometimes clunky, and it isn't intuitive on a lot of levels. Remember, D&D Beyond was an unqualified success, but you could argue that it was primarily successful due to a lack of other character and campaign managers that were out there.

Pathfinder 2E has some other character builders and campaign managers out there at the moment, and they are great. On the commercial side, there's Hero Lab Online. While you do have to purchase content for Hero Lab Online, once you have it, you can build however many characters that you want inside that product. There's also a community-supported solution called Pathbuilder 2E. Now, for both Hero Lab and PathBuilder, new content comes out very, very quickly in those solutions, usually within a couple of the weeks of a book being released. PathBuilder, for example, has a great mobile user interface, and it's easy to build characters and export them in both PDF and JSON formats. Further, Pathfinder's integration

with Foundry includes a way of integrating character sheets and builds into Foundry itself. Even if it is fairly clunky and it kind of is difficult to do, it still works. On the other side of the coin, Wizards of the Coast went very aggressively after other content aggregators and content providers in late 2020 and throughout 2021. after other content aggregators and content providers in late 2020 and throughout 2021. This limited the non-D&D Beyond options out there for building characters, maintaining campaigns, and so forth. Paizo has yet to get that aggressive against these other providers.

Even when they do, they've announced integration with Foundry moving forward, so I don't see them trying to shut down that character build engine, even if it does kind of, well, suck right now at the moment. D&D Beyond succeeded by Wizards maintaining an effective monopoly on digital content publishing that Paizo has not been able to establish as of this recording. So in a lot of ways, Pathfinder Nexus can't really replicate what D&D Beyond did, and Nexus appears to be a solution in search of a real problem. Suppose it's just intended to be a single source of released official Paizo game options. We already have a site called the Archives of Nethis,

which integrates information from official sources. In that case, Nexus is at best the Archives of Nethis with a prettier front end on it. I've purchased a lot, and I mean a lot, of Paizo PDFs through the years, and those downloads are maintained by the Paizo store. Granted, the user interface looks like it was designed by someone who had major brain surgery, I can make that joke, and its performance is absolutely dog shit, but the material is still there, and so I already have a single place to go to download and access all of my Paizo material that I've purchased. Like I would imagine most GMs do, I maintain an online trove of my own purchases that are available whenever I happen to need them and wherever I happen to be. I use Google Drive, but I know GMs do the same thing with Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive, Box, and so forth.

Hell, I subdivide all of mine into various campaigns that I'm running or playing in right now. There's my Skull and Shackles folder. There's my Emerald Spire folder. The relevant books and excerpts from content that I need right there at my fingertips. So as implemented right now, it's a Pathfinder clone of D&D Beyond, which not a lot of people were clamoring for, to be honest. In the future, Pathfinder Nexus will have character building and campaign building options, but those aren't released yet at all. So to evaluate the product, I need to pull out my future goggles to talk about what it could become in the future. We are now stepping into the realm of pure

speculation. None of this could be true, but strategy is one of my strong points since I've been in executive management for my last 10 years or so of my career. So let's suppose someone waves a wand of wish and makes me the king of Paizo for a year or so. First off, bring me Jason Bullman, for I have some ideas for a couple of adventures that have not been done anywhere else and it would be fun as shit with the right players. Secondly, I'd like to sit down with Lisa Stevens, current CEO, and talk about Paizo's digital tabletop strategy over the next decade. First off, the good news.

Paizo has a lot of the LEGO pieces already in place to take advantage of the digital tabletop that a lot of groups have migrated towards. What are the great-to-have items to run or participate in a campaign digitally? You need a way to store and access the digital content you purchase to run the adventures and manage your character. Pathfinder Nexus, I believe, provides that capability. It currently duplicates a lot of the functionality with the current Paizo store, like I talked about earlier, so I'd recommend that the two integrate, or even better, the Paizo store is taken out back and put out of its misery. So, let's make Pathfinder Nexus the single source for all Paizo content that you've purchased. Second thing you need.

Digital content that you purchase from Paizo should be available in a variety of formats, depending on what's conducive to the GM's game at the time. Nexus may be great if I'm running a game where I have a solid internet connection, but for example, some conventions have weak Wi-Fi and internet access may be spotty at best. In that case, I should be able to download my purchased content in PDF form or some other digitally signed format so that I can access it offline. Third thing you need, you need a digital tabletop solution. The good news is Paizo's partnered with Foundry Virtual Tabletop as their tabletop of choice. They have announced

that they're going to be excelling adventures pre-built for Foundry, so it's almost point and click for GMs out there. This is brilliant, and I think it's one of the keys to future success. Four, you need a way to build characters for the adventures that play in. They have licenses with Hero Lab Online and Pathfinder Nexus that can support this functionality, but I really think they should move to a single solution here. It looks like they're betting on Pathfinder Nexus for this, so let's assume that's going to be their single character builder of choice. 5. Need a way for GMs to build adventures they want to run.

Foundry would be the tabletop, Nexus could be the source for purchase content. There you go. That should solve that problem. Six, you need continued support for a solution like Pathfinder Infinite that allows the community to create content. And then seven, now comes the hard part. Pathfinder Nexus, Foundry, Pathfinder Infinite, they all need to integrate together in both online and offline content. I will grant you this would be difficult and would require some revamping of the way Paizo licenses both its first and third-party content, but let me paint a picture for you of what this would look like for we consumers. Suppose I want the Book of the Dead, which was just released for Pathfinder 2e. I purchased that from Paizo on Nexus, which gives me access to the book's material on Nexus,

and would give me the ability to download the PDF for offline viewing. Seamlessly, my Foundry installation would have access to the same content in formats that can be imported into my games. GMs could drag and drop the new monsters into the tabletop and customize them as needed for their adventure. Players could add the classes and the ancestries to their created characters to allow them to play with the content that they just purchased, all from a single purchase directly from Paizo. Now, if Paizo wanted to go the extra mile, for bonus points, they could also include the ability to allow GMs to purchase content at a higher level to make it available to players in their games. That way, if I wanted to run Outlaws of Alkenstar, I could make those character options in those books available to all of my players, much like you can do with Hero Lab Online these days.

like you can do with Hero Lab Online these days. The other thing that Paizo could do for bonus points is include options for paid and premium GMs to run branded games that Paizo supports directly. Allow third-party content providers to build NPCs and monsters based on the rules provided in the Paizo official content. So, someone builds a low-level lich character and makes it available for sale for 75 cents. I could purchase that content directly, which automatically integrates with the Book of the Dead purchase that I already made with all of the feats and the class abilities and ancestries automatically linked.

That would be fantastic and, of course, an ideal situation, but Paizo historically has supported what they call the Open Game License, which much of their material is made available for free for content providers. So assuming that they continue to support OGL, the Open Gaming License, everything could work that way. But if Paizo starts going after these community projects and third-party produced solutions, then well, all bets are off. If they go after Archives of Nethis and get it shut down, there goes a lot of good content.

If they stop supporting OGL, much of the free content available for us will just disappear online or move to pirated sources. If they start suing the developer of Pathbuilder, both mobile and online versions, then that takes away one of the better solutions out there. But honestly, I don't think Paizo is going to do that, since support of OGL has been a cornerstone of Paizo since they were releasing the Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine in support of Dungeons and Dragons. If they try to take away community-made solutions, I honestly think they'll lose a huge portion of their player base. If they start attacking GMs and players that release their custom content online, like adventure path websites, campaign discord servers,

I believe they're going to drive people away to other game systems, and I think that would be the death knell. So I think they're smarter than that, so I think they're going to continue to support these third-party providers. They just, I think, need to do some good heavy lifting to integrate all of their digital solutions, including, yes, Pathfinder Nexus. I think Paizo does have a plan for this integration with the digital tabletop, but it's just going to take time to get it fully implemented, given all of the licensing deals they currently have. I sincerely believe that the future online

gaming experiences will be much better than what we currently are going through, and that huge companies like Wizards of the Coast and Paizo will find a way to make money while supporting traditional in-person gaming and gaming around a virtual tabletop. Pathfinder Nexus can be one of those digital building blocks, and so when gaming in the near future, the GM and the players can all have access to the content that they've purchased, and they can all have fun doing it. Thank you all so much for listening and continuing to listen even through the break last week and all the well wishes. My health is improving and I greatly appreciate every single one of you.

If you do like the podcast, I'm going to ask again that you please like, subscribe, and maybe even provide a review for the podcast wherever you happen to find me. And don't forget to send in your ideas for those 3D printed accessories that you'd like to see at table because I've gotten some entries,

I'd like to see some more. But before I go, I want to thank our other sponsor, Dancing. Remember that it's better for your feet to have arch supports when you dance. After all, dancing should always be good for the soul. You see, it's a play on words. With soul meaning the spiritual part of your being and the bottom of your foot. Yeah. Did I mention that I'm recovering from multiple head traumas? Tune in next week, by the way, when I'm going to answer the question, is realism overrated in your game?

Until then, though, this has been episode 129 all about Pathfinder Nexus. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube Media Production. Copyright 2022. References to game system content are copyrighted by their respective publishers.