Is there a fairly simple guide anywhere on how the PFS / Organized Play system works? It is royally complicated to try to get involved. I have a paizo.com account and a -0001 character thought up, and it is just insanely difficult to figure out just how the system works so that i can play with him!
There’s dozens of hits on google because of each region having its own organization with their own write-up, but frankly they seem to be written for people who are already involved or familiar with some form of organized play.
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.
Thanks for the reply, don’t take the rest of this as an assault on you but as a commentary on the difficulty I’ve had trying to get involved- What’s a VC? Or a VA? What’s Warhorn? This is the difficulty because this is how the “guides” I’ve found (even Paizo’s) are written: full of acronyms and esoteric terms that are never defined anywhere. Surely there are common terms (like lodge?) that apply to every region, but there isn’t a glossary to even help with that.
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.
I’ve gotten into PFS via conventions. GenCon Online and PaizoCon in particular. The instructions for signing up tend to be pretty explicit for those events. And there’s a discord channel (a social network program) with people willing to help you in real-time.
Once I found my first game, I just asked (pestered) the GM. He was very helpful and understanding.
But I totally agree with you - getting started is super hard. I’m still working things out. The plus side it everything works on the honor system. The negative side is I’m always worried I’m doing something wrong!
p.s. warhorn is a website - warhorn.net - where you can search for and sign up for games or tournaments for all kinds of systems. It’s popular with PFS. As is rpgchronicles.net which is PFS specific (I think).