Inexperienced PFS 2E player feedback using Demiplane

General Demiplane Feedback
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Note: As I’m a new user to the forum, I can only add a maximum of two links. To work around this, I’ve wrapped the link markdown in code, hence the odd formatting.

I’ve played PF 1E for years, but for this year’s GenCon I participated in 2E scenarios with friends. There’s fundamental differences between the two that it helps to have quick and easy access to resources related to mechanics.

While some of these have been echoed in other posts, I wanted to give my feedback based on my experience attempting to use Demiplane to get answers to my questions during gameplay.

I’ve formatted my issues in quotations/:hammer: and my ask with :hammer_and_wrench:.

:hammer: Search functionality is nearly useless when looking for anything that’s repeatedly referenced throughout the books.

Conditions or actions is a fruitless endeavor. There is the Conditions Appendix from the Core Rulebook but there’s no shortcut to it under Game Rules. This was a source of pain during gameplay. Looking up “grabbed” or “Grapple” would return 167 pages of results.

:hammer_and_wrench: It would be nice to have a dedicated search tool (that Spells, Items, and Feats has) that combines Conditions, Afflictions, and Actions/Activities under one search page, then add that under Game Rules as a shortcut.

:hammer: The Pathfinder Nexus landing page’s Call To Action is unnecessarily large and obtrusive.

When I log in, it’s because I’m looking for information. Having to see a call to buy books/share feedback that takes up the whole screen on mobile or nearly 25% of the vertical resolution of my monitor (2560x1440) is simply unacceptable. It’s on par with the terrible template designs you see on many websites nowadays that take up the entire screen until you scroll; the Youtube video itself makes up half of that wasted real estate. And that’s ignoring the fact there’s another half-page advertisement to buy books and bundles towards the bottom of the landing page.

:hammer_and_wrench: Remove the Call To Action. You already have a half page advertisement to buy the books on the same page. Use that newfound screen real estate to put in a universal search with filters along with links to commonly referenced resources.

:hammer: Ability to link to section headers

None of the headers of a page allow you to link directly to them unless you manipulate the URL and append #HeaderID or follow the link from the rulebook that brings you to the relevant section. For example, when looking up [Focus Spells](https://app.demiplane.com/nexus/pathfinder2e/sources/core-rulebook/focus-spells), there is a link that’ll take you to rules for casting focus spells in the Spells > Focus Spells sections. I can then bookmark or share the link directly to that section.

:hammer_and_wrench: Please add linking to section headers. A good example of it in action would be [Microsoft Docs](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/net-standard?tabs=net-standard-1-0); next to each header is a link icon that you can then copy the URL to.

Keep up the hard work and look forward to future developments!

2 Likes
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Thanks for taking the time to post your feedback. I’ll share replies below.

Search is one of the most “unfinished” parts of the platform right now at this stage of Early Access. I’m not offering that as an excuse, but as an explanation - we have the groundwork for how search will work in place, but we haven’t done any more than that yet since we’re laser-focused on bringing the character builder and digital sheet to life right now. You will see dramatic improvements to search functionality across the site after we get through that major milestone.

Additionally, compendium listings for Actions, Conditions, Afflictions, Hazards, and more are on the roadmap, coming after we get the first iteration of character management out as well.

The entire homepage will change once we are out of Early Access and are fully-launched. I agree that the main purpose of the entire experience is utility, but at this phase of our lifecycle, we still are getting thousands of people hitting the site for the first time, and that information currently serves as an explanation of two things - 1) we are actively looking for feedback (like you’re providing here), and 2) Pathfinder Nexus is not at all “done” or launched yet.

Once we launch, we’ll have no need of that information, and the homepage will take on its final form, which will focus on utility.

That’s something we could potentially explore, but solutions like that (such as what you might see in Confluence) don’t work very well on mobile.

What will work now and on any screen size, is the page / side navigation provides links to those sections, and the link can be grabbed directly from there. We’ll monitor feedback to see if that doesn’t do the trick.

Thanks again for the post, and stay tuned for much more to come. We’re pretty heads-down in a tunnel right now with character management development, but there will be many more updates once we come back out into the light.

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Thank you for taking time to reply! Can’t wait to see what the team has in store!