I’ve been running two weekly campaigns on demiplane for well over a year now and I am gearing up for my third and fourth campaigns soon. I will continue using demiplane as the GM and many of my players will also continue using demiplane for their character sheets, but everyone is not thrilled with the experience and some will be using other options for future campaigns. While I appreciate so much of the work you’ve done so far here are some items that I feel should be given higher priority at the risk of losing people for their next campaigns:
constantly being logged out and being prompted for newsletters every time. I personally haven’t found this to be a problem for me but I wonder if this differs depending on whether you are a subscriber or what login option you use, but every single session more than half my players have to login again, and every time they mention having to opt out again as an extra step. It’s a real turn off and maybe devs and employees aren’t facing it but my players at the start of each session mention it.
loading times for character sheets… is it a little possible to optimize loading? At the start of every session, after complaining about logging in again 10-15s and then opting out 10s, there’s another couple minutes of character engine and other updates… every time. It sucks to start a session with roll for initiative hype and then take 5 minutes before we actually know who goes first… it’s really long. I’m exaggerating but it really hurts when the barrier to play and first impression each time the site is used is something done in moments by the competition (pathbuilder, etc.) like if you could server side cache perception and basic strike or something and load in features afterwards it would go a long way to speeding up the experience … like what if the character engine updates loading screen showed a perception roll result for example… or even better even just the modifiers for perception and skills statically so our exploration can also move forward without a minute or two wondering what play-by-phone got for stealth.
slowness for required features. Remaster (player core and GM core) were released in November of 2023. We are 18 months out and don’t have proper spacious pouches.
lack of shared rolling. This is pretty big actually. I mean it’s nice that many players have gone back to physical dice for the tactile feel and for important rolls we use owlbear rodeo dice from time to time, but since a shared roll log isn’t a feature of demiplane, basically there’s no lock in to ensure all my players are using the sheets here. Everyone self reports by voice anyway so it doesn’t matter if they use other options for character sheet and for the next campaign I’ve had players tell me they’ll use pathbuilder or even pen and paper over the experience they’re getting here to avoid the issues above.
no new themes: given that the competition is lackluster in the design side, at least the advantage you have here could really be built on. I think hiring one person to do character sheet art/design and releasing one a month or even one a quarter (based on AP/other book releases) would go a long way to helping players make their sheets feel unique and engage a lot of players. It certainly was a big part of why I enjoyed dndbeyond… theming out my sheet, the character frame, the dice, etc., to really enhance the feel of my character.
complex class simplifiers: of course our least invested in learning the rules through reading players chose investigator. On sheets with a complicated core mechanic to the class it would really be nice for there to be something to indicate the final modifier … there are probably other classes that could use this help. I think our thaumaturge has maybe kinda finally figured out personal antithesis and mortal whatever at level 12… but there are a few classes with core mechanics that would love to have a little more TLC in their presentation on the sheet.
Conclusion: Okay, so basically, I’m still here. As a GM there’s a lot of value for me. Especially if I get rollable monster sheets like dagger heart has. I’m locked in and loyal. My experience is pretty good. I’d still like to pin my current APs to the library menu and have a campaign view that gives me a one stop place to look at all the character stats of my players so I can better make secret rolls… that is, when it comes to GM tools I have a wishlist. But I think a more fundamental issue for demiplane moving forwards is to be adding value to the character builder for players loyal to pf2e. The issues I gave above are taking all my players out of demiplane for our next year of adventures here… they’ve already filled seven character slots and don’t want to delete their precious friends. And the experience to date doesn’t inspire confidence that they wouldn’t be more satisfied with other tools for the next ones. The pace of change has been too slow and primary frustrations are not being addressed. I’m saying tough critical stuff because I love you and want you to be better. Sincerely thanking you for your hard work.
I’m sorta with you. The constant sign-out is absolutely infuriating. It is such a complete pain.
I also am pretty frustrated by search. Searching for rules is way harder to do than searching for character stuff (classes, feats, etc.) And the search is annoying. It doesn’t remember the status of the ‘legacy’ toggle, and I have to enter a search query, load the results page, then click a link, as opposed to getting a popup near the search box where I can bypass the full search results page.
The signout issue might be browser-dependent. I was having issues while using Chrome during my GM sessions, but since I switched to using Firefox for all my Demiplane tabs I have not seen any problems.
To be clear. I’m not abandoning Demiplane. I really enjoy my experience here and I’ll also be using it for introducing players new to Pathfinder. My point was to raise issues faced by my players that don’t normally come to the forums and remark that there could be a drop off in users as first/second campaigns run their course and the 7 character limit is reached making some of these issues higher priority.
@re7erse I’ll let people know that firefox might be more reliable for sign-in. I use Brave and don’t have any issues while some of my players that use Brave do so I’m not sure if it’s browser or some settings or sign-in method… it’s been a little tough to diagnose but I think I’ll also ask them to try flushing browser cache, etc.
@quirken It’s a good point about rule lookup. I think my players tend to use archives of nethys as it’s more responsive for looking up spells and feats at the table.
I think another thing that speaks to me is items like the spacious pouch being left out a year and a half later. It really feels like development energy has been shifted away from pathfinder to focus on things like daggerheart, starfinder and roll20 integration. There’s pre-sales for starfinder core books that won’t be released for several months, but PFS scenarios are months and months behind, LO:Shining Kingdoms is nowhere to be seen (official release in just a few days)… and many other things I would expect to be implemented that have been put on the back burner.
Anyway, I understand that there are limited resources, and I’m grateful for what we have, but I raise these issues to just kind of highlight the fact that there is a backlog of tasks for probably the largest game system on Demiplane while it seems a lot of energy has shifted to other projects.
Demiplane is severely lacking still unfortunately and your problems are similar to mine and my players. We still use Demiplane, but it’s frustrating at times.
Pathfinder 2e needs to be their base, but they’re adding new games too quickly to manage it all. Pathfinder 2e isn’t even up to a basic standard yet with a lot of problems in the character generator where it doesn’t get feats, items, and information about the class correct. Until they get Pathfinder 2e up to standard Demiplane isn’t going to really take off.
Major issues I have:
1: The system doesn’t work for new players. Browsing figuring out which feats and items to use is cumbersome and not intuitive to a player that has limited experience. They need to sit people down that don’t play Pathfinder 2e and ask the person to make a character and equip that character, then understand where they fall short. Pathbuilder2e is far more intuitive than Demiplane at the moment. Want a background for your character? Good luck scrolling through the … I don’t know how many, 100? 200? Oh yeah, you can only load 10-20 at a time so in order to load them all you’re going to spend at least 5 minutes, maybe up to 15 minutes just loading them so you can scroll through them all!
2: Site is slow. There’s just no way around this, it’s still slow. Information should be loaded and cached, especially in regard to the character class and items. Their competition is Pathbuilder2e and its standard. Whoever designed this system to constantly read and write to a database every single time a letter is typed ---- is ridiculous. If their site gets saturated its going to come to a crawl or crash. Lets dive into notes. A player should be expected to press a “save” button when done with a note - OR - make it so it saves the note after a new node on the page is pressed after the player types a note. Tries to close the page? The page warns the user that there is unsubmitted data they’ll lose. In either case you’re not constantly trying to update the character sheet letter by letter as the user is typing, which itself in its current state glitches out.
3: There are a lot of small bugs everywhere in the character builder, and they can be frustrating. I’ve submitted some tickets in the past few weeks and a couple are over 30 days old now. I understand that the team is busy and people have a lot to do, but the product is out of beta but still feels like it’s a beta product. This shouldn’t be happening for a $3000 product, it’s a huge glaring problem. This is not an open source project, it is a closed source for profit project. As such quality assurance needs to be improved or there should be bug / bounty rewards for bugs to people who have paid for the products to help improve and fix the products. Otherwise it’s tedious work that DM’s have to explain to their frustrated players why their character isn’t correct.
Am I being critical? Yes. Am I trying to provide helpful ideas too? Yeah! Do I want this to be better? Absolutely, they should make this the gold standard for Pathfinder. I’m still disappointed that roll20 got involved and so much shifted to integration with it rather than being an open standard for any system to connect into when Demiplane was supposed to be Paizo’s official online partner, but that’s just another sore point of my own.