Back in November 2014, you may recall the Pathfinder Society team held a marathon meeting to address a long list of feedback and devise numerous concrete objectives for how to improve the Pathfinder Society Organized Play campaign. In the spirit of the main announcement for today, let's take a look at what Mike and I shared back then and see where things are now.
Factions
Factions were getting a bit unwieldy as promoting faction goals relied on playing the right scenario with the right character. Updating faction documentation on the website was also behind schedule. We proposed getting new art for each of the revised factions, getting the website text updated, and producing the faction journal cards. As you can see by the links, we've hit all of these goals, albeit a little later than projected.
Scenario Length
As scenarios developed deeper stories and greater complexity, the adventure gradually ran longer and longer—even extending beyond the 5-hour soft limit. What's more, numerous locations couldn't manage to complete some of the average-length scenarios because the venue or weeknight schedule only allowed for 4 4.5-hour games.
Beginning back in January, I began trimming the number of encounters in higher-level scenarios while also watching for exceptionally time-consuming encounters in lower-level adventures and adjusting as necessary. Based on the feedback I've read, the first month or two after the change was a bit hit-or-miss in meeting this goal, but what I've read since suggests that it's getting easier to run the new scenarios in a 4-hour slot (not including set-up and paperwork).
Scenario [Preparation] Difficulty
With the Pathfinder Reference Document so easy to reference from home, scenario authors and I felt more comfortable including increasingly complex and diverse options from the Pathfinder RPG hardcover line. The trouble was that this made scenarios harder to prepare and run—especially in the unenviable but occasionally necessary circumstance of running an adventure cold.
Beginning in December 2014, we began including full Bestiary pages in the back of scenarios, reducing the books that a GM might need to juggle to the “character option” books such as Advanced Player's Guide for a feat or a spell. We also returned to the practice of including full stat blocks for creatures with simple templates that substantially modify their statistics (e.g. the advanced simple template, but not the fiendish one). It's a little harder to measure how well we've limited the number of subsystems and complicated mechanics, but it's certainly been on my mind while writing outlines, working with the author, and developing adventures.
Season Plotline
By 2014, Pathfinder Society had developed a reputation for basing its season-long plotlines off a recently released Adventure Path, and it was increasingly apparent how much this tied our hands regarding what kinds of stories we could tell and pushing the Society toward year-long goals that did not always support its main agenda of exploration, documentation, and scholarship.
It's a little hard to share a lot on this front without giving away too much, but as you probably picked up from the recent blog announcing the Year of the Serpent, we're cooking up a fun new season that tips its hat to the upcoming Hell's Rebels Adventure Path but focuses on its own story near and dear to the Pathfinder Society's interests. All of that includes traveling to a large number of destinations—many familiar and many new—in the name of exploring, reporting, and cooperating.
The Story So Far
If you're following along with that first blog I linked to back in November, you may notice one big entry that I haven't talked about yet: the Story So Far project. As the organized play campaign gets older, the accumulated wealth of stories, NPCs, and other developments can make it tough to know what has happened already, how the current season might tie in, and what the underlying assumptions are when playing an older adventure.
The project really picked up steam when Linda Zaya-Palmer joined the team, and I am happy to announce that the first wave of Story So Far handouts is now complete and available for download. These five cover the first five unified season plot arcs in a very low-spoiler sort of way, providing enough information to give a newer player helpful context without identifying who a mysterious benefactor or a hidden traitor might be—all in a few hundred words. Pass them out before an adventure tied to that season's metaplot, and let us know how they work. Based on feedback, we're looking into addressing major plot arcs and unifying threads (like the Blakros family and Grandmaster Torch) in a similar fashion.
John Compton
Developer