So last night we ended up having nine people show up to play Pathfinder Society at the local game store. Nine is a lousy number, because technically you can't set up two tables. You need two GMs, and then you have a table of four players and three players.

The end result was that we had to turn away two players, which is awful if you want the PFS to grow. "Sorry you came out for nothing, hopefully in two weeks you'll be able to get in on the next game!" isn't what I want to say to folks.

Now I wanted to take a pre-gen and just plop it into one of the tables to get it to four. In the latest PFS guide there is the option for event organizers to use a pre-gen to get it up to table minimum, with the caveat that the person running the pre-gen should stay quiet and not spoil anything if they had already played the scenario. I can easily see this extending to having a pre-gen just being an NPC that is there to help bolster the party enough to get them over the edge. No big deal.

Unfortunately the long shadow of bureaucratic RPGA culture hung over the group and too many people fell into the "this does not compute!" zone of rule thinking and so two people went home.

Can we get some clarification on this for the future? Right now technically how it sorts out with people showing up is:

Four - no
Five - yes
Six - yes
Seven - yes
Eight - no (send someone home)
Nine - no (send two people home)
Ten - yes (two tables)

I think we can keep growing our local PFS group. Now that the core books are out people are finally paying attention to the living system again and so over time we've seen more people showing up, but we need enough flexibility to make things work. I have no problem pounding a square peg into a round hole so that fun can occur, but the gaming hobby has a lot of people that are much more comfortable in legalism and so judgments need to be made from powers on high.

Being able to use pre-gens as NPCs will also help in the future as we need two tables because of huge differences between tiers. If eight people show up, but half are 5+ level and the other are just starting out with first level characters then it would be infinitely easier to just have two tables with three players plus a pre-gen npc, rather than negotiating which characters to use, or creating new characters, etc.

Never, ever, ever, ever send people away. Forget everything you ever learned from other org play environments--our number 1 goal with Pathfinder Society is to get people playing as often as possible.

For last night's game, I would've been okay with the GM running a silent pre-gen just to get that table going. This should NEVER be the norm (always strive for 4 + the GM minimum) but if the choice is between the GM running a silent NPC to make the table happen or sending two players home, I would ALWAYS side with making the table happen.

Thanks! That helps!

I passed that along to our local group and one person wrote:

"Another example of Paizo doing it right. I have been very happy with Pathfinder and Pathfinder Society."

One question that was raised by another player in the group is how does using pre-gens work in reporting? If you only have three players in a game does the reporting system insist on needing four player numbers, or will it accept less than four player numbers?

Nope. In fact, for Gen Con, there were entire tables of pre-gens sometimes and I reported the tables as having 0 players plus the GM just so the GM could have the record of running that table.

The short answer: you can report the table at any size.

I am now that much more looking forward to OwlCon in February after reading this thread.

:)

This is great. I'm introducing some friends to PFS later this week but we can't get the numbers for a minimum table size. Good to know that we can include some silent pre-gens to make it work. Unless I've missed it somewhere, the Guide really needs updating to talk about how to deal with too few players. It only seems to talk about how to deal with too many.

I'll include language doing just that in 2.2.

Never, ever, ever, ever send people away. Forget everything you ever learned from other org play environments--our number 1 goal with Pathfinder Society is to get people playing as often as possible.

+1