Chris Mortika's page

What I want to know is, if a player mentions or brags about having bought a boon from someone, should I, if the GM, allow it? I personally find doing that distasteful, but if there is not a rule against it, I cannot tell the person anything other than my personal opinion of their actions - same as when I tell people I find them illegally downloading and trading Paizo material reprehensible.

If they've bought it, yes. If they've downloaded it, no. That isn't just reprehensible; it's illegal, and we don't cotton to that kind of stuff 'round here.

I have a couple of boons that I'm unlikely to use. It's likely that I'll give them away to a player at a table whose playstyle I want to recognize and encourage. Let's not make rules that would make it difficult for me to do that.

We have what we need: a community that approves of boons, of any stripe, being given and traded, but disapproves of them being bought and sold for money.

People get those boons at conventions. So it's likely that anyone putting a boon up for sale has encountered the Pathfinder Society community.

My recommendations for a good scenario for a person stepping onto the other side of the GM-screen depends on the person's strengths. If that person's already an experienced player, he or she doesn't need anything extra to role-play monsters and NPCs. If he or she has already built a complicated class, such as those out of the APG, then I'm not too worried about how that person will handle combat.

Simple combats, strong role-playing
Devil we Know II: Cassomir's Locker (with the corrections)
City of Strangers I and II

Simple role-playing, easy-to-follow plot
Citadel of Flame
Shadow's Last Stand I
Tide of Twilight

--

Something else I recommend: the GM-to-be co-GM with an experienced mentor once or twice. Discuss the adventure ahead of time. Prep together. Have one person run the bad guys in combat, and the other be the impartial judge. Trade off role-playing NPCs.

He's stuck. He received the joy of the adventure, the warm fellowship of playing with a group of like-minded role-playing enthusiasts, and the heartfelt thanks of the GM. What more could he want?

Thanks, Thod.

Really excellent work there, assembling facts from thousands of pages and other source materials.

Captain Kirstov,

The Guide, version 4.0 did not change the qualifications for gaining Fame in earlier seasons' adventures. It changed the name of the missions. Now, if the scenario was written to have two faction missions, one of those faction missions is renamed to be "the primary Pathfinder mission" and the other is renamed to be "the faction mission". But successfully completing the assignment that the Venture Captain sends you on still doesn't provide any Fame.

I concur, Marcus. Given the rumors at the beginning of the scenario, my monk was excited about the adventure. He did get to visit an monastery and compare Tiean monastic traditions with his own. But he does not consider the braid to be a serious choice versus his amulet of mighty fists or the amulet of natural armor he keeps for emergencies.

He is considering a level in Cavalier now, though.

nosig, so far as I can tell -- and I might have missed something somewhere on the thread -- nobody, anywhere, has recommended a mandatory audit for PCs at a convention. Some people have suggested offering rewards, other people have suggested that just getting a clean bill of health, or a "you seem to have missed taking your favored class bonus for three levels" is reward enough.

I admit, the "pick a player character at random to audit" implies a certain level of coercing, at least in terms of public pressure. ("Gary, we've chosen you to receive a valuable boon and get your PC checked out." "Um, no thanks.") That's one of the reasons I don't like it.

Folks, there are certain errors that players make, in their favor, that are going to get caught eventually. In the last three months, I've noticed: cavaliers with dinosaur animal companions, characters who have bought items beyond their Fame limit, a whole team of beginning characters who had all chosen the Rich Parents trait, and that's just a sampling. Where's the better place for these players to find out about their error: at a review table, or in the middle of a combat?

However attaining full PA from a scenario isn't an automatic thing. It is assumed that players will only get their 2nd PA 50-70% of the time. That pretty much works out to 4PA per 3 scenarios.

Aaron, can you walk me through that calculation?

For (a) assuming a completed main mission and (b) assuming a faction mission success from 50% to 70%, I get an expected Fame return of 4.5 to 5.1 per level.

Todd, it's also changed from "voluntary, offering a service to help players check their characters" to something else.

And by "abuse", I mean to say, "error".

Sorry, Mike. I didn't think that was obvious at all.

I have several more "Free Vanity" boons than PCs, so I've assigned more than one to a character, not thinking there was anything wrong with a PC getting both an adamantine wayfinder and membership in a thieves' guild.

I'll fix this for my own PCs, and I'll be on the lookout for this kind of abuse from players at my tables.

I concur, having rolled dice for the [redacted] as it killed an entire party that had decided to do just that.

One of the "only 100 left" items in today's front page Paizo blog is the Haunted Mansion map pack. That's one of the map packs used in this adventure.

(Although that map pack isn't necessary for any other scenarios, it's durned useful here and again. For example, Tide of Twilight can profit from a hedge maze.)

It's a high enough check that normal people in Razmiran, in continual contact with the Masked Priesthood, haven't caught on.

Noticing that a particular priest is using arcane magic with divine trappings, instead of divine magic, might be a Spellcraft check with a DC of 20 + spell level.

Jumping to the conclusion that all his priests are faking it and that Razmir must therefore be a false god seems unwarranted.

(For a datum: my monk Petrus hails from Razmiran; he believes that Razmir is a god, but an evil one, despite the frequent shows of benificence. Having been in Absalom for a few years now, he has come to find that Razmir's divinity is a point of discussion among some of the academics of the Society.)

It would still be good at my table. If you started putting Living Forgotten Realms and Arcanis logos on it, maybe not so much.

In similar threads, the campaign coordinator has observed that the faction tee shirts are slow sellers, and that sales would need to pick up before more money could be justified going to printing a new batch of shirts.

That's a good round number.

Mike,

About how many distinct non-pre-reg PCs did we ran through at Gen Con last year?

Folks, hang on a minute.

Most folks here think that having someone double-check PCs would be a good thing.

Some people here think that it would be an unwelcome burden. If that's true, then it's a nice idea in theory but too hard to implement.

Bang, we're done.

Other people think that it's worth it, if the manpower (a couple of people with HeroLab on their laptops) is available, either (ideally) before a con, or during.

If there's the resources available there have been some suggestions for how to make it workable. I personally like the idea of a boon for those PCs.

For what it's worth:

I've played a couple of PbP PFS games, and the GM has always audited the characters, 'cause there's time, and it's useful.

I've run a couple of high-level sessions at large cons where I know in my bones that someone's PC isn't adding up right, but there's no time to check. Other players at the table sit around and watch their colleague trounce serious party-killers by himself. An audit might have reassured everyone at the table, myself included, that the player was just a master of optimizer-fu.

If I'm ever at a large con, and I have a session left unscheduled, I'd be happy to volunteer to sit and audit. It's a chance to teach people the Pathfinder game rules.

Before you go saying that Ezren is quite decent, take a look at 7th-level Ezern's spellbook. Remember, his bonded object allows him to cast any of the myriad emergency spells in those pages once a day. Imagine how many spells a 7th-level wizard might have access to, since versatility is the Wizard's forte.

Thanks for all the work.

I can well imagine, LoreKeeper!

I've GMed this scenario at low sub-tier, after playing it at high. Our party of six included a barbarian and my flowing monk. I kept tripping the scary yeti, which kept making it flat-footed for a round, and the barbarian chewed him up.

But with the First Steps series and other sanctioned 1st level modules available now, and replayable for credit as much as you want, why does anyone who wants to be a part of PFS even play MotFF?

1) Because it's fun.

2) Because, unlike Tier 1-2 modules or the First Steps series, it doesn't take 12 hours. As a 3-to-4-hour adventure, it requires less commitment to serve as an intro to Pathfinder RPG, to Absalom, and to the Pathfinder Society.

3) In particular, after you've already sent characters through First Steps and Godsmoth Heresy, who would want to repeatedly play the same damn adventure to get new characters through Level 1?

It's my go-to introduction to the Society. Right now, with 0 Fame, it's also a punch in the gut, and an actual discouragement. Players with a long-term interest in PFS are better off throwing away that Chronicle sheet and starting their first Tier 1-5 scenario with 0 xp.

This summer's free RPG Day adventure, Dawn of the Scarlet Sun, looks like another terrific adventure. If it, too, has a Chronicle sheet that rewards 0 fame, it'll be equally discouraging.

I strongly encourage Mike to make sure that all Chronicle sheets, including MotFF and DotSS, offer at least 1 point of Fame.

Is anything being organized for Platte-Con in Wisconsin?

I can't speak for James, o wondrous catbunnygnome thing, but I'm understanding him differently.

Any time there's an audit, there has to be somebody taking the time to do the audit. 15 minutes per character or something doesn't sound like much, but a mid-size convention like Winter War probably had 80 or 100 PCs. So, 20 - 25 hours.

But those people doing the auditing don't need to be the same people who are volunteering to be table GMs.

Having said that, if it were possible, I would dearly love to have the opportunity to look over the PC sheets before a PFS session, to acquaint myself with their capabilities, look up the effects of their wonky items, and fine tune the scenario to their benefit. So, if something like that were implemented, I would probably choose to volunteer to audit the PCs for my tables, myself.

nosig,

It's been my experience that last-slots for a convention are oftentimes harder than the rest of the convention. People are a little crispier, and if they've leveled their characters or bought items during the con, there might be several fresh abilities that they're less familiar with.

But mostly, it's the crispiness. (We play all day Saturday. We play the SPecial, which goes till 1 in the morning. We go to sleep in an unfamiliar bed. We get up in time to check out and eat breakfast. After all that, we try to be at our best in a PFS scenario, having fun and making sure the other players have fun, too.)

I look forward to playing with you at some future convention. Maybe not on Sunday.

I'll speak up as nosig's "authority guy" in question. I was a player at the table.

I'm very sorry I made your wife uncomfortable. Please pass along my apologies to her.

I was taking pains to avoid running her character for her, telling her what her cleric should do. (I've seen several situations of one player bossing around everybody at the table I discourage that as a GM, and I try hard not to be that guy as a player.) It was a tense situation, with my PC surounded by ghasts, helpless to prevent a coup de grace, and nobody else able to affect them. I wasn't sure whether her cleric had some archetype that wouldn't allow her to harm undead, or if she just didn't want to, and I handled it poorly.

Having said that, I don't believe I will be the last person that expects a player to know the basics of a class by the time her character's third level.

Does Xykon have a zone of truth up, do you think?

BigNorseWolf, if the headband is found as treasure, the associate skill ought to be part of the description of the item.

If you're using your current Fame score to justify the headband's purchase, you can choose the skill you like.

Enevhar, that hasn't always been the case.

Each time a batch of Season Zero scenarios was to be removed from Pathfinder Society play, we were given some lead time to play out any planned sessions.

I was expecting something like this decision, but I was also expecting the same kind of warning period. My PC from Razmiran has just tonight passed out of the legal range for "Masks of the Living God", and I regret not playing this level at slow progression.

I'm currently pouty, but I will shake the chip off my shoulder.

Nevertheless, I like Enpeze's idea of a desert nomad village flipmat.

This is a halfling we're talking about? Is a Medium starknife considered a 1-handed weapon for a Small character?

Dragnmoon, I don't understand.

So, to avoid spoiling a current-year module, let's pretend that City of Strangers (a two-scenario adventure from Season 2) was going to have a multi-scenario boon. The Chronicle sheet for The Twofold Demise, the second scenario, would read something like: "If City of Strangers Part 1: The Shadow Gambit is this character's most recent Chronicle sheet, then this character receives a +1 competence bonus on Sense Motive rolls against residents of Kaer Maga."

So, you're saying that this would be all right if Mark was otherwise not planning on putting a boon on the Twofold Demise Chronicle sheet, but if he was planning on including one there, then you'd have a problem with his making it a multi-scenario boon?

--

Mark, if I GM Wonders in the Weave Part I, and assign the Chronicle sheet for it to my PC Damon, whom I then play in part two, does my PC get the boon?

--

Under most circumstances, the multi-scenario boon keeps players from benefitting from playing out of order. For example, there's a boon at the end of Shades of Ice part 3 that would have been pretty helpful in parts 1 and 2. If a PC plays those scenarios in reverse order, she can enjoy an advantage.

Would a starknife work? It's a ring-shaped one-handed martial slashing weapon that is often thrown.

By like measure, there's no rule asserting that, as a GM, I have to allow a player to sit at my table with any PFS concept she pleases. If I don't want to GM a gunslinger PC in my home-based PFS games, there's nothing that asserts I must.

It's a tricky thing to pull off.

I'd already signed up to play a particular PC in Wonders in the Weave Part I and then an unrelated scenario at a convention this coming weekend. So I'll lose out on that boon. It's easy to imagine a player choosing not to play a particular character until he gets a chance to play Part II, or feeling wronged that he loses out.

Of course, once the meta-gaming knowledge of the boon filters out, fewer people will make that kind of mistake.

Recommendation: there are fewer scenarios in the 7 - 11 tier, and most players have fewer characters in that range than they do between levels 3 and 6 or so. If you make the multi-part boon available in the higher tiers, it will be simpler for people to coordinate.

Looks legal to me.

Shar Tahl,

Sure, we can turn away players in a home game, even if it's reported as a PFS game. (Surely you're not suggesting that if a stanger knocks at my door on gaming night, I *have* to let him in, let alone sit at my table, or else the game isn't PFS-legal!)

Last month, thee was a discussion about Painlord's offer to run PCs through modules only under certain conditions. Mike and Mark hade the opportunity to weigh in and discourge that, and they didn't.

The Ruby Phoenix tournament is a story about a world-wide competition for best combattant. The Decembrivate sends agents out, scouring the world for obscure pieces of loot that can give their chosen champions an edge.

(At this, the Shadow Lodge members who'd been trying to sieze power last year, who'd been making the argument all along that the Society ought to actually use its treasure trove, are probably pointing their fingers and saying, 'Exactly!')

Will the Society's champion be a player character? That's a hope, but there are hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of pathfinders, and the competition to be the Society's representative is hot. So we each go on missions, and learn, and increase our strengths, so that the Decembrivate might select us.

So, it seems keenly inappropriate for us to just *pop* jump to 11th Level and enter the tournament, and then *pop* drop back to our regular tier. Unless the Society has discovered some sort of really cool Super-heroism Vita-Ray procedure that turns everybody into their 11th-level powerhouse versions of themselves.

1) The rules are silent. The way we've played, having the eidolon present prevents the Summoner from using his SLA, and having the SLA-summoned creatures out prevents the Summoner from effectively beginning the eidolon-summoning ritual.

2) The rules are silent. The way we've played, a full-round action.

3) I suppose it might be possible to cast the ritual defensively?

I've seen that question answered higher in the thread. However, that person is someone I don't know, and for all I know has no more authority to speak on the answer than I do myself. So I'm simply curious, is all.

If nothing short of an official answer will do, you should note that with an "FAQ" flag.

In any case, I'm not sure what authority an answer needs. The Guide's language is opaque, but once you read carefully, the directions aren't ambiguous.

I get the "Pregenerated Characters by Class" box, but nothing else.

Mike Brock:

In the thread about the PFS exclusive scenarios, you invited Dragnmoon, and presumably the rest of us, to brainstorm ideas for cool goodies that Paizo could give its most active GMs.

My suggestion:
Every two-month period, Paizo could put PDFs in the accounts of people who have GMed some threshhold of scenarios over the past period.

For sake of argument, let's say the threshhold is 3 scenarios. So, if I GM (and report) 3 scenarios in the months of January and February, Paizo would drop some PDFs in my downloads at the end of February.

Which PDFs? I would be giddy if they were full-scale maps from some upcoming scenario. So, at the end of February, I could download a map, which would come from either one of the scenarios on sale that last week of February or else one of the March scenarios, as sort of a teaser.

Right now, we have to either hand-draw, or else print out enlargements of the maps in the scenarios, using Acrobat to strip out the labels. Doug Miles enjoys the hand-drawing. I think Thea does, too. I'd rather spend my time studying NPC stat blocks and preparing hand-outs.

Notice that this incentive doesn't have anything to do with the star-rating of the GM involved. If I, at 3 stars, don't report any sessions during that period, I don't get the download. If a newbie GM does, he gets the reward for doing so. It keeps people consistently active.

You could offer more PDFs for more reported sessions, but that's way too complicated.

nosig, have you ever sat down at a table with someone who clearly didn't understand the idea of tabletop roleplaying as a cooperative experience? A player who cooked up a weird class and insisted on all sorts of stretches of rules-fu in order to make it legal or playable? A GM who was openly antagonistic or blood-thirsty? A player who tried to drive the scenario off its rails or tried to make things less fun for other players?

that's what we're talking about. Being on both sides of the screen helps people develop empathy.

Jiggy,

That's a good point. It's easy to misunderstand people when all they have is the written text with no inflection or affect.

Continuing the derail, I have a suggestion for helping to ameliorate any stresses between GMs and players. GMs should play sometimes, and as many people should GM as feel comfortable doing so. When you're always on one side of the screen or ther other, it's easier to see the other ide as an antagonist.

a) T10 on the first roll, fail and take the Shirt re-Roll as a dice roll?

.

The reroll needs to be called before the player knows the results of the die roll. How do you know you've failed with a Take-10? If you don't think 10 is going to be good enough, then just roll; why use up the shirt needlessly?

b) Roll, fail, T10 on the shirt re-roll?

Not at my table. It's a re-roll, a recast of fate, not a reconsideration as to whether you want to take the chance or not. (For the same reason, I wouldn't allow a player to roll, and then use a tee shirt to ask for a re-roll with new modifiers added in.)

I have a Faction shirt displayed across the top of the case, where it is visible to everyone as I move thru a Convention area. So... would that work for YOU as the judge? or do I need to have the shirt ON?

As a way of rewarding players who show their support for the Pathfinder Society Organized Play campaign by purchasing and wearing special tee shirts featuring campaign insignia or faction logos, a player wearing any of the shirts listed below during a Pathfinder Society event may reroll one d20 roll during the course of that scenario.

Are you wearing the shirt?

Dragnmoon,

I think it's a thing. Not bad, not good. There are 28 new scenarios available. There are 28 available scenarios that everyone can run. You're sort of cherry-picking your qualifications to say that there's only 27 scenarios that fulfill both qualities.

In any case, I want to thank Mark for the explanation, and for the effort that was required to update Midnight Mauler for Season 3. (I am sort of curious, though, as to what counts for the scenario victory condition. I imagine that it might well be one of the toughest scenarios to 'win'.)