PSF2e 2-13 A Gilded Test

Anyone have a take on whether or not there is time for treat wounds checks between encounters here?

It sounds like any time between combats is spent walking to the new location, but I can't imagine players are going to be too excited about not being allowed to perform Treat Wounds checks...

Disclaimer: Have not looked over the scenario.

In previous scenarios, where it is suspected to be time sensitive, I usually give them 10 minutes and then move them along.

For time critical missions, I would not allow it. Time to chug some potions/elixirs as you move.

Reminder, treat wounds is an exploration activity. If they say they are going to be treating wounds while they move to the next location, they can not be doing anything else. ie searching, scouting etc. Nothing says they have to remain stationary to treat wounds.

The last encounter may cause some friction, as Archis Peer uses an Invisibility Potion, performs a Hostile Action by springing his lion trap (which normally breaks invisibility), and is then supposed to sneak up invisibly to ambush a PC.

It's clear how the scenario wants that to be run. I just expect it to grate a bit on some people that invisibility doesn't work normally here.

The last encounter may cause some friction, as Archis Peer uses an Invisibility Potion, performs a Hostile Action by springing his lion trap (which normally breaks invisibility), and is then supposed to sneak up invisibly to ambush a PC.

It's clear how the scenario wants that to be run. I just expect it to grate a bit on some people that invisibility doesn't work normally here.

I think it is fair to decide that Archis is Undetected, having taken time to conceal himself. In that case, the actions would be 1) trigger the trap, 2) drink the potion, and then 3) move.

I ran this last night and the party had great fun, but at Subtier 1-2, the encounter was a bit underwhelming. Even the commoners from encounter 1 have more hit points. I cannot believe they would make the second encounter, which is supposed to be harder, with creatures who have fewer hit points. The trappers also did not have ranged weapons. Encounter 3 was much more in line of increasing difficulty.

The trappers do have javelins, at least, in both tiers.

===Influence Subsystem===
Given the secondary success condition is tied to the influence system, a reminder that the Discover checks of are secret, and that you reveal what the Player wants. A skill, the weakness, or the resistance. If revealing a skill you must start with the lowest DC skill and work your way up.

This has a big impact on how the skill challenge plays. Particularly the weakness as it's two free influence points for just mentioning Gloriana and a connection to her.

===Secondary Success Conditions===
Ouch that first one is rough, as Muesello has no way of knowing if they PCs ID'd the tails or not, if the PCs ask him about it I considered him assuming they ID'd them and gave it to the players.

I have no idea what "attracting unwanted attention" is other than outright saying "We're pathfinders" during the influence section given you're supposed to be in several very public places. This one is super wishy-washy.

I think the unwanted attention is mainly if you try to bring the captive in by the main gate/guards. Unless people do something very stupid/outside the expected.

===Secondary Success Conditions===

Ouch that first one is rough, as Muesello has no way of knowing if they PCs ID'd the tails or not, if the PCs ask him about it I considered him assuming they ID'd them and gave it to the players.

I have no idea what "attracting unwanted attention" is other than outright saying "We're pathfinders" during the influence section given you're supposed to be in several very public places. This one is super wishy-washy.

I have had a quick skim through the scenario now after playing it last night. I dont think it is as bad as you think. As I read it capturing Archis alive and finding his ledger are two separate criteria, not an either/or. That means you only then need one of the other criteria to meet your secondary condition.

As for the unwanted attention: There are couple of things in the scenario that say something along the lines of "Muesello wouldn't be happy if he found out" - Confronting the incorrect person after a crit fail on the perception check prior to the briefing, mentioning Gloriana without making sure her name is being kept from the VC and failing to hide the captive at the gates are the three that I can remember from the top of my head.
I took it that every single one of them would be enough to fail that part of the secondary success condition.

I plan to kind of run it by ear when it comes to how much time there is between encounters. Especially for tier 1-2 parties that don't have Continual Recovery yet, or just get unlucky with Treat Wounds rolls. It should feel tense, but not be an unreasonable death march.

So I'd say as a GM, take advantage of the vagueness. Use the NPC to egg them on if they're comfortable, or to tell them to take a bit longer to get ready for the next match if they really need it.

I gave the party I GM'd for 10 minutes after the first one and 20 after the second. Not everyone was topped off, but no one was down more than 25%. People used some of the free school or VC musello potions. Felt about right.

Our GM gave us an hour after the first encounter, though it was fairly easy so we only needed like 20 minutes to heal up. Then we got twenty minutes after the 2nd encounter which was mostly fine between the Treat Wounds, lay on hand and a couple free healing potions from school graduates. Another hour before arriving at the tournament grounds and we were at full health again.

Having prepped this it very much feels that there were a load of changes made in development but they weren't then properly integrated into the final PDF.

We have the secondary success condition with no clear guidance on what counts as not drawing unwarranted attention actually means.

We have a mass of information in the last encounter about a boat which is a long way from the actual encounter zone and which is extremely unlikely to come into play with the encounter as presented.

All of the page references for the encounter stats are wrong. The low tier page notes send you to the high tier stats. The high tier notes send you to the art/reporting sheet/chronicle. This is particularly bad as I can absolutely see someone running this in low tier overlooking that and using the high tier encounters.

The concept behind the scenario is decent enough but the execution is awful. The idea that its totally OK to go off and engage in death matches in the middle of Oparra without even a mention of how the party should conduct themselves says something quite ugly about the society. The fact that the first fight is with a bunch of desperate local workers makes it worse. I would expect Musello to at leas address the idea that the PCs are being sent out to commit murder on the streets and the way in which they might want to deal with this.

The concept behind the scenario is decent enough but the execution is awful. The idea that its totally OK to go off and engage in death matches in the middle of Oparra without even a mention of how the party should conduct themselves says something quite ugly about the society. The fact that the first fight is with a bunch of desperate local workers makes it worse. I would expect Musello to at leas address the idea that the PCs are being sent out to commit murder on the streets and the way in which they might want to deal with this.

It did feel odd to me that this wasn't addressed at all in the scenario text. If nothing else, it seems like a case where Dying condition rules should be used for the NPCs.

andreww wrote:

The concept behind the scenario is decent enough but the execution is awful. The idea that its totally OK to go off and engage in death matches in the middle of Oparra without even a mention of how the party should conduct themselves says something quite ugly about the society. The fact that the first fight is with a bunch of desperate local workers makes it worse. I would expect Musello to at leas address the idea that the PCs are being sent out to commit murder on the streets and the way in which they might want to deal with this.

It did feel odd to me that this wasn't addressed at all in the scenario text. If nothing else, it seems like a case where Dying condition rules should be used for the NPCs.

The scenario is heavy-handed about social commentary. The Gravedigger fight is almost certainly intended to be the slaughter of peasants and demonstrate how nasty these people are. If players are uncomfortable or it's taking away enjoyment from the game at the table, GMs should use the rules clause that "at the GM's discretion" dying NPCs can be brought back from 0.

I went the silly route, and really hammed up the gravedigger fight like a ridiculous WWE brawl; it seemed to help.

When my PCs asked Vionnia (they didn't think to ask Museullo) about it, she gave a 'oh of course we have people standing by to help out those who are not killed". Perception (sense motive) to know she wasn't telling the truth, but more of a she's still naïve and not lying, but just purposefully ignorant. They also noticed by the second fight that aside from their respective handlers, there wasn't anyone else around.

I had Vionnia act a little shocked/appalled by the degree of overkill my PCs did in the gravedigger fight. Which I think helped transition into the first influence portion.

The disposability of NPC gladiators has been a bit of a running theme lately (Pathfinder Trials, Live Adventure Extreme). I'm inclined to lean heavily on the Dying rules for NPCs that say you usually don't bother tracking Dying status for them.

As I read them, they say that you normally don't apply Dying rules to monsters because it's unlikely anyone will try to save them. In this case I'll probably run with them being dragged off-stage for stabilization by some faceless stagehands.

Nitpicky frustration, but it's annoying that the map for Event 3 was not saved by someone on the graphics team as a single image. I know that it's made of the map pack tiles, but it means that for those of us running digitally.... which is probably still the MAJORITY of games.... there's no easy way to bring that graphic into a digital platform, leaving you with the unsavory choice of taking all 16 composite pictures that comprise it into a graphics editor, if you have one, or trying to do a screenshot that includes all the meta-text overlaid atop it.

Frustrating in terms of, this is the sort of support that they WERE doing better with for digital/online games....

Yeah, dunno what happened there. I thought they changed the process sometime last year and all multi-tile or custom maps were being attached as image files to the original scenario PDF? Personally, I don’t care, but it does seem like either a case of backsliding or forgot.

It was a single image for me, using my normal workflow of extracting images from the PDF.

I played this one recently and will definitely run it, but to be honest while it felt slightly bad to attack weak enemies with lethal damage, but the setup for fights felt a bit unfair. It might have been based on our group setup, but it felt like there was a real change of dying or getting betrayed.

We did not learn a host of things, so some parts of the story of the scenario might have been a bit obfuscated to us, but I feel like some aspects could have used a bit of word count. Something like "stagehands drag out any dying opponents, while someone else casts stabilize on them"

It's not really a huge problem for the players, but it paints things in a very grim light, and while some players might want to deal non-lethal damage, that makes fights harder, and some characters simply will not have that option with their spells.

Considering the final encounter, I guess it would have been reasonable for players to be a bit paranoid, particularly if they don't have enough time to heal up properly.

It was a single image for me, using my normal workflow of extracting images from the PDF.

Interesting. My own workflow (such as it is) is just to click the image and copy into Paint or another program in order to save it as its own file, and clicking it for me just clicked one of the 16 parts and not the whole thing. But good to know not everyone had that experience.

Interesting, Adobe Acrobat sees it as lots of tiled images. Nitro started off treating it as tiled images, but after it was fully loaded, it treated it like a single image.

It was multiple images for me. I had to load them all up on a slide, and then take a picture of that slide, and then use that unified image for my game. I also was unhappy with all the secret checks in this one. It was a lot more work to run on the GM side without being special on the story side. If I'm going to put that much work in, I want more fun NPC interactions to play with.

You can always just let the players roll them, but yeah not a lot of fun NPC interaction in that one.

I was a little surprised there wasn't a reference to Zyphus here.

Seemed like a perfect set up for a little bit of accidental death.

Luckily it wasn't critical to the extra Prestige, but the Influence Point count seems... high. Maybe I read it wrong and missed it, but do player get only two rounds of Influence on Vionnia?
Assuming no modifications, you need 6 Influence Points for Vionnia to spill the beans on the second encounter, and 10 for the jousting grounds. A party of four people need to get 6 successes for that? That's only possible if they blindly guess one of her influence skills (though Diplomacy usually seems like a good guess), and two of them need to crit succeed.

My party of 5 people got 7 successes in total, and that is with name-dropping Gloriana Morilla. They spent quite a few rounds identifying which skills to use, as the Lore skills weren't useful. And the scenario wants to get 14 successes in a party of 4?

I also agree with andreww about text being wasted on scenery that isn't relevant. The setting of the tournament grounds take up half a page and don't add anything to the scenario. And the weird bit of the marble lion roaring as you're leaving Oppara is neat, but also pointless. Feels like all that text could've better gone elsewhere.

Also, what is the Ninth Army? For being the driving force behind this scenario, I couldn't find anything about it, or why they'd be recruiting off the streets.

Fights were also really easy. The DC 10/12 Reflex to avoid the mud is pitifully low, and my players only failed because they kept rolling nat 1s.

The whole scenario feels a bit undercooked, as if things either were removed, or simply needed more development time to flesh things out.

Yes I could do it for

Anyone have a take on whether or not there is time for treat wounds checks between encounters here?

It sounds like any time between combats is spent walking to the new location, but I can't imagine players are going to be too excited about not being allowed to perform Treat Wounds checks...

Yes