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(Budget godzilla monster noise followed by a Wilhelm Scream)
...How co-incidental. I had to do two of those myself last night, when I ended up GMing a scenario, and a player valiantly cut down an indentured commoner being used as a human shield by the scenario's villain. If only I had some canned applause to bring with me to the weekly sessions...
Like the differences between a book and serialized episodes, that actually gives you a bit more freedom with things like characterization. You can have all the scenarios with Baron Dalsine be flashbacks for your Taldan-factioned character who prefers Lady Gloriana's methods; if you have someone who specializes in Bluff and Disguise, you can give your team-mates a different name for the same character every week!
Contributor, RPG Superstar 2010 Top 4
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The thing about scenario difficulty is that all scenarios (prior to Season 4) have been designed for 4 players, but statistically most tables being run have had 6 players. Now consider those scenarios cannot be altered to compensate for that fifth and sixth player.
Those two extra players affect the difficulty rating significantly. That's extra damage being dealt, and extra healing and skills available.
With Season 4, that challenge rating is adjusted to compensate for 6 players (with a safety allowance for 4 players) which should make the difficulty closer in line with what is intended.
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The thing about scenario difficulty is that all scenarios (prior to Season 4) have been designed for 4 players, but statistically most tables being run have had 6 players. Now consider those scenarios cannot be altered to compensate for that fifth and sixth player.
Those two extra players affect the difficulty rating significantly. That's extra damage being dealt, and extra healing and skills available.
With Season 4, that challenge rating is adjusted to compensate for 6 players (with a safety allowance for 4 players) which should make the difficulty closer in line with what is intended.
I think what he means by "too easy" might be more than that--if you have bad luck in scenario selection, it is possible to play 1-7 or 1-5 scenarios where, say a party of 6 ordinary level 1-2 characters can safely and easily destroy the Subtier 3-4 or 4-5 opposition. In this case, since the extra characters have knocked the party up a subtier, the number of characters has been taken into account.
That said, in early scenarios this is usually due to attempts to save wordcount by throwing in larger numbers of enemies that can't really hit PCs to begin with and the like. Recent scenarios have been, as a whole, way better than this. The removal of 1-7s helped a lot with that, and I think that the PFS development team has also gotten stronger and stronger with years of experience. That plus a growing pool of creative and solid authors means I'm expecting even better for Season 4.
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Season 3 has more challenging scenarios in general at all levels, so the writers and designers are learning.
Balanced for 4 players was the largest issue, and Paizo has addressed that. Now we'll see if the public will think it's too hard. I'm really worried that the team will just use more single boss type of monsters that's even higher CR. That's the wrong way to do it, because after all of these years in the d20 system, they should know that action economy is huge, and the side with action economy has an advantage.
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@ Rogue Eidolon - I see. I don't have any experience prior to Season Three, but in that light what you say makes sense.
I've looked at Scenarios from earlier seasons and wasn't sure about that three tier split for exactly that reason.
Yeah. I'm only a two-star GM, but since low level play is necessary with new players, I have actually GMed or played every 1-5 or 1-7 from Seasons 0-1 (and I think I have all but 3 scenarios at those tiers from 0-3). There's maybe one or two of them that are hard, another handful that are kind of challenging, and the rest are quite easy. Of course, Season 0 was written for 3.5, which had weaker characters in general, and in Season 1, PFRPG itself was a baby, so the scenario authors were probably cutting their teeth on the new system. That plus the word count thing, I think.
For the "cake" scenarios, many of them aren't even much challenge for a party of 4 at the minimum threshold to play up. My last PFS scenario we played one of those easier scenarios with a party that was actually the correct level (we were APL ~6 in a 6-7 rather than playing with an APL 5 party), and the Monk's Vicious Amulet of Mighty Fists wound up dealing about twice as much damage to the party as everything else in the scenario combined (the attack bonuses just weren't high enough to hit any of the party frontliners without around a natural 20). I think any two of the characters could have defeated the entire thing (OK, maybe not the healer and the support bard!). We had been trying to balance tables for challenge enough recently that I had forgotten quite how easy the easy scenarios are when all the characters are in the correct subtier.
If you look at scenarios from earlier seasons, one way to pick out the ones that will have problems is by glancing through and asking "how many of these guys can consistently hit a monk with Mage Armor up or a guy in heavy armor and a shield?" If the answer is "none but the boss" or "none including the boss", there's likely a problem unless there's a lot of save-or-sucks or AoE Reflex save damage.
Anyway, I've been trying to rate a few scenarios, with challenge as one of my criteria. Fortunately, this problem is getting smaller over time, since very few of the new scenarios are among the cakewalks, so the percentage of cakewalks is shrinking every month.
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Contributor, RPG Superstar 2010 Top 4
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Balanced for 4 players was the largest issue, and Paizo has addressed that. Now we'll see if the public will think it's too hard. I'm really worried that the team will just use more single boss type of monsters that's even higher CR. That's the wrong way to do it, because after all of these years in the d20 system, they should know that action economy is huge, and the side with action economy has an advantage.
That's really a great point, Bruce. I recently had a conversation with a 3PP author who made the same remark. I have done some single Boss with higher CR encounters in Season Three. Please don't worry, I think I have done things to mitigate what you're saying, but your logic is spot on. I totally agree. And word count has been part of that as you're trying to squeeze all that you can in there. Which means either repeating creatures from earlier in the scenario, using unmodified stock creatures, or just having one tougher Boss.
Small disclosure though (may Mark forgive me) is that in Season 4 we're not automatically saying you have to have two to three puzzles/traps/haunts to equal to one combat encounter. We're looking at them in terms of minor and major encounters and saying that we should have so many of each, and a minor encounter can be just a single simple puzzle/trap/haunt. That gives us some wordcount back, and that can be re-invested into the combat / role-playing encounters where they are sorely needed. So it becomes easier to give that Boss some back-up, and not make that fight a study in action economy.
Yeah, technically some of my Season Three scenarios (one of which is still in development) has too many encounters by the new Season 4 standard. I think it rocks anyway, but two traps, their descriptions, in two different tiers would have saved me some words-allowing for hot boss minion action.
May my masters forgive my brief parting of the curtain! Things improve all the time!
Anyway, I appreciate your comments Bruce, and your feedback.
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Another possibility about groups of 6 - sometimes, they don't make things too easy, due to close quarters and tight spaces; instead, the guy at the back can't do anything because everyone else is in the way. Widening hallways and clearings would make it easier for larger groups to surround smaller ones. If the guy at the back can just Inspire Courage, then it doesn't matter, but if the last one doesn't have Improved Precise Shot or worse, focuses on melee attacks, then he'd better have bough a bag of marbles from the Adventurer's Armoury.