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I have just started a local PFS Lodge for the game store I recently opened (we launch our first event in less than a week) and I want to purchase a season of PFS to keep us in scenarios for a while. Now however, I don't know which season to purchase. I'm leaning toward 4 because it's pretty centrally located in Varisia and that might help in the establishment of PFS locally, plus I can tout the great Varisia: Birthplace of Legends as a companion.
According to the reviews all of the seasons are pretty well reviewed with only a handful of scenarios with low ratings. Season 0 is the only one with a bunch of retired scenarios but I feel like we will get more bang for our buck out of PFRPG scenarios over OGL scenarios.
So what is the best season in your opinion?
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That's a big price tag for something that might not pan out. What happens when you shell out $100 for a bundle and no players join? Many players have character ADD and abandon their original PC to start a new one after a few scenarios. Like Rob said, you need to think about Tier 1-5 scenarios if you're starting a new group. If past trends continue, you'll be running A LOT of low level stuff before you begin to need Tier 5-9s and 7-11s.
Venture-Lieutenant, West Virginia—Charleston
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If I was starting a new lodge, I would schedule the following scenarios:
First Steps Pt. 1
Silent Tide
Mists of Mwangi
The Penumbral Accords
Murder on the Throaty Mermaid
The Frostfur Captives
The Gods' Market Gamble
The Temple of Empyreal Enlightenment
The Rise of the Goblin Guild
Severing Ties
The Night March of Kalkamedes
The Glass River Rescue
That would take your players to level 5, and all players would be able to play all scenarios.
I would also recommend starting with First Steps, then purchasing scenarios as you need them. The bundles are somewhat cheaper, but the fact that you can't choose by tier makes it something of a false economy.
Edit: Also, where is this store located? You probably have a Venture Captain who would be more than happy to help you get started.
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Most cohesive is probably Season 4.
The best is, as the answer should be, "this one!" ;-)
Doug, Paz, and Pirate Rob are all correct that you'll need 1-5s nearly 2:1 over higher level scenarios.
Any of the first 6 Season 0 scenarios are good choices. I'm partial to Mists of Mwangi myself, and as a bonus it's one that's been converted to PF from 3.5, which also addresses Ill_Made_Knight's post — Seasons 0-3 were designed for tables of 4 PCs, not 6. Penumbral Accords (2-11), Echoes of the Overwatched (3-07), and Voice in the Void (Season 1, scenario #35) return to the same site as Mwangi, so can create its own story arc.
Also would recommend the Shades of Ice trilogy from Season 2 (2-15, 2-17, and 2-19), Frostfur Captives (3-01) and Goblinblood Dead (3-23) from Season 3, and any Season 4 Tier 1-5 not named Severing Ties for new PCs.
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I would go with Season 3. It has more Tier 1-5 scenarios than Season 4, and as a whole has a pretty good metaplot. My top two favorite scenarios happen to be from that season as well.
I also suggest starting your first group of players with Crypt of the Everflame. It will take two or three sessions, but is well worth the effort (players who complete it gain a level).
You should try to mine your first group for GMs. That will be the most difficult part of setting up your lodge. Have them take turns running Master of the Fallen Fortress and We Be Goblins for each other. Start with players who have GM experience, but really encourage newer players to give it a shot also. Also encourage using pregen characters for new players, and remind everyone that they can really experiment with different characters at first level--it isn't until after you have played your character at level two that changes are disallowed.
After that, Season 3 should be ready to go. Your first players should all have one or more characters at level 2 or 3 by this point. Play the Tier 1-5 scenarios in order, but have someone on standby each week to run a second table of Master of the Fallen Fortress or We Be Goblins if you have an influx of players.
There are 10 scenarios in Season 3 at Tier 1-5. If a player starts with Crypt of the Everflame, and plays all 10, then they would be at 5th level. Even if they only played half of them, they would still be almost 4th level.
At that point, you can start running the Tier 3-7 scenarios. And so on.
Lastly, you need some sort of scheduling system so that players can sign up for games they want to play. Our local lodge uses warhorn.net. You might consider giving priority to those players who have stepped up to GM or have otherwise helped in setting things up for you. Encourage (require?) players to play at a table whose average party level is closest to their own level. The scenarios are most fun for everyone at the table if the characters are very close in level.
Good luck!
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I would name Seasons 2 and 4 the best, though both are a bit short on 1-5's. Between the two of them you should have enough. Both have a focus (heavy and light) on the Shadow Lodge (starting with Season 1's 51 & 52 - The City of Strangers).
If you plan it out well you could have quite an epic run. Just run the Season 1's, 2's, and non-Shadow Lodge 4's, before finishing out the end of Season 4. Plenty of 3-7's from Season 4 to help with filler also.
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Venture-Lieutenant, West Virginia—Charleston
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So what is the best season in your opinion?For your purposes? Season 4. Season 3 is where I started and would also be a good kickoff point.
Season 4 only has 5 1-5s, though.
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There's (6) 1-5's in season 4 (You forgot Cyphermage Dilemma), so it's possible to get them to level 3 that way. There are (6) 3-7's in season 4, so you can get to level 5, and there's (8) 5-9's, which is more than enough to get the players to 7. Then they could finish off the season and have 26 XP, which puts them 1 XP shy of level 10.
Edit: If you put In Service to Lore in first, you can get them to 27 XP, which is level 10. I would recommend that.
Edit 2: This is all assuming they complete every mission and get the 1 XP each time.
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RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
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Edit 2: This is all assuming they complete every mission and get the 1 XP each time.
And I'd take this with a grain of salt. New players make mistakes, and mistakes, when coupled with poor dice luck, have consequences. I've run a game-store lodge for about a year now, and the regular attendees have had a couple set-backs (choosing to play up in "Citadel of Flame" followed the next week with "Severing Ties": two near-TPKs right after one another.)
Combine that with new players filtering in (yay!), and you'll need access to twice as many Tier 1-5 and 1-7 scenarios as you might otherwise expect.
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Wow, thanks a ton for all the advice. The lodge is in Auburn/Lewiston Maine and we will be doing organized play events every Saturday but only one every month will be PFS, though I am keen on expanding out to do more if it becomes popular. As far as i am aware there is virtually no outlet for PFS locally so it will all be new players.
Our first event is this Saturday and we will be doing Master of the fallen Fortress because it is free, easy to run, and I have run it before. I have two other GMs tasked to run tables if enough people show up.
I am preparing a Varisia home game for my Friday group and I admit that part of the draw of Season 4 is it can pull double duty, especially the parts about Krune, which I may buy anyway.
Given what we are working with for a budget and the projected sales $100 isn't too much for what amounts to advertising as far as business is concerned so a bundle won't break the bank.
The general consensus however, seems to be, collect a ton of 1-5 scenarios before getting a full season. Perhaps I could grab a bunch of the highest rated 1-5 scenarios, run the game for a bit to justify the additional expense, then nab season 4.
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I would suggest the earlier seasons over the newer ones. The earlier ones tended to bea lot more interesting concepts, and also kind of felt much more like you where exploring and learning the world as you went. Went outside the box. With the more recent scenarios, many are very hit or miss. Especially when they start to grind into the plotlines a lot. If you like it cool. If not, well a lot of the season is tied into things you probably dont like.
Season 4 also has a pretty terrible rep for killing non-optimized parties, as did the later Season 3 scenarios. Probably best to avoid for a while. They also started to go more into gimmick encounters a lot to make it more difficult, which starts to getmore frustraiting than fun after a while. It also seems that as the Seasons progressed, the scenaeios become more and more dictated, taking away some of the DMs ability to insert flavor as the like for stricter details. So it depends on if you like more creative power or more everything done for you.
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I would name Seasons 2 and 4 the best, though both are a bit short on 1-5's. Between the two of them you should have enough. Both have a focus (heavy and light) on the Shadow Lodge (starting with Season 1's 51 & 52 - The City of Strangers).
If you plan it out well you could have quite an epic run. Just run the Season 1's, 2's, and non-Shadow Lodge 4's, before finishing out the end of Season 4. Plenty of 3-7's from Season 4 to help with filler also.
If you decide to run the Shadow Lodge story arc, you really will want to start with #1 Silent Tide and then #14 The Many Secrets of Grandmaster Torch as they are the introduction of Grandmaster Torch and the first mission in service to him.
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Pretty much. If you read the reviews for a lot of the scenarios you will see a bit of that, too, but I think a lor of the reviews are from the DMs side. How the players felr and enjoyed it can really depend on the DMs skill and style.
Something else to keep in mind is that you do not need to own scenarios to run them for PFS. It is 100% fine to barrow other people's and run them, so if you can, I suggest trying that out a bit and see which ones your groups favor or get a little bored or lost with.
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Crypt is very, very difficult at level one. In fact, a general rule for modules is to play them at the highest level possible.
I find the gold hit for modules when played at highest level somewhat of a detriment. Course they are harder then standard PFS scenarios in general...but honestly, as long as your not made too badly, you can handle modules just fine at min levels.
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We are running at local libraries with a pretty strict 5 hour time frame so modules are right out. We also are the first ones locally to do PFS as far as I can tell so the option of borrowing scenarios won't work either. However, one of the reasons I want to buy a whole season is so we have scenarios to lend out and help build the local PFS community outside of the events we are running personally.
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I ran Crypt of the Everflame as my very first Pathfinder game a while back and it was a lot of fun. I ended up changing a few things so it wasn't so brutal on 1st level characters plus I ran fast XP so they leveled before heading downstairs. It was a lot of fun and I would consider running it for PFS but only if we weren't restricted by time the way we are now.
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you can split sessions for modules.
You can if you're sure you'll have everyone who played in the first session show for the second session. We've had problems with this locally to where we only run modules now if they can be played in one double-length sitting.
This is one of my concerns with modules, the other being that we will not be meeting every week so self contained stories like the scenarios provide. That being said, if I could count on an uninterrupted 6 hours, I'd run Feast of Ravenmoor in a heartbeat. I love that module.
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you can split sessions for modules.You can if you're sure you'll have everyone who played in the first session show for the second session. We've had problems with this locally to where we only run modules now if they can be played in one double-length sitting.
True...I had to run a quick and dirty thornkeep 1 for a group because 2 of the players had been waiting 6 weeks to finish the second half and the other 2 players hadn't played it yet. Did manage to finish in 4 hours...well actually under 4 hours because we started a bit late and ended a bit early to boot. But I admit that is not the optimal way to run such things.
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Also be sure to look at Master of the Falllen Fortress and the We Be Goblins Modules. They're all free in PDF form, and the two 1-2s can be applied multiple times to first-level characters, which will help you and your players bring up multiple low-level characters without exhausting your options too quickly. With those two and the remaining First Steps, it's entirely possible to get every character to second level playing those same three scenarios - First Steps gets old pretty fast, but the other two are plenty of fun to play over and over (especially We Be Goblins).
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We did Master of the Fallen Fortress today and everyone had a blast. It was a lot of fun and I foresee us having some decent turnout at our events. The plan is to do In Service to Lore next. I'd like to do the other installments of First Steps but they're not legal for play anymore. I ran them for some friends wanting to try out PFS a while back and they were all a lot of fun.
Given the turnout we had I'm not sure what season to go with. I've got a few weeks to decide since we will be meeting once a month for PFS. I don't know if the larger assumed table size of 6 with season 4 and 5 are a benefit or not. Today we had a total of ten people show up, GMs included so we had two tables of four. However, the events will likely grow so larger assumed table sizes may be a good thing.
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I'd never be able to run We Be Goblins in a library. I get too into the voices and songs. Last time I ran We Be Goblins Too, I silenced a crowded game store with an in character rendition of the Birdcruncher clan's rhyme. I guess it's not every day you hear someone gleefully singing about crunching and biting in a nasty voice. ^_^
If you're just starting out GMing scenarios, be sure to stop by the Shared GM Google Drive each time you prep!
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If you're just starting out GMing scenarios, be sure to stop by the Shared GM Google Drive each time you prep!
This is awesome and will save me so much work. I usually make a word doc ahead of time that compiles all of the opponent stats in one place, but this will take out part of the step for me. Thanks. :D