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It feels more like a party faction mission now, more focused - inline with the story, and less like a side-chore.
The only downside I see is that what you actually have to do isn't readily apparent anymore - nobody is really telling you what you need to do. This by itself would be fine, if it was just to re-direct the story outcome (ala the A-B-C-D tickboxes in reporting), but failing to complete that mission costs you 1 prestige point. Over time, if the system doesn't work, that might really hurt some players.
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Some of the them are actually difficult.
Ill give 2 examples of difficult and some not so much
Among the Living:
Among the Dead
They are 2 that ive run since the new secondary success became live.
Any particular interesting ones out there?
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The best one I've seen so far was for "Frozen Fingers of Midnight".
The group I was running for almost let the BBEG sorceress take it, until she mentioned she was going to Irrisen. That set of one of my players' witch, who has a major grudge against Irrisian witches. It was "roll initiative" after that.
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I ran Voice in the Void with the new secondary success condition, and it was actually mentioned, in passing, at a couple of places in the scenario interactions.
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I don't care for it, mostly because it's a patch that often isn't well integrated into the scenarios. There is often nothing in the briefing that event hints at the condition since it's post-hoc and thus the players are left stumbling around. Maybe this will change and as DMs get used to cross-referencing the list they'll plant their own hints or downright orders, but as it stands it's been a bust from what I've seen so far. Half the time the GM doesn't even look up the success condition until after the module ends and it's as much a surprise to them if the PCs succeeded.
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I don't care for it, mostly because it's a patch that often isn't well integrated into the scenarios. There is often nothing in the briefing that event hints at the condition since it's post-hoc and thus the players are left stumbling around. Maybe this will change and as DMs get used to cross-referencing the list they'll plant their own hints or downright orders, but as it stands it's been a bust from what I've seen so far.
From what I've seen, most of the secondary conditions come from Pathfinders being thorough and being Pathfinders and not ruffians/scoundrels, from going above and beyond the initial mission as they should. Even in Season 5 that's the case. You're told to help, you end up saving the hostages and negotiating with the captors, above and beyond.
Half the time the GM doesn't even look up the success condition until after the module ends and it's as much a surprise to them if the PCs succeeded.
Guilty, haha. Though I do look it up beforehand, I just forget when it comes time to do Day Job rolls to let the players know if they got it or not. Learning curve, I guess.
So in the end it really comes down to giving everyone time to transition. GM's to remember about the secondary conditions and actually be on the ball, players to stop following a 'kill-kill-kill' mentality and actually be Pathfinders.
Venture-Lieutenant, Washington—Pullman
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I believe most are in line with what the Pathfinder Society expects of their agents. You can no longer say "I'm a Murdering Hobo(love that phrase learned it the other day on the forums), I don't care what I do unless a Faction Leader tells me to do XXXX, at which point I keep an eye out for it and murder everything else!" You are required to act like Ambassadors for the Pathfinder Society.
I have seen one adventure so far that players were not happy with secondary success condition.
Primary: The PCs retrieve Amao’s Bones and return
them to Osprey.
Secondary: The PCs prevent the way station from being
destroyed.
They returned to the way station and the GM described the station as on fire and burning down. They D-Doored in, grabbed a guy that was inside, D-Doored out, and let the building burn as they figured there was no way to save it. Got to the conclusion and it was revealed you needed to save the way station and they were less than pleased with the outcome.
GM decided not to award them Secondary Prestige.
Other than that the response at my location has been positive.
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Venture-Captain, California—Sacramento
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Umm... Lets see.
GMed Voices in the Void - PCs won 2 PP with no hints from me.
GMed Mist of Mwangi - No one even mentions the success condition. Made it anyway due to the helpful halfling in the party being a decent fellow.
Played (before and after faction missions)
4-18: Would have made it? I have vague recollections of making that check.
0-14: A) GM wasn't running scenario as written, B) Faction mission contradicts secondary success.
0-02: Made it. (from what I recall, is it even possible to fail if you make the main goal?)
0-29: Umm... Don't remember. Again, that one was not run as written
1-35: Was told by the GM (incorrectly) that my action would not work and was not the right way to solve the mission, that the only solution was the opposite of the secondary success criterion. Of course this is the same GM who when I stuck my head around a corner to check the hallway had 5 opponents melee full attack me in the surprise round, in spite of the fact that there was a cliff occupying 5 of the squares around me, and a wall occupying 2 of the others. (The GM had misread curtain as cliff)
0-30: Made it (auto success)
1-41: Made it (Though GM was confused about whether the success condition was there or not.)
1-48: Made it. Thought it was the primary condition. Almost went home without making the primary because we thought we were done.
0-08: Made it. Probably shouldn't have? Not sure. GM read the scenario 3 minutes before game started.
4-15: Failed, but tried and knew we failed. Notoriously hard from what I hear. Still might have made it if I had chosen a different action on my first round, or of one of several saves had failed.
0-24: Made it. It seemed like the obvious thing to do if you are not a++~~&&s.
3-05: Made it. Again, not called for in any briefing that I remember, but it just seemed like the decent thing to do if you had the resources.
The consistent pattern here, for those playing along at home, is that in a properly GMed game, where the PCs are playing nice people, they should know that they are supposed to try to do the secondary success criterion, even if they don't have the tools to do it.
(Note the second pattern. I have gotten better at picking GMs who run the scenario as written.)
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I believe most are in line with what the Pathfinder Society expects of their agents. You can no longer say "I'm a Murdering Hobo(love that phrase learned it the other day on the forums), I don't care what I do unless a Faction Leader tells me to do XXXX, at which point I keep an eye out for it and murder everything else!" You are required to act like Ambassadors for the Pathfinder Society.
I have seen one adventure so far that players were not happy with secondary success condition.
** spoiler omitted **
Other than that the response at my location has been positive.
That's the players own fault.
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It's just not always clear there's even an option IMO. I ran The Goblinblood dead today and the
secondary condition was to not allow some NPCs to die AND either not allow additional NPCs to die to to help the caravan set up traps correctly to help defend the caravan at the waypoint. Now, assume that the PCs had screwed up on the protection or some mob had gotten lucky and whacked one of the second set of NPCs. It says specifically that the remaining NPCs tell the PCs that once the caravan reaches the campsite they should be safe for the night. Nowhere does it ask for them for help to set traps, nor even disclose the fact there are traps to be set. If the PCs escort them to the site and assume that the job is done, they could theoretically get screwed for taking the NPCs at their word that they were fine instead of fishing for additional ways to secure the camp
Now, we can argue that a careful DM would have made note of all that and broached it in the conversation somewhere but it could be a really easy thing to miss. Without the deliberate emphasis as given in the faction mission, it's hard to blame them for not discovering there even was an extra mile to go. And the worst part is it's actually specific to those devices. If the PCs had decided to dig a moat for them it wouldn't have counted scenario as written.
It's just not my cup of tea as it stands. I'd be happier if the secondary missions were handed out like a group faction mission of some sort and not this fumble and hope you find.
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That's the players own fault.
I have seen one adventure so far that players were not happy with secondary success condition.** spoiler omitted **
Other than that the response at my location has been positive.
I don't see why. Unless they were given some special emphasis of why it should be saved, life > property. The idea that if they had taken the people and used them to beat out the flames and gotten that second point may be reductio ad absurdum but it's immediately what comes to mind.
Maybe it's because it's become expected that PCs should get 2 prestige per scenario. If the 2nd point was supposed to be a bonus for going above and beyond in years past, it clearly failed miserably. The general feeling is that you should get 2 unless you bork something majorly. The fact that we're shifting to a system now where the 2nd point is more uncertain changes the entire perception and mechanic. It's not that the players didn't earn a bonus (as maybe is the intent) but instead that you're punishing them by removing something they would normally receive. Now, maybe over the course of a year or two the change will filter down and people will look at that second point as a bonus but for now, it's nothing but punishment.
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I want to say that I was one of David's players, and while my understanding of the situation was not completely clear, I don't fault David. He was handed the Scenario to run more or less cold, and there are a few different complexities in that scenario. I have since read it and I believe how that other goal may have been more obvious, but that fact of the matter is 1 prestige here or there lost is not the end of the world.
Part that led some players to feel put out included: We were led to believe the Taer army was still pursuing us, while the scenario states that they only pursue for a few hundred yards), also I personally did not realize that there were more than 2 people at the way station when we played (the guy we saved and an Aspis Agent).
But I still thank David for stepping up to GM and appreciate his GMing of the game.
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I don't see why.
Because negligent homicide, while a mite better than the pathfinders regular homicide MO, does not engender good public relations.
Swooping down off the mountain and saving the day like big damned heroes? That gives the society a good name, and that good name gets them invited back to dig up more artifacts.
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I've said it a few times before, and I'll say it here: I'm not a fan of secret objectives.
I don't think, on most of them, I would call them secret objectives, so much as non-obvious objectives.
And, indeed, for most of the earlier season scenarios, good RP and/or paying attention to what is going on, while trying to minimize collateral damage, will usually succeed.
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Venture-Captain, California—Sacramento
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To continue to update my list above.
Played
0-04 Didn't make it. Was pretty sure I knew what we were supposed to do, given the party composition, couldn't figure out how to do it. (we lacked an entire class of skills.) Could possibly have figured out a way, but table events left me wanting to just get my chronicle sheet and leave.
RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
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It's easy to complain about things, and I wanted to give the secondary success conditions a fair shot, but...
1) Faction missions were better in several ways. The best of them highlighted new aspects of the scenarios and made them richer. Without faction missions, things seem ... flatter now. The secondary success conditions don't do the same job.
1b) There is now a stronger incentive to avoid the resource-draining side encounters and get to the identifiable threat. There's much less incentive to open side rooms on the way there.
1c) So, there is a rules issue leaking in: if a party completes the scenario, quickly and efficiently, but avoids all the other encounters -- going straight for the back room in the Blakros Museum if you will -- then do they get full gold and full access to items? (My answer is no: if you didn't even notice the undead in the path you didn't take, then you miss out on the gold they had, and you don't get access to the magic items they were guarding. I'm in the minority here: most GMs bestow full Chronicle rewards for a complete mission success.)
2) I have had new players at my table who don't know what faction their character is. (Answer: then you're Grand Lodge) Factions are now much, much less a part of the game.
2b) And sorry, but virtually nobody remembers what their faction's current Season 5 goals are. I've had Taldor players just breeze over their boon condition in a recent scenario, because they had no idea what Lady Morilla's current plans were.
3) Pathfinder Society has a history of discouraging "farming," choosing which characters to send on which missions based on gold or unique treasure. ("Which scenario can I go on, to find a wand of lightning?" "Sorry, we don't encourage that.") With the new faction boon system, that's changed. Picking a character for a mission based on the boon is expected, at least around here.
3b) At all three conventions I've attended this month, I've seen players turn down the opportunity to play in a scenario, because they had a different character who could receive one of the faction boons, and needed to level that character into Tier first. Let me repeat: the faction boons are creating situations which discourage players from sitting at a table with a perfectly good, suitable PC, in lieu of eventually playing the scenario with a faction-appropriate character.
In summary, the current situation isn't as much fun, doesn't get players as hooked on their characters, and acts as an impediment to play. I would advocate returning to the status of Season 4: one fame for mission success, one for faction success.
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At all three conventions I've attended this month, I've seen players turn down the opportunity to play in a scenario, because they had a different character who could receive one of the faction boons, and needed to level that character into Tier first. Let me repeat: the faction boons are creating situations which discourage players from sitting at a table with a perfectly good, suitable PC, in lieu of eventually playing the scenario with a faction-appropriate character.
I'll back this one up. I'm signed up for Port Godless at AetherCon on the 17th, and have four eligible characters but don't want to pick two of them because the other two are the ones that can get the boon. Since I can only get credit twice, either I sack the boon for one of them or use a character who might not fit the party composition.
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RPG Superstar 2013 Top 16
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@Chris: I agree with your second point; I haven't played enough to go by personal experience, but I can easily imagine everyone showing up to "You Have What You Hold" with their Sczarni rogues (or some future scenario with a table full of Silver Crusade paladins, etc.), spread across the entire level span, and refusing to play another character because they want to play the right faction.
But I think I disagree with your first point about the secondary success conditions. Personally, as long as I don't know what I'm looking for to get that other Prestige Point, I'm going to be following the Pathfinder Society mandate to explore, and checking every room I can for something worthwhile. But that may change in the future, depending on my experience with the SSCs.
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RPG Superstar 2013 Top 16
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Oddly enough my Sczarni is a druid...
And mine (formerly of the Lantern Lodge) is an alchemist, but in my experience the Sczarni faction is heavily weighted toward rogues, just like the Silver Crusade is weighted toward paladins, and the Lantern Lodge was weighted toward ninjas and samurai.
But the point is, it makes people much less flexible in what characters they are willing to play in a given scenario.
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That depends on how many characters I have that can receive the boon. If there's only one character that can I'm able to be freer about it, since I can always GM it and apply my credit to that one PC. It's when I have more than one, like my Osirion and Qadira characters for Port Godless, that I feel the pressure.
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Personally I'm really annoyed at the goals that assume a specific role is present - especially an uncommon one like trapfinder. PFS play seldom make that a certainty.
There's plenty of ways to avoid taking damage from a trap without having someone who can disarm magical traps, or even necessarily Disable Device at all.
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In summary, the current situation isn't as much fun, doesn't get players as hooked on their characters, and acts as an impediment to play. I would advocate returning to the status of Season 4: one fame for mission success, one for faction success.
Problem is... doing yet another full-tilt change would, at this point, pretty much require a reboot of the campaign. It's just getting to be a mess.
The problem with factions wasn't so much the missions themselves (though I believe having the authors write the missions was a bad idea, a problem for another thread), the problem was, and still is, one of too many factions. The campaign started to fix that problem by removing two factions, but it took two years to only partially solve the issue.
It's my belief that the issue of wanting to take certain PCs through certain storylines is a feature, not a bug, Chris. Dropping down to a more reasonable number of factions, though, would help alleviate any perceived issues with table-forming. Other organized-play campaigns did just fine with the PCs-involved-in-storylines feature, by the way.
Dropping down to around four factions in the either the new system or the Season 0/1 system would be ideal, but the campaign's such a mess that it'll likely take a reboot.
-Matt
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Having played or GMed #5-01, #5-02, and #5-04, my impression of the boons is that while they're a nice little bonus, they're not worth worrying about when choosing which character to play.
I could have played 'the Wardstone Patrol' with my Silver Crusade cleric, but I have no regrets over choosing to play my Andoran ranger (of exactly the same level) instead.
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As a DM I will stress the secret goals more. The I feel guessing the secondary objective in an adventure is not a strong way to have them go about it. I know the ones we earned so far were by sheer luck of having all characters that made an effort to not kill people. I had no idea the actions I took were completeling secondary goals.
I plan on having the venture captain stress the secondary goals in her faction mission.
I also very strongly dislike the need to not do faction missions. I am the only DM that handed them out that knew they were not neeeded and still gave them out. Most do nto take the effort. I feel these have the character get a feel for their faction. Honestly factions now I feel are extra boons IF you happen to play one with a character with that faction for THAT adventure. So some people may never learn abotu their faction since they never do things for them.
SO the factions matter much less and it is not important... well much.
I enjoyed the every mission faction importance.
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Sure. There's more than this, but here's three basic techniques that can be performed by almost anyone.
*Don't step on the trigger area. This possibly includes jumping, climbing the wall, or whatever it takes.
*Cause a false trigger when no PCs are in the kill zone. This one only works if the trap doesn't auto reset instantly. You can do this with objects on pressure plates or even with a simple mount or other summoning spell if you are particularly cruel to animals.
*Send in someone skilled at avoiding that type of trap. If all else fails somehow, you might be able to avoid taking damage from a trap simply by sending the right PC for the job. For instance, Deflect Arrows on a character with Uncanny Dodge will make short work of an arrow trap.
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IIRC, one of the goals of the secondary ones, and especially of their being secret/not obvious was that PCs were never supposed to gain 2 points in almost every scenario.
Faction goals failed at this and secondary goals are supposed to be harder to achieve (if only by being missed completely) so that PCs ' Fame (and thus power) will be more in line with what the lead team expects.
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Sure. There's more than this, but here's three basic techniques that can be performed by almost anyone.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to raise a bullshit flag on that play. The primary assumption your making is that the trap can be found. This is hardly ever the case.
*Don't step on the trigger area. This possibly includes jumping, climbing the wall, or whatever it takes.
Even assuming it could be found at least half for more of GMs will not disclose the locations of triggers. And then even if that's true we're now relying on the entire party to pass a particular sort of skill check? I don't like the odds that a cleric won't botch my mission success despite his best effort.
*Cause a false trigger when no PCs are in the kill zone. This one only works if the trap doesn't auto reset instantly. You can do this with objects on pressure plates or even with a simple mount or other summoning spell if you are particularly cruel to animals.
Most traps seem to auto reset instantly. Also don't forget to bring those hireling vanities into play ya? Wait aren't we mostly tring to keep a good rep with these secondary success missions?
*Send in someone skilled at avoiding that type of trap. If all else fails somehow, you might be able to avoid taking damage from a trap simply by sending the right PC for the job. For instance, Deflect Arrows on a character with Uncanny Dodge will make short work of an arrow trap
Deflect Arrows requires you to both be not flat footed and aware of the attack. Many GMs won't even tell you what the triggering conditions are how many do you think consider players aware of the attack even in the unlikely event that they spot it.
I really don't like relying on multiple layers of luck to try and achieve success.
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I really don't like relying on multiple layers of luck to try and achieve success.
Isn't that the whole point behind rolling dice instead of saying it works automatically? Even with faction missions you relied on the roll of a 20-sider most the time.
As stated above, many of the secondary missions I've come across have been incorporated in such a way that you will know if you pay attention. Case in point, one scenario says "Don't kill these people! Just knock them out if you can!". Then, when two players failed, one raised a fuss saying he planned on healing them later, didn't that count? The direction was written in the scenario a couple years ago, but the secondary success condition fit perfectly.
I'm a fan. There, I said it.
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RPG Superstar Season 9 Top 8
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PCs in my game last night bypassed a gelatinous cube trap by doing the following:
1. Moving at 1/2 speed and searching for traps, and putting their cautious, high perception character in the front of the part.
2. Spotting the cube on the ceiling above them, and then tossing a riding dog out of a bag of tricks onto the floor beneath the cube.
3. Casting create pit under the cube after it dropped on the dog, then nuking it to death as it tried to slime it's way out of the hole, 30 feet below them.
They didn't have a rogue in the party. They had no way to disarm magical traps. They defeated this trap entirely. This was the high subtier of a 7-11 game.
I'd say Mark's examples are perfect as they illustrate clever ways to bypass identified hazards. Calling them out, or saying "well yeah, but you have to see them first," sidesteps his responses.
If you aren't going to search for traps or invest in Perception, then traps will obviously be a problem. Just like if you refuse to make attack rolls in combat as a fighter -- it's going to be a struggle.
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Responding to Chris:
1) Sure, the best of them highlighted awesome aspects of the scenarios. The worst of them were freaking annoying for the GM. I can't tell you how frustrated I am with Cheliax's faction mission in Tide of Twilight.
Sure, there were great faction missions, but there were also crappy ones and there were ones that spoiled the scenario right from the beginning. (I have never had a single party actually go through Shadow's Last Stand Part II the "appropriate way". It's always been "Let's go do faction missions!" and then happen to do the mod along the way.)
1b) You mean besides treasure and item access and possibly learning more things that they can use to help them in the final fight? I guess if they aren't motivated by that...
1c) Absolutely take off for stuff they didn't do. This is academic for me since I haven't had a party do this yet, but that seems entirely reasonable.
2) This is an interesting side-effect. I feel like as a community, we need to be taking a long-term view towards factions and not looking for immediate contact like we have been. Before factions were just a side mission flavored towards working for a particular faction. Now they are an actual story. We need to work to drive new people into that story. (The best ways of doing that are still swirling around in my mind as I prepare for a con full of new people to PFS.)
2b) I keep reminding my GMs of Season 5 scenarios to print out copies of the letters to give to relevant players. I feel like this onus is on the GMs as well as the players, and if the leaders of the individual communities step up and lead by example, making sure that the players know what their faction goals are before a season 5 game, the rest of the community will follow.
3/3b) This is not a bad thing. The main difference between farming for items and farming for factions is that one is farming for entirely mechanical benefits while another is farming to be part of a storyline (and also get mechanical benefits too). I see this as no different than someone not wanting to play Fortress of the Nail until their character from The Disappeared levels into tier or if they want to wait to play Among the Gods until their Among the Living/Among the Dead character hits level 3. We should encourage players to do this, but also give them realistic expectations. You will not get every boon on every chronicle. In fact, there will probably be some season 5 scenarios where you won't get a single faction-specific boon - and that's OK. Pick a couple factions you like and focus on those.
I think that we as a playerbase are still getting used to the new system, and while we have the mechanics of how everything works by now, we still haven't tempered our expectations in light of the new system. If this is to succeed, we need to change the way we look at factions and their role in the campaign. If we change from "group we do side missions for during a scenario," to "active storyline we are participating in," then I think the factions will work a lot better over the season.
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stuff
James I think your tide of twilight is a very poor example.
There are poorly written faction missions. Everyone agrees witht hat. SO finding a poor one does not make the system bad, but the writer unable to make a decent faction mission . I feel so far all faction stuff wirtten for season 5 is poorly done. I get the feeling it was pushed into the scenario and is forced. Also it is exclusive. Me playing a sczarni in hell knights feast made the other faction things not relevant for me and thus harder to follow. Since I was not involved. Plus the boone for this scenario was automatic, garbage if you ask me.
I am unable follow the story currently. I randomly play scenarios. So I have a mismatch of what is going on. So far I have one character that happened to run across a scenario for their faction and had no idea I was doing faction stuff, but I got my boone!
I agree with chris though. The new method needs to be implimented much better to be an improvement over the previous method.
Honestly better writing for the faction mission using the old method I think would be best the idea.
Developer
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stuffI agree with chris though. The new method needs to be implimented much better to be an improvement over the previous method.
Honestly better writing for the faction mission using the old method I think would be best the idea.
With the selected portion of your quote, I have two responses. For the second piece ("Honestly better writing...best the idea"), I say, "Okay, noted." I am going to set that portion aside for the moment because I feel I understand what you're getting at there.
For the first part ("I agree with Chris...the previous method") I must raise an eyebrow and inquire what you would suggest. Telling me, "Hey, do this better," tends not to be too helpful unless you're trying to tell me to keep doing what I'm doing while continuing to strive for ever-higher quality—conveniently my standard operating procedure.
As you may recall from back when there was confusion about which factions were involved in which scenarios, I received specific feedback requesting that there be some publicly accessible means of knowing if a faction's story plays into a particular scenario. Further, some folks worked with that sentiment and suggested the information be available on the product page. After considering the balance of metagame knowledge and scheduling interests/concerns for players and coordinators, I employed that specific suggestion.
There are poorly written faction missions. Everyone agrees witht hat. SO finding a poor one does not make the system bad, but the writer unable to make a decent faction mission. I feel so far all faction stuff wirtten for season 5 is poorly done. I get the feeling it was pushed into the scenario and is forced. Also it is exclusive. Me playing a sczarni in hell knights feast made the other faction things not relevant for me and thus harder to follow. Since I was not involved. Plus the boone for this scenario was automatic, garbage if you ask me.
To my discredit, I've taken your quote out of order. Pardons.
Factions' involvement in the called out scenarios are actually quite central to how campaign leadership wrote and continues to write Season 5. I've had only one instance that I can recall of saying to myself, "Oh, XYZ faction really needs to fit in somewhere in this quarter," and by the time we've figured out how it will work out, we're as happy with it as if it had been the plan all along.
One issue with faction missions as they were before this season was that there were 5–10 little missions that had to be fit into the main storyline come heck or high water. As a result, many seemed superficial or forced, though some real gems sometimes came through. I love some of these older faction missions. There are many, many more to which I am ambivalent. A healthy pile remains behind of those that feel very forced, indeed. In developing the faction missions as I do now, I aim to give each faction something significant to do several times each season, borrowing a bit of the feel and gravitas of Scenarios #4–11 and #4–13 for the Cheliax faction. I can agree to an extent with Mattastrophic above that having many factions complicates this somewhat, though I continue to believe that the story that's coming together for the different factions is more compelling than that presented by the oft-teased but not universally representative "fetch me a tea set" standard.
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Now with that said, I think we've wandered off topic a bit, and I'm guilty of perpetuating it. This is now a discussion about faction missions and not secondary success conditions.
And the earlier suggestion/challenge/call to action stands for anyone, not just Finlanderboy. Therapeutic as it may be to call something garbage, it's not constructive until one suggests how to fix it. It's difficult for me to consider a fix and then actually implement it to a diverse player group's satisfaction without constructive criticism.
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Thank you for answering me. I appreciate it.
I apologize for my choice of words offending you or anyone. If you pefer I think it was extremely poorly implimented to have an automatic faction mission/boone. It seems like the everyone gets a medal type of thing. It requires nothing from the PCs. They are not building the living campaign but watching it unfold fromt he sidelines. I feel this could have been an illusion of choice situation. Like mark box d is they sided with x, leave it unchecked is sided with Y. That way the PCs get some interaction veruses a cut scene. In the end these can or can not have any effect. Thats why i said illusion of choice. To make the PCs appear they matter in the livign world every chance they get.
Back to the secondary missions. I strongly dislike the team we win with less individualism. I also played with someone that wanted to kill what ended to be our do not kill this person secret side mission. Now I stopped him from outright killing him with hey this could be our side mission. Seems contrite I have to go out of character and metagame to stop wanton killing from wrecking our team goal. If I played night march during these rules the same thing would have happened because of a player going against our best interest. Honestly feels like the jerk using "it is what my character would do" allows them to grief other players. The vagueness of the side missions I am not entertained with. It seems kinda chance at times. Espcially with a DM that does not get detailed.
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Well, in the interest of helping out, I can present a few key suggestions regarding factions in PFS:
-Don't have the scenario authors speak for the faction heads. This was a very big problem in the past, as many different authors all had their own take on NPCs who were unestablished before the campaign began. Reduce the number of people who write Zarta, or Aaqir, or Amenopheus. That way, the campaign will avoid falling into its previous stereotypes, such as the oft-mentioned tea-set-craving Baron Dalsine.
-Reduce the number of factions. Four is a good number. Four would have the advantage of giving the players a good number of choices, yet would not overcrowd the field. With four factions, under the Season 5 model, each faction could have a role in at least every other scenario, and a skilled author could include all four in a scenario, which would yield a better experience for everyone. And be quick about it; choose your number and reach it as soon as possible. Don't get there slowly.
-Do something with the undeveloped faction boards. I was very excited when, at PaizoCon 2012, Painlord showed the new faction boards to me minutes after they went up. I can even claim credit for the very first faction-specific post. There is a great opportunity here for a unique and interesting online roleplaying experience. It would also do a lot to draw in players who might not feel so immersed in their local PFS environment. Paizo.com also has a lot of really solid tools, used for play-by-posts, which can enhance the online experience. And there's a really easy way to really embrace this underutilized aspect of the campaign...
Find eight solid volunteers. Have them roleplay the faction heads, and give them a large amount of freedom to interact with members of their factions. Give them plot points to start threads with, and let the volunteers' creativity shine. The reason why the faction boards don't have very much going on is because the players have very little to discuss! The scenarios really don't give us topics to talk about, and the topics we might want to talk about quickly fall into spoiler territory. A creative roleplayer playing a faction head could do a lot to develop a faction's storyline, merely by having the go-ahead to run threads which have to do with topics relevant to the faction's story.
Such an approach would give players another angle through which to experience their faction's storyline, having the effect of increasing player investment in their PCs and the campaign itself. We saw the response to the chronicle-piracy blog post earlier this year, and it was pretty impressive. All it took was a hook to draw players in and a relevant topic to discuss. We already know that this sort of approach can work. The board aliases are already there, perhaps the campaign could start making use of them?
-Matt
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-Do something with the undeveloped faction boards....
Find eight solid volunteers. Have them roleplay the faction heads, and give them a large amount of freedom to interact with members of their factions. Give them plot points to start threads with, and let the volunteers' creativity shine. The reason why the faction boards don't have very much going on is because the players have very little to discuss! The scenarios really don't give us topics to talk about, and the topics we might want to talk about quickly fall into spoiler territory. A creative roleplayer playing a faction head could do a lot to develop a faction's storyline, merely by having the go-ahead to run threads which have to do with topics relevant to the faction's story.
I love this idea.
I disagree with less factions, but this above is brilliant.
I greatly enjoy chatting in character.