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As of this afternoon we finished the first PFS special play by post ever ran. In total, it ran for 16 days at a ratio of one day: 15 minutes face to face time. I'm working to get some stats together on average effective 'time' of each person's turn and a few other things.
What did you guys think, both those participating and those following along from home? How was the pacing? Did you feel the real life time crunch that a special should create?
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As one of the players in this event I have to applaud Feral and all the GMs for their organization and coordination. From my perspective things ran flawlessly. There was definitely a sense of urgency from post to post...so much so that I checked the game several times each day to see if my turn was up. It even caused me to be a little late for work one day last week! There was also a sense of teamwork amongst the tables; checking the map after each task to see where we would be needed next.
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Was fun to watch, and overall seemed to work.
There was a little bit of disagreement from players with different expectations of posting speed and I thought some of the more flavorful encounters were run in ways that squeezed out too much flavor in an attempt to save time.
All in all it was awesome to follow along and I'm just sad I wasn't able to be one of your GMs.
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It was a great experience overall; thanks to all the GMs who put so much work into it! And of course my fellow players who made the experience doubly enjoyable. :)
The pacing was pretty spot on. Our group was in general fairly punctual and regular with posting, although less so towards the end; I guess it's difficult to keep up motivation in that final hard slog. I think dragging it out for longer would have been frustratingly slow, and making it shorter would have been quite difficult.
The use of "leaders" was instrumental in my experience. With everyone understanding that you would be NPC'd from time to time, there wasn't (at least on our table) any issues with us pushing along with the plot if need be. Of course, I'm biased as I was the leader at my table. ;P
I agree with Deane, too; I was constantly checking for updates! That's a sign of very good pacing and engagement.
Kudos once again!
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More thoughts:
I really liked the ability to see where other tables were, it made it much more possible to coordinate for that part and it felt really cool. This was probably my favroite bit.
Question for players/GMs:
How did you feel about the difficulty? The assumption is 6 players tables, but here it was donewith only 4/table. (Remember, no spoilers)
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There was a little bit of disagreement from players with different expectations of posting speed and I thought some of the more flavorful encounters were run in ways that squeezed out too much flavor in an attempt to save time.
I noticed this too during my occasional glances over at the other tables. Both points you raise, actually.
I think that I was lucky; our entire table was fairly amicable and reasonably fast-posting in general, but I can see why groups with people who had different rates would be a bit frustrated (Tektite's group in particular)...
Also, I think the flavour thing is really a GM variable. Feral seemed to always be putting hints of flavour into encounters (e.g., Barres! Noo! ;_;) that I really liked, but when I looked at other groups they didn't always have the same... panache, I suppose. Not to take a dig at the other GMs, as I was only really skimming the posts, but I agree that sometimes just adding a few extra details helps a lot!
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How did you feel about the difficulty? The assumption is 6 players tables, but here it was donewith only 4/table. (Remember, no spoilers)
The first major part, where we went from district to district, seemed easy~average. We didn't have much of a problem overall with combat (though that one fight on the docks was hectic!) and the challenges seemed surmountable, though not typically particularly hard.
The second major part, where my group defended the wall... oh my god. That was ridiculously hard.
The "successes" we were required to do was made incredibly hard with only 4 characters, particularly when the NPCs were downed. Two people on the catapult and two people fighting multiple enemies? How are you supposed to do that?
RPG Superstar 2014 Top 32
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Personally, I was impressed - this worked far, far better than I expected it to. Still, I do feel that the posting requirements (I was getting poked on Google if I hadn't posted for my players within the last 5 hours) were a bit much. I think that a slower pace would really enrich the opportunity for roleplay. I often ended up having to skip longer roleplay exchanges due to time.
I think that perhaps a better way to handle it for, say, Blood Under Absalom, would be to use a checkpoint system - if you're done up to a certain checkpoint, wait for the other tables to catch up, then continue.
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Overall I was quite impressed with everything, this being my first special and my first PBP special. The time crunch was definitely visible as a player trying to make sure I was keeping it updated. The timeframe seemed to be about right. I'm not sure how my group kept up compared to others, but it seemed we were lagging behind at times. The coordination between the GMs seemed pretty top-notch, and ours was definitely available.
Setting up a group leader was definitely a good decision. But I think I would've liked to have some other form of communication setup, even if it was as simple as giving my cell phone number to the group leader for texting. Other ideas I was thinking was maybe giving him an email address, maybe a KIK ID. I remember someone setup a chat, but I never did take advantage of that and wish I did now.
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Question for players/GMs:
How did you feel about the difficulty? The assumption is 6 players tables, but here it was donewith only 4/table. (Remember, no spoilers)
At first it felt like a cakewalk in my opinion. But it seemed to keep amping up the difficulty.
Our last fight was really close. If it hadn't ended, I think we may well have ended up with at least 1 or 2 dead players if not a TPK. In fact, that entire last part seemed like we suddenly switched from normal to hard mode.
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Rob, were there any specific encounters you thought were streamlined a bit too much? Feel free to PM me if you'd rather not deal with spoilers.
PM sent.
Also in case my earlier posts were unclear I thought this event was awesome and went great. I've just got little nitpicky thoughts on how to make it even more awesome for the future.
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Our last fight was really close. If it hadn't ended, I think we may well have ended up with at least 1 or 2 dead players if not a TPK.
This fact here coupled with the fact it was a PbP and an overwhelming victory has me very skeptical about how this all played out.
I'm not sure how common overwhelming victories are with Siege, but when this was run locally, we struggled significantly (especially on the 4 player tables, for which this special has no scaling).
I was in Sigrun's group and I agree with her comments. The defending section difficulty was really ramped up from the first day's actions. We almost bought it a couple of times, but toward the end, I think our group adjusted and we were managing better once we got used to it.
Posting speed in our group seemed to go well. Sigrun was the table leader and she and one other player did a lot of heavy lifting in terms of NPCing of our group and keeping the game running at a good pace.
I enjoyed it, as my first special. I'd love to jump in for another one some time!
Many thanks to the DMs for their hard work.
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Well, we had a couple tables on the ropes, and some doing very well. (I played with Sigrun)
I have to say that the event was pretty impressive. For comparison's sake, I played Race for the Runecarved Key face to face at a con, and it basically made me not ever want to play specials again.
In that game, our table was racing through encounters and simply rolling checks instead of roleplaying in order to get points. Our higher-level players definitely wanted to "win Pathfinder". I cannot explain how contemptible that attitude is to me for a game that, IMO, ought to be entirely cooperative. The fact that a boon was awarded for our "accomplishments" made me wonder about Society play in general. Now, that special is long in the tooth by now, so on to Diamond City.
I felt like this PBP mostly avoided these sorts of problems. A few times players from other tables chimed in our our boards it felt a bit irritating. But I didn't even have time to read their posts, let alone post in someone else's thread. So that pat of the game was so-so to me. I did like having the threat map available.
The pace was good for me. Once or twice I stayed up later than I should have, but I was often on the edge of my seat. Yes, things slowed down at the end. I may PM Feral, or post a review on the products page, but part of it was deliberate on my part. Let's just say that the last fights were very hard, and there was little incentive to finishing more of them, except greater chance of death.
I think with 6 players we would have fared much better, depending on the classes played. Still, it was a great event, and it took over my PBP activity for the past 16 days. I won't be able to commit to something so intense for a while, but I enjoyed it.
Thanks to all the players and GM's for making this a great experience!
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This was my second PFS scenario and my first (well finished ones anyway) was first steps 2 and it took a long time and ended up with several players getting angry with others. So my feedback is from that place.
Overall, I enjoyed the special, most times I was lost and just reacted to whatever was described to us. Probably a good feeling of what it might have felt like for those defending the city. My group was one that had some misconceptions about posting speed. I think my experience with Feral and Oladon tempered my expectations. I read high post count as probably higher than a lot of folks. I think some of the tension at our table was due to differences in that expectation and a lot of that time pressure. I felt like we weren't doing enough.
I guess it was about halfway through that I realized that this was all happening in one day and perhaps I'd used my 2 spells too early. Again, chalk that up to being completely new to this.
Having never done anything like this in real life at a table or online, I thought the time pressure was real. Perhaps at the crunch of RP, although it's a war scenario, not sure how much RP is expected?
I second the whole contact thing. Having someway to contact people to verify their availability would have helped. One thing I did was to post when I was heading to bed or going to be away from the game for a while. I am not sure if there's a timer or something when this is run at a con or something, but I think it was hard for me to judge if we needed to speed up or if we could coast for some time to allow folks to post. I think because of that, I tended to err on the side of go fast. I didn't want the war to be lost because we didn't do enough.
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Having never done anything like this in real life at a table or online, I thought the time pressure was real. Perhaps at the crunch of RP, although it's a war scenario, not sure how much RP is expected?
For my table we got a decent amount of roleplay in in the first half. From my experience playing this in a live con vs judging it in the pbp, I think the amount of roleplay we got in is similar. You get some roleplay in in the first half, and not much in the second because of how the module was designed.
What are you skeptical about? You can go and read the threads if you're curious, but the game was played as scheduled and we got through what seems like a mountain of encounters in both sections (we faced ~4 encounters in that second part all in a row... pretty damn crazy)
I suspect the skepticism is because many of the "live" traditional face to face runnings seem to struggle to get much better than a "admirable" rating.
-j
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RPG Superstar 2014 Top 32
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What are you skeptical about? You can go and read the threads if you're curious, but the game was played as scheduled and we got through what seems like a mountain of encounters in both sections (we faced ~4 encounters in that second part all in a row... pretty damn crazy)I suspect the skepticism is because many of the "live" traditional face to face runnings seem to struggle to get much better than a "admirable" rating.
-j
For what it's worth, I ran 13/14 encounters at GenCon and 11/14 encounters during the PBP.
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For what it's worth, I ran 13/14 encounters at GenCon and 11/14 encounters during the PBP.What are you skeptical about? You can go and read the threads if you're curious, but the game was played as scheduled and we got through what seems like a mountain of encounters in both sections (we faced ~4 encounters in that second part all in a row... pretty damn crazy)I suspect the skepticism is because many of the "live" traditional face to face runnings seem to struggle to get much better than a "admirable" rating.
-j
Just did a quick tally of our encounters (Tier 1-2)... 14 in the section around the districts. (14/14, perhaps?) And either 4 or 5 waves in the section on the wall; it's hard to tell because they sort of mashed in on each other to begin with...
edit: We succeeded at all those encounters in the districts. They were pretty easy for the most part. And we had at least one failure in the 4-5 waves, but once we "reset" the encounter we were able to manage it pretty well.
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RPG Superstar 2014 Top 32
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Yeah, but you folks were proceeding at a rate that I consider to be unnatural. I had to shift my GM style greatly for this adventure. Generally speaking, I always make the party make the decision of whether to open doors, and I also make them have a conversation with me for Diplomacy to work. I had to forego both of those things, and it felt more than a bit dirty to me, to be honest.
Then again, this is coming from a GM who has ran a PBP in which 4 pages were devoted to a single conversation. Your results may vary.
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It's much faster than I would normally run or play in a game, but it felt much more similar to a true table-top experience I suppose. And still probably had more roleplaying than any face-to-face game I've played...
Typically I'd run with "At least two people want to do X significant action" in a PbP, not party democracy; things slow down too much if you are waiting on a quick "Yes, let's go.". (And that's why we nominated a party leader as well - to make it doubly as fast.)
We also usually managed to have conversations with the NPCs that needed "diplomacising", it wasn't just a dice roll. Sure, it wasn't extended back-and-forths (usually; we also had some of those!), but I don't think that would necessarily have added anything to the game apart from decreasing the pace of progression.
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It's not often you can drop 100 IC posts and be dead last at your table. :)
The first three tables had posting volumes very similar to that of my own PBP games. ~300 posts is pretty normal for a scenario.
By comparison, I am playing a sanctioned module now, and while we're close to the end, we just cracked 800 posts. And that gains you a WHOLE LEVEL in PFS.
I also looked at consumables usage. My 7th level ranger (with 18 XP) has a CLW wand with 19 charges remaining. Considering he bought it in his second scenario, and has just 2 GM credits, he has used on average 2 charges per the 15 XP earned with the wand.
Talwin used 13 charges off his wand plus two castings on CLW.
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I was in Netopalis' table, and I could sense that half of our group was expecting a slower pace. As we were preparing for this and making player and character introductions, Netopalis asked us what sort of combat/roleplay ratio we desired, and we went with 75/25. I think the potential for exists for a lot more roleplaying in a PbP because you can have entire inner dialogues, stay in character easier, and better narrate action during combat, as compared to a tabletop game where your turn is spent mostly calculating dice and bonuses, or cracking jokes while the next person in initiative is handling their turn. Maybe you get a battlecry or catchphrase in too, but the action isn't the same when you're swinging a 2-liter of mountain dew like a warhammer.
I would have liked to roleplay a little more, and I can see where he had to cut-scene quickly at times to keep us from falling behind, but I still had a good time and I think our group had a few good "Band of Brothers" moments throughout the event. Our last declared actions in the battle, right before victory was claimed, showed a group that started the scenario as individuals, with perhaps some rivalry among some of them, becoming a team and working together as our strength, magic, and healing abilities were approaching depletion.
Aod's last round of rage was ending, Hailey had just used her last channel energy, Sarion was out of smites, and Ezren had already used his arcane bond. We were all injured, and we faced a demon fresh from the ranks. But we still had hope, a few small resources left to us, and a good plan to make a last stand against the enemy.
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Feral, a few things:
Thank you very much for putting this together.
If you ever decide to organize this scenario again I'd love to help GM it.
On that note, I think that this even might have benefitted from a few Assistant GMs to help run combat, answer questions, and maybe take over if a GM has a conflict (For example - I think Tektite jumped into a couple tables to help out over the course of the Siege, but that probably took a little time away from his own GMing duties).
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DM Red table.
Dam so it seems that we were the longest table to finish encounters?
Once again congrats to all the tables and dm this was a great fun adventure.
Now What i really wished was to have a method of communicating with various leaders of the different table. at time it didn't feel that a district was in real need of help but we tough and move there anyway.
We had a great table
An inquisitor with all the intimidation / monster / perception end sense motive skills.
The amazing healer
and Borron you managed great enough tough the last fight he only hit the creature once...
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Thanks again guys for the feedback.
I feel like this is one thing that a digital medium like a play by post does better than a face to face game and I like what we had. Still, I agree with some of the feedback that it could have been better. I mentioned when things started that the recruitment thread was cool as a cross-table coordination thread but I don’t know how many actually were checking in on it. At one point Oladon suggested a chat room for communication as well but I don’t know if I saw more than 4-5 people in it at any time.
If/when I coordinate something like this again, I’ll try to setup clear communication channels/threads early on.
I feel like this was a big win for us but it might help to better set expectations for folks in the future. Yes, we had some faster tables and some slower tables but that’s no different than a face to face game. Some tables are going to have the table with the DM that reads really slowly, or the ill-prepared player, or the character that makes 42 attacks per round and has to roll them one at a time. Table-pacing is going to vary drastically. I see nothing wrong with that carrying over to play by post (in a different way).
In the future I’ll try to better establish what folks should expect. Describing the event as fast-paced may not be enough. For some, like Net, fast-paced is more than four posts in a day. These statistics Oladon put together for us will help a lot to that end.
On that same note, folks should be honest with themselves about what they can commit to. If you know your days are very busy and/or unpredictable, perhaps a time-sensitive special event isn’t good for you. If things were too fast/intense for you, perhaps fast-paced games aren’t a good fit for your schedule.
I challenge anyone that thinks that myself or any of my DMs cheated or were in anyway dishonest in our running to review the threads. That’s the beauty of PBP, everything is recorded. =)
I can say that I honestly pulled no punches nor fudged any dice (the latter is impossible in PBP). I was mercilessly true to the tactics and mechanics of the scenario even when I thought it might be more than my table could handle. I’m sure Sigrun can attest.
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More thoughts:
I really liked the ability to see where other tables were, it made it much more possible to coordinate for that part and it felt really cool. This was probably my favroite bit.
Question for players/GMs:
How did you feel about the difficulty? The assumption is 6 players tables, but here it was donewith only 4/table. (Remember, no spoilers)
There were definitely a few spots where I was sweating it out...but I think sweating it out was part of the fun. In a typical scenario you tend to save your "big guns" for the BBEG...but I felt the need to bring a few of them out a lot sooner than normal.
My group was one that had some misconceptions about posting speed. I think my experience with Feral and Oladon tempered my expectations. I read high post count as probably higher than a lot of folks. I think some of the tension at our table was due to differences in that expectation and a lot of that time pressure. I felt like we weren't doing enough.
I was the slacker at Belroar's table. I definitely felt the "time crunch," and though a few unforseen real-world issues did hamper my access, the pace in general was also faster than I had anticipated. Counting up all my gameplay posts, I had a mean rate of around 2.4 per day--slightly under par in theory, a mere fraction of the most active players in practice.
The party leader system was key. Expecting the already active members to further supplement the less active ones isn't necessarily fair, but it's better to at least have the option.
I didn't mind my character being party-PC'd through half his actions, but I can't say other players would feel the same way on either side of the issue. An agreement of expected availability seems like a good compromise--players sign up knowing that they must not only keep up a certain daily rate of activity, but also keep the group apprised of their schedule so that the table isn't left hanging when someone gets out of synch. If you can't meet those requirements, you can't say boo when your allies take over to move things along.
As far as the difficulty, our 1-2 table didn't have too tough a time, though we also came well-prepared with three strong melees and an eidolon meatshield in addition to a broad mix of social and utility skills. I could see a group less optimized for combat having a difficult time in the third stage, especially if the time-to-next-wave rolls were less forgiving than ours.
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I was mercilessly true to the tactics and mechanics of the scenario even when I thought it might be more than my table could handle. I’m sure Sigrun can attest.
Even when all four of us were crying foul in the discussion thread, he continued to come and end us all. Pretty sure Feral had a streak of about a dozen d20 rolls all above 15. :P
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Heh. =P
An interesting point worth discussing:
The original ratio given was 5 minutes face to face time for 1 day play by post. That would have put the event at 48 days.
Does that sound like a good amount of time? Too much time?
Would that allow for more roleplaying while still allowing for the ‘time pressure’ we need to preserve?
I’m curious which tables felt like the roleplaying was lacking. I felt like my table knocked the roleplaying out of the park but the player’s perceptions are ultimately what’s important.
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If I can throw something in here...
There was a limited amount of roleplaying when we played Siege live. The roleplaying that was there fed back into the time crunch. We were outside the gates rounding people up. There was roleplay, but it was along the lines "for goodness sakes man, get to the city! We need your help! Gogogogogo..." There were some skill and diplomacy challenges that had us slowing down (because we had to), but the time pressure meant that we didn't go off topic. We were very military about it- get in, clear the objective, get out.
The time crunch and limited roleplay was rather part of the point. We felt like we were in a warzone. We weren't there to horse around. We were there to get the job done as fast as possible so we could go out and save more parts of the city. There was an intensity and energy at the table that I've never seen before. It's part of what made the experience so amazing.
It wasn't until the final part, where we faced wave after wave of grind, that things really slowed. That part was brutal!
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I think 48 days would have been way too long. I actually thought the non-stop action added to the sense of urgency. The first half felt like we were running around putting out fires and that it was imperitive to put out that fire before another one sprung up. If we had the time to shoot the bull in between encounters we would have lost that element.
Feral, I liked the pace, even though I was one of the slower posters at your table. That made it feel all the more exciting...the first Saturday when we fought the odds until like 3 am, was insane and awesome and all other sorts of cool words. I couldn't do that often, but doing that once or twice on the weekend was super fun.
48 days would be way too long, I agree.
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The original ratio given was 5 minutes face to face time for 1 day play by post. That would have put the event at 48 days.
Does that sound like a good amount of time? Too much time?
That's almost two months - far too long for a PFS module, even a special. I think that 21-30 days is probably the average length of a PFS PbP, maybe a little less, maybe a little more, with a single post per day.
Of course, those of us who are used to Feral's pace can kick it up a little bit :P
edit: To put it in perspective - my Blakros Matrimony PbP, which I ran for the PbP Game Day, was slowed for at least a week because of local bushfires and exams, AND was an almost entirely roleplaying-based scenario, took about 2 months. I can't see this special taking that long.