Adapting scenarios to move away from official rules


GM Discussion


I am currently looking at running a series of the scenarios as a sort of mini campaign.

This is purely because fairly regularly the core game my players play in falls apart because someone cannot make it. However as long as 4 are free than I felt PFS scenarios could be easily run as one shots in the weeks where people are not available (I tried modules but ended up a third of the way through and it has never been finished)

I have tried to stick closely to PFS rules because my view is that is what the scenarios are written to assume of the characters taking part.

But the players are mostly quite new and seem to bristle at the extra layer of rules, whining about not being able to pick up gold, losing scribe scroll as a wizard etc.

My question is do the scenarios get broken if I remove the gold reward mechanism and just let them pick up and sell things (I know this is a book keeping nightmare so will try and make that plea)

And would shifting to that also mean removing Prestige, Fame and Boons (which seem part of the fun)

My view is that whilst some scenarios seem to offer less gold than if you were able to get your hands on everything (all the Poison in Stolen Heir really throws things out) this is controlled by:

- Not actually being able to get your hands on everything, notably consumables the NPCs use
- The difficulty with carrying everything around
- Potential ethical issues with stripping everything you find out of places / off opponents
- Fame, Prestige and Boons providing extra monetary and non monetary benefits that cannot be quantified

Switching approach also would encourage murder hobo behaviour which my players are too prone to. (You would after all get no cash for non combat resolution)

So basically:

- Do scenarios get broken if you don't follow the way gold allocation works
- Do most scenarios offer similar amounts to what you would get if you picked most things up anyway (with Stolen Heir being one of the anomalies due to the ridiculous price of poison in Pathfinder)


Personally...I wouldn't change what you're doing.

There are plenty of scenarios where the players get a few very expensive items to 'play' with which if sold would unbalance play.

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I can understand why PFS' reward system is counter-intuitive to new players: they would expect that if they find an item, they get to keep it, as opposed to getting a flat cash reward and an "option to buy". If they really don't like the PFS system, I think you should be able to run the scenarios and simply monitor and adjust available treasure to ensure that WBL doesn't get crazy. After all, with 200+ scenarios, you have a lot of options to choose from! On the other hand, the benefit to you of PFS-style play is it helps keep under control the somewhat crazy character builds that unrestricted play can allow.

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If you do decide to change things, be aware that you can't report them for PFS credit. If you want to use the PFS mechanism of leveling, but change a few things, you can do that, just don't report the games.

As for balance, the assumption is that you'll follow the entirety of PFS rules, which spreads out the wealth rewards and provides the prestige mechanic to give a slight boost. Allowing PCs to keep and sell items throws off that balance, which will in turn remove part of the goal that you are hoping for with not needing to maintain complete player continuity.


DrParty06 wrote:

If you do decide to change things, be aware that you can't report them for PFS credit. If you want to use the PFS mechanism of leveling, but change a few things, you can do that, just don't report the games.

As for balance, the assumption is that you'll follow the entirety of PFS rules, which spreads out the wealth rewards and provides the prestige mechanic to give a slight boost. Allowing PCs to keep and sell items throws off that balance, which will in turn remove part of the goal that you are hoping for with not needing to maintain complete player continuity.

Thanks for this. I thought this would be the case with regards to balance.

I have no intention of reporting the games. I threw that idea out the window when two of the players showed up with a Tiefling and an Aasimar and I didn't want to force them to change as some can be stubborn. I was quite frustrated about this as it seems like it would have been useful to build up GM credibility (of which I have zero). Alas, it wasn't to be.

(I think we slightly misinterpreted some of guidelines - for example the additional resources seems allow all the tiefling variants so it followed that they were allowed themselves)

Now to try and convince the players they will be just as well off going this route than full murder hobo pick up everything that is dropped as per seemingly most "standard" games...

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