Building PFS 2.0 Logistics Around Quests

[GM Thrawn]

I've had several posts in various threads that all really come back to one topic: Quests.

1) Brief history of quests and similar content in PFS1.0?

2) What is the benefits of having quests as a part of organized play?

3) What works with the current quest system in PFS1.0?

4) What areas have opportunities for improvement around PFS1.0 quests?

5) What organized play systems need to consider quest?

6) Why is this important to address now?

1) Brief history of quests and similar content in PFS1.0?

Quests as most people know them have been a part of PFS since the release of Honor's Echo during season 5. It had 6 quests, built around a somewhat united plot, with the 6th quest being a finale. It was built for level 1 characters, and each quest was built to be about an hour long. 3 more quest packs followed this model with a release in each season from 6-8. The Season 8 entry varied a bit, expanding to a 1-5 tier and only having 5 quests instead of 6 in the set.

There are other similar types of content that have been flirted with including those published in kobold quarterly and demo table creations like those run at gencon each year (that offered boons but no experience, prestige, or gold.)

2) What is the benefits of having quests as a part of organized play?

PFS was built around 4 hour scenarios, which has proven a good basis for organized play, but doesn't work for all groups and situations. Quests allow organized play to target 1 hour slots, being better for those with lower attention spans (kid track!) or smaller windows of play (weekday evening slots at game and hobby stores). They give smaller building blocks to be able to fit into events. (Have a 2 or 3 hour slot to fill at a con? Quests can do that, where scenarios don't do it well.) Quests give us a better way to introduce players to a game. (Getting people to play a 1 hour quest is much easier than getting them to commit to a 4 hour scenario. Perfect for both game store recruiting and con demo tables.)

3) What works with the current quest system in PFS1.0?

PFS1.0 quests gave us these 1 hour timeslots we could build around. This let us work with shorter time slots and something to more easily catch the attention of players who couldn't give us a full 4 hours for a scenario. They gave smaller sized offerings to develop new writers with, are excellent for training GM's, and are good learning tools for new players.

4) What areas have opportunities for improvement around PFS1.0 quests?

Although each quest in PFS1.0 was an individual session, which could in theory be scheduled independently, the implementation didn't truly make them independent. Series of quests were all linked by a single chronicle sheet, effectively "locking" a character who wishes to play all of the content or to get rewards from the quest. Rewards were based on completing multiple quests from the same set. This creates scheduling problems for players in situations such as "our game store are going to run 1 quest per week on Wednesday nights after work." If you run all the quests from one set, players who made some weeks and not others end up with a partial chronicle and have to decide whether to shelve a character, or whether to live with the reduced rewards, putting their character behind the curve. Mixing multiple quest packs doesn't work at all, since each player needs to have a different character for each quest pack they have "open" and haven't completed the chronicle for.

When doing demo tables or con slots, you often end up with partial chronicles. This makes it so those just trying out the game don't really see any tangeable results at all in the progress of their character, where even small rewards of xp/pp/gp would show them moving forward and give a feeling of accomplishment.

Many veteran players avoid quest play altogether, for fear of "locking" a character or necessitating closing a chronicle without finishing.

Independent chronicles with independent rewards would resolve all of these issues. The current experience and prestige systems make this difficult, and would likely need to be addressed to realize improvement in this area.

5) What organized play systems need to consider quest?

Although the quests themselves don't need to change a whole lot, how the organized play supports them has some key factors to address.

Experience System: - The current 3xp/lvl system is based on scenarios being the smallest increment of adventuring. Each scenario was 1 xp, and larger sized adventures (modules and adventure paths) awarded larger increments of xp. This created some obstacles when figuring out how to best chronicle quests. A change to make the quest the base increment instead of a scenario, resulting in 1 xp per quest, would make expanding the role of quests in PFS2.0 much easier. If the base decision is made that 1 quest = 1 xp, then it's a matter of determining how many quests make up a scenario (4 or 5 are the likely choices) will tell us a resulting xp/lvl system. (This assumes we still want 3 scenarios to result in 1 level. That can change as well, but that is an independent decision from this discussion.)

Prestige System: - The prestige system is equally difficult to break down into increments to support quests. With 2 pp per scenario, the pp per quest is currently fractional, and only works due to the way combined chronicles for a set of quests is structured. In order to support independent chronicles per quest, I recommend we establish a new figure of 2 pp per quest (so that pp are still earned on a 2 to 1 ratio vs xp). Scenarios would be increated accordinly, awarding a maximum of 2 pp per xp. (This would result in them being worth 8 or 10.) Note, this also gives the advantage of allowing more variation in prestige rewards based on how successful a party was, or what tasks were accomplished, potentially moving away from the expectation that all prestige will be earned for every scenario.

Quest Independence: - Although I believe quests should still be released in packs, each quest should stand on it's own, allowing players to get a full "experience" for playing it. If a player is getting their first look at Pathfinder, or their first look at organized play, it's important that they feel that they have accomplished something, even if they are only playing a 1 hour demo.

6) Why is this important to address now?

To support some of the items here means some fundemental changes to the foundation calculations used in the campaign. Making those changes now, allows quests to be useful, in addition to giving a number of other side benefits by allowing more configurability when writing. I believe making quests more of a focus can go head to head with some of the advantages D&D gained over PFS, by giving content easily run in short slots. Most D&D AL players in my area started with 1 hour content. I want the option to win players back and find new players using the same tool.

[numbat1]

Some well-reasoned arguments presented clearly. Thank you.

[Ferious Thune]

A smal correction, and then my thoughts...

Honor's Echo was the season 8 series of Quests. Phantom Phenomena was Season 7. Silverhex Chronicles was Season 6. House of Harmonious Wisdom was released as a regular scenario during Season 8, but it is a series of 5 Quests for levels 1-5, though only repayable at 1.

More importantly, though, there are Quests that predate all of those series. Ambush in Absalom and Urge to Evolve were single 1 hour Quests released through Kobold Quarterly. Later, Fate of Fangs was a 1 hour Quest released alongside Pathfinder Unchained to feature those characters.

The older, single quests do not grant XP, GP, or PP, but instead grant small one-time use boons. They almost never got run, because there were no significant rewards attached to them. They don't work for scheduling a short session (1 or 2 hour game), because of the lack of rewards. And they don't work well at conventions, because they are multi-tier (except for Fangs, I think).

The reason I think it's important to look at that history is to look at what problems the Quests were originally trying to solve. Part of it was to have something short to run at conventions. Part of it, though, was to help locations and players that don't have the time available to run a full 4-5 hour session on a consistent basis. It's that second goal that I don't think the current Quests are quite succeeding at.

As is mentioned in point #4, tying the Quests together in a series creates issues. At conventions, the payers could walk away with a completed chronicle and some rewards. If they are new to Pathfinder, they likely won't care that much if it's 1 prestige or 2 or a small amount of gold.

At a regular game day, though, players are more likely to feel punished for missing a game if they don't finish a series. Since they can't ever continue it later if the play something else on that character, they want to finish it. But if the series is being split up over multiple days, players can't always make the game.

As an anecdotal account, I attempted to start a Quests night at a local shop that always closed relatively early mid-week.

Anecdote:

Thursdays they were open to 9:30. So if we started by 6 or 6:30, allowing people time to arrive from work, then we could do 3 Quests a night. I was able to GM twice a month on Thursday nights.

For the first night, I ran Parts 1-3 of The Silverhex Chronicles for 6 players. Everything went fine. Some had played them at conventions, some had never played them. Fun was had.

For the second night, I ran Parts 4-6. Half of the people from the first night couldn't make it to the game, and a couple of new people showed up. Now, 3 people had completed the series, 3 had parts 1-3, and 2 had parts 4-6.

For the third night, rather than move on to Phantom Phenomena like I had planned, I went back and ran parts 1-3 again. This time is was with 1 of the players who had joined for parts 4-6, 1 who hadn't played at either earlier session, and 1 who had played parts 1-6, so started another new character. Plus a GM pregen.

To take a quick stock this now left us with:

4 characters who played parts 1-6
5 characters who played parts 1-3 (one of which was a second character for a player who played 1-6)
1 character who played parts 4-6.

9 players, 10 characters, 3 weeks, and only 4 completing the entire series.

For the fourth night, we decided to move on to Phantom Phenomena, which meant that characters who participated and had not finished Silverhex would never get to finish Silverhex. I ran parts 1-3 of Phantom Phenomena. We had some new players join. We had one of the original 6 players (who never finished Silverhex) return. We ended up with a 7 player table, which was a little crazy for the Quests, but no one else wanted to GM.

The fifth night, we finished Phantom Phenomena. One of the players didn't return, but the other 6 got to finish it on their characters.

The next month, I wasn't able to GM, but one of the players attempted to schedule Honor's Echo. I'm uncertain whether or not he was able to get a table going. I don't see it on the reporting for the location. The month after that, my schedule changed and I had to stop running Thursday nights. However, if Honor's Echo did happen, then we would have been out of Quests (not counting the early ones that don't grant XP), as House of Harmonious Wisdom had not been released yet.

Since then, only House of Harmonious Wisdom gets scheduled locally outside of conventions, and only ever in a full scenario length slot.

If the Quest series weren't linked, I might try it again with 2-hour slots instead of 3. But doing that with a 6-part series would just make the issues of getting all of the characters onto the same page that much harder, as now they need to make three game days for the complete series, not two.

I would very much like to see a more versatile system in 2.0.

My suggestions would be:

1 hour to 1 1/2 hour length. Slightly longer than now.

4 Quests is equivalent to 1 Scenario in terms of rewards (XP, Gold, Prestige, and GM rewards)

Quests are released in packs, but need not necessarily be linked.

Linked Quests do not need to be completed before other content is played. As long as a character is in-tier for the Quest, and has not already played it, they can play it.

Quests are repayable on different characters, regardless of level. (But scenarios are not)

More Quests above 1st level.

Quests cover a single tier 1, 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8, 9-10, etc.

Slightly longer quests would enable better storytelling, as would limiting them to a single tier. House of Harmonious Wisdom is great, and the best of the Quest Series so far, but a lot of space in the book is spent on the multiple tiers. Also, since it is only repayable by level 1 characters, inevitably when it is scheduled, someone signs up who is replaying and someone signs up with a level 4 or 5, creating an awkward situation where the level 1 player cannot even select a level 4 pregen.

I'm a big fan of the Quests, but as they stand now, they're not quite fulfilling their potential.

[mogmismo]

Thanks, it is a good time to consider quests. I can see doubling the quests released per year, but I would be disappointed to lose many more PFS scenarios per season. Trading a single scenario for another quest series sounds like a good balance.

They *are* valuable additions, and good for demos, but one of the real things we have going for us in in-depth stories. Higher level quests would be amazing as well.