The chase rules for this scene are not quite the standard ones.
On your turn you can either:
A. try to move one card forward.
Your move action would be to move across the card. Your standard action would be to try one of the listed skills to leave the card. You can try a different skill than the listed ones, but it will be with a higher DC.
B. You can try to go really fast. As a full round action, you can try to meet both skill checks listed on the card. If you are successful, you can move forward three cards. If you're not successful, it is possible you could move forward by one, not move, or not move and get stuck for an extra turn.
C. You can try something else, like a spell or ranged attack. An enemy three cards or more ahead has total cover and total concealment, two cards away give partial cover and concealment, and one card gives partial concealment.
If your movement speed is not 30 feet, let me know; you can still only do the above, but you may have a bonus or penalty to your skill checks.
Alternate movement, such as flying, are allowed, but messy. The effects will vary card by card.
The chase DCs are the same for all levels, so I hope you get to do another one that will be more interesting some other time... This is going to be ridiculously easy for your team.
|
That makes sense... by the time chase scenes got introduced into PFS scenarios, I was way past Tier 1-5 which seemed to exclusively have them. The authors also never really extended them beyond these sorts of in-initiative, 30' block foot chases that are entirely about movement, the exact situations that are just not a challenge to PCs past like 6th level.
For example, I once wrote up a chase for pursuing a criminal across a city Law & Order style, where the PCs needed to use their detective skills to catch up to the criminal as they burnt their loose ends, where the timeline was completely abstract.
The system could have been so much more!
Yeah, the issue here is that the DCs for the chase were the same at all tiers, so things went really really fast.
This combat we are just starting is, like the others so far, appropriate to characters in the 12-15 level range. The final sequence of fights after that will be level appropriate, though... :)
Arnaut, your question does not matter now, but I wanted you to know I'm not ignoring it. I would have allowed teleport to move you forward by two cards, because that's how far forward you can see.
In cast you are curious, more enemies would have appeared if you had not defeated her so promptly. Now we get to move on to the level appropriate fights sooner.
For the adventure so far, everything has been CR12-16, which is reasonable for levels 12-15. The part we are starting now is the only one to do 15+ separately from 12-15, and is CR 15, 17, and 18. (your APL is 18.3)
I get the impression you guys want a big, bad fight. If this is correct, I can change my approach a bit to make the bad guys do the smartest, nastiest things their abilities and written morale/strategy allows for. However, I think we all need to agree on that, and everyone needs to not hold back if I do.
I'm still waiting to hear if Cazic is OK with me really going for it in terms of bad guy strategy.
OK, team. We've completed all three waves set up for us in the scenario. We can either stop now, with full rewards, or keep fighting more wendigos. They will be the same level challenge as the last one.
If we stop now, we are just waiting for the House GM to tell the end of the story in a week or so.
What do you want to do?
Even to allow more wendigos is unfortunately a bit of a stretch. The scenario does think it likely that a group could have time for more than three waves. A group that finishes their three waves is allowed to move on to the combats appropriate for the next tier up, but there is nothing beyond you guys.
If you as a team are interested, I'll start another wendigo combat. It would be with a template like the second one was.
The scenario is actually a pretty rotten one. The only reason for its popularity is that it allows such high level characters, but it does them very poorly. Until this final set of combats, everything was actually written for a table of level 12 and 13s. This final set of combats separates out APL 15 or higher, but the final bad guy is still only CR 18, while you are APL 18.3. I think you would have found these combats more challenging/interesting if the results of initiative had allowed the bad guys to act, because the wendigo actually has some powers that you guys might at least have noticed.
Why I say this is a rather rotten scenario is how much it casts the Society as a bunch of murder-hobos. I've tried to make it a bit more fun by at least avoiding the most egregious examples of this, such as forging documents to frame people, pretending to be enforcers from a loan-shark, or blackmailing someone by threatening to reveal their romantic involvements. These were all some of the possibilities for other missions a while back.
I knew you guys were going to be overpowered, but I expected that it would be quickly smashing bad guys in a way that would be fun as something very different from a normal adventure. The scenario wasn't actually even set up to allow that, except for at the very end.
I do apologize to you guys for any extent to which your lack of fun was caused by anything I did. I've been trying to make things fun with the scenario I was given, and it sounds like I've failed.
|
I think you did a good job, given the limits of the scenario. And I appreciate that you avoided the sketchier missions as much as possible--Falling Rock is a very efficient murder-machine, but a reasonably honorable one, in his own semi-barbaric way.
I was mainly interested in playing this because it was one last chance to play the only PF character I've ever played to anywhere near this level (my next highest is 14th). But I knew coming into this that he was going to be hard to challenge in a fight.
For me, the more enjoyable parts were when we had to be a bit more creative instead of just steamrolling things. Like keeping the hydra fight interesting without a quick kill, or the little show we staged to scare off the one bidder.
Dropping out of character...
My main frustrations with this whole special is that we were rushed through the interactions with the scenario itself and weren't really allowed to employ creative solutions. This was a Tier 1-5 scenario in how constrained we were in what methods we could employ! It's as if no effort was made to support anything beyond that, other than a couple lines of text!
If that's an okay approach for specials, then why don't they do the same with every scenario, just slap on a couple lines of text and have everything be 1-20?
And then, as insult to injury, we got rushed through the interactive pieces, and now, with weeks to spare, there's just nothing left you the GM are allowed to present to us, at all? That's awful!
-Matt
Yeah, Siege was after my time... Does it go all the way to 19th?
I'm just relishing the prospect of playing Lady Gabrielle again after all these years of dormancy. I'll take anything!
|
|
Content at this level is VERY scarce in PFS. Other than Race, the only PFS-sanctioned content that goes above 15th level is (AFAIK):
#10-98 Siege of Gallowspire: level 5-16, multi-table special.
#10-22 & #10-23 Passing the Torch, Part 1 & 2: level 12-18.
The Moonscar: level 15-17, module.
The Witchwar Legacy: level 16-18, module.
Most Adventure Paths cap out at 16-18 in Book 6, if they even go that high. Return of the Runelords (17-20) and Wrath of the Righteous (18-20) appear to be the only exceptions.
(Falling Rock, Rilke, and Cazic played Passing the Torch and Witchwar as our final adventures after completing Giantslayer, Shattered Star, and bits and pieces of Emerald Spire.)
Wrath of the Righteous and Return of the Runelords sound fun!
Lady Gabrielle ended up going through Eyes of the Ten for 13.2, then APs and mods to 19.2, and now here.
Now that PFS1E is kind of defunct, how do individual GMs feel about playing loose with the level caps? I would love to have Lady Gabrielle interact with the NPCs of Passing the Torch.
|
|
I'm not a V.O. or anything of that sort (though some of the other players in this game are) but from everything I've heard, Paizo has no intention of changing the rules for PFS1E. There might not be any new content available for it, but it's still a viable campaign, with a huge player base. GMs who want to run games for legal credit can't bend rules like level caps, period.
On the other hand, anyone is free to run PFS scenarios as part of a home game without receiving organized play credit. In those games, they're free to do whatever they wish with the material, just like any other published module.
Sure, just let me play 33 scenarios with a Core Bard real quick here :(
Unless, and since Eyes Part 1 was that damn good... Am I able to access my mountain of GM credit from the pre-Core days and make a Core character?
@Falling Rock so even though PFS1E is defunct, Paizo is still governing it?
PFS1 is not defunct. We still report scenarios on Paizo's website, and even still get boons from Paizo for our conventions. There are not new scenarios or books, but recently more APs have been given chronicle sheets.
Flaxseed lodge is still active, and PFS1 only. It's quiet right now because of GameDay, but I expect that soon recruitment will pick back up.
About GM credit, only GM credit from running core games can be used to build core characters. Your GM credit is just as valid and usable now as it has always been, and under the same rules.
Some local lodges have chosen to stop supporting PF1, and may even give the impression that PF1 has wound down or is ended, but that is not true.
PFS1 is not defunct. We still report scenarios on Paizo's website, and even still get boons from Paizo for our conventions. There are not new scenarios or books, but recently more APs have been given chronicle sheets.
Flaxseed lodge is still active, and PFS1 only. It's quiet right now because of GameDay, but I expect that soon recruitment will pick back up.
Oh wow! I'll have a look at that Flaxseed Lodge, thanks! There's been zero PFS, 2 or 1, in my country since the pandemic started, and digging up what I needed just to join this table, like the Guide to PFS PDF itself, was such an ordeal that I assumed the campaign was fan-run. There's nothing on Paizo.com itself about PFS1E but a link to the old messageboard, not even a link to First Steps 1 or The Confirmation.
The 1E scenarios are available on Paizo under Pathfinder > Adventures > First Edition Adventures: https://paizo.com/store/pathfinder/adventures/first. There's still a fair amount of stuff online, if you search on Warhorn, in addition to Flaxseed for PbP/PbD.
There's almost no sanctioned content for very high level scenarios (as Falling Rock posted above), which is why folks want to play this special. It's only the 3rd or 4th special that Paizo ever wrote and it is definitely showing it's age. Later season specials worked much better. I loved Gallowspire myself. But in terms of society legal content, I'm guessing you won't have much of anything for Gabrielle.
But in terms of society legal content, I'm guessing you won't have much of anything for Gabrielle.
Yeah, I might just have to clone her for 2nd Ed or look at joining an AP.
Hi, everyone.
Now that the story is wrapped up, please roll 1d20 to see if you get a boon. I'll roll for anyone who has not rolled themselves in 24 hours. 19 or 20 wins.
edit: I forgot to specify that if you get a boon, please roll 1d3 to determine which one.