As the campaign evolves, we often take time to review some of our decisions. Recently, we’ve discussed the qualifications for GMs achieving 5 novas. After parsing feedback from the community, we acknowledge the current path of reaching 5-Novas only works for people who can regularly attend conventions and that we need to provide other paths to the 5 nova goal.
As we looked at the issue, we discussed why each of the requirements for 5 novas existed and what being a 5 nova GM means. At the heart of the matter, GMs who achieve 5 novas aren’t just putting in time and running games; they foster their communities and are ambassadors for table-top roleplaying games. This necessitates GMs need to engage a playerbase beyond their local game. It also means GMs need a solid set of GM skills that enhance player experiences. The requirement of 10 special scenarios helps measure a candidate's community engagement.
Designating Starfinder Society #1–98: Into the Perplexity: The First Trial as a qualifying special made sense, but it didn’t go far enough in fixing the access problem. In truth, the team had some fears of this special scenario being run repeatedly for those who wanted their 5-Novas, which could diminish some of the special nature of this unique scenario. After reviewing all of this, the Organized Play team has come up with a solution that we think will resolve most of the issues going forward.
Our Solution: We’re going to take a batch of existing scenarios and make them 5-Nova qualifying scenarios, but with a maximum limit of credit. Each of these scenarios will now provide a maximum of 3 sessions worth of credit towards earning your 5th Nova. This means that a GM can run these up to 3 times to get credit towards their 5-Novas, with any subsequent runs not counting towards your 5-Nova qualification but still granting other GM credit as normal (such as number of games run).
The list of scenarios is as follows:
- Starfinder Society #1-39: The Herald’s War (Levels 7–10)*
- Starfinder Society #2-24: Cornered Rat (Levels 9–12)
- Starfinder Society #3-20: TBA Name (Levels 11–14)
- Starfinder Society #1-98: Into the Perplexity: The First Trial (Levels 3–6)
This change to qualifying events now provides a total of 12 potential credits towards your 5th Nova that are not convention specials. This means there is now an established path in place to get your 5-Nova without attending conventions.
To work with our reporting system, we automatically converted all prior runs of the above scenarios to being “special qualifiers” and made new reporting sections for non-qualifying runs of the game. Event reporters: please ensure you are choosing the correct reportable section when reporting these tables.
Left to right, Hierarch Kraaton by Graey Erb, and Dispassion by Mark Molnar.
Due to its unique nature, 1-98 will also have a 4-Nova GM restriction as well as a stipulation that players cannot use pregens for this scenario. While these restrictions may seem excessive, they should make a lot of sense as to why they exist once you play the scenario. There is also a request not to reveal the surprise or spoil the scenario for others.
In putting together the list of qualifying specials, we recognize that without 4 scenarios in this pool, GMs would be 1-credit shy of meeting the 10 special qualification. The asterisk by 1-39 represents that it is a “temporary” qualifying scenario. What that means, is that if you’ve run it in the past it will count towards your 5-Nova qualifications. It will continue to count in this manner until we have a suitable high-level scenario in Season 4 that will go above the level range allowed by pregens, which is our ideal goal for these scenarios to fill. Once such a scenario comes out, our intent is to “retire” 1-39 from this rotation.
This system should address the rightful concerns from the community about the accessibility of 5-Novas, while also ensuring that the qualifications for special scenarios are still something important, not something people can just easily grind out as they would a normal scenario, and emphasize the community involvement aspect of being a 5 nova.
While we are implementing these changes to the Starfinder Society program immediately, we are already formulating an equivalent path to 5 glyphs for the Pathfinder Society program and will release that list shortly.
Go forth, enjoy, and good luck to all those of you on your quest to hit your 5th Nova!
Until next time,
Thurston Hillman
Starfinder Society DeveloperTonya Woldridge
Organized Play Manager
Nova Qualifications Update
Thursday, October 29, 2020
