I have three main issues with the scenario.
The first is that the scenario has a single point of failure, which in my opinion is a massive no-no for any scenario. If you walk past the portrait in the Paracountesses study, you fail the mission, period. We did search the room when I played this but because we never specifically said that we were searching the portrait we failed the scenario.
Historically as a DM and a player I have assumed that when you roll a perception check on the room; you are searching everything in the room (how else do you discover that pulling the fifth book from the right on the bookcase opens a secret door?). This set a precedent where players may start to specify every item in each room they search. As a DM and a player I would find this tedious.
The second problem I have is with puzzles themselves. While I do like giving the players something a bit different to do, it doesn’t gel with roleplaying your character, as the player is expected to solve the puzzle rather than their character. So if you have a character with five int being played by someone that is very good at puzzles and someone with a character with eighteen intelligence that is not good at puzzles, how do you explain that the character with five int is more likely to solve it?
So, by all means put a puzzle in. Link some gold to it but don’t make it a core requirement of the scenario as it breaks the concept of roleplaying or at the very least allow a brute force solution if all else fails (See Rebels Ransom for a good example of this). (You could in theory make getting the solution a intelligence check but that takes a lot of the fun out of it and attribute checks are too swingy for anyone to really like them)
The third problem I had with this is the time counter. The concept of time in Pathfinder outside of combat is very nebulous and frankly should be that way (it saves a lot of time). No one really wants to workout exactly how long it takes to search a dead camel for loot. It’s irksome when something you though would only take a minute ends up taking three.
The prime example of this is when you are trying to get back to the meeting room in time to meet the ambassador. It took the party that I played with eight minutes to get to the Paracountesses room on the way there, including stoping for clothes and various other shenanigans on the way. However on the way back you don’t play the trip rather it just takes a flat 15 minutes (it’s specified in the adventure). This almost caused our group to fail, as we assumed it would be roughly the same amount of time to get back as it did to get there in the first place.
Worse still, if you count the distance, its three hundred feet from the Paracountesses rooms to the waiting room (the long way around). That’s five rounds or thirty seconds of movement typically. Even if you double that for opening doors and avoiding servants, it’s still only a minute as opposed to fifteen. If you had some players that relied on that metric for determining how long it takes to get back to the waiting room only to find out that that it takes a flat fifteen minutes when they go to do it and the 14 minute gap between the two numbers is enough for them to fail the scenario (and lose all of their collected gold!), I don’t imagine that they would be very happy.
A style similar to the chase mechanic would probably serve infiltration section far better.
Lastly, and very minor points:
- You go from fighting awesome Bearded Devils, the foot soldiers of hell, to fighting a bunch of chairs.
- As a Judge, have you ever tried to describe the attacks of an animated chair?
- Why doesn’t the ambassador have a name?
