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I have come to sincerely dislike the new sub tier system introduced this season as well as the faction mission guide lines.
More often than not I find my tables fall between tiers and at 6 - 7 players. So they have to play the higher tier with the 4 player adjustments. This has resulted in uncontrollable player deaths. Most of you know, I have no sympathy for players doing dumb stuff and getting killed. But this environment doesn't leave room to make the deaths enjoyable. There is a very small window to make the deaths either glorious or comical. I feel it's important to make sure may players have fun regardless of the outcome of their adventuring, and I feel the ability to manipulate poor situations has been stripped from me when a couple level 1, 3 and 5 characters are facing a CR6 or CR7 encounter. This was fine when the players chose to do so as most groups opting to play up where either optimized builds or strong niche builds.
I have also found it more difficult to keep the games within a 4-5 hour window. Last night was a prime example of this. I was running Veteran's Vault which has a reputation of being a "quick" scenario. Last night it took my table of 6, 5.5 hours to complete. The group did not play poorly, but being that most of the players were "out of tier" they simply lacked the damage output to handle the encounters in a timely manner. They even diplo'd through one of the encounters and it still took over 5 hours. Thank the gods, I didn't have to handle faction missions in conjunction with this.
I have also come to dislike how the factions are being handled. I thought it was a great idea initially; giving more freedom to both the players and GM's to see each Pathfinder push for their factions. Since we play and run so many more of the old seasons vs. season 5, most of my players have become unattached to their factions. I even had one of my newer players (New to PFS, not RPG) come to me and ask what the point of the factions was. This was disappointing to hear as much fun as I know I had in the past with the faction hand outs.
I wasn't running into these issues until the Season 5 changes. Is anyone else running into these issues? I'm sure I can't be the only one seeing this and I would love to hear how others are managing the faction separation as well as managing their tables to keep them on time.