More teenage shenanigans from GMing for my church’s youth group. It’s technically not PFS any more since we started playing Skull and Shackles this year. Here are several quotes from today’s game, not necessarily in sequential order:
Me (as GM): I’d prefer that this game not get bogged down in a discussion of kobold genitalia.
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Player: You know how I said my character doesn’t drink? Well, I changed my mind because, you know, pirates.
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The kobold bard twice fell in the water practicing grappling and boarding, and the master gunner was pointing out his inadequacies in a curse-heavy tirade.
Bard: I curse back at the master gunner draconic..
Master Gunner: I don’t speak good draconic, but I know what that means!
So, this was my last session with my church youth group before we take a break for the summer. They have collectively asked me about a million times if there are more modules with pirates in them, so I told them that I had purchased the first book of Skull and Shackles to run when we start up again in the fall. They immediately get distracted from today’s game, talking about what characters they want to play in the pirate game.
Kid 1: I want to make a dwarven gunslinger.
Dad who plays with us: I’m thinking of making some kind of brawler.
Kid 2: I want to make Warmachine. Can I have a suit of armor with a cannon on the shoulder?
Is there some subliminal messaging in this mod that makes players want to split the party? I have run it twice, and twice had to threaten and cajole my “ducks” back into line.
Session 1 - The party jumps out a window with Tistin. Half the group goes to find him a safe location to lie low, and half goes to report back to Roderus.
Session 2 - Half the party goes to investigate Phlegos’s shop/lodge and half stay at the party “so it doesn’t look suspicious that we all left at the same time”.
In both cases, it was low tier and there were, and there were some combat capable level 3s in the right place to avoid half the party getting wiped. I try not to tell the players “no, you can’t do that”, and players are usually pretty good about staying together. I’m just kind of amused that this happened twice with the same module.
It’s not a horrible idea, but I think it may have some unintended consequences of encouraging the same experienced GMs to run games all the time. If a new GM, who is just learning the ropes, gets slammed with some critical reviews early on, that person may just get discouraged, decide they’re a bad GM. Maybe they just needed 10 or 20 games to get comfortable and they would have become a good GM eventually.
If this system existed, the PFS community would need to be very intentional about encouraging new GMs, saying “Look, people are giving you constructive criticism to help you get better. Don’t be discouraged. Learn from it and don’t take it as a personal attack.” Hopefully we are encouraging of new GMs anyway, but we would have to do that even more if players got to rate the GMs, because someone would write “stupid noob, doesn’t even know the rules for grappling” and someone would get upset and stop running games because of that.
I am planning on running Reaping What We Sow for my church youth group of gamers on the 28th because one of the kids asked me if I was going to do something special for Halloween.
I pondered using Murder’s Mark for the creepy circus aspect, but that does not accommodate level 3 characters.
More tales from running PFS for a bunch of middle schoolers at church. Yesterday’s game was Rise of the Goblin Guild. This group’s feelings towards goblins are colored by their experience playing Frostfur Captives (they regularly inquire about whether their former prisoners are making progress in their Pathfinder training).
The spoilers are relatively minor, but I’ll hide them just in case you are very fastidious about avoiding such information from mods you have not played . . .
Spoiler:
1. The party was chasing Ekkie through the streets. Several PCs had cornered her, while the ranger was lagging behind at the horse and cart event. The player asked, “Can I use handle animal to get the horse to stampede towards the goblin?” “I’m not sure that’s a great idea,” I replied, “but we’ll call it a contested handle animal check between you and the driver of the cart.” “Great,” said the player, “I just put another point into handle animal when I reached 2nd level.”
2. The PCs were interrogating Ekkie. “We need to consider that she might actually be a Pathfinder,” said the wizard. “She was carrying a wayfinder.” When Ekkie announces that she was part of the Nightsoil Marauder gang, the wizard opined. “Oh, your not a Pathfinder, but a Poopfinder.”
3. Final boss fight, though context is not super important. “What kind of action is it to move forward and tell Randall (the cleric) that he’s being an idiot?”
Thank you for your helpful answers. You've helped me get a clearer picture of where I’m going with this character. I realized that I had a ratfolk boon, which I wanted to try to use before it gets rendered obsolete by PF2. Being a clockwork tinkerer is an excellent social guise for a sneaky ratfolk vigilante.
This may be a more general setting question, but it pertains to a PFS character that I am considering. What is the state of clockwork technology in Golarion?
I know that there are various clockwork beasties scattered across several of the monster books, and even a clockwork type to cover their common characteristics. Is there more mundane clockwork stuff, or is it so rare and expensive that it only gets used for fantastical creatures and servants? For example, do pocket watches exist? Do grandfather clocks exist?
Basically if I gave a character craft (clockwork) is he necessarily a construct repairman or could he be a watchmaker? I’m thinking it’s a good story for a character who is also a skillled loci picker and device disabler but doesn’t rely on thievery to make a living.
Would craft (mechanical) be a better fit? Would that cover actually making locks? It’s probably not going to affect play all that much, but it’s more a question of what does this guy do in between Pathfinder missions.
I feel like I am coming to this party late, and other people have said most of the things that I would have said. I would add two comments:
1. I have always felt that Grand Lodge works well as an “I don’t like any other faction” faction. If you don’t really want to deal with the other factions’ politics, and just want to get on with doing Pathfinder missions, that’s a good choice.
2. It can be fun to play against the stereotypes. For example I have a tiefling rogue in Silver Crusade “because the bad guys are going to sneak and cheat, so you need someone to stop all the paladins from walking into traps.”
I run a monthly game for some of the youth in my church (and one super helpful dad, who helps me herd the cats). Since they are relatively young, and new to role-playing, they are usually good for a couple of good quotes, or humorous strategy that’s outside of what I expected. These are from The Frozen Fingers of Midnight, but the context is not super important:
“So, our goal is to kidnap this guy, and steal his stuff, but not look like criminals?”
While discussing a plan to sneak into a warehouse, one player turns to the player with the Harsk pregen. “Not you! You’re too short and fat for sneaking!”
Teenage boy, “Well, you’re a hottie.”
That player’s sister, “Please ignore him. He doesn’t speak for all of us.”
3-01 The Frostfur Captives is pretty straightforward, and if you can play up the Goblin's antics, it's a great romp. It's one of the first scenarios I played, and the one I probably remember the most simply because the GM made the Goblins as entertaining as possible, even if it broke some of the rules.
I have recently started running a monthly PF game for some of the teenagers at my church (and one Dad who used to play RPGs back in the day). I ran this, Sunday afternoon, based on Kwinten’s suggestion and it was a lot of fun. Much hilarity watching some relatively new role-players threaten and cajole their goblin prisoners. Giving each gobbo a name and one sentence of personality was totally prep time well spent.
I have not read the entire thread, so forgive me if I am being repetitious. In my real life work as a college professor I have seen numerous situations where a student knew something once and then couldn't recall it correctly in a pressure situation. I'm assuming that fighting a demon is roughly equivalent to taking a calculus test ;-)
My -8, Mila Syrenka, is the adopted daughter of my Kingmaker character. After a scuffle with some of the barbarian tribes in the River Kingdoms, our Kingmaker group took one of the chieftain's daughters back to our capital city as a ward to promote peaceful dealings in the future. As an adopted daughter, she is part of the Syrenka family, a noble house that my Kingmaker character basically invented.
She was not much interested in helping to run a kingdom (though she is a rare barbarian with a skill point in diplomacy because she tried). When our Kingmaker game ended she was sent south to join the Pathfinders, with some vague instructions to spread the word about the recently formed kingdom, make friends and secure allies. Her current goal is to marry into the Blakros family, which would surely surpass all expectations of the Kingmaker party.
Other than that, my PFS characters are not really inter-connected.
In my opinion, Grand Lodge is a good choice in the sense that it says, "I'm focused on nature, so I don't really have time for the petty politicking of you other factions." That was probably a stronger argument back in the day when many of the factions were tied to a specific nation.
As many people have said before me, there isn't an obvious nature choice. You could make a case for multiple other factions depending on exactly what you want to do with nature, or if there is some other motivating factor for your character.
I have experienced two PC deaths, both by the same character though I had enough gold and PP to revive her both times. I think my experiences match some of the common themes that other people have been talking about in this thread.
The first death was due to a failed save. The bad guy cast a big area damage spell, when Cat was already an pretty low hit points. She's partly a rogue, so she has a pretty good reflex save and evasion - full damage was going to kill her, but there was a pretty good chance of taking 0. Except I rolled a 4 on the saving throw, and then used my shirt re-roll to roll a 3.
The second was just from trying to get in some sneak attack damage when I should have been hanging back out of reach of the heavy hitters. It was a little bit bad tactics on my part, and a little bit bad party balance. We were a four person group without much of a front line melee presence so I was trying to step up and contribute more melee with a character that is not really built for that. From that death, I at least have the cool story of being raised from the dead thousands of years before I died.
The closest I have come to killing a PC when I was GMing was from critting an already injured first level character . . . but then I rolled a 1 and a 3 on my 2d8, and barely even knocked him unconscious.
I have a character who went through the change from "Cat" to "The Amazing Katarina" to "Trade Princess Katarina". That's probably not so dramatic as what you are proposing, but nobody has ever given me any hassle over it.
The Erastil and Calistria folks may not get along. He's about structured society and traditional gender roles; she's about liberality and sexual freedom.
We had a Calistrian High Priestess in our Kingmaker game, and our GM played up the disagreement between the Calistrians and the followers of Erastil. It became the explanation behind several of the negative kingdom events that we rolled up.
On the other hand, our Calistrian was on reasonably good terms with some followers of Gyronna, and stalled the party from hunting them down for quite a while until it became painfully obvious that they would not give up doing disruptive things to the kingdom.
I don't know the details of the module that you played, but I have both played and run PFS games, so let me try to answer a couple of your questions.
Why are the GM's hands tied?
The official PFS line is that GMs should stick to the module, so that there is a consistent play experience from one place to another. A GM can't go crazy and kill everyone with things that aren't really there. A GM can't go crazy and give away all the cool loot without making the party face the same challenges as anyone else who played through the same adventure. In practice, you'll find some GMs that are very conscientious about sticking exactly to the script and others who are willing to mix things up depending on what the party is doing. Some will be willing to pull their punches for a new player or new character, and others will say this only sets up for future failure. You start expecting that things are always going to be easy and then you get your 3rd or 5th or 10th level character killed after you've invested a lot more than four hours of play in that character.
Why was the module built to ensure PCs would be killed?
Low level mods can be very swingy for first level characters, particularly brand new first level characters. One or two good hits (particularly if you are unlucky in initiative, and someone gets the jump on you)) can take a first level character from full health to dead. I know the closest I have come to killing a character was rolling a lucky crib against an already injured new character. I happened to roll a 3 and a 1 on 2d8, when an average roll would have killed him. If you happen to roll 8, 9 and 10 on your 2d6 rolls for negative channeling that's just bad luck and it hits particularly hard against first level characters.
Should I play again? Will my character die again?
Give it another shot. Maybe you'll play with a different GM or a different mod that you'll like better. Maybe you'll just be luckier with the dice rolls. Once you get a few games under your belt, and a few experience on your character, then you're a lot safer from one streak of bad luck wiping you out.
I don't totally regret these characters, but I definitely have some second thoughts on seeing how they turned out.
1. Rogue/Sorcerer/Arcane Trickster - She's an interesting character, and a lot of fun in social scenarios like Blackros Matrimony, but she's definitely behind the power curve and gets carried by other party members when serious fighting breaks out. She has died (and been raised) twice, which is more than all of my other characters combined. She kind of fell into the trap of being capable of doing a lot of things, but not really great at any one thing.
2. Sylph Monk - I wanted to make a monk who was good at jumping and acrobatics, and could do all the kung-fu movie special effects. Like the arcane trickster, he is fun, but not very powerful. Jumping around and looking cool is just not a universally useful skill in Pathfinder mods. It also doesn't help that the Crane Wing feats got changed just as he was getting high enough level to take them. I see how they could be overpowered on some characters, but I thought they might be a chance to boost my not overpowered character back to something like normalcy.
I actually enjoyed Stolen Heir for the interesting moral dilemma it presented. I played it at a con, where there were 2-3 different tables of the same mod over the course of the weekend and we had some great conversations on the theme, "oh, your table did it THAT way?"
My Experience in Stolen Heir:
I played this mod with a character who is chaotic good, and very devoted to Calistria. He is very big on helping the underdog and getting revenge for those who can't do it for themselves. Rescuing a girl who was sneakily kidnapped by her own father was right in his wheelhouse for role-playing. I was pleasantly surprised when I said "This is an important religious point for my character, and I don't think we should let this guy go unpunished just because he is influential" the rest of the table was pretty willing to go along with me.
Here's another story about having trouble doing good . . .
My Experience in Masks of the Living God:
I had the misfortune to play this mod with my paladin. He was the right level, and he had played through Crypt of the Everflame, but he was a terrible, terrible choice to sneak into an evil cultist gang. There were multiple opportunities where I had to choose between making non-Paladin choices or really derailing the whole game for the rest of the table. I went for the "don't be a jerk" option, and voluntarily paid for an atonement afterwards, though the GM said I didn't have to. He was just being nice because I didn't disrupt his table too much . . .
It looks like there have been a bunch of good answers to the question already, but I'll add a few more. If you want to borrow or adapt anything go for it. If you want to say, "Dear Lord, thank you that I am more creative than that idiot, Geoff" just say it quietly so you don't hurt my feelings.
Arcane Trickster:
She considers herself too intelligent and charming to have to do physical labor for a living. Becoming a Pathfinder was a more acceptable option than burglary or insurance fraud.
Paladin:
Saranrae told him to take his healing talents to the Pathfinders, where they would be well-used. Also, as a gnome, he tries to avoid falling into a boring routine, and the Pathfinders are anything but boring.
Monk:
Being a Pathfinder allows him to test his training against all manner of opponents and challenges. That, and a bit of sylph wanderlust.
Rogue:
He's a bit of a vigilante type, in the spirit of Batman. He really bought into the Shadow Lodge ideals of keeping a watch on those in charge, and making sure they don't abuse their power.
Magus:
He hopes to follow in his father's footsteps as a diplomat and ambassador for the Elven Kingdoms. He has been tasked with traveling the human lands and learning about them, and the Pathfinders give him an excellent opportunity to do this.
Barbarian:
Her adoptive mother was a minor noble in the River Kingdoms. The daughter was a wild spirit, who wanted no part of court intrigue, so her mother sent her to go make friends and allies among the Pathfinders. In keeping with that motivation, she is saving up prestige to marry into the Blackros family.
Cleric/Rogue:
He's a bit of an Indiana Jones type. The Pathfinders send him out on daring adventures, and then he has stories to impress the ladies, and score free drinks.
Summoner:
He seeks access to the knowledge gathered in the Dark Archive to further his studies of spirits and extra-planar creatures.
Druid:
She is gaining power and experience to prove herself a worthy student/lackey to the Master of Gales. Of all of my PFS characters, this is probably the character with least loyalty to the Pathfinder Society and/or her faction.
My druid (Now into the storm kindler prestige class) is all about finding out what's up with the Eye of Abendego. The society gives her resources to sail around and learn things.
Of course, by the time they actually visit the eye she's far too high level to go with them, but...
In what book is the Storm Kindler? It sounds like it would eventually be a good fit for the druid character that I just started.
In an attempt to not derail the conversation too greatly, that same character joined the Pathfinders to travel more widely, and grow in power. Her backstory is that she wanted to learn from the Master of Gales (in the Shackles) and he basically told her, "Come back when you actually know something, and I'll see if you're worth teaching."
I can't pretend that I'm going to respond to every thought that's come before me in this thread. I may even end up repeating some things, but here's a couple of experiences I've had with evil characters and evil campaigns.
Evil campaigns I have played in:
I have played in two reasonably successful evil campaigns (one in a fantasy setting, one in the Star Wars universe). It is possible to enjoy playing in a campaign like that, and not let it devolve into setting kittens on fire for the lolz. However, I think those games had a couple of things that Pathfinder Society does not. One, it was consistently the same players every week, so the characters built up some rapport with each other even if they were murderous bastards to most everyone else. Second, there was a powerful authority figure in both games who, to some degree, forced us to work together towards common goals.
We Be Goblins:
I very much enjoyed playing We Be Goblins, but my table also TPKed in that adventure, which I have been fortunate enough to avoid (sometimes narrowly) in other PFS games. If I lost a character that I had actually spent a lot of time and effort building up to chaotic, evil and goblin-like behavior, I think I'd be pretty upset about that.
My nearly evil Kingmaker character:
My local group recently played through the Kingmaker adventure path. I was interested in playing my character's progression from N to CN to CE as she became more and more obsessed with getting her children into positions to inherit the Kingdom after the current generation of adventurers got old and died. I found that I could not be really chaotic evil without being massively disruptive to the game, so I ended up sticking at CN and letting most of the evil part fall into "and this is what I would have done after the campaign was over".
So, based on my experience, I am extremely skeptical of a successful integration of evil characters into Pathfinder Society. It can be fun in one shot games (the upcoming Aspis Consortium game sounds cool) or if you can get a consistent group to buy into the idea. Just letting random people roll up to the table with evil characters - the risks outweigh the rewards in my eyes.
1. A gnome paladin. His riding dog fits in most places and helps him overcome the disadvantages of being painfully slow, and utterly incompetent at acrobatics checks to avoid slipping and falling.
2. A mounted fury barbarian. About half the time I have to leave the horse behind, but I've tried to make sure that that character has a few cool things she can do while not mounted, so she is not completely worthless every time the party has to go down a 5 foot corridor.
I plan on using my star (and probably my second if and when I get that far) to replay Blackros Matrimony and/or Hellknight's Feast with my character who has the potential to join the Blackros family. I feel that would be thematically appropriate.
I'm signed up. I have other level 1-3 characters other than the barbarian if we have an excess up run up and punch the enemy in the face type characters.
Do you expect the same players will want to come back and continue with the same characters? I would love to join you next Saturday, but I don't want to throw a monkey wrench in anyone's continuity.
Ooh, there has been a flurry of activity here while I was throwing stuff in boxes and driving across the country. I will check out the Warhorn site and try to make it to some events soon.
"Mites - I've walked a mile in their shoes, and I still hate them!"
Our party ranger spent most of the campaign nursing his hatred (and boosting his favored enemy bonus) against the fey. When he was killed and raised from the dead, interfering fey magic caused him to come back in the form of a mite. He had some self-esteem and self-hatred issues for the last several sessions of the game until we saved the kingdom, lived happily every after, and the GM decreed that he could find someone to turn him back into a human.
It's not quite on-topic, but we had an event at my local PFS where we chose a few scenarios and played in pairs, playing a single character 4 or so levels above the tier they were in. The idea was inspired by the stories of pathfinder that went in, mucked up, died, and then they send in the team. It was really fun! Obviously not for PFS credit though.
That sounds line a fun twist on the usual missions. I can imagine that certain PFS characters would be reasonably good at running solo, and some would be a bit too one dimensional. I guess that's why you need to send in the rescue team . . .
I guess the goal is to try to get more DM's to run more often, but more specifically in the cases where it's not strictly required, (like when a table or two are close to or are maxed out), and another table would probably be the better option to make things more fun for everyone. When this happens, I think, and this is just my opinion, is that the largest barrier is those other GM's getting credit or not, especially when a lot of the people I play with have a very limited selection on what they can get credit for and how.
In this situation I'd actually say its better not to open up another table unless you had a prepared GM. Even if that means sending someone home.
Running cold should almost never be an option.
Andrew, I agree with your argument overall, but I think you are mis-representing the opposite argument here. The point is that it wouldn't be running cold if the GM in question could pull out "the thing I ran last week" and run it again.
The counter-counter-argument is that there is nothing stopping GMs from doing this already. I have even done it myself, and I have not even GMed that many sessions to the point where I am overwhelmed with GM credits. For me, the advantage of not having to prep a completely new thing is enough of a positive to outweigh that I cannot assign credit to one of my characters for the second run through.
A couple of observations from running this past weekend (with spoilers, but I'm assuming if you have gotten up to post 180 in a thread in the DM forum then you probably know most of what is in this mod!) . . .
1. Using Star Wars minis was a great tip (I forget who mentioned it earlier). I used battle droids and super battle droids for the various robots/gearsmen, and also found a appropriate woman with a laser pistol for Gerda.
2. My players apparently hate Nigel so much that they took the time to ransack his office (and "steal his paperweight and engraved letter opener") even though none of them actually needed to for their faction.
3. I was very sad that one of the hungry fleshes died when it was one growth point away from becoming bigger :-(
4. My PCs were woefully unprepared for getting the cyberplasm out of Pendleton at the end (since they basically told Gerda to scram as soon as they talked her down). Eventually they tried to grapple him and tie him up, and I thought it was reasonable that the cyberplasm would come out and try to seize a less incapacitated host. Then they got to enjoy another couple rounds of trying to beat it out of the bard without killing their friend!
Well, that's not a question with a short, easy answer but let me throw out a couple of thoughts and see if other people agree or disagree . . .
1. People want their special snowflake to be special, not dead. If you envision your character as the next Batman, or Aragorn, or Lara Croft then it's not cool if you get ganked by goblins, or fall into a 20' pit, or die in some other ignominious fashion. If people can reduce their chance of death from 20% to 10% they will. If they can get it down to 5%, that's better. And some people will keep pushing until they get it down to 0.001%.
2. It's the nature of a game like PFS, where you may get thrown together with who knows what combination of other characters for your next game. Some people will take the approach of trying to make their character as awesome as possible so that they can survive being thrown into the most awkward, incompetent, unbalanced party that could ever be.
3. Optimizers like to talk about optimizing. You are more likely to get mechanical advice from other players (i.e. take this feat so that you can do three more damage) than you are to get flavor advice or role-playing advice.
3b. The internet. There are a plethora of threads about how to maximize class X to be good at task Y. You don't have to figure out how to make the most damaging fighter, or the most blasty wizard, you just need to go looking for what others have done before you.
If you are willing to travel as far as Pittsburgh (it's on the north side of Pittsburgh, though!) on the second Saturday of every month there is a group called GASP (Gamers of Southwestern Pennsylvania). They have all kinds of games, including some PFS.
Their website is www.gaspgamer.com
They have a message board where sign-ups and GMing is coordinated. They also run a local con in November, again with a variety of gaming, including some PFS.
I think it must be a challenge in writing scenarios that are of appropriate difficulty for any party. If you write a scenario that is sufficiently challenging for a bunch of well-optimized characters, who work well together as a team, then you will probably kill the four random people who showed up to play PFS at their local game store with three bards and a rogue. If you aim to make the scenario difficult for an average group, then a party with just the right combination of skills and abilities is going to roll some scenarios. I think that's just the nature of making a campaign where anyone, and any group of people, can play.
I don't really have any further questions, but I'm going to comment here so that I can find the thread again. I'll be moving to Vegas some time before the end of the year, and I'm definitely interested in finding a place to play PFS. I'm even willing to GM once in a while.
I have several characters with vanities that suit their characters:
Trade Princess Katarina acquired her title and a caravan at the same time, signifying her transition from a small time con artist to a successful merchant (although it's still a bluff-driven caravan). The idea of rising up from her poor roots has been a theme I've tried to develop in that character.
Auggie, my rogue who thinks of himself as Batman to the Silver Crusade's Justice League, has purchased several vanities to help further that analogy. He has a townhouse in Absalom, and a butler (seneschal) to help him recover after rough nights of dispensing justice from the shadows. He also works at the temple, but he has only one rank in the heal skill, so he is more of a philanthropist volunteer who never gets paid much for his efforts.
My paladin, Dr. Barjandar, also works at the temple between Pathfinder missions, but he's actually good at healing people because he's, you know, a doctor.
I feel like another good fictional example to look at are the Aes Sedai from Wheel of Time. They have made magical vows to tell the truth, but they're not stupid about it.
My favorite fictional paladins are the Knights of the Sword from the Harry Dresden books!
if i argue that vivisectionists, undead lords and gravewalker witches should be allowed using this same exact argument, how does that make me look?
I really need to answer this question:
Tobi, The Masked One wrote:
Why do we trust players being paladins not to be jerks but don't trust players to be Vivisectionists, Undead Lord clerics, allowing witches to have certain hexes, allowing Blood Biography, etc.? Its public perception. Neutrality leaning towards good and banning evil will always be more accepted than true neutrality banning extremes, and that is the true bias here.
Tobi has hit on a key point. The campaign, and the people who have official powers to decide what is legal within PFS, is trying to be neutral, leaning towards good. When the paladin is causing trouble, it is usually because he is doing something like being honest, or trying to stop party members from killing a defenseless prisoner. If an undead lord is being disruptive is is usually because he is desecrating corpses that were "resting in peace". I think that goes deeper than just public perception. There's a significant moral difference between those two things.
Why is the campaign not "neutral, banning extremes"? I feel like the weight of precedent in Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder style games (and certainly the overwhelming majority of large, organized play campaigns) has been on playing the good guys, and going out into the world to combat evil. You can be shiny good guys (Sir Galahad, Superman, Michael Carpenter, or Ollysta Zadrian) or darker, edgier good guys (Robin Hood, Batman, Harry Dresden, or Colson Maldris) but you don't get to play the bad guys. If the campaign authors are going to write a module, with some bad guys in it for you to oppose, they want to assume you fall within some broad category of people who would oppose undead running amok in Absalom, or demons pouring out of the World Wound.
I've played in individual games that permitted evil characters. I've played in games that were entirely evil characters. Those can be quite enjoyable, but I don't think they hold up well on the scale of PFS. You want some sort of assurance that the random cast of characters that show up at your table is on the same side, and willing to work together. One way to encourage that is the "no evil" rule. Evil doesn't have to be psychopathic, I know, but it generally comes with a "doesn't play well with others" vibe. Another way to encourage that is the Pathfinder creed, "Explore, Report, Cooperate". If your paladin is so tight to the code that he can't cooperate, then he's not a good Pathfinder either. My personal opinion (and we may just have to agree to disagree if it comes down to opinion) is that a paladin is easier to make fit the system than an evil character.
yes, you can roleplay LG, but you don't have a class restriction forcing you to do so. GM fiat is pretty much what allows paladins to be played at all. Roleplaying restrictions from other classes such as swashbuckler/gunslinger acts of derring-do are not enforced in society, are paladins meant to be hand-waved as well?
While I don't agree with your original argument, that Paladins need to be banned, I kind of agree that PFS does force both players and GMs to treat them a little differently than you would in a home game. That's just the necessary price for being able to throw together lots of random tables of different GMs, players and characters, and still get it all done in four hours.
It's a little on the player. If you want to play a Paladin in PFS, know that you will not have the time to finish (and you're not going to make many friends at your table) if you cause major drama of every possible moral issue. Pick your battles, quickly role-play your objections, and if the rest of the party wants to do it anyway, know that you can't fight them.
It's a little on the GM. Don't spend the whole game, watching the paladin and looking for an excuse to make him fall. Just as the paladin shouldn't make mountains out of molehills, neither should the GM. If you think the paladin is doing something really outrageous, let him know he's putting a foot over the line, but don't nit-pick. For example, if the paladin objects to water-boarding the prisoner, but the rogue does it anyway, don't blame the paladin for finishing out the adventurer with the rogue. It's kind of a jerk move to say "Go wait in the corner for two hours, until the next game starts, or your paladin falls."
And it's a little on the rest of the players. The paladin should make some effort not to completely de-rail your game, but you can also make some effort not to start fights with the paladin. Don't metagame the fact that you, the player, know that the paladin is not allowed to smack you in the head if you do too many whacky evil hijinks.
To me, it really all comes down to the "don't be a jerk" rule. Can you have long, game de-railing arguments about paladins? Sure, but PFS kind of assumes you will act like a reasonable, cooperative person and try not to have those arguments because you want the next four hours to actually be fun.
Regarding the target audience for PFS, I think a good analogy is that PFS is like the McDonald's of gaming. Is it the best burger you ever had? Probably not. Can you go to lots of different locations, in lots of different cities and get a pretty consistent burger? Yes. Are there people who look down their nose at McDonald's because they only like burgers from The Holy Ground Irish Pub? Sure, but there's only one Holy Ground and if you don't live in New Orleans it's probably too far out of your way to get a burger. Do lots of people enjoy going to McDonald's every day? Yes, but it's not everyone's idea of a good time.
So, to specifically answer some of the OPs questions, does it favor gamers who move around all over the country? Sure. It's a good fit for people like that, or for people who can't commit the time to a game that runs every week. It's good for accommodating people who play all the time, and people who play only occasionally at the same table.
Does it favor optimizers? I think one of the qualities of a big organized play campaign is that you have to define, in more detail, exactly how the rules work. You want that consistency from one game to another. However, if the rules are more strongly defined, and the GM has less power to say "that's ridiculous, we're not using that in MY game" then it's easier for an optimizer to work. If you've min-maxed your character with a very obscure weakness, an optimizer might never (or only rarely) run into their problem situation.
Is it welcoming to new players? That probably varies from group to group, but it should be. You are less likely to end up at that table with five guys who have been gaming together since 1987, with their laundry list of in-jokes and house rules. It gives you a chance to try the game for four hours without making a commitment to show up at every session from now until the end of the campaign.
Is it adversarial? It shouldn't be, but I think because the rules are more strongly defined, sometimes GMs feel backed into a corner. It may feel like their putting their metaphorical foot on the neck of your character, but they're trying to stay true to what the module says to do. Different GMs seem to vary in how much they will stray from what was instructed - ymmv.
Is there any role-playing, or just combat? There are games that have more role-playing, and if that is your favorite thing about rpgs, then perhaps PFS is not the best fit for you (some people don't like McDonald's). The two things that seem to cut down on role-playing are that you sometimes get thrown together with a bunch of strangers (and you have no idea how much THEY want to role-play) and you're generally trying to get through a game in 4 hours. I think this varies widely, from table to table, depending on who else you are playing with. I have had some very fun RP in PFS sessions, and I have some where we spent most of the time fighting.
Wow, that turned out longer that I meant it to be. I hope I said something intelligent in there somewhere . . .
Because someone has to keep these murderhobo's directed at evil.
I know that my PFS paladin is motivated by a heavy dose of, "If you guys go off without me, then you'll just get into trouble, hurt yourselves, and probably die. Someone, and it looks like that's going to be me again, needs to keep an eye on you, so that you come back alive."
Mikhail Orlovsky, aasimar paladin of Shelyn, received a GM credit for Silent Tide on August 9th. I look forward to using my GM star replay to take this suave gentleman (with perform (dance) and profession (dance instructor)) to the Blackros Matrimony!
The same day, my long ago established tiefling rogue played Assault on the Worldwound, establishing his legacy as one of the worst military commanders to grace the ranks of the Pathfinder Society. If he were not Silver Crusade, I would probably have played a different character . . .
What kind of town are we talking about, and where is it located? Is it mostly a farming economy? Fishing? Shepherding herds of animals? Is it a trading cross-roads, with lots o resources catering to travelers and some quirky businesses that you'd typically only find in a much larger city? It seems like you'd get different kinds of inhabitants depending on your answers to those questions . . .
