I would like to share my experience from PAX 2013.
This was a couple of firsts for me. It was a first pax, and it was a first Pathfinder Society. As a matter of fact, it was a first non-homebrew pnp experience, which is saying something since I've been playing tabletop dnd since the late 80's.
So, for whoever may give a damn, here is how Paizo and Pathfinder represented itself at what is supposed to be a pretty big deal gamer expo:
Paizo/Pathfinder had a small area in a general commons area, difficult to find for a PAX newbie, but findable for a guy who wanted to find it. The table had a few gents working at it who didn't know much about Paizo or Pathfinder, but were nice guys and able to direct you to people who knew enough to answers questions.
There were no freebies at the booth, but you could join a short tabletop scenario or card game for a pull of a random key from a grab bag, which had a chance to open a chest. The chest contained some goblin plushies, pathfinder novels, maybe other goodies. If you completed all 6 scenarios you got a PFS boon.
So my buddies and I joined the line to play a scenario. Only had to wait about 30 minutes, which isn't too bad considering some of the lines at pax. We went to the table with our GM, one of many tables in the room.
During our wait we were told to choose one of the 1st level pre-made characters. Choices were cleric, barbarian, rogue, sorcerer, wizard, bard, fighter, paladin, ranger, monk, gunslinger, ninja and samurai.
My buddies and I chose fighter, ranger and rogue. The three random folks who joined us for our scenario chose cleric, paladin and wizard.
Our scenario was given the nickname "woods". Our GM stumbled through the introduction text, he was pretty textbook, "read the dialogue and stick to the script" which is. . . well its different than I am used to, but it was a new experience for me which was fun. My group plays a couple of weekly tabletop games of pathfinder, so we felt we were fairly familiar with the rules. The three joining us were rusty on the rules but very intelligent folks who picked it all up right away. Our gm seemed to have his rules down fairly well.
The story was shaky at best. We were read a short script that we were in a bar, the bartender spoke to a random npc who entered then bar. The npc said something to the effect of "I own a farm. My farm and a couple of neighbors' have been attacked by a werewolf the last couple of nights. Do something." The bartender then looked at us and said,"you heard him, go handle it."
We basically said, "why should we?" and were told if we didn't that we would get beat up by some big important local official. Fair enough. This is supposed to be a demo, after all, so I can handle being told what to do. We are told to go buy some silver weapons from the local blacksmith. We head over to the blacksmith, buy all two of the weapons and 50 crossbow bolts that he has, and head to the farm where the werewolf has been.
We spent some time setting up an ambush for the wolf. Our ambush sucked and was ignored. Were wolf and some random guy traveling with the werewolf show up and start ransacking the house. We attack. We find out very quickly we are outmatched.
Meta-game speaking, the Were wolf has an AC of 21 and the dude with him an AC of 23. most of us have a +4 to hit. The paladin did a bit better, +6 with smite. Badguy's minimum damage was 7. We ranged from 10 to 16 HPs. It was definitely a get our ass kicked scenario.
Suffice to say, we got lucky. Our pally decided to roll a 19, 20, 19 on three attack rolls in a row, the rest of us managed 2 hits total, plus a couple of magic missiles and some helpful healing from our cleric. Our dm said that he had killed a lot of people that day, the way the encounter was set up.
My thoughts on the experience? Well, I feel our DM could have known his short script a bit better, and given it some personality instead of just stuttering through a crap script. I also felt he didn't know some of his rules thoroughly, but that's just me nitpicking, and all in all I thought he had a great sense of humor and I appreciated what he was doing. I felt the scenario was designed for people familiar with pathfinder. It would have sucked for newbies, with badguys who had an AC high enough that most of us needed to roll an 18 or more to hit. Also, the badguys hit hard enough to easily drop us with a single swing. We definitely won against the odds.
In the end, we only did one scenario. We got 9 cracks at the loot safe, of course we didn't win anything. Meh.
Final thoughts: the gaming was a fun and new experience for me, but railroad story and rookie unfriendly. The pre-made characters were okay, but the only character with any healing ability was the cleric. No oracle and bard had no cure spell. With badguy hitting hard enough to drop an ally in a single hit, limited curing was a bit rough. No reward for playing was crappy. Not even a little pin or lanyard. I got more from wizards of the coast for having them take a picture of us: a pin, and a costume goggles. I hope paizo does better in the future. I really hope Goblinworks has a presence for PFO in upcoming years.