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I GM both. I thought 2e would become my system of choice because it's honestly a very good game and addressed a lot of the issues that I had with 1e. But now that I've played a lot if 2e I'm glad I still have a 1e game going.

I like that 1e has a lot of flavor abilities, even if those abilities are sometimes bad or janky. I like that there's a lot of stuff that's designed for utility with little obvious combat application. I like that classes can do stuff like talk to spirits, haunts, or animals, or walk through underbrush without difficulty, or become able to speak any language. Things without obvious combat utility but help a character feel cool and magical. The balance issues can be very difficult to manage, but sometimes its fun to be really good or really bad at something. I think a the jank and issues give the game a lot of personality-- but can also be really frustrating as well. 2e, by contrast, feels really well designed, but a little sterile.

I do quite like 2e though. It's fun to GM, easy to learn for such a complex game, and the rules make sense and just work. High-level play is also actually fun, unlike in 1e, where the game really breaks down once you hit double-digit levels.

I also just find the first edition Adventure Paths more interesting. t's probably personal preference, but I think they struck the right balance between being on theme while avoiding being too specialized. With the 2e ones, they come out so quickly that I think a lot of them never get played. They don't develop any kind of reputation and ultimately they feel a little forgettable.

I was reading through the LO: Tian Xia book and noticed that, canonically, Ameiko has not used the seals to rebuild the other four Imperial Families of Minkai. I know that this is likely because the assumption is that the PCs of Jade Regent would take on those roles, and that this can't be in canon, but I also think that could be a cool adventure.

One major criticism of Jade Regent is that you really don't spend a lot of time in Minkai proper, and I believe a lot of people would like a Minkai-focused AP. I'd like to see an AP where the PCs help Empress Ameiko select worthy individuals to recreate the Imperial Families (and maybe select a spouse for Ameiko as well, as I believe she's canonically childless, isn't getting any younger, and that Amatatsu line has to continue or what was Jade Regent even all about anyway).

My own Jade Regent campaign was based on relationship-building, and I think that could be a cool motif for the campaign. Seek out prospective candidates for the mantle of Imperial family, convince them to take on the responsibility, resolve their issues, and/or choose between a host of viable candidates, both good and evil, who might be best suited for the role.

James Jacobs wrote:

vyshan wrote:

The Raven Black wrote:

After having misread a description of Gatewalkers as an escort quest AP, I now demand an escort AP. With the long-awaited attending LO book : Dancing Halls of Golarion.

Isn't an Escort Quest basically the plot of Jade Regent or are you talking about the courtesan type of escort?

That's exactly what folks are talking about (before some folks started running with the fact that "escort" is also sometimes used as a euphemism for prostitute).

** spoiler omitted **...

I just want to put some positive feedback here for the way Paizo has handled "escort quests", including in Jade Regent and the middle chapter of Gatewalkers.

My group loved the bioware style relationship building in Jade Regent, and I had a player who previously hated roleplaying blossom into one of the most involved roleplayers in my party because it helped them to have an underlying mechanic that could help them track their progress. Eventually it wasn't necessary and got moved to the background.

More than that the players treated Ameiko as integral to the party as if they had another player at the table with their own opinions on how to handle things. I played up Ameiko's nervousness about her destiny, and the weight of responsibility and made clear that she was relying on the PCs to help her navigate that situation.

People will gripe loudly when something didn't work for their game, or they were unable to adapt something to the needs and enjoyment of their players and that's understandable. People pay money for adventures and then expect it to work out of the box with little additional adaptation or preparation. Whether that expectation is fair or not, it exists.

However, for me and my group, who treats every AP as a scenario skeleton to build our own experience around, and players who treat NPCs with the same weight of existence as their own PCs, we love NPCs who are relevant to the plot and have their own drives, goals,...

This is almost exactly how my Jade Regent game is going. We used the Ultimate Relationships rules, which give more mechanical heft to the relationship-building aspect of the AP. Essentially, it's turned into a campaign with a Persona-like social system, where the players are building relationships with a ton of NPCs, and have mechanics for how those relationships are built. The mechanical aspect is important: I know a lot of people will say "you don't need mechanics for this stuff, that's what roleplay is for" but I think that works for some people and not others, and also roleplay mechanics can be fun.

Goes to show that even a "bad" AP can be right for your table if you approach it the right way. The "escort quest" aspect of Jade Regent is actually what led it to being a great campaign for my group, as it encouraged the players to roleplay with NPCs and really engage with the world.

Honestly, with the popularity of relationship simulation games like Persona, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, etc., I wonder if you could make an AP that is about building relationships as a primary goal. I know a lot of APs have that aspect in service to a larger story, but I think adding some mechanical heft to roleplay is really fun when it's done well.

I eventually rebuilt my Miyaro to be a Kami Channeler Medium. I wanted to play up her connection to the Forest of Spirits and make her feel like an otherworldly forest creature that's as much spirit as person. But instead of making her a cool swashbuckler, I gave her a strong fairy tale vibe. She's basically a Totoro. She can talk to forest spirits, she's nice to everybody, she can probably grant wishes to good children. She might be immortal because of the Kami. Her life is a Studio Ghibli movie. I'm having fun playing with a high-level NPC with that tone.

I think it really needed to expand Book 3 to multiple books. The lost city in the middle of a jungle is a cool trope and gives off great pulp adventure vibes, and when you get there it's just... not that great. If I were to really put my back into GMing the module I'd feel like I had to totally rewrite the content of the book. Different factions, more ways to interact with them, all kinds of stuff. And sadly, I just don't think it would be worth the effort. After all, the reason I'm doing an AP is because I don't want to put in the work required to homebrew a campaign.

Then eventually you go underground and there's .. another city? That's also underdeveloped? Sigh.

The lost city and the interactions with its denizens should have been most of the campaign. Unfortunately it would require a complete rewrite of the plot and redesign of the modules. It's a tall order.

Another gripe I have with it is the repeated encounters. This is a problem in a lot of games for sure, but in a couple of the dungeons there's a lot of fighting enemies with identical stat blocks. In the serpent fortress in Book 5, it's just generic serpentfolk soldier group encounter, again and again. Now, I get that it's a fortress and fortresses have soliders so you should be ready to fight soldiers. It's realistic, I guess. But I don't know how a GM makes that interesting. A lot of the SS dungeons felt like a chore to run, as the encounter designs weren't very great.

About three encounters away from ending Curse of the Crimson Throne (including the last boss) in the game in GMing. Been going for years and let me tell you, I'm very ready for this one to be over. It's a great AP, but it's time for it to be finished.

I've soured on them, honestly. In my experience they're just another way to optimize characters. In my groups I almost never see them roleplayed or integrated into backstories. Same with drawbacks-- nobody takes the ones that will be mechanically disadvantageous and they never get role played, so and it's just a free mechanical bonus.

In my games I just have every player take the campaign trait for the AP I'm running, and give them a free class skill of their choice. No traits.

I kind of like the back-of-the-napkin tactic of using (Int + Wis)/2 X 100 = character IQ, myself. Most modern IQ tests and theories of intelligence assess both formal, learned knowledge (Int) and the speed in which information is processed and acquired, as well as creative problem-solving (Wis). So just dumping one or the other doesn't make a character intellectually deficient in and of itself. But I digress.

Topics like this kind of crack me up. For sure, bloodless power gaming can certainly be irritating. But I've also played with players who over-RP and want all of the attention and spotlight, take 10 minutes to go over every encounter, make overbearing alignment decisions, and derail the game by backstabbing the other PCs and then declaring "it's just what my character would do". Then they think they're awesome because look at how complex and deep their character is!

Some players are just annoying, regardless of whether they consider the game a number-crunching fest or a "ruining your game is just what my character would do" drama camp. It's more a function of irritating players rather than one play style being endemically "better" than another.

An opt fighter can do the same damage as meteor swarm at lvl 10. A more vanilla build managed like 71 DPR on a full-attack. Heavy opt druid can pull 79 unbuffed all day with wild shape. Opt blast sorcerer can pull 90 per round provided they still have slots.

10 lvl fighter

assume +4 str and +2 weapon for magic

Hit 10BAB + 2 feat + 2 weapon training + 7str - 3 power attack + 2 magic weapon = +20

Damage = 7 greatsword + 2 weapon training + 2 feat + 2 magic + 10 str + 9 power attack = 32

That's without gloves of dueling with boost that to +22/34

Thanks! This is the kind of thing I was looking for. I wanted to get a general baseline of the kind of damage that a martial class that was moderately unoptimized could do but my system mastery is pretty poor. So the above post, assuming, what, a 2d4 Falchion?, will do about 72 DPR on a full attack. We'll bump it to 74 with Gloves of Dueling because it looks like there is never any reason for a fighter not to have those. I'm miserable at DPR calculations, so let's just assume that both attacks will just hit. But as mentioned, there might be times in which the fighter's weapon will not be *optimal* for the job-- perhaps it's against a flying enemy or an enemy with DR/bludgeoning or a "no greatswords allowed" rule or something. This won't be common, so I'll just estimate that the fighter's class features will operate 90% of the time. So 10% of the time he'll lose those +4s to hit and damage, to just spitball a number. This will barely put a dent in his DPR on average, so it's honestly barely worth calculating.

We'll assume that the base stats are the same-- that there's no reason to believe that a fighter and a ranger will have different Str scores or access to different equipment-- this might be a poor assumption but it's what I'm going with. So the "special" fighter contribution to damage and to hit is the +2 Weapon Training Damage and +2 for Weapon Focus. So I'm trying to parse out "generic" martial damage, with no special class features thrown in. So Mr. Generic Martial loses 8 damage across 2 attacks because he lacks those spiffy fighter abilities, bringing his dpr to 66. He also loses +4 to hit with each attack, meaning he'll do about 20% less damage overall. This brings his DPR to 53 or so-- a well statted/equipped martial DPR with no special abilities.

Ok, so let's take that and add Ranger class feature damage to it. At 10th level a ranger has 3 favored enemies. That said, I have no idea how often FE comes up, but I do know that I am not bullish on it. I'll say a ranger has a 5% chance of encountering any one of his FE at any given time, so a 15% chance overall to do an additional +2 to hit and damage. This will not likely nudge the ranger's DPR over Mr. Generic's 53. I am not a big fan of FE. This will leave the ranger with about 53 dpr compared to the fighter's 74-- admittedly a baseline that is accurate for the fighter and shows disfavor to the ranger. Somebody can correct me on that if they'd like.

Next I'll go through the bestiary and look through CR9, 10, and 11 monsters; the sorts of things that would be reasonably difficult for a Level 10 character. I took a random sample of 20 of each and averaged their HP to ask how many full attacks it takes each class to kill the monster.

Full attack damage: Fighter: 74 Ranger: 53

CR 9: 115.79 damage average.

The fighter will drop a CR 9 monster in 2 attacks, while the ranger will not quite make it. But let's give the guy a break. Critical hits are a thing and weren't accounted for in these calculations, so let's say it nudges the ranger enough to drop it in 2 hits. If the enemies don't have DR. Which 40% of them did.

CR 10: 128.63

Again, the fighter takes 2 full attacks and the ranger takes 3.

CR 11: 145.47

Big difference here. The fighter will still eke out dropping an enemy in 2 full attacks, but the ranger is laboring. Setting aside critical hits, he'll drop an enemy in 3 full attacks on average... but if that enemy has DR then he won't-- he'll need 4 full attacks. Now, neither will the fighter, but when critical hits ARE taken into account then I'd expect him to get over the hump.

Ok, so this was obviously a pretty terrible comparison in a lot of ways, but to me it does give a baseline as to how *much* more effective the fighter is in combat. On average it seems like the fighter will drop a CR appropriate challenge ONE FULL ROUND earlier than the ranger will. Personally, I think this make the fighter substantially more effective in combat and does seem to imply that he can kick ass so solidly that he has a role that is difficult to replace. Also note that none of this takes defenses into account at all.

There are a lot of caveats, of course-- no equipment, no optimization, full attacks assumed all of the time, no buffs. But I'm not sure that any of those things will favor a ranger any more than it favors a ranger.

How do we know the developers don't care about balance?

Grappling is a big problem early, for sure. Later on it's more of an inconvenience.

I don't think it's any easier to pull apart a wizard party than any other class, truth be told. Sure, a party of low-level wizards will have trouble with grapples. A party of low-level fighters, for example, is in a lot of trouble if they're invited into that same yurt and the orc shaman casts color spray or sleep on them. A party of low-level rogues will have trouble with... well, they'll basically have trouble with combat in general. Low-level PF is swingy as hell even for non-gimmick parties.

I'm still confused about how we can have threads that aren't about casters vs. martials.

It's especially great when the rogue stealths into amazing tactical position in order to deliver that sneak-- 50 feet away from the nearest party member. Well, say the monsters, I can't quite get to that squishy wizard hiding behind those armored chaps. But as a consolation prize, here's a squishy rogue!

I find that a lot of the time "theorycraft" is used as a last resort dismissal of various "problem" builds. I liken the apparent "theorycraft" criticism, as it's often used, to the backlash against the use of statistical analyses in sports. The "old-school" non-stats crowd tends to throw around dismissive statements like "well if you'd watch the games, you'd know I was right" instead of engaging in actual discussion. This seems to gloss over the fact that people who use statistics to analyze sports probably watch sports as well.

The point is that I haven't seen many builds that I don't think would work on an actual game. Even "joke" builds like AM BARBARIAN would probably translate pretty well into most games I've seen.

Man, Marthkus just wears you down with his combination of being wrong and persistent. But you've been a trooper for hanging around as long as you have. Personally I don't know how to respond to a statement like "34 spell slots IS LIMITED SPELL SLOTS" beyond just shaking my head and moving on.

I think that if I'm in combat against 100 soldiers then losing initiative is the least of my worries.

Casters have defenses too, you know. A wizard with, say, mirror image or stoneskin on doesn't detonate instantly upon being attacked. And that's not even taking into account things like high AC sorcerer or druid builds. And even if my wizard takes a hit... hm... checking the rules... nope, not instantly dead. Apparently I get HP too.

Oh man, there's no way this isn't going to turn into a "casters vs. fighters" thread. Just sayin.

I don't think it's about disrespect, exactly. If I'm playing a wizard and there's a bard in the party, I'm probably not going to put a lot of skill points into Knowledge skills. It's not that these skills aren't important, but it's something of the bard's schtick, and he's going to be better at it than I am.

With combat it's not really like that. You can argue about whether Control spells are more effective than damage, but they sure as hell aren't a lot less effective than damage. So when I look at other party members, I'm trying to think of what they bring to the table that my wizard doesn't-- or at least what I can't do without significant effort.

Also, The Fighter isn't really the standard to flock around for the "pro-martial" crowd, IMO. Paladins, Rangers, and Barbarians are core-classes that are all kind of awesome and bring a lot to the table that spellcasters can't easily replicate.

Paladins are tough to bring down because of great saves and do sweet bucketloads of damage against most enemies. Great package! They don't get a lot of skill points, but their high charisma makes them terrific at social situations, giving them good out-of-combat utility. Plus they even get some nice spells. No problems with a paladin at all.

Rangers get terrific skills and do a lot of damage. I don't have one in the party, so I can't speak from a lot of experience, but they're good in combat and have a lot of utility outside of combat. Plus, again, nice saving throws (two "good" saves and will have a reasonable Wis score).

Never played with a Barbarian, but they get a reasonable amount of skills and are tough to bring down in combat.

Personally, the problem isn't with "martials", the problem is that The Fighter is pretty limited in what it can do. Sure is good in combat... but every class is pretty good in combat. What other bases can they cover? As a wizard who can (theoretically) "do anything", any base the Fighter can't cover is a base that I feel I have to deal with, so the fighter's poor Will save (gotta pack Protection From Evil in case the fighter's Dominated) and poor skills put some pressure on me. Other martials have a bit more utility and bring a bit more to the table, at least IMO.

Sloanzilla wrote:

I guess you should probably decide either way- even aside from the stealing issue, it's important to avoid the double standard. The worst is "evil" players who think any in-game interference with their "right" to do evil stuff is OOC limiting on their roleplaying rights. My paladin has as much right to roleplay stopping you from torturing someone as you have a right to say that your character is torturing someone.

Oh good God, That Guy. Especially when they expect everyone else to play their characters like impotent bystanders while they flaunt that #%€*.

"Why aren't you letting me play my character?"

"We are. Now let us play our good characters. Also, actions have consequences."

The very epitome of Chaotic Stupid. Works especially well with his counterpart, the poorly-played Paladin with the Lawful Annoying alignment. "I detect evil on everybody. If they pop as evil I kill them. What do you MEAN I'm going to prison? You aren't letting me play my character!"

Alignment is fun tool, but I find that sometimes players forget that their PCs have personalities as well. Evil characters can actually care about others, after all. A person can be evil and quite loyal to their friends. They just might have strange reactions sometimes-- if somebody hurts their friends, an evil character might, say, murder the transgressor and everybody that person cares about. But hey, at least they won't steal from the rest of the party!

Hm. this has been talked about a lot and in waaaaay greater detail than I'm able to produce, but I'll give it a shot.

-- A fighter can out-dpr a barbarian, but it costs them feats to do so. So in matching a barbarian, the fighter has to commit their class features (more feats). Barbarians just get rage, which scales with their level and requires no feat/ability investment.

-- Ditto with survivability. A barbarian's AC will be lower, but they don't ALWAYS have to rage. If the lack of AC puts them in danger, then they don't have to rage and can still put up some good dpr. Even then, there are barbarian archetypes that can give them ridiculous DR; this will boost their survivability much higher than an AC fighter's.

-- AC is not the only measure of survivability. Barbarians will likely have better saves. A fighter, OTOH, has to spend some of their feats to remain competitive. We're seeing that the fighter's bonus feats can be deceiving; they have to spend a lot of them to account for the class features of other classes. Their feat advantage looks more striking than it ends up being.

-- Barbarians get rage powers, which can further close the gap between the two. Rage powers scale better with level than do feats, as I understand. Barbarians can't cast spells while raging. They also cannot cast spells while not raging. This matches them up well with fighters, who also cannot cast spells.

-- Barbarians get more skill points, giving them more out-of-combat utility.

-- For a "who is the best DPR" discussion, you'd be remiss if you didn't include the paladin. Smite Evil is (arguably) the best DPR ability in the game. There is, of course, the caveat that not all enemies are evil, but you'll have a target more often than not. And sometimes that target will be an evil outsider, dragon, or undead and then the DPR discussion isn't even close.

-- Paladins also have much better survivability than fighters by virtue of vastly better saves. A lot of the AC difference will be balanced by a paladin's ability heal themselves as a swift action.

Yeah, I'm inclined to agree. Off the cuff, I'd rule the say I said above (that it can). If I had time to sit down and deliberate after the session, I'd say that it's just not flammable enough.

But again, it's because this specific type of grease isn't flammable, not because the spell doesn't say that you can. I honestly don't get the "power creep" argument-- maybe a better example than grease or gate is in order? I'm not saying I disagree with your position, I'm just not seeing these cases as being egregious enough to worry about.

Pretty much. The "broken" stuff involves a lot of RAW nonsense like Planar Binding and Simulacrum. I don't think this comes up a lot in actual games.

For things like Overland Flight and Teleport... well, it's just a matter of realizing that high level games are different from low-level games. The "bandits wait in the forest to ambush the PCs" style of encounters are over now. Instead, ambushes are "the demon is scrying on the PCs, will teleport him and his flunkies in to attack them when they least expect it". NPCs get things like Overland Flight and Teleport too.

I'm a proponent of giving Martials Nice Things, not banning spells. Balance is more fun when you're giving, not taking away.

Except for Blood Money. Ban that cheese.

I always roll my eyes at the "caster superiority is just theorycrafting" arguments-- as if none of the dozens of people making this argument have ever played a game. I also feel like these discussions always move the goalposts. I think most "pro-caster" people are making the argument that, properly applied, magic can solve *most* problems in a game *more efficiently* than alternative methods (skills, pointy sticks).

The "anti-caster" arguments often come across as "well your caster can't solve EVERY problem ALL OF THE TIME, so the game's balanced". Well yeah, full casters can do anything, but not everything. I'm not sure how this makes them weaker, but to each their own, I suppose. This leaves the martial classes to solve problems that casters have not deigned to waste resources on, i.e. have relegated them to support classes.

And really, the "pro-martial" arguments rely on just as much theorycrafting. In this thread, the notion of a "flip" relies on ideas that casters run out of spells/finite resources. After playing a low-level wizard, I just don't see it. Cast Sleep, hit 3 guys, say 2 of them fail their saves. This outcome is hardly theorycrafting, it happens all the time. Now 2 guys are dropped with 1 spell (for all purposes). Much more efficient than a martial class in combat. This isn't even optimization, it's just the ability to recognize that Sleep is awesome at low levels and choosing to take the spell. How is this pie-in-the-sky theory?

"But spell slots are limited", you say. Alright, sure. This is a problem at low levels, but it assumes things like 4 encounters/day. Personally, a lot of my DMs have trouble with the 4 encounters/day paradigm. Combat just takes too long and detracts from the story too much to fit 4 encounters into a session. And a lot of stories just don't lend themselves to "4 fights before sleeping". Sometimes you have time pressures associated with them, but some plots just don't. You can't add these artificial fiats to prevent casters from resting to regain spells without these fiats eventually becoming contrived ("Oh look, another race against the clock story. For the sixth week on a row. Sigh"). In the game I play (a real game, no less!) we're usually good for 2, maybe 3 encounters before resting, and often it's just the one fight. Your experiences might be different, of course. But I feel that the caster/martial design choices were made in an era where many D&D adventures were dungeon crawls. In my experience, though, dungeon crawls and sessions with many combats/day are pretty rare. In games with political intrigue or mysteries to solve, it's a lot harder to fit enough fights into a session to make a caster rue the lack of spell slots.

And casters aren't the only classes that have limited resource issues. Paladins have the same problems, with limited Smite Evil and Lay on Hands. Barbarians only have so many rage rounds at lower levels. Monks and Ninjas spend ki to do a lot of class features. The idea that martials can operate at peak efficiency 24/7 is really only true for some classes-- fighter or a rogue, perhaps. Until his hp run out, I suppose.

So again, I maintain that there's no "flip" that takes place. There's not really any point in which a caster is significantly outclasses by a non-caster class. The opposite cannot be said-- martial classes can be inferior to martial classes at very low levels (rogue vs. bard, for example).

Sure, and again, if you're specifically trying to make a PC seem weak then you'll often succeed. But I would argue that throwing variety at the party makes spellcasters seem stronger, not weaker. Casters have a much bigger toolkit from which to work, and thus have a better chance of finding SOMETHING useful to do. Martial classes (especially at low levels) can often have a harder time. Again, this is not always the case! There are definitely times that martial characters just shine. But on average the casters have more to do.

For example, in the monsters you listed... do they really impede casters effectively? I'm not trying to be Schroedinger's Wizard here, but not all wizard builds are save-or-die based. What part of my low-level Conjurer's Haste/Summon Monster rotation is going to be less effective as a result of any of their abilities? Hell, I can't remember the last time I cast a spell that targeted SR. SR is pretty rare isn't much of a problem at low levels and a lot of battlefield control spells aren't subject to SR. Things like Grease, Create Pit, Summon Monster will all still work and be just as effective. And for things those don't work on (say, an incoporeal undead)-- well, I'll take bets that a wizard or cleric will find a way to deal with that before a fighter will.

On the other hand, the party Rogue or Ninja looks at that ooze, realizes that it's immune to sneak attack, sighs, kicks a tin can down the alley, then cries softly to themselves.

Ok, I see what you mean about the father and not wanting him to betray the PCs. It makes sense that you wouldn't want to do that right now, if at all.

First, I will say that it's not a *bad* thing that the PCs are in control of your story. It's their story too, after all! I'll re-iterate that I'd try to ask them what they plan on doing with the thing. This lets them move the game forward, which is a good thing. If players care about what happens then you're doing your job as a DM.

One thing I like to keep in mind for a sandbox game is that you don't have "plots", you have a setting. You can't predict what the PCs will do, so it's hard to write a typical "they have to do X so Y will happen" plot. Instead, you're reacting to what they do. "So the PCs did X. Given that information, how does Faction Z and NPC Y react? What's their next move?". If you have a good handle on your setting's major NPCs, then you can react to what PCs do in a reasonable fashion. It's a lot easier to react to PCs than it is to predict PCs :)

-- So right now, they have no idea how valuable the object is, and they're level 4, so a "huge amount of gold" could still work within WBL guidelines (so about 1000 gp per encounter for level 4 PCs). Again,you could have them make an Appraise check to determine what the value of the object is, opposed by the Patron's Diplomacy check as he tries to haggle them down. They get, say, 1200-1500 gp for it, your story goes on. They could ask for more, but you could just laugh it off and suggest that it's kind of unreasonable-- it'd be like me trying to sell my used car for $1 million. Sure, I'd LIKE to, but.... In this way the object seems like you intended solely for them to sell it for a nice chunk of change. Giving them a little windfall won't disrupt your game, and you can go about your business plot-wise.

-- If the PCs feel immune to danger because they're invaluable to 3 factions, you could disabuse them of that notion veeeeeery quickly. Faction A might want to play nice with them... but Faction B might decide that if they can't have the information, nobody can. Faction C might be hiring adventurers to find out alternate information-- if successful, then the PCs info might drop in value very quickly. The PCs think they hold all of the cards for now, but that can change really quickly.

-- Steal it back. It seems like what your NPCs would try to do in the first place. It might seem contrived to the PCs right now, and that's a problem you can deal with. What I would suggest is simply forgetting about the object for now. Ask the PCs what they intend to do with it, then just take note. Run another 4-5 sessions where the PCs do something totally unrelated. You can begin another long-term plot thread, if you want. The point is to distract the PCs from the object. Then, when you steal it, they aren't rolling their eyes and saying "Oh, you just did that so you can get your plot back on track". Instead, they're saying "Oh, that thing we found last month? I forgot about that". Depending on your players, this could work quite well-- it certainly would in any group I've ever played with.

Stories like this make me want to buy my GM a beer in appreciation for how he can run a good game, week-in and week-out, for years on end. Yeesh.

The thing is that I've had Unwinnable Fight scenarios work out-- as in, the session involves the PCs being captured. The BBEG shows up, wipes the floor with the party, captures them, now... adventure!

The first time my GM tried the "you're supposed to lose this one" encounter, it did not work well. The problem was that it wasn't difficult enough, oddly. If I'm supposed to lose a fight for story reasons, I'm happier feeling that I never had a chance to win in the first place.

But it sounds like your GM isn't making these encounters because they're supposed to lead to something fun. It sounds like he just wants to win. I find this can lead to a competitive table culture where people think tabletop RPGs can actually be "won", which leads to player-vs-GM mentalities, which is less fun in total. At least to me. YMMV.