I’ve hit a bit of a conundrum with PFS recently and I wanted to get a few serious opinions on the matter. A little while back, there was a thread called “Season 9, The Year of Research?”, and one of my friends (second post) basically said he hated all the skill check marathons that PFS was doing that season and got plenty of flak for it. I had joined in on the thread, but I think I just derailed it further, so I thought I’d make this one instead. Season 9 has been favoring skills over combat from what we’ve experienced head-on, and a couple of people in my group have gotten sick of it, myself included.
I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve made an investigator just to get through the skill marathons and dialogue. His gimmick is this: although he’s a decent investigator, he hates his class, is unsociable (7 CHA), and is just in it for the money (Chaotic Neutral). Even though I picked my skills well enough, it hasn’t made the first scenario I used him in any better aside from speeding it up a bit. We ended up skipping the first 2 out of 3 combats because of this, the last one involving acid-resistant swarms that we we’re woefully unprepared for, all the while making me wish we ran something else. Being a video gamer growing up and jumping onto the tabletop RPG train later in life might be the reason, but I don’t enjoy foregoing combat in favor of a bunch of skill checks and huge streams of dialogue, which can turn into watching the GM and the skill monkey player talk back and forth for 50+% of the session with little else to do for everyone else (fun fun).
Bear in mind, I don’t dislike role-playing characters as a whole, it would be boring just playing cardboard cutout classes, but the method that some of these scenarios do it just upsets me to the point that I’m wondering if I should even continue PFS at all. What baffles me is how almost nobody else feels this way from what I’ve seen online, either they’re a silent minority, or they get shouted down otherwise.
So out of curiosity, am I the dumb one for feeling this way, or is there anyone that gets this vibe as well?