Neginea's page

I finally got a chance to run this scenario, and I had a bunch of thoughts on how I could have run it better, and how many of the critiques of the scenario may be addressed.

I've fleshed out my prep notes and posted them here for future travelers:

Prep for PFS2 5-10 The Crocodile's Smile

Many people don't even read the whole Guide before GMing (sorry, Guide folks, but it's true).

IMO this is working as intended. We want barriers to entry to be reasonably low. You need not read the whole Guide to be a player, and I think you need not read the whole Guide to be a GM either. Remember, "thanks for running!" is the entire rubric for a zero-glyph GM.

Hopefully, though, a new GM has at least scanned the most important bits, and we've made the most important bits easy to find and digest.

Once you've left those tenderfoot days far behind with your super-elite one glyph status (shout-out to the One Horde!!), I think it's OK to have a certain expectation that you've read the thing pretty well through.

GM Discretion currently says GMs can allow:

PFS Guide wrote:

Alternate or creative skills used to bypass or overcome traps and skill checks.

But naturally, in the next line it immediately runs into the issue you mentioned about alternative skills potentially being at a higher DC:

PFS Guide wrote:

DCs and results of a check are part of the mechanics and cannot be changed.

The way I had been interpreting those lines was: it's OK to use creativity to bypass a check (e.g. "well, because you're flying, you can skip this Acrobatics check!") but not to provide a substitute check (e.g. "sure, use Warfare Lore instead of Athletics to influence this NPC, because they think warriors are cool, and I'll say it's at DC.").

So we may need to clarify that a bit.

I would sleep better after game nights if you did!

The issue I wrangle the most with is uses of skills not explicitly called for by the scenario when it calls for a skill check. By temperament and in the spirit of fostering creative solutions and enabling my players' fun, I am always looking for ways I might be able to accommodate players' requests. Some scenarios explicitly allow for skill checks not explicitly called for, though not consistently. I don't know to what extent that might be considered an oversight. I wish there was just a consistent OrgPlay rule for enabling this.

Yet adding an additional allowable skill for a skill check does change the mechanics of the adventure, even if only in a minor way. Adding such a skill check with a higher DC, which is the way I'd prefer to deal with some of these, could be construed as increasing the difficulty of the adventure, which we have now clarified is not allowable.

Yet the proposed text does not go so far as to explicitly forbid the addition of skills to existing checks. So I'm still not sure what the right thing to do is. I want to support creativity, but I feel even more out over my skis here just writing this down. :-P

I have no interest in arguing with you, but... I don't believe it's ever given an indication that any PC except those with reported games prior to November 15 would get a rebuild at all.

I also distinctly remember this bit:

This rebuild must be used before December 31, 2024.

with attendant discussion indicating that this window was specifically extended to allow rebuilds of PC2-remastered classes. So I don't know whether I misread it, or read and forgot it, or assumed the cutoff date for PC2 classes would naturally align with the PC2 release, or what. Nevertheless, that's the data point.

In fact, the discussion around that time would imply the opposite. People who wanted to build PCs of yet-to-be-Remastered classes were strongly advised to wait until the Remastered class was out for that reason, as I recall.

Had I seen that discussion I would have objected. Who would agree to hold back ~30–50% of character creation options for nine months (or whatever the percentage of classes is)? That makes no sense to me. We're here to play Pathfinder, not dance around it!

Anyway, like I say, it's not a major upset for me. Actually, it's even less trouble for me than I thought, since I now see I didn't assign as many GM chronicles to my alchemist as I thought I had. But I do think an updated creation cutoff date for free PC2 rebuilds would be more sensible.

We made it very clear when we first posted the Remaster Guidelines that characters would not be granted a second rebuild. Players who elected to build characters using classes slated for a remaster should have been aware that they would not be granted a rebuild.

As a data point of one:

Yes, it was clear to me that characters would not get a free second rebuild...

...but it was not at all clear to me that a PC of a non-remastered class, created in the last nine months, would not be eligible for a free first rebuild.

As it happens, I rolled up an alchemist in that intervening timeframe, planning to rebuild upon release of PC2. IIUC I must now spend AcP to rebuild them.

Now ITOT I hoard my AcP as well as any nonmetallic dragon would, and can take the AcP hit just fine – but if I understand it right, I find the situation somewhat irksome.

Doug Hahn wrote:

Guess it's about where the $$ is though and who can blame Paizo.

Where is this stupid conspiracy coming from?

I don't think a conspiracy wasn't necessarily implied there. In a world where Paizo's resources are limited and there's a high-priced, high-quality product they want to deliver, it's possible for entirely non-conspiratorial reasons that they would focus on one instead of the other.

That doesn't line up with my limited understanding of how these VTT modules get made, though. I think it just as likely that these are issues that a sharp-eyed contractor caught and got fixed in their work, and no attention was paid to recording those clarifications for PDF users. Nothing about money, then, just opportunity.

I also don't think it would take a ton of effort or cost to address. With any luck, merely calling attention to the issue is most of the work done right there!

I agree that discrepancies between an official PDF and official VTT module are concerning. I do not think Foundry content should ever automatically be considered as normative – not just because of access issues, but because it's always possible an error snuck in during the conversion! I'd rather see the PDF + some form of published errata be normative.

Has Paizo ever done errata for PFS scenarios, though? Is this new ground we're getting into?

Follow-up on my end: the last couple of scenarios arrived as expected and on time, and the Spice is once again flowing. Hopefully whatever got fixed stays fixed! Thanks!

Hi Rob! Here are my thoughts:

1. Rasuna's a PFS agent and carries a wayfinder. See p. 5.
2. My idea is to have them write their choice privately on cards the first time through if they didn't prearrange their decision. A roshambo-like hand gesture reveal would work too. I thought a risk of non-unanimity, at least for the first instance, was too good not to explore, and I thought it very unlikely they wouldn't try to game their way out of it if you asked them and they saw they were not of one mind.
3. Yeah, I read it as a modified chase, more like an influence encounter. The last spurt under "Development" would make no sense if run like a standard chase. So: one round per obstacle; track the total number of chase points they get for the whole encounter; ignore chase point threshold per obstacle. (I suppose this means the scaling advice is inapplicable, though the final condition naturally scales already.)
4. I think Idrix can put a stop to any troublemakers. :-)

Hope that helps!

My scenario subscription has several missed deliveries – in fact, automated delivery has been broken for months AFAICT. I'd be very happy to work with you to help diagnose it and take some load off your CS agents.

Help me help you!

Trapmaster Tok especially has begun to blame the Pathfinder for their misfortune.

Shouldn't Pathfinder be plural?

It's plural on page 3.

I'm not a lawyer and am able to read it. It's not much harder than the OGL IMO. My suggestion is to start with the AxE, then either skim the definitions or just skip to section II to start.

Were there specific things you didn't understand?