 
Sign in to create or edit a product review. 
Starfinder Society Scenario #3-22: The Vast Experiment: Dancing at the EdgePaizo Inc.Our Price: $8.99 Add to CartInteresting content with some problems. 
bakamono
—
The story content of the scenario is quite appealing and it has quite an epic scale compared to many scenarios, even other high tier ones. It is also important for metaplot in my opinion.
Spoiler:
The firt part of the scenario is a lot of investigation. There are quite a few rolls and tension is built up somewhat but if you accidentally avoid the encounters for a longer time (since you don't know where enemies are,) it gets pretty boring to basically just walk around an empty, dead city. The second major issue is the space combat. This is another "take the Drake" scenario. Unless you have a perfectly built starship crew and above average rolls you can forget winning the space combat with a Pegasus (which will also cause you to lose a third of the scenario credits). A Drake makes it way more feasable to win but even then a few good rolls by the gm can be enough to kill you as early as round 2 in that combat without much you can do about it. 
Pathfinder Society Scenario #1-17: The Perennial Crown Part 2, The Thorned MonarchPaizo Inc.Our Price: $8.99 Add to Cartfun but has flaws
bakamono
—
Overall I liked 1-16 and 1-17 quite a bit. The end of this one is pretty epic too. There are some major flaws though that reduce my rating to 3 stars. See Spoilers for the flaws. Spoiler:
The first major flaw is that there are way too many skill checks or rolls in general in this adventure. That makes hero points hardly have any impact, can be very punishing for a few character classes and makes it hard for the GM to create a suitable atmosphere since everything is disrupted by tons of rolls. The second major flaw is the chase. While the chase mechanic itself is fine and might work better than PF1 chases the wording of the rewards for the chase and the behavior of the enemy makes it very frustrating for a group who rolls well but not insanely well with crit successes all over the place. If you succeed at everything (without huge amounts of crits) the enemy will never catch up, therefore never stop for a round and always stay behind you. You lose out on 20% of you gold and likely 2 fame/reputation for being too good (but not insanely good)at the chase. I played the scenario recently and then read through the encounters afterwards to find out what exactly went on there. We had four players and about of them liked the scenario, the others didn’t very much. The Good The introduction was pretty fun, even if there is a lot of travelling and talking to people that doesn’t give you any real information. I think the dungeon layout was nice and there was a reasonable amount of encounters for a dungeon crawl. The encounters and traps in a vacuum were interesting and creative too. The Bad A few encounters were not very challenging and felt like filler in comparison to the overtuned other encounters and there is no good way for players to know when difficulty spikes will happen and how to avoid them. More in spoilers. May run pretty long depending on how encounters play out. The Ugly Challenge point system doesn’t see to adjust to the power of the group well. Certain challenge point ranges seem way more difficult than others. Spoiler:
We were 4 players: Level 4 Rogue (2x), Fighter 4, Druid 2 (21 challenge points) The druid was a normal mix of ranged damage with spells and healing, all others primarily melee without striking ranged weapons. Encounters were very easy until the kobolds at the barricade. It ended up being a very long, dragged out encounter that we barely won with the level 2 druid dying. We checked the boss and after rolling a knowledge check that revealed the infernal wounds we decided not to attempt fighting him. I read through the encounters to find out what went wrong and was pretty horrified about the amount of HP, enemy types and adjustment by challenge points. Or group of three level 4s and a level 2 was up against two level 4.5s, three level 2s and two weak level 0.5 enemies. Thar is already a pretty severe difficulty and with the terrain the players don’t know and will waste their turns on (not very enjoyable btw) this becomes very deadly. Even though the GM played the enemies very intelligently (maybe a bit too much), an almost tpk is an expected result with this kind of difficulty. A group of six or seven low tier characters in the same difficulty might just tpk without much of a chance right then. The next higher challenge rating bracket is quite a bit easier since there is one less caster that is very high hp and very dangerous with this kind of terrain. Of course groups with many ranged fighters and casters will have an easier time with this encounter but it is still overtunded. The last encounter is overtunded as well. Again with challenge points 19-22 being more dangerous than the next bracket. The amount of damage the boss does combined with his damage reduction, high to hit chances and high saves will pretty much guarantee that one or several players will go down and not unlikely die of the infernal wound. A low tier group in the 19-22 bracket has at best a 25% chance to hit him with the first attack getting their damage reduced by his DR but he will have about a 90% chance to hit them (for a potential one shot) and a 45% to crit them for a 100% one shot all including infernal wound. These unbalances in difficulty are not acceptable in a normal scenario in my opinion. I played in high tier with a group of 5 players.
Spoiler:
Our group somehow managed to never encounter the killer which caused us to lose quite a bit of gold reward, prestige and another boon because we lacked one appreciation point for the orc lady we could have gotten by finding the killer earlier. I wasn't happy about that because neither our rolls nor our choices or ideas about the plot were stupid or wrong. We might have been a bit unlucky and our GM wasn't very lenient about us having warned all the late victims (some were killed anyway). Still I think something like that could have been avoided by some GM instructions about what npcs do when warned about a poison killer and some better clues that actually looking for the killer makes sense. We only had one chance to actually expose the killer in the distillery but we chose to talk to the owner in private and decided against "looking around for poisoners in a city full of assasins and poisoners" among the patrons which seemed pretty wise. So the killer just waited till we were gone, poisoned the lady at the distillery even though we told her not to eat or drink any food whe isn't sure about and we never saw him again after that because of the schedule that didn't line up with our timing. Just adding infos about what npcs do when warned and still getting full reward when not running into the killer on accident I would have liked more. Also the plot poison that you can't stop with normal means is a bit heavy handed but I guess it's needed to actually get the adventure going. Our druid would have cured the venture captain twice if it weren't for that. 
Pathfinder Society Scenario #9-22: Grotto of the Deluged God PDFPaizo Inc.Our Price: $4.99 Add to CartNice adventure but some questionable design choices
bakamono
—
Im played this in high tier with a full group.
Spoiler:
The "reward" for not fighting the dragon is a bad joke. Especially in hier tier when you identify the brine dragon and see its size it's downright madness to just fight it. It is very hard to exactly identify that it's not exactly a large dragon you have there, unless the GM helps you along a lot. The negative boon is way too punishing and both getting a teleport scroll on a chronicle till level 6 and the fact that a brine dragon can ruin your reputation is pretty ridiculous. Much worse though is that players who thought "We should not be facing a large dragon in this subtier and were not warned about it, I bet we can kill it somehow" get rewarded by metagaming like this. The boon also invites players to metagame for that teleport scroll chronicle. Very bad choices that will neither make players nor GMs or developers happy in the end. 
Pathfinder Society Scenario #8-18—Champion's Chalice, Part 1: Blazing Dangerous Trails (PFRPG) PDFPaizo Inc.Our Price: $4.99 Add to CartGood Concept, really bad Execution
bakamono
—
I usually don't review things but for this scenario I make an exception. I'll mostly just echo what others have said about it but I think it's important to make the points real clear. Things I will not complain about:
The problems:
All of those problems could have been easily avoided by only slightly tweaking some of the restrictions, encounters and scenario rules. Please just don't release this kind of scenarios that make a fair amount of players miserable while and after playing if they don't have insider information what to expect. |
