Am I missing something, or is the Azata unambiguously worse than the other two? You give up a LOT for that tech workshop and longer range (but lower quality) sensors. I don't know if this was the intention, but unless I'm missing something this really looks like a "trap" option.
These are all good changes. (Well... I need to see how the whole AcP thing really shakes out before I make a judgement on it.) *THANK YOU* for the "players do their own downtime". Removing bits of gratuitous administration for GMs at the end of a game (when they might be rushing to get to the next session, or to get out of a closing game store) is nice. Also thank you for automatic success when you pay for a remove condition or similar.... I wish PFS1 had that.
Can you spend AcP for body recovery and raising a character? I've not used it very much in PFS, and haven't yet had to use it in SFS, but having the "insurance policy" there for the character you've invested a bunch of time in is very nice. I would hate to lose that. (This will especially be true if we can't convert existing fame to AcP before we lose all of our Fame. The characters that previously had insurance policies may all of a sudden not have them any more.) (Also... I should have two novas, but they don't show up next to my name....)
If we're going to have a Merry Veskmas, we need: 'Twas the night before Veskmas, when in the spacedocks,
The agents were nestled all snug in their beds,
When from the Armada there arose such a clatter,
The Sun was reflecting on starships and stuff,
More rapid than Oma his starships they came,
As asteroids of Diaspora will all freely tumble
And then, with a crackle, I heard on the speaker,
He had a long head and a mouth that was hidden,
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
He sprang to his Drake, and his pilots were fast,
As long as I can remember, there have been a lot of cancellation threads in the customer service forum. Years ago, it used to alarm me a little bit, but I've come to recognize it as the regular churn of people starting and cancelling subscriptions. Remember that you *don't* see people starting subscriptions, because those just happen, they don't require a thread in the forums. So, looking at forum subject lines is always going to give you a very stilted view of how subscriptions are going. The fact is that I don't think any of us have any way to really know how subscriptions are going, and any illusion of data we have is just going to be that: an illusion.
I thought a lot of them were quite good. Sutter's were great, Nightglass was great... but the Jackson pirate ones were great, the Varian/Radovan ones were great, lots of others. I think "Liar's Blade" remains my favorite. There were really only a couple of them that I found disappointing.
It strikes me that there's something... strange... about our global economy that it makes sense to have a whole bunch of books printed on one continent and then shipped to another continent, rather than printed on the continent they will be distributed from. The cost in terms of real resources (not money, but fuel, whatever damage the fossil fuel does to the environment, etc.) of shipping stuff across the ocean is something. For Paizo's books, it's probably a truly insignificant effect in the global scheme of things, but Paizo is hardly alone; this is standard practice for a LOT of manufacturing. (What fraction of the stuff sold at Wal-Mart is produced in China? And Wal-Mart in the US and Canada sell a LOT of stuff, many orders of magnitude more than Paizo does.) For a small operation like Paizo's, it's impossible to avoid some shipping of stuff around. But our economy has made it cheaper to ship reams of stuff across the ocean when there's no technical reason it couldn't be produced a whole lot closer (and, thus, cheaper in terms of fuel, etc.) to where it's going to be distributed from.
It sounds like Laarafel is not interesting in finding a way to make it work, but is interested in getting the Con shut down for whatever motivation. *Anybody else* who has issues signing up with Warhorn because of being vision impaired or for any other reason, the VOs have indicated a willingness to help. I know that there is a vision impaired person who's played in a couple of VTT games here (that were mustered via Warhorn). Please reach out to the VOs and find a way to make it work. They really do want to help make it work for you. There's no exclusionary sign hung out anywhere; it just may require a little manual intervention to get things working for you. (And, heck, that kind of thing happens all the time. I know that a few times I've had to ask for manual intervention to get my subscriptions to ship right, for example.)
Also, I'm not sure how Google Sheets can substitute for Warhorn. It may be that there are ways to lock the columns that I don't know about. The core operation for Warhorn is that people can sign up for games, and Warhorn remembers the order in which they signed up. You can't remove other people's signups. With Google Sheets, if you want the public to be able to edit the sheet, you have to open up the sheet to the public. Or, at the very least, you have to approve people to edit the public parts. But, I believe that if one person signs up, another person could then remove that first person's signup, UNLESS you use the labor-intensive process of locking the rows of the signed-up people to only those people. As I understand Google Sheets, it's not really a practical solution for massive amounts of signups on a convention of this size. (It works well for single games, and I've used it that way, where you have a handful of people registering for it. But when it comes to managing massive numbers of signups for massive numbers of games, and making sure that people can't just remove other people's signups, I don't believe that Google Sheets is practical. I'd have to see a demonstration or an explanation before I believed that.)
I strongly suspect that if there are people who need individual help in registering for events, there are folks in the venture-officer corps who would be happy to help them register. Lots of people sometimes need at the very least some coaching on Warhorn, and I know that my local VO has sometimes signed people up for games who were having trouble using Warhorn themselves. Perhaps this would be a better solution than threatening (or even following up on) shutting down the entire convention because the infrastructure isn't perfect? A solution exists, even with the current infrastructure. Just use that! Doesn't that make a lot more sense than trying to make sure that nobody gets an online con at all?
How many March subscription orders did not ship? Mine is still Pending. Is there any hope of those of us with pending March subscription orders getting access to the PDFs of our subscription items before they actually ship? I'm guessing that the 2-week warehouse shutdown is going to become a lot longer. The incubation time of this virus is long, and the various analyses I've seen indicate that even 6 months of the social distancing that we're doing may not be enough to keep our health care system from being overwhelmed.
Apropos one of the authors mentioned -- if you ever get a chance to play a game at a convention with Jessica Redekop, take it. I played a couple of Pathfinder games set in the Planescape setting at PaizoCon a few years ago with her, and she's one of the best GMs I've ever played with.
Sekrit GM Roll:
Iovo moves around to the side, looking through the window. She sees into the house, and does not see anybody lurking by the front door -- unfortunately, the way it's laid out, she wouldn't be able to. (You'll discover this is true for all of the windows, if you try them.) She is perhaps a little bit surprised, as the tables and chairs she sees suggests that this is a nice little country bed & breakfast. However, there's no sign of occupation -- which is quite surprising given the number of visitors in town for the festival of execution. Perception DC 33 for CoCo (only):
There's somebody lurking on the second story, looking out a window down at the party below! Sensing nothing, Kleins kicks open the door -- and sees an empty house. There's an entryway with a nice rug, and a pair of staircases heading upwards on either side of the front door.
Whether you like it or not, 5e is clearly not a mistake for WotC, for reasons already started. My fear for PF2e is that they're imitating some of the changes in other games like 13th Age or 5e without having the core soul of those games. PF2e remains a rules-heavy fiddily system. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't. Honestly, I suspect it will succeed if it manages to avoid annoying people too much so that they can continue to enjoy what Paizo is actually good at: adventures. At the same time, there *must* be at least one 3pp looking at doing what many of us wanted PF2e to be: a clean up and reboot of PF1e/3.5 that makes Unchained-like changes but that isn't a completely new system. Who will Paizo Paizo?
While the structure of which segments you reuse and all of that in Solstice Scar could stand a tune-up, there's a much bigger problem with the structure of all the multi-table specials in the last several years. The first time I played Solstice Scar A, it was fun. Since then, it's been an exercise in repeated frustration; the last time (part C) had me swearing off PFS specials forever, unless the structure fundamentally changes. Here's what has happened, GMing twice and playing twice. The table I'm at starts an encounter. We get partway in-- perhaps never even that far in. The room leader announces that the encounter has been passed, and we should move on to the next session. We move on, not completing the encounter. We completed well less than half of the encounters that we started in each case. I don't think I've completed the final encounter of any part of Solstice Scar -- the room got called before I got through it. (Indeed, I think that the only reason I survived the last two or three encounters the last two times I played it was because the room declared the scenario over before we had time to TPK.) When I GMed it at GenCon, only one member of the party even managed to make it across the map to where the action was before the scenario was declared over. It's intensely frustrating. It is true that I was at the highest subtier the last three times I ran or played Solstice Scar (once each A, B, and C). And, people say that high subtier is more complicated and takes longer, so yeah, no surprise that it's the table that gets cut off. But this is a design flaw! If everybody expects that the high subtier tables aren't going to be able to finish the scenario, then why is the scenario designed that way? (At GenCon last year (2017), on the elevators up to rooms after that Special, I heard a number of other people saying that they were never going to run one of those Specials again. I know that this is, or at least seems to be, a minority opinion, because they keep being very popular events. But I also know I'm not alone in finding them increasingly frustrating.) It happens in other scenarios. I'm running the Scarab Sages encounter for the first part of Assault on Absalom. I'm coming up to the big cool reveal where I drop the gigantic pawn down on the table... and the announcement comes over to the whole room about it before my encounter gets there. Undercut. The scenarios are designed so that some fraction of the room is guaranteed to have this sort of frustrating encounter-ending anticlimax. When a success is declared, and the announcement is made to the room that this encounter is over and here's the big reveal for it, when only a fraction of the tables have completed it, then there's no way for some tables to ever finish it. The design of the multi-table specials is fundamentally flawed. Any tune-ups to which pieces of Solstice Scar get put into version D are going to be small patches compared to the nature of the overall problem that transcends just Solstice Scar.
WHY did you think this was obvious given the large number of times a request for some clarity in the goals of PF2e has come up? The thread I posted beginning of August has over 30 "favorite" marks on it. Since then, it's come up repeatedly again and again in multiple threads. Generally, it's followed by rampant speculation on the part of people trying to figure out what it's all for, and maybe they were right, but it was all ungrounded. What do we have? In a nuthshell, we know you want it to be easier to pick up, and that you want it to "feel like" PF1e. There is a lot of debate (particularly on the latter point) as to whether or not PF2e really succeeds at that. But what else? There's a lot of "fix this, it's broken in 1e", but all of these, together with "feels the same" suggests that a updated version of PF1e is what we should have expected. Instead, we get a whole new system, as different from D&D 3.0 as D&D5 is. Obviously, there are more design goals than "simplify and keep the same feeling". So, why the whole new system? What motivates it? Were there any core design principles? It's really not obvious what you're doing... and I'm extremely surprised that you thought that it was obvious, and that it took a bloody month and a half before we get even a "oh, yeah, I can see where people would want that, but we have more important things to do than articulate what this whole new entirely changed game is supposed to be doing". If I sound frustrated in this post, it's because I am.
When looking at the state of the PF2e playtest, remember that it's not comparable to the state of the D&D Next playtest when it came out. 5e had nearly a year and a half of playtest, with more than one release of the playtest document. There was a lot of time to try out things, get feedback, change them, and then get feedback on the changes. It was then almost another year before the printed books came out. This playtest, while longer than the Starfinder playtest was, is still much faster. We're told this represents 2+ years of work on the part of the design team. Now, there's a single period of several months for the playtest. A lot of work has already been done, and the playtest is a relatively short period. What's more, the printed book is scheduled to come out just under a year from now -- or just over a year from the beginning of the playtest. D&D 5e had an additional year and a half between the beginning of the playtest and publication beyond what PF2e has. The playtest allowed for many more large scale iterations. So, when you compare the state of the PF2e document to the state of the original D&D Next playtest documents, bear in mind these differences in time. I strongly suspect that the 5e development was more playtest-driven, with a lot of development planned to happen while playtest was ongoing; in contrast, the PF2e development has gone a long way already. It's entirely reasonable to expect that the PF2e book needs to be much closer to the final version than D&D Next was to D&D 5e when it was first released.
Have they? Note that your URL just goes to paizo.com, so it doesn't link to anything in particular. I've looked. I haven't found the answers to these questions. I don't belived they've been answered. These questions keep coming up, over and over again, in these forums, but I've never seen an actual answer. I started a thread a month and a half ago asking exactly these sorts of questions, but have heard nothing back from any of the designers. In that thread, I dig up what I was able to find from blog posts, but I still didn't find any sense of what the overall design goals of PF2e really are. If there's a GameInformer interview that answers these questions, I'd love to see it. As far as I can tell so far, though, there is absolutely no indication of what PF2e is trying to do (other than "be new and try to fix some PF1 problems"), which would give us some sense as to why they've chosen to build a whole new system rather than update and clean up the old system. When people do point at things that are supposedly descriptions of what they're trying to do, they are usually blog posts that talk about some specific mechanic and how it works, rather than what sort of game they're trying to make and why that mechanic is a key part of it.
It's not age specifically that matters. However, trends do come and go. One thing gets popular, then another thing gets popular. The only way in which age really matters is that the "oh, shiny, new!" effect makes things that are new seem more exciting than they would have were they not new, and being looked at based only on their merits. Arguably, folks wanted something that was simpler than D&D3.5e, but still felt like classic D&D. For many (most?), 4e did not feel like classic D&D, so they went to Pathfinder... even though they might have wanted something simpler. D&D 5e came and gave them both. There's a big trend right now towards simpler games, and towards more "narrative" games, rather than more "simulationist" games that are closer to wargames. But will that last forever? Who knows. The fact that the OSR is a thing indicates that it's not age specifically, but trends. There is a subset of folks looking for things that are like they were back in the 70s and early 80s. A lot of this is nostalgia, but probably not all of it. Age is a red herring. There are some things about Pathfinder that lead to a burning need for a new edition that are secondarily related to age. The huge overwhelming unremitting gigantic bloat of ungodly number of rulebooks that PF1e has now means that a serious slate-clearing needs to happen. It's highly intimidating to new players, and even some old players no longer feel like they have a grasp of all the classes and rules out there. This can only happen with age, as it takes time to build up the rules bloat. But it's not the age of the underlying system that's the problem per se; it's just the fact that so much cruft has built up around it.
There's also the problem that the economics of magic items simply doesn't make sense. The price of potions and wands goes up (more or less) as the square of the level, but the actual benefit of using that potion or wand goes up linearly. So, for the 300gp that could get you a Cure Moderate Wounds potion that will heal, on average, 12hp, you could buy six potions of Cure Light Wounds that each heal on average 5.5hp, or 33hp overall. It's nearly three times as effective to buy lots of first-level consumables than it is to buy a second-level consumable, if equivalent versions of both are available. This is why even high-level characters carry around Cure Light Wounds wands. It simply makes no sense to purchase higher level wands, because compared to the first level wand, they're extremely overpriced. This is a fundamental problem in Pathfinder. Resonance only patches over it, and doesn't fix the problem. Fixing the problem isn't trivial. There are several constraints. First, you want low-level adventurers not to have too much gold, and not to be able to afford higher level magic items. Second, you want to have dragons able to sit on big hoards at higher levels. But, third, you want to have the economics of it all such that it's not a financially dunderheaded move to buy a higher-than-first-level healing consumable. I'm not sure you can satisfy all of this at once. Ideally, a CMW potion or wand will be enough more expensive than a CLW potion or wand that most PCs won't be able to buy it until 3rd level. But, you really want that CMW potion or wand to be more efficient in terms of hp per cash, so that it's what the medium-level characters will buy. This means that the wand price has to scale linearly with spell level, rather than quadratically. You then need to reduce the character WBL accordingly, drop the prices of everything else, and now you have the problem that 10,000gp is way to big of a hoard for a (say) CR12 dragon. This is the core problem, and this is what should be addressed. Resonance is overdriving the system in an attempt to correct for bad steering by installing rocket engines pointing in the opposite direction. That sort of thing never ends well.
[Oh, and I REALLY want to see Automatic Bonus Progression. I really don't see why they don't do it. It works wonderfully with all of their professed design goals (makes creating characters a LOT easier, reduces disparity between characters, leaves design space for cool magic items) At Paizocon a year-plus ago, I asked Mark Seifert (I assuredly just got his name wrong) why they didn't include that in Starfiner, since I agree with you that it's a great system and a great house rule for Pathfinder. It fixed so many problems, why not include for Pathfinder? He told me that they tried it with some focus/playtest groups, and by and large people didn't like it. The reason they gave is that they wanted to have control over how they were getting and allocating their bonuses, so they preferred buying the bonus items rather than it just happening at a pre-specified level. Me, I'm completely the other way. The fact that the "big 6" use up slots that you then can't justify using for other flavorful things because the ability bonuses are basically required just makes me sad. Starfinder fixed it a bit by having your bonus increase not use slots, but still limiting how many you can take and how expensive they are.
"Exponentially" is a word that is misused all the time, and it drives me a little bit nuts. Expoential does NOT mean "a lot". If something is increasing exponentially, it means that after each given interval of time, the amount increases by some factor. Exponentially increasing sales would mean that one month you sell 1 item, the next month 2, the next month 4, the next month 8, the next month 16... up to 2048 items in the last month of the year. Each month, you sell twice as much as the previous month. Only, it doesn't have to be double. It can be *anything*. Your savings account (assuming no deposits or withdrawals) is increasing exponentially. Every year, it gets 1% bigger. Not very impressive, but it *is* exponential. Exponential increases don't have to be with time, although usually when not specified that's what you mean. You could say that the time it takes to run combat increases exponentially with the number of players at the table. So, a combat that would take 5 minutes with one player takes 7.5 minutes with two players, 11 minutes with 3 players, 17 minutes with 4 players, 25 minutes with 5 players, and 38 minutes with 6 players. In this straw-man example, I increased the time by a factor of 1.5 when you added each player. What makes the exponential powerful is that the difference in time between 5 and 6 players is way more than the difference in time between 2 and 3... but the factor is the same. If you are just comparing two things, "exponentially" isn't meaningful. D&D5e's sales can't be exponentially more than Pathfinder's, because if you only have two numbers, there's no way to establish an exponential trend. You could say that the difference between D&D and Pathfinder sales is increasing exponentially with time. But when you say one thing is "exponentially more" than another, you are musing the word "exponentially". Just say "a lot" if that's what you mean. Or, if you need emphasis, say "a tremendous amount" or "a gigantic amount". Exponential does not mean a lot.
It's based around the math which is designed to require an 11+ to succeed on most appropriate level rolls. Using that as a gauge means that if buffing or circumstance can lower it by 2, you essentially crit on 19 or 20. If buffing or circumstance can lower it by 3, you crit on 18 to 20. But usually it won't come into play much... for PCs. For monsters it'll come up pretty regularly, since they nearly always have better bonuses than a PC. Degrees of success and failure are a thing I generally like. Rolled really well? You blew them away. However, they tend to be troublesome -- especially for failure, or success by monsters -- with a linear system like d20. It makes critical successes and failures far too common. The "better success for each +5 you succeed by" that shows up with things like Diplomacy in PF1 work just fine, but too-common critical failures, unless your skill is horrible, make a game frustrating. In a system with a different dice mechanic, this makes more sense. Consider GURPS' 3d6, or Fudge and FATE's 4dF. These are on bell curves. The chances of rolling a flat critical failure are a lot smaller -- just under 2%, compared to Pathfinder's 5%. (And, there, if your skill is high enough, it's down to less than half a percent, which is qualitatively along the lines of "if you would have succeeded on a nat 1, you only regular fail.) GURPS also has a "if you fail by more than 10, you critically fail". However, that's only very rarely going to com into play, and only when you're heavily penalized on the skill roll. It will come into play far more often with a linear system like d20. Each ±1 in a system like that adds 5% to the chance of critical failure. With a bell curve, it adds more and more as things get worse and worse, but there's a limit to how much it can ever be. I really think that Pathfinder 2 should completely ditch the critical failure rules. Pathfinder 1 did just fine without them. PF2 is going to feel very frustrating (especially, as many people have pointed out by now, with things like lockpicking) with them.
A large segment of the population that won't move on is a bigger risk with a whole new game system, as PF2e is. It's just less likely to appeal to as many of the same people. On the flip side, it could potentially bring in new people. Remember that slightly (often barely) tweaked new versions worked for Call of Cthulhu for decades. Yes, that's a much smaller, niche-market game, although it is critically extremely well-regarded.
That makes me very sad. I wish it had made it into PF2E.
The game is designed around Paizo's needs, not ours.I'm not sure that is a good business approach: screw what the customers want, this is what me and Hal, like. It might actually be good business sense. I don't know the breakdown of Paizo's sales, but remember that Paizo publishes 12 Adventure Path books a year for Pathfinder. That's a lot of effort, not just from freelancers, but also from editors and developers. If you can make that process a lot easier, you might be able to free up the time necessary to improve the quality of the things you put out. Paizo's APs already are quite excellent, by and large. It'd be nice if they could get back to regularly putting out modules (either the 64-pagers they were doing later, or the 32-pagers they were doing earlier, or both). I was talking to another guy at a convention recently. There were a lot of complaints about PF2. Leaving those aside, though, one guy said that the main reason he'd stuck with Pathfinder was that they put out two scenarios every month, an adventure path book every month, modules (at least in the past). He's too busy to design his own setting and adventures any more, but the amount of support from Paizo allowed him to keep GMing a lot. This is Paizo's killer ap. A core game designed to support that might just not be a bad idea. It doesn't have to be exactly the game customers would want to play, it just has to be something they will play and won't hate too much, and that will support the rate of adventure publication that they do. (Myself, it's going to be hard to overcome the way they've implemented critical failures on Nat 1, and resonance for potions, to have the core game not be too frustrating to play long term. Here's hoping that those two things get fix. Alas, while there is a lot of talk about resonance, I'm not seeing a lot about critical fails on Nat 1.)
I did an initial analysis of Starfinder feats that laid the groundwork for that chapter, in a way similar to Mathmuse described of looking through PF1 feats, and this led to my creating the majority of the feats in there. However, many of the feats that let you do specific skillsy stuff like Veiled Threat, Medical Expert, Fast Talk, Barricade, Antagonize, Amplified Glitch, and others were added later on; every section of a project like Starfinder (or PF2) is a huge team effort! Well, so, here's where this is relevant to the PF2E playtest. Games like Pathfinder are very vulnerable to what one might call the "potion sponge" problem. New rules are coming out all the time (it eventually gets very overwhelming, frankly). Sometimes those are cool new classes, or new fun items. However, sometimes it's a new feat, or a new item, whose description suggests that something people have been doing all along wasn't actually possible, and you have to have a specific item or a feat to be able to do it. (It's worse when it's a feat, because that's a very limited resource.) The potion sponge in Advanced Race Guide suddenly made us all think that we weren't supposed to be able to drink potions under water, even though many of us had no problem with that beforehand. Barricade, from Starfinder, is one of the worst examples of a feat gating what should just be something anybody might try. Quickly stacking a few loose objects to make some temporary cover that won't last very long is a creative action that you might expect a player in an RPG to try. But, now, it looks like you need a feat before you can do that. (What's next? Requiring a feat to suggest in the middle of combat that we could call a temporary truce?) Perhaps at some level this is just what happens when you have a very rule-heavy game. There's a rule for so many things that if you don't find a rule for it, you should be prepared for a rule to come out in a later supplement that limits access to it. This is particularly true in a rule-heavy game like Pathfinder, where the rules aren't as systematic as something such as GURPS. New rules tend to be wholly new feats and classes that are haphazard based on what the topic of the new supplements are. If you don't like it, perhaps you should be playing FATE or something where rules for what you can try are far less specified. However, I'm worried that the "feats and ability levels gate what you can try" model is so baked into PF2E that it's going to turn out to be more of an issue than it was with PF1E. Lots of the skill unlocks and such really are just bonuses to actions, which isn't a problem. But, tying lots of feats to skills mean that instead of just a list of new powers you can get, the rulebook becomes in part a list of all the things you can't try to do with a skill. There is a danger of Pathfinder 2 being "Pathfinder: the Potion Sponge Edition". New feats will inevitably come out. As much as I'd like to see the Player Companion and Campaign Setting lines become all setting information, with new mechanics limited to items (but no potion sponges), NPCs, monsters, the very occasional rare spell, and locations, I know that cool new powers for your character is what sells. So, we'll be showered with a constant stream of feats, just as we are in Pathfinder. How many of those new feats are going to be things that gate something that previously we thought we could just try? Hard to say, but the design of PF2E as it exists leans pretty heavily on that kind of thing.
Nobody knows what PF2E is trying to do other than be new so that people will buy Pathfinder again. In multiple places (for instance this thread I started 5 weeks ago) people have asked for some overarching design goals, but we haven't been able to piece much together (other than "make it feel like Pathfinder"), so by and large it's all speculation based on what 2E seems to be actually doing. This, of course, makes it difficult to know if 2E is succeeding at what it wants to do. I'm personally finding it a little frustrating that we don't know what kind of game it's even supposed to be, meaning that any feedback about how well things are working is completely entangled with feedback about what it's trying to do. I am beginning to strongly suspect that 2E didn't have any real design goals in mind, but was a bunch of different changes and systems put together by the developers. They threw a whole bunch of stuff out to see what would stick. There may be some sort of coherent idea for the audience, or the type of game they were trying to design, but I've not seen that articulated anywhere.
NN959 has given a lot of answers that I would agree with re: the conditions of PFS, and why PFS is often how people play Pathfinder. I would like to throw another thing in here, though, and say that it's more than just PFS. Lots of folks are busy and don't have time to do a whole lot of prep, either creating their own adventures, or modifying other ones. So, prewritten scenarios, modules, and adventure paths become vital tools to enable gaming. I know I myself would never have been able to GM nearly as much as I have without prewritten materials, even though I really do love creating my own games. However, when the prewritten scenarios need to be modified so that they work well with your group of players, then their advantage decreases. It becomes more work to run them, which will inevitably slow you down. Yeah, some GMs are really good at doing it on the fly, but not everybody.
This is a serious problem with PF1e, many of us would agree. I'm a very experienced GM. I've been running games since 1978. I had 5 stars in PFS before I ran Eyes of the Ten, which means I'd run at least 150 games before that. And, yet, my experience in Eyes of the Ten was very much like the OPs. I felt like I wasn't challenging them, at all, the whole way through. A ROFLStomp can be fun, like a silly joke, but 20 hours of silly joke, or ROFLstomp, just gets boring. When the story make clear that there are supposed to be serious challenges, not hilarious enemy dispatch moments, it can get rather frustrating. I don't think the players minded as much, but by the end I was freaking happy it was over.
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