schattenstern's page

I started GMing org play as I wanted to ease the burden of the regular GM at my lodge, it helped that I was a home-game GM beforehands for a long time.

As an Organizer I asked a lot of my regular players if they were interested. For weekly games I offer providing a repeatable scenario they played at my table with me as a player to help them if they have problems. If possible I seed that table with some of the easy players/helpful ones (and ask them to not use their weirdest chars)
What helped here (anecdotally) quite a bit were the RSP-boon and SF-boons with “check 1 box as a player, 2 boxes as a GM”
As a convention organizer *nothing* helped more to get someone in (and in my experience the 1st table is the important one) than the race boons of 1e/early SF where you got one shiny thing for doing one table at the convention. It also helped motivate recurring GMs WAY more than the small boost in ACP. (Especially as that boost has to be compared to a “I could also play in that slot” proposition, which would also grant increased ACP)

Well I am quite dissapointed that the specials get less and less levels.

I always found it fun to do them with old and trusted - high level - characters and now we get them only for low level characters.

One thing I never want to see again is the atmosphere rules, as these will just end up in everyone moving at a snakes pace.

I agree with Tommi/Sebastian here.

This would not only be a QOL update but also reinforce the image of the society we want the players to have.

As the capstoneraceboons of APs seem to just want to "limit" the boon to players who completed the AP why not allow double dipping for them and change the future versions with:
If you have a chronicle from each part of the AP (list here) you gain access to this boon.

I think their intent is different from preventing someone to check a box on a skittermander and a pathra boon at the same time.

As you can adjust the shields freely before combat this does not seem like the issue here.

The problem is, that creatures whose only "unique" thing is the name they got get the unique tag, which causes problems with abilities that rely on recall knowledge.

PF2 also still has the old recall knowlegde problem of:
"Oh this newly born red dragon might be identifiable by the villagers it attackes"
"after 500 Years terroriszing the village noone can even know they are a terrorized by a RED dragon but they only get critfails on recalling it"

Sad to hear the class loosing the one thing that made it an interesting caster.

Nice to see the change.

Do VL/VC get bonus novas for running Perplexity? This would greatly ease the burden on the few (if any) 4Nova GMs outside of America.
As far as I know there are 2 4 Nova GMs in all of continental Europe, while if the bonus would count we would have a far better GM-pool.

Well it would be nice if the solution to the 3-player table would be something that is not a hardmode, as this leaves the players in a bind, if they are not that comfortable with the extra challange:
Either they suck it up cause they want to play or they speak up and noone gets to play (which might lead to peer pressure)

As can be seen in my review of the scenario I completely agree with the three posters above me.

Mike I think you did a good job with making the hobgoblins feel "there" but not useless or overbearing.

The key is a reasonable dm to player ratio. If you have DMs with prepped ish scenarios it doesn't matter how many people show up until you run out of flat rolling surfaces.

The problem in a lot of 1 table locations is that there is no second table available...

pauljathome wrote:

Michael Sayre wrote:

The overall rewards for everyone have increased.

Uh,that's not really true. [...]

Sure it is. Did you get three race boons a year just for GMing regularly on your way to 5 stars before? Because now if you're an active GM you do, plus your bonus points for convention GMing. If you do 7+ slots at a major con, you get an ancestry boon's worth of points plus a free rebuild and three free resurrections. And if you don't want/need an uncommon ancestry you've got e.g. many lifetimes' worth of free resurrections.

At the end of the day this is one of the most generous programs we've ever had. The World Guide is a core assumption. Every weekly player gets enough points for a new ancestry over the course of the year and a twice-monthly GM who GMs a con can clear three. A highly active GM who runs weekly games and attends multiple cons might clear a year with 6 or more. And that'll apply to every GM, not just the ones who make it to GenCon or get lucky on an RSP roll.

Sry Michael this is just wrong. First there are no major conventions with the highest scaling in continental europe as of now, second there was a very big benefit of doing multiple smaller conventions in the old system that is no longer in the new system. (For example in 2018 I got over 12 race boons for running around 24 tables at conventions. Which is not possible in the new system)

Thurston Hillman wrote:

BigNorseWolf wrote:

Multiple checks don't miss any: in PFS1 this was something that made me wonder if the writers failed statistics or just hate players. If there's any chance of missing a check requiring multiple checks dramatically increases the chance of failure.

Please avoid attacking our writers for their perceived competency or dubious morals.

My bad, thats a fair bit harsher than I intended.

While this is formulated harshly the statistical truth still stands, if you have to make three consecutive checks to achieve something, even if you can make the check on a 5 you still have nearly a 50% (0.8*0.8*0.8=.512=51,2% success chance).

I recently got a LOT of complaints from some of my players that computers is very harshly penalized in this way, as you have to do the same computers DC (except the few “here is the keycard/password reminder”) than the engineering check for the same result in a lot of cases, but for computers you often need to do 2 to 3 checks to get the same result you would have gotten with one engineering check.

Matt2VK wrote:

What's scary is pull up a pregen and try to make some of those DCs.

When I helped playtest scenarios, we used L1 pregen parties to see if they could at least survive and succeed at the primary success condition.

But I don't believe, really don't believe, that this is being done with higher level scenarios.

I think this is the most important part, if the pregens cannot succeed with a reasonable chance of success we will alienate players. Especially if you have weekly/biweekly tables even the newer players will play everything and will play pregens in the high subtiers, so they should not feel like dead weight.

If the check is just for flavor/background/foreshadowing/reducing avoiding (reasonable) damage you can do something that challenges the specialists to reward them.

Well of the goblins I had at my table 2 were pyromanics that got an infamy warning during the session and one was a "mechanical character" so the race was choosen for purely mechanical reasons and did not come into play.

I still think it was a BIG mistake to make goblins player characters without a lot and well written in world reasons as to why they are no longer kill on sight. It does not help that my first contact with Goblins in Pathfinder was Rise of the Runelords 1 aka "Why we have to kill goblins".

For the area B5 encounter, what is the savebonus of Tavvar and her aides?

It might be the local metagame but all our powergames seem to have no problems in spaceship combat:

It helps tremendously that our local meta depends largely on unsing Longarms on everyone but the operative so everyone can at least be a decent gunner as they will have maxxed or near maxxed DEX. It also "helps" that the class most players view as the "strongest", the operative, has to actively try to be bad in spaceshipcombat as most operatives will have DEX maxxed and most of them will also have ranks in engeneering and computers.

But after a game with newer players yesterday I completely agree that a "starhip" part of a character and/or pregensheet would help a lot with explaining what to roll and especially where to find it.

Thursty, have you though about changing scenario design so that starship combat might be the best option but not the only option for the players. (Starship encounters seem to take less then a page of space so scenario word count wouldn't be a big issue).

Please do NOT do this, this will not only mess up the slot time most of the time but it will also lead to toxic discussions between the players who like Starship combat (and might have invested quite a bit into it) and those who hate it.

For me the archetype has the very big problem of being dippable: For a 1 level dip you get:
->Dancers Grace for +1 AC if you are unarmored (possibly the least important for a dip)
-> Graceful Warrior (Weapon finesse as a Bonus feat and access to 3 new weapons to use it with, two of which have reach, one of them is by far the best x4 crit weapon to finesse and the katana is a straight upgrade to the rapier which is one of the premiere finesse options.) This alone makes this archetype highly problematic as it opens up options for Dex-based martials that are not that welcome in the campaign (see the bladed brush discussions).
->Skirmishers Challenge (Like challenge but a strict downgrade as it is worse if you fullattack, which is not that big of a deal in a dip but if you fully commit to the class it is a fair downside.)
->Order: The benefit of this is variable depending on the order and not limited to the archetype.
->Martial Weapon Proficiency + some exotic weapons, which are also boosted by the archetype.
-> 1 Flourish: This is the big elephant in the room:
Exodus of Jinin: No problem here, comparable abilities are easily available.
Harmony of the Tranquil Garden: Blindsense is not an ablility that should be freely available to 1st level characters.
Kitsune’s Mystique: This gives a useful feat and also boosts it with additional utility. This also messes a lot with action economy and can be used to (for example) set up sneak attack in places where it previously was not possible.
Petals on the Wind: NO, just NO. This has quite a bit of abuse potential if you have Combat reflexes, which is not that weird considering the kind of build this archetype encourages. This not only does you allow to take multiple non provoking “5ft-steps” out of your turn, this also can be used to ignore the penalty of reach weapons to have a “blind spot” area. (On a class that is highly encouraged to abuse reach weapons). If this would be made legal I would retrain at least one of my AoO based characters just to be able to use this ability. (It is a bloodrager who most of the time has around 15-25ft reach, which would make him massively mobile if this would be added.)
Additionally the interaction of this ability and difficult terrain/flying as well as the prevention of the triggering action itself (especially charges in areas with corners) is highly unclear.
Wrath of the Heavens: A level 4 feat with 3 prerequisites (2 of which are a feat tax) available at level 1 is wrong. If you are an archer and want this feat most of the time dipping the warrior poet is easier than taking the feats to qualify.

So the Archetype might be fine if taken single classed (But I still think Petals on the wind should be banned and Graceful Warrior should not unlock the additional weapons for finessability) it is too problematic if it is dipped, as the level 1 flourishes have some options that are too strong for some other classes to use.

I've seen PFS Legal archetypes get completely broken.

This does not mean that new problematic stuff should be added in. I personally see a big problem for the archetype in petal on the winds and its possible rammifications especially with creative use of "foe". But I do not know why it was banned but I can see this, or the fact that this archetype is one of the best dips for certain builds, as a reason for it.

The point is that in our area the only ones using small arms are operatives, everyone else is getting longarm acess as smallarms do no damage.

At level 10 you will most likely have a 2d10 (average 21 damage)Energy weapon. This deals as much damage per shot (fullattacks are a good option if you get even 1 debuff on the enemy)
Additionally the enemy saves seem to scale better than the AC so you will get your mind thrust damage halved more often than not.
For example a CR 10 Combatant (which is not the boss but part of an encoutner most of the time):

Both characters are assumed to have 20 or 22 in the main attribute (Dex/Wis -> a lot of players seem to favor Dex over their casting stat on their second caster), the "shooter" has Longarm Proficiency, versatile specialisation and weapon focus (longarm).

The caster has Spell focus and (for the ease of math) Spell penetration and Greater spell Penetration which lets him (for this example) ignore Spell resistance. The weapon I used is the LFD sonic rifle, a weapon which will rarely be resisted but there will be stronger options if you just want the damage.
You hit him on a (EAC 23) with a 7 (BAB)+ 2(weapon Focus) + 5/6 (Dex) so a 8 or 9, in most parties on a 6 or 7 as the enemy will be flatfooted by the operative or envoy. This will lead to a DPR (against not flatfooted) of 24.255 if you single attack or 30.87 for a fulltattack. (You will get problems with one type of energy resistance)

Compared to that the Mind Thrust will have a DC of: 10 (Base) + 5/6 (Wisdom) + 1 Spellfocus + 2/3/4 (Spellevel). This leads to a maximum DC of 21/20/19. This leads to an average damage of Mt4 (38.5 Slightly higher than a fulltattack), Mt3 (25.98 LESS than a fulltack), Mt2 (14.3 Less than even a single attack.) And you will be completely useless against anything immune to mind affecting damage.
And this is the best case for your mystic as the combatant is the enemy array with the lowest will save. So the spells are mostly used to finish of enemies that just need to be hit (As the have (barring immunities) no way to deal no damage.)
But as you see even the second highest level spell is worse than just attacking with a weapon.

While I like the prize table approach I think ifd you sacrifice permanent (race) boons you should get a permanent benefit in PF2.

Bob at least here in Europe some conventions you would call "small" are also the only cons in the nation where specials CAN be offered. So even "small" events lead to long distance travel if you look outside of the US. For our big convention we have regulary players from multiple countries as this is one of the very few events that can offer specials in continental Europe.

And the Gencon boons are causing a bad divide between the communities because if you happen to live on one of the other 6 continents your chance of getting one without going to spend a 4-Digit ammount is miniscule.

While I am a big fan of everything that requires me to fill out less, purely online chronicles have one BIG downside:

A lot of conventions have shaky or no internet connection so they are worthless as a only solution as players will not be able to access the chronicle immediately. (And a lot of players will play more than one scenario per convention.)

Regarding the boons, could we please adress the other elephant in the room?

Can we please get rid of boons that are completely unobtainable for 95% of the playerbase. With this I sepcifically mean the GenCon exclusive boons as these are boons that will almost never make it to the players outside of America.

For slotted boons:

While I somewhat like Starfinders approach it got diluted extremely fast as over 50% of all boons are slotless or "This might be relevant sometimes -> and the relevance was sometimes so low that we would have been better of slotting another boon but as we did not know the consequences we were not able to make an informed decission.

After thinking about it for a night (and reading the Module to GM it) I can see a glaring problem:

The enemy to hit is too high.

It seems like they used the same formula for starfinder (enemies hit very good) but they forgot to also lower their defenses to compensate it. The biggest offender was the goblin commando encounter, the enemies are having a BETTER to hit than any character could possibly achieve but their defense is also comparable. So it realy feels like the odds are stacked against the PCs.

The best AC we had was a 18 (from the fighter) and he was hit on AT LEAST a 12 from every enemy in the whole dungeon, the animal companion with its 12 AC had it worse as everything could CRIT it at least on a 16, some enemies even on a 12 (one enemy in its best turn even on a 10). Maybe a solution would be to drop the enemy to hit down a bit as with the current numbers there is never a reason NOT to triple attack if you have the chance to it.

I just finished playing Doomsday Dawn 1 (The Lost Star) and as the Survey is not online (yet) available, here is my feedback.

Party Composition:

We finished the adventure in around 6 hours (real time) and 2 days (ingame time). The combats all felt very random and disappointing, there was no real difference in the to hit between the characters so it only mattered if we rolled good. (The druid and cleric had a +4, the rogue had a +5 and the fighter a +6) The actions of all characters were also the same as most rounds were Stride/Strike/Strike or Strike/Strike/Strike, with only the druid deviating as he used mostly Stride/Strike/Command or Cast or heal Animal/Command. So all classes played the same and there was no noticeable difference. This carried over to the skills where there was no notable difference between the characters, as all had skillboni between -2 and +5 (and the skills the characters rolled were in between +3 and +5)

All the casters complained about that they had far too few spells, especially as taking a healing option felt forced as there is not a real option to buy healing at this level. Even with 2 characters capable of healing someone went down in every encounter (except in A3 and A10)[in total we had at least 10 cases of players down]. The characters felt extremely fragile as nearly all enemies hit us on a 10 or 11, with a lot of them hitting even better. The worst experience had the druid whose animal companion had a 25% chance to be critted by the initial encounter and be instantly downed by it (which happened).

This was not helped with the fact that nearly every encounter was a bottleneck encounter as there was next to no room to maneuver.

The consensus was that the experience was far worse than the low level experinece in Pathfinder 1 (and this comes from a player who does not really like low level Pathfinder 1)

In my experience the most chosen pregens by newer players (without tipps) are:

1.) Lini
2.) Kyra
3.) Merisiel

With some guidance by other players this shifts often to:

1.) Kyra
2.) Crowe
3.) Amiri

People may have differing opinions on my interpretation, but until the OPM tells me otherwise, I will continue to act in the manner and good faith I always have, as it has served me and my community quite well.

While I will not say that this is a problem in your case (I have next to no contact to your region) I am a firm believer in the philosophy that rules are not made for the "good" people to break. They have to apply to everyone. I already saw a region on the verge of collapsing because one VO thaught he did so much good for the region in the past that he could decide what course of action would be best for it (as long as noone told him otherwise) He often would use the words "VC-privilege" to describe his "reasoning" on why stuff was handled the way it was and I have seen the damage a individual with this way of handling his region can have.

We need the WRITTEN rules to apply to everyone because not only gives this everyone a chance to understand what he is in for but also protects everyone from a "bad" superior officer. One of the best things that came out of the restructuring of the VO-corps back when Tonya took over from Mike was that we now HAD definitions on what it meant to be an VO.

Act as the third step in conflict resolution process, working with VCs to resolve community issues utilizing established guidelines. Up channel any issue that cannot be resolved to the OPC.

While I agree that this establishes a chain of command this only exists in the area of resolving issues. Also where are the established guidlines to resolving these issues?

I’m sure I would be, but I appauld Michael’s decision to continue to be a leader in the community, to organize, to GM, to play. That is what makes all the difference to his community, not some badge on his shirt. For that, Michael has my respect.

I have to completely agree -> Michael does deserve our respect for that. But if he still does the work of an VO why should he not stay one?

We’re still in the middle of major convention season, with Origins this week and Gen Con about 8 weeks away.

Mark could you please post a time of year where we COULD discuss some of these matters?

Admittedly, that is not expressly listed in the Guide or in the NDA, but I have expressed this concept to my VO team and explained on numerous occasions my ideas on the philosophy of chain-of-command and the escalation process to the VCs.

Bob it is nice that your region has a procedure like this but could you please post the paragraph of the OPF contract or the written and to VO available source of your confidence that an RVC has the right to do this and the VC have to follow this?

I am posting here NOT because of any involvement in the discussion about the incident itself, I am on another continent and my contact to Del is limited to around 5-6 posts here in the forums. This issue is something that shows that while the current ways of PFS-issue control has its flaws and FAR too much of it relies on unwritten rules the VO in question might have never heard of. Also I find it highly disturbing that apparently these unwritten rules take precedent to any written rule we are provided.

I have worked a bit with Michael in a taskforce and I remember that working with him was always productive and provided me with new perspectives to the presented problems. So while I cannot speak for how he is as a GM or as a player (but I would be interested to join him at an online table) I have only good memories of him as a VO.

Well I also think the SHEETS are fine, the problem is the procedure to fill them out. Most of the time they are handed out with all GM-fields filled out or the players should fill in their number and mark their tier/slowtrack and the GM uses this for reporting and gives back the chronicle filled out.

I agree with Bob that we VOs NEED the event code, it might be the most importat information for correcting wrong chronicles. The date is also needed to find out in which order chronicles have to be applied (or to order tham after the stack got mixxed up-> Especialy for players who do not use a binder) The GM-number is needed to identify who ran the game which can be important to find out if there was a error in reporting.

But I completely agree with BigNorseWolf that the procedure is not realy needed and is not folloewd in reality. And especially with PF2 coming up it would help to make the wanted procedure something that is feasible to follow. (Especially with cons/gamestores where we have maybe 3-5 minutes to wrap up the table and give out the chronicles)

I agree that the current way of filling out chronicles is far from everything I see in reality. I would agree to make it align more with reality because the current method is far too long and tedious.

This applies to online and offline games as well.

What would be wrong with:

"Give out the chroniclesheets with all GM-only areas filled out and cross of the boons/items the player did not qualify for"

So there is no back and forth and this is how I see it done at most games.

I am against anything that massively complicates reporting.

It is hard enough now when you report all games from a convention to get the 4 checkboxes done (Because most GMs dont fill them out on their reporting sheets)

Also agree that this would be a good opportunity to ban evil deities alltogether.

NO -> I see it as more realistic to ban CN (it causes a lot of problems) than open up LE.

Realistically I can see no change in the allowed alignments.

Thank you very much John, while I love the old snowball as a player, the GM-Me is currently happy enough about the songird change that this is worth it overall.

@Feroius Thune:

I would be completely ok with a rule saying: If you earned a PF 1 raceboon and did not use it you can use it in PF 2 once the rules for the race are released.

ItsJustAce:

If there is something for raceboons then it should apply to all of them:
If not there will be a lot of people crying out loud "PAY TO WIN", especially because the boons should be a reward for GMing at conventions and I see a very lackluster interest for any con next year when I am starting to asking who wants to GM. There should be something meaningfull (and a lvel 2 character is NOT meaningfull at all for GMs) for those who do and it should be a piece of paper collecting dust (Because a lot of us CAN NOT play 1st edition after the release of 2nd because we dont have any scenarios left.

So something should be done for all raceboons, maybe not carriing them over exactly but maybe a tradein for other exclusive races? (Because I can forsee not all boonraces being available at the start of the 2nd edition.)

I would vastly appreciate 2 things, firstly an option to do something meaningful with your old boons (especially race boons) in PFS2 and that once the playtest is released that we giver out PF2 boons at conventions (there is already a big pushback of my regular gms against new race boons for PF1 because they will not be able to use it anyways.)