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Hello All,
I thought I'd share a few comments from GenCon. My gaming group and I played in two events (#1 & #2). In no particular order:
- marshaling / organization was very well done
- the adventures were overall fun to play, with opportunity for each faction to "take a part in the adventure"
A few comments and suggestions for improvements:
- the room was very very noisy -- at times we simply could not hear the GM
- the adventures were relatively short - we finished #2 in under 2 hours. I'd suggest adding some optional elements that the GM can throw in as needed due to time.
- the faction specific goals were far too simple. It would have (perhaps) been more fun if they were a bit harder to accomplish.
That's all. Overall a resounding success! I can't wait for next years GenCon.
Keep up the good work.
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- the room was very very noisy -- at times we simply could not hear the GM
Then don't play at Cons. That's nothing Paizo can do, fix, or should concern themselves with.
- the adventures were relatively short - we finished #2 in under 2 hours. I'd suggest adding some optional elements that the GM can throw in as needed due to time.
Agreed. We blew through Hydra's Fang and Silent Tide in, like, demo time. Because of the nature of Con play, it's too hard to pad things out with role-playing to stretch a 2 hour adventure out to 4 hours. Better to have a 4 hour adventure with *lots* of things that can be cut.
Also, the faction goals were a little *too* balanced. Or the GMs were way too nice about interpreting whether you succeeded at them - in all four sessions, everyone at the table finished their goals, and everyone at the table got the same amount of Prestige. If that becomes NORMAL, there's no way an "unpopular" but clever/sneaky/skilled faction can come out ahead of a stupid but extremely popular faction like Cheliax.
Overall a resounding success! I can't wait for next years GenCon.
Keep up the good work.
100% agreement.
EDIT: Although I wonder why this thread isn't in the PFS sub-board?
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We played through 3 scenarios at Gen-Con.
Avoiding spoilers -
Murder on the Silk Carvan (or whatever) ran long. We couldn't have finished that one in the time allowed. Some of that was our group trying to make things unnecessarily complicated, some of it was the pacing from the DM, and part of it was an encounter that was totally inappropriate for 1st level characters (DC 15 Will Save).
Hydra's Fang was super quick. We finished in about two hours. We had one death in the first minute of play, and that player and his friend left, leaving us with four. But the nature of the encounters was such that even with four people we rocked through it - no challenge. It helped that our part was a 'sneaky' party. I'll just say that some groups had to swim - we weren't wearing much armor, so we had an advantage there.
Frozen Fingers of Midnight (or something) was another 2 hour one and this one all six survived. Again, the encounters were pretty straight forward, and other than the risk of a critical confirmation basically equaling death it didn't take much to accomplish our faction missions.
We played through 3 scenarios at Gen-Con.
Avoiding spoilers -
Murder on the Silk Carvan (or whatever) ran long. We couldn't have finished that one in the time allowed. Some of that was our group trying to make things unnecessarily complicated, some of it was the pacing from the DM, and part of it was an encounter that was totally inappropriate for 1st level characters (DC 15 Will Save).
Hydra's Fang was super quick. We finished in about two hours. We had one death in the first minute of play, and that player and his friend left, leaving us with four. But the nature of the encounters was such that even with four people we rocked through it - no challenge. It helped that our part was a 'sneaky' party. I'll just say that some groups had to swim - we weren't wearing much armor, so we had an advantage there.
Frozen Fingers of Midnight (or something) was another 2 hour one and this one all six survived. Again, the encounters were pretty straight forward, and other than the risk of a critical confirmation basically equaling death it didn't take much to accomplish our faction missions.
You were there? feh.... I think we needed a paizo messageboard meetup (though there probably was one and I just didn't know it)
- Ashavan
Chief Creative Officer, Publisher
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I had to cut the organ encounter out of my running of "Silent Tide," but I think it's because I ran it in the very first slot of the convention and the players were still finishing up their characters and asking questions about the campaign.
Also, I milked the hell out of Grandmaster Torch, who is one of my all-time favorite NPCs in organized play after only one session with him. Oh, boy I enjoyed that encounter.
I really hope that he shows up again in Absalom-based adventures. So many times during play in the old Living City campaign I've thought "Oh, I'll bet such-and-such and NPC I encountered a year ago in this part of town might be able to help with this mystery," but the NPC is never-ever mentioned again and the hapless GM (who may not have played the original module) is helpless to do anything when a PC asks the eventual question.
After a while you sort of resign yourself to the idea that the continuity of an organized play campaign is necessarily tight and focused on the now, and you stop asking questions that engage the fullness of the home city setting.
I've always assumed that that's the way it "has to be" in an OP campaign, but seeing how Josh managed to organize everything at Gen Con and seeing how Nick Logue and the attending authors approached the writing and judging assignments, I wonder if we might be able to pull off things in this campaign that have never been seen before.
I hope you'll stick around with me to find out!
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Chief Creative Officer, Publisher
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On another note, I did have a difficult time hurting my players with the incredibly feeble gang members in "Silent Tide," and I heard about a few really deadly encounters, so I agree that there's some balancing stuff that could use perfecting.
We're going to try really hard to get more space for next year's Gen Con to make things a little less noisy and chaotic.
Based on the overwhelming turnout this year, I suspect securing a larger space will not be a problem.
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I had to cut the organ encounter out of my running of "Silent Tide," but I think it's because I ran it in the very first slot of the convention and the players were still finishing up their characters and asking questions about the campaign.
That is thee only part I am dreading...Character Gen for those that don't do it before hand.. I am just glad the Gen Con UK slots are 5 hours.
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On another note, I did have a difficult time hurting my players with the incredibly feeble gang members in "Silent Tide," and I heard about a few really deadly encounters, so I agree that there's some balancing stuff that could use perfecting.
We're going to try really hard to get more space for next year's Gen Con to make things a little less noisy and chaotic.
Based on the overwhelming turnout this year, I suspect securing a larger space will not be a problem.
I liked the difficulty of the Silent Tide gang members for a level 1 campaign.
Yes, they were feeble, but they did occasionally get in a hit, and didn't instantly kill people (like the greataxe wielding barbarians did in Frozen Fingers). It almost seemed that the difficulty level was spread way across the board (the undead encounters were horribly simple with a cleric in the group, but I'd have hated them without one).
That's awesome news about the space though.
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That is thee only part I am dreading...Character Gen for those that don't do it before hand.. I am just glad the Gen Con UK slots are 5 hours.
You know, I hate to be a jerk about this one but we started our second session nearly 40 minutes late because people at the table didn't have a character. Moreover, two were fairly new to the game and without the help of the people at the table who had made characters and knew what they were doing, we wouldn't have played at all. There has to be some kind of enforcement regarding character creation (having not been involved in organized play before though, I have no suggestions of what needs to be done).
Good thing Frozen Fingers was the short one and we finished with plenty of time remaining.
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I had to cut the organ encounter out of my running of "Silent Tide," but I think it's because I ran it in the very first slot of the convention and the players were still finishing up their characters and asking questions about the campaign.
Also, I milked the hell out of Grandmaster Torch, who is one of my all-time favorite NPCs in organized play after only one session with him. Oh, boy I enjoyed that encounter.
Last response, I promise.
(and a spoiler tag as requested)
Grandmaster Torch was a ball, and I absolutely loved the character and everything about his encounter (the chests were great). I hope your writers keep up this level of NPC development and start playing off each other.
On a side note, it's really too bad you had to cut the organ encounter as it was one of my favorite set-ups in quite some time. I can't say enough positive things about the Silent Tide in general. Our group literally ran to the wire with 5 minutes left and tons of good role-playing though, so I can see why it might have needed to be cut for time sake.
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Also, the faction goals were a little *too* balanced. Or the GMs were way too nice about interpreting whether you succeeded at them - in all four sessions, everyone at the table finished their goals, and everyone at the table got the same amount of Prestige. If that becomes NORMAL, there's no way an "unpopular" but clever/sneaky/skilled faction can come out ahead of a stupid but extremely popular faction like Cheliax.
I think Cheliax might be an example of a vocal minority. It's purely anecdotal, but I DMed eight sessions, and at my tables Osiron was probably the most popular faction, while Cheliax was probably slightly below average.
According to the DM briefing at the beginning of the Con about 1/4 scenarios will feature a possibility of a second "hidden" prestige point. I think this would be a good way to allow crafty factions to gain prestige. (I'd even like to see a higher number of mods with two prestige)
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I ran Hydra & Fingers. All my scenerios ran the majority of the 4 hours slot. True, that two of my games had people generating characters at the beginning, but the slot allowed time for that.
played Caravan. heh. sorry guys.
Second encounter. Goblins & Hobgoblins. Whole party bought it, except me. i ran. made it out with 1 hit point. on a camel.
as to noise...yeah. i sat in the back for a reason.
all around fun.
going to want to start a 'chapter' in Bloomington soon.
While waiting for the next session, Joshua Frost told me that for unknown reasons Cheliax has significantly fewer members than the other factions thus far.
Also, I had a hard time hearing the DM, but it was my first Gencon so I just assumed that was normal.
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Director of Brand Strategy
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While waiting for the next session, Joshua Frost told me that for unknown reasons Cheliax has significantly fewer members than the other factions thus far.
I imagine this might have something to do with the no-evil-PCs policy. Some people might find it difficult to play a devil worshiper/slave driver while remaining on or above the Neutral line.
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For what its worth I had a freakin blast.
Both with the two the Society games I played as well as the Acension of the Drow game on Friday.
Yes there are points that can be worked on but any new thing like this takes work and Paizo seems prepared and able to do the necessary work.
I had what seems to be the opposite of the trend for my experience in that both games we barely had enough time to finish, admittedly on the second one we had two people making characters.
graywulfe
<edited cause I hit the damn submit button when I wanted to hit the preview button>
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Based on the overwhelming turnout this year, I suspect securing a larger space will not be a problem.
Good news on securing more space. I played several games over at Union Station and the noise level was much better -- although the rooms were far less packed.
You may want to check in to Edison North or South. Saturday afternoon (4 - 8pm slot) there were only 2 tables being used in North and South was completely empty. Both had 8+ tables in them.
May not be enough -- but it's a suggestion.
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While waiting for the next session, Joshua Frost told me that for unknown reasons Cheliax has significantly fewer members than the other factions thus far.
Also, I had a hard time hearing the DM, but it was my first Gencon so I just assumed that was normal.
Nope; NOT normal. The acoustics in that room were terrible. So bad, in fact, that after the first (otherwise very fun) slot I refunded my other 3 tickets. I literally couldn't hear the DM at least 50% of the time.
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Question for Plotty Fingers:
I came to Gencon with a group of 5 others. This was my first trip to The Con, and my first experience with organized play. After hearing what a crap shoot RPGA play was, with quality of players and DM's being either good or *really really* bad, I must admit that I was pleasantly surpirsed with the quality of all 4 DM's, and with the few players we got in our group (we didn't have all 6 of us sign up for all 4 events).
I participated in all 4 events, and here are some specific pieces of feedback.
Factions: Most of our group was Andoran, with one Osirion. We found that the faction missions were fairly simple, but also well-balanced in that there was no direct competition--in fact, my Andoran cleric assisted the Osirion barbarian complete one of his missions! All of us dug the role-playing potential inherent to having side missions relating to factions. Also . . .
We thought the encounters were well-balanced overall. In the Silken Caravan, the last combat encounter was *extremely* hairy for us--it was a near TPK, but we knew beyond a doubt that the DM was giving us some dice-fudging assistance because we were really playing well (but rolling poorly). I'm decidedly not complaining about this--I've always believed that this is the DM's prerogative, and he made the correct choice to "help" us beat that last fight, especially since we were all being cooperative, tactically sound, and following our character/class roles very well.
While the treasure system is very very different than what I'm accustomed to, I find that it makes sense to do things this way, particulalry if you're NOT part of a 6-person group and you're simply joining 5 other unknowns in your party.
Our only real DM complaint was our last DM, Saturday AM (Silent Tide). While he appeared confident and knowledgable, his grasp of the rules was not perfect (example: he ruled that with the Rapid Shot feat, you can only shoot different targets once you have multiple iterative attacks due to BAB. We tried to argue this but gave up quickly in order to just move on, even though he's dead wrong according to RAW.) But all the DMs were *at least* average, if not better than one might expect. All had some RP skill as well as good grasp of rules and allowed the story, and battles, to flow smoothly and relatively quickly.
All in all, everyone in my group had a blast in all of our Pathfinder events. I'm looking forward to continuing Val's carreer as a Pathfinder!
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I played all 4 adventures. Silken Caraven and Frozen Fingers took my groups the longest. Silken Caraven was pretty tough for 1st level and we got really bogged down in several of the combats. Frozen Fingers, my group spent more time rp'ing than in actual combat. Overall, I had a blast at Gencon and really enjoyed gaming with most of the people at my tables.
-- Maura the Bard.
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After a while you sort of resign yourself to the idea that the continuity of an organized play campaign is necessarily tight and focused on the now, and you stop asking questions that engage the fullness of the home city setting.
I've always assumed that that's the way it "has to be" in an OP campaign, but seeing how Josh managed to organize everything at Gen Con and seeing how Nick Logue and the attending authors approached the writing and judging assignments, I wonder if we might be able to pull off things in this campaign that have never been seen before.
I hope you'll stick around with me to find out!
That is not the way it has to be. It just requires a lot of work by the campaign manager to see to it they are not forgotten.
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After a while you sort of resign yourself to the idea that the continuity of an organized play campaign is necessarily tight and focused on the now, and you stop asking questions that engage the fullness of the home city setting.
I think Living Greyhawk showed that it can potentially work, just that it varied a lot from one region to another based on the quality of the triad.
It may be trickier for PFS where it's spread over the whole continent, rather than focusing on individual regions, but hopefully a writers bible can be created and maintained which would make things easier for writers once they grow beyond the relatively close-knit circle they're starting with.
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First of all I want to thank the Paizo team for allowing me to come down (up really) and run stuff for them. It was apparent how much work and effort went into trying to make the launch of the society go off without a hitch.
Here are some of my comments:
I ran Silent Tide and Murder on the Silken Caravan:
Silent Tide
This adventure was one of my favorites. It makes me sad I will never get to play in it.
Clearer definition on the organ battle setup would be good, as it doesn't have the marking where 4 of the bad guys are on the map. The Constant climb and jump checks seemed to only slow things down, but by the second time I ran this it seemed to work out well.
Also in both of the parties I ran they seemed to steam roll the encounters. There was no real challenge. The First encounter with the thugs was not deadly, they just shot them from a far and dropped them in 1-2 rounds. It was the same with the final encounter. I was shocked to see the party just sneak up and decimate everything in 1-2 rounds. Granted there are 6 pc vs 5 badguys so something had to give.
Please know that I LOVED this module. Thought it has great pacing, a decent option for time constraints; the fact that you could pull out the 4th Act, and good thematic story. Would easily give it a 4 out of 5.
And it would only need slight clarifications in some of the combats to give it a 5 of 5.
Murder
Clarifications on what the party had to do in th beginning was not very clear. Did they need to prepare the body or did the society do that for them? How is the body being transported, on a wagon or something else? What can be done if the PC's let the cultist take the bodies? Honestly I can't see the evil cult just sticking around with a stolen body and not doing something right away. My solution was to have them make a spot check while they were doing their faction business in town at night to spot the cultists sneaking around wheeling the body out of town.
Thought the Harpies were WAY over powered. Only one member in my party made their saves and as such they were pretty much meat. Was there a way to snap out of it? (could have been me, cause by that point I was pretty sleep deprived and was trying to do my best.)
Finally the last encounter while thematically cool, seemed over too quick, as the big bad rushes into combat with the PC's and gets schooled. Could have been my party was set up for combat, but it still seamed short.
Better clarifications on the goals for the Andorens would have been nice as well, as I was not sure what some of the difficulties of placing their message would be, I often placed it between a 15-25 depending on when and where they were trying to get things done.. Also thought some of the other factions goals were somehow obscure and not easily understood by players. At least that is the reaction I got from some of them.
Overall would give this adventure a 3.5 out of 5.
General Comments
Also separate check in lines for each of the modules might have been nice as to make it easier on Josh and Nick. Pre-gen characters are coming in the future, so I am not going to worry about that.
Over all thank you Josh and Nick for a great time!
Heather
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Our only real DM complaint was our last DM, Saturday AM (Silent Tide). While he appeared confident and knowledgeable, his grasp of the rules was not perfect (example: he ruled that with the Rapid Shot feat, you can only shoot different targets once you have multiple iterative attacks due to BAB. We tried to argue this but gave up quickly in order to just move on, even though he's dead wrong according to RAW.) But all the DMs were *at least* average, if not better than one might expect. All had some RP skill as well as good grasp of rules and allowed the story, and battles, to flow smoothly and relatively quickly.
All in all, everyone in my group had a blast in all of our Pathfinder events. I'm looking forward to continuing Val's career as a Pathfinder!
OK, time to own up to own up to something. That was more than likely me. And after review I blew the call. In my defense, in between sessions I asked other DMs about this and not a single one corrected me. (but the responsibility is mine.) As for RAW, my review of the SRD today doesn't say anything about attacking multiple targets as far as I can find at any level at all. So I will going forward understand Rapid Shot will allow to be split amongst targets.
To those players I hindered I am sorry. I hope that I didn't come across as abusive and I'm sure it doesn't come to any consolation that I enforced a rule the same way every other time it came up. But what can I say I'm just human. I hope that next year you can let me have another shot.
Oh and by the way. At least in my game, I wasn't fudging any rolls. You guys were handling your own very well. You ran a very good team.
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RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32, 2011 Top 16
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As for the noise, due to construction at the convention center, there was simply less space for game events this year, and next year will be the same. However, it sounds like the construction will be done in 2010, and that there will be more space than ever - which could allow more spreading out of tables and therefore cut down on the noise. It certainly does vary some from room to room, but in my experience most games that aren't in large ballrooms with high ceilings tend to have bad noise problems.
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Monster ate my post:
Personally, I found noise more of an issue at the Ascension of the Drow event than during the sessions I ran.
My Frozen Fingers sessions all wrapped up early, but that was usually because the groups were properly goal-oriented. And I appreciated the time for the necessary paperwork.
One thing that I would like to see improved is the access to water. In past years, most of the RPC events that I went in have had coolers or pitchers in the room. The coolers outside the PFS room were usually empty, and were inaccessible during the Drow event. I suspect that dehydration may have played a part in the number of lost and hoarse voices over the con.
Also, I really like the way that treasure distribution is handled, but it needs to be more clearly explained so that everyone understands the mechanism, and the reasons for it.
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I played in 3 of the 4 adventures, Ascension of the Drow and had a great time in all of them. I would like to second the comment on the water situation; the facility did not handle that well. Great writing on all of the adventures and all were enjoyable. All of my GM were great and worked hard to make the game enjoyable to all of the players. I am sorry that my memory will not allow me to name them at this time. One suggestion would be to have the boxed text available as a handout for the players if they are having a hard time hearing. I had a very hard time with the noise level in that room, but all of the GM did allow me to see the text when I asked. I would also like to add my thanks publicly again to Josh, Nick and all of the writers and GMs for their hard work and dedication to making these events the highlight of Gencon for me.
Kevin Brown
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First of all I want to thank the Paizo team for allowing me to come down (up really) and run stuff for them....
I want to thank all three of my judges, Heather, for her great job with Silken Caravan, Chris for running that last, sleep-deprived slot of Hydra's Fang on Sunday afternoon, and to Sean K. Reynolds (yes, *that* Sean K. Reynolds) for running us through Silent Tide, the first PFS mod I played.
I told everyone at Gen Con that, as much as I was hoping for a good play experience, I was blown away by PFS. I had a blast at every table I played. I am completely hooked.
I also had the opportunity to participate in Acension of the Drow Saturday night, first as a ticket-taken and demon understudy, then as a player. By now, most other have probably identified the main problem, which was trying to expand a LARP-style interactive from 30 to 150 people in a short period of time. The overall effect was chaotic and truly frustrating. Most frustrating was that the concept and design were so phenomenal, it pissed me off that the lack of organization detracted from the game. However, the fact that this game was pissing me off drove home the point that I was instantly and significantly emotionally invested in a game that I had only played for the first time just a day earlier.
My suggestion: Use Jason Buhlman as a resource. Some of the best interactive events I every played were in the early days of LG in the Highfolk region, and much of it is due to Jason's ability.
P.S. Congrats to Hans House, M.D. for intriguing his way to having his character crowned Queen. Thanks to the Shackleton brothers for some of the best roleplay I have ever seen, hands-down. Long live Queen Sho'Benigm and House Sardavic!
P.P.S. To the player of Fermal Tracinoa, you really are the best. :)
-George
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As for the noise, due to construction at the convention center, there was simply less space for game events this year, and next year will be the same. However, it sounds like the construction will be done in 2010, and that there will be more space than ever - which could allow more spreading out of tables and therefore cut down on the noise. It certainly does vary some from room to room, but in my experience most games that aren't in large ballrooms with high ceilings tend to have bad noise problems.
Bah, boot WOTC out of their big room and declare it PAIZOLAND!
Annex their space and start a war, that's my suggestion.
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Thanks for the shout out George. I was on fumes with that last slot but I'll never forget you guys singing "Yo Ho Yo Ho a pirates life for me" before charging onto the Hydra's Fang and beating the ever living love outta Du Moire.
I want to thank all three of my judges, Heather, for her great job with Silken Caravan, Chris for running that last, sleep-deprived slot of Hydra's Fang on Sunday afternoon, and to Sean K. Reynolds (yes, *that* Sean K. Reynolds) for running us through Silent Tide, the first PFS mod I played.-George
Singing is an integral part of adventuring. I tell my tables that I only give full XP to those tables who sing along with me!
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I had the opportunity to play 3 of the 4 organized play sessions, and the disorganized play session of Ascension.
For those who got to share my table, I was the studded leather bikini clad elf barbarian witht the two great swords on her back, and the short bow...
Anyway, all 3 of the standard sessions went great. I personally thought most of the scenarios were a bit too easy, but heard of many others having deaths or even TPKs to deal with.
Many of the scenarios seemed to reward non-standard thinking, which is something I love about all Paizo adventures. The guard left alone outside the warehouse was caught quite unaware when Ruthaer (my barb-ie doll) jumped into his arms and tried to yank his pants down. Gave the rest of my party the distraction they needed.
Overall, having had the chance to play, I would make the following recommendations.
1. split the tables up more. A bit more complicated to do muster, but instead of having the left and right side of the room, have the tables mixed so groups are not hearing the adventure right next to them.
2. Have a couple dozen semi-generated characters. For example, let people pick race, and choose feats, but have other stats and skills done already. All but one session people were murderfraging time generating characters.
3. water in the room would be nice, but is always a risk around so many people, and more importantly so many books
Otherwise society play was great.
As for ascension...
I had a good time in general but there were some very frustrating parts. I got to talk to a few of the DMs about it, and apparently there were twice as many people as was originally planned so some chaos was expected, but wow...
Finally,
Congratz to Paizo!!!
Between winning 8 awards, and having almost everybody at the con (that i spoke to) talking about their games, Paizo was miles above the lizards on the beach.
Thank you to everyone at Paizo, and all the volunteers for making sure I had the best for days of gaming I could have
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Anyway, all 3 of the standard sessions went great. I personally thought most of the scenarios were a bit too easy, but heard of many others having deaths or even TPKs to deal with.
Well, it does help when one of your rounds has two barbarians and a 2nd level fighter in it . . . and the bard still almost didn't survive his valiant charge into battle. ;)
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P.S. Congrats to Hans House, M.D. for intriguing his way to having his character crowned Queen. Thanks to the Shackleton brothers for some of the best roleplay I have ever seen, hands-down. Long live Queen Sho'Benigm and House Sardavic!
-George
Thanks George. That was so much fun. It was awesome to know that we stirred up so many hornets nests at once that it ultimately destroyed us. And that the end result was still our Matron on the throne! The evil drow gods work in mysterious ways.
Thanks to all members of House Sardavic for being such a cool bunch to game with.
I echo the concerns with all the chaos but once I realized what it really was we were there to do (something a little more LARP-like) I threw myself into it with gusto and had a blast!
My most fun moment was probably bellowing that one of the other house leaders was a coward to goad her into a duel (as my character's cursed sword demanded).
The whole thing was nuts and almost disturbing it was so chaotic, but ultimately I had a great time.
Glen