So we are playing SS. we start off of course on SoSS. Now I wasn't there, but the opening being pretty much "YOU MUST FALL ASLEEP FOR PLOT" irks the hell out of me. But like I said I was there at the time.
Later we are now in racing to ruin, and we join the pirate fraction as my character is a pirate, and our favorite npc is a pirate (Bizock) Our warehouse get attacked by two people getting ready to set fire to it, and I suddenly go paranoid about the alchemist fires they hold right next to our warehouse. I ready actions for whenever the alchemist fire leaves their hand to scoot an unattended object away from our warehouse, and safely land in the street.
So our party goes and kills the bad people, and they die, I quickly scoot the object away from our warehouse... OH but PLOT happens and the last man suddenly explodes setting the warehouse on fire with speed backed by the power of plot that our warehouse MUST be set on fire and not be something that is easily put out. Its like... Seriously?
I really really hate scripted sequences where the players are thrown into it with abilities seeming able to mod the sequence, only to have it be of no consequence. Fortunately the game did allow us to save Bizock.
Sometimes a GM should ignore parts of an AP if it increases the fun for the group. My groups sometimes do things to take them off the rails. I just go with it.
I have not read SS so I am not sure how necessary that fire is though. I would probably try to reengineer whatever the fire was supposed to do through other means if the result of the fire is that important.
The fire is only slightly needed the falling asleep is however i still gave saves and gave my party the 5% chance of rolling a natural one knowing that one Pc couldn't really do much to change the wreck if someone happened to make the save.
The fire is in no way necessary and you shoudln't pin this scripted event on the AP but on your GM.
The auto-fail during the opening sequence has been discussed before at length. IMHO the players' acceptance of an auto-fail depends strongly on where you start the adventure. If you start on the boat, let them interact for a while and then suddenly force a save on them that they can't make they feel rightfully(?) cheated. But if you simply tell the story of their journey and don't hand over control to the players right until waking up on the Shiv's beach it runs with less reluctance.
Sometimes a GM should ignore parts of an AP if it increases the fun for the group. My groups sometimes do things to take them off the rails. I just go with it.
I have not read SS so I am not sure how necessary that fire is though. I would probably try to reengineer whatever the fire was supposed to do through other means if the result of the fire is that important.
Not really sure what the fire was suppose to do. Especially since shortly after the fire happened, a bunch of people ran to aid us and the fire was over with.
If anything I'd suspect the fire was "needed" as a means of making the leader of the town angry at us.
Kingmaker seemed much more open and able to go with our flow. But perhaps it was cause we had a different DM running it, and our current one is going more by the book..
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The fire isn't required by the book. That's something the GM did and maybe he has something in mind for it. Can't tell you. The GM might have changed huge portions of the plot. Shrug. Don't know.
I would suggest if you have problems with it: take it up with your GM, same as you would with anything else where you think you're being unfairly railroaded by the GM.
As for waking up after failing a save, I agree with Nullpunkt: that's just how the adventure starts. You wake up on a beach. I personally didn't even give my players a save. But that's just me. My players actually enjoyed the hazy memories and assumed that the saves required were just too high to make for 1st level characters anyway. Shrug again.
Well for the first part, like I said, I wasn't in town at the time.. so it kinda just passed by me much more smoothly, simply cause I wasn't there and didn't end up trying to put a kink in the plot.
The fire though, we were activly trying to prevent the fire. We used abilitys and skills specifically for this. Granted, it pretty much was just "okay fire starts it burns stuff. .and you put it out with the help of these people."
I've brought that DOOM events like this always irk me. like the very end of the last add-on to halflife 2..
There will always be cut-scenes.
A role-playing game, especially one as carefully pre-planned as an Adventure Path, must involve a balance between the PCs' free will and the GM's narrative control.
There is usually a tacit agreement between PCs and GM not to go "off the rails," and experienced players will pick up on the signals without having to be told directly. My gaming group usually cracks one or two jokes about railroading, then shrugs and moves along. That's because they want to be part of a story, and sometimes the story needs to take priority over their individual agendas.
Some GMs (and adventure writers) are better at striking this balance than others. But in any case, a player who believes that she is totally free to do anything she wants is just fooling herself. Even the sandiest sandbox has borders.
Personally I ran Souls for Smugglers Shiv like an episode of Lost: once they were on the island we had flashback sequences where we roleplayed through each character getting on the boat and then what led up to the boat crashing. The party had no idea why they were on the island at first and it was revealed as we roleplayed through it over time.
That sounds like the best of all possible ways to start this - I like giving each Player (I have 3) a couple of minute warm up to get into character via flash-backs and memories which would fit perfectly.
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Personally I ran Souls for Smugglers Shiv like an episode of Lost: once they were on the island we had flashback sequences where we roleplayed through each character getting on the boat and then what led up to the boat crashing. The party had no idea why they were on the island at first and it was revealed as we roleplayed through it over time.
Agree with Khelavraa, this is awesome and I'm totally irked that I didn't use it myself. You could totally just move from PC to PC describing different scenes and making them roll with it. Give everything a disjointed feel and then they wake up on the island.
GREAT way to introduce the other castaways, Ieana, the Captain and the rest of the crew as well as the events leading up to the shipwreck. I just had them make rolls to remember bits and pieces of what happened but actually playing through them would have been MUCH better!
2 bad things here. Both parties (GM and Player) seem rather rigid. No offense intended. Shiv's beginning is scripted the player needs to be a little more understanding of that, I also blame the GM for a certain lack if creativity or he might just be new to running a game.
There is also the possibility of not knowing your players long enough to figure out if that kind of loss of PC control situation would irk them.
If I knew my players would seeth about this (enough to post about it even), I simply would have started them waking on the island. The module start is better for introducing the NPCs of course, but the shipwrecked theme works just as well. I definately would have worked around the warehouse situation based on how things unfolded (I'm with the player on this).
Btw, Skulls and Shackles starts the pcs out as prisoners iirc. You might not like that either. CoTs start also assumes your character wants to help the city, the strong silent types of players probably wouldn't get the most out of it. APs just might not appeal to everyone, the rails might be too straight. Some players prefer to walk cross country instead of riding.
:)
As a GM, I enjoyed the beginning of Smuggler's Shiv. It was a good use of in media res. The players sit down at the table, both in RL and in the module, I get their character names and say, "You're on a ship, and after several weeks at sea, you sit down to dinner. Make a fort save."
Then, smash-cut to the beach - a crab-thing just bit your toe. You're in combat, with no gear. Your comrades are still unconscious next to you - though the biting crab-things will take care of that. Done right and there's not even any time to wonder about the weirdness of the "auto-failed" saves, though...
It makes for a very cinematic opening.
As for the fire, your GM probably just wanted to use the cool mechanic of fire-fighting that's referenced in the module. Plot-wise, it's neither here, nor there.
2 bad things here. Both parties (GM and Player) seem rather rigid. No offense intended. Shiv's beginning is scripted the player needs to be a little more understanding of that, I also blame the GM for a certain lack if creativity or he might just be new to running a game.
There is also the possibility of not knowing your players long enough to figure out if that kind of loss of PC control situation would irk them.
If I knew my players would seeth about this (enough to post about it even), I simply would have started them waking on the island. The module start is better for introducing the NPCs of course, but the shipwrecked theme works just as well. I definately would have worked around the warehouse situation based on how things unfolded (I'm with the player on this).
Btw, Skulls and Shackles starts the pcs out as prisoners iirc. You might not like that either. CoTs start also assumes your character wants to help the city, the strong silent types of players probably wouldn't get the most out of it. APs just might not appeal to everyone, the rails might be too straight. Some players prefer to walk cross country instead of riding.
:)
Well the first one wasn't as bad, mostly cause I wasn't there playing at the time. I just really hate when a DM goes "There is nothing you can do" when i have skills/abilities/feats that say otherwise.
Granted it was cause I wasn't there, even if I was, I'd probably end up falling in line with the events at the time.
but when the event is happening in such a way that I should have some sort of influence over it, and I attempt to act on that.. only to find it was futile.. Some of it is just cause mechanics don't allow for it, some of it is cause DMs tend to be "this is how it is!"
For SnS I think I'd be cool with that, unless there was a scene before that where we are getting captured. Even then I might be fairly cool with it, unless I end up you know, beating down the enemy in a clever scheme of some sort only to wind up just randomly passing out anyways.
I really don't know what it is about Serpent Skull that's got me a bit riled up and agitated. It could be that I'm seeing a little bit of what really annoyed me with LFR and 4e in serpents skull.
The opening Fort save is really just an initiative check and it works well. I skipped the onship stuff and started with the beach as scripted. I told my players that the adventure kicks off with the PCs waking up on a beach and that the order of who wakes up first is determined by the Fort save. My players had no problem with this and I can't see why it would be a problem. Particularly given you're saying you weren't there for it.
I think the AP is better for this style of kick off as it ties into the flashbacks and builds the hate towards the villain of the story.
As for the fires bit well based purely on what you have typed, which is the only info we have to go on, it sounds like a GM fumble. The AP has that the arsonists attempt to set the building on fire and that they break away from that task if attacked.