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Most of the adventure, I had a great time. The atmosphere of the group setting was electric. Dozens of tables working together to achieve strategic goals was a lot of fun. But honestly, it would he like having most of a great dinner and someone leaving a wet messy defocation on it before you finish.
And then, after all of your efforts, after watching your friends characters get wiped off the boots of a pair of half fiend minotaurs, you are thanked for your service with chronicle sheet crap. I think I'm not supposed to really reveal what's on it, but for anyone else who played subtier 3-4, you know what I'm talking about. +1, 5%? Really? I just saved your city!
So, maybe next year I will consider a different event for that time slot. I'm really hoping a lot of others enjoyed it more than I did.
Just my $0.02. Oops, I don't even have that after paying for raise dead.
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I am sorry the demons killed your paladin.
I'm not. I don't know who told you it was going to be easy, but they lied to you. At least you got to play it. I'm sure if I had been there, I would have been one of the GMs and you bet your butt I would have remembered to power attack. Death is part of the game, and it can even be a fun part if you let it.
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Wait, you're surprised a demon went after your Paladin? That's pretty much what they are created to do right?
Also in PFS GMs can't just pick any monster they want. They run the scenario that is written. So the monster must have been in the scenario to begin with and wasn't "hand picked" to kill your specific character.
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I have never seen a Pathfinder scenario where the GM can handpick monsters for some specific purpose or pick the monsters at all. The scenario has all the monsters that will appear already indicated and GMs are expected to run them as written with exactly those monsters. There is some variability for differen numbers of players in the season 5 stuff (or the one I own so far) but the monsters are still predetermined and part of the scenario.
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My group got hammered hard. We had four deaths over 3 characters at 10~11 I personally had a great time. The first encounter was rough. The second encounter was rough. The third encounter we had our head in the game and blew through it. The last encounter I solo'd the breaker *as a sorcerer*. It was good. I lost a majority of my goods but some came back.
Our vc who ran us was fantastic.
~Skip
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To answer your question, no the GMs did not get to hand-pick the monsters. In one of the encounters there was a small list of semi-random monsters that would attempt to disrupt the attempts of the PCs to defend a tactically important position in the war vs. The demonic horde. Was a fiendish minotaur one of those "random" monsters? Yes. Is it a nasty baddie? Absolutely! As a comparative to your experience, my table of level four pregens, yes I said pregens, those oft-maligned characters also faced said baddie and did fine. There were two near deaths and Ezren had a really hard time penetrating SR, but they worked together and won in the end. And just as an FYI, the minotaur wasn't even the most challenging monster on that list. There were five other assault waves that would attack the PCs over the course of that encounter
Like others, I have heard nothing but good things about players experiences (except that of the OP). As you will undoubtedly read in other threads, the Diamond City special was expertly written and developed. It flowed very well and did not fell rushed despite the chaos inherent with the story. Players had choices, which was awesome, and the encounters were both challenging, and entertaining as well. There was certainly a sense of "oh, cr@p" with most of the monsters, but what else would be appropriate for a demonic incursion?
If you did not have the pleasure of attending GenCon, I strongly recommend talking to your local organizer/s and get this scheduled to play. In my opinion, and that of everyone I have spoken to, GM and player alike, it was easily the best GenCon special to date.
And I hope that everyone who played or judged will leave a review of their experience in the scenario's product page.
Thanks go to the players, GMs, HQ staff, Thurston Hillman, John Compton, Kyle Pratt, and everyone else who contributed to this event!
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I had an absolute blast with this special; my table of Seekers tore through it until the last encounter with the cr 17 mythic 7 demon lord; that fight challenged us all to dig deep, fight tactically and use almost all of our resources. It was fantastic.
My only issue with the special is that, despite being the coolest special to date, the boons at the end were pretty dissapointing. After a few people got goblins last year, I was hoping that a few people would get something special this year. Even compared to the boons I got from ruby phoenix/risen rune specials played away from gen con it was dissapointing.
Overall though, I had a blast and am looking forward to next year!
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If you did not have the pleasure of attending GenCon, I strongly recommend talking to your local organizer/s and get this scheduled to play. In my opinion, and that of everyone I have spoken to, GM and player alike, it was easily the best GenCon special to date.What would that require?
The GenCon special will require multiple tables to be run simultaneously. I may be mistaken on this, but I believe the number for this year's special is 3.
In addition, you need to get your hands on the scenario - all Venture-Officers have access, and if you're planning a con (or you know someone who is, but who is not a VO) then you can ask for the special as part of the convention support request. (If you don't know about submitting a request for con support, you can ask for advice on the forums, here, or contact the closest Venture-Officer. Or any VO, for that matter - I don't know anyone who wouldn't help just because you're far away.)
Then, you need a GM for every table plus one overseer GM to keep the tables on-pace. An extra body or two as a runner can help immensely as well; there's generally information that needs to flow from the tables to the overseer, and if you've got more than a few tables that can be overwhelming.
You can run it as part of a game day or night - you don't need to have it being run at a convention, just anywhere there's three simultaneous tables (and a little flexibility on time limits helps.) There are often posts about it being run on game days and the like.
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I had a friend play the special (I skipped it this year) and he also didn't like it (@ subtier 6-7), but mostly because "it was just a series of combats". His words, not mine.
And yes, he said the combats were very tough, but it was mostly because his GM didn't know the rules on how to handle magical darkness. If you can believe it, his GM has the PCs running random directions in the darkness (when they tried to move), but not because they were confused, because he thought that's how darkness "should work". *Sigh* This year was a bad year for GMs not knowing game rules.
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Our group got through it ok at 5-6 tier.. but we were playing off each other very well. Two barbs with teamwork feats (Butterfly Sting and a Scythe), my druid and companion tripping it all, plus a life oracle and socking grasp magus. However... fighting an enemy with THIRTY-FIVE AC at level six? TWICE? Yeah... we got really lucky, because we couldn't hit except 10% of the time with both flanks and trips.
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If you can believe it, his GM has the PCs running random directions in the darkness (when they tried to move), but not because they were confused, because he thought that's how darkness "should work".
What.
It boggles my mind when I hear about a "ruling" that makes fantasy heroes less competent than real-life commoners.|
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I had a good time at the special, but I also was disapointed in act 3 of the 5-9 tier. It was pretty much the same encounter over and over again, and I was flaberghasted when the special ended and there wasn't anything else to do. Rescuing fallen crusaders is a noble task, but a boss fight at the end would have been nice. Felt pretty underwhelming at the end.
Also, the chronicle sheet really needs the out of tier gold calculated on it, because the GMs were super confused how to apply the new rules, and I'm pretty sure at least 2 characters got screwed out of gold at my table.
For what it's worth, at the beta version at Paizocon, I also played the 5-6 subtier, and our table and GM made it clear to those involved with creating it that the first bits constituted far and away the best interactive to date but that the finale was quite boring and a let-down at our subtier. It was even more than 6 waves if you were fast--it was infinite waves, and Act 3 had a longer time at Paizocon. We actually fought >10 waves. I suggested that there be increasingly difficult waves of a limited number like in Runecarved Key that you could eventually finish, perhaps handing off one of those boon cards to another table if you finished before time was called, rather than a grind of the same difficulty over and over. They gave some good counterpoints about it being weird for one group to be "done" when a siege was still ongoing, but I still contend that from a gamist perspective, infinite waves are a bad thing.
I still think that the first two acts were excellent, and it sounded like some of the other finales were great too, so this is probably hands-down the best Special for those other tiers, and it's still a strong contender even in our tier from the strength of the first two acts alone.
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I had a good time at the special, but I also was disapointed in act 3 of the 5-9 tier. It was pretty much the same encounter over and over again, and I was flaberghasted when the special ended and there wasn't anything else to do. Rescuing fallen crusaders is a noble task, but a boss fight at the end would have been nice. Felt pretty underwhelming at the end.
Also, the chronicle sheet really needs the out of tier gold calculated on it, because the GMs were super confused how to apply the new rules, and I'm pretty sure at least 2 characters got screwed out of gold at my table.
For what it's worth, at the beta version at Paizocon, I also played the 5-6 subtier, and our table and GM made it clear to those involved with creating it that the first bits constituted far and away the best interactive to date but that the finale was quite boring and a let-down at our subtier. It was even more than 6 waves if you were fast--it was infinite waves, and Act 3 had a longer time at Paizocon. We actually fought >10 waves. I suggested that there be increasingly difficult waves of a limited number like in Runecarved Key that you could eventually finish, perhaps handing off one of those boon cards to another table if you finished before time was called, rather than a grind of the same difficulty over and over. They gave some good counterpoints about it being weird for one group to be "done" when a siege was still ongoing, but I still contend that from a gamist perspective, infinite waves are a bad thing.
I still think that the first two acts were excellent, and it sounded like some of the other finales were great too, so this is probably hands-down the best Special for those other tiers, and it's still a strong contender even in our tier from the strength of the first two acts alone.
I was the gm for Rogue Eidolon's table at Paizocon. And yes, we finished off well over ten waves of critters. Granted, they were very efficient at eliminating the demons. Either we powered through too many encounters at Paizocon too quickly or I rushed the table because we were in danger of running out of encounters. So when Thursty told us we were crazy if we got through all of the encounters, I laughed a bit inside.
I can not comment about the mid-tier for gencon as I requested a low tier table for the special.
I think we had less time for act 3 this go around (at least it felt that way to me). But, from reading the updated version and talking to others the difficulty was increased. There were much fewer successes called out at every tier.
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Wait...
Most of the adventure, I had a great time.
Not the first line I expected after such a mean-spirited thread title.
Your character died - that's hard, especially at lower level where you've invested in the character but can't afford a raise. It's also tough if you're used to playing PFS where many situations are a walk-through for reasonably-optimized PCs. The Special at GenCon is tougher than that. How many evil creatures did your paladin one-shot before this game? I bet you're still on the winning side of that equation, even after the death.
Given the amount of time Paizo put into this event (including TWO playtests, AND adding the event back to the schedule in the first place based on overwhelming popular support), it would be nice to temper our personal feelings with the personal feelings of those who worked on it, hey?
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Ah, it sounds like they changed it to give a feel of escape and powerful demons everywhere that were above your paygrade. I think that's an improvement from Paizocon--the enemies were chumps, and we just sort of parked ourselves in one spot and slaughtered them, easily sparing plenty of actions to heal up the wounded as we went. I think at one point the wizard just sat down for a short while.
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Also, the chronicle sheet really needs the out of tier gold calculated on it, because the GMs were super confused how to apply the new rules, and I'm pretty sure at least 2 characters got screwed out of gold at my table.
One thing that could've been clearer was how to deal with the gold in this adventure. I had a table at subtier 1-2 with a pair of level 3 players. My solution was to make a "out of subtier" between 1-2 and 3-4 and give them that, and since it sounded reasonable to the HQ guy who was standing behind me (Kyle Pratt, iirc), I went with it. It would be nice to see some official guidance as to how to deal with Out-of-Subtier gold for scenarios with more than 2 subtiers. (See also, all the 1-7's from year 0 & 1)
Venture-Captain, California—San Francisco Bay Area North & East
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I haven't even looked at my chronicle yet. Just used other characters for the rest of the con.
I didn't like the last act much, but it wasn't that bad. We were in the "heal downed crusaders, while holding off demons" group. (Tier 7-8) Nobody in the party dropped, and we had almost dropped the enhanced vrock (we alternated between calling it a hard-vrock, and a mike-vrock) when the super-vrock arrived. One of our players had used the mythic rules before, and was very scared. The rest didn't know what to make of it. But before we got to actually fight it, time was called. Saved by the bell, apparently.
Still, it was rather frustrating to just run around, kill something, have something else pop up, kill it, repeat until time runs out.
I played the special with a group that I play with regularly. The party features a wizard played by a very experienced and cunning player; a highly-effective barbarian/fighter; a similarly effective archer fighter; a very well-designed soundstriker bard; a more than competent alchemist; and my own cleric of Zon-Kuthon who is okay, but almost certainly the weakest member of the group. We played through the special at 10-11 and did not have much trouble at all. In fact, we all really enjoyed it. From the most experienced (I've been gaming for like thirty years) to the least experienced (the player of our barbarian/fighter has been gaming for about one year), we all had a great time.
That said, those of us who were present generally thought that last year's special was more enjoyable (even though we all died and failed to earn our goblin boons). Along those same lines, we also enjoyed level 1 of Bonekeep more than level 2.
Of the party, I'm about the only player who has any experience with LFR and its battle interactives. I think this special could have benefited from being more like them. I would have liked to have seen it stretched out over eight hours. I would have enjoyed more formal reports between each act of the adventure. Special missions carried out by a select number of tables (or even new tables made up of representatives from existing tables) would have pushed it over the top. That said, I understand that the logistics of doing these things with a room full of 100-140+ tables has to be nigh on impossible.
So, in short PFS staff, thanks for what you were able to accomplish and good luck on making such events even better in the coming years.
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Most of the adventure, I had a great time. The atmosphere of the group setting was electric. Dozens of tables working together to achieve strategic goals was a lot of fun. But honestly, it would he like having most of a great dinner and someone leaving a wet messy defocation on it before you finish.
** spoiler omitted **
So, maybe next year I will consider a different event for that time slot. I'm really hoping a lot of others enjoyed it more than I did.
Just my $0.02. Oops, I don't even have that after paying for raise dead.
For what its worth, my group had a great time in the bottom tier. If anything, we felt like it could have been more challenging.
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Running the 12-13 tier, I didn't see the problems the OP and others had. But I can definitely say that the mid-tier Act 3 was the weakest part of the scenario. It makes sense narratively, but isn't as exciting to play out.
If I had run it at the PaizoCon playtest I probably would have suggested the mid-tier actually take part in the melee, with the number of foes slain allowing other crusaders to reinforce the walls and the low-tier. It would have given those PCs the ability to pick and choose their foes in some way, as the high-tier could, but with less success as other targets could jump in as the GM saw fit.
This would have been a nightmare slog for the PCs and for the GMs to run and would have been difficult to completely alter the Act 3 writeup for those sub-tiers in time. So we were unfortunately stuck with it.
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My character also died to the same encounter. I had some issues with the encounter here.
I'll spoiler tag the stuff that would give away things or is too really meta-gamey.
The specials always feel weird because you have way more combats/fights than any other PFS mod.
Also, I don't believe it was a GM chooses the encounter, after I died and the rogue in our party died, our GM asked us to roll D6's periodically right before a new wave approached, so I think it was a table of monster encounters.
Meta-game stuff that I noticed:
I died because I was cranking one of the smaller turrets, which I dont think had an effect on anything. Our GM was marking down rounds to fire the larger turret, but did nothing on the smaller turrets, leading me to believe that my efforts were for nothing.
Huge jump in difficulty between the first set of encounters and the last. When we were running around town trying to help out it seemed like the fighters were about as well tuned as you got, a little dangerous, but nothing that a little strategic combat couldn't overcome.
Then we get into the outside big battle, and we have monsters that can one-shot folks, multiple monsters with really harsh attacks and the like, etc.
The worst was however, that it wasn't clear what making the zones "safer" was doing. I'm not even sure there was a difference between a fight in a zone that was red or green, b/c we still fought demons and stuff in safer zones.
All this being said, my teammates pitched in money to offset the cost of my resurrection in gold, so I was able to come back, albeit with no gold.
I had a really good time with it actually. The feel was great, and it was fun to see the seekers
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There was definitely a difference between fighting in a red and a green zone, including the demons having bonuses in the red and the PCs having bonuses in the green. The difference may not have been enough to notice however.
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Do you have other examples than simply this one about the darkness?
Mark
Lots of examples but I'm not going to derail this thread. On the positive side, at least 5 out of 6 GMs were OK with learning/using the correct rules.
What.
It boggles my mind when I hear about a "ruling" that makes fantasy heroes less competent than real-life commoners.
Yes. The GM had the players roll a D8 (like you would if an alchemist missed with a bomb) and that’s where they would move that turn.
The worst part is that 6 players came away from that table thinking that’s how darkness should work. My inexperienced friend came back from that and actually tried to correct me on “the rules”… lol.
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I've had a player once tell me as a GM that their character would have no frame of reference for moving in an area of both darkness and silence, so he asked to have his character go a random direction. The next round, he did the same, and I told him "you would at least be able to keep going the same way you went last time, trying to find a wall." He agreed to this.
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As one of the volunteers who stood for 5 hours to do the hand signals.... please no...I would have liked to have seen it stretched out over eight hours.
Were you in the middle of the tables by the wall, hmmm, I think we were in the Red section? If you are faicing HQ, the right side of the room nearest a bit more than midway back? We were Red 7. If that was you, then you stood right next to our table the whole time, and you did great, thank you thank you. No matter where you were, thank you. I thought the reporting scheme worked great. Holding up fingers, repeated back, thumbs raised to acknowledge. You guys were awesome.
Did I mention: Thank you!
I was standing in between the yellow and green tables
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Definitely not my favorite special. But much like Jason's friend it wasn't because it was too hard but rather because it was entirely a one note event. Something about the endless combat sequences didn't elicit the excitement or interest that I've experienced with other specials. I kept thinking- "When are we moving on to the next part". Except there was no next part.
And this is coming from someone that genuinely likes a lot of combat... so idk.
Still it was a packed ballroom and I had a decent table so it was a good night overall :).