Venture-Captain, California—Sacramento
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in the encounter with
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I'm always keen to save paper; is there going to be any issue with printing the two 'Mythic Powers' chronicles back-to-back on one sheet of paper?
Possibly, since that will involve a lot of page flipping by any player using the powers from the chronicles, rather than using Mythic instead.
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Suffered through a hot mess of a run last night.
7 person table, but APL put us at sub-tier 4-5 with 4 person adjustment (which was fine).
Three caveats: It was the GMs second game as a GM. This person stepped up to GM when no one else did. When the VL is not around, I act as a gameday coordinator and help muster, explain PFS stuff, etc
I got the impression that since the GM had played it before, that he could relax on prepping. He didn't pre-draw maps, forgot the the PFSprep.com statblocks, had problems running many of the monsters/combats, couldn't effectively communicate the adventure background or the import of what we were seeing.
Once we mustered and everyone was there, since he was a new GM, I made sure he knew about the 4-person adjustments for encounters...which he did not.
After the first combat (where he forgot a monster and I had to pull up the stats on my tablet mid-combat and he had trouble running just 3 gnolls), I asked the GM for a 10-minute break...it had taken 1hr15min to get to just this point.
I had one of the other players (who had previously GMd this) to draw the temple(?) map ahead of time once I found out that it was a large-ish map that the GM had not drawn yet. Meanwhile, I showed the GM where he should look for the 4-person adjustments for the upcoming encounters and gave him time to read (re-read?) ahead.
The remaining adventure basically devolved into me pulling up creatures and explaining how they work to the GM, whose forte is not combat to begin with, and the other player (who GMd previously) occasionally asking guided questions to prod the GM to provide info about what we were seeing.
Now, had this been a simpler, basic scenario (like early low tier seasons), this would have been fine. But once we got the final encounter where the GM was misunderstanding/misremembering who was attacking who and then throwing in a mythic Allip on top of that was a huge mess (all the while, I'm pulling up tons of stat blocks, explaining the options of the various NPCs/Allip AND trying to run my character).
I'm so befuddled about exactly what we saw and the import of which that I asked the VL to give me a copy of part 2 so I can read it and synopsize it for the part 3 table (like, we got mythic powers? from something that happened after the allip died?)
I immediately volunteered to GM part 3 while at the table (even though I had just played the first 2 parts and wanted to play the 3rd) to end the trilogy on solid note...and then when I got home and looked it up online I just about died. Mythic stuff? Can run 5ish hours? Sigh.
For the record, I strongly urge campaign organizers to start labeling scenarios with a simple system for GMs to know how much prep is required and level of system mastery expected to avoid novice or time-short GMs from ending up with a prep-/rules-heavy scenario.
Again, I absolutely commend the GM for stepping up to begin GMing at our store, but he was put in a bad spot by this particular adventure and it really soured the experience of the people at the table. It was a combination of a new GM not understanding general prep required in running a scenario AND getting hammered by Destiny 2.