so i ran a game at a local event last nite with a full table of 1st and 2nd levels and then 1 5th level. this was my first pfs gm experience and im wondering if i should have gone high tier because the 5th lvl sorcere just annihilated everything. and what sort of wiggle room is acceptable for scaling stuff.i didnt want to ad lib anything cuz as i said i am new.
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so i ran a game at a local event last nite with a full table of 1st and 2nd levels and then 1 5th level. this was my first pfs gm experience and im wondering if i should have gone high tier because the 5th lvl sorcere just annihilated everything. and what sort of wiggle room is acceptable for scaling stuff.i didnt want to ad lib anything cuz as i said i am new.
There isn't really any wiggle room; the formula is relatively restrictive now due to people abusing the flexibility that was allowed in the past. You played low tier as it sounds like you should have.
Catering to 1st- and 5th- level PCs at the same table is always going to be problematic, especially if the higher level character is optimised to some degree. Maybe next time, encourage the player of a 5th-level PC to play a lower-level character, or start a new PC by playing a 1st-level pregen?
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Still a big hit to their rewards. The level 5 player essentially paid 700-800 gold just to play in this low level scenario with minimal risk.
Lower risk always equals lower rewards. At least it is better than it was before: previously, he would just get the low tier gold.
There was a huge problem with groups "always playing up" because they all got the upper tier gold. This skewed the wealth by level and created a high-pressure environment where a lot of the lower-tier players felt bullied or forced into playing up when they didn't want to--and they had the biggest risk.
thnx for all the feedback. very helpful going forward
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Still a big hit to their rewards. The level 5 player essentially paid 700-800 gold just to play in this low level scenario with minimal risk.Lower risk always equals lower rewards. At least it is better than it was before: previously, he would just get the low tier gold.
There was a huge problem with groups "always playing up" because they all got the upper tier gold. This skewed the wealth by level and created a high-pressure environment where a lot of the lower-tier players felt bullied or forced into playing up when they didn't want to--and they had the biggest risk.
It seems really hard to go up now, you need 6 players to do so if its even close.
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Your level 5 player's alternate option was to bring a level 1 character (or play a level 1 pregen).
Generally in PFS you want more than 1 character and those characters to be around 3 levels apart. If you only have a single character, you're mostly at the mercy of whatever's running and what everyone else has.
Playing a pregen would have been a great choice - that player could have even changed the character build later using the rules for 1st level retraining.