Why only some repeatable? How to solve non-repeatables not being run?

[Twilight2k]

First, one thing I've never understood about PFS - why are only some adventures/quests repeatable? Many other organized play have all adventures repeatable. Yes, I know some are written with random bits to make it not exactly the same.

Is there a solution to non-repeatables rarely being run (other than making everything repeatable)? For instance, at ConCurrent, 1-04 is not being run at all and Quest #6 is being run only once because no other GMs signed up (presumably because they would not get xp/etc) - there are clearly plenty of players that need it (I signed up the instant Warhorn went live and, by the time it refreshed, I was 7th (3rd on the waitlist) and that was 1 minute after it opened).

[Pirate Rob]

Replay Discussion

Replay Issues

Replay Discussion

Here's some readings that may help answer your first question.

[RealAlchemy]

As for why different scenarios are or are not being run at an event, GMs are volunteers. They will run the scenarios they feel comfortable running and have the materials to run.
Just as an example, before Norwescon was cancelled I volunteered to run Starfinder 1-10, PFS2 1-06, and PFS2 1-07 because that was what I felt confident preparing. One of those is repeatable and two are not.

[Twilight2k]

After reading all three links (thanks), I still really don't understand the "no replay" rule for PFS2 - there just simply isn't enough content. I've only been playing heavily (1/week, occasionally twice, and a couple virtual cons) since COVID isolation started and I'm almost completely out of non-repeatables (and, if I start a bunch of new chars and just do repeatables, I'm stuck at max of level 2.5ish).

Every other organized play I know of allows replays of all content (I'm sure there are OP societies I'm not familiar with). The only one I know of with any limits is Arcanis (you can replay but only gain the xp+gold (in PFS terms, no boons or items)). The only real issue I've seen is replaying specific adventures in AL (5e OP) for the loot but that is because of bungling of a few item rarities by WotC and not a problem with AL or replays generally.

From reading the linked threads, it's clear some places had issues with 4e LFR replays but I never saw any of that but I only played LFR locally (not at cons). By the end, it was almost always the same players but not because new players weren't welcome - just because there were no new players.

Frankly, without open replays or more repeatable adventures, I'm likely to drift to some other game system (possibly OP, possibly not). I know some other players locally that will likely do the same thing. I do play in two local PF2 games but both are on hiatus right now (part of the reason my PFS2 play increased).

And, yes, I do GM some but it takes more prep time and more mental energy than playing (often more than I have available right now).

[Nefreet]

You can also search this forum for the myriad other discussions surrounding replay over the past twelve years.

There is currently more replay now than there ever has been before.

And once AcP gets opened up and GM Glyphs go online, you'll likely have even more replay.

I think I was able to replay something like 50 times back in PFS1, in addition to the adventures tagged as replayable.

[NielsenE]

Rehashing the replayble discussion is unlikely to be fruitful, so I'll focus on the other bit -- how to support weekly play with a two scenario a month release schedule.

Obviously, if you're current in scenarios, there's only two new ones a month, so you have ~two session to fill per month (sometimes three). I recommend finding a long form content group for one of those monthly sessions (Fall of Plaguestone, the soon to be released Slithering, Age of Ashes/Extinction Curse, etc). Some of those might even be twice a month and then you're golden. if you can only find once/month, that's still a good start. Fill the last session of the month with an existing replayable -- we have 4 full lengths and a fifth coming out soon. Cycling through them means you only repeat them about 2/year.

[Belafon]

Twilight, it's fine if Pathfinder OP turns out not to be for you. Or if it's only part of your gaming diet. It's worth noting that your play frequency is quite high but not ridiculously so. I know several people who consume all Pathfinder and Starfinder Society content as it comes out, as well as playing and DMing Adventurer's League on a regular basis.

On the question of replay there are many, many more threads than the ones Rob linked. While people definitely had issues with LFR replay I have seen Paizo Organized Play staff comment a few times that the biggest issue they have with replay is with character involvement. While it's relatively easy for a replayer to be conscientious in combat (by not preparing the one rarely used spell that ends an encounter, or by not buying the weird weapon the BBEG is weak against), it's a lot harder outside of combat.

The issue (and I have seen and felt it many times myself) is that outside of combat there's very little middle ground between "doing what the scenario writer is looking for" and "keeping your mouth shut and not participating." I know there's treasure under that flagstone and none of my party members found it. Would my character have searched there? Would he really, or am I just trying to justify it? If I don't search now but might have if I was playing for the first time am I hurting everyone else at the table? If one NPC reacts very favorably to a specific line of conversation (and I know this) is it fair for me to bring it up if no one else does? And don't get me started on puzzles.

So it's more about hurting the experience of the other players than about breaking a power curve.

[Twilight2k]

Maybe it's just me. I've never had an issue with out-of-combat...
Would this character have thought to look there or brought up that conversation thread?

On the other hand, I've definitely seen players abuse meta-knowledge on replays (no idea if it was the player intentionally doing so or the player being incapable of separating player vs character knowledge).

My main problem is with amount of available content. Has a phased approach been considered? I mean where all content is replayable until there are enough repeatable content to get through a tier and then content is shifted to non-repeatable (4 levels per tier, 12 xp per level, 48 xp needed per tier). It could be either all-or-nothing (all content is replayable until there is 48 xp worth of repeatables and then all of the "should not be replayable" isn't) or a hybrid approach (where all repeatables plus "marked" adventures are replayable to come up with 48 xp and, as more repeatables are brought out, adventures are made non-repeatable).

It seems bizarre to me that Paizo wants to limit people to only playing their game (via PFS) a little bit per month. I would think they would want as many people to play it as much as possible.

[Nefreet]

Most people don't have your level of availability.

[Twilight2k]

Even playing once per week (VERY common for Org Play groups around here) and starting now, you would be out of content to play (except repeatables) within 10-11 months (if I did the math right).

For every con you play at, it is likely to go down by 2-3 months (and potentially a LOT more (I've played 16 slots of 4 hour games at cons before)). Given the number of online cons this year, a lot of players are attending cons.

It's entirely possible I'll be out of things to GM for credit by the end of the year as well (one of my home PF2 games just went on hiatus so I'm probably going to be GMing PFS mods as filler until the normal GM is available again).

[Pirate Rob]

1 good games is better than 10 mediocre games.

When you play a PFS scenario it's a special snowflake. Work with your GM and fellow players to make it as awesome as possible. You can't just come do it again next week.

---

If there are 2 new scenarios every month and if you participate once a week, and you play and GM them both. That covers 4/4.5 weeks.

If you play and GM the quest as well that covers the final half week.

There is currently enough PFS content being produced to participate once a week without ever having to replay.

---

Here Vic Wertz shared some very interesting stats.

Over 50% of players who played at least 2 sessions averaged less than 12/year.

Averaging 3 or more sessions puts you in the top 10%.

Now I'm sure these stats aren't totally accurate 7 years later and if the pie is big enough than 10% can be worth it to get out more material. (I suspect it may be at that point, but the PaizoBoat turns slow).

Especially with quests shifting to the (presumably) easier to develop bounties that might free up enough time to get an extra scenario every other month, or maybe get AP sanctioning in a timely matter. Either of those effectively provides more content. I'm excited to see Paizo step up and help make PFS2 season 2 even more awesome than season 1.

[Blake's Tiger]

I’m not sure how you can run out of material playing 1/week (I wish I could play that much).

If you’re not GMing, then only if you don’t do the replayables, which are ever increasing and more than PFS1 or SFS in their respective year 1. Now, I know that detail doesn’t help you, and if you’re coming to PFS from another org play system that allows unlimited replay of all content it may not seem like much, but I think they’ve done a lot.

[Belafon]

It's worth noting that Twilight2K's original post can be paraphrased as:

paraphrase wrote:

I can't find a place to play the non-repeatable scenarios I'm missing. They just aren't being run or aren't being run often enough. Wouldn't it be easier for me to find people running them if everything is repeatable?

We quickly went into the whole "is replay a good idea?" debate, but I don't think anyone (including me) has made alternate suggestions.

Probably the easiest way to play those scenarios right now is to got to the Organized Play Online Discord and ask in the LFG channel "Can anyone run Scenario XX I'm missing?" And you'll be much more likely to get a volunteer if you add "I can run a scenario for you as well!"

[Shifty]

The same thing happened with the release of Starfinder, people simply consumed the available content at a great rate. It takes time for the content pool to get 'deep', and playing 1/wk is always going to be an issue when content only drops 2/mth until APs and Modules start rolling out the door.

[Blake's Tiger]

Yeah. If the paraphrase was the goal, I didn't catch that.

The Cottonseed Lodge Play-by-Post reruns lots of stuff because there's a lot of GMs, if you're willing to do PbP, which isn't everyone's cup of tea.

[Twilight2k]

There were really two parts to it. 1) Problems finding some non-replayables to play in. 2) Why not make it all replayable?

Having played in multiple other Org Play with all or all-with-some-limits replayable, I really just don't understand the PFS take on replays. There can be issues with replays but there is also issues with people not doing replays and reading mods for meta-knowledge and boon/item-hunting anyway (for the most part, I'm not convinced replays make this worse).

If the goal of stopping replays is to prevent boon-farming, then go the Arcanis route and replays (for non-marked-replayable) only grant xp, gold, and rep/fame (no items or boons). If the goal is to stop people meta-gaming at the table, the GM can just ask them not to and, if they persist, ask them to leave the table (just because it's not a replay, doesn't mean a player can't/won't metagame at the table).

[Ferious Thune]

Most of the scenarios will be running this weekend at Concurrent, though seats may be limited now. I don’t remember the GenCon schedule, but I imagine most of them will also be on it, with maybe the exception of some of the earliest ones.

[Twilight2k]

Ferious Thune wrote:

Most of the scenarios will be running this weekend at Concurrent, though seats may be limited now. I don’t remember the GenCon schedule, but I imagine most of them will also be on it, with maybe the exception of some of the earliest ones.

Yes. ConCurrent is what actually spawned my original post. 1-04 is not being run at all (and I was told GenCon will have even fewer of the non-replayable early mods). Q-6 is being run a grand total of ONCE and filled up in <1 minute (I got lucky and 3 people apparently un-signed-up so I did manage to get in even though I was 3rd waitlist at 12:01).

[NicoleH]

Twilight2k wrote:

Ferious Thune wrote:

Most of the scenarios will be running this weekend at Concurrent, though seats may be limited now. I don’t remember the GenCon schedule, but I imagine most of them will also be on it, with maybe the exception of some of the earliest ones.

Yes. ConCurrent is what actually spawned my original post. 1-04 is not being run at all (and I was told GenCon will have even fewer of the non-replayable early mods). Q-6 is being run a grand total of ONCE and filled up in <1 minute (I got lucky and 3 people apparently un-signed-up so I did manage to get in even though I was 3rd waitlist at 12:01).

Unfortunately Quest 6 is only being run once, because that is the number of times a GM signed up to run it. The games that are being run are based solely on the lovely GMs that volunteer their time to make the games happen. As I told you on the server, we will continue to see less early non-repeatables as the time goes on, for multiple factors. If you look at the 1e games they are offering, the cons are splitting up what is offered based off of themes. One is offering the oldest seasons, one the newest, and another the higher level games. Unfortunately it just becomes more difficult to fill tables of older non-repeatable games over time as more people have played them, and again, I will still most likely offer this for you a week or two after the convention if we are able to find a time and enough players. And often, to get one run, all you need to is put out a call to the community and you can find a GM willing to run it again for no credit a majority of the time.

We are getting replayable content about a 20% rate I believe so far, which isn't that bad, considering, and a new one is coming out this month! I also want to point out the extra amount of work that goes into making an adventure repeatable. For one, they normally have many moving parts that can be interchanged, which requires more time and effort from the author, and dev team side; on top of that, it is more prep for your GMs, if they are to offer more options. Especially on the VTT side that you have been playing on lately, unless they were to run them just off of the stat block, and not put the NPC stats in.....but even in this case it could very well be more set up on the map side as well. Generally, it is just more work by 2-3+ fold for all parties, except for the player to offer more replayable content, and content that won't go stale on multiple run throughs. I hope you are able to find more games for this con, but I will see you around the multiverse :)

[Nefreet]

Twilight2k wrote:

Having played in multiple other Org Play

Just simply put, different companies do things differently, and have different customer bases with different interests. I did not enjoy the living D&D campaigns I played. But I've been hooked on Paizo's for nearly a decade.

My 'real world' example of this:

After having my identity and credit card information stolen a few times, I asked for the three Credit Bureaus (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion) to freeze my credit file.

Turns out, even though these are the three Bureaus that pretty much run the credit lives of every American, they each operate completely differently, even though they offer the same basic services.

Freezing Equifax and TransUnion was easy. One I did online, one I did over the phone. It took me two years of mailing physical documents to Experian to get them to freeze mine.

And when I moved to a new address, I was able to update one Bureau over the phone, one online, and was unable to update the third. They told me it could only be updated after a credit payment had been billed to the new address.

Now every time someone compares Pathfinder to D&D or Adventure League to Pathfinder Society, I can't help but reflect back on my other recent experiences.

[TwilightKnight]

Twilight2k wrote:

Why not make it all replayable?

If you read the myriad of repeat Le discussion threads you’ll see a wide range of reasons why. That you may disagree with some/all of them doesn’t invalidate them. Most will not remember but we had close to unlimited replay briefly back in season 2 (?) of 1E and it generally was not well-received. Since then, leadership has been fairly resistant to more replay, or at least uncontrolled replay. There are options for replay outside of the official replayable scenarios. Not a lot, but more than zero. So far, the loss of gameplay by players who are “out of content” seems to be less important to Paizo than the loss of players who will leave the campaign if there were much more liberal replay rules up to and including unlimited.

[Hmm]

Blake's Tiger wrote:

Yeah. If the paraphrase was the goal, I didn't catch that.

The Cottonseed Lodge Play-by-Post reruns lots of stuff because there's a lot of GMs, if you're willing to do PbP, which isn't everyone's cup of tea.

Thanks for mentioning the Cottonseed Lodge, Blake! As the person who primarily runs Starfinder for my local venue, I really love the opportunity to get in PF2 time in Play-by-Post!

An advantage for me is that it is slow, so I can really experience the world of each adventure.

[Watery Soup]

PbP is great, but it's a red herring in this discussion.

Paizo only puts out enough material for someone to play 8 hours per month. You can spread that out on PbP, to last longer, but that decreases the hours per day spent.

It's a mathematical barrier. Twilight plays more than Paizo puts out. Over the course of a year, Twilight has the capability of playing 28 more scenarios than Paizo puts out. And he's right, replaying all the replayables will just leave him with 7 level 2 characters.

That's just math. Can't do anything about that.

But ... the non-obvious solution is to GM every other week. GM credits will allow two characters to "max" at 7. It will take care of the time problem, and it would be good for the community to have one more regular GM. It would also be the answer to the question of how to get more non-repeatables run.

[TwilightKnight]

Also, if you can get enough people together to play PFS twice or more each week, you can probably get a group together to play non-OP material like an adventure path or a series of modules or even a free-form campaign. Its a healthier approach than replaying the same content repeatedly. YMMV

[Nefreet]

Watery Soup wrote:

Paizo only puts out enough material for someone to play 8 hours per month.

To be fair, it's enough material to play more than once a week.

One PFS Quest
Two PFS Scenarios
Two SFS Scenarios
And an Adventure Path Book or Module per month.
Plus, you can play or GM any of those.

That's why it's such a very, very small number of fans who can consume it all.

For someone like me, who played regularly before the Pandemic, including nearly every scenario for several Seasons, I still can't keep up with everything.

[Nefreet]

And, since there are so few people who can consume that much, there gets to be a barrier where it's not profitable to release more material.

[Ascalaphus]

Twilight2k wrote:

Is there a solution to non-repeatables rarely being run (other than making everything repeatable)? For instance, at ConCurrent, 1-04 is not being run at all and Quest #6 is being run only once because no other GMs signed up (presumably because they would not get xp/etc) - there are clearly plenty of players that need it (I signed up the instant Warhorn went live and, by the time it refreshed, I was 7th (3rd on the waitlist) and that was 1 minute after it opened).

Yes, there is. Ask someone to run the specific game you want to play.

Sounds so basic that it doesn't sound like serious advice, but it really is. Scheduling doesn't happen by magic or fall out of the sky. It's driven by people saying "hey, this is a really cool scenario, I wanna run it" or "I like that guy and he asked me to run this, so let's see if we can find some more players".

If I want to play a particular scenario, it isn't really difficult. I mention it a few times among some of the other people I play with a lot and someone will be happy to run it. Why? Because I'm an involved player, I GM a lot, and so a lot of people will be happy to do me a good turn in return.

And with the current era of massive roll20 play, it's not that hard to find a few other people who haven't played the particular scenario I want to play. Just post the game a couple of times in the VTT sign up links channel of the various discord servers.

[Philippe Lam]

I'll be rehashing the argument about DnD 5 Adventurers' League to point out how damaging unlimited, or even broadly (if not unlimited) replayability can be harmful.

- The sense of déjà vu growing over time
- The progressively unwitting higher risk of metagaming even from people who won't do so otherwise
- Many of the scenarios are currently written to be played two times at most. Unlimited replayability as a golden standard would require altering the future publications, and complexify the authors' task. It isn't impossible, but given some plot backgrounds, it's not always desirable.

It's a debate who should be buried six feet under. PFS is its own product and worked as such for several years now. I'm among those who would leave if that happened.

[RealAlchemy]

Lau Bannenberg wrote:

Twilight2k wrote:

Is there a solution to non-repeatables rarely being run (other than making everything repeatable)? For instance, at ConCurrent, 1-04 is not being run at all and Quest #6 is being run only once because no other GMs signed up (presumably because they would not get xp/etc) - there are clearly plenty of players that need it (I signed up the instant Warhorn went live and, by the time it refreshed, I was 7th (3rd on the waitlist) and that was 1 minute after it opened).

Yes, there is. Ask someone to run the specific game you want to play.

Sounds so basic that it doesn't sound like serious advice, but it really is. Scheduling doesn't happen by magic or fall out of the sky. It's driven by people saying "hey, this is a really cool scenario, I wanna run it" or "I like that guy and he asked me to run this, so let's see if we can find some more players".

If I want to play a particular scenario, it isn't really difficult. I mention it a few times among some of the other people I play with a lot and someone will be happy to run it. Why? Because I'm an involved player, I GM a lot, and so a lot of people will be happy to do me a good turn in return.

And with the current era of massive roll20 play, it's not that hard to find a few other people who haven't played the particular scenario I want to play. Just post the game a couple of times in the VTT sign up links channel of the various discord servers.

This. The regular GMs in the area where I play do take requests. So do the less regular ones. And they are even more likely to take requests if they know you're willing to run something for them later, or even if you're willing to buy them a drink at our local game store/restaurant combination.

[Nefreet]

There are also a LOT of games on Warhorn. I just played one across the country, with a group I'd never met before, because I needed 1 more XP to bump the party's subtier up for the next game I was scheduled.

[trollbill]

You can go to Warhorn.net click on the Games tab in the upper left. A side bar listing all the game systems currently offered (and the number of the) will appear on the left. Click on Pathfinder 2 and it will show you a complete list of all Pathfinder 2 games currently scheduled on Warhorn. You can also search by the title of the scenario if you are looking for a specific one.

[Pirate Rob]

It's a bit tricky at the moment as some places re-open physically and you have to investigate their warhorn to find out what's going on.

[Wei Ji the Learner]

If it seems like there's a lean to Warhorn, at least part of it is in recognition of significant yet subtle Quality of Use items that have been implemented there since Paizo Conline...

At least from my perspective?

[Scott Young]

OP: If you still need 1-04, I'll run it for you via Roll20.