Venture-Captain, Germany—Bavaria
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I played this one yesterday and will run it soon... that first ooze encounter is brutal, mostly because 2 of the currently available 6 pre-generated characters are relatively useless.
Combined with our group activating the trap, it felt more like Serpent's Rise than a quick and easy scenario for beginners.
The GM's cursed dice did not help with secret checks either.
The first encounter felt pretty good though.
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Ran this at GenCon, table felt like they had fun. However none of them had significant ties to PFS/Golarian lore so it was harder to motivate this as an exciting adventure. 'We're tracking down old books in a library' wasn't a great hook for them.
The first encounter worked pretty well, especially as it typically will be triggered with the party somewhat spread out. However it did have a bit of a 5e feel in 'it doesn't matter what class you are, your rolls matter more' -- our higher AC fighter with shield raise kept getting crit, while the lower AC wizard tanked one for 3 rounds with no hits getting through.
The skill check portion at the beginning is structured a little oddly IMO with the red herring 'there's nothing left to find here' before some of the good/required results. Not sure how GMs are running that. I was letting all simultaneous checks happen and then tallying the results, so we jumped over these problem areas due to the way the dice fell. But if they had gone wrong I think the PCs lose the primary success condition for no good reason.
The black pudding is brutal and I can see it causing tpks indirectly later in the fight -- depletes a lot of resources, a couple of people lost armor/weapons.
The pacing felt a little off for a 'new to the game system special'. There will often be a fair bit of rules explanation/questions about characters. I try to keep it brief, as I believable in learn by playing, not by lecture. But with level 5s people had a lot more questions than they did with the level 1 pre-gens. The skill checks were harder for me to add interested role-play to (felt I did a better job in 1-01 with all the NPCs) so its just a set of checks to make until the combat is triggered. And then winning the combat only means you go back to the same checks. Once you exhaust those checks it back to more skill checks to gather information/etc. I could tell my group was itching for combat and the scenario delays.
Venture-Captain, Nebraska—Bellevue
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I played this one yesterday and will run it soon... that first ooze encounter is brutal, mostly because 2 of the currently available 6 pre-generated characters are relatively useless.
I ran this one in the Thursday night slot at GenCon. Two of the veteran players felt pretty frustrated with both the black pudding and the final fight. At first I was concerned that set of 6 pre-gens available weren't well tailored for it.
But after some thought, I realized that as a GM I missed something important. For the most part, I treated the scenario as a tutorial. It was the first PF2 game for all of us. But I clearly didn't emphasize well enough what the players find in the library and in their investigation.
- All the missing books are on Oozecraft - the making and use of oozes.
- The suspected thieves are from an area that specializes in oozes.
- The hidden trap door obviously leads to the sewers.
And finally, you're in one of the bigger towns in Golarion with plenty of time on your hands for an investigation.
If I had footstomped the obvious ... you may see oozes? Allowed a knowledge check or two. Maybe the rogue stops to buy a light mace (finesse, 2 sp) and the Barbarian stops to buy a great club (1 gp). For 1 gp, 2 sp, they would have changed the fights altogether. Both those pregens have plenty of cash on hand for that.
Kicking myself for not emphasizing that part of the story.
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I ran this one in the Thursday night slot at GenCon. Two of the veteran players felt pretty frustrated with both the black pudding and the final fight. At first I was concerned that set of 6 pre-gens available weren't well-tailored for it.
But after some thought, I realized that as a GM I missed something important. For the most part, I treated the scenario as a tutorial. It was the first PF2 game for all of us. But I clearly didn't emphasize well enough what the players find in the library and in their investigation.
- All the missing books are on Oozecraft - the making and use of oozes.
- The suspected thieves are from an area that specializes in oozes.
- The hidden trap door obviously leads to the sewers.And finally, you're in one of the bigger towns in Golarion with plenty of time on your hands for an investigation.
If I had footstomped the obvious ... you may see oozes? Allowed a knowledge check or two. Maybe the rogue stops to buy a light mace (finesse, 2 sp) and the Barbarian stops to buy a great club (1 gp). For 1 gp, 2 sp, they would have changed the fights altogether. Both those pregens have plenty of cash on hand for that.
Kicking myself for not emphasizing that part of the story.
My table at GenCon was fantastic with the oozes. Once they identified the weapon damage problem, Ezren pulled a "yeah, I can hit things with a staff" and proceeded to charge into melee. Eventually, Amiri took it from him and the rest was history. They had the pieces they needed.
The table I ran last weekend opted for the poisonous spores and did fairly well at it.
Both tables roflstomped the final encounter. My GenCon table snuck up on the alchemists. I rolled crud initiative and they just wiped the floor clean with them. The table from last weekend needed a couple of rounds due to coming in single-file through difficult terrain, but Merisiel won initiative and got a crit success for the Disable check on the trap.
Venture-Lieutenant, Michigan—Warren
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We had a TPK on this one last night. The team had done a general knowledge check on oozes before heading down to the sewer, but that didn't pick up the piece of knowledge that a specific type of ooze (black pudding) splits under certain circumstances. In the encounter, the first PC split the pudding into three puddings and the creatures then devastated the team. With three actions, going toe to toe with these things can be catastrophic! I totally agree with John Brinkman's comments suggesting finding ways to feed more information.
Except for the collective bummer of the TPK, the players seemed to enjoy the plot and new rules. Be prepared that this one has a decent risk of going long, especially with new players involved.
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We also very nearly TPK'd on this one Friday night. The first encounter was fun and relatively easy/straightforward, but Fumbus blew through almost all his bombs and then used up all his reagents making more before we went into the sewers, and with the rest of the party being Ezren, Amiri, and Valeros, we were hard up for healing. It did not occur to us to buy more appropriate equipment before we went down into the sewers, even though we all bloody well knew what oozes meant, so Valeros and Amiri were severely handicapped, and that was after they both crit-failed against the trap at the beginning, so when we wandered into the poisonous spores and Valeros again crit-failed, that player was done. He walked back through the acid trap on purpose to kill the character and went home early, with the strong implication that he had no intention of ever playing PF2 again. The rest of us narrowly managed to "defeat" the alchemists by triggering their retreat morale condition and disabling the ooze extruder.
Overall, while I still had fun playing Amiri, I feel like this was really spectacularly poorly balanced for the pre-gens we ran it against and the equipment they were provided with. It just felt like a meat grinder, and not a fun introduction to the system.
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When I ran this at Gen Con, the players did pick up on all the ooze-lore. As such, they assumed that the black pudding was some sort of ooze.
This didn't help Merisiel, who got critted, grabbed, and spent the rest of the encounter learning about the death and dying rules. Once they took a moment to recall knowledge, they did get some basic things (though not before Valeros managed to split it).
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Venture-Captain, Colorado—Denver
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Still trying to work out how downtime checks work for this though... for now I didn't give the players the downtime as giving it at level 5 to a level 1 char seemed broken and anything else seemed house rule. I've promised to fix it up once I know the rules, if anyone can help me here it'd be great.
Short answer: It depends.
Long answer:
You can apply credit from a higher-tier adventure to a 1st-level Pathfinder Society character. When doing so, you gain only the gold appropriate to a 1st-level character. You do not benefit from any boons until your Pathfinder Society character reaches the minimum level listed on the Chronicle sheet, unless otherwise noted.If they're applying it to a level 1 character, my understanding is you would use the dayjob of the character the chronicle is being applied to. If that character is not yet built, I think you're just SOL on the downtime, since downtime must be used at the end of the session in which it was earned.
Special: This adventure was designed for use with pregenerated characters. You can assign this Chronicle sheet to any character of
levels 1–5 who does not already have a copy of this Chronicle sheet.
However, there's also the rule that says:
You may apply a pregenerated character’s Chronicle sheet to one of your Pathfinder Society characters once your Pathfinder Society character reaches the level of the pregenerated character used to play through it. For example, if you played a 5th-level pregenerated character, you would apply the credit once your character reaches 5th level.
...
Downtime: Pregenerated characters can use Downtime.
So, you could use the pregens downtime roll, which would be available when the PC reaches level 5. In this case, they would get all the boons at level 1, since the chronicle says level 1-5.
Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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Earn Income is not a boon, so it's not covered by the delayed gratification clause.
I also don't think it's covered by the scale-to-L1 rule, that one seems intent on scaling the treasure bundles.
It seems like this one particular scenario is quite lucrative for lower level characters. For a level 1 character, that's about 30% extra gold. However, I don't think it's really cause for alarm. The scenario isn't evergreen. And it's only a lot of money relatively speaking; the advantage fades rather quickly as regular scenario awards quickly become bigger than that. By level 3 it's as if you had earned one extra treasure bundle, hardly reason for panic.
So I'd say just let people enjoy it this once.
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We TPKed last night (later reversed by GM fiat for reasons that I found unconvincing).
The Black Pudding is just brutal. We knew we were fighting oozes but it never occurred to us that we'd need to go get better weapons. So, maybe our bad. But this is an INTRODUCTORY scenario and we were all concentrating on learning the rules, our characters, etc. And we've all been well trained to stay on the obvious railroad tracks in PFS. I guess a TPK will learn us :-)
An all but automatic grab on a creature with reach is just brutal. The check to get out isn't too bad but that takes 1 action, getting in reach takes a second, allowing only one hit. Which then splits the ooze. What happened to us seems quite likely. A character got grabbed early so running away was no longer a great option (you're leaving a character to die)
The scenario seems to assume that the wizard (who may or may not be along, of course) will make a knowledge check before the party splits the ooze into several component parts. Never happened since the wizard was slow and we'd already split the ooze into too many parts to handle by the time his initiative came up.
This would be hard with level 5 characters made by players. With pregens it really is over the top in how difficult it is. The pudding is fairly likely to crit whoever he hits and, depending on which character that is, fairly likely to put him unconscious in a single round (a full round attack starting with a crit does 6d8+28+6d6 damage, or 75 pts of damage on average).
And only one of the Pregens has in battle healing. We made the fatal mistake of not choosing to bring Kyra. Yes, PF2 has all sorts of ways to make a cleric no longer essential. Except none of the pregens had them.
This scenario brought me one step closer to deciding that PFS2 isn't for me (a lot of the issues I'm seeing can be handled by a decent GM. Except in PFS where GMs don't have the freedom to be decent :-().
If it was my first exposure to PFS2 it would definitely have been my last. As it is, it may well be my last.
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It sounds like you just got some very bad luck with the ooze fight.
It's got a decent chance to crit, but not a likely chance as the AC of just about every PC is 22, requiring a roll of at least 14 on the die to crit on the first attack. Grab takes an action, as does constrict. The most likely turn for a black pudding is Attack, Grab, and Constrict for 3d8+14 bludgeoning plus 3d6 acid. If the PC doesn't escape it will most likely keep the Grab and Constrict the next round, costing it two actions for 1d8+7 bludgeoning plus 1d6 acid.
There's two ways to handle the split ability. One is to only use bludgeoning weapons and spells and the other is to deliberately split it as fast as possible and let Ezren and Fumbus deal with it (fireball and bombs). The second requires a lot more player coordination using delays and careful targeting to make sure you split it as far down as possible between its turn and Ezren/Fumbus. Unfortunately what often happens is that individual players pursue a mix of strategies and the end result is several barely damaged puddings.
It is a big problem that Amiri and Merisiel have no way to damage the black pudding by default.
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Yup, its a doozy of a fight. I've GM'd it 7-8 times now (losing track), most groups split it ~1-2 times and typically at least half the PCs have wounded 1-2 by the end of the fight. I had 2 groups do knowledge checks before entering the sewers after all the ooze references -- both learned about the splitting, one bought blunt weapons for everyone, one decided on the 'intentional split and burn' both of those groups did much better, but even still often had 1 person emerge with wounded. Commonly Valeros or Amiri has lost some of their gear to the ooze's acid too.
It does feel a touch unfair to PF newbies just trying the game out at a convention (where 5 of my tables were). When you have experienced players (even if they've been taught the railroad), at least they understand what's happening after the first split.
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We also had one table with Merisiel stealing bombs from Fumbus (skill checks and player permission), Amiri disarming Ezren (again w/ player permission(not character permission)) to get a staff to bludgeon the ooze), before Ezren used his hand of the apprentice to throw the staff and get it back leaving Amiri with nothing (probably not RAW, but the entire table was laughing and enjoying it)
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Action(s): one
Requirements The monster’s last action was a success with a Strike that lists Grab in its damage entry, or it has a creature grabbed using this action.
Effect The monster automatically Grabs the target until the end of the monster’s next turn. The creature is grabbed by whichever body part the monster attacked with, and that body part can’t be used to Strike creatures until the grab is ended. Using Grab extends the duration of the monster’s Grab until the end of its next turn for all creatures grabbed by it. A grabbed creature can use the Escape action to get out of the grab, and the Grab ends for a grabbed creatures if the monster moves away from it.
It prevented the first hit from grappling Merisiel in my run, as it was the last action the pudding took, so it had no action to Grab.
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It has regular Grab not Improved Grab. That means after an attack that hits, it can spend an action to grab. Improved Grab makes it a free action.
You're right. GM got it wrong (as did I when I looked up the monster) and it actually would have made a difference in the fight. I feel less bad for the armwaved "you didn't actually die"
But man is PF2 failing the "simpler" goal. It's just as complicated as PF1, just in different places. If I look up a monster and see an action that includes grab I shouldn't have to look up every word in its attack line. One of the stated purposes of the 1,2,3 action icons was to reduce lookup.
I know, learning curve. But when EVERYBODY at a table misses something it's pretty good evidence that things aren't being explained well.
Sorry for being so negative. Part of the problem is that I WANT to like this game, I'm just finding it hard to. I keep stumbling over several issues that really bug me.
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No one else at the table is likely looking at the bestiary, so its not the best example.
However, it does help to approach it with a mindset of 'whoops I/we made a mistake, lets fix it and move on' not 'I can't believe we couldn't find it in the first place'. Once you're already in the mindset that its not easier, everything you see will just compound that feeling.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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We TPKed last night (later reversed by GM fiat for reasons that I found unconvincing).
The Black Pudding is just brutal. We knew we were fighting oozes but it never occurred to us that we'd need to go get better weapons. So, maybe our bad. But this is an INTRODUCTORY scenario and we were all concentrating on learning the rules, our characters, etc. And we've all been well trained to stay on the obvious railroad tracks in PFS. I guess a TPK will learn us :-)
I think to some degree the adventure is intended to shake you of PF1 railroad tracks. It takes an action to do Knowledge checks. The fighter can do that check, Valeros has Occultism. But it would stop him from moving forward and (disastrously!) using Double Slice. Most peoples' instinct is not to "waste" an action on knowledge and pile on the damage. This is a lesson worth learning!
An all but automatic grab on a creature with reach is just brutal. The check to get out isn't too bad but that takes 1 action, getting in reach takes a second, allowing only one hit. Which then splits the ooze. What happened to us seems quite likely. A character got grabbed early so running away was no longer a great option (you're leaving a character to die)
Note that being grabbed isn't quite as bad as it was in PF1. In PF1 being grappled prevented you using 2H weapons and spells. In PF2 you can still do most things while grabbed, you just need to clear a DC 5 flat check to do Manipulate actions (like spellcasting). It's a lot easier to cast spells in a PF2 grapple than in PF1.
The scenario seems to assume that the wizard (who may or may not be along, of course) will make a knowledge check before the party splits the ooze into several component parts. Never happened since the wizard was slow and we'd already split the ooze into too many parts to handle by the time his initiative came up.
After the first splitting you didn't pause to think about it? Also, Valeros also has Occultism trained - kinda like how PF1 fighters also had Dungeoneering as a class skill ("what did I just step into").
This would be hard with level 5 characters made by players. With pregens it really is over the top in how difficult it is. The pudding is fairly likely to crit whoever he hits and, depending on which character that is, fairly likely to put him unconscious in a single round (a full round attack starting with a crit does 6d8+28+6d6 damage, or 75 pts of damage on average).
Actually I've seen especially Valeros use his shield effectively to deflect most of the ooze's attacks, but yeah, he also got critted a lot by it. It's a harsh encounter to be sure, but both when I played it and when I ran it, the pregens won through.
And only one of the Pregens has in battle healing. We made the fatal mistake of not choosing to bring Kyra. Yes, PF2 has all sorts of ways to make a cleric no longer essential. Except none of the pregens had them.
Well I guess again the scenario works to teach a lesson: always talk about your healing strategy when mustering the party.
This scenario brought me one step closer to deciding that PFS2 isn't for me (a lot of the issues I'm seeing can be handled by a decent GM. Except in PFS where GMs don't have the freedom to be decent :-().
If it was my first exposure to PFS2 it would definitely have been my last. As it is, it may well be my last.
At this point you're being a bit sour grapes about it. The scenario is surprisingly spicy for an iconic-only one, but it isn't as bad as you describe it. Both times I saw it in action was with a group with mixed experience as gamers, and they made it through intact. And both the other guy and me as GM didn't feel that the scenario got in our way while we tried to be a decent GM.
You guys had several chances to avert disaster:
- Think twice before not bringing any proper healing character. I mean, Medicine is nice but apparently you didn't even check if the other characters could actually do that.
- During the investigation in town, a critical success on asking about oozes warns you about oozes splitting.
- Both the library investigation and the investigation in town are rife with hints about oozes being a thing. You could have thought "hey we're likely to face oozes, maybe we should think bout what we could do to prepare for that".
- When you actually faced the ooze, both the wizard and the fighter have the skill to know more about it.
- When you first split the ooze, that's a damn good hint something is up. But you imply that you guys split it more than once. Why did you keep doing a thing that was working out very badly?
Venture-Captain, Ohio—Columbus
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The pudding fights were tough, since most of the pregens were built to use Pointy-Slashy Things.
But... in 2E, *everyone* is trained in unarmed attacks. Once the party splits the first one and realizes the Attack did no damage at all, the GM might need to give the party a hint on how to stop the things. The two best plans I have seen so far are to create as many puddings as possible and let Ezren roast em all like giant marshmallows, or for the melee characters to throw down their weapons and start punching it in the squishy bits.
As we all learn a new rule set, I think a few hints from the GM on better tactics is a good thing. I’m not advocating telling people how to play their characters, but I suspect that very few players will realize that everyone is now trained to punch things — this is a change from how we are all used to thinking.
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We TPKed last night (later reversed by GM fiat for reasons that I found unconvincing).
The Black Pudding is just brutal.
I'm not going to quote all of your response but I will reply to the gist of it,
I totally agree that we could have done some things better. Both the GM and players made some mistakes that contributed to the TPK.
But in an introductory scenario for a brand new game system I think it is just too hard. One can EXPECT the GM and Players to make mistakes. An introductory scenario shouldn't be so difficult that a failure to play smart (by looking for information on oozes BEFORE going in) combined with a bit of bad luck ends up in a TPK.
I think to some degree the adventure is intended to shake you of PF1 railroad tracks. It takes an action to do Knowledge checks. The fighter can do that check, Valeros has Occultism. But it would stop him from moving forward and (disastrously!) using Double Slice. Most peoples' instinct is not to "waste" an action on knowledge and pile on the damage. This is a lesson worth learning!
I wasn't playing Valeros. I don't think that it even occurred to the player that Occultism would let him know something about oozes. Maybe the GM should have hinted.
Note that being grabbed isn't quite as bad as it was in PF1.
Agreed, but it is also WORSE than in PF1 in one significant respect. As far as i can see you aren't pulled adjacent so given that you're grabbed by a creature with reach the fighter (assuming no reach weapon which is the case for pregens) can't even strike back.
Well I guess again the scenario works to teach a lesson: always talk about your healing strategy when mustering the party.
It was an online game. The player who was going to play Kyra didn't show up. We briefly discussed somebody swapping into playing Kyra but it was pointed out that PF2 was designed to make the cleric no longer essential. So we believed the hype and nobody chose to bite the bullet and play Kyra.
Our mistake I guess. The lesson is to not believe Paizo? Yes, I know this is largely unfair. It IS true that other characters can take on the healing role. Just none of the pregens. But is it really good introductory adventure design to make the cleric so crucial a character? I'm going to say no.
At this point you're being a bit sour grapes about it.
Not really, no. In my experience a very large number of new players take quite badly to character death, especially to what seems like unfair character death.
As to me, I didn't really mind the TPK per se (the chronicle was attached to a brand new character. No way I'm risking a real character on a Paizo pregen only scenario :-) :-)). One of my biggest concerns with PF2 is how limited and expensive knowledge skills are. And how crucial they seem to be. This scenario accentuated that concern. Big time.
I've got a knowledge monkey character. I'm getting very close to deciding that he is the only character I'll ever play in PFS because that role is so crucial and, in PFS, you can't rely on the other players.
I stand by my original position. This is too hard FOR AN INTRODUCTORY PREGEN ONLY ADVENTURE. Its acceptably hard with player built characters, its probably even going to be acceptable for pregens a year from now when the players and GM know all the rules. But it is too unforgiving for right now when the GMs and players are all making substantial mistakes.
As I said, the GM thought that he'd made enough mistakes that he retconned the TPK. Now that I know that he oops'd on the grab I almost agree with him. But mistakes like that are all but inevitable at this stage (I'm most certainly not blaming him in any way).
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Can’t agree with you there. I have now run it 4 times and it has been a fun introduction to the game with a suitable challenge that forced them to really work to succeed but was achievable with some reasonable GMing. A few times characters have been put down but no one has died in any of those runnings.
There are a couple of points in the adventure when you can gather information and learn about split specifically., giving you a chance to prepare so you may have missed these clues as well.
One of my groups decided to split the pudding over and over again and then fireballed the whole room, friends and all, to kill the puddings.
Another group attacked it with their fists and slings to kill it.
The deadliest encounter for most groups was the trap and persistent acid damage.
It seems like you keep finding things that cause you to lose heart with 2e, only to find the rules weren’t followed or your initial assumptions were incorrect.
I have played at your tables and found you to be a lot of fun to play with so I don’t get where all this negativity on the boards comes from sometimes, but next time you think “this time my expectations that this game will suck have finally come true” I advise you to take a deep breath and check first that significant mistakes were not made in how the scenario was run before using that experience or an assumption to judge the system a failure.
Give it a fair chance! You might come to enjoy the new system if you don’t keep jumping to conclusions.
I say this with the friendliest of intentions.
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Agreed, but it is also WORSE than in PF1 in one significant respect. As far as i can see you aren't pulled adjacent so given that you're grabbed by a creature with reach the fighter (assuming no reach weapon which is the case for pregens) can't even strike back.
Sometimes part of a creature extends beyond its space, such as if a giant octopus is grabbing you with its tentacles. In that case, the GM will usually allow attacking the extended portion, even if you can’t reach the main creature.
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Agreed, but it is also WORSE than in PF1 in one significant respect. As far as i can see you aren't pulled adjacent so given that you're grabbed by a creature with reach the fighter (assuming no reach weapon which is the case for pregens) can't even strike back.
Sometimes part of a creature extends beyond its space, such as if a giant octopus is grabbing you with its tentacles. In that case, the GM will usually allow attacking the extended portion, even if you can’t reach the main creature.
I missed that. Thanks.
Too many versions of D&D floating in my head, all with fairly minor (but quite significant) differences. I'm an old fart, its hard to keep track of which is which :-(
Give it a fair chance!
I am really trying to! One reason that I post has been to see if people can convince me that I'm wrong :-). Or to identify mistakes that have been made.
But I also do realize that not all games are right for all people. And, unfortunately, its becoming quite likely that PF2 (at least PFS2) is just not for me. I have NOT yet made that decision but I'm definitely headed in that direction.
Oh, and I AM giving it a fair chance. Played every PFS scenario out there so far, ran most of them. Played under a variety of GMs.
Sorry that I'm coming across as quite negative. Not my intent although I definitely see how I'm coming across that way.
Also, for what its worth, I'm NOT saying that PF2 is a bad game. I am saying that I'm not sure its the game for me, which is a very different statement.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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There's three chances actually:
Crafting or Diplomacy (Gather Information) (DC 20) to ask about the Ohrlavis among the alchemical crowd, requires a simple success.
Diplomacy (Gather Information), Pathfinder Society Lore, or Society (DC 22) to ask about the Open Road Pact book, requires a critical success.
Society (DC 20), simple success to get Igrigi to remember that the Ohrlavis were based in Wishful Cures.
Now, going for lunch with Igrigi a second time doesn't make much sense, but I don't see anything stopping you from retrying the other checks. And asking around among the local alchemists is a fairly obvious thing to try again (hint hint).
The punishment for needing to try again is that the Ohrlavis get closer to finishing their device.
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Also, the pregens are actually pretty decent at these skills.
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That seems like a case of "failing forward," as mentioned on p. 491. Though I think I've heard this concept mentioned by Jason Bulmahn on both Oblivion Oath and Knights of Everflame, and in a few other YouTube videos discussing 2nd edition, this brief mention on 491 seems to be the only one. It doesn't look like the Society GMs are explicitly given guidance on when/how this is applied for Society play, but I would think it could apply here. As Lau mentioned, having the machine closer to completion would seem to be an appropriate consequence.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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Thanks for the response.
The pregens have good modifiers. The players don't have good rolls. The first check is a DC 20. When you roll a 2, you're going to miss it. The other problem is that Aid Another has a default DC of 20, so there's not a lot of Aid Another in PF2.
The Second check requires a 28, they didn't get it.
Yeah PF2 isn't so hot on Aid Another. But in this case, why would you use Aid Another in the first place? Why not send people out to do independent checks? For the Society check, Fumbus has a +11 and Ezren has a +13, why aren't they both trying the check? For diplomacy checks, why aren't both Fumbus and Kyra trying? For Crafting, both Valeros and Fumbus are good. For Occultism, both Ezren and Valeros are good.
The third check requires that the actually know who Igrigi is and they needed to get five success in the Archive to learn that name.
Why did they stop researching in the archive so soon?
It's definitely not clear that the Pathfinders can keep asking over and over, but I think that this makes the most sense in this situation.Thank you again.
How else are you going to take 30 hours to get to area B5? It's assumed the PCs spend multiple hours in the archive, then a couple of hours gathering info on the streets. But to have it be possible to take 30 hours, you're going to have to repeat some things.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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@NN959:
I'm having a hard time understanding what your players did. I get the feeling either you had a distinctly different idea about how the scene should be run, or your players were stuck in a mindset with PFS1 tactics that don't work so well with PFS2 rules. And while I respect the autonomy of players, and I'll let them make their own decisions, if they're planning to do something out of ignorance that doesn't make sense in the new game's rules, I'll tell them and ask them if they want to reconsider.
To try to get us all on the same page, here's how I think it is intended to be run.
Each hour, each PC picks a section of the library to work on. I wrote the skills for each section on the map and had people put their mini on the part of the map that they were investigating. The skill check represents how well that PC does at investigating that part of the library. So if in the first hour Ezren attempts the Occultism check, the next hour Valeros can go to that section and see how well he can do it too. So at maximum the PCs can attempt 6 x 9 skill checks. In practice it's a bit fewer since on average 2 pregens are good at each skill, but that's still a lot of skill checks. It should probably take the PCs 2-4 hours to get everything. At my table last month, they had six pregens and it took them only 1 hour to get 8 successes due to a lot of crits. Each pregen attempting the skills they're best at is by far the best strategy.
Were I think our views diverged is that I think each PC can attempt each skill (but should only do so if they're good at it), while it seems you thought all of the PCs together could only attempt each skill once?
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After the PCs are done in the library they have a meeting with the VC and then go into the city.
I know that "don't split the party" is a normal practice, but it's not a rule in the rulebook or anything. Most of the time, splitting the party is a bad thing because it's risky and because it doesn't make things go any faster in OOC time if the GM has to divide attention between groups. So when a scenario seems to want the party to split up for something relatively safe, such as walking around to gather info, I think it's good if the GM just tells the players that it's safe and useful to do so. Quantium is a civilized and fairly safe city, walking around and chatting to people is safe enough that you don't have to do it as a gang.
PF2 does in fact allow you to retry Recall Knowledge. It's intended actually: you tend to learn only one bit of information per attempt, but you can attempt multiple times to learn more. The thing is, that takes multiple actions. In combat, it's possible (and sometimes useful) for a highly knowledgeable character to spend multiple actions to get more information about a monster.
And since the skill checks here all take 1d4 hours and are described as "asking around", I would say that they're basically all Gather Info checks, just using specific skills related to the topic you're asking about. Use Crafting to talk shop with alchemists for example.
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@NN959:
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Each hour, each PC picks a section of the library to work on. I wrote the skills for each section on the map and had people put their mini on the part of the map that they were investigating. The skill check represents how well that PC does at investigating that part of the library. So if in the first hour Ezren attempts the Occultism check, the next hour Valeros can go to that section and see how well he can do it too. So at maximum the PCs can attempt 6 x 9 skill checks. In practice it's a bit fewer since on average 2 pregens are good at each skill, but that's still a lot of skill checks. It should probably take the PCs 2-4 hours to get everything. At my table last month, they had six pregens and it took them only 1 hour to get 8 successes due to a lot of crits. Each pregen attempting the skills they're best at is by far the best strategy.
Were I think our views diverged is that I think each PC can attempt each skill (but should only do so if they're good at it), while it seems you thought all of the PCs together could only attempt each skill once?
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I think I ran it/interpreted it the same way as NN did, and not as you did. Once a check has been attempted at a spot, that spot is closed unless the check was a crit success. If multiple PCs are independently searching the same section (ie not aiding), I have been rank ordering their rolls from best to worst.