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Echoing ^ that, you may miss out on loot, information, keys, secondary success conditions, or may arrive at your destination at the wrong time.
There's a Star Trek Next Generation episode that comes to mind, where Wesley raised a collection of his mother's plants to maturity faster than usual, but Beverly had been studying their growth rate =\
That, and sometimes you don't *know* where you're going. If you did, it's probably already been explored and looted.
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There's a Star Trek Next Generation episode that comes to mind, where Wesley raised a collection of his mother's plants to maturity faster than usual, but Beverly had been studying their growth rate =\
You're thinking of "True Q," and the character of Amanda Rogers accelerating the plant's growth rate using her Q powers.
Poor Wesley, catches s%@* for episodes he wasn't even in!
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IC, why would you not move 17x faster than normal to get to where you're going?
Same reason you wouldn't rent a Lamborghini for $80/hr to get you to your minimum wage job.
It costs 450gp to cast a minimum CL teleport. The Society usually pays a 1st Level Adventurer just a little more than that for a mission.
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Astral Caravan looks to be vague about whether or not thing in the Prime Material Plane still affect you. It says, "You can’t travel fully into the Astral Plane or any of the other planes it borders, but while using this ability you can cover incredible distances, traversing 50 miles per hour, as per the shadow walk spell." Shadow walk says:
Because of the blurring of reality between the Plane of Shadow and the Material Plane, you can’t make out details of the terrain or areas you pass over during transit, nor can you predict perfectly where your travel will end. It’s impossible to judge distances accurately, making the spell virtually useless for scouting or spying. Furthermore, when the spell effect ends, you are shunted 1d10 x 100 feet in a random horizontal direction from your desired endpoint. If this would place you within a solid object, you are shunted 1d10 x 1,000 feet in the same direction. If this would still place you within a solid object, you (and any creatures with you) are shunted to the nearest empty space available, but the strain of this activity renders each creature fatigued (no save).
So it's safe to assume if you don't know where you're going, that's not going to get you there. Even if you do know where you're going, it seems vague about whether or not something can stop you on the way. Since it doesn't address that point, probably not, but it's not completely clear.
So maybe you'll skip some "ambush on the road" type encounters, or travel time might be cut down from days to hours, but "find the hidden ruins in the jungle by encountering things on the way and following the clues" scenarios aren't going to be affected.
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Nature's Paths, Mount, and Tail Current let you move faster, (in the case of Mount, so does buying a horse), but they won't stop encounters along the way. There is potential impact if the amount of time you take to get there is important, and in those cases, good for the PCs! They did what they were supposed to do.
Scrying isn't as useful as it would seem. First of all, it's not great for finding people you have limited knowledge of, because they get a save, and there are large bonuses. Most decent BBEGs are going to have a good chance at making the Will save if they've got a +5 or +10 to it. Even if they do fail the save, if it's a whodunit, and they already did it, then you may not gain any useful information by watching what they are doing now. And it doesn't help at all for finding a dead pathfinder, which is often what you're looking for.
Locate Object, similarly, says, "Attempting to find a certain item requires a specific and accurate mental image; if the image is not close enough to the actual object, the spell fails. You cannot specify a unique item unless you have observed that particular item firsthand (not through divination)." Maybe you can use the general object to find "a goblet" or "a gem," but "show me where the amethyst sage stone is" isn't going to work unless you've seen the amethyst sage stone.
Sneaking past or missing clues can make things more difficult. The GM does have some leeway to place that clue elsewhere, I think, as Jurassic Pratt pointed out.
Killing the creature in The Confirmation is always a possibility. It doesn't ruin the scenario. Killing that creature is not the point of The Confirmation, and there's still plenty to do.
Players can definitely go off the rails or come up with solutions to invalidate parts of the scenario completely. They shouldn't be punished for doing so. If they manage it, good on them. It's not as easy to do in a lot of instances as it would seem, though.
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Isn't there a clause in the Guide about repositioning loot if players bypass it by going a creative route?Loot, yes, but I don't think it covers "other" stuff - secondary success conditions, vital clues, etc.
Clues in the form of letters or things that would be discovered alongside loot, I think would be covered. If a secondary success condition is something like "fully explore and document the dungeon," and they kill the BBEG right at the beginning, then turn around and go home, or they skip the dungeon entirely, then, yeah, they weren't really doing what they needed to do as Pathfinders, and they don't get the secondary prestige.
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Please check the ability being used as an example (first revelation here.)
-Anyone that can cast Nature's Paths
Mount
Tail Current
Scrying
sneak the party past what was supposed to be an ambush
one-shots the first enemy in The Confirmation
I don't see an issue with any of those.
Where you're treading with this conversation really belongs in the individual threads of each scenario. Some work. Some don't. Some benefit the party. Some are detrimental.
I really don't see an issue. A lot of these (and more; see my above example of teleport) are to be expected.
Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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There aren't many scenarios where the PCs travel speed has a hard impact. Any events that coincidentally happen "just as the PCs get there" can still happen just when they get there.
And yeah, quite a few adventures are a bit contrived in their encounters. So are plenty of real-world myths. People don't tell stories of the time everyone missed each other and nothing happened.
An author has to make some assumptions about what the party can and will do. And given the scale of PFS, those assumptions are a bit broad, the author doesn't know your group personally. If you go out of your way during character creation to invalidate those assumptions, and then say "but now that my character has that ability, it makes sense for him to use it", that's on you. You don't have to take these abilities. They might not be rewarding build options for PFS. Just because it exists and is powerful in a vacuum, doesn't mean it's good here.
A story without coincidences has a certain hardcore charm, but you can overdo it. There are plenty of justifications for having a few of them. For one, coincidences do just happen now and then and when they do, they make good stories. They're the interesting things that happen in our lives that we tell other people about. And the only thing that "gets aired" in a scenario should be when the camera saw something interesting happen. Second, there are deities like Desna that like to gently nudge things along. Real-world myth is full of people referring to fortune or fate causing things to happen. Why then would we rule it out in RPGs?
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Venture-Agent, Netherlands—Utrecht
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I once GMed an adventure where you have to travel on a boat, and one player had his own boat. He was pretty annoyed that they had to follow the story of stealing another boat, and I had to convince him it was a good idea to not use his own boat there.
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I once GMed an adventure where you have to travel on a boat, and one player had his own boat. He was pretty annoyed that they had to follow the story of stealing another boat, and I had to convince him it was a good idea to not use his own boat there.
** spoiler omitted **
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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Analogously, yesterday I played an adventure where the plot expects the PCs to draw attention as they move around town and do their thing. The villain forces a public confrontation in which he tries to discredit the PCs; but it gives them a platform to present evidence against him.
I was thinking, what if after the mission briefing (which sort of said: don't make a mess), we'd gone in sooo stealthy and smooth? I mean, not that our particular party could have, but at a 4-5 tier people can have good enough disguise and stealth capability that it's implausible the NPCs can connect the very small blips on the radar.
We would have outsmarted the scenario writer by undermining the assumptions he makes about normal parties ("freakshow"). Outsmarted him but also ourselves probably.
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A lot of this comes from having to run the game with a random bunch of players in a fixed time slot. I love sandbox-style games where PCs can go off on tangents or do whatever they want, and the GM can modify to keep the story and the PCs in the same place, but that takes time. In PFS, we're not playing our characters' lives, we're just hitting the highlights, and so some of those come from coincidences.
The more "realistic" scenario would be, "Drandle Dreng wakes you up at 3AM, and sends you on a three week voyage where nothing happens. The Aspis heard about you and changed their plans, so you journeyed three weeks back with nothing to show for it but a sunburn and parasites." Luckily, we skip those scenarios (or call them "Day Job rolls").
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Then again, there is the "reward creative solutions" rule: if PCs avoid a certain encounter or clue they need, there's no reason a GM can't give them the clue anyway. "OK, you teleport to the town and stay completely covert so no one notices you. A few days pass where nothing happens. And then, you pass a bar called the Singing Salamander, and it reminded you of a bar with the same name in Riddleport that you were in where this guy was ranting about (X clue), and you suddenly realize ..."
Or, for the stauncher realists, the clue can be something you uncovered in research between adventures, or heard from Janira's stories during your Confirmation, or...
In practice, though, it can be hard to come up with this on the fly. If you plan to use your own boat, or teleport, or whatever, let the GM know in advance. I'd love it if my PCs told me stuff like this (or even what previous adventures they have played) so I can build some things into the background. It's just not always doable time-wise.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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For the record, I have used Teleport in PFS. To take the body of a deceased PC to a temple outside Rahadoum to get raised and then back to the dungeon. Fast travel isn't entirely useless. But although the ability is "powerful" in isolation, it's not necessarily very good in organized play.
Contributor
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Determining which locations are well-known to you is another matter, although I think it's safe to say any lodge from which you've gone on adventure before.
I'll have to check the book when I have access to it again, but I think there's actually something canon for this.