If Mark or another dev were willing, I had a few questions about the playtest adventure. I don't think these would count as the sort of "spoilers that would bias playtest data." I mean, I could be wrong but if so, just say so. <3
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- Is the adventure pretty grimdark, or would it be fairly easy to reskin it to a comedy or dark comedy without too much work? I haven't run a comedy game in some years, and I think it would be a nice break from our darker regular Starfinder campaign since we'll be running the Playtest on our off-weeks between our Starfinder sessions.
- Are players able to build their own characters for the adventure, or is being requested that people just take pregens through it?
- Assuming players can build their own characters, would playable monster races from the bestiary PDF (orcs, gnolls etc) be viable, or are you just wanting CRB races?
- Will the data you are most looking for the GM to be mindful of and collect from each segment be listed in the adventure itself, or is the GM going to have to look at the survey for that segment before running the adventure? It's been pretty clear that you don't want players looking at the survey beforehand and biasing the adventure, but it's not entirely clear if you also don't want GMs reading the survey beforehand and if that would be considered a biasing factor.
- A couple of the devs have talked up the lethality of the adventure. Assuming that isn't just bluster, what is the expectation when a PC dies? Are they able to take up a new character and keep playing like usual in most campaigns, or is one of the playtest goals to whittle the party down and the dead PC's player is just booted out of the game to sit on their hands or go home early?
Hopefully these are answerable. Thanks in advance :)
Not a dev, naturally, but they've mentioned character creation in a previous post somewhere. They were saying that while there will be other ways to generate ability scores, they want playtesters to stick with the default ABC method so that the experience is more uniform across the board.
I wonder if the map-pack will be commonly available, since while I have no problem with digital core or adventure books, I neglected to consider how nice an actual map might be rather than drawing everything out.
I wonder if the map-pack will be commonly available, since while I have no problem with digital core or adventure books, I neglected to consider how nice an actual map might be rather than drawing everything out.
I believe that, like the other playtest materials, the map pack was only guaranteed to be available to those who pre-ordered by May 1st, but if there are any unspoken-for copies, I'd expect they will be in distribution and/or on the Paizo site.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure you are right, Joana. Foolish of me, but oh well! I might get lucky.
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My understanding is that you'll create several characters (some likely at higher levels) and progress one character a couple of times -- ie its some number of scenarios, some of which use the same characters, others of which use new ones. This sounds likes its designed to allow people to play a few different classes so that they'll have a broader range of feedback. It also sounds like its designed to stress-test how easy/hard it actually is to create characters/level up. I think the intent was that the creation/leveling happens as _part_ of the session, not between sessions.
Pretty sure they'll prefer you to stick to core races and not use monstrous.
I think I heard Mark saying that while the subscenarios are designed to stress test different parts of the system, they are trying to avoid prejudicing either the GMs or the players by hinting/highlighting what subsystems those are before the play through.
IIRC, it's 64 pages, which is about the length of Dragon's Demand which padded XP to barely hit 7th. 3.X mega-modules of 128 pages which had little NPC interaction kept about the same pace.
So to advance to 20th, and presumably play a bit there, Doomsday Dawn will have to more than triple that! They'll need to have monster info online (especially if they want a variety to measure against), maybe even maps too (because even l page of maps per level would use up 1/3 of the space!). Since Paizo mentioned testing downtime too and likely wants to test out social skills and so forth, I really don't know how they're going to format this in a narrative style. (I don't mind this at all if there are simple descriptor seeds for GMs to nurture into life!)
So I suspect we'll play in sections with skips in between (and IIRC one dev's description implied this).
So maybe play 1st-2nd, 4th-5th, etc. Not only would we not need to play the missing levels, but we wouldn't need to gain all of the XP needed for other levels too (so maybe play half of 2nd level, for example).
Paizo then could also focus on the levels where the biggest shifts in power occur or where new abilities unlock, especially since it's nearly impossible some random skipped PC level will be flawed while others near it operate smoothly.
Creative Director
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I was the primary developer for the adventure, so I can answer these.
Is the adventure pretty grimdark, or would it be fairly easy to reskin it to a comedy or dark comedy without too much work? I haven't run a comedy game in some years, and I think it would be a nice break from our darker regular Starfinder campaign since we'll be running the Playtest on our off-weeks between our Starfinder sessions.
The adventure is serious—it's about a potential end of the world scenario and features some of the scarier monsters in the game, after all. But it's not all "grimdark" from start to finish. One adventure in particular is a pretty heavy roleplaying adventure. That all said, I don't think it'd benefit from being turned into a comedy at all. There's not a lot funny about a potential apocalypse!
Are players able to build their own characters for the adventure, or is being requested that people just take pregens through it?
You'll build your own characters, with guidelines as appropriate for each chapter. No pregens. One of the more important things we want to test is the character building process, and pregens remove that.
Assuming players can build their own characters, would playable monster races from the bestiary PDF (orcs, gnolls etc) be viable, or are you just wanting CRB races?
Nope. One of the things we're playtesting is how the core races work, and playing other races wouldn't give us that information (never mind the fact that there won't be information for playing non-core races in the playtest anyway).
Will the data you are most looking for the GM to be mindful of and collect from each segment be listed in the adventure itself, or is the GM going to have to look at the survey for that segment before running the adventure? It's been pretty clear that you don't want players looking at the survey beforehand and biasing the adventure, but it's not entirely clear if you also don't want GMs reading the survey beforehand and if that would be considered a biasing factor.
The GM must look at the surveys. The adventure's content is pretty much all about the adventure—there's not a lot of room for non-adventure content. There'll be lots of specific things we'll want each GM to track and observe and such for each chapter, and the surveys will have more info. In addition, there'll be more info, I suspect, on when and what the players should read before the game.
A couple of the devs have talked up the lethality of the adventure. Assuming that isn't just bluster, what is the expectation when a PC dies? Are they able to take up a new character and keep playing like usual in most campaigns, or is one of the playtest goals to whittle the party down and the dead PC's player is just booted out of the game to sit on their hands or go home early?
One of the things we're playtesting is the combat engine and encounter balance. We THINK we've set up encounters as appropriate, with some being deliberately intended to be super easy and some being deliberately intended to be super tough. If PCs die all the time in every encounter, that's as valuable playtest info for us as if no PCs ever die, or if every encounter feels perfectly balanced. If it turns out PCs get killed and have nothing to do for a session and there's no way to come back, we want to know that as well. Remember, this is a playtest. Some parts might not work as intended. This is your chance to tell us when and how often and why un-fun play experiences like this occur. The playtest is intended to be fun, yes, but there'll likely be annoying or obnoxious or just plain un-fun elements as well. We want to know about those when they happen so we can work to mitigate or even remove them from the final game.
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Creative Director
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IIRC, it's 64 pages, which is about the length of Dragon's Demand which padded XP to barely hit 7th. 3.X mega-modules of 128 pages which had little NPC interaction kept about the same pace.
So to advance to 20th, and presumably play a bit there, Doomsday Dawn will have to more than triple that! They'll need to have monster info online (especially if they want a variety to measure against), maybe even maps too (because even l page of maps per level would use up 1/3 of the space!). Since Paizo mentioned testing downtime too and likely wants to test out social skills and so forth, I really don't know how they're going to format this in a narrative style. (I don't mind this at all if there are simple descriptor seeds for GMs to nurture into life!)
So I suspect we'll play in sections with skips in between (and IIRC one dev's description implied this).
So maybe play 1st-2nd, 4th-5th, etc. Not only would we not need to play the missing levels, but we wouldn't need to gain all of the XP needed for other levels too (so maybe play half of 2nd level, for example).
Paizo then could also focus on the levels where the biggest shifts in power occur or where new abilities unlock, especially since it's nearly impossible some random skipped PC level will be flawed while others near it operate smoothly.
The adventure is 96 pages, but it doesn't follow a linear 1 to 2 to 3 to so on level progression. We want to playtest multiple levels, not just low level ones, so the seven parts skip around, ranging from 1st level up to 17th level, and are spread out more or less equally in between. This is NOT a playtest of a full character progression from 1st to 20th level that would happen organically over the course of an entire campaign.
Thanks for the answers, James! :)