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Unfortunately, I don't know if Paizo's vision for PFS is compatible with the sorts of changes you are asking for. PFS seems to be engineered to cleave as close to RAW as possible in order to give a consistent experience from table to table. Allowing GMs to make changes to the material on the fly creates inconsistencies between play experiences, which is against a stated goal of PFS.
While the goal of the Pathfinder Society Roleplaying Guild is to provide an even, balanced experience to all players, doing so would require all PCs to be exactly the same and all GMs to be restricted to a stiflingly oppressive script. We understand that sometimes a Game Master has to make rules adjudications on the fly, deal with unexpected player choices, or even cope with extremely unlucky (or lucky) dice on both sides of the screen.
Scenarios are meant to be run as written, with no addition or subtraction to the number of monsters (unless indicated in the scenario), or changes to armor, feats, items, skills, spells, statistics, traits, or weapons.
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What you say is true Hwalsh, and it indirectly has affected the development of PF2 quite heavily so that players will hopefully not be able to do any of those problematic things you said.
Is this the right subforum to post this thread, though? I want it to get the visibility it deserves.
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There is no feasible way for paizo to check who is and isn't able and willing to adjust the scenarios without wiping the party out. The CR system has a lot of holes in it (A couple of orcs? I'll just swap in this necrophidious they're the same cr...)
You do not have to read boxed text. You are allowed to paraphrase it.
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Oh God, that sounds terrible. No thank you. Every example you have on changing a scenario punishes players for using a character's abilities - especially situational abilities that do not come up every game (like object reading). A GM tells and facilitates a story where players have agency, and that comes before your desire to keep things on the rail you want. If someone puts in the effort to have a +56 grapple I sure as hell won't tell them "sorry, plot powers activate and he slips away"
And even if your a good GM there are bad GMs who will abuse that. With current GM fiat I've seen scenarios change from a fun romp to a hallway of murder-holes.
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Maybe just toss in (at least) a small section under each encounter that says things like: "The GM can, if they wish, substitute out these monsters for X, Y, or Z if they choose to."
The idea of scenarios offering you a subs bench for some encounters seems cool.
Especially as a lot of scenarios have a monster with a statblock that recurs and/or turns up in large groups - e.g. a group of 'basic orc warriors' turn up a couple of times - scenario gives the options to swap some for some archers or a shaman's apprentice or just give one a bag of alchemist's fire vials or a magic weapon
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The basic problem is very, very simple.
Tables with good GMs would benefit from more GM agency.
Tables with poor GMs would suffer from more GM agency.
How can Paizo possibly tell which is which?
I'm hoping that, at least for awhile, PF2 will be a much more balanced games than PF1. That alone will significantly reduce the positive effect good GMs can have in making things more challenging.
Also, of course, GMs DO have SOME tools to affect things. Not as many as I'd like but they exist. Tactics can often go some ways to making things more challenging.
As an aside, that shadow octopus thing was either an extreme edge case or a player misinterpreting something. If I had that situation at a table (and I was convinced it was rules legal) I'd ask the player to tone it down or just hand the player a chronicle sheet and proceed to actually PLAY the scenario with the other players. If things get THAT broken the GM DOES have recourse.
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This has absolutely nothing to do with "if Paizo doesn't trust me enough to do *anything* in a scenario", in a system with so many people there has to be limits to the people that will take advantage of too much flexibility or simply lack the experience to use it well. Common sense rules don't remotely equate to a complete lack of trust.
GMs add immense value to the scenarios they run, they are trusted to bring the characters and story to life, judge the game fairly, expound on the narrative they are given to weave (yes, even from {horror}box text{/horror}), they are trusted to make 6 hours of time fun for half a dozen people, and because they do this all is why players tell stories to each other about the games they've played, and on and on. Frankly it's a disservice to all the GMs who make games awesome to play to insist they add nothing to them. The fact that you personally want a different system doesn't remotely mean the system is broken or not working perfectly well, just that you have a different priority.
There are thousands, probably 10s of thousands of people who GM Pathfinder & Starfinder Society, there is no feasible way without incurring massive costs of ensuring that even the majority of those are going to run scenarios where they can change parts and still give players a fair, reasonable, consistent experience.
We all know that monster CRs can be entirely out of whack (yes, I'm looking at you Ghoul, don't try and hide) so suggestions of replacing monsters with ones chosen by the GM is clearly not going to result in a consistent, fair experience. I think many people are well aware of other organised play systems which give their GMs lots of leeway and the horror stories that come from it, this doesn't even have to be an 'all the time' thing, just often enough that it drives people away.
The possibility of more Wounded Wisp/Tome of Righteous Repose style scenarios is a welcome one, but also one I suspect that doesn't go half as far as you would 'need' (and obviously requires more development time which means fewer scenarios in the same period).
PFS is one of, if not the, most successful organised play RPG campaigns that has existed, the solid majority of players enjoy it very much. Can it be better, always, do these suggestions result in that, not remotely imo.
Venture-Captain, Missouri—Columbia
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The older 0-4 scenarios could be rewritten to reflect the impact the expansions to Pathfinder have created. But then since we are moving to PF2 that might not be feasible. What we do need to do is open up the scenarios more so that GMs have flexibility in adapting the scenario encounters so that the encounters respond intelligently depending on the encounter's creatures to what the players do.
It is very difficult to write a scenario that will anticipate what players might do. Intelligent foes should react to situations in ways that meet their strengths, not just as a text block says they will do.
I would like to see some additional foes placed in the encounters for the GM to select from in place of others similar to the way Tome and Halflight have done, but not to the point where there's 96 combinations. Just a few options to consider would be better.
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Writing without any experience of PFS play - not much of that here in Sweden.
I have played many FPS scenarios at my own table, outside of organized play, where I am easily able to do just what you propose. I can feel your pain. What others say about not being able to change things are true, and you already knew that... but posting here is an attempt to affect a change, and I must say I support that.
At the moment it seems only bad GMs have agency, in that they don't know the rules as well and might thus misinterpret - misinterpret and interpret according to their own sense of what works. A system where bad GMs, by "virtue" of poor rules knowledge, have agency - but good GMs who do know the rules do not. This does not seem ideal.
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Paraphrasing Boxed Text is not GM'ing. You have to at least see what I am saying here BNW.
You're annoyed by x, someone may have told you x is a rule. I see a lot of funny "thats a pfs rule" for things that are NOT pfs rules.
The fact that the GM is so hampered and completely stripped of any and all agency (or creativity) is the main reason I *only* run PFS to help out our local lodge at conventions or special events.
You have a lot of free will and agency to create dialog and give personality to the NPCs (in fact you almost have to)> Their personality and the tone of the adventure are pretty much yours to decide, and that to me is more agency than x amount of plus hit or Y amount of damage.
Once the PCs go off the rails (which is early and often) you get a lot of leeway with the tactics. If someone is a shadow creature do what the PCs would have done and grabbed a torch and set him and or the entire place on fire.
Do I want to see NPCs with a little more OMF and brains? definitely
Would I like qualified DMs to be able to change the monsters? Sure.
(Thats more of a game designed thing than a DM thing. They're not always the same skillset)
But the practical options here are that either no dm can change the monsters or EVERY DM can change the monsters. They can't just give this ability to you.
For me the decision making model goes roughly like this
(Extra fun had with hard challenges) X (% of dms that can do well with those changes) V.S. (Bad time had by hard challenges) X (% of DMs that will get the balance wrong)
Given how much easier it is to make a really bad game than a really good game, and that not all of the fun at a table is tied to the difficulty of the encounter, that doesn't seem like a good idea.
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I ran Rose Street Revenge four times at GenCon.
My GM experience?
The *players* had to *do* something *APPROPRIATE* rather than 'follow the plot train' in order to really make the set 'POP'.
The tables that had some people sitting like lumps waiting for everything to be handed to them? Not so exciting.
The tables that had disruptive players at them (thinking that was the best way to 'playtest' something)? Not so exciting.
The tables that took things 'off the rails' but in an entertaining fashion that encouraged me to stretch my neurons a bit? Those were FUN.
I don't think we're gonna get that by throwing under-CR'd creatures at L1 characters (for example).
Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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"Agency" is a bit of a difficult word. It gets used a lot lately and it's sometimes hard to figure out what someone means by it. I'll be using the following definition:
1) You have the ability to make choices.
2) Those choices have consequences.
3) Enough insight into the likely consequences that you can make a meaningful choice.
Usually the touchy topic is player agency, as GMs use "illusion of choice" to suggest agency when actually player choices all lead to the same outcome. But in this case we're talking about the GM instead. I think points #2 and #3 are fairly easily realized (based on your impression of the players and looking over their character sheets to see what they can do), but #1 is what you feel PFS isn't good enough in.
To some degree that's inherent in what PFS aims to be. One aspect of an organized play campaign with published adventures is that you can meet up with other people who played the same scenario, and swap stories of how it went. If GMs have the "agency" to completely rewrite the plot, that's not going to work of course.
Another aspect of organized play is that you can move from one table to the next, because people are using the same rulebook and everyone is getting a fair deal. If one GM gave out much more treasure than another, or one GM banned options that are allowed at another table, or one GM makes some monsters much more powerful than another, that all makes it harder to have characters go from one table to another.
So that means there are some kinds of GM agency that PFS by its very nature can't accomodate. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with those kinds of agency, or that there's anything wrong with PFS. It's just that the format isn't compatible with all play styles. PFS never claimed to be the only or the best way to play. It's just one game that we hope you'll enjoy for what it is, not for what it can't be.
Playing with (many) others means we can't have unlimited GM agency, but that doesn't mean there isn't any. And it doesn't mean we shouldn't be looking for carefully measured ways to increase it. I think it's also important to distinguish between agency and creative input. They're related concepts but not quite the same.
How you portray NPCs beyond the small bit of description you get from the scenario, what details you add, how you respond when the PCs engage them in discussion - these are all places where you have creative input. Not an enormous amount of hard, meaningful choices, but definitely room for creativity that will be a big part of how people remember the scenario.
What kinds of GM agency are there in a typical PFS scenario?
- The GM fiat rule -
One handy rule to keep under your belt is the Fiat Rule—simply grant a player a +2 or a –2 bonus or penalty to a die roll if no one at the table is precisely sure how a situation might be handled by the rules. For example, a character who attempts to trip an iron golem in a room where the f loor is magnetized could gain a +2 bonus on his attempt at your discretion, since the magnetic pull exerted by the f loor helps pull the golem down.
I rely on this a lot especially in social situations to give people a +2 bonus if they come up with a good argument, have someone with appropriate background or something like it.
- Combat tactics - you should keep to the tactics given in a statblock, until they're invalidated. However, you do have to do some parsing. Some of them are written more in a tone of SHALL DO X, and others more in WANTS TO ACHIEVE X, SO WOULD PROBABLY DO Y.
I was recently helping someone playtest a scenario and I suddenly TPK'ed the party with some filler monsters. So we gave them a slightly suboptimal ability and tactics to use those every other round, instead of going full-throttle for the kill. Some tactics really are intended to softball. However, other tactics are just to give the GM an idea of what the NPC broadly hopes to achieve.
I think it would be a good idea for PFS2 to clearly separate mandatory and suggestive tactics, to prefer suggestive tactics and avoid lowballing bad mandatory tactics. Yeah, that goes against what I just did. Nobody's perfect :)
- Combat priorities - in practice, the majority of combat tactics are really not that detailed, and you can make choices like which PC to focus on, whether to focus fire or spread it out. When I'm running a scenario for nice but newish players with weak builds and I have a strong boss, I make much of him raging around and attacking everyone, instead of focus-firing to kill a character every round. If I'm running for hardened veterans I'll try to scare them by really trying to hammer down one PC.
There are also more meta things you can do, especially when faced with powerplayers:
- Try to make sure nobody's playing down. People playing down tends to make things way easier than they should be.
- Make sure there's not more people in the scenario than it was written for. Season 0-3 scenarios really shouldn't be played with more than 4 people. I've found that they tend to be really enjoyable with just 3 people and a pregen actually, because you get a very focused group of people and everyone gets a nice chance to shine.
- If someone is really going out there with a build that while technically legal takes out all the fun: say so. It's not a problem that you can solve with more rules giving you more agency. It's a player that doesn't realize that just because all the individual bits are legal, that it's a good idea to put those things together. Learning that is sometimes a part of a player "growing up".
Worst case, you might have to be completely blunt: "Joe, if you make a character that none of the enemies in this scenario can do anything against, it's no fun for me and not really fun for anyone else at the table either. I know it's allowed by the rules but it's not fun for us. If you insist on doing that, there won't be a game because I don't want to GM it anymore."
This is kind of the A-bomb of social problems because PFS is built on a lot of freedom to make your character. One of the big draws, being able to play at any table, requires that GMs don't go effectively banning things. But while that freedom needs to be broad, it's not entirely absolut. You need to be extremely careful with this but it is the final option.
I think some of the ideas suggested here to enhance agency are worth investigating, but I don't think you can broadly put them in every scenario. Running into the same monsters again and again is not that common anymore, and when it happens they tend to be flunkies. Keeping things simple enough to keep down the workload for GMs has been an oft-requested feature. Most of the time the monsters in an adventure tend to have a specific role in it - the monster is a cause or effect of the plot - and can't just be replaced with something completely different. So while this could be an option in some scenarios, it can't be done across the board.
As for NPC gear - some writers really are more cunning than others. I would personally like a blanket rule for PFS (1) stating that all weapon-wielding NPCs gain a backup dagger, all casters backup spell component pouches and holy symbols. Because now they tend not to have those for word count reasons, but it makes disarm/sunder tactics unreasonably effective.
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Please no agency. This is what separates PFS from D&D adventurer’s league. There are far more bad GMs than good. Also, the RAW format of PFS protects players from GMs who, no offense, use bad GM tactics of going after players for building their characters to be good at something.
When I GM I enjoy seeing some crazy build do something I hadn’t thought of. I’m curious how this PC turned into a shadow octopus? Most of the time people post stuff of the boards about something being OP it’s not...
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Regional Venture-Coordinator, Baltic
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In any case, without more actual meaningful impact in the games I run, I have retired from running PFS.
There are quite a few modules that allow Campaign Mode. In Campaign Mode you can change whatever you want, so instead of retiring completely you could just run Campaign Mode modules.
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The table GM is not the GM of organized play. The table GM is not the game designer nor are they God. That's a fundamental tenet of organized play. What you are looking for, it seems is more of a game designer/God role for the table GM.
The problem is I trust the organized play campaign staff to provide a consistent and fair experience when games are run as written, I do not trust any given GM, on the fly, at a table to do likewise.
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HWalsh,
some of us really enjoy running games within PFS and SFS. Some people don't, and you are one of them.
I can honestly say I have been in similar situations to the one you describe, where the bad guys I am running have no way to affect the PCs. Well, it happens. In that situation, you do the best that you can to bring some fun into the game. Maybe play up its ineffectiveness, or whatever. Or just grin and bear it, as it will all be over fast.
However, I gotta agree the sentiments of shared experience. I do enjoy talking about how we got through a scenario as a player to other folks around the world, which is only possible if we actually played the same adventure!
You are right that many of the older (and a few of the newer) scenarios are not set up to handle the current rules and character options. It is the nature of the game, as the campaign is on its 11th year, and Pathfinder itself is seeing a lot of rules bloat.
Could an experienced, unbiased, professional GM fix that problem? Sure! The problem is that not enough GMs or Players are experienced enough, unbiased enough, or professional enough to correctly update the encounters. For every GM that does it well, there are ten that are going to throw in things that increase the difficulty to the point of TPK land.
This happened back in the day, and will happen again if GM agency is expanded Just look at the frequency of TPKs in Tome of Righteous Repose... GMs selected the most difficult encounters without regard to who their players were.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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Well, I think it's alarmist to say that there's ten GMs with bad judgement for every good one. However, it only takes one really bad experience to sour people. Even if the previous ten GMs were great people, one idiot who permadeaths your favorite character because he thought it wasn't challenging...
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By the way, how, exactly, did the player turn into a shadow octopus?I don't actually know. I was closing up after running back to back sessions all day when a GM came up to me and an organizer saying:
"I've got a player who did this. What do I do because nothing in the scenario can effect him? Can this enemy even touch him? He's a unique with monk abilities? He doesn't have a ki pool though."
Which prompted a 15 minute session of us digging through multiple sources. Trying to find some weakness or workaround. We ultimately weren't able to find a way to hurt/affect the PC in question, but we did find out that the PC technically had no way to hurt (one of) the scenario enemies.
If I were the GM and it was a home game I'd just give the Monk villain a hand wrap of the mighty fists +1 or, since it is a unique enemy, just say, "His unarmed strikes count as magic."
I mean, not that it would've mattered it would've been like half damage of like 1d6+4 or something tiny like that, but it would've been something.
Though, because PFS, that wasn't possible. I don't know how it ultimately turned out as I was tapped to run another Rose Street Puddles.
arcanist with beast shape and shadow projection could get you octopus shadow but still only one attack because that is all a shadow gets.
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Well, I think it's alarmist to say that there's ten GMs with bad judgement for every good one. However, it only takes one really bad experience to sour people. Even if the previous ten GMs were great people, one idiot who permadeaths your favorite character because he thought it wasn't challenging...
I don't think Jack was saying there are ten bad GMs for every one good one.
I think he was saying that it's a fine line between a fair fight and a TPK when you start fiddling with monsters--even within the same CR--and it a certain level of expertise and wisdom to fiddle safely. There are more GMs who lack that level of expertise and wisdom than those who possess it.
Also, let us not forget that there are two directions the difficulty can go when we fiddle with encounters. A GM can easily make an encounter too easy as too hard. Both GM A and GM B fiddle with the scenarios. GM A's tables finish 2 hours early and everyone steamrolls the encounters. GM B's tables always have at least 1 character death and run 2 hours late. Even worse, GM C fiddles with the scenarios, and it seems that every time his significant other sits at the table, the encounters are steamrolled and every time Player Z sits at the table his significant other doesn't sit at the table and everyone struggles to survive every encounter using far more than the expected resources to survive.
That is why we don't fiddle with encounters.
HWalsh could have made his point that he feels frustrated that he cannot alter scenarios because he feels that it stifles his creativity without insulting everyone who enjoys GMing PFS by equating them with mindless, skill-less automatons. He employed his self agency and chose to equate us so, however, and that is hurtful.
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Well, I think it's alarmist to say that there's ten GMs with bad judgement for every good one. However, it only takes one really bad experience to sour people. Even if the previous ten GMs were great people, one idiot who permadeaths your favorite character because he thought it wasn't challenging...I don't think Jack was saying there are ten bad GMs for every one good one.
I think he was saying that it's a fine line between a fair fight and a TPK when you start fiddling with monsters--even within the same CR--and it a certain level of expertise and wisdom to fiddle safely. There are more GMs who lack that level of expertise and wisdom than those who possess it.
Also, let us not forget that there are two directions the difficulty can go when we fiddle with encounters. A GM can easily make an encounter too easy as too hard. Both GM A and GM B fiddle with the scenarios. GM A's tables finish 2 hours early and everyone steamrolls the encounters. GM B's tables always have at least 1 character death and run 2 hours late. Even worse, GM C fiddles with the scenarios, and it seems that every time his significant other sits at the table, the encounters are steamrolled and every time Player Z sits at the table his significant other doesn't sit at the table and everyone struggles to survive every encounter using far more than the expected resources to survive.
That is why we don't fiddle with encounters.
HWalsh could have made his point that he feels frustrated that he cannot alter scenarios because he feels that it stifles his creativity without insulting everyone who enjoys GMing PFS by equating them with mindless, skill-less automatons. He employed his self agency and chose to equate us so, however, and that is hurtful.
think you make agood point. i think of it this way, as soon as you change something and a PC dies,than they will claim foul. that is just extra work not neeed.
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I agree with many of the posters above; in my opinion, PFS doesn't need more GM agency than it already has. I've been running home games for what seems like forever and yeah, I'm pretty good at identifying a good solid challenge and adjusting and adjudicating on the fly. Not everyone is, and I've found that the rules of PFS provide a floor--a minimum level of quality and consistency in play--in addition to a bit of a soft ceiling. You might have a bad GM, but as long as they follow the rules, they can only reach a certain threshold of suck. The training-wheels approach makes for a good way of training GMs, and it provides for some oversight by the organizers--if things go horrifically wrong, a VO can step in and help unwind the mess with the justification that certain changes violate a basic understanding of the "run-as-written" rule.
Our responsibility to run a scenario as written means that it can take a few dozen games before you can start to see how you, as a GM, can apply your creativity. And when you look for avenues for creativity and GM agency, you'll find that the campaign steers you away from changing stat blocks and mechanics. If those are the levers you really want to be pulling, you're going to be dissatisfied, for sure.
Even so, the options for creativity are there; they just take time to discover. For me, that's a feature, not a bug. It means that what customization is available is gated behind an experience requirement. It also means I can be confident that even if one of my GMs runs a bad game, the fallout is constrained. Nobody's boon character is going to kick the bucket because someone ran a haunt wrong or ragequit or decided they didn't like a player and wanted to murder their character. (It might die in other, more legitimate ways, true. But we're just talking the really egregious examples--which would be much harder to adjudicate if we open up weapon or spell swaps, for example.)
Now, it's not all rainbows and butterflies. It's easy to see why you might not like those kinds of constraints, especially if you've got a lot of experience GMing, or if you're used to a type of play that isn't a great fit for the Pathfinder Society metagame. That doesn't mean that PFS is in need of repair--it just might mean that Society's not a great fit for your talents. GMing PFS is certainly not for everyone. And while we don't want to force anyone out of PFS, it's also impossible to make it work well for everyone. Since what you're looking for is a very fundamental change to the ethos of PFS and the types of experiences that PFS players will enjoy, I think it's exceedingly unlikely that you'll see PFS2 GMs get the level of agency you want.
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Having said all that, it seems the new system is trying to give the GM more judgment calls in some areas that were previously clearly defined in PF1. I doubt it's going to be AR, but depending on what you're looking for and what emerges from the other side of the playtest, you may yet find PFS2 to your liking.
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My personal play experience and GM experience has been that the 'high level babysitter' characters tend to do more 'tanking' and 'taking hits' for the lower level characters.
It's also been my experience that 'high level =/= super-overpowering' -- I've laid out characters that were at the 'high' tier playing 'down' with a critical (and not even on a critically nasty weapon like a scythe or a pick).
Part of my prep process involves the typical 'What If...' scenarios running through my mind:
...the NPC can't do any of the tactics listed?
...the NPC is presented with a better option that under normal circumstances wouldn't be on their radar, so to speak, but player action has opened it up?
...the NPC gets hit with something that isn't listed in any of their write-up, how do they react?
...the players bypass a crucial section of the scenario through clever tactics and/or dumb luck?
I have found having these sorts of ideas at least thought of a couple of times BEFORE play helps incredibly in both promoting a proactive gamestyle (versus a reactive one) and in keeping the action flowing.
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Just because a character has defenses that an enemy cannot breech is not a case to justify changing the mod. It just means they have a character optimally built for that encounter. It happens to players from time to time as well. If an illusionist plays a scenario with all undead, we don't change it because all his spells are mind-affecting and the targets are immune. Sometimes players get lucky and their character is in "god mode."
If the character is always immune to everything, then I would guess they are not legal and need to be audited. Generally speaking, many characters have something they are really good at, be it spell DCs, armor class, DPR, etc. but other things not so much and there are likely some glaring holes in their skills. Its not "fair" to always change the adventure to exploit those holes with the idea it is more challenging.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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I agree with Bob on this - especially witches can have it bad when an entire scenario seems to be immune to 90% of their spell list and hexes.
When you get characters that seem super-powerful in a scenario though, sometimes it's a matter of "training towards the test". There are broad similarities to scenarios - many of them have encounters packed densely together so you can do an entire dungeon within an hour, meaning you get maximum value out of 10m/level buffs for example. And monsters tend to rely on the same old tricks to offset the players' numerical advantage, like invisibility. So a spell like See Invisibility is disproportionally powerful. Word count limits tend to mean NPCs don't have backup weapons or spell component pouches, so Disarm/Sunder are more powerful than they should be.
When you get into a scenario that violates some of those expectations - like several scenarios with mazes where a random number of minutes to hours passes between encounters - these characters lose a lot of steam. Or when enemies rely on holy symbol tattoos and get eschew materials as sorcerers.
Some scenarios written by very experienced VOs tend to be quite challenging because the writer knows a lot of the dirty tricks the players like to pull, and they also know those tricks can be foiled. Andrew Hoskins' production of Thralls of the Shattered God has claimed its share of kills from people who thought they knew how scenarios worked and what dangers you could just heal up from.
Another case of training towards the test: skills. When John Compton took over as lead developer for PFS, he started increasing the skills component of scenarios. Beforehand the focus was mainly on combat, but under his direction skills became more important. I like to think that it's because he's trained as an archeologist and watched a lot of Indiana Jones. If you scrutinize those movies, there's a lot more skill challenges than combats in them. Skill challenges involving chases and running away from boulders, traps, puzzling out lore, and convincing shady locals to hide you from Nazis. But at the time he took office, most of the class build guides said stuff like "if you're not a wizard, dump Int to 7 and put it in Strength". For a couple of years we had a lot of moaning about "year of the skill check", but eventually people's perspective about what the right way to build characters changed. Now, people put a lot more effort into being good at many skills because it's what makes you a good adventurer in modern scenarios. However, that does mean you're absolutely going to steamroll really old scenarios that did not expect really competent PCs.
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Venture-Captain, Germany—Bavaria
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On some level, I understand where the OP is coming from (though I could have done without all the praising and mentioning of his experience), but for organized play, GM freedom is the price we pay for all the benefits.
Sometimes players just destroy scenarios with certain builds or combinations, if that bothers you, I would suggest avoiding those tables.