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I dislike to open a second thread – but this is potentially a massive issue for running the game and I don’t want it to be buried in an existing thread.
I GMed this yesterday and ran it in a way that “made sense” mathematically. After some reflection and re-reading the whole scenario it daunts on me that there seems to be a massive !! mistake in the description. The alternative is that the game mechanic is way, way off.
Table 4 describes the Overland Travel Progress Points. I did some Maths and calculated the expected values:
Skill CF F S CS Expected PP Race
0 15% 45% 35% 5% 0.30 1.0 4
1 10% 45% 40% 5% 0.40 1.0 4
2 5% 45% 45% 5% 0.50 2.0 8
3 5% 40% 45% 10% 0.60 2.0 8
4 5% 35% 45% 15% 0.70 2.0 8
5 5% 30% 45% 20% 0.80 2.0 8
6 5% 25% 45% 25% 0.90 2.0 8
7 5% 20% 45% 30% 1.00 3.0 12
8 5% 15% 45% 35% 1.10 3.0 12
9 5% 10% 45% 40% 1.20 3.0 12
10 5% 5% 45% 45% 1.30 3.0 12
11 5% 0% 45% 50% 1.40 3.0 12
12 0% 0% 45% 55% 1.55 3.0 12
What does this mean? You need an average skill of 2 for your overland check to gain 2 PP per day for a total of 8 for the race and to win. Keeping in mind that weather adds an average penalty of 1.5 skill points and that we roll the dice this seems reasonable / balanced so far. There also is Sabotage as well as Diplomacy. For simplicity I assume these two cancel out each other.
Now I do the same for checkpoint tests. These are in principle the same numbers with a -3 on skill. I multiply the total with the number of players as nearly all tried in my group each test. There are 3 differences here:
a) You can’t get negative success / PP
b) You gain PP and not success (at least according to the writeup)
c) Caribou is limited to 4 attempts – others might stop on a critical failure
Skill CF F S CS Expected PP (4) PP (5) PP (6)
0 30% 45% 20% 5% 0.30 4.8 5.7 6.6
1 25% 45% 25% 5% 0.35 5.6 6.7 7.7
2 20% 45% 30% 5% 0.40 6.4 7.6 8.8
3 15% 45% 35% 5% 0.45 7.2 8.6 9.9
4 10% 45% 40% 5% 0.50 8.0 9.5 11.0
5 5% 45% 45% 5% 0.55 8.8 10.5 12.1
6 5% 40% 45% 10% 0.65 10.4 12.4 14.3
7 5% 35% 45% 15% 0.75 12.0 14.3 16.5
8 5% 30% 45% 20% 0.85 13.6 16.2 18.7
9 5% 25% 45% 25% 0.95 15.2 18.1 20.9
10 5% 20% 45% 30% 1.05 16.8 20.0 23.1
11 5% 15% 45% 35% 1.15 18.4 21.9 25.3
12 5% 10% 45% 40% 1.25 20.0 23.8 27.5
Now here is the problem: You need an average skill of 1 (6 player), 2 (5 player) or 3 (4 player) to gain 7 or more PP to win – using checkpoints alone !!
Looking through the numbers I can only assume the following:
The checkpoints give you success and not PP. In addition you add success for overland and checkpoint together for a maximum of 3 PP per day or 12 for the whole race.
In PFS we are instructed to ‘run as written’. What I suspect how it should be is very, very different to what is written. But it seems the only way I can make sense of the scoring system. This is especially an issue as this is a repeatable scenario. You don’t want speed-runs of this.
Any official input would be welcome.
The tables will likely come out badly formated - here is a link to google sheets: Tables formatted in google sheets
Organized Play Developer
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It looks like there were some significant post-dev changes to the numbers here, so I'm currently poking at them with Linda to see what happened and how we can best fix it. I'll post here again when I have a better idea of what happened and what the solution is going to be.
UPDATE We've reworked the numbers and are looking at getting the adventure repackaged and updated. This requires us to chase down some folks who I'm not even sure are in the building still as we go into the holiday break, but I'll update/post again when I have any further updates.
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Organized Play Developer
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For those of us that have already printed it, is list of corrections short enough to have a list here that we can manually update?
They should be, yes. I'll follow up and post those here when the update is ready to run (since that will send the notification to everyone that a change has been made, and because these posts lock after an hour and I want to make sure everything is locked in with the update before I start disseminating information about the changes).
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Organized Play Developer
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Michael, as long as the scenario might be given an update (or else I wouldn't bother you with this in this thread), is the Fame/Reputation at the end also in need of correction?
Thanks for looking into all of this!
Yeah, after Linda and I figured out what was going on and how to fix it, we also hit the other items that folks had brought up like the incorrect Fame/Rep entry. It should be giving the standard rewards like any other scenario (this appears to be a template error that I think we've corrected so it won't show up again.)
Contributor
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Yeah, after Linda and I figured out what was going on and how to fix it, we also hit the other items that folks had brought up like the incorrect Fame/Rep entry. It should be giving the standard rewards like any other scenario (this appears to be a template error that I think we've corrected so it won't show up again.)Michael, as long as the scenario might be given an update (or else I wouldn't bother you with this in this thread), is the Fame/Reputation at the end also in need of correction?
Thanks for looking into all of this!
You all are awesome - thank you!
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Contributor
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We've reworked the numbers and are looking at getting the adventure repackaged and updated.
I know the holiday break was in the middle, there, but since it's been two weeks now from when this was identified, would you be willing to let GMs know what the correct numbers/fixes are for this before the weekend?
Thanks again in advance for the work on this!
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Contributor
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Since I'm running this in just over an hour from now, I had a thought upon my final review of the scenario and the GM threads: Is it possible that Table 5 is the one in error, or maybe just incomplete?
If the opposing teams' scores on that table were just for overland travel and not the checkpoint trials, things might be a bit more balanced versus Thod's chart. Alternatively, if table 5 is meant to be the grand totals for the other teams, an easy fix to the scenario could be to just increase those numbers for all teams A-E.
Just a thought. Back to finalizing my soundtrack!
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When we ran this at my site over the weekend me and the other table GM decided to rule that the PCs could only get 1 progress point from each trial, so a maximum of 4 points per day.
Ultimately we were just guessing as the update isn't out yet, but this limited the PCs to 4 successes per day including the 3 from overland. So they needed 8 to win and it gave them the chance to fail 50% of the time and still succeed.
And honestly even with me rolling Stormy weather every day they still got 16 points.
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Thank you very much, Linda!
One followup question, though. How is Table 4 supposed to be read for a party of 6+ PCs? At the moment, 1 success could result in either 0 or 1 progress point.
Edit: My apologies, but I had another question...for Table 5 with a a 6 player table, is the +6 added once, or added once each day?
Team A if added once:
11 points after day 1
16 points after day 2
21 points after day 3
26 points after day 4
Team A if added each day:
11 @ day 1
22 @ day 2
33 @ day 3
44 @ day 4
If the PCs get maximum overland every day (3x4) that's 12.
Max points at the Tree is 6
Max points with the Caribou is 4
Max points at the River is 12 (average is 6)
Max points at the Ice is 12 (average is 6)
Because a party of 6 PCs can max out at 46 points, it's within the realm of possibility that Team A is meant to be nearly unbeatable...but I wanted to ask to be sure.
Thanks again, and in advance!
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I'm assuming from Mike's post above that the fix was changing the progress points for the competing teams. My downloads page has still not updated the scenario, so is it possible for someone to share that table here? Thanks in advance!
That's a common Paizo site issue when trying to get a file they updated after you've already downloaded it. The most reliable workaround is to open your downloads page (and re-login) with an "incognito" browser window. Sometimes clearing your cache will also work, but so far the former has always done it for me.
Hope that helps!
(if not I'll try to post the numbers when I'm next at my laptop and not my phone)
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I'm assuming from Mike's post above that the fix was changing the progress points for the competing teams. My downloads page has still not updated the scenario, so is it possible for someone to share that table here? Thanks in advance!That's a common Paizo site issue when trying to get a file they updated after you've already downloaded it. The most reliable workaround is to open your downloads page (and re-login) with an "incognito" browser window. Sometimes clearing your cache will also work, but so far the former has always done it for me.
Hope that helps!
(if not I'll try to post the numbers when I'm next at my laptop and not my phone)
Thanks Mike! That worked great.