Venture-Captain, Massachusetts—Boston
|
I've been thinking through some rather contrived examples of deferred xp as I explore corner cases in my chronicle tracking tool and I've run into a place I'm not sure if the rules are clear what should happen.
Can you get into a state where your stack of deferred exp limits what you can play or what you can continue to defer? How is an un-apply-able chronicle dealt with after being assigned?
Examples:
Players-side
You have a level 2 and 8/12ths character. You've played a tier 3-6's using Pregens at level 3 and hold the chronicle. This is definitely allowed as per the rules.
Can you do it a second time on this character? I think the answer is yes, because nothing forbids it.
How about a fourth time -- this is where things break down for me. The character is still level 2, but one scenario (assignable to a level 2) away from level 4 -- a level 4 character could not choose to play a level 3 pregen. (Neither could a level 3 character, which is why even the second pre-gen assignment to the stack feels like it could be a corner case).
If you apply credit for multiple adventures at once, your Pathfinder Society character might advance multiple levels. The character’s level cannot exceed the tier range of any Chronicle sheets applied to them.
It sounds like the assignment of the chronicle would be allowed, but it's not-applicable. What happens? Gold/Fame/XP reduced to 0, boons/items crossed off. Still counts as played for replayablity?
Is the player forced to switch to level 5 pre-gens at some point? Does the size of the deferred stack influence what chronicle you could apply at level 2 --if instead of a 4 xp chronicle you play Fall of Plaguestone for 12 xp, if FoP would push the last deferred chronicles out of the tier of the scenario is that a problem?
GM-side
Basically looks the same when holding higher level GM'd scenarios. Generally its 'simpler' as you're worried about 4 level tiers, rather than possible 2-level pre-gen bands (depending how some of those other questions are resolved).
PFS2's module/sanctioning process is simpler here than SFS/PFS1 -- there's no way to defer that xp in PFS2. But the narrow level bands of SFS/PFS1 module/AP, can make it a little easier to run into the corner cases, I think.
This case is not covered by the existing rules, so we can only offer our personal interpretation and preferred way of handling this. Here's mine:
A player should be responsible for keeping track of how many chronicles he has assigned to a character to be applied at a later date, and to ensure that this number does not exceed the actually applicable number of chronicles.
If by mistake he messes up and has accumulated too many, rule any such non-applicable chronicles as void, consider them as having used a pregen as you might have to bring a table of 3 up to legal size. The character/player does not gain anything from it, no gold, xp, boons, AcP, etc., and is not considered to have played the scenario for purposes of replayability (but should inform the GM when he does play it later that he has in fact "played" it off record and hold back his player knowledge, similar to as if he had GM'd it before).
If this happens repeatedly and there is suspicion of deliberate abuse for some reason, punishment to be determined by VC.
Edit: for the purpose of a chronicle management program, everytime you assign a new chronicle to be applied later, have the program do a test run of applying all assigned chronicles in order, filling in the gaps to neccessary new levels with fictional XP, as if the player had just played enough quests to barely fulfill the level requirements. If not all chronicles can be legally applied that way, prompt the player that those chronicles that cannot legally be applied will need to be reported to the VO to be voided.
|
That seems rather harsh, and accidents happen.
Most of the time, people keep good records. I could really only see this happening to that new player who's used Pregens for their first half dozen scenarios and finally sits down to make their own character.
I have watched this before, and it simply involved sitting down with their VC and working through which could be applied, and which needed to be reassigned to a new character number. Assuming everything has been reported online, you can simply reach out to the GM through your Sessions tab and ask them to change which character number received the credit.
This can also happen (as it just did to me) when you have a character in the middle of a PbP who received GM credit. This weekend I GMed my first two PFS2 sessions, and applied the credit to my 2nd level PbP character. When she finishes her current game, I'll apply the new Chronicles and she'll jump to level 3. Had I been worse at record keeping and decided to play a bunch of Pregens this weekend, I might need to shuffle things around, but none of them should become "void" if it had been an honest mistake.
Your example of a new player accumulating that many pregen chronicles seems highly unusual to me, I'd expect new players would be interested in actually making their own character much more quickly than that. If that realistically happens in your region, you may need to offer more charcter creation workshops for new players. That said, I'm perfectly happy with making any number of concessions and exceptions for new players making innocent mistakes.
For experienced players and maybe GMs even more so, I'd hold them to a somewhat higher standard and expect them to generally be able to keep their records in sufficient order.
But like I said, this is just my opinion, your's may well be different.
I did not consider PbP, as that is not a form of play I'm really interested in, or have any contact with. Are there any special rules for that? Can you play multiple adventures with the same character simultaneously? Would you be allowed to reassign GM-credit if the character you had previously assigned something to died later on during the ongoing adventure?
|
|
I did not consider PbP, as that is not a form of play I'm really interested in, or have any contact with. Are there any special rules for that? Can you play multiple adventures with the same character simultaneously?
No. Your character is occupied for the duration of the scenario, however long that is. You cannot play that character in any format while it is occupied. This is true for all situations where a scenario or module takes more than session to complete.
Would you be allowed to reassign GM-credit if the character you had previously assigned something to died later on during the ongoing adventure?
GMs in all formats have the luxury of assigning the credit when the scenario finishes. However, if you assign GM credit to a character that is in the middle of a multisession game and that character dies after you've assigned those GM credits, you're often stuck.
|
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Your example of a new player accumulating that many pregen chronicles seems highly unusual to me, I'd expect new players would be interested in actually making their own character much more quickly than that.
It can happen fairly easily at a convention, or a one table venue where people are playing higher level scenarios
|
Venture-Captain, Massachusetts—Boston
|
[snip]
Edit: for the purpose of a chronicle management program, everytime you assign a new chronicle to be applied later, have the program do a test run of applying all assigned chronicles in order, filling in the gaps to neccessary new levels with fictional XP, as if the player had just played enough quests to barely fulfill the level requirements. If not all chronicles can be legally applied that way, prompt the player that those chronicles that cannot legally be applied will need to be reported to the VO to be voided.
This is the heart of what I'm trying to get at, (but more on the advanced detection/warning side for listing legal scenarios for a character, rather than detecting after the fact problems).
And it seems like as long as the deferred chronicle is still in level range for the scenario (and not a duplicate chronicle, etc) , it can be applied. Even if the character + fictional exp + deferred xp, is too high a level to have played a pre-gen. It was still a legal assignment of the chronicle given the character's state.
Venture-Captain, Pennsylvania—Pittsburgh
|
In Pathfinder 1 the intention was, I believe, to make it the player's responsibility to track chronicle sheets that are assigned but not applied. If you get to a point where you're applying chronicle sheets and you have an chronicle sheet assigned that can't be applied, you've made an error. And I think we have pretty universally trusted the player and their VC to figure things out at that point and fix chronicle assignments to make them legal. In our experience it's a hopefully-rare thing that a VO handles, and if it becomes more frequent we might start having conversations with the player about it.
I think a similar approach might be assumed in PFS2 even if it's not explicitly called out.
We've run into that here in Pittsburgh occasionally, as we've often had new players play pregens early in their careers, we've had some players who are not so on-top-of their paperwork, and we run conventions where some players have preferred to do nothing but play pregens. It comes up every now and then and we've never made a big deal out of it.
Do other regions handle it differently?
|
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Your example of a new player accumulating that many pregen chronicles seems highly unusual to me
Not saying it isn't, but it has happened before, and it'll happen again. Sometime. Somewhere. When it does, sitting down with the VC and sorting it out is pretty much the fallback option.
Venture-Captain, Michigan—Mt. Pleasant
|
Locally years ago, we had a player who's friend had higher level characters than he did, but he kept playing pregens. He finally got fourth level and had enough xp in pregens to make it to tenth level. Back then Mike Brock was fine with saving up the pregen xp and applying it as soon as it was possible in order of play. If you leveled multiple times so be it as long as the chronicle was still applicable to the level you were a when applying it.
|
|
In PF1 it was a bit convoluted and archaic and I *almost* fell victim to a 'not quite good math' situation -- and I was being careful with the chronicles I was getting with pregens (didn't have much choice, all the local convention play I could get into for a while was for high tier stuff and I was forced to play a pregen).
It became quite the juggling act making sure that I didn't 'outlevel' the tiers of the 3-7 and 5-9 before they were applied. The sudden boost from something like 5.2 to 8.1 was... rather jarring.
But especially when one has a bunch of eager-beaver go-getters burning up the new content and nothing is being done to help the up-and-coming new folks, this will continue to be an issue.
EDIT: Paradoxically, it actually became easier to manage things once I was actually given tables that 'fired' on the local level when I was trying to GM.
Venture-Captain, Nebraska—Omaha
|
It is the player's responsibility to keep track of their chronicles. If a chronicle gets applied to a character that would no longer be in the level range of the chronicle, the player is SOL and losses the credit. They can't just re-assign the chronicle to a different character. The player did take a chronicle so adventure is "lock" out to them to another GM chronicle. They could not just GM the adventure again and apply to different character (unless it is a repeatable).
This is an area of personal responsibility.
|
Venture-Captain, Pennsylvania—Pittsburgh
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
It is the player's responsibility to keep track of their chronicles. If a chronicle gets applied to a character that would no longer be in the level range of the chronicle, the player is SOL and losses the credit. They can't just re-assign the chronicle to a different character. The player did take a chronicle so adventure is "lock" out to them to another GM chronicle. They could not just GM the adventure again and apply to different character (unless it is a repeatable).
This is an area of personal responsibility.
I agree that it's up to the players to keep track of their chronicles, but as has been noted above, that can be kind of tricky. I've mentored some new players through the process of acclimating to society play, and most of them are very bad at tracking chronicles at first. No matter what I tell them...
Given that the language to enforce this doesn't quite exist, and that the situation (at least in my experience) mostly afflicts the new players we want to attract and keep, is a hard-line policy really the policy we should be enforcing? I'm not sure I see the downsides to some reasonable leniency.