Circus anticipation and payout

[BeanBean]

I'm looking for some clarification on Anticipation and Payout in the circus system.

For a successful circus, the calculation is (Prestige + Final Anticipation) = Payout (in gp). So increasing the Anticipation by X also increases the Payout by X.

The amount of gold spent to raise Anticipation through advertising far outpaces the amount of gold gained for a successful circus. For example, it costs 20 gp to raise the Anticipation by 4 (5 gp per 1 Anticipation). The gold per Anticipation ratio is even starker at higher levels, to a max of 3000 gp for 50 Anticipation (60 gp per 1 Anticipation). Even on a critical success where the payout is doubled, the circus still loses substantial money on advertising. So why would a circus spend money to raise Anticipation?

There are similar scaling problems for other aspects of the circus. For example, the permanent upgrade watermarked tickets (50 gp) allows Prestige to be treated as 2 points higher than it actually is for calculating Payout. But it would take 25 circus performances for the cost of the watermarked tickets to break even with the Payout gained!

Is there an error in the formula for Payout? Should (Prestige + Final Anticipation) be multiplied by party level or another modifier?

It seems like Prestige may be the more important variable given this statement: "The circus’s Prestige will factor into several rewards and events throughout the Extinction Curse Adventure Path." This may incentivize players to minimize Anticipation to they can be sure to succeed and gain Prestige more quickly/easily.

Am I missing something? We are really enjoying the AP so far (halfway through Book 1), and I'd like to keep the players engaged in running the circus -- but the math does not seem to incentivize investing in the circus.

[Porridge]

Yeah, I've wondered about the cost of advertising as well, for the same reasons.

The watermarked tickets cost does seem over the top, but it's at least conceivable how this might be an upgrade that a long-term circus might find worthwhile. The cost of advertising, not so much.

I've been keeping a list of issues with the circus rules that I think most people running the AP will want to tweak. (Much of this comes from the helpful discussion by Cyprion, SkylerJB, Zapp, and others.)

Anyway, here's my current list of issues. (I've also included a spoiler-ed versions of the house rules we've decided to employ to address these issues, borrowing from suggestions others have made. But this is less useful than pointing out potential problem areas, since most GMs prefer to make their own house rules.)

1. Worry: The cost of advertising is at least as high (and usually much higher) than the increase in payout that this boost in anticipation could bring about.

(For example, Tier 12 advertising boosts anticipation by 50, and so can usually increase payout by 50 gp (though it can get up to 200gp if the show is a critical success and performed during bad weather). But Tier 12 advertising costs 3000gp to purchase.)

2. Worry: When performing tricks, critical success results can be worse than success results, because they generate additional anticipation (making it harder to put on a successful show) but don't generate additional excitement.

3. Worry: Some tricks can be performed using several different kinds of checks. But there's no incentive to use anything other than the highest bonus check when performing a trick.

4. Worry: The division into acts has no mechanical impact (and thus there's no reason to, say, not grant the big number slot to Mordaine when she asks for it).

Some Possible Tweaks:

• Tweak 1: Change the cost of advertising to 1/2 (round up) of the anticipation generated in gp.
• Tweak 2: A critical success on a trick adds +lvl/2 (round up) to anticipation and excitement (instead of just anticipation).
• Tweak 3: If a trick is successfully performed using two different checks, treat it as having earned an additional success (for the purposes of calculating excitement).
• Tweak 4: Say an act is successful if it generates positive excitement.
• 4a. A successful opening act yields a +1 to trick checks in the performances that follow.
• 4b. A successful build-up act yields an optional anticipation bonus equal to the highest level successful trick.
• 4c. A successful big number act yields double the excitement.
• 4d. A successful finale act yields an optional anticipation bonus to the next performance equal to the highest level successful trick.

A more involved set of house rules, focused on worries 3 and 4, has been offered by Zapp.

[krobrina]

There would be no problem if players didn't read modules until after they played them.

We paid more advertising this week and our profit went down. Why? There must be some random factors. Was it something we did? Lets try less advertising next month. Managing a circus is fun. There is so much to explore.

[Zapp]

Well, I don't want to trivialize your worry. After all, I'm one of those people investing energy in more detailed rules (thanks for the shout-out!).

However, in this case I think it's a simple case of trusting the writers.

Unless Ron comes here to say "oops we didn't think of that" which I would consider unlikely, the obvious answer is that Anticipation is a metric a later adventure will require of the players' Circus.

(Something like "The King only gets word of the Circus once they reach 50 Anticipation. They cannot proceed to Part X until the King has seen their performance.")

In other words, the Circus (and its advertisements) is designed to be a money sink. Remember: while the Circus rules prevent players from taking out money from the Circus, it allows them to put in their own money into the circus. As soon as I read that, it was obvious to me the Circus would need cash infusions from the riche nouveau - the high-level heroes!

Obviously, this assumes the amount of treasure has been increased in later installments of the AP to compensate, but I don't have to mention that. Either that, or they offer rewards that modify the payout. ("If you pull off a successful Show in front of the Court, you're rewarded a diamond worth 5,000 gold. The court only invites you if your Anticipation is 50") etc

In short, I would wait and see. :)

[Zapp]

I should add I don't take credit for the idea behind my house rules. As the linked thread says, I just developed the ideas offered by others.

Regarding Worry #2 that is clearly intentional. Yes, it makes it harder to succeed, but it also increases the reward!

Meaning I wouldn't call it a worry. I realize the natural inclination is to feature rules that incentivize critical successes unconditionally, but this is best handled as simply an exception to that rule.

[Ron Lundeen]

Zapp wrote:

Unless Ron comes here to say "oops we didn't think of that" which I would consider unlikely, the obvious answer is that Anticipation is a metric a later adventure will require of the players' Circus.

Anticipation is a metric a later adventure will require of the players' circus.

[Zapp]

Ron Lundeen wrote:

Anticipation is a metric a later adventure will require of the players' circus.

Whoo hoo :-)

[Zapp]

I've been doing a bit of math...

(Remember we're in the GM section so here be spoilers)

Assuming that any adventure that demands Anticipation from the heroes also increases the loot treasure payout to match, there is no suggestion any adventure so far (up til instalment #3 Life's Long Shadows) contain additional loot, simply because so far, there has been no anticipation requirements.

But what if you would like to introduce this requirement before it's officially introduced?

Then what would be a reasonable ask of the heroes, expressed as a percentage of their available cash? Let's aim high and say 50%, if only for the sake of argument. (Remember, if we "reimburse" heroes through additional loot, there really isn't a percentage too high to remain reasonable)

Then this means that a party of 8th level characters could be expected to encounter a city asking the circus to amass maybe 25 Anticipation.

Why? Because since we've assumed it would be reasonable to ask them to plow half of 1,000 gp into the circus, that pays for tier 8 adverts, or Anticipation 20. Asking them to amass another 5 points through promotion would not be a big ask. Ergo 25.

Then of course the adventure would be well advised to place an additional 500 gp as loot throughout the level to compensate.

This also means that above 10th level or so, heroes quickly level out of the price range of advertisements. That is, even the highest tier of adverts become pocket change for high-level heroes.

And since we know for a fact that any official Anticipation demands won't appear until level 12 at the earliest, I predict that there will be an instance of "reach Anticipation 50 or go home" ;) at the start of installment #4.

But if you're concerned about heroes minmaxing their circus income by sticking to zero advertisements as long as they can, you could probably say that each Show in the Swardlands (installment #3) starts at Anticipation 25, adding five points for each subsequent Show.

That is:

Level 8: Anticipation 25 (+250 gp loot) assuming 9 Anticipation elsewhere
Level 9: Anticipation 30 (+500 gp loot) assuming 10 Anticipation elsewhere
Level 10: Anticipation 35 (+800 gp loot) assuming 10 Anticipation elsewhere
Level 11: Anticipation 40 (+1,200 gp loot) assuming 10 Anticipation elsewhere

...nicely leading up to the Anticipation 50 demand I predicted earlier. That way, you'd give your players the impression these demands were in the official material all along :)

[Zapp]

PS. Do be aware that adding Anticipation demands does offer a way for Charismatic characters skilled in Society to save a nice chunk of cash through the Promote the Circus activity.

That's because you must allow the characters to pay for their Anticipation either through advertisements or promotion, you can't reasonably expect them to be good at both.

A tenth level Bard would gain roughly 4 Anticipation per day. At that level, each point of Anticipation would save maybe 25 gold (assuming the alternative is to purchase tier 8 advertisement). That's considerably more than Earn Income.

A twentieth level character could gain up to roughly 6 Anticipation per day. Assuming lots of Anticipation is needed, the Promote the Circus activity can gain the character 360 gold a day (in saved adverts). Adverts max out at 50 Anticipation for 3,000 gold = 60 gold per point. Sure, based on the above a character could only expect to generate 6x6=36 Anticipation through promotion, but since those would be the "expensive points" the savings would remain roughly the same. (Instead of shelling out 3,000 gold, you would only need tier 7 advertisements to cover the remaining 14 points or 250 gold, meaning you have still saved the circus 2,750 gold.)

Meaning that the way the Circus Rules work, the presence of Anticipation demands makes Society a very valuable skill indeed.

Just throwing this out there as a possible justification why we haven't seen any such demands yet, and why there might only be a few of them.