| Zapp |
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I've talked about this previously, but I don't think the visibility was that high inside other threads, so in the hopes of garnering more discussion, here it is again, in a thread of its own.
As you might be aware, there's been discussion re: the fact that the circus can't pay for its own expenses regarding purchasing advertisements to raise Anticipation (each Anticipation point yields 1 gp while costing potentially dozens of gp in adverts), and that there aren't yet any reason for heroes to jack up the Anticipation. (though Paizo has promised there will be)
Now it's clear installment #4, Siege of the Dinosaurs, does not feature any story-based reasons to increase Anticipation either. This means that any such story mechanics won't show up until level 15 at the earliest. For many of you this might come off as too little too late, essentially meaning there's no point in striving for ever-higher Anticipation. And at double-digits, it feels... off... to have the heroes' circus still putter about with Anticipation 20 or thereabouts.
If you're concerned about heroes minmaxing their circus income by sticking to zero advertisements as long as they can, you might want to add minimum Anticipation requirements to the AP where none exist.
If the heroes fail to meet the minimum requirement when the Show is about to begin (I would guess most shows start in the late afternoon), the Show is simply cancelled, counting as a failure. Not enough people show up, so the spectators that do simply leave or even demand their money back. Purchasing "Beer" (the temporary upgrade) should be allowed, as a last desperate resort to fill the tent.
Essentially, the heroes need to put money up front with no assurance of ever getting it back. They do get (some of it) back, but don't tell them that. In order for this not to bleed heroes dry, you need to insert additional loot to the adventure.
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.
In part 2, the circus is still new enough that minimum anticipation requirements doesn't feel warranted. And part 4 only features a single circus performance (that gets interrupted to boot). So the best place, in my mind, to add these are in part 3, the Swardlands.
The heroes need to visit four towns, so stipulate they need to pull off a successful show in each town. Then say that these towns aren't easily impressed, and so, there is a minimum Anticipation requirement for a show to count as a success.
It starts at Anticipation 25, and increases by 5 for each successful Show. (If you fail, you basically have to try again. This might even force adventurers to do some adventuring just to cover the advertisement costs)
First performance: Anticipation 25 (+250 gp loot; level ~8)
Second performance: Anticipation 30 (+500 gp loot; level ~9)
Third performance: Anticipation 35 (+800 gp loot; level ~10)
Fourth performance: Anticipation 40 (+1,200 gp loot; level ~11)
As you can see, I've indicated the amount of extra loot/cash I think appropriate to insert into each chapter.
At least this way, the circus rules (and advertisement costs) makes more sense to me. It remains to be seen what, if any, Anticipation requirements installment #5 will impose on the heroes.
Hope to hear your thoughts on this. Do my numbers make sense to you?
Zapp
| Zapp |
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Just got confirmation the heroes are without their Circus in installment #5, making my choice of adding Anticipation requirements to installment #3 even more natural.
It basically means that the official adventure path will only require Anticipation once, in the final installment, when the heroes and their Circus is already level 18 (or higher).
| Zapp |
Okay, so I'm getting closer to starting installment #3, Life's Long Shadow.
It's time to dive into an example, to make sure my assumptions aren't way off. Your comments are welcomed!
For the sake of simplicity, let's assume the party is ~10th level and your next circus has an Anticipation requirement of 30, meaning that when the Show starts (bullet point #4 of "Putting on a Show"), the anticipation needs to be 30 or higher, or the show is aborted as a failure, and the week is wasted.
For instance, the Bandleader non-performing role comes into play too late to be useful to meet an Anticipation requirement, but the Animals Break Loose and Overflowing Crowds random circus events will help characters meeting such a requirement (not that they can ever be counted upon happening).
We'll start off with the assumption our heroes will gain a single success at Promoting the Circus for 12 points, just to pick a number. (Remember they have three tries, not counting Hero Points and such).
So the question is, how to reliably generate the other 18 points. Or rather, for our purposes here calibrating the requirements, what tier of Advertisements will a party feel reasonably compelled to purchase. (Remember, they must make this decision BEFORE making any die rolls)
16 points of Anticipation costs 250 gp in advertisements. That's likely the upper bound of what a cautious party will buy.
That's ~16 gold per point of Anticipation. Now then, are there cheaper ways of (reliably) obtaining Anticipation?
There are no permanent circus upgrades that help with actual (as opposed to maximum) Anticipation. Obviously heroes need bigger tents, but we're exploring alternatives to expensive advertising here.
There is Beer. You gain 2d6 Anticipation for a mere 5 gp; which is about 1 gold per point. Heroes will definitely always want to purchase this (when they face an Anticipation requirement).
And there is Merchandise. This is HUGE, or would have been if it could be used for every show. Even extraordinary merchandise has a fairly low Prestige requirement and a low cost (compared to advertisements, anyway) so we need to analyse two cases:
A) with (extraordinary) merchandise
B) without any merchandise
A) is fairly trivial. You simply don't bother with advertisements at all, full stop. If your Anticipation requirement is 30, you probably managed 25 last show. 75% of 25 is 18, so you'd simply bet on a single Promote the Circus success and you're done.
B) Okay so back to the main case.
At this stage we have 12 points, and we need 18 more. On average we'll get 7 from Beer, so we need 11. So we'll purchase tier VI advertising (12 points for 150 gold), saving us 100 gold compared to the cautious approach. Let's call this the minimal approach - we can't hand out less money without expecting the party to lose money from the Anticipation requirement we've introduced.
More importantly, it tells us the adventure at that level needs to be sprinkled with an additional 150 gold. If the adventurers gamble on making more Anticipation from Promoting the Circus, they get more money to spend on magic items.
As we level up, the savings between the cautious scenario and the minimal will widen.
It appears I've been slightly generous in the spoiler in the post above (given that I'm handing out money for one tier of advertising higher than the present analysis).
Obviously the above also does not take Merchandize into account at all. Basically, the total amount of cash needs to be roughly halved since you only need to purchase adverts every other show. Instead of purchasing adverts for 150+250+500+800=1700 gold you only need to spend (and therefore award) 150+0+500+0=650 gp. Add two helpings of extraordinary merch (120 and you'll get 770 gp which is half of 1700 or close enough)
So here would be my revised estimates:
First performance: Anticipation 25 (+150 gp loot; level ~8)
Second performance: Anticipation 30 (+150 gp loot; level ~9)
Third performance: Anticipation 35 (+250 gp loot; level ~10)
Fourth performance: Anticipation 40 (+250 gp loot; level ~11)
This adds up to 800 gold which is close enough.
Note that parties are expected to understand they need to spend their regular earnings on advertisements for their first show INSTEAD of purchasing kewl loot. That is, you get compensation AFTER the fact, and as stated above, players won't know they will receive compensation at all.
A party with bad luck could still fail a requirement. This probably just means they will have to get back to that town at the end of the module (every level's worth of loot is always enough to pay for advertising).
Z
| Zapp |
After thinking about this more (the party will likely level up to 9 next Saturday) I am inclined to remove Merchandise, or at least significantly restrict its impact.
Having every other show's Anticipation be essentially free severely disrupts any aim to create a challenge out of meeting Anticipation requirements.
| Zapp |
I ended up significantly reducing the utility of Merchandise:
Basic merchandise: 10%
Quality merchandise: 20%
Extraordinary merchandise: 30%
I did drop the strange "every other show" condition, though.
Note that 30% of, say, a final Anticipation of 30 is still a *huge* deal.
It means that, for instance, if you felt compelled to pay up for Advertisement level 8 (20 Anticipation for 500 gp), you can instead settle for Advertisement level 6 (12 Anticipation for 150 gp), since 12+9 is better than the 20 you were aiming for.
In other words, even with the *massive* nerf compared to the core rules, Extraordinary merchandise still just saved you 500-150=350 gp for just 60 gp; a net gain of 290 gp.
It's hard to not conclude the devs dropped the ball on this one. The original effect of merchandize pretty much makes any Anticipation requirement completely impossible to balance.
(In the RAW adventure, there is only a single anticipation requirement at the very end of the campaign. But even if the requirement, 100, sounds impressive at first, it's completely trivialized by the simple timing of a 60 gp temporary upgrade.)
| Zapp |
By my calculations, even my severely nerfed merchandise will still mean that for only 20-60 gp, the heroes will never have to increase their advertising expenditure during installment #3, Life's Long Shadows, above their initial likely tier of 5 or 6 (9 Anticipation for 80 gp or 12 Anticipation for 150 gp).
I won't allow the benefits of merchandise to cross over from one island to the other, so the fact they did not purchase any merchandise back in installment #2 won't become a liability.
Remember, I'm adding a minimum anticipation requirement to each of the four shows the Circus is scheduled to have in the Swardlands.
This starts at DC 25, which might seem high, but remember I also let them add half their Prestige to either Anticipation or Excitement because of their Sideshow. They have already figured out that adding it to Anticipation is much more valuable. So that pretty much means that you should read all the DCs as ~5 steps lower.
The requirement starts at DC 25, and increases by +5 for every successful show. (A show that ends in failure doesn't make future shows harder.)
Even DC 40 becomes far from impossible - thanks to merchandise!
Without merchandise, the calculation might look like this:
+5 for the sideshow (roughly)
+7 for Beer (on average)
+20 for tier 8 advertisements (500 gp)
This is 32, meaning just a single success at Promoting the Circus gets you over the top of 40.
But extraordinary merch will give you 30% out of last show's Anticipation, which we can assume was at least 35. That's 10 Anticipation for only 60 gp!
Meaning you can safely drop from tier 8 adverts back to the tier you settled for to start you off. If that tier is only 5, you've just paid 60 gp to save 500-80=420 gp!
And that equation (5+7+10+9) still gives 31 Anticipation so a single Promotion success still clears the hurdle!
| Zapp |
What this means is, that the amount of money I need to infuse the adventure with (to cover the costs of advertisements, something that wasn't part of the original adventure)...
...stays pretty trivial.
We're talking about maybe 150 gp per show.
80 gp for tier 5 advertisements plus 60 gp for extraordinary merch.
Roughly speaking.
Despite only covering three levels, there are still four chapters and four treasure lists of the adventure.
Add 100 gp to the first one, and maybe 150 gp to each of the three remaining ones, and the players shouldn't be able to complain you're financially starving them (if they ever find out you added the financial burden of anticipation requirements at all, I mean).
| Zapp |
I haven't spent too much thinking about that final level 20 anticipation requirement of 100.
I've just assumed what's necessary, given my tweaking of merchandise, is that they need to build up to it, maybe setting up three shows, so each can build up a higher anticipation than the one preceding it.
After all, the party can always purchase tier 12 advertisement to jump-start their efforts. At top level, 3000 gp is pocket change.
So I imagine they should reach anticipation 70 or so without even trying. That's +21 from merch alone.
So, no, at worst they hold two shows, the first one setting up a very good shot at Anticipation 100 for the second. A very good shot indeed!