Venture-Agent, Online—VTT
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When I read the influence subsystem in the GMG, it was immediately familiar to me as being similar to how some PFS 1E social scenarios were structured. I thought the codification was very convenient as it would provide a common expectation of the subsystem used for what had been a lot of great 1E experiences for me.
The way that I keep seeing this system used in 2E seems odd, though. In previous experiences with this subsystem, there were often large social encounters, with multiple important people present, which went a long way in making discovery of how different people could be influenced important, as it gave characters with different skills the chance to find people they might have more common ground with. In 2E, influence encounters seem to keep being used with an entire party trying to influence a single person over multiple rounds, and the scenarios can start feeling bogged down as players go "what else can I say to this person before rolling some dice that wasn't in our last 4 rounds of conversation?"
Am I alone in this, or does the "X rounds of everyone trying to influence a single NPC" paradigm seem to other people like the system isn't being used in the way that makes it easiest to keep everyone engaged?
Venture-Lieutenant, Finland—Turku
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It's especially jarring when one character has assurance in one of the skills and they just "yeah, I'll take assurance 20. Another success".
A recent scenario with this mechanic has five or six rounds of influence vs a single NPC. Granted, the PC's get to make other rolls and observations during the influence phase which -hopefully- adjust the roleplay and give them ideas to keep it fresh, but I have to admit that it was pretty tiresome hearing the same kind of argument about 20 times, and trying to come up with somewhat novel response.
It's... kinda like the basic skill challenges that pop up in scenarios from time to time, except that you don't know which skills can be used at first so the first round is a round of perception, and after that it's basically the same one or two skills over and over again.
On one hand, I liked the roleplay aspect of said influence encounters. It provides a lot of context and really emphasizes the personality and background of the NPC, but on the other hand, it feels pretty heavy to RP and to prep if you want it to work nicely, instead of just being a bunch of rolls.
There's also the issue of "oh my barbarian doesn't have any suitable skills so I'll just sit in the corner for 2,5 hours" which isn't exactly fun (although honestly, that's more of a problem in character building and less about the scenario/system, but it's compounded by the fact that you only have a couple skills that you can roll (because there's no point in looking for more skills after you know the few easiest ones).
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Venture-Agent, Finland—Tampere
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Yeah it definitely makes roleplaying it awkward when you have 6 rounds total and not new topics to discuss fluently in skill you are using to influence one character :'D
The crit fails do definitely incentive to characters without suitable skills to just be awkwardly hanging around silently. Which is double awkward when influence scene has REALLY high threshold amount for what is considered "success".
In 1e certain ap there is influence scene that lasts 17 rounds, assumes four players and has 7 npcs who of some leave and come during the rounds. Some of them require one success, most of them two and few 3. And scene comes with things all characters can do at meanwhile even if they can't help with influence. So basically even for party not built all around diplomacy, there is still chances for them to influence lot of characters successfully, small hard chance that they get everything perfectly and no single character stays around too long until you have gotten all out of them.
Meanwhile 2e society influence scenes seem to assume that you need to get about 2.5 successes per round with four players if you want to have "successful" influence a single character in entire encounter :'D
Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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I suppose you can't blame scenario writers too much for using the mechanics as presented in the GMG. Although the experience with PF1 chases suggests that the GMG shouldn't be the end of innovation - at some point the "team chase" was invented and was much more popular than the "paladin in heavy armor left behind the wall" chase.
But yeah, PF2 GMG style influence is a bit unsatisfactory. And there ARE some mechanical differences:
- You learn the best skills first when doing Discovery. This also means that at some point more Discovery becomes pointless.
- Skills don't "wear out" when used again and again on an NPC. This encourages a PC to keep using their best hammer on that nail.
- The amount of successes asked for seems to have gone up a lot. At least compared to PF1 DC/skill bonus ballparks :P
But also, the GMG presents single-NPC influence encounters as a legitimate use case. Which I'm sort of okay with, but then I think they should be quite fast scenes, like maybe 20 minutes at most? But in some PFS2 scenarios they've been used as the extended core of the scenario.
I think single-NPC influence encounters aren't really a good, interesting mechanic. There isn't really much agency - you find out your best skill vs the NPC and bash that button as much as you can. Compare that to multi-NPC situations where the party has to decide which of their characters to send to which NPCs; that's got choices of who you think are the most important or where you stand the best chance.
There isn't any strategic challenge to single-NPC influence encounters, and there isn't any story choice in how to spend your time either. So using 3x6 rolls to settle what could maybe also have been settled in about 3 rolls.. it doesn't seem great.
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The problem is that it is Extremely difficult to pre write a conversation.
If the NPC just sits there and gets talked at, it *is* extremely boring, and basically comes down to dice rolls.
So make it a conversation, have the NPC talk back to the players, if the players failed their checks, have them dismissed the players assertions. If the player used a skill that the person is not interested in, have the NPC ignore that players appeals.
That said, I would like more multi NPC influence challenges because that would make feats like group coercion much more useful.
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I felt better about the scenario that split the influence between two individuals with round-by-round prompts. The scenarios that have been against a single individual, with no prompts, and none of the milestones leading to extra conversation topics, haven't been as satisfying.
I would definitely like to see a multi-individual one to see if it behaves better -- to keep it to a reasonable time, I think we'd need to avoid padding the discovery skills with 3-4 lores each like they've been doing.
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Venture-Agent, Finland—Tampere
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There is also that often in single npc influence scenarios, best skills are lore skills that party quite likely won't have, second best skills after lore skill is something semi specific not every party has and then is diplomacy with decent dc. So basically lore dc is "basically auto success if party has it" if party DOESN'T have it then its really hard to actually get best result with average skill spread party which "feels" bad when best result is important for secondary success or "hey now you can recruit this person to society as ally"
(fun fact: I love ally rewards :p)
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There is also that often in single npc influence scenarios, best skills are lore skills that party quite likely won't have, second best skills after lore skill is something semi specific not every party has and then is diplomacy with decent dc. So basically lore dc is "basically auto success if party has it" if party DOESN'T have it then its really hard to actually get best result with average skill spread party which "feels" bad when best result is important for secondary success or "hey now you can recruit this person to society as ally"
(fun fact: I love ally rewards :p)
A lot of the extra lore options are lores given for free by pathfinder schools.
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Venture-Agent, Online—VTT
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The problem is that it is Extremely difficult to pre write a conversation.
If the NPC just sits there and gets talked at, it *is* extremely boring, and basically comes down to dice rolls.
So make it a conversation, have the NPC talk back to the players, if the players failed their checks, have them dismissed the players assertions. If the player used a skill that the person is not interested in, have the NPC ignore that players appeals.
That is what I've tried to do. It's been easier to keep going sometimes than others. My past experience has been that it was much easier to keep it flowing as a conversation with multiple NPCs and fewer successes needed. I think that would also help a lot with the other occasional pattern I've noticed where you've got specific information an NPC will give at X level of influence, and trying to keep the conversation going around thise details that are the specific thing the players are trying to ask about without setting off all of the Untrustworthy NPC alarms in their heads is a feat of verbal gymnastics that is possible to land, but pretty difficult to do reliably.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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The problem is that it is Extremely difficult to pre write a conversation.
I don't think it's actually that difficult. You just need to have some topics and starting points. For example, the PCs have to convince a judge to give them a warrant to raid a suspicious building. Then you can turn this into a challenge where the PCs have to "win" on 3 our of 5 topics to sway the judge. They might have found some evidence for example and each piece of evidence can be presented and explained with some skill checks (like Medicine to explain the marks on the body, Survival to talk about tracks, pr Society to show that the property records for the house don't make sense); and they can just try to impress the judge of their sincere and noble intentions (Diplomacy) or maybe just paint the owner of the house in especially bad light (Deception).
This is certainly a social encounter, and you can imagine the flow of conversation easily enough. But it doesn't require a whole Influence mechanic with everyone contorting themselves so that six people argue at this judge for four rounds for 24 total dice rolls, just to meet an artificially high number of required successes.
If the NPC just sits there and gets talked at, it *is* extremely boring, and basically comes down to dice rolls.
So make it a conversation, have the NPC talk back to the players, if the players failed their checks, have them dismissed the players assertions. If the player used a skill that the person is not interested in, have the NPC ignore that players appeals.
I agree with you that that makes the encounter more interesting, but I think the "we have the Influence mechanic so all social encounters look like nails" way of writing isn't the right way to do this. Because when you say that the NPC ignores a player who fails a skill check - mechanically, there's nothing stopping the player from using the same skill next round. In fact it's probably the best thing to do because it's probably the PC's best skill/target DC matchup. The PF2 Influence mechanism natively doesn't really encourage people to change to different skills.
I think this is really a hammer/nails kinda thing. There's this supposition that a social encounter should last four rounds with everyone rolling every round but the actual topics at hand in the scenario probably don't really provide talking points for 24 skill checks. If you just set the target number lower and give fewer skill checks, you can get a more natural sync-up between roleplay and dice rolls.
And yes, that one particular scenario is better than most. But even there it starts to drag with a 6P party when you have to come up with something to say for 60 skill checks. And not a lot of meaningful choices - it's always the same person you're talking to, probably using more or less the same skill. I think if you want to make people vary skills more then the Discovery mechanic actually gets in the way. For example if every round different skills were "featured" with lower or higher DCs because of changing conversation topics, you'd have to really redesign your Discovery mechanic to make sense with that.
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Venture-Agent, Finland—Tampere
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A lot of the extra lore options are lores given for free by pathfinder schools.There is also that often in single npc influence scenarios, best skills are lore skills that party quite likely won't have, second best skills after lore skill is something semi specific not every party has and then is diplomacy with decent dc. So basically lore dc is "basically auto success if party has it" if party DOESN'T have it then its really hard to actually get best result with average skill spread party which "feels" bad when best result is important for secondary success or "hey now you can recruit this person to society as ally"
(fun fact: I love ally rewards :p)
Well yes. But that doesn't change it that when party doesn't happen to have underworld or art lore, best thing they can do is to roll that diplomacy or performance ;P (yeah I'm talking about specific scenario) where they still have almost 50% of failure
On sidenote about naturally flowing conversations, that actually kinda reminds me of why I don't really like "Q&A: Example question and answer" format. Because its bit unclear of whether "running as written" means "the character will only share this information if pcs ask it directly" and such :p
Like I much prefer "over course of the conversation, this is what character will reveal to PCs without them asking" format where its clear what info characters need to probe and what is information they will have by the end anyway assuming they don't ignore the character completely
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Unpopular opinion, I feel the opposite to everyone here.
I've been in a number of PFS content with Influence encounters, and the only one I didn't find utterly dreadful was the one singular 'single NPC influence encounter'.
Poor balancing and skills being spread in an aggravatingly lopsided manner results in party members spreading too thin trying to get progress and usually winding up failing to sufficiently influence *anyone* to the point of almost being an overall fail state.
