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Playtest Points allowed the option of purchasing a level or two for a starting character.
About half of the 'starting' scenarios I've played (1-01, 99-01, a couple of others I've blanked out on) have had the difficulty cranked out the wazzoo.
Rather than risking a brand new character in those deathtraps, would it be possible to come up with a Boon of modest pricing for folks who want to avoid them, perhaps as much ACP as one would have earned playing that 12exp worth of scenarios or modestly more?
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Personally, I think the outrage is a bit extreme. Sure there are a few scenarios that may be over-tuned, but they are the exception not the rule. And scenario difficulty is often more affected by party makeup and player skill than a misapplication of the game's methodology (if that is even true). Org play has an excellent track record when it come to scenario design. Sometimes we have to take ownership and assess which scenarios are most appropriate for new players and steer them towards those options. You cannot expect every leave 1-4 scenario to be targeted at n00bs. Experienced players play them too and would like to be entertained as well.
tl;dr you cannot please all the people all the time, but you can please most of the people most of the time and that is something they have done.
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. . . Org play has an excellent track record when it come to scenario design. Sometimes we have to take ownership and assess which scenarios are most appropriate for new players and steer them towards those options. You cannot expect every leave 1-4 scenario to be targeted at n00bs. Experienced players play them too and would like to be entertained as well.
tl;dr you cannot please all the people all the time, but you can please most of the people most of the time and that is something they have done.
Sorta.
I started playing PFS right as Season 2 of PFS1 was being released. I started GMing around the start of Season 3. And I very quickly learned that most of the GMs I had been fortunate enough to have (7 of my first 8 GMs would be 5-stars before another two years were up) really were all-stars. When I started GMing, I would run a Tier 1-2 scenario as it appeared to be written. And it would very often degenerate into a player-killing slog. Because the authors expected the players to have certain tactical knowledge and expected certain items to have been purchased. I hadn't realized how much those excellent GMs had been subtly steering me and other newbies to avoid the potential pitfalls in the scenarios. I took me a while to figure out how to smooth the curves.
Not all scenarios were bad! Some were well-balanced. But some had barbarians with x4 weapons or shocking grasp magi facing off against level 1 characters. So I don't think "excellent track record" is exactly correct; it took a while for writers and developers to find the mark. Ask me again when there's a good sample size of low-level PFS2 Season 4 scenarios.
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That comment seems intended to diminish people with less experience than the speaker.
Can't say I read it the same way. Given the context, it was used in place of 'inexperienced players'. There was not further context to denote derision toward 'inexperienced players'. Therefore, I am failing to see where there was any 'intent to diminish'. But, maybe I missed something.
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You cannot expect every leave 1-4 scenario to be targeted at n00bs. Experienced players play them too and would like to be entertained as well.If a player at my table referred to me, or anyone else, as a "N00B' I would leave and never come back. That comment seems intended to diminish people with less experience than the speaker. Do we need to perpetuate that? Aren;t we better than that?
It's very seldom actually meant as something that bad so I don't see the point in assuming that it is something that bad. For starcraft its pretty much how I and my friends say "Hi"
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Level 1-4 scenarios can feel difficult and the enemies are sometimes tough, but this isn't such a huge problem as this thread seems to suggest. Even at level 1-4, actual deaths are rare. The only thing that really needs fixing is how the massive damage rule can kick in from a regular boss crit at level 1-2, but not at later levels. It's clearly unintended.
Other than that: Don't apply your valuable AcP boons at level 1. Play 3 games, and apply the boon during the rebuild before you level up to 2.
Stock up on healing, play something sturdy, GM games, play Beginner's Box and bounties, or one-shots, or apply AP or module chronicles. Coordinate with the rest of the players to ensure your group has out of combat healing, or rebuild your character before the game as needed to fit the groups needs. Save your hero point for stabilising, instead of using it on a random skill check or attack roll. Avoid joining 1-4 games with a level 1 character if the adventure will be on higher tier - play a level 3 pregen instead, you can still apply the chronicle directly to the level 1. OR, just play a level 3 pregen regardless of what the rest are playing, and you're lot less likely to die.
I'm not strongly opposed to the idea of AcP boon letting people start at level 2 or 3, I just think it's one of the worst possible fixes for this problem, because those boons tend to give you considerably less gold than if you actually played the games, leading to rougher start for your character as they can't afford as much useful equipment as they otherwise would.
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I liked the Playtest Point start at level 2 and 3 boons. I used both of them. I would like to see a similar ACP boon, but I think it would need to be costed a lot higher than the OP was saying -- probably closer to 50 ACP. Or 4x what a player would have earned playing in non-bonus ACP settings for the same level worth of xp. GM credit is a thing, and a common tool people use to boostrap a character that doesn't feel right at level one, etc. We still need more GMs all the time, so devaluing GM-credit with 'cheap' ACP for XP would likely hurt.
And it needs to be priced high enough that its a 'sometimes buy' not a 'always buy'. At the low price of 12 ACP that OP was stating, it feels like it would become an always buy for most people, for their non-first character.
And it probably needs to be capped at only 'start at level 2' not a generic 'buy a level'.
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I suspect the problem mostly goes back to the other thread discussing scenario design: the outlier level character at a high total CP table. For example, for a level 1 character, high tier 1-01 is quite deadly. PFS(2) 1-01 can also be quite deadly for low tier if run incorrectly or antagonistically. However, Intro 1, a tier 1-2 scenario, has some rather wicked monsters and combinations for an introductory experience (multiple, spammable 2d10 basic reflex save AOEs, paralysis, improved grab with swallow).
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Personally, I think the outrage is a bit extreme. Sure there are a few scenarios that may be over-tuned, but they are the exception not the rule.
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Org play has an excellent track record when it come to scenario design.
I agree with the first quoted part, so I suspect any disagreement in the second part is semantics.
I think "new players will survive 95% of Tier 1-4 scenarios" isn't going to become a net benefit with respect to retaining new players. There will be a small minority who love the danger and positively advertise, a small minority who die and negatively advertise, and reviews will be "mixed".
That the 1-01 and 2-01 scenarios have been tougher than average hurts more than average because those tend to be released at big conventions and tend to shape public opinion more so than .
That 1-01 and 1-10 are repeatables and tend to get offered more often than other 1-4s also disproportionately hurts public opinion.
I actually think the average difficulty is fine (a little low, even). But I prefer there be gross inequality in the distribution - Tier 1-2 being all rainbows and puppies and Tier 9-10 written by Zon-Kuthon himself.
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Don't apply your valuable AcP boons at level 1. Play 3 games, and apply the boon during the rebuild before you level up to 2.
Stock up on healing, play something sturdy, GM games, play Beginner's Box and bounties, or one-shots, or apply AP or module chronicles.
The flip side to this is that I want to test out the high-ACP builds while I still have rebuilds.
I know how human fighters work, I don't really want to play a Valeros clone for 3 scenarios just because it's safe.
I want to figure out how crippling it is for my azarketi to be carrying a 6 Bulk barrel of water before I close the door on the mistbreath heritage.
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Venture-Agent, Netherlands—Utrecht
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Handing out levels willy-nilly seems problematic to me. As said before, it makes people expect to skip level 1. While I understand the drive to skip the "boring" levels, I wouldn't advise newbies to do so.
PF1 had a special where you could start a character at level 2 (or was it a 12+ arc? I forgot), which I think is a nice solution. It limits the availability and can be given out to a controlled audience, or as a cool reward. Though locking content away for people who haven't "completed" PF2 feels a bit wrong. On the one hand, you want a cool reward for these special scenarios, but making them too cool can lead to feel-bad when people miss out on it.
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Whether or not a character dies in a scenario shouldn’t really be the measure of whether or not it’s a good experience for a new player. 1-01 is easy to pick on, but…
The issue to me is not the overall difficulty of 1-4s, or even 1-2s. It’s that every scenario specifically designed as an introduction seems to end up overtuned. 2-11 had to be rewritten, and thankfully was, so there’s at least one now that leans towards being easier. I haven’t had a chance to play any of the new intros, but between this thread and the other one, the things I’m hearing aren’t making me feel better.
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This comment probably belongs over in the scenario design thread, but there are a lot of other defeat/failure conditions besides character death/TPK or total goal failure that can be written into stories. Not everything has to be survive or die every time.
Also, scenarios shouldn't need a conceit like Pathfinder Trials to make a Tier 1 scenario safe. It does create a safe space to play with experimental builds--and created a hilariously bizarre situation with my Battle Oracle going down to persistent damage, and really made him mad at the end.
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Back to Wei Ji's suggestion: there are definitely times I would seriously consider throwing AcP at a character to level them up. I can see it going against some of the ethos of org play ("Use the rewards from playing games, in order to...not play games!") but at the same time, I could also see it useful for people with lots of banked Chronicle Sheets (like in the often-seen example of a PC who's played through an AP, and so has 1 level's worth of XP banked every-other-level) or for folks with more AcP than time to play (perma-GMs, or folks who maybe played a bunch in the past, but then for whatever reason had to step down RPG time.)
I could see there being a use case there, to use AcP to 'buy' your way up to the next level, so you could apply your next AP's chronicle sheet (or whatever.) Or, in those situations where you see a game pop up, and you know the GM or players, and it's a scenario you'd like to play - oh but your PC needs one more XP to level up and be in Tier. It'd be neat to have a way to do that. Oooh, or - how about that situation where the other 5 players at the table are three levels higher than you, and you're getting A Rising Tide Raises All Boats'd into High Tier, but you're thinking, like, "oh no my character is going to get insta-gibbed." Boom, drop some AcPs, and now you're maybe that much more robust?
...maybe if it was the kind of thing that was limited in some other way, so it's not used egregiously? What if, the AcP cost was high but not prohibitive (making up numbers, but, say, 50 AcP) and it was a one-time purchaseable boon, that you can buy once at Tier 2 of All Factions rep, and then again at Tier 4 of All Factions Rep? That way any given PC can buy it twice, once in early-ish career and once in later-ish career?