Sanctioning Change Request for Beginners Box

[Hilary Moon Murphy]

Hello all.

At the moment, the sanctioning rules for the Beginner's Box are preventing me from scheduling the Beginner's Box adventures for my game days. Why? Two reasons.

Reason A: Well, players usually want to use their own characters for adventures. So if there is a choice between their own character and a pregen, they will want to play their own character.

Reason B: I don't want to confuse new players who have already figured out how to create characters with the CRB and tell them they now need to recreate those characters with Beginner Box rules. It's hard enough teaching character creation, Pathfinder training and Organized Play access rules.

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I love that the sanctioning allows players to create characters with the Beginner Box rules. That's important. I just want to change it so that you can have either a party of PFS characters, or a party of Beginner's Box characters. I would love to be able to run this for the new folks in my lodge!

Please allow this change? Pretty please?

Thanks so much,
Hmm

[zeonsghost]

Two Votes on this.

I think having them use PFS legal characters for a sanctioned trip through the beginners box is going to help new people only have to learn rules once.

[Sebastian Hirsch]

I don't offer the Beginners Box for new players, or rather players that have found org play, because they often already have a CRB and have to build a character.

Forcing them to use a different set of rules to create their characters for the Beginners Box is somewhat confusing, and as Hilary mentioned, org play char creation rules are already rather complex.

Paradoxically, PF2 is a game that is known for the number of creative, outlandish, and versatile heritages/ancestries... and we completely hide that absolutely outstanding feature of the game, by limiting players to play a couple of ancestries in the Beginners Box.

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Personally, I would suggest retiring the old sanctioning with the decadent amount of ACP, or finding a way where that only applies to people that play it for the first time. My reasoning for this suggestion is that it can negatively affect the community if people want to replay this one, thus causing our scheduled offerings to become less diverse.

The Beginners Box is not a bad dungeon crawl, but dungeon crawls are just sliver of what PF2 and org play have to offer, and I would hate if this would cost us players that are less interested in this sort of experience.

[NielsenE]

Sebastian Hirsch wrote:

...
Personally, I would suggest retiring the old sanctioning with the decadent amount of ACP, or finding a way where that only applies to people that play it for the first time. My reasoning for this suggestion is that it can negatively affect the community if people want to replay this one, thus causing our scheduled offerings to become less diverse.
...

+100%

Its an ACP and XP farm that can be speed run, which I think is bad for the campaign. I haven't run it since the first time.

My ideal world would be two reporting codes for it:
Bonus ACP, BB box rules
Regular ACP, regular character rules

I wanted to fine tune the two categories with "new player present" or not, but that introduces some complexity where if a player drops suddenly the table's state changes. I had wanted to introduce non-repeatable for tables with no new players, but that really has problems if the new player(s) drop and strand a then-invalid table of repeats.

[cavernshark]

I think having a second version of the scenario with different AcP would be an elegant and very thoughtful way to handle this.

[Hilary Moon Murphy]

Does this one have decadent ACP? (And what constitutes decadent ACP? I've never run nor played it because of the BB character requirement.)

I don't care too much that this one is a dungeon crawl, because we have plenty of non-dungeon crawl repeatables: Lions of Katapesh (the tiny cave in there does not count), Lost on the Spirit Road and Tarnbreaker's Trail. While I prefer non-dungeon crawl scenarios, this one is the story from the Beginner Box, and I want to run its sequel, Road to Otari. Yeah, I know that I don't have to run BB to run Road to Otari, but I'd like to do both together over a set of gamedays for my new players.

[Ferious Thune]

It’s double ACP and repeatable. I’ve similarly never played it, in part because of the character requirement. Whenever I see it listed, I don’t seem to have the time to look over the rules.

[Hilary Moon Murphy]

Ah, double ACP. Yes, that is Decadent. Thanks for clarifying. I would support having regular ACP for OPF characters.

Hmm

[NielsenE]

It ends up being closer to 4x ACP since groups can run both parts in a single block, if they're all replaying, etc.

[Doug Hahn]

The new San Francisco VA is running Fistful of Flowers as an intro module to great success; people love cute leshies! I advised this person not to run Beginner Box for the reasons Hmm listed above, as well as the following:

⠀⠀1. It expects PCs to wipe out a whole tribe of kobolds with cold-blooded efficiency just for stealing some fish.
⠀⠀2. The last encounter is a TPK machine.

Not the best intro to Pathfinder, or even TTRPGS. When I run I tailor it a bit more based on the PCs wanting to interact with the kobolds in ways other than murderizing them, and running the final encounter in a way that is challenging rather than maliciously overpowering. Need to be cautious about who your GM is, especially with new players.

[Bigdaddyjug]

Ferious Thune wrote:

It’s double ACP and repeatable. I’ve similarly never played it, in part because of the character requirement. Whenever I see it listed, I don’t seem to have the time to look over the rules.

Where does it say that it's double ACP? I cannot find it anywhere on the sanctioning page.

[NielsenE]

From the third paragraph on the blog post that announced its sanctioning.

[Hilary Moon Murphy]

Doug Hahn wrote:

I advised this person not to run Beginner Box for the reasons Hmm listed above, as well as the following:

⠀⠀1. It expects PCs to wipe out a whole tribe of kobolds with cold-blooded efficiency just for stealing some fish.
⠀⠀2. The last encounter is a TPK machine.

Not the best intro to Pathfinder, or even TTRPGS. When I run I tailor it a bit more based on the PCs wanting to interact with the kobolds in ways other than murderizing them, and running the final encounter in a way that is challenging rather than maliciously overpowering. Need to be cautious about who your GM is, especially with new players.

Yeah, I was looking to evade the kobold genocide. It's a really harsh element, and it's not in keeping with our current world and storyline. I'm glad that OPF is friendly to all kobolds!

[Bigdaddyjug]

NielsenE wrote:

From the third paragraph on the blog post that announced its sanctioning.

Well hot damn! I need to run the Beginner's Box more to buy all of the race boons I need for my army of 2E characters.

[Hilary Moon Murphy]

So we have a house guest from France, and Mikkel really wanted a Pathfinder game while he was here, and my son Duncan was recently gifted the Beginner Box. So we thought about running it for Mikkel, when he said, "And I want to play a gnome bard!"

So I sighed and ran some bounties for him and my family instead, though parts of the BB were still useful for minis and such. I still really want a way to run the BB adventures with Society characters.

Hmm