Venture-Captain, Washington—Seattle
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What if a 6-player group obtains exactly 4 Preparation points? Should the medium degree or the highest degree of success be used? Or is this a failure?
EDITED TO UPDATE: I hear (secondhand, but from a reliable source) the word from the Devs is that it's 1-4 for the lesser success and 5+ for the higher success.
Where are the "five marked areas outside the firelight" intended to be on the map?
It sure is annoying when references are made to marks on the map which don't exist. But, my guess is it probably matters very little in practice if GMs just put them wherever.
In high subtier, encounter 1C has a variant monster called enraged little man of the woods, which is marked as both [unique] and [rare].
Treating it as Rare seems the way to go, as the only thing this really affects is the DC of Recall Knowledge checks to Identify. If you don't like that, you could avoid the issue altogether by choosing a different encounter variant.
Anohatsa fills in missing details, willing to tell the true story following Wanikkawi’s death [...] Doesn't the first sentence mean that box B will always be checked in any non-TPK playthrough?
Besides TPKing, the party could also run away. But barring those corner cases which would fail the primary objective, yes, box B will get checked. This doesn't seem to really be a problem, though.
As written, the PCs can be *told* that they succeed at each of the three Preparation tasks (and get rewarded!), but *actually* fail them as far as reputation is concerned.
I suggest not telling the party they "succeeded" in each Preparation task but simply playing the quest-giver NPCs as merely polite or increasingly enthused, as appropriate. It does feel to me that the secondary success conditions should line up with the one of the thresholds on the Preparation tasks, but it isn't clear to me which threshold that would be. In any case, by not giving the PCs the impression of "success" even when they may have gotten the lesser reward from the NPC, we can run as written without being too misleading.
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Venture-Captain, Washington—Seattle
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Running away from the final encounter would still allow Anohatsa to "fill[] in missing details, willing to tell the true story following Wanikkawi’s death".
I guess it's possible the party first kills Wanikkawi in the final encounter and then runs away without killing his sidekick(s), but otherwise running away wouldn't meet the condition "following Wanikkawi's death" for Anohatsa to fill in the missing details.
Going from needing 3 points with five PCs to 5 points with 6 PCs (to get the top tier reward) is a big jump-- almost punitive for having a sixth PC.
Mission success does not require getting any top-tier rewards in the preparation activities. In practice, those rewards don't make a huge impact on the combat encounters and may be nice to have but are not at all necessary.
In general, is there any way to summon a PFS dev / OrgPlay leader to resolve issues like the ones discussed here, especially with regard to success thresholds?
In general, there is no way to summon anyone official to clarify these sorts of things, but perhaps a dev will come into the thread after the holiday season and publicly post what has already been clarified privately about the success threshold (see above).