Venture-Agent, Ohio—Columbus
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It seems that clarifications and corrections are being given to the team creating the Foundry modules. That's great, but it makes it all the more frustrating that devs/writers have basically stopped responding to questions here and on the product pages.
Anyway, I thought it would be helpful to pass along the changes included in the foundry modules that GMs using only the PDF will never see.
The scaling for the influence encounter on high tier was changed to the following:
SCALING ENCOUNTER A (3–4)
To adjust for the PCs’ overall strength, use the following Challenge Point adjustments. These adjustments are not cumulative.
19–22 Challenge Points: Add 1 to each Influence Point threshold.
23–27 Challenge Points: Add 2 to each Influence Point threshold.
28–32 Challenge Points: Add 3 to each Influence Point threshold.
33+ Challenge Points: Add 4 to each Influence Point threshold.
And the following clarification was given for encounter D:
creatures that appear are separate from the scaling changes. I know it's confusing, but we needed a way to keep the fight going while the ritual happened. This got lost in the body text. I'd replace the initial statement with "When the ritual begins, two weak cosmic amoeba and one weak hound echo appear (two cosmic amoeba and a weak cacophonous hound echo for levels 3–4), adjusted as appropriate for scaling as given in the Challenge Point Sidebars for the encounter." The rest can be unchanged, as scaling won't impact those additions, just whether or not there are 6 PCs
Venture-Lieutenant, Minnesota—Minneapolis
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The number of monsters in 5-17 that can throw slow is a problem in a tier where dispel magic items are not widely available. I was playing a party's sole spellcaster in this and critically failed a save vs. slow at the VERY BEGINNING of the final encounter. I was NOT happy, having literally everything I could possibly do that was useful stolen from me for the entire fight. Dispel magic is a rank-2 spell... but it requires 2 actions, so you can't cast it if you only have 1 available action in a turn.
I literally said, "Well, I'm going to Shield on every turn. I'm going outside, come and get me when the fight's over."
Venture-Lieutenant, Finland—Turku
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Even casters have 3 actions per turn, and since casting typically takes 2, casters should have something useful to spend their third action on, like guidance, intimidation, battle medicine, bon mot, athletics, recall knowledge...
Don't get me wrong, getting slowed 2 as a caster IS harsh and eats away the majority of what you can do, but it's unlikely to crit fail twice in a row (with your heropoint) and if shield is the only 1-action thing your character can do, that's kinda on you. You could be taking out resources such as healing potions or scrolls or bombs and using those. You could be providing flank, aiding, or on the very least, tank a hit or two.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Minnesota—Minneapolis
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Even casters have 3 actions per turn, and since casting typically takes 2, casters should have something useful to spend their third action on, like guidance, intimidation, battle medicine, bon mot, athletics, recall knowledge...
Don't get me wrong, getting slowed 2 as a caster IS harsh and eats away the majority of what you can do, but it's unlikely to crit fail twice in a row (with your heropoint) and if shield is the only 1-action thing your character can do, that's kinda on you. You could be taking out resources such as healing potions or scrolls or bombs and using those. You could be providing flank, aiding, or on the very least, tank a hit or two.
2/3 of the combat encounters in this scenario deal with monsters that can cast slow. If someone is unlucky enough on the dice, they can be reduced to 1 action per turn for 2/3 of the entire scenario, which doesn't feel right to my designer brain. Remember that a critical failure is not just a natural 1 but also -10 from the DC number (19 for the low tier). With level 1 proficiencies, that's on average 4 or under on the die if Fort is the character's weak save, or a whopping 20% chance of critically failing in a tier where the average party doesn't have access to dispels or other removal options.
I get what the designer was going for, but I feel like this should have been a tier 3-6 scenario because of the number of monsters with Rank 3 spell slots, and having the possibility for a player's first experience with Pathfinder (tier 1-4 is open to beginning players, after all) be having 2/3 of their actions stripped from them for one or more fights could be seriously damaging to the game and PFS.
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Soo... I'm reading the Hounds of Tindalos entry and it mentions that they are sickened 1 and lose their resistances any time they aren't adjacent to a 90 degree or lower angle.
How am I measuring angles? I don't mean to get math nerd on main but an angle of 120 degrees is *ALSO* an angle of 60 degrees... a flat plane is both 0 degrees and 180 degrees. You may notice that in both these situations the same angle is both more than and less than 90 degrees. I'm also really wishing I knew how to make the little degrees symbol. If the Hounds are on the inside of an angled structure should I use the smaller angle and if they're outside the structure use the bigger one?
I understand it's pedantic but it's messing with me a bit and I don't want to make the encounter too hard or too easy because I'm not fiddling with resistances and sickened the correct way.
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Venture-Agent, Massachusetts—Boston Metro
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I typically measure it as 'the angle on the side they're on'. So if for example they're in a hallway with sloped walls like this:
\__/
I'd count that 'angle' as ~110 degrees
I also don't consider in the middle of a relatively flat floor to be 'adjacent' to any angle. The hounds like to hug walls, corners, be next to masts jutting straight out of the deck, etc.
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Is Arjol Parkit a prepared or spontaneous caster (and, if spontaneous, how many spell slots)? I was running him as prepared, but I noticed afterward it actually says "Occult Spells Known," not "Prepared."
(Also, the text really assumes the PCs kill him. My party decided they might need his help and attacked him nonlethally, then bound and healed him.)
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Is Arjol Parkit a prepared or spontaneous caster (and, if spontaneous, how many spell slots)? I was running him as prepared, but I noticed afterward it actually says "Occult Spells Known," not "Prepared."
(Also, the text really assumes the PCs kill him. My party decided they might need his help and attacked him nonlethally, then bound and healed him.)
I made it so, they can use now social skills to interrogate him and find the counter ritual.
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Venture-Agent, Netherlands—Utrecht
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Ran this yesterday, encountered a problem I hadn't thought of while prepping it: what does "win over an NPC" (during the influence encounter) entail? Because depending on how you interpret that, things can get incredibly difficult. Reaching Influence 2, where they'll spill the beans and point you in the right direction, is already pretty difficult (certainly doable, but undoubtedly difficult) with all NPCs. But if it's the last influence threshold (4, or 8 for Fidero) with all of them is nearly impossible.
In my case, I had three players at level 4, one player at 3. That's 22 CP, so +1 influence point threshold. If they needed 3 influence points with each NPC (5 for the captain), that breaks down to the following:
16 checks total
Three times 3 influence points, plus one time 5 influence points, so 9+5=14 influence points needed.
So, assuming they skip the Discovery checks altogether and immediately go to influencing, they can only fail twice. Or they can try a difficult Medicine check to immediately gain 4 points with the captain, which means 11 successful checks out of 16. And that's only to reach the middle threshold, again with skipping all the Discovery checks. If every NPC gets Discovered at least once, you can miss a single check.
If they actually need to reach the final influence threshold to be considered "won over," that's literally only possible in the low tier. With a full party of six level 1s, you'd get 24 checks to get 3x5 +1x9 (low tier says for every 2 points above 10, while the smallest possible party starts at 8 challenge points, meaning there's no difference between 8 and 10 challenge points), is exactly 24 points. All checks need to go directly to influence, and not a single fail (or a few crits).
Furthermore, the Captain's DCs are way too difficult. I get that he's sick and hard to interact with, but this is ridiculous. A typical level 1 DC is 15. The literal easiest DC to influence him is DC 20, going as high as 24. That's simply not feasible. I know it's expected to not get full treasure bundles all the time, but the combination of higher DCs as well as higher influence thresholds means the captain is basically a lost cause, without the players knowing.
TL;DR: Influence thresholds seem difficult to reach with only four rounds, captain is unfeasibly difficult for this level.
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Constructive criticism: when I played this, my GM didn't give the captain as an option at first, and introduced him as part of the influence rounds. It made the investigation feel more natural, rather than introducing three NPCs on the deck and oh yeah, there's a sick captain inside. I really liked that. You'd have to fit him in the narrative organically, but I feel it enhances the story.
Hell, my GM scrapped the influence system entirely and just made us roll checks organically, cutting us off at a certain point. That's a bit more difficult to do and I wouldn't advise it for everyone, but it really helped the narrative, rather than going "okay, here's today's minigame" all of a sudden.
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Venture-Agent, Netherlands—Utrecht
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I think the main problem with influence encounters is that a larger party size is treated the same as a stronger party, which is not the case. Yes, 5 people can make more checks than 4 people. The encounter should be adjusted for that. But in my case, three people get +1 to their skills. That could turn a fail into a success (or a success into a crit success), but that does not warrant a higher success threshold (as my math above indicates)
Other scenarios typically give 6 rounds of influence checks, with one fewer round per player above 4. That seems reasonable (4 and 6 players get a total of 24 checks each, 5 players get a slight bonus with 25 checks). But flat out increasing the number of successes needed regardless of player count does not work. And hell, some scenarios even do both. I get that if you have two level 4s and two level 1s, you should alter the DCs a little. But in general, I feel picking one or the other gives a better result than a blanket "increase the threshold by X."
I get that you don't want to get too granular, so in a hypothetical situation of two level 1s and three level 3, there is no ideal middle ground, but an easy fix would be to not give a set DC, but a DC based on that party member's level. A level 1 character would roll against DC 16, a level 3 character against DC 19, or simply noted as level+1. This keeps the difficulty level, well, level, while giving options for additional party members. Makes it a little more difficult for the GM, as they have to cross-reference the player's level versus the scaling DC, but leads to better results, IMHO. The only downside is that you're supposed to be better at things as you level up, and the DC increases at the same pace as you do, so you're technically getting better at the skill. I still think this is a better solution than the current system, though. If the adventures were a single tier, this would've been so much easier. Then you can just adjust for player count, not necessarily for player strength (four level 2s will fare better than four level 1s, but that's fine, IMHO). For social encounters, at least.