Grigory Encounter Warning

[Snake0202]

Hi everyone! I ran the Grigory encounter for my PCs and it turned into a very unfun session so I wanted to share my experience in hopes that it helps future GMs modify the encounter.

So the initial role play was great. PCs instantly hated him, but couldn't deny that he had made some good points in his critique of their decisions. Then when they saw the unrest go up, they knew they had to do something. I introduced the fight propaganda downtime activity, and they all agreed to do that.

The problem is, his DCs are really high for a 4th level party. Most of my players have a range of +8 - +10 in their social skills and his DC is 24. Which means anywhere from 14-16 on the D20. Not very good odds at all. Furthermore, every failure looses them a support point, so when they got a good roll and got a support point, the odds were almost always in their favor they were going to loose it soon.

They did 4 downtime days of fighting propaganda and they had a net 0 support points, plus additional unrest and corruption for a crit fail one of them got. Everyone at the table was really frustrated because they said it felt like there was literally nothing they could do besides be evil and arrest him for not breaking any laws or let him single handedly destroy their kingdom. I have some players who were very uncomfortable with the idea of arresting someone for free speech.

At the end of the day, I quickly realized my players were getting frustrated, disengaged, and not having fun. Which stinks for me because I was really looking forward to playing him and having him be a reoccurring thorn in the player's side.
At the end of the day, we all agreed to just have him run out of town by the citizens so we could get back to doing fun adventuring.

So I do think this encounter needs to have a way to beat it that doesn't involve arresting or attacking a man for free speech, or passing 15 very hard DCs in a row. So words of advice for GMs getting ready to run this encounter. If it looks like the players aren't having fun and they can't win, have Grigory do something that's clearly evil or illegal to give the PCs a Casus Belli to attack or arrest Grigory and turn the adventure back to something fun, or just be ready to cut him if your players aren't into this.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

[Paul Zagieboylo]

Losing a Progress Point on a normal failure is not typical for these kinds of Progress Point-based situations. I'm not sure why this one is written this way. Maybe just remove that? It should work much better that way, at least for people who get a success on a 14. I'm definitely going to do that when my players get to this scene (in September, probably).

Also, +8 to +10 in social skills probably means that none of your players took on the "party face" role, because a party face should be a bit higher than this at their preferred skill at 4th level. My 4th level bard is going to have +13 Diplomacy to Make an Impression, assuming he gets to use his maestro's lyre with Versatile Performance. Yes, this is completely ridiculous. But even a more normal sorcerer or rogue party face should have +11 or +12, as long as they remembered to put on their high-fashion fine clothing and/or ventriloquist's ring!

DC 24 is still Very Hard for 4th-level characters, though; even very focused characters are going to have a tough time with it. I would consider bumping this down to 23, which is a Standard DC for Grigori's level. But I think just not reducing progress on a standard failure is probably enough.

[Deriven Firelion]

Grigori is supposed to last a few levels and be a thorn in the side as he is described. I figure if you use Grigori, he should start being annoying early in the kingdom's growth at lvl 4 and still be there being annoying by 6th level or so. The idea is he is this threat lurking around rousing people up in your settlements with a campaign against the PCs. So you use him at various points after events in the kingdom happen as he builds his case. So he doesn't have to be done all in one encounter with a constant amount of rolls. You can slow play him over a few levels.

At least that is how I run it.

[Gristoufle]

After a few public jousts, my players ended up cornering him in his room, and threathened him enough for him to consider public apologies and leaving town (though I plan to make him come back at some point elsewhere).

They never intended a trial since he didn't break any law, so there wasn't much space for the downtime activity.

As mentionned by someone else, having him doing something illegal helps.
Seeing his spell list, I had him enthrall the crowd and suggestion Amiri to get into a tavern Brawl fight (she broke too many arms that day), causing trouble.

Anyway that 24 is indeed too high, even if you give free +1/+2 circumstance bonuses for rewarding PC choices/RP.

The face of the party can indeed have a net +13, but that's one PC.

The failure shouldn't remove a point as well!

[Snake0202]

Deriven Firelion wrote:

Grigori is supposed to last a few levels and be a thorn in the side as he is described. I figure if you use Grigori, he should start being annoying early in the kingdom's growth at lvl 4 and still be there being annoying by 6th level or so. The idea is he is this threat lurking around rousing people up in your settlements with a campaign against the PCs. So you use him at various points after events in the kingdom happen as he builds his case. So he doesn't have to be done all in one encounter with a constant amount of rolls. You can slow play him over a few levels.

At least that is how I run it.

Yeah, if I could do it again I would run it like this. Instead of having him show up unload a boatload of criticism, I'd start introducing him around level 4 and just have him be that annoying NPC. I think I went to hard to fast with him. Oh well... I probably won't ever get to run him again.

[Tridus]

Ran into this as a player... and yeah it was really frustrating. We're level 5 (we have been massively outpacing the kingdom level as players because when other stuff comes up we go adventure to deal with it), and I am the party face. Even then, I needed double digits on the dice with my +14 and others in the party are worse at this than I am (because they're not all built to be face characters).

Having failures remove points basically means that very few characters should actively participate in this because if they attempt to help the odds are stacked against everyone in the group except me. For a one-off thing that's fine since at some point everyone will get a chance to use their skill and be the best at something, but for an ongoing thing that just requires constant attention like this? It's not good.

We spent six days dealing with this, got effectively nowhere due to failure penalties, and then had to stop to spend time doing a kingdom turn (which wiped out whatever points we did have since we literally ran out of time in the month).

Since its effectively a coin flip (or worse for half the party) to get a success and we need to chain several of them in a row to get anywhere at this, as people realized that it stopped being fun and just started being annoying. That reached the point where despite being a party of mostly "heroic hero" types, people started taking the more shady character pitching assassination more seriously as a way to make this problem go away.

Would probably be better if he showed up, caused some trouble, and then left again for a while, since as we gain levels he'll become easier to deal with. As an ongoing thing with how difficult it is, it got old real fast.

[Tridus]

As an update, we managed to get through this encounter in this weeks game. It took 2 hours (plus the time from last week), and we had to go to a "only the person with the best chance of success is going to attempt it" strategy because having three of us trying was not even remotely working... and the best person for the job wasn't the one with the best modifier in the skills: it was the one with Halfling Luck*.

The obvious problem with that is that effectively 4/5 of the table was locked out of being able to participate. However, the "failure removes a success" rule here makes it almost necessary since anyone but the best person at it rolling is making it harder to make progress, as we found the first game night we tried to deal with this.

So two of them started doing long term crafting, one of them retrained, and the last one (me) launched an investigation to try and find some evidence to convince everyone else to deal with this guy faster. I'm not sure how helpful that actually was, but it was fun to be doing something other than rolling to aid 15 times or declaring "I'm crafting an armor potency rune and will spend all these days reducing the cost" and then being uninvolved for 2 hours.

Then the trial event came up, and we pushed through that Kingdom Turn as fast as practical (which caused us to make mistakes) just so we could get this over with and not have it drag into another game night because we just want to get back to adventuring.

I'd definitely recommend a GM consider reworking how this works to either remove the failure situation, or have this guy come and go over multiple events. As written, you basically have no choice but to stop everything and deal with this for however long it takes, and it's just not enjoyable as written with the failure mechanic discouraging participation.

*RAW that doesn't work, but we have generally allowed it anyway because its usually fun when its applied to something like cooking dinner. In this case it turned out to be wildly overpowered. That said, we really just wanted this event over with so the players were largely content with continuing to allow it to give us some kind of edge here. The alternative was just saying screw it and opting for assassination, which is not really what the majority of the players want our kingdom to be doing.

[Snake0202]

Tridus wrote:

As an update, we managed to get through this encounter in this weeks game. It took 2 hours (plus the time from last week), and we had to go to a "only the person with the best chance of success is going to attempt it" strategy because having three of us trying was not even remotely working... and the best person for the job wasn't the one with the best modifier in the skills: it was the one with Halfling Luck*.

The obvious problem with that is that effectively 4/5 of the table was locked out of being able to participate. However, the "failure removes a success" rule here makes it almost necessary since anyone but the best person at it rolling is making it harder to make progress, as we found the first game night we tried to deal with this.

So two of them started doing long term crafting, one of them retrained, and the last one (me) launched an investigation to try and find some evidence to convince everyone else to deal with this guy faster. I'm not sure how helpful that actually was, but it was fun to be doing something other than rolling to aid 15 times or declaring "I'm crafting an armor potency rune and will spend all these days reducing the cost" and then being uninvolved for 2 hours.

Then the trial event came up, and we pushed through that Kingdom Turn as fast as practical (which caused us to make mistakes) just so we could get this over with and not have it drag into another game night because we just want to get back to adventuring.

I'd definitely recommend a GM consider reworking how this works to either remove the failure situation, or have this guy come and go over multiple events. As written, you basically have no choice but to stop everything and deal with this for however long it takes, and it's just not enjoyable as written with the failure mechanic discouraging participation.

*RAW that doesn't work, but we have generally allowed it anyway because its usually fun when its applied to something like cooking dinner. In this case it turned out to be wildly overpowered. That...

Thanks for sharing! Yeah, this encounter is not designed to be beaten at level 5 in the social arena I don’t think. If I ever were to run it again I would change it heavily and make it much more RP focused and would not run the fight propaganda downtime activity RAW.