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I am curious how many other GMs have made much use of the Research Subsystem, especially as it has been developed in the GM core?
I am guessing not many, although it is something getting more and more baked into APs, so maybe (hopefully?) that will be something changing over the next couple of years.
I am trying to work it into my Shattered Star Conversion in pretty intrinsic and involved ways, and a couple of questions have started to arise:
How do you deal with topics who's "research level" are going to change over the course of a long running campaign?
Like do you just set a really high level for the research task as a whole? And then maybe have some early libraries that just have much lower research DCs than the task would otherwise require?
I am guessing the "correct" way to run it is to divide the research topic up into multiple smaller research topics that will run a gambit of levels, but something about that structure feels like it is just making more work for itself than necessary. Is it a big deal for libraries to have levels instead of (or as well as) the Research Topic? What would be the issue with doing so?
Secondly (and probably relatedly), I am thinking about trying to tie secondary value to the research beyond the direct information learned at each threshold. My primary idea for this is to have a list of things players can spend their research points after they have been earned (not losing their total research done, but just to turn the points themselves into a spendable resource). So for example, if the party spends time researching the Runelord Krune in the process of their adventuring, then in addition to reaching certain research thresholds for knowledge that will help advance the plot of the adventure, they can spend their research points on things like: learning uncommon and rare spells that would fit in that Runelord's school; get formula for items they might want to make; unlocking archetypes; forging connections with NPCs in the local settlement and gaining boons from helping those NPCs level up their locations.
Is there any obvious issues with this that I am just not thinking about that I can catch before falling too far down this rabbit hole?
Also, have your tables had fun with research? why or why not?
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I am curious how many other GMs have made much use of the Research Subsystem, especially as it has been developed in the GM core?
I haven't used that one specifically, but it looks like a fairly standard Victory Point system variant. So take my thoughts on this with that in mind.
I am trying to work it into my Shattered Star Conversion in pretty intrinsic and involved ways, and a couple of questions have started to arise:
How do you deal with topics who's "research level" are going to change over the course of a long running campaign?
Victory Point systems are intended as encounters. Not as major campaign arcs. So I would agree with your idea of levels in the library.
However that ends up being represented narratively. It doesn't have to be physical levels of a library, or even a physical library in the traditional sense.
The best analogy that I can think of is Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. You regularly go back to a particular dungeon. The first time you go there, you can't make it very far, but the item that you need is very close to the entrance. When you return with more special powder, you can make it farther into the dungeon and get new plot-relevant items or information that you need.
So something like having particular sections of the library or even specific books that are off-limits when the PCs first encounter the library. Then as they continue the plot, they will get special plot items, additional knowledge, or power of some variety that allows them to access, find, or realize the importance of one or more of these previously off-limits things to research.
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Is there any obvious issues with this that I am just not thinking about that I can catch before falling too far down this rabbit hole?
No, that sounds like a cool idea. A way for PCs to earn access to uncommon/rare things like spells or formulas.
As for balance, you could just give access to the uncommon things for free.
Actually what Finoan is suggesting is something I was veering towards with the ruins under the party's settlement in my campaign.
As the party uncovers more about its nature and finds ciphers/sigils that allow them to interpret and bypass the layers of Jiksa ruins and under that a broken startower they will be able to progress deeper.
in a sense it could be structured as a research subsystem.
Thank you Unicore I really like the ideas you've shared. I dont see many people on these threads sharing ideas as much as they argue.
The party is going to be able to return to dungeon rooms they have already cleared to research murals, statues, laboratories and such, so there are going to be a lot of little different “libraries” over the course of the 6 parts of the AP. I will probably just treat each library as its own unique thing rather than have a level specific research goal overall, I think.
Thank you for the ideas and feedback!
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Strength of Thousands uses the research system a few times. The way it's used is generally "you have X amount of time in this area to try and learn things, and as you accumulate points you get extra info."
I think the best way to handle a campaign long version of this would be to have multiple research locations/opportunities. Each of those is distinct, with a set level/DCs, and how much can be learned from it. That's how the subsystem wants to work and it would be easy to implement.
But for an overarching research goal, take the research points earned at each opportunity and combine them for the overall goal. So as they visit more research locations and do more research, they gradually reveal more about the overall research.
It would indeed be pretty neat if they could spend some of that research on extra things like rare spells. That could also be doable if they exhaust the main research topic's available points but still have time left: let them use that time on another subject. That would be a reward for being effecient, though if they're not time pressed you would have to put a cap on this as well.
Strength of Thousands uses the research system a few times. The way it's used is generally "you have X amount of time in this area to try and learn things, and as you accumulate points you get extra info."
I think the best way to handle a campaign long version of this would be to have multiple research locations/opportunities. Each of those is distinct, with a set level/DCs, and how much can be learned from it. That's how the subsystem wants to work and it would be easy to implement.
But for an overarching research goal, take the research points earned at each opportunity and combine them for the overall goal. So as they visit more research locations and do more research, they gradually reveal more about the overall research.
It would indeed be pretty neat if they could spend some of that research on extra things like rare spells. That could also be doable if they exhaust the main research topic's available points but still have time left: let them use that time on another subject. That would be a reward for being effecient, though if they're not time pressed you would have to put a cap on this as well.
Kind of like if the overall project has a very high DC and each discover lowers it by a certain amount?
Strength of Thousands uses the research system a few times. The way it's used is generally "you have X amount of time in this area to try and learn things, and as you accumulate points you get extra info."
I think the best way to handle a campaign long version of this would be to have multiple research locations/opportunities. Each of those is distinct, with a set level/DCs, and how much can be learned from it. That's how the subsystem wants to work and it would be easy to implement. ...
The first module, Kindled Magic, in Strength of Thousands has a system, Life in the Academy, that features three skills: Study, Cram, and Practical Research--that let the PCs advance along a track named Branch Level to gain extra minor abilities.
I figure that the writers of Kindled Magic had a dilemma. Classwork is boring, so they left it out of the adventure. And the five branches of the Magaambya are important in the lore about the Magaambya, so they ought to include them. Thus, Life in the Academy advances the PCs in their branch using the language of studying for classes.
The players have no obvious opportunities for performing Practical Research until the 3rd module, Hurricane's Howl, in which the PCs have lore-speaker status.
PRACTICAL RESEARCH
The Life in the Academy article starting on page 61 of Pathfinder Adventure Path #169: Kindled Magic details student advancement at the Magaambya, but only hints at post-graduation advancement. Although many lore-speakers teach, and some teach quite a lot, lore-speakers don’t advance in their branch by teaching alone. Primarily, they discover new things for the Magaambya, add new scholarship, or uncover lost knowledge to progress.These are reflected in the catch-all activity “Practical Research.” By the time the heroes get their first opportunity for Practical Research late in this adventure’s first chapter, they should be eager for opportunities to advance in their respective branches, since they aren’t getting those by simply teaching classes.
Heroes first get to perform Practical Research when a student leaves the Magaambya for her family’s village near the ruined city of Bloodsalt. There’s a second Practical Research opportunity in Chapter 3, but whether the heroes discover and recognize it as such is up to them.
There are also individual missions with a research component that require reading several records in the Magaambya libraries. Those are resolved by spending time and making a single skill check. For example, Spoken on the Song Wind has the sentence, "Heroes who perform their own research in the Magaambya’s libraries and archives should attempt a DC 20 Arcana or Occultism check."
My own players wanted their student PCs to attend classes. So I invented 23 courses and 7 seminars. (I am a former university professor.) I adapted the Study and Cram skills into activities to pass their classes. I dropped the Branch Level system and instead give minor perks, such as access to uncommon spells or gifts of 1st-level magic items, for passing classes. I still have not adapted the Practical Research activity. I have time, for we are still in Kindled Magic.
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I haven't really seen any use of the Research rules in PFS so far that I though was particularly adroitly done. (It's pretty rare, to be sure.) It's been used a few times in PFS1, in one case memorably well in The Blakros Connection.
The key issue is that if there's no kind of constraint on how many times you can roll, you can just roll until you're completely done.
The classic way of doing this is giving you a limited number of days to research, but I think more is needed. If you're gonna roll five rolls straight in a row, you might as well just roll once and use a single roll to figure out how well the whole thing went. Throwing dice more often is just busywork then.
To make rolling multiple times actually a useful game mechanic, there needs to be something else. I can think of two things:
1. Interruptions. There are other events happening in between checks. They could be there just for a change of pace, but they could also be related to the topic of the research. For example, the players are in a town that is attacked at night by dangerous undead. Fortunately there's town walls so they're not completely overwhelmed, but at night they need to stand watch. During the day they try to find out what's going on and how to more effectively fight these undead.
2. Pivots. The players might have access to multiple zones in the library, with different topics. After a round of research, they might decide that they should go investigate in a different stack now. Maybe a book in the occult section mentions a historical figure who fought these kind of undead? Next round the players go to the history section to try to look up that person to see how they fought them off.
Both approaches can be combined of course. The first one is interesting because it alters the pacing of the minigame. The second one gives the players more agency, beyond "just try to get complete success on everything"; they get to set priorities and make informed choices.
For instance there's an AP that gives you 10 1-hour chunks to research. That's 40 rolls. With a tiny bit of lore added in small chunks. The first complication comes at around 20-24 successes, I don't recall exactly. That's too many rolls without anything of interest happening. I feel you need "something" interesting happens on average every two rounds -- whether that's a complication (fight/hazard), or a new discovery that unlocks different skills, or possibly a higher pay-off/risk-reward investment, etc.
For a campaign long research project, I think you can have a succession of libraries, with increasing DCs as you find the more obscure/yet relevant ones. If you're tracking RP points globally, some of the higher tier libraries probably should give a bonus if you're below some total to help catch up.
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I have a very minor issue with the research subsystem (and actually the search and investigate activities as well) giving players and GMs no guidance for amount of time spent doing an activity, so if the GM doesn’t explain that in advance players have no idea how much to expect from the return on doing something for an hour vs 30 minutes…but decent GMing mostly alleviates that issue.
The bigger issue I see is that the critical failure results immediately invalidate each other. Unless the GM is not telling PCs how many RP are possible and how many have been earned, getting false information on a critical failure is putting an unfair burden on players and has a high risk of causing conflict about whether the whole party is supposed to go along with a false piece of information or just the player who went astray. My reading of the critical failure result is to pretty much just treat it like -1 RP, but that does result in it only mattering if the party is up against a very close time limit.
It almost seems like it might be better to have a limited number of research checks that can be made instead of research points that can be earned. Edit: Or at least there might be times where it is better to structure a research challenge that way if you are not going to be able to set a specific time limit for narrative reasons, but have reasons not to just let the activity be a diceless, narrative declaration of "you do the research until you learn xyz."
I would buy a book that flushed out each of the subsystems, providing concrete examples of play, more in depth uses, and a section on combining subsystems both within the 3 modes of play and each other.
The timeframe is important like you said. Research is set as an exploration activity but you can easily make it a downtime activity with greater impact on the number of points gained.
You really can have different kinds of research scenes to play out depending on the circumstances and sometimes depending on the approach the players decide to take.
Exploration
- With no time limit - use these for specific information available in the scene that you want them to gain no matter what, the difference will be failing forward in terms of time or other things gainable or npcs influencable or saveable or monsters stopped before escaping to cause havoc elsewhere if its done faster with more successes the party can also accomplish those other objectives. The RP points gained would be tallies at the end and contribute to the campaign long research value which i am assuming is part of progressing your camping story.
- With time limit - here there is not only a sense of urgency but this is information the party can miss out on and still progress the story. Use to give a sense of cheating the curve if they can succeed.
Downtime
- Time limit here would be things like the party has only a few days where an ancient cuiform vase will be on display at a museum. The party chose to use diplomacy to gain time to examine the artefact and succeded so exploration isnt as appropriate to run this part. instead downtime days can now be spent examining the artefact but it will be limited to the time allowed by the good graces of the host.(if they chose infiltration to get to it instead use infiltration rules and the exploration research action)
I think that the lack of time guidance is to allow flexibility. If the party is researching something in a single ancient book, maybe each 'round' is only 10 or 15 minutes.
If they are doing it by going to multiple museums at a place like the Smithsonian, then maybe each 'round' is a day.
Leaving things like that open narratively is, I think, a strength of the system.
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I don't have a problem with the flexibility, I agree that is a good thing. My minor issue around time constraints is that the GM really has to make it clear to the PCs what kind of time frame is available or the PCs can be left in the dark about how "seriously" to dedicate themselves to doing research. Is it better for everyone to make checks, because a time limit is the issue? Or is it better for only the best researcher to make checks and everyone else either aid, or do something else?
Clear GMing alleviates this issue, 100%. And in places like PFS, the instruction for GMs about how to frame subsystem engagement is usually overly explicit. Players will know exactly how many rounds they have and how long each round is. That kind of knowledge usually helps the system run most effectively, but it can feel very gamist and unreal to many players and GMs, so sometimes GMs might be inclined to ask the players how long they intend to look through books in the library or try to record the songs of the ghosts singing in gate house. In those situations it can lead to players wanting to say "we spend enough time to learn everything we possibly can," and that is where it gets tricky for a GM in deciding if this is supposed to really be some kind of research challenge, or if it is just a moment of narrative exposition the players shouldn't really make rolls for.
I think this same problem often happens with searching rooms too, so it isn't just an issue with the research subsystem, and I don't even think a GM would be wrong to never have players roll dice when "we take as long as is necessary" feels like a valid option for players, except that removing most of certain kinds of die rolls from the game can radically change what kind of characters are going to be most successful in that campaign. If you tell your players they are going to be scholars plumbing the depths of an ancient ruins for knowledge about XYZ, and they build characters to be good at investigating, recalling knowledge and discovering mysteries...only to hand wave most of those rolls and only really make moments of tension occur in combat...then you are really running a combat heavy dungeon crawl. Right now, in PF2, it is a lot easier to turn any adventure into a combat heavy dungeon crawl than it is design or ad lib a lot of the non-combat style of encounters because there are so many more examples of combat encounters and books and books of monsters to fight in combat, but only really a handful of examples of anything else, especially if you haven't read the 3 or 4 Adventures that have specifically used these systems more extensively.
But again, I think this is a minor issue for now, because I think some of the subsystems are a little light on the playtesting, development and robustness that will make them easier for more GMs to use in their campaigns. I think that is one of the things that some GMs are reacting negatively to in APs that try to use victory point systems to represent non-combat encounters: The implementation of these subsystems can often feel underdeveloped or unbalanced due to lack of play testing, and that leaves many groups to kind of want to just skip those sections.
Like a research challenge that requires completion before the story can move on, but doesn't really have much at stake for degrees of success between "learn the essential information to proceed" or "don't learn that information and the campaign is over," doesn't really work as anything more than a moment of narrative exposition.
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I like Unicore's thinking here. Just because something is narratively research, doesn't mean you always need to bust out the research minigame.
Just like you don't always need the full-blown Influence rules if really all you're doing is Make An Impression or do a Request or Coerce someone.
Just like you don't really need to put down a map, draw a complex environment, roll initiative for everyone, when the level 5 party is taking out a lone level 1 animal.
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If "roll until we have everything" is an option, it's probably also not a good idea to use these rules. Or if failure is not an option because then the campaign crashes.
So really what you need is stakes where (partial) failure is an option. Suppose the party's bargained for five days (= rounds) of access to the royal library.
- If they need longer, they'll need to ask a favor from a courtier they don't trust/like.
- If they don't earn enough successes themselves, maybe bring in an expensive consultant to buy up the remainder?
- Maybe the key things they need to know are actually easy to find (so somewhere in the first 30% of the average amount of successes you're expecting them to score). So the campaign can almost certainly go on. But extra successes earn extra rewards (items, information about the weakness of a monster they're likely to fight,...)
The way PF2's treasure system is set up, this is a good flexible area to work with. If the players earn more or fewer rewards than average at level 1, they'll be a bit stronger or weaker for a level or so. But by level 3, the relative value of level 1 stuff compared to the loot you're earning at level 3 makes this much less significant.
There's a tendency to put the really interesting information in research challenges at the really high point targets. So maybe if you score a lot of VP you find out the backstory that makes the whole adventure make sense. But I think that's the wrong way around. It's not certain the party will score that adventure, and if the players never get there the adventure won't make sense.
So I'd order the benefits for scoring VP as first story information, then practical goodies.