A few years ago, when a long campaign ended, my group decided to run some PFS adventures. It was definitely "disorganized play", but a rich supply of one-shots at a variety of levels allowed us to rotate game masters before the next campaign.
The adventures were fun, well designed and served our purpose, but it always feels like I am missing a big part of the story. I've read the Player's Guide to PFS and a fair amount of Golarion lore, but it feels incomplete.
The Meta:
From the marketing blurbs, forum posts etc., I know that there is an over-arching story for a season. Some of the adventures are marked as being part of the meta story. How many of the "marked meta" adventures do you need to play to see the arc? Should you or do you have to run them in order?
Character arsenal:
As a player, do you need multiple characters at different tiers to be able to play enough adventures to see the arc?
Past meta:
Is there a place to read up on the history of past seasons without reading all of the adventures? Each adventure feels like I am starting Breaking Bad halfway through Season 4 and nobody wants to explain what is going on.
Role-playing opportunities:
For obvious reasons, the railroad is very rigid or else you wouldn't be able to reliably run sessions in four hours. As a player, do you feel like your character still has personality, agency and room for growth? Or do you have to sacrifice a lot of that so the format works?
Venture-Captain, Nebraska—Bellevue
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Welcome to organized play. It's going to feel different than a home game where you play with the same players every time. But its still a lot of fun and a great way to meet other players.
Think of it like episodes of Star Trek. Each episode stands alone in that four hour block. Your character still grows and evolves, but the other characters you meet will change.
There are ongoing stories, but honestly, I wouldn't worry about those as a new player. You'll grow into those stories as your character(s) do.
You character is a semi-independent member of the Pathfinder Society. Every so often you're asked to accomplish a task with a group of other members who happen to be available at the time. Your character's personal story is different from those around you. But that's OK. It's your story.
Personally, some of my characters have more personality than others. But building them over time is part of the fun and I don't think I sacrifice personality or growth. Hope this helps.
Contributor
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Welcome to our community, Keeper!
Some context: I have been in Organized Play over a dozen years now. It's my primary RPG outlet other than two Adventure Path games that have a somewhat sporadic schedule. I am a story-based GM and player who roleplays my characters to the hilt, and who loves building working relationships with other player characters over time, and I love PFS.
You won't get the same characters week after week, but chances are with local play that you will get to know many of the PCs of fellow regulars. You can greet them and say, "Ah, Grog, I see that you and your trusty boar, Tiny, are here to defend us again! Wonderful!"
The story and metaplot is best taken in individual episodes. Some metaplots cannot be played by the same character all the way through without serious pre-planning. In Season 5 of PF2, the Equal Exchanges Meta Plot played over four very different level ranges with no overlap, so it was more an ongoing story for the player rather than the PC. But that is okay. You are an adventurer traveling the world, and the adventures you complete become part of your individual story. My characters have grown and changed in PFS, and I've loved each of their weird journeys.
★ --- ★ --- ★ --- ★
PFS came at a time when I was ready to give up on gaming. I was tired of dysfunctional gaming groups where everyone was out for their own thing and there was no real plot except killing creatures and taking their stuff.
Then my boyfriend, Bret, tried out a game of PFS at Convergence. He liked it. He started telling me about the Pathfinder Society with their missions, and their tenets of ‘Don’t be a jerk’ and ‘Explore, Cooperate, Report!’ After a month or so, he asked me if I would like to try it. So I read the Season Six PFS guide cover to cover, and joined him in our first paired build. We came up with Omar and Zahra Senay, a Keleshite couple from Katapesh that just wants to travel everywhere and help everyone. We played PFS1 Trial by Machine, a deadly scenario for a bunch of first timers just starting out... Still, the group we were in showed teamwork and perseverance, and we all came out alive and with the mission accomplished. I was hooked.
Soon, I was GMing my own games... Not just in person, but also through a new medium that I had never tried before, Play-by-Post. (If you are looking for story and roleplay, Play-by-Post is slow but awesome for allowing you to sink into a character and a story like you never have before.) I became a regular on these boards, where I started to get to know the folks who were organizing games like I was. To my surprise, I loved just about everyone I met through PFS, so I started reaching out more and more to the community that had brought me joy.
PFS has brought me a community of friends that I love and respect, and given me a chance to know people from all over the globe, as well as those from my favorite local stores in Minnesota. The PFS community brought me laughter and happiness.
I hope your own journey brings you similar joy!
Hmm
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Contributor
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Also, if you are looking for more information on the backstory of the Society, there is a blurb on the Pathfinder Society Page that you can find by scrolling all the way down. It's called THE STORY SO FAR.
I found it a bit bare-bones, but it does cover the story of the different meta plots of each season.
Hmm
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I've been playing PFS since S7 of 1E, Starfinder since partway through Season 1 (it took a while to get traction in our area), and PFS 2E since its inception. Like Hmm, it's been my primary RPG outlet for most of that time. Even my home gaming group tends to favor scenarios and APs that earn us organized play credit these days.
I have a fairly large stable of characters for each of those campaigns, but there's usually only a handful of them that see regular play at any given time.
In the most recent seasons of PFS, the metaplot has been broken into short arcs of 2 or 3 scenarios that each tell discreet parts of the season's overall story. That helps make the metaplot more accessible to all players, both the long-time veterans and the newbies who know none of the back story yet.
As Hmm said, there are many opportunities for roleplaying and character development. At times, you might have tone down some of the theatrics in order to keep the pace of the game on track, but if you can inject some fun color without significantly delaying game play, by all means embrace that!
Nearly every venue will have some regular players whose characters you will get to know over time, and depending on scheduling and the scenario, you may even be able to coordinate with them to play certain combinations of characters who work well together--or who are just fun to play off each other. My wife and I have created at least one set of characters who only adventure together, because they're built to be partners, but we and other regular locals also have several characters who are old companions simply because they've always been playing at the same tier together most of their careers. (At the other end of the spectrum, conventions are a rare treat because we get to play with very different folks, which is its own kind of fun.)
Hmm makes a good point about PbP offering a way to inject more roleplaying into the experience, without the time pressures of a live game. There's more time to think about developing your character's style and mannerisms, their likes and dislikes, and how they interact with the world. And even if you know a character pretty well, you might discover something surprising because of the opportunities to pause and reflect. (I had a 12th-level Starfinder character whose lovelife I'd never really thought about in all the time I'd played her, when suddenly she meets a new and unusual NPC who made her go, "Oh, so that's what I like." She didn't pursue the NPC in any way--that would have distracted from the mission and potentially could have been very awkward, both IC and OOC--but it definitely informed her interest in that conversation and attitude toward the NPC. And it was one more note to file away for future roleplaying.)
Finally, welcome, and I hope you find the kind of game experience you're looking for!
Thank you, everybody.
I have been PFS and SFS curious for many years due to the challenge of getting five adults in a room for four hours, but none of my FLGSs host them. Magic the Gathering and Hasbro's Pathfinder-knockoff are the only choices if there are any.
I will re-invigorate my search.
