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I just ran my party through a chase in the second book of Fist of the Ruby Phoenix. It was fun, tense, and pretty well balanced but there was one major issue that jumped out to my players, and it feels like a fairly common one in the various Victory Point systems outside of social/influence encounters.
First the good: Things moved quickly so we could get through many rounds in not a lot of time. The pacing of required points for each obstacle compared to the DCs for harder and easier obstacles felt really good for the party. It was refreshing for some DCs to feel like "hey, we can crit that, maybe twice this round!" vs "This one is tough, do we have any spells/consumables we can throw at this for a guaranteed point?" That really kept the different sections of the chase fresh and kept the players creative.
The "this feels like it could be better" stuff: Rolling a D4+2 for each other team in the race/chase, no matter what obstacle was being faced, no matter the average level of the other team made it feel like player's team was just racing a set of dice, and not unique other teams that they have been interacting with now for a book and a half of adventuring. Like one of the teams is at least one level behind the party and yet was able to fly through an obstacle with very high DCs (that the party really struggled with) when the party knew that no one in that team had the skills to do well with the challenge. This happens with a number of the VP systems in APs I have seen that (as an adventure writer myself) I understand why it happens, but it feels like pre-written adventures could probably take care of for GMs and make a little smoother.
Which gets to the rub: So many of the rules of the game are written almost explicitly for combat encounter mode, from activities to the feats that modify them, that players are almost always hoping that every aspect of the game can take place at that pace, even if they realize that for many kinds of encounters, that leads to incredibly slow, monotonous play, that almost certainly falls apart because dice will be dice and a D20 means that even one party that is good at stealth is going to raise the alarm eventually in a infiltration encounter, or a party with a lot of face skills is going to upset someone in a social encounter...things the VP system is really good at fixing (specifically letting entire chapters of an adventure/scene rest exclusively on one die roll).
So for example with this race/chase in the second book of the Fist of the Ruby Phoenix: We get an entire, detailed stat block for each character on each team, that gets used multiple times for various other encounters in the book...but none of that rich detail informs any of the VP systems used in the book. As a GM, it would have been really cool in advance if each team even had different dice to roll, or penalties and bonuses for each obstacle based on the skills of their team. That would have been additional work, for sure, which is why as a GM, I didn't do it myself, especially as I didn't realize it would play a factor until we were basically in the Chase and I would have been having to do all of it on the fly...but it doesn't feel like it would take up a lot more page space to add a section to each obstacle stat block telling us what teams would get bonuses or maluses navigating through them. That is work that feels like it could be done on the front end of adventure writing that would really help GMs sell these VP systems in play without significantly slowing things down.
I guess the trick to this suggestion is that specifically applies to this one "Big Race" style chase encounter, but wouldn't necessarily apply well to every kind of chase encounter, so how valuable is it to spend time thinking about this? I just know my players always tend to get skeptical when I say "this is going to be resolved with a VP system" and then their eyes gloss over when I am trying to explain how the rules will work for this specific encounter, that fly in the face of how they have spent months thinking about their character, and so when there is an opportunity to add more logical narrative connective tissue between the general game mechanics and the specific VP subsystem, it could go a long way to selling its value to the players.
What do you all think?
Caveat 1: My tables and I tend to play slow so I haven't read deeply into Curtain Call yet. Some of this might already be happening.
Slight aside, but is this the
My party is going to do the first one next session and this is useful stuff to think about for when I prep for it.
Slight aside, but is this the ** spoiler omitted **
My party is going to do the first one next session and this is useful stuff to think about for when I prep for it.
First one.
So it is all fun and games at this point, and there should be a decent chance of losing, since the stakes are low.
Creative Director
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We've had years more practice at integrating Victory Point type stuff into Adventure Paths since Fist of the Ruby Phoenix; that feedbak's great, but I'd love to hear some similar feedback from more recent Adventure Paths that use this stuff. Curtain Call is a great example; with that one's focus away from lots of combat, I ended up using all sorts of Victory Point style rubrics for encounters there.
We've had years more practice at integrating Victory Point type stuff into Adventure Paths since Fist of the Ruby Phoenix; that feedbak's great, but I'd love to hear some similar feedback from more recent Adventure Paths that use this stuff. Curtain Call is a great example; with that one's focus away from lots of combat, I ended up using all sorts of Victory Point style rubrics for encounters there.
I am glad to hear that, and am sorry that my play speed can’t keep up with y’all’s publication schedule. I have held off on reading curtain call yet because I may get a chance to play it, but it sounds like you are on top of continuing to improve the VP system usage. As I come across them I will do my best to keep providing feedback.
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The "this feels like it could be better" stuff: Rolling a D4+2 for each other team in the race/chase, no matter what obstacle was being faced, no matter the average level of the other team made it feel like player's team was just racing a set of dice, and not unique other teams that they have been interacting with now for a book and a half of adventuring. Like one of the teams is at least one level behind the party and yet was able to fly through an obstacle with very high DCs (that the party really struggled with) when the party knew that no one in that team had the skills to do well with the challenge. This happens with a number of the VP systems in APs I have seen that (as an adventure writer myself) I understand why it happens, but it feels like pre-written adventures could probably take care of for GMs and make a little smoother.
I had the same issue, for that reason. A couple of the teams shouldn't be nearly as good at this as they are, especially compared to the teams with skillsets more suited to it.
Additionally, d4+2 can easily be more than the party can actually get even if they all succeed, and I have a hard time believing that some of the other teams have multiple members critically succeeding on these challenges regularly. Hell, even a 1 on the dice is still more than the party will get if they hit a challenge that is particularly ill-suited for them or just have an unlucky dice round.
d4+2 felt less bad in the party of 5 players, but is absolutely punishing for the standard 4 players if you roll big numbers. Just a straight d6 would feel better, since other teams can actually have a bad round just like the players can.
I tweaked it for each team/challenge just by applying a different modifier. ie: Team is particularly ill-suited to this challenge? That d4+2 is now d4-1. The weaker team just flat out had a lower modifier all the time.
Aside from that, I agree that there's definitely more room to use the team's unique abilities here to make this somewhat more interesting to run, but it also needs to be simple enough on the GM that you don't slow the pace down. One of the things I like about chases in PF2 is that they feel fast-paced and I wouldn't want to lose that.
(Amusingly, in one of my two campaigns, the lowest level team won the first time. That was a combination of good luck and everyone ignoring them while the PCs and their rival team actively interfered with each other.
In the second campaign, they were big into gambling and had an NPC place a bet that they would get disqualified... and then deliberately got disqualified. Said NPC pocketed the profit and disappeared "as seeing us together would arouse suspicion." ;) )
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We've had years more practice at integrating Victory Point type stuff into Adventure Paths since Fist of the Ruby Phoenix; that feedbak's great, but I'd love to hear some similar feedback from more recent Adventure Paths that use this stuff. Curtain Call is a great example; with that one's focus away from lots of combat, I ended up using all sorts of Victory Point style rubrics for encounters there.
New to posting here but have been running AP's professionally for a while. I like subsystems a lot. It's something I appreciate about PF2e. I like crunch! And putting rules to chases and infiltrations and influence encounters equips the GM to offer players real agency that rewards character choices and feels fair and meaningful.
That said... you're starting to do too many of them. I've gotten complaints from players about Seven Dooms having too many for a dungeon delve. They want to head back to the Pit and hear me say, "Roll initiative!" rather than another exposition on how the mechanics of this next Research challenge works. I'm currently prepping Triumph of the Tusk. Love the story, but I'm going to have to tone down the subsystems. I think the chase and the infiltration are central and meaningful in Book 1 of that AP. Everything else is extraneous and distracting.
So my input as a devoted Pathfinder GM who regularly purchases your AP content is to moderate the subsystem usage a little bit.
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We've had years more practice at integrating Victory Point type stuff into Adventure Paths since Fist of the Ruby Phoenix; that feedbak's great, but I'd love to hear some similar feedback from more recent Adventure Paths that use this stuff. Curtain Call is a great example; with that one's focus away from lots of combat, I ended up using all sorts of Victory Point style rubrics for encounters there.
I'm critical of the research subsystem in curtain call, wasn't super interesting as a game system. Story was great but would rather less math.
