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This is a follow-up thread to the Revising "Run as Written" thread
An enduring belief of a vocal portion of the community is that Organized Play adventures must be run exactly as written, with absolutely no GM improvisation, deviation, or correction of obvious errors. This is, quite simply, incorrect, and I would like to see the community actively work to excise this thinking.
So that quote got me wondering just how far have people pushed not "Run as Written"? while still following the rules. So this is more about changing up the appearance or feel of a scenario while still running it within the organized play rules. I think changing up repeatable can really help make them more interesting. Before getting into PF2e and SF1e I played D&D and several other TTRPGS for over 40 years and 90% of those were all homebrew games, so homebrewing is something I miss when playing organized play, but Alex's statement above I think gives me enough room to find a nice in-between.
So I'm looking for examples of how others have changed up their scenarios. I'll start off with an example of a game I played in as a player that I think would not be recognizable to others who had played the same scenario.
Would it turn any heads if I said Starfinder Society Scenario #6-03: Project Dawn is my favorite music-themed scenario? A Record store, a concert t-shirt, and song lyrics ended up being used in over half of the encounters or skill checks.
So curious to see how others have changed up scenarios or added a new appearance or feel to them, either preplanned or spontaneous as a reaction to what the PCs did.
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I'm trying to understand the limits of what adjustments can be made to a scenario. For example let's say I want to run Acts of Association, I have picked to make a custom Ambassador who is an aquatic species and wants to visit the Puddles for some part of the tour.
Since the THEATORIUM encounter is non-combat I don't see a problem with moving it underwater. A map isn't even really needed but making a custom map for it would be just to add to the atmosphere. So I'm thinking this would be allowed?
The PET HUNTING encounter, the squoxes could be reskinned to some underwater species with all the skill checks staying the same, The potential combat in this encounter could happen after the PCs leave the water. An altered map would be needed to appear underwater and have a place out of the water if combat happens, but both parts of the encounter would be mechanically the same, so should be ok? Optionally the whole encounter could take place in shallow water the PCs can just wade through using the original map layout.
The IN TRANSIT encounter is a combat encounter, using the underwater combat rules would alter the encounter too much, so would not allowed?
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When I first ran Acts of Association I though random humanoid dignitary meant using any playable species in Starfinder. Rereading the rules for making a random humanoid dignitary it looks like the GM is free to make up a new species and location.
"When selecting a random humanoid dignitary, create the dignitary’s
name, species, personality, and home world. The dignitary should
be humanoid, with some differences such as size, physical
appearance, number of appendages, etc. Use the humanoid races
in the Starfinder Alien Archives volumes for inspiration.
The dignitary’s home world should be a planet in the Vast that is
not currently described in the setting. Make up a name and a brief
description of its civilization."
So that differently lets the GM have some fun homebrewing. Are there any other scenarios that let the GM do similar things?
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I'm certainly testing the water to find the limits, which example or part of an example do you think there is a problem with?
Scenario #6-03: Project Dawn was run as written as far as I can tell. It turned into a music theme adventure after one of the players asked to buy a local concert t-s~!% and local music to fit in with the locals, the GM said sure you find a local record store, the GM made up a name for a local band and linked them to a real band that we used lyrics from. Both players and the GM still reference the band and songs from that mission.
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2 of my 3 ideas for reskinning some encounters in Acts of Association fit in with the guidelines.
GMs must:
- Ensure players experience all major plot points and NPC interactions (excluding optional or bypassed encounters)
- Maintain the presence and functioning of skill checks, subsystems and similar - challenges, while allowing for creative player solutions
- Run combat encounters without deliberately increasing difficulty, except as dictated by the scenario
One of the combat encounter ideas would increase difficulty due to the underwater combat rules so doesn't work, but everything else should fit in.
GMs may:
- Adjust obvious typos or errors in a scenario
- Use alternate maps (or areas of provided maps) for encounters
- Reskin enemies to avoid phobias or for personal preference without altering mechanical traits
I would need to alter the map's appearance but not the layout to make it appear underwater.
At the THEATORIUM employees and customers would be reskinned to aquatic species or in Starfinder anyone with armor with environmental protection so almost everyone.
In The PET HUNTING encounter, the squoxes are reskinned as aqua-squoxes
GMs must not:
- Change player-facing armor, feats, items, skills, spells, statistics, traits, or weapons, or any other mechanics of player character options
- Disallow legal character options
- Add new encounters or NPCs with mechanical weight or influence
All the plot points are met, the only NPC changes are reskinning, maps have similar layouts just different environmental flavors, and The presence and functioning of skill checks, subsystems, and similar - challenges, while allowing for creative player solutions, are all maintained.
Only the IN TRANSIT encounter wouldn't work underwater do to the changes in combat rules. It might work in shallow water, the puddles don't necessarily have to be fully submerged to feel like you are in the puddles arm of Adsalom Station.
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My 3rd post about random humanoid dignitary is a direct quote from Acts of Association, other than needing to use the provided stat block for the random humanoid dignitary, I read that as making up your own species and planet.
"When selecting a random humanoid dignitary, create the dignitary’s
name, species, personality, and home world. The dignitary should
be humanoid, with some differences such as size, physical
appearance, number of appendages, etc. Use the humanoid races
in the Starfinder Alien Archives volumes for inspiration.
The dignitary’s home world should be a planet in the Vast that is
not currently described in the setting. Make up a name and a brief
description of its civilization."
Contributor
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Hmm raises hand.
I'll admit that I have pushed the Run as Written rules. I've added shops when players said they were looking for them, let them have a conversation with a villager, and then brought the game back on track. As for the game that you're discussing, so long as you're not forcing underwater combat rules on folks, the rest of your changes sound on track to me for that particular scenario, which was designed to let you customize it to the Ambassador.
It reminds me of flavor changes I've made in the past. Perhaps the most egregious was for the Free RPG Day that occurred right before the launch of SF1.
We had no Starfinder Adventure to run for Free RPG Day. All we had was a Starfinder Bestiary. So I made the decision to push the map substitution rule and run...
Instead of crashed pirate ship in the swamp, I had a crashed shirren ship. Where there were goblin heads on spikes, I had goblin heads on spikes with laser eyes! Instead of a crazed horse, I had a crazed robotic horse that kept calling out 'Exterminate!' as it charged.
But hey... I posted about my idea in advance, and several Paizo employees gave me advice for more SF tropes to throw on for fun.
Mechanically, the adventure was 100% We Be Goblins stat blocks and plot points - but emotionally, it was the Starfinder intro that I was looking to provide to my players.
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The most egregious example I can think of off hand was in PFS1 days with the module Murder's Mark.
I greatly expanded on the Carnival aspect, inventing whole new attractions from whole cloth. I ran it 3 or 4 times and every time at least the entire first session was just spent interacting with the carnival and NOT advancing the plot.
But I knew the players fairly well and was able (at least I thought I was able :-)) to read them reasonably well. They all seemed to be having lots of fun.
And I'd warned the players ahead of time that it was likely to take 4 sessions instead of 3 and to let me know if I was overdoing things and they were getting bored.
Like many GMs I've also basically cheated from time to time. I'll hasten to add that I almost always did it to help the characters and to avoid TPKs due to some over tuned monster, especially when GMing for newbies.
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Contributor
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Heh, come to think of it, my Murders Mark (of Crows) was a bit egregious, too. But I 100% stand by the quality of that game!
Hmm
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Heh, come to think of it, my Murders Mark (of Crows) was a bit egregious, too. But I 100% stand by the quality of that game!
Hmm
It was a great game, no doubt about that
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We are playing Age of Worms as a PF1e conversion. Our GM substituted an entire dungeon in one of the AoW chapters because, many years back in their homebrewed campaign, they actually lifted that dungeon and used a modified version of it as a standalone.
I have no idea if we would have remembered it because that's going back about 17 years or more, but I understand the concern.
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We had no Starfinder Adventure to run for Free RPG Day. All we had was a Starfinder Bestiary. So I made the decision to push the map substitution rule and run...
This makes me want to make new pregens to be able to run
This would be a great chance to use LFAN Symbiosis with 4 Raxllites. However, converting a tiny SF1e species with only 2 hp into PF2e might be hard to balance.
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I think the furthest I ever pushed it was one scenario that had a lot of thematic set up, but then just had random people show up out of nowhere to be a combat. Think 13th warrior vikings in arabia level random. I kept their stats the same but had them be weirdly time displaced people from the scenario, because running into the still living version of dead guy's body in the hallway still wasn't as weird as the random people that showed up to fight. Especially since there was a time warping doohickey in the scenario.
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Now that SF2e scenarios are both shorter and all of them are repeatable, I think this topic is even more relevant now.
Shorter scenarios are a good place to try to find ways to make them run a bit longer.
Repeatable scenarios are a good place to look for ways to make running them over and over more interesting. Which also makes playing in the over and over more interesting.
Another reason could just be to add a bit of your personal touch to it.
I have a couple of strategies for doing this.
1. Look for ways to extend existing encounters, especially social interactions with NPCs in the scenario. , the event host interviews the PCs before the start of the race. So I had him also do some interviews before, during, or after each race task.
2. Add something that plays along with the scenario but doesn't change things. In The Great Absalom Relay race, the GM tracks points for how fast the PCs did each race task, to see who wins the race. It's really hard for the PCs to win the race, which is a charity event. So I added a tracking system for how many donations the team brought in from views after each task, which in turn gave the host more to talk about, too. When I ran, the PCs didn't win the race, but they did raise the most donations, which feels good but doesn't affect the outcome of the scenario in any way.
3. Make a fun recurring NPC that's always courious about what the CPs have done recently or about the PCs' current mission. I'm now doing this as a friendly NPC that keeps sneaking aboard the PCs' ship as a stowaway. When the NPC finds out the PCs are not going to where they wanted to go, the NPC jumps ship when another ship passes by. This is also good when traveling by ship is just a way to get from point A to B.
4. Add something to the end of the scenario. I think this is a good time to add some completely new, after all the scenario objections are done and the PCs are just returning to report in. In Starfinder, this could even be in combat in a virtual simulation, so there are no consequences. You could have the players race back to the lodge or the lore spire and run it as a chase.
5. Let the players act out their downtime. In a play-by-post game, one of the other players at the end of the game gave all the PCs tickets to their team's next Brutaris game. All the other players roleplayed their reactions at the game. We kept the game going that way for 2 days after the GM was finished.
Those are some of my ideas and strategies for making games run longer, I'm courious to hear other people's ideas and strategies.
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I am old school with regards to "run as written". I see the adventures needing to feel as similar as possible for each group of players. Adding encounters is a no-no. Removing an encounter, or reducing its importance, is ok if time constraints are in play.
This is a hard one to answer. With all adventures becoming repeatable, and the adventures so short that alternatives are not built into the scensrio, I fear that this are going to become stale for players and GMs after the adventure is played multiple times.
This is for organized play adventures. Modules are ran in "campaign mode" and thus can have whatever the GM wants provided the main points are covered.
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I am old school with regards to "run as written". I see the adventures needing to feel as similar as possible for each group of players. Adding encounters is a no-no. Removing an encounter, or reducing its importance, is ok if time constraints are in play.
Nothing wrong with wanting to "run as written".
From a player's perspective, all the games I've played in that were rushed and had to be hand-waved to get done in time felt bad, or at least not as fun as a normal game. I have a lot of respect for GMs who can look at the time and, on the fly, make a decision on what to handwave, and then have the game finish just in time, but a rushed game is still a rushed game. I feel it's less "run as written" to have to rush and leave parts out than it is to finish the scenario, then it is to have spare time, and find something for the players to do to make the game session longer (within guidelines, of course).
This is a hard one to answer. With all adventures becoming repeatable, and the adventures so short that alternatives are not built into the scensrio, I fear that this are going to become stale for players and GMs after the adventure is played multiple times.
It's hard to answer because there is no one right answer. Which is why I think sharing ideas and examples from the best games helps. Also, some scenarios are easier to do this with than others. So no solution fits all scenarios.
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My whole point of buying APs and not making something up from scratch is I don't want to do that kind of work and trust professional writers to write better than I do. Thus I go out of my way to not go "off script".
That said sometimes it is inevitable, usually a strong desire by the group. When my group got tired by so many fights in Age Of Ashes, I removed fights and swapped to milestone leveling. That was an easy one. It was negative work really.
I've changed a dungeon layout once. I am sorry, the writing was good, but the architectural design was atrocious. Thats the furthest I've gone "off script".
Most changes are adding and changing items. Like, oh this fight was hard but there is no reward. Lets add some gold for the PCs' trouble; or oh there is a staff in the next chest, but it isn't for anyone's tradition, lets swap that real fast.
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Venture-Agent, Minnesota—Minneapolis
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APs don’t have the same requirements as Society adventures. The Mode of Play section of the guide explains this.
I do tend to run as close to the script as I can. Can’t say that I can recall any instances where I really pushed the rules.
APs are a very different thing. Running Agents of Edgewatch, my players had to patrol the beach and docks for a day. If my anime can have beach and spa episodes, I see no reason that I can’t bring it into a Roleplaying game. I also changed around one of the investigation segments to make it much more of a sandbox adventure. I felt it was way too linear and railroaded in the AP so I changed things around there.
Neither of those changes would be appropriate for a Society adventure. I made mechanical changes and added encounters not in the AP. They would still be within the bounds for “Adventure Mode”. Since it was Agents of Edgewatch, it didn’t matter any ways as that AP is not sanctioned.