Venture-Lieutenant, Oregon—Portland
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I feel like I've overlooked something obvious for the infiltration. I can't fine any number of infiltration points the party has to achieve, which implies to me they have to overcome every obstacle. For a group of 4, with 2 individual obstacles and 6 group obstacles, they need to earn a total of 26 IP to finish and it will take a minimum of 5 rounds or so. That means they're going to hit 4 Awareness Points no matter what.
The subsystem rules recommend infiltration failure at twice the number of required IP. But this scenario has the infiltration failing at 10 Awareness Points. Unless they roll nearly all crits and no failures, the infiltration seems destined to fail. My players failed it when I recently ran this. What am I overlooking?
I also felt like I needed a flowchart for this at times. The quiet/high alert path had one encounter, unless they had avoided high alert, in which case they could sneak and would then use the encounter from the quick path.
I really loved that the players got to make choices early that significantly changed the encounters they faced. But with 35 pages of stat blocks it was a lot.
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Alright, I keep looking for some adjustment to the battle D1 Zombies About Town on the Quick route for High Alert. There does not appear to be any adjustment for this.
The Quiet Path (D3) has one last check using Stealth and if they make that they rescue everyone and then do the battle D1 (same as Loud route, but no time pressure).
I also don’t see anything modifying battle D2 or D4 for High Alert. Since the boss was hidden that seems somewhat reasonable.
Did I miss something?
Venture-Agent, Ohio—Columbus
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I see the same thing you’re seeing. I don’t see a reason for D2 (quick, assessed at Moderate) to be easier than D4 (quiet, assessed as Severe). I definitely can see having D4 (high alert) be harder than both the other variations, but they didn’t make any adjustment there. Seems like a missed opportunity. D3 high alert is substantially harder to complete without losing TBs, maybe they thought that was punishment enough.
I think they had some good ideas for this one, but the execution didn’t quite come out right.
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Venture-Agent, Ohio—Columbus
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It occurred to me a couple days ago why this infiltration has been bothering me so much. In addition to having either omitted instructions to only run a subset of obstacles rather than all OR wildly misunderstanding the relationship between Awareness Points and Infiltration Points (and an appropriate balance point between the two), the designer seems to fundamentally misunderstand the concept of individual and group obstacles in the infiltration subsystem. Every single obstacle should have been listed as an individual obstacle rather than group obstacle, as they are things that each PC has to overcome (though they might need/receive help, I discuss this later). There are no obstacles like a door needing unlocked or a trap needing disarmed, which are examples of group obstacles.
Group obstacles are things that only have to be overcome once by anyone in the group. The obstacles in this scenario are all things requiring EACH PC to do things (swim across a rushing river, climb up or down things, sneak from here to there). In the framework of the Infiltration subsystem, these are individual obstacles. The infiltration system does make allowances for team members helping each other with the Smooth the Path opportunity (pg 198 GMC):
Smooth The Path
Opportunity
Requirements The PC has successfully completed an individual objective and some other PCs have not.
Having completed your objective, you help an ally who is still trying to reach that goal. Describe how you are helping. This gives the ally the benefits of Following the Expert (Player Core 438). In unusual cases, the GM might allow you to attempt a relevant skill check to overcome the obstacle on behalf of the other PC instead.
You might say, “why can’t successes at a group obstacle represent the efforts of the entire group to get everyone in the group through the obstacle, after all that’s how chase obstacles work”, and you wouldn’t be wrong. I have two responses to that, firstly hold that thought for a paragraph or two, and secondly anytime you reference a preexisting game mechanic, but then utilize it in ways not consistent with that mechanic, you encourage misunderstanding of the mechanic and cause confusion down the road. I can’t imagine Paizo wants to encourage that sort of thing.
The infiltration subsystem really is an extremely versatile system. The possible addition of PC preparations, edge points, varied types of complications and awareness thresholds, not to mention the option to choose from different paths to accomplish the same goal, can make for a robust and interesting set piece. However, it is understandable that the designer of a PFS scenario might not want to make full use of all the options offered by the infiltration system. It is understandable that they might want to make the skill challenges more cooperative without having to add the complexity of the Smooth the Path opportunity or other means of a PC assisting other PCs. PFS scenarios need to be succinct due to the nature of many store and convention venues and teamwork should be encouraged. A simpler skill subsystem that measures the group’s progress rather than individual already exists…the chase subsystem.
I suspect the designer looked at the names of these two subsystems and decided infiltration seemed like a better fit for the theme of the “quiet” path, and so used it without fully understanding how it works. However, the framework of the chase subsystem comes much closer to what the designer seems to have been trying to accomplish. And just because the NAME of the subsystem implies haste and bluster doesn’t mean it can’t be flavored as a quiet and deliberate process.
I’m not saying that the designer was wrong to use infiltration, it certainly could have worked with some tweaks. But, as presented, the skill challenge poses problems. The overall difficulty of the challenge is way too high (26 IP to succeed while failing at 10 AP), which is what started this discussion in the first place, and the mislabeling of group/individual obstacles will only foster more confusion down the road for GMs, especially inexperienced ones.
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Alright, I keep looking for some adjustment to the battle D1 Zombies About Town on the Quick route for High Alert. There does not appear to be any adjustment for this.
The Quiet Path (D3) has one last check using Stealth and if they make that they rescue everyone and then do the battle D1 (same as Loud route, but no time pressure).
I also don’t see anything modifying battle D2 or D4 for High Alert. Since the boss was hidden that seems somewhat reasonable.
Did I miss something?
If you are high alert you use D3 instead of D1 is my take on it.
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If you are high alert you use D3 instead of D1 is my take on it.Alright, I keep looking for some adjustment to the battle D1 Zombies About Town on the Quick route for High Alert. There does not appear to be any adjustment for this.
The Quiet Path (D3) has one last check using Stealth and if they make that they rescue everyone and then do the battle D1 (same as Loud route, but no time pressure).
I also don’t see anything modifying battle D2 or D4 for High Alert. Since the boss was hidden that seems somewhat reasonable.
Did I miss something?
D3 is labeled QUIET/HIGH ALERT: D3. THE ROT, AWARE
Because it was labeled Quiet I thought it was only used on the Quiet path, not the Quick path.
Although it goes against the section labels, I think you might be right about using D3 in place of D1 if High Alert is active.
The things that makes me think that is
If the parties have remained on the Quick path without causing High Alert, The Heartwood Rots has not had time to gather many forces. Consequently, the final two encounters are easier.
That makes it fairly clear that D1 is only if they are not in High Alert.
Then you have this at the start of D3.
If the party was detected, or chose to move quietly, instead read or paraphrase the following.
That does indicate this is the path for High Alert.
It really isn’t clear about this and doesn’t follow the pattern they established for the other sections but I can see where this makes sense.
I certainly would have organized it differently.
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But, as presented, the skill challenge poses problems. The overall difficulty of the challenge is way too high (26 IP to succeed while failing at 10 AP), which is what started this discussion in the first place, and the mislabeling of group/individual obstacles will only foster more confusion down the road for GMs, especially inexperienced ones.
This is my concern, I am new to GMing Society Games and currently prepping this scenario to run in a few weeks, but rules as written the infiltration seems almost impossible to pass, so I was wondering if there was some errata out there for it.
Does this qualify as an error in the scenario for the "GMs can: Adjust obvious typos or errors in a scenario" rule on Lorespire? I was debating either ignoring the gaining one Awareness Point automatically each turn if they're expected to pass every obstacle, or lowering the IP threshold of the encounter to 10~12 and letting the players choose which obstacles to try to pass.
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This is my concern, I am new to GMing Society Games and currently prepping this scenario to run in a few weeks, but rules as written the infiltration seems almost impossible to pass, so I was wondering if there was some errata out there for it.Does this qualify as an error in the scenario for the "GMs can: Adjust obvious typos or errors in a scenario" rule on Lorespire? I was debating either ignoring the gaining one Awareness Point automatically each turn if they're expected to pass every obstacle, or lowering the IP threshold of the encounter to 10~12 and letting the players choose which obstacles to try to pass.
I know of no errata for it.
It is an error in how a subsystem was implemented.
Since it makes no mention of increasing awareness every round and that isn’t a required component of the rules, there should be no problem with you not automatically increasing it each round.
As for how to handle the Infiltration, I would think that only requiring about 5 obstacles should still be challenging. The statistical analysis is more complex than I can do without digging out my old statistics textbook, so I’m not sure exactly where the break off is. If we anssume about a 50% chance of success then five obstacles is about where you would expect to get to 10 awareness assuming a 4 character group.
Since you have time, talk to the person hosting about the situation and ask their advice.
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Since it makes no mention of increasing awareness every round and that isn’t a required component of the rules, there should be no problem with you not automatically increasing it each round.
It is an explicit part of the infiltration rules though:
Awareness Points increase in three different ways... a PC fails a check... Awareness Points also increase by 1 at the end of each round of the infiltration... [and] whenever their activities are disruptive enough to draw attention to the infiltration, subject to GM discretion.
Right now I'm leaning towards including the AP auto-increase each round, making the first and last individual checks mandatory (last one definitely since that leads into the next section of the scenario), letting the players choose 3 of the remaining 6 group tasks, and upping the total failure threshold to 20 from 10.
By the guidelines in GM Core, failure should usually be at double the number of IP necessary, so with the above changes that still makes it a little more difficult than a standard infiltration (11 IP vs 20 AP instead of 22 AP) but not requiring basically every roll to be a success or critical success like the printed version.
But, this could all be moot since they might be on a different path and not encounter this at all, lol.
