I like subsystems, and I can tell you why: they are a good way where characters not built for combat get to shine. They are also good ways to add to the story without violence. That's a plus as it gives a GM more tools than just fights to add tension.
I don't see, and I am curious about, why rolling to hit and damage doesn't break immersion, but rolling skill checks does? If anything, I would think it would flip as IMO - and I very well might be wrong here - you have more options as the GM to describe things out of combat.
Like in your fishing example above, I can think of a lot of ways to describe a failure to control a boat.
I also think a GM tracks *less* in a subsystem than one does in a fight. Typically, in a subsystem, you track VP, which almost always works the same way (-1 points for Crit Fail, 0 for Fail, 1 for Success, 2 for Crit Success), and maybe a debuff or two from a fail.
In a fight, you track HPs and conditions on multiple foes, as well as things like Persistent Damage. This can lead to a crazy amount of tracking, though I suppose that's easy to not see if you are using a VTT, as it will do it for you.
As I have not read my front matter for Myth Speakers 1 (I have read the back matter), I can't give an opinion on whether there are too many. I believe, and I could be wrong, that part of Book 1 is games for the equivalent of the Olympics, and in that case, I'd expect a lot of subsystems.
SKT Book 1, Chapter 1, had a lot of subsystems, and they were absolutely needed for the story that chapter was telling. Age of Ashes had very few because they were not needed. It's going to vary by AP, and the book in the AP, and sometimes the chapter of the book.
Adjusting is part of being a GM. As an example, Sky King's Tomb is one of my favorite adventures of all time. But, when I ran it, I cut two fights, for narrative reasons, from Chapter 2 of Book 1, and if I were to run it again, I'd rewrite all of Chapter 3 of Book 1. If you think there are too many subsystem events in Mythspeaker 1, cut the ones that don't support the story that you want to tell with it.
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My general attitude toward subsystems is illustrated by the Caravan Combat Subsystem in The Brinewall Legacy, 1st module of the PF1 adventure path Jade Regent. It replaced the individual player characters fighting against raiders attacking their caravan with some dice rolls that represent the entire caravan fighting back. I did not see the point of teaching them a whole new subsystem so that they don't get to play their characters as designed. So I skipped the Caravan Combat Subsystem and just let their characters fight a few of the raiders directly, telling the players that the rest of the caravan defenders would perform as well or as poorly as they did. Later I read in these forums that the caravan system did not work properly.
The big issue is teaching the subsystem. I own the modules and the players don't. In the days when we gathered in person around around a game-store table, I could hand the module around, but that meant that the players had to memorize the subsystem and then pass the book to another player. These days, we play online via Roll20. I could copy subsystem pages out of the PDF and email them to the players, but technically that is a copyright violation. Paizo and the Archives of Nethys are kind enough to include the Life in the Academy subsystem online for Kindled Magic in Strength of Thousands, but I rewrote that subsystem to include attending classes and having adventures on class field trips.
On the other hand, Paizo writers do invent one-shot subsystems designed for non-combat challenges that are pretty easy to explain. In our last game session, I ran the "Tell a Tale" event in which some PCs participated in a storytelling contest about magical animals. We had two absences that day among our seven players, so it was a good event that we could justify players skipping. The module writer Quinn Murphy invented a special exploration activity for this event:
PRESENT A TALL TAIL
Auditory, Concentrate, Exploration
You present one aspect in your narrative about a meeting with a mystical animal. Each attempt takes 1 minute and requires you to attempt a DC 20 skill check. You can choose between describing the animal (Nature), inventing something supernatural about it (Arcana, Deception, or Occult), recalling past tales about the animal (Society), adding narrative drama (Deception or Performance), or connecting with the audience (Performance). You can’t take any of these options more than twice in the same story.
Critical Success You gain 2 Story Points.
Success You gain 1 Story Point.
Critical Failure You lose 1 Story Point (to a minimum of 0) and can’t retry the option you just attempted, even if you haven’t yet used it twice.
I had some trouble understanding the description of the activity, but I decided--based on the four NPC contestants having earned 7, 5, 4, and 2 Story Points each--that the storyteller gets up to five rolls: one for describing the animal, one for its supernatural powers, one for choosing an animal from familiar folktales, one for drama, and one for exciting the audience--using one of the skills listed. This might be wrong, because the line, "You can’t take any of these options more than twice in the same story," makes no sense in this interpretation, but the bard in the party rolled 8 Story Points, the kineticist and wizard rolled 5 Story Points each, and the rogue rolled 2 Story Points, so their results came out in the right range. (The magus did not participate, and the 2nd bard and the champion were absent.) Weirdly, many of the players' stories were retellings of encounters the party had with animals, but with the animals able to talk.
PRESENT A TALL TAIL was quickly-teachable Victory-Point subsystem and more fun than a single Performance check. I described the five rolls and the player had to give a sentence about the story for each roll. And it fit the Uzunjati storyteller theme of the Magaambya Academy in Strength of Thousands. The magus who skipped the contest was a combat-oriented character who attended the Magaambya Academy to learn to fight better, so the player not wanting to participate fit his character.
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I love a subsystem.
I do understand they aren't all winners, and there is a complexity threshold that can make GMs and players bounce off them.
I played Jade Regent with a revised Caravan system.
I'm running Skull & Shackles with a revised ship combat system.
Were I to run Kingmaker again I'd probably revise and simplify the Kingdom building to be a bit more narrative focused rather than Crunch-Focused.
What I've found works well (for my groups) are subsystems that let my players utilize their own skills and abilities rather than roll for a shared character sheet (such as a caravan, ship or kingdom).
Victory points to track overall progress during a book, or tracking the party's relationship with a community work pretty well my players like having a concrete measurement and default action to take during downtime.
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Subsystems have a place and are a nice (IMO) expansion to the game so that combat or a single Diplomacy (or other skill) roll is not the only way to deal with an encounter, event, or situation.
To the OP, Myth-Speaker (and Acropolis Pyre, especially) is specifically designed around Iblydan culture (contests, etc.) and creative solutions: (page 7) "Like Heracles cleaning the Augean stables or Orpheus charming Hades with song, mythic adventures thrive when PCs can accomplish great feats using cunning and their surroundings. The Adventure Path facilitates these scenes, but consider being extra charitable when players propose their own schemes - especially if they spend Mythic Points to do so." A group in Myth-Speaker that "thinks outside the box" will likely find the AP more enjoyable than one that leans more to a "kick down the door" approach.
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Conceptually I like subsystems. They let you add meat to skill challenges and do some things that don't normally have rules. Chases for example do a good job of having a narrative chase, because going into encounter mode to chase someone down across a city is tedious and not very fun vs a more narrative way of running it.
The thing with these is that they're meant to be narrated. If you're just rolling and tracking points, they really aren't that interesting. People should be describing what they're doing with flourishes and the GM should be using it all as a narrative tool in order to build a story. That's where they really work, as they make the actual tracking of how you're doing pretty easy.
The big problem with subsystems is the AP specific ones because they're generally not playtested and thus they range in quality all the way down to "this is unplayable/broken", at which point they're actively worse than not having a subsystem at all. The most infamous examples are the Caravan system people have already mentioned and the PF2 Kingdom Rules.
"Failure You barely control the boat. The fisher takes a –1
penalty to their next check to Gather Fish during this run.
Increase the DC of subsequent checks to Sail by 1 for the
rest of this run."
This feels fiddly, for sure. It's a very specific thing to track and if a bunch of them pile up you'll need to track them all, which for something that you don't do frequently will definitely get annoying and feel like a lot of work. Hell, this isn't even using consistent modifiers: it's a penalty to one thing and a DC increase to another thing.
I generally don't like these kind of hyper-specific modifiers in general. I'd prefer something simpler like "Failure: You barely control the boat. If the next time this action is taken is also a failure, lose 1 success point."
I had some trouble understanding the description of the activity, but I decided--based on the four NPC contestants having earned 7, 5, 4, and 2 Story Points each--that the storyteller gets up to five rolls: one for describing the animal, one for its supernatural powers, one for choosing an animal from familiar folktales, one for drama, and one for exciting the audience--using one of the skills listed. This might be wrong, because the line, "You can’t take any of these options more than twice in the same story," makes no sense in this interpretation, but the bard in the party rolled 8 Story Points, the kineticist and wizard rolled 5 Story Points each, and the rogue rolled 2 Story Points, so their results came out in the right range. (The magus did not participate, and the 2nd bard and the champion were absent.) Weirdly, many of the players' stories were retellings of encounters the party had with animals, but with the animals able to talk.
PRESENT A TALL TAILAuditory, Concentrate, Exploration
You present one aspect in your narrative about a meeting with a mystical animal. Each attempt takes 1 minute and requires you to attempt a DC 20 skill check. You can choose between describing the animal (Nature), inventing something supernatural about it (Arcana, Deception, or Occult), recalling past tales about the animal (Society), adding narrative drama (Deception or Performance), or connecting with the audience (Performance). You can’t take any of these options more than twice in the same story.
Critical Success You gain 2 Story Points.
Success You gain 1 Story Point.
Critical Failure You lose 1 Story Point (to a minimum of 0) and can’t retry the option you just attempted, even if you haven’t yet used it twice.
Just a note on this one: that limitation is effectively saying "you can't use a given skill more than twice". So you can't roll Nature 5 times. You can for example "describe the animal (Nature)" twice, then you must do the other things. Unless you critically fail on your first Nature and then you can't use it again.
Creative Director
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As long as folks are giving feedback on the use of subsystems in Adventure Paths... I'd love to hear about more recent examples. Once we published the 2nd edition of GameMastery Guide (remastered into GM Core), we've tried hard to make sure the subsystems we use in adventures either come directly from GM Core, or are built on those bones (typically atop the Victory Points mechanic) so that GMs and players are, in theory, as familiar with those rules as they should be fore things like combat.
I suspect that the fact that these rules ended up in the GM book and not the Player book is part of why some players aren't as familiar with these rules (either because they avoid looking in the GM book, or because the GM tells them to do that).
With recent Adventure Path Player's Guides, I've been trying to have us include a "Subsystems" section that tells the players what GM Core subsystems play roles in the Adventure Path they're about to go on, and thus should check out the rules for in advance.
Things like the caravan rules from Jade Regent were created in a different time, where we didn't have the existing structure of subsystems like this in play, and as we looked at building new adventures that were more than just "fight monsters take stuff" at their core, we DID get more experimental with those systems. Sometimes they worked great. Sometimes they did not. Even in the early days of 2nd edition, before we had the rules for 2E subsystems in place to really work with, early Adventure Paths struggled a little bit (including the remastering of Kingmaker—but that one's kingdom rules also suffered as a result of the deadly combo of employee resource shortages and the pandemic throwing everything into chaos)... but for the past few years I feel like we've been doing a much better job at leaning in to and relying upon the GM Core subsystems.
If the use of those (research, influence, chases, infiltrations, etc.) are still pain points... I'd love to hear about why they are, ESPECIALLY if they're still pain points after the GM has worked with their players to make sure they know how those subsystems work beforehand!
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As long as folks are giving feedback on the use of subsystems in Adventure Paths... I'd love to hear about more recent examples. Once we published the 2nd edition of GameMastery Guide (remastered into GM Core), we've tried hard to make sure the subsystems we use in adventures either come directly from GM Core, or are built on those bones (typically atop the Victory Points mechanic) so that GMs and players are, in theory, as familiar with those rules as they should be fore things like combat.
The influence chapter at the start of Spore War was super fun! I really liked having the whole group effectively forced to interact with one NPC at a time as it prevented the old standby of everyone splits up/attaches to a single NPC and spams their best skill. Since it also imposed a defacto time limit, folks had to get more creative in trying to use skills and also try things that were not so optimal. (Our Goblin Alchemist tried to impress one of the delegates with an impromptu indoor fireworks display using his Fireworks Performer background as the justification... and the fact that he had recently blown up a local warehouse by accident was looming over it. But he rolled a 19 and it went great.) These NPCs also felt very distinctive with the personality quirks and penalties. It's the best influence encounter I've seen in PF2.
When I GM'd Ruby Phoenix, the chases were well received, especially the race in book 2. Folks also had a good time with the influence in book 2.
I'm GMing Strength of Thousands and has a bunch of them come up too. Someone already mentioned the Tell a Tall Tale one, which was great fun to run. I used it as a framework to do some narration and let folks who are comfortable try to come up with a basic story via improv, and that worked great. Players uncomfortable with that spotlight were allowed to just roll, so everyone got to participate.
The only issue I've had elsewhere with these subsystems is that at the end of book 3 they can do practical research but don't have any obvious time pressure, which is effectively a "keep doing it until you're maxed or the GM invents some time pressure" situation.
Research feels similar to me: it works well provided constraints are put on it that make failure actually possible. If failure isn't an option and the adventure basically stops until the PCs find the information, I prefer a single check that determines how long it takes for that to happen, rather than "we're going to keep rolling until you succeed", you know?
This is something the rules touch on but don't expand a lot. ie: the research example in the book doesn't have any constraints at all. Constraints breed creativity and create a sense of tension, so they're essential. Chase and infiltration kind of have them baked in, but for the others it's important to make sure they're tuned so that the players have incentive to be active and try things without it being so tight that it feels punitive.
SoT also has a couple of "you can fail this, but you must succeed to advance the plot" points. Book 5 has a ritual you can fail, but success is literally required to advance the plot. So it's a case where I'm replacing that with a fail forward result instead: they do the thing no matter what, but their success/failure result determines how well it goes rather than if it happens at all.
My general experience with PF2 subsystems is that if they stick to the GMG framework and expand on it, I and my players are usually going to have a good time with it. It's when we get something entirely new that it becomes much more likely to be a frustrating experience. ie: Cirus rules in Extinction Curse, Kingdom and camping in Kingmaker (we quit before trying the army ones, but no one was enthusiastic about it).
Plus, at this point I can tell players "this is an influence" and while I'll give them a refresher on what they can do, they already understand the idea and it doesn't feel like a bunch of new stuff to learn for a one-off.
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Personally, as I DM, I'm a fan of subsystems.
They give players a chance to drive narrative action, to introduce NPCs, always an opportunity for a joke when the barbarian crushes the library check and the wizard flubs it.
There might be too many in Myth-Speaker and Wardens, but I think they are a critical part of adventure paths. Otherwise, it's just punching and blasting.
I honestly do not understand the influence system [this is after running Book 1 of Sky King's Tomb]. It's a lot of note keeping or otherwise I was doing something wrong.
I would hope that future subsystems not vary dramatically from the GMG. But yes, get the party in a library, get them on the dance floor, get them in the courtroom.
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As long as folks are giving feedback on the use of subsystems in Adventure Paths... I'd love to hear about more recent examples. ...
If the use of those (research, influence, chases, infiltrations, etc.) are still pain points... I'd love to hear about why they are, ESPECIALLY if they're still pain points...
I can regale you with the experiences my table has had with the subsystems. For reference I am currently running Agents of Edgewatch (soon ending, we've just hit lvl20) and Sky King's Tomb (half-way through it). I have also played through the first 3 books of Blood Lords and am currently a player in Season of Ghosts, closing in on the end of book 3.
Me and my group have gotten quite familiar with the basic Victory Points system, as well as the Influence and Research subsystems. (And Rituals as well, if we count those as a subsystem). It's to the point that I or the other GM can just go "This is an influence/research/victory point encounter" and our group knows what to do. We've encountered two paint points with these systems.
The first pain is with influence, where we find that we can blow through the influence statblocks of our enemies within a couple of rounds of influence. This is of course roll dependant, but for most of the APs we tend to be able to max out every influenceable character well within the pre-written time limit given by the adventure.
The second paint point comes with rituals, and it is that it is super easy to make them impossible to pass. Since rituals must have the correct number of secondary casters, and the secondary casters must crit succeed to give a +2 circumstance bonus but need only fail to incure -4 circumstance penalty, it becomes very easy to make the ritual impossible to pass. It's even worse if anyone critical fail, at which point rituals decrease their degree of success by one. This is "fine" when rituals is just an optional thing we do to resurrect our party members, gain undead minions, or some other downtime like activity that isn't crucial to the adventure's progression. But...
On the other hand Research encounters seems to go over pretty well. In the adventures I have played through every research encounter has had a "ticking clock" attached to their research encounters ensuring that we can't just spend forever getting max Research Points. But also makes sure you only need to hit the low thresholds in order to continue the adventure. So no real complaints here.
But now for the two systems that we really struggle with: Chases and especially Infiltrations.
To take chases first, the problem isn't that we don't understand the rules, but more that we find the rules to be... dumb? So the chases are basically just regular Victory Points system, except you are trying to catch up to someone who is overcoming obstacles automatically ahead of you. The problem we find is the immersion breaking of having to have every PC having to roll to overcome every obstacle. Or to be more precise, the fact that the group as a whole need to overcome the obstacle's VP threshold or else we can't progress. If our acrobatic monk leaps onto the market stall roofs and acrobatics checks themselves over the crowd blocking their path, then surely the monk should be able to proceed regardless of if the wizard at the back gets lost in the mass of people, right? But the chase rules says no, the monk has to wait for their party to catch up before they can proceed. This tend to break our immersion and has lead to a lot of frustration with the chase rules at my table.
The main subsystem we struggle with however, is infiltrations! We. Don't. Understand. Infiltrations.
By that I mean, we've read the rules for infiltrations, we sorta understand how they are suppose to work in theory. But none of the infiltrations we've encountered whilst playing through the APs have really... operated in the way that the GM Core subsystem describes...
In Book 2 there is another "infiltration" when the PCs enter a Hryngar city. My game hasn't gotten to that place yet, but this one too is a "modified" version of the infiltration system, utilizing basically just the awareness points system and the "bad shit happens when you accumulate awareness points." mechanic, meaning it really doesn't run like an infiltration as presented in GM core. No prep. No edge points. No obstacles. Just the awareness point section. It's fine, I guess.
The second paint point comes with rituals, and it is that it is super easy to make them impossible to pass. Since rituals must have the correct number of secondary casters, and the secondary casters must crit succeed to give a +2 circumstance bonus but need only fail to incure -4 circumstance penalty, it becomes very easy to make the ritual impossible to pass. It's even worse if anyone critical fail, at which point rituals decrease their degree of success by one. This is "fine" when rituals is just an optional thing we do to resurrect our party members, gain undead minions, or some other downtime like activity that isn't crucial to the adventure's progression. But...
Yeah the way that rituals work is a huge problem in general, but especially if it's plot mandatory. I had the same problem in SoT: it wants the players to do a bunch of rituals with a bunch of secondary casters. Mathematically, with 2+ secondary casters, SOMEONE is failing. That -4 skews the math massively considering the primary check is already a very hard DC.
I know on one of them, we ended up with the primary caster needing a 16 on the dice to succeed, and that was the best in the party at it. If it's plot necessary you can't run it as written because players will fail/crit fail and need to try it several times. I had players fail one seven times before they gave up and asked an NPC teacher for help. To say the players are not enthusiastic about having to do another ritual would be an understatement.
I made a thread about it a while ago. I ended solving it by removing secondary checks: all secondary casters have the option to auto-succeed with no roll. That -4 is simply too punitive.
Additionally, if the ritual is plot mandatory, I just change the outcomes so it's fail-forward: the plot mandatory thing always happens and if you did badly, there will be some other consequence.
So yeah, good point: rituals as written that are required for the plot do not work well in APs. No ritual that must succeed to advance the plot should evert have a failure condition that prevents that since it just feels like a colossal waste of everyone's time to make them keep doing it (and keep gathering components to do it!) until the dice decide its okay to move on.
I hate it for some other ones too, like Heartbond: the way it's written the people being bonded effectively need to be trained and half-decent at diplomacy or society otherwise they're imposing severe penalties on the primary caster and screwing up their own bonding ceremony. Narratively I just hate how restrictive that is.
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I really liked the infiltration in Prey for Death. It also helps that you're building characters to be assassins so you're prioritizing skills and abilities that synergize with the main abilities you use for the infiltration. So the infiltration helped make us feel like the awesome high level assassins we were. I can imagine an AP that springs an infiltration on the party that is not suited for stealth or deception may be less enjoyable.
I feel that influence works best when you're doing other things concurrently. I loved how the influence system worked for the sponsors in Fists of the Ruby Phoenix, because it took place over a longer time scale than just a party and so you're also exploring the city of Goka and dealing with extraplanar assassins. In other adventures, especially society scenarios like Godsrain in a Godless Land, its become "Oh boy, time for an influence system encounter" which is less fun.
As a DM and player I also tend to find it more enjoyable the more work a DM does to hide the subsystem. For instance, with the influence subsystem, with a DM who is less skilled at RP it can quickly become all mechanical and I get less interested when its not my turn. I've seen this happen in Book 1 of Sky King's Tomb and a couple of society scenarios like Godsrain in a Godless Land. Instead of becoming a mechanism to enable roleplay and advance the story, it becomes a bunch of dice rolls we need to get done before we can advance the story , (except its bad design to lock things behind dice rolls, so its either really easy or pointless). I imagine this is part of the issue with the increase of using subsystems in APs, is that DMs don't hide them and they stand out.
The last thing is once in awhile the subsystem feels shoehorned in when something custom could have done it more effectively. I unfortunately can't think of an example off the top of my head from a recent AP, but I've definitely had this feeling a few times when reading or playing APs.