Venting on Pathfinder Society Faction Missions

[Jade_Tarem]

To the lead writer for Andoran faction-specific missions:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am taking this opportunity to thank you for your tireless efforts in representing the difficulties and frustrations brought on by bad intelligence and the fog of war, which no doubt real elves and dwarves suffer from on the front lines of petty disputes in the River Kingdoms as we speak. These, the faction missions given to my Andoran colleagues and I, are wonderful examples of how to shatter immersion in a role playing game - examples that were sorely needed in a system where the accumulation of wealth is capped based on personal power level, crafting of magic items is impossible, morally deficient protagonists are nonexistent, and all characters feel the sudden and irresistible urge to retire shortly after completing their thirty-third task for the Society.

While my companions which serve other masters have occasionally had their challenges, my Andoran colleagues and I were particularly delighted to discover, upon one fine evening, that the sparse Andoran mission briefing - presented to us by what I can only assume was Andoria's attempt to grant "free and equal" employment to a mentally handicapped gnome - had no bearing whatsoever on what we needed to do to succeed at our mission and earn prestige within the faction, and that indeed the tribe we were instructed to find does not, strictly speaking, exist. Given that there are a limited number of opportunities to acquire these 'prestige points' available to a given Andoran gentleman (before he feels the aforementioned insatiable urge to retire), one might consider this a heavy price to pay - especially when the only lesson we could possibly learn from it was not to trust anything you tell us - but my colleagues and I laughed it off and realized that the only way to succeed at future missions would likely be to continuously query random people, flora, fauna, and suspicious mineral deposits, asking if there are any injustices in the area that the Andorans might need to correct, as though afflicted with some sort of highly idealistic Tourettes Syndrome.

On a similar note, you and only you could possibly have known the value of providing a village under siege with personally handcrafted arrows, as opposed to purchased or donated arrows. Our observation - that all arrows do the same amount of damage regardless of source - was clearly the result of some sort of adventuring-based delusion (perhaps acquired from the alcoholic witch and child-labor proponent we were required to drink tea with on our first mission), as we found that indeed purchased arrows, spellcasting resources, the enchantment-based subversion of 25% of the besieging force, a sequence of deadly barricades and booby traps, and our best efforts to train the villagers to defend themselves were made meaningless upon our failure to put ranks into a crafting skill in a system where crafting is strongly discouraged.

These, however, pale in comparison to your latest effort, a masterpiece of obfuscation that refuses to tell us not only everything we should know, but everything that the person giving us the mission knows that would help us succeed at it. One could argue that when liberal use of the Memory Lapse spell is the only way to recover from a mistake that could have been easily avoided with the inclusion of the information that our target openly betrayed the Andorans as opposed to covertly - information which the person who briefed us must *surely* know - that the Andoran leaders must have an appallingly low score in whichever stat determines how many fornicating actions they might provide, and, well... one would be right.

As the module is not over yet, I do not know if we will lose prestige within your hallowed order for it or not, but I and my Andoran colleagues do confess to feeling the slightest bit cheated at this turn of events - even were we to succeed, we will have still completed an entire mission (the mission in question being the nigh-impossible task of determining what we might need to do to succeed at the *actual* mission) without gaining anything for it.

The running theme among your missives and the results of our efforts in the field seems to be that these are not "missions" - a word that implies an objective that could be achieved in multiple ways based on the resources we have on hand, ideally suited to an open-ended role playing game such as Pathfinder - but rather a sort of guessing-based minigame completed long ago at character creation, where we would have to guess at which *one* out of twenty or even a hundred possible methods you would find appropriate to handle a vaguely-defined problem. The game completed, we now are merely tallying up the score, feeling something akin to dismay (And gratitude, mind you, for reminding us all that obtaining a job writing modules for Paizo does not necessarily mean that one is good at it!) as we watch our opportunities to acquire prestige - the scarcest resource in the game - slip away.

At the current time, the only mystery remaining is why you have chosen to call them "missions" at all, or why you would even bother importing arbitrary restrictions on actions into an otherwise structured free-form game. The explanations provided for *why* a given "mission" was failed typically rely on the GM's imagination, and in many cases are indistinguishable from GM fiat or the much-ridiculed "box text." While we realize that "because I said so" is sound reasoning when deployed against your four-year-old child, your target audience has met and indeed exceeded puberty by ten years or more, and tends to prefer something more substantive, or at least an explanation as to why the most frustrating aspect of point-and-click adventure games was spot-welded onto an otherwise excellent tabletop gaming system. Unless, of course, your goal was as I surmised - an attempt to make us appreciate the difficulties of Pathfinders presented with inaccurate briefings and bad information. If this is the case, please award yourself a prestige point, but only if you can first succeed at a craft check to create a magical router that turns sarcasm into praise.

Sincerely,

Rijn Bancross, Andoran Eagle Knight

[Lord_Gareth]

Come here, my friend. I, too, have been a victim of Paizo. Let us begin the healing process together.

(Also hilarious post bro, comedy gold).

[kardar233]

I aligned my Paladin with Cheliax, and let the DM try to figure out what the hell was going on there.

[Arbane]

Confound it, where's the 'like' button on this forum?

[The New Bruceski]

I dunno, I think the "requires dispel magic in a level 4 adventure to get past the first door" dungeon in a D&D... (dang I need to ask my bro what edition he was playing) module wins the worst decision award. Yours comes close though.

Someday I would love to have the designer of one of these Modules of Shame do a post-mortem on their work. Is it communication error? Deadlines and half-finished work? Are they actually designed by committee with many chances for blunders? I'm sure there are good modules out there, but for the bad ones we hear about does the author send them off thinking "people are going to love this" or "thank God I managed to get any of it finished?"

[oxybe]

see, at least with that dispel magic door one, if you don't have dispel magic, you go home disappointed and you continue adventuring

no. 5th ed's "Mud Sorcerer's tomb", the module released to allow players to playtest their high-levels, wins the worst module (well, worst module i've played in recent memory) award.

now, we ran (and are currently running) the playtest using 2 fighters, 2 monks, 1 rogue in a play by post format.

the line that caused everyone to twitch was : "The secret door on the west wall can be found with a DC25 Intelligence Check."

sounds like a rather innocent line, one you'd find in various modules, right?

spoiler for people who haven't played the module yet.

no one had the "search" skill or a maxed out (20) intelligence. even with the search skill AND a decent int, it's not a roll you can expect to easily make.

it was technically impossible for us to find this secret door in the 2nd room in the dungeon, which is required to find to proceed with the crawl. the GM, however, had a bit more foresight then the paid game developers and allowed us a secondary method.

it should also be noted that the walls are entirely impervious to damage (can't try to break each wall to find a way out) AND you cannot teleport out of the dungeon (not that that mattered to us) AND are magically treated in a way to be tramper proof or dissuade tampering via spells (again, no magic). now, this is of important note since once you go in the dungeon, the door made of the same unobtainium as the rest of the dungeon closes behind you and locks you in.

by the rules, upon entering the dungeon the GM should have just said "you have entered your tomb. it is literally impossible to proceed. you all starve to death, as none of the chumpy villagers want to go in the dungeon that just offed 5 level 14 PCs"

for those interested, this is a remake of a 3rd ed module of the same name. here are it's credits:

By Mike Shel
Revision by Chris Sims
Revision Developed and Edited by Chris Perkins and Jennifer Clarke Wilkes

it saddens me that this revision was edited by Chris Perkins. i like that guy. and this issue and context should not happen in a well-designed module. i'm willing to let it slide this ONE time Chris.

but only because it's you.

[stupiddDice]

Mind if I ask for the details of the module that inspired this rant?:smallsmile:

[Sith_Happens]

the line that caused everyone to twitch was : "The secret door on the west wall can be found with a DC25 Intelligence Check."

Wha... DC 25, in a system designed around scaling character ability with level as little as possible?

Is taking 20 a thing in 5th Edition? By this post I'd guess not, in which case... GUUUUUH.:smallyuk:

[oxybe]

at the moment, there isn't anything like taking 20 to my knowledge.

not like that would have helped as that assumes you try for several minutes until a 20 is "rolled". IE: you try until you've given it your best shot.

for our group, this was literally impossible.

the best we could get with a "take 20" roll would have been like... 22.

i think.

the game's aid another rules also only give you advantage on the roll, essentially making it so you roll 2d20 and pick the highest.

there was also the issue of a hazard in the area existing that would have made taking a 20 (in the context of finding the door) impossible.

[Jade_Tarem]

Oh, I'm sure there have been worse written modules than the ones I'm complaining about, especially once we take every system into account (and not just Pathfinder). In fact, the modules themselves are generally nowhere near as bad as the faction missions, and some of them were fairly inventive.


Come here, my friend. I, too, have been a victim of Paizo. Let us begin the healing process together.

Hugs all around! And later, poorly planned vengeance.


Mind if I ask for the details of the module that inspired this rant?:smallsmile:

3 modules, actually, and as I mentioned above, it wasn't the modules themselves so much as the faction specific missions. The first one was priceless: we were supposed to learn of the local customs of tribe X, which was located in area Y, after talking to person Z. However, tribe X and person Z do not actually exist in any known module, and visiting area Y was not within the purview of the module this Andoran mission was attached to.

The second was pretty neat until we learned about the actual scoring system. A village was 4-12 days away from being raided by bandits - a lot of bandits. There were various things we could do to improve the village defenses, and simply defeating all of the bandits was enough to win the module - that is to say, we'd get the Society's prestige point and XP award for it. The Andorans, however, had to convince the village to "stand up for itself in the future" or some such, which sounds fairly open-ended but actually meant that we had to fully complete all of the possible defense-boosting actions thought up by the module writer, one of which was "making a Craft (Arrow) check." As mentioned before, magic item creation is impossible for PCs in Pathfinder Society, so the odds of a PC actually having ranks in a crafting skill are about the same as finding someone in Montana with a degree in Ancient Chinese Poetry. Moreover, charming a fair number of bandits to fight for the village, completing every other item on the list, simply giving the villagers some arrows, and beating the insurgent bandit force like a rented gong did nothing to convince these hapless villagers that the bandits could be defeated. No, they could only be inspired by mad fletching skillz.

The most recent one is that we're supposed to investigate this one demon-blooded lady who "betrayed the Andorans" in the past. We're supposed to figure out what she's planning without letting her know that the Andorans are on to her. That's all the information given. We now know, from the GM, that we are apparently supposed to hit some kind of absurdly high perception check. Earlier, I tried to get into her confidences by being another Andoran contact - my logic was that if she betrayed the Andorans, the most comfortable thing for her to hear would be that they're still trying to do business with her, meaning that her cover wasn't blown.

However, it turns out that she openly betrayed the Andorans and already knows that they're after her, meaning that first of all, there's really no point to any secrecy on our part, and second of all, that the person who gave us the mission absolutely had to have known that and simply chose not to tell us - or more likely, that the person writing the mission was just lazy and elected to throw a bunch of hidden "gotchas" in there to artificially increase the difficulty. We were saved from auto-failing the mission on the spot by the ever-lovely Memory Lapse spell (I'm an Enchantment-heavy Fey Bloodline Sorcerer, because we already had two other casters and I didn't need to optimize), meaning that I got to "fix" the error that I never should have made in the first place.

Again, these are the Andoran faction missions - the actual Society missions (the main quests) tend to be pretty amusing, much better thought out, and a lot of fun to play through, which is why I'm still playing at all.

[Kane0]

I loved the last line the most OP.

Heres to bad PFS missions! Kudos to you for putting up with it this long.

[raspberrybadger]

I laughed out loud. So you've turned these faction missions into 'so bad it's good territory'. Did your character ever act on the reasonable inferences about the incompetence or malice of the mission giver in that last scenario?

[Jane_Smith]

I would do the following; Tell the demon lady the truth and say your tired of this BS. Kill your mission giver and bring there head as proof of your allegiance, then proceed to aid her in destroying your organization for there stupidity, cause, they sound so incompetent i doubt they could stop a party of 4-5 level 1 pc's, and she has the right idea of ditching those losers asap. Oh, and go raid and loot those villagers who can only be inspired by craft (arrows) by killing them with arrows. :smallcool:

[Lost Demiurge]

Oh lord...

The first time I tried Pathfinder Society was in an intro game, back at Gencon last year.

The bulk of the mission was fine. It was a bunch of fetch quests and amusing scenarios, with a couple of light fights.

Then at the end, the GM tells us "Hey, this bunch of folks you've noticed shadowing you all day are finally making a move. You're getting ambushed!"

We asked "Well, can we run away?" Nope. "Can we find a good defense point?" Nope. "Can we jump THEM instead?" Nope.

Okay. Well, a little railroady, but hey.

Turns out we're up against a rogue, a barbarian, a cleric, and a sorceror. Roughly the equivalent of our party, maybe a little higher. They jump us in a narrow alley.

The sorceror knows color spray. We're all first level. In an enclosed space that gives us no space to spread out. It goes about as well as you'd expect, with me left standing and everyone else either bleeding out or stunned/dazzled/blinded/etc.

Up until that point, the module was fine. But JESUS. We even focused on the mage! The cleric healed him back up, and his second shot took down ANOTHER guy. Then the barbarian critted on our rogue and damn near killed him...

And it was planned this way. They let us go after taking our stuff and interrogating us. The module PLANNED it this way.

I told the GM that that fight right there was the turd in the pie. Total buzzkill, especially since everything had been relatively enjoyable up to that point.

One of the young kids playing with us mumbles something about it being the Society's way of illustrating that there would be no holds barred with these missions, and they were supposed to be tough... Bull****. There are plenty of ways to do that WITHOUT unfair encounters, or making the players feel deprotagonized and railroaded.

For Pratchett's sake, people, the GM can win at any time. The goal is not to win. The goal is to work with your PC's to make an awesome story, that lets them be big damn heroes. If you're more interested in bullying and harassing the PC's, go play second ed. That's not what most modern gamers I know are playing for, anymore.

Damn near turned me off the society for good. I had enough of that nonsense in LFR, back in the day. Fortunately I gave it another shot.

Amusingly enough, in the third intro adventure (The best of the lot, a fun dungeon crawl,) the big bad was a dark creeper with a sorceror level, who knew color spray. I pulled a crit with a repeating heavy crossbow, rolled high, and practically one shotted him before he could do jack.

But having two bad guys in two missions out of three each with 4 shots of a spell that's pretty much "save-or-be-out-of-the-fight" against level 1 PC's, in a series of missions that are supposed to be FOR level 1 PC's is frankly a **** move. So yeah, not much love for PFS here. I had hopes that they'd dodge the usual Living Campaign nonsense, but it seems like that ain't gonna happen...

[Ravenica]

Having been on both ends (player and DM) for PFS play...

yeah it's not cool, some of the stuff they expect of us is ridiculous as DM's and the "houserules" meant to "speed up the game" tend to break it horribly... I quit dming PFS games after the first complete run. I've played through 3 complete runs as a player and even that was tedious.

[The New Bruceski]

Oh lord...

The first time I tried Pathfinder Society was in an intro game, back at Gencon last year.
(snip)


I think there's a rule or guideline or something about episodic content (commonly TV shows) about that. You're allowed to be "to be continued" on a down note, but don't end on one. If you plan to continue but the players may not, treat it as an ending. When a show fails this it's either due to the proper tone (Sopranos) or because they didn't see the end coming when they wrote it (The Finder).

If you end on a victory, players are happy and more likely to sign up for more games. If you begin on a downbeat it gives them something to strive for through the adventure (or you can take all their stuff to force them into some tangential job/quest, but even if they get a castle full of loot they'll be bitter about their missing sword). If you know everybody's going to be back and you're just ending for the evening, a downbeat can add some nice tension and get them excited. If you end the adventure by knocking them down and taking their stuff, though, it's just mean. It gives an impression of futility. The players have no chance to do anything about their loss, and that's their final memory of your adventure.

[Raven777]

The second was pretty neat until we learned about the actual scoring system. A village was 4-12 days away from being raided by bandits - a lot of bandits. There were various things we could do to improve the village defenses, and simply defeating all of the bandits was enough to win the module - that is to say, we'd get the Society's prestige point and XP award for it. The Andorans, however, had to convince the village to "stand up for itself in the future" or some such, which sounds fairly open-ended but actually meant that we had to fully complete all of the possible defense-boosting actions thought up by the module writer, one of which was "making a Craft (Arrow) check." As mentioned before, magic item creation is impossible for PCs in Pathfinder Society, so the odds of a PC actually having ranks in a crafting skill are about the same as finding someone in Montana with a degree in Ancient Chinese Poetry. Moreover, charming a fair number of bandits to fight for the village, completing every other item on the list, simply giving the villagers some arrows, and beating the insurgent bandit force like a rented gong did nothing to convince these hapless villagers that the bandits could be defeated. No, they could only be inspired by mad fletching skillz.

What about finding a Villager who can make this Craft (Arrow) check for you? Would this have been legit? In a, you can now make your own arrows to stand up for yourself, kind of way?

[Jade_Tarem]

As an update: we actually did manage to pry our Prestige Point out of that last mission, essentially by making the crazy Perception check when given the chance. Our backup plan was basically to enact the entire plot of a romantic comedy to try to get the information out of part-demon girl, but it turned out to not be necessary.


I laughed out loud. So you've turned these faction missions into 'so bad it's good territory'. Did your character ever act on the reasonable inferences about the incompetence or malice of the mission giver in that last scenario?

Well, we do now.


Then at the end, the GM tells us "Hey, this bunch of folks you've noticed shadowing you all day are finally making a move. You're getting ambushed!"

We asked "Well, can we run away?" Nope. "Can we find a good defense point?" Nope. "Can we jump THEM instead?" Nope.

Okay. Well, a little railroady, but hey.

Turns out we're up against a rogue, a barbarian, a cleric, and a sorceror. Roughly the equivalent of our party, maybe a little higher. They jump us in a narrow alley.

Yep. That was our first mission too. My group had a couple of extra things going for it, though - first, we had six people, so we matched them in numbers even after two players went down to the Color Spray. Second, the four that stayed up were our Alchemist, our Fighter (a very competent tank and battlefield manager), our Barbarian (a dps monster), and yours truly, who returned the color spray with a Sleep that put their rogue down. After that, the fight went better for us (we won) but it was still one of the toughest in actual difficulty.

The mods are designed to try to make the encounters the same for every group, which leads to some fairly inflexible railroad tracks.


What about finding a Villager who can make this Craft (Arrow) check for you? Would this have been legit? In a, you can now make your own arrows to stand up for yourself, kind of way?

The villagers were actually used as a resource by the module (as in "devote this many villagers to taking in the harvest and you'll finish in X time"). Crafting, however, had to be done entirely by the PCs. The villagers had no skills that we could determine. The whole session was interesting because it becomes a giant resource management problem, but it's one of the few times when the PCs are given infinite time to communicate and plan. We made an absolutely optimal plan, and then the Andorans got screwed because no one takes craft arrow. Hence the rage.

[Laserlight]

Worst Module Ever:
We go on a mission for the Council of White Wizards. The BBEG was an evil dwarf who had been turned into an evil dragon; to kill him you had to use a dwarf-slaying weapon that we "just happened" to have been given.

Let's see. The Council of White Wizards...who are, we can safely assume, of at least average intelligence...decided to punish an evil, but not particularly powerful, dwarf, by transforming him into an evil and powerful dragon...

[Arbane]

Worst Module Ever:
We go on a mission for the Council of White Wizards. The BBEG was an evil dwarf who had been turned into an evil dragon; to kill him you had to use a dwarf-slaying weapon that we "just happened" to have been given.

Let's see. The Council of White Wizards...who are, we can safely assume, of at least average intelligence...decided to punish an evil, but not particularly powerful, dwarf, by transforming him into an evil and powerful dragon...

Well, you know, Wisdom IS a dump stat for wizards, what with the good will save and all... :smallamused:

Why would a dwarf-slaying weapon work on an EX-dwarf dragon?