Comments | athelis: My thoughts on the Pathfinder Society Game so far.

athelis

My thoughts on the Pathfinder Society Game so far.

Oct 21, 2008 10:42

I played the first 4 Pathfinder Society Games at Gen Con this year. Now, while I had tons of fun, overall, the mods themselves were very simple and the faction missions downright lame. Now, being the start of a campaign, I can understand having simple modules to get people into/used to a new world. However, to keep people's interest it can't be ( Read more... )

Comments 6

banantalis October 22 2008, 03:30:56 UTC

Having played #5, I can lend another voice to Joe's summation.

Pathfinder mods also see print and sales so must meet a strict 7k word limit (this includes encounters, background, summary, introduction, treasure, conclusion, and faction missions). The mods are a sparse 15 pages. Great for printing. Bad for creating fully developed scenarios a la some of the better LG or LA mods.

lemuriapress October 22 2008, 03:49:31 UTC

banantalis October 22 2008, 04:47:54 UTC

The Pathfinder Society scenarios are not printed, and are available only in PDF. We'll be tinkering with the word counts to get what best serves the play experience, and I strongly suspect that 7,000 is too few.

Good to know. I operated on the assumption that the word counts were for printing purposes.

Which one was #5? Mists of Mwangi? I haven't read that one yet.

Yup. The premise is decent and the atmosphere is appropriate. However, the single-day emphasis as 1st/2nd level characters takes so much gamer brainpower that a lot of the details get lost. In reading the scenario I've got a deeper appreciation for it, but it didn't play too well. Which seems to be the general trend. But as you said below, Season 0.

lemuriapress October 22 2008, 03:47:49 UTC

Nice to hear some commentary on this. I thought the adventure I ran you guys through at Gen Con was pretty fun, but we all milked the roleplaying and even though I felt the scenario was light, I ended up having to cut a whole combat encounter to get to the end by the allotted time. Making sure these are of the appropriate length is going to be an ongoing challenge, but I think our coordinator (Josh) will soon develop a good sense of pacing. He is editing all of the adventures and has seen all of them in play ( ... )

athelis October 22 2008, 14:21:12 UTC

First of all, I want you to realize that I am not all down on the Pathfinder Society stuff. My post may have come across harsher then I intended. In fact, I have had a really good time so far and that game that you ran us through was crazy fun. :) And that I'm definitely not looking to quit the campaign ( ... )

calentir October 29 2008, 14:08:10 UTC

You may not want to know, but the official page count of HIG8-02 Intertwined was a monstrous 78 :-p