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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8870187" data-attributes="member: 70468">Why does a social encounter require two pages and a combat encounter only a short description?Here is an outstanding pair of social <s>score</s> adventures we had in Blades in the Dark: trick your rival into attacking another faction while your companions set up another faction to take the hit, so you tip off the Bluecoats and frame your rival for your crimes. That was an entire session. Lots of stuff happened, and it was awesome. I doubt [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] needed two pages of material to prep and run it. (In fact, I doubt he did much prep at all for it.)How should that encounter be presented in the AP? It should be: negotiate with so-and-so for a place to hold your performance (12-point negotiation). If the NPC hasn’t already been established, provide some adjectives describing them and a list of things the PCs can tug at. The BIFTs stuff in 5e would actually be really good for this. I’d expect such an encounter to take up about as much space as a typical keyed entry for a combat encounter. (Sure, it’s easy to list out some monsters, but Paizo usually also describes the scene and what’s happening in the key, so there’s more context than a list of things to fight.)So, again, why is a social encounter two pages? Does Paizo feel the need to script it? My guess, having run other Pathfinder APs and adventures, is Paizo is giving the GM way too much background information on the NPC. A lot of that stuff is neat, but it’s not very useful for the GM. You might get some of it to come out, and maybe they’re trying to nudge the GM into deciding how things should go that’s in alignment with what the adventure needs.However, I reject the idea that such a thing is necessary. It’s not if these types of encounters are systematized. They are for combat, but they’re not for other types of play. With everything having a proper structure and play loop, you can let them do the heavy lifting of driving play while the adventure’s key can focus just on the needed context (and stop writing two page backstories for NPCs that only the GM will read while you’re at it).And if the adventure needs PCs at a certain level, and it’s a story-driven adventure as Paizo’s usually are, they should just use milestone leveling. Free up the adventure to spend space on doing cool, story-driven stuff instead of apparently needing to provide the right number of fights, so people can advance at the required rate. If people really want to track XP, award it in chunks for completing various parts of the adventure (like what PFS does).</blockquote>

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