Pathfinder 1E Your experiences with "Skull & Shackles"

[S'mon]

Although, I usually find the over arcing stories to be good in the APs, I never run them as is. I remove a fair number of combat encounters

I tend to make around 40% of 'attacks immediately' into 'will negotiate'.

 

[Arilyn]

I tend to make around 40% of 'attacks immediately' into 'will negotiate'.

ME too.

 

[S'mon]

Another thing about the APs is that fitting widely varying campaign concepts to the 6-book format has a Procrustean effect as the work is compressed or (more commonly) stretched to fit the allocated space. A lot of AP concepts look like they'd fit 3 or 4 books better than 6. Quite a few look like they'd better suit a start level higher than 1st. Writers are paid to fill the space of a book/issue and so are incentivised to throw in a bunch of word salad. After all if they include too much actual content the PCs will exceed the expected level!

Re S&S in particular, I'd say the press-ganged concept is a good fit to 1st level (unlike eg Kingmaker's 'go conquer the untamed territory on our southern frontier'). Like most APs it looks a bit stretched-out to me, with Book 5 a more natural climax than Book 6, and should probably end a few levels lower, just creeping over 10th level I'd say. But not having GM'd it yet I can't say for sure.

 

[amethal]

As for useful advice, however, I'd point your DM towards the Paizo forums. Every adventure has a "GM Thread" where I'm sure he can find someone else with the same problems.

Just echoing this. The Paizo forums' GM threads are extremely useful for GMs planning to run adventure paths. (Massive spoilers for players, obviously.) I find they do an excellent job of identifying potential problems in advance, which gives me plenty of time to do something about them.

You can also post your own problems there and see what solutions the community has come up with - particularly if, like me, you run these APs many years after they came out (we are currently 2/3 of the way through Legacy of Fire ...)

(For example, several problems with Second Darkness can be solved by requiring all the PCs to be elves, and I also ran a prequel set several decades earlier where the PCs got to do a few missions for the protagonist - obviously, you can only do this is you know what the problems are before you start the campaign.)

 

[Xenonnonex]

Serious question -> have you tried running this with 5e? For ease of play. You will be moving away from Pathfinder's annoying and poorly designed minigames.

 

[Xenonnonex]

Clarity & Presentation - Paizo write primarily for the reader on their couch, not the GM at their table. The material tends to be incredibly verbose, and often irrelevant to at-table play. I have learned over time how to treat the material as a buffet and not be bound by what's written down. Eg you get a great NPC with a few paras of backstory, who is "Remains in room - fights to death - suicides if captured". The GM can delete that last bit, take her out of her room, create links with PC(s), make her a cool part of their own campaign.

Goddamn this. Paizo write well. Very well. But teasing out what is important for the adventure in their purple prose is like teasing blood out of a stone. It is very easy to miss crucial details. Because it is all embedded in word noise.
I have now come to appreciate the clarity you get in a 5e adventure.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

Surprised this hasn't been mentioned already (or I missd it).

There was a module released some time after the Adventure Path was printed called Plunder & Peril. It was a collection of three "piratey" adventures set in the Shackles for 4th level characters, which made it ideal for fleshing out the sandbox-like approach of the second module. At 64 pages, there is plenty of detail and ideas to mine, if not transplant wholesale into the original campaign.

And if memory serves, I think it was based on the new scenarios created for the Adventure Card Game of the same name.

 

[Inchoroi]

Surprised this hasn't been mentioned already (or I missd it).

There was a module released some time after the Adventure Path was printed called Plunder & Peril. It was a collection of three "piratey" adventures set in the Shackles for 4th level characters, which made it ideal for fleshing out the sandbox-like approach of the second module. At 64 pages, there is plenty of detail and ideas to mine, if not transplant wholesale into the original campaign.

And if memory serves, I think it was based on the new scenarios created for the Adventure Card Game of the same name.

Yes, I have that one as well. It's actually pretty good, and, while it's a little late for the OP's DM to pick up now, I'll be adding it to the campaign whenever I start the actual writing.

 

[Celebrim]

Serious question -> have you tried running this with 5e? For ease of play. You will be moving away from Pathfinder's annoying and poorly designed minigames.

No, I haven't, and at the current level of play I don't think it would result in any ease of play. D20 only starts to get to be annoying when the fiddliness stacks up at higher levels. The only real advantage I could see to 5e play is that some of the pervasive magic is toned down.

As for mini-games, just because Pathfinder's are poorly designed does not mean I wouldn't need minigames. For example, the very basic problem that Pathfinder tries to handwave away the mass combat minigame and run PC combat as if it was a separate event from the actions of the crew, and as if the actions and abilities of the crew were irrelevant to play would not go away if we switched to 5e. Likewise, switching to 5e wouldn't solve the problem of unrealistic stat blocks for sailing vessels, nor would it solve the problem that at every level of play there isn't really good guidance for sailing those vessels. Indeed, in a bit of ironies, the only ship rules I've seen for 5e are so similar to the Pathfinder Skull & Shackles rules, I wouldn't be surprised to discover they have the same author.

 

[billd91]

Chapter 2: One problem we have hit on early on is that we mutinied successfully before the game expected it - pretty much as soon as we got away from most of the officers - and then immediately ran into the problem that sailing the ship as an officer had no corresponding minigame. Initially, since we were on rails anyway, the fact that we had no real rules for determining how well the ship was being sailed didn't seem to matter, but the further we've advanced the bigger the problem it was. I guess there is an assumption that we just have enough competent crew to control the ship, but it feels like that if you are going to have a redundant sailor game with little impact on the ship, that an officer game of actually sailing well would be worthwhile. I want the experience of being a pirate captain, which I would think would involve the normal zero to hero D&D arc, and yet with no ship sailing game to fail or succeed at there is no real marker of both the struggle and the ultimate victory.

But the biggest problems in chapter two have to do with verisimilitude and playing to simulationist aesthetics and not gamist aesthetics. In particular, we seem to be simultaneously in a sandbox but also expected to handwave the actual mechanics or reality of owning a powerful armed sailing vessel crewed with cutthroats.

a) The scale of the game seems inappropriate to sailing vessels. After a bit of rough math, it turned out that the Shackles were 15th the size of the real Caribbean, and more on par with say Lake Michigan. While the problem is partly smoothed over by the fact that distance per day for sailing vessels seems to be about 1/2 of what is realistic, it still leaves the playing area really too small and cramped, so we are playing deliberately off the map - with the result that our novice GM has to really just wing it.

b) There is this weird expectation that we aren't going to have a crew aiding and abetting our villainy. The boarding action minigame seems to divide combat into PC's versus NPCs, while the crew are entirely in the backdrop. Unfortunately for the GM, we didn't really know that, so we spent 10 days recruiting a crew and are sailing around now with 80 low level characters constituting a small army. The GM has no tools for dealing with this sort of mass combat, and the Paizo mass combat rules are intended to handle an entirely different scenario in details and in scale and as such don't work as a minigame for the crew combat. The situation seems likely to only get worse, as we could easily recruit more if we wanted. The feel of this section is as if they were going entirely for ‘Pirates of the Carribean’, and don’t expect someone to go, “There is no way a 38-gun frigate could be sailed to Tortuga by two people.” The fact that we are ordering our crew to act like pirates and attack things we are supposed to be fighting wrecks the suggested scenarios, something I couldn’t be expected to know until it happened. Again, I get that they are trying to deal with XP awards in a way that favors the PC’s leveling up, but this feels in play like we are supposed to know as players the metagame design and interact act with that, and not interact with the fiction. I’m starting to feel guilty for interacting with the fiction of the game, since the minigames don’t support it, and just mess things up for the novice GM.

c) There are some weird assumptions in the ship operations minigame. First and most obviously, the amount of pay you need to give the crew doesn't seem to scale with the size of the crew, which is something we had to patch right away. Beyond that, the game seems to have made some wildly unrealistic assumptions about how pirate ships would distribute shares, entirely at odds with anything believable. As best as I can tell, the game expects us to pay our crew far worse than they were paid working for the cruel masters we induced them to mutiny against and kill. I know it’s trying to deal with wealth by level issues in a relatively simple manner, but still, it’s weird and counterintuitive and basically doesn’t expect that the players will proactive engage with wages as an in-game issue. Beyond that, the plunder point system which is intended to simplify things, has some weird issues as well. Ships don’t really have the ability to store many plunder points, and so far plunder points have proven pretty scarce. The result is that the most valuable thing on the sea is ‘prizes’ – that is, captured ships – but this works against what would be desirable for play, because splitting the party across multiple ships just makes for a headache for the GM and reduces RP, however economically efficient it is. It seems like a combination of ships being fat with plunder and higher costs to operate crews would have resulted in better gameplay.

c) The ship vehicle rules are both unrealistic and poorly serving the games intended tropes. It seems all sailing vessels regardless of size are intended to be simulated with a single stat block. The party has inherited a standard stat block ship, which seems to represent a sort of typical mid-sized three-masted pirate ship like you might expect to find in a movie. But the technology of the setting is all over the place, with everything from 4th century BC ships to ships which appear to be 16th or 17th century in conception and possibly later in some cases. The integration of these different technologies is haphazard at best, and there are many reasons to think that the most powerful ships in the game are oared galleys of various sorts. But who really wants to be a pirate commanding an oared galley? And if rowed galleys really are important to the setting, why is the expectation that we’ll have such a tiny crew? Many galley’s had hundreds of rowers and marines on them. If we really tried to seize such a behemoth by boarding it, we ought to be just overwhelmed by the numbers even with our 80 crew, and yet the expectation by the designer seem to be that a crew of 80 is a large number. Why go for Pirate tropes in the art and story direction, and yet have physical mechanics that prioritize playing like this is Ben Hur or Cleopatra?

d) The ship to ship ranged battle rules are mix of good ideas with bad ones, and seem to come down to a poor mix of abstraction with granularity. Since the ability to close the range is based entirely on generating large differences in the sailing skill check, owing to the fact that most ships move the same speed, closing takes a long time. (Galley’s, continuing the trend of being superior in just about every fashion to other sorts of ships, are faster, but again, few are going to want to play pirates and then end up with mental images for Carthage and Rome (and certainly the book art doesn’t provoke those images)). But since the designer didn’t want players to play out the tedious process of closing to the grapple (where the action is), ships are placed so close together at the start of the minigame that the range of the ship’s weapons are ultimately irrelevant. The game really doesn’t provide for any sort of ‘artillery duel’, and reinforces this by making the cost of ammunition for ship’s weapons prohibitively expensive. Ship’s have 1000’s of hit points, but ammunition does less than 1 hit point of damage per gold piece spent. The result of all that collectively is to make you wonder why they even bothered to have ship to ship rules given that they seem to want you to just handwave that away and treat the combat as if the ship’s could just as easily be dry land.

Also, as a small note, shooting the ship’s control device is so easy and such a winning strategy for both prey and predator, that there is hardly any reason to shoot anything else. The situation is so unrealistic, that were this an actual thing that could be done in the fiction, you’d expect ships in the setting to be constructed with armored barbicans around the control device (as the bridges of battleships were) so as to make them relatively invulnerable to assault. One session after hitting on that strategy, we are having to patch the rules because it’s so degenerate.

e) I love the idea of the Infamy/Disrepute minigame, as it feels very much how I thought Birthright should have played, with the PC’s gradually gaining authority over the setting and the ability to assert their will over it. But gaining Infamy seems too easy, while gaining Disrepute seems too hard. It’s left up I think a lot to the GM, but again, with a novice GM this isn’t the best, and we have yet another system that is just not really living up to its potential. Additionally, Disrepute feels like one of those video game consumables where you never spend it because you feel you ought to save it until you really need it, and so you never spend it because you never really need it. Cool idea just feels like a little more polish would make it even cooler.

Anyway, that was a bit rambling, but the tl;dr version of this is, if you have run S&S before, how did you deal with the disconnects between the minigames and the fiction they are intended to support? Was it something that bothered you at all?

I've played Skull and Shackles and have read it. I think it's a thoroughly enjoyable AP - some of the challenges are a bit tough at the start, though, when healing resources are likely to be light. I've also found that relying on a summoner as your arcane caster has problems since their spells are pretty heavily stacked on the shorter range.

About some of your specific points:

A lot of the mini-games/abstractions are intended to allow the players to interact with the fiction without being bogged down in mechanics. We didn't feel any lack of officers-running-a-ship minigame. Our players picked the positions they took on the ship and we hand-waved the day-to-day so we could focus on the decisions on where to go and who to get cozy with.

That worked quite well for us - same with the shipboard combat aspect where we focused on the opposition officers while our crews duked it out. None of us wanted to push 20-odd tokens around the board, rolling for each one's attacks. Our GM narrated the rest based on the buffing we gave the crew compared to the resources of the opposition. And if he narrated one of our particular favorites getting in trouble (like Barefoot Samms or Rosie Cusswell, that gave us a chance to effect a rescue.

I mention this because I think we were better prepared for the assumptions of the campaign than you seem to have been. Much of this is covered explicitly or implied in the player's guide. And it fits our style of play fairly well.

But, yeah, you've noticed a couple of things. The scale of the sea is tight, particularly if you want to think Caribbean Sea - it's not as bad if you're thinking of the density of the Philippines. Still kind of tight but that's easily adjustable.

The issue with paying the crew not scaling - they probably assumed players would continue with crews on the scale of the Man's Promise - about 20 sailors. Now that you've spotted it and have 80 crewmen, you know to drop 4 points of plunder paying them off when you sell in port rather than just 1.
And yes, taking ships is more lucrative. But you don't have to split the party if you've built a trustworthy crew (i.e. not like Scourge and Ploog) to sail it home with a prize crew - it's also a good excuse for PCs to take the Leadership feat. I was playing captain in our campaign - as soon as I was able to take Leadership, I took it and we made Rosie Cusswell my cohort. I gave her a prize ship to captain and started to build a fleet... which you will eventually want if you ever want to be Hurricane King.