I've found this trope works best when all players know the secret, but the characters don't. If it's a cool, interesting secret, everyone can play into it and enjoy the dramatic irony.
I agree, this reads like a reporter interviewing someone to get them to define terms they made up. This didn't sell me on why I should want to use one style of play over another, just wistful "torturing" themself wondering if anyone still uses this mysterious style of play. It's not mysterious. As you said, it's just Play to Find Out.
I think it would be more useful to show the strengths and weaknesses of PtFO and as well as more scripted gameplay, because each has a place in RPGs, and knowing when to use one over another is a great skill for GMs to practice.
I would avoid running any combat where the party is forced to lose. That would make any time spent on it feel like a waste. A short narrated vision would be fine, but if you want to make this a bigger encounter, you should give the party a goal that they can actually accomplish. I can think of a few ways you could do this:
- The party could locate survivors among the dead to gain information about what happened.
- Survey the wreckage, the party could use investigation skills to look at debris and piece together what happened. Think, crime scene investigation on a grand scale.
- The BBEG may be showing a true vision of the future, but not a complete vision. Perhaps there is something that the BBEG is trying to hide, such as a clue to how to defeat them. For example, the party could use some kind of magic detection to see through an illususory water fountain and reveal a magic MacGuffin or a person who knows the BBEG's weakness.
I've been using the Pathfinder 2E Beginner Box, and it's the first time I've run a premade adventure. I've been customizing it quite a bit in terms of the story to better match my players. I expected the adventure to feel stale and on-rails, but what I found was that it gives you a safe baseline to work from. If you find any parts of session planning stressful, you can just leave them at the baseline and devote more of your time toward the things you actually enjoy.
In my case, I was still learning the system, so it was nice not having to worry about balancing encounters, drawing maps, or distributing treasure. Instead, I was able to spent my prep time on modifying the story.
I'm in the exact same boat. I'd like to use some of the monster lore and trying to convert the action oriented bosses to be used in PF2e. I'm thinking it would be pretty easy to just treat the Villain Actions as costing two actions in Pathfinder. I think the minion rules would transfer over as well.
I find feats like this, along with all of the creature type specific ones, are really campaign dependent. You either take them reactively once it becomes clear that it would be really handy to speak, say, Gnomish, or you need to metagame a little bit with your GM to know which languages won't be dud picks.
In my game, I would also find it totally reasonable to retrain a language that hasn't ever shown up, using less downime than it would normally require.
This is great advice. I like how this shares the narrative burden with the other people at the table. Mini-encounters like these give you some insight into a characters values, it's less railroad-y, and there's always the threat that it could turn into a big encounter if handled poorly. Plus, the players discussing what they want to do takes up some real world time, and that makes the travel seem less instantaneous.
It's entirely possible to play in a game where there are nonviolent solutions to every encounter. The main thing is that it would require buy in from the GM and the rest of the table. It depends on the genre of game your GM wants to run. Similar to how a hard boiled detective would be out of place in a game centered around a travelling carnival, a pacifist would be out of place in a dungeon crawler. That's not to say you can't do it, but you would have to accept that your character would be a fish out of water.
A pacifist could work well in a few genres though. A murder mystery, a spy thriller, or political intrigue story would probably feature little to no combat.
The Player's Guide for Abomination Vaults includes a ton of information about the major players in Otari: https://downloads.paizo.com/AbominationVaults_PlayersGuide.pdf
That said, don't worry too much about contradicting the official lore. This is your game, and if something in the guide contradicts something you made up, just don't present it to your players, they will never be the wiser.
Take a look at the Roseguard section in the pdf though. That should give you an understanding for why this town exists, and informs some of the politics that are currently going on.
If you are planning to run Troubles in Otari later, you should be aware that it consists of three short adventures dealing with the lumber industry, the delivery service, and an abandoned fishing shack just outside of town. If you want to ease your players into these quests, you may want to introduce them earlier.