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[atomicgm]

Doomsday Dawn: Somberfell Hall: Character Creation

So.  As promised, it’s time to talk about Somberfell Hall.  And the character creation in Someberfell Hall. Ugh.

So this is the third time I created characters for these adventures.  My players are 50/50 in technical skill, so I have a few that I need to pregen for.  Last time we did 4th level characters and I complained about that incessantly.  Push came to shove when a player backed out of creation and threw something together in an hour.  This time I had to make 7th level characters and it literally took three days. Granted it was my six to seven hours free time after work, but twenty-plus hours for four characters hurt.

So, following the suggestions of the module, I made two clerics, a paladin, and a sorcerer.  I wanted to vary my choices, so we have a NG sun cleric, a LG justice paladin, a CG angelic sorcerer, and a CN war cleric. The sun cleric was made to be a full caster so I needed to be a human for Adapted Spell.  I needed that blast cantrip.

Side note, cantrips are totally unbalanced at 1st level.  Some deal a d4, some deal a d10, and then they all balance out at 5th level.  They are still vaguely terrible, since they take two actions to cast and deal roughly as much damage as a bow, but at least I didn’t feel like an idiot for not taking Telekinetic Projectile this time.

For the sorcerer I was limited to the Divine spell list.  Same problem.  I want that blast cantrip, and you’re not getting it without human.  So, human it was.

A war cleric, I thought to myself.  What’s a good race for that?  Well, Half-Orcs are cool and dammit I just made a part of humans.  Sigh.

At least I still had the Paladin.  I had made a Goblin Paladin for The Ashen Ossuary, so this one was a Gnome.  Man, being able to use Small races for martial classes is really satisfying.

So anyways, the sun cleric. Massive overheal potential, no need to wield any weapon besides his holy symbol, heavy armor, turn undead, support and defensive buff spells galore.  I’m sure you’ve heard how heal clerics perform in P2.  He was set.

The war cleric.  Kind of a conan-esque, figure, giant sword, heavy armor, summons, blasts and offensive buffs everywhere.  With Power Attack and Weapon Surge he could deal 4d12+4 damage in one hit.  Did I mention I multiclassed him into Fighter?  I multiclassed him into Fighter.  It’s feat intensive as all get out, but man is it cool.

The angelic sorcerer. I struggled the most with this one. I ended up using Spontaneous Heighten on Summon Monster and Heal, giving a huge flexibility in healing and summoning. Besides that, it resembled the clerics to a disturbing degree.  It honestly did not feel that special, and the feats did not impress.  In hind sight I probably should have multiclassed, but without the new multiclass update available, I could only pick Cleric, Wizard, Rogue, and Fighter.  As a Charisma fullcaster, none of those were useful, so I’m not really sure what else I could have done.

The gnome paladin was the easiest character to make.  Heavy armor, a shield with hardness 10 that can take 3 dents without breaking, and a flickmace. That’s it really.  It was kind of a boring build, actually.

…What is a flickmace anyways?  A whip? One of those party swizzley flick toys made out of paper?

Anyways, Fleet is a mandatory feat.  The gnome in plate armor had a 10’ speed without it.  The Sorcerer wanted to be fast and a 30’ speed really helped with making range on those short cantrips.  Everyone takes Fleet.  If you don’t take Fleet at level 3, then you will take it at level 7.  The thing is, general feats suck for the most part.  Toughness is okay, maybe, but gaining 7 HP at level 7 only served to push the war cleric into the triple-digits HP wise.  That’s a moral victory, not actually useful.  An HP pool of 94 would have been more than enough.

Speaking of sucky feats, skill feats are terrible.  General feats are boring and generic, but at least they do something.  +1 to Fortitude Saves is as plain as you can get, but at least it’s functional.  The Cleric could Make Impression faster and on extra people.  The sorcerer could intimidate without taking penalties.  The gnome could craft, but would never do so because it’s a one shot and crafting is only sort of useful anyways.  The war cleric got the best deal because he got jumping feats, which actually come up when you’re not playing in a one-level mansion. Oh wait.

Well, he would have been effective at jumping, but you’re limited in distance by your move speed. The move speed that suffers a -10 penalty from the plate armor.  Sigh. That’s my complaint.  Martials need to wear heavy armor to survive the front lines, and they suck at their signature skills due to check penalties. Skill DCs are too high anyways, to the point where Druids routinely critical failed nature checks last session, so I guess everyone always sucks at skills.

So I wrote down a ton of spells.  This made me stare at all the conditions inflicted by spells.  The condition rules are exhaustive, but they are so siloed. This is bad.  Blindness causes Blindness, which causes creatures to be Unseen unless you Seek.  If you successfully seek, then they become Sensed. This requires several references and it is not immediately obvious when looking at the Blinded condition what Unseen and Sensed, which does not reference those conditions but hints at them through natural language. “All other creatures and objects are unseen to you unless you succeed at a Seek action to sense them.”

So I noticed a bunch of other annoying stuff while I was in there making characters, so. Lightning round complaints.

Propulsive is stupid.

Volley is stupid-er.

Bastard sword does piercing damage. Why?

Bulk should be listed for all magic items.  Some do, some don’t.

Speaking of bulk, we made a whole subsystem for weight only to make armor weight different and stack the penalties.  Why? Pick one!

Why do I need to choose an ancestry, background, and class; allocate two-to-four ancestry ability boosts, two background ability boosts, a class ability boost, four free ability boosts, four level up ability boosts; and choose 5-plus skills, 3 skill increases, four class feats, two general feats, three skill feats; calculate hit points, saves, skills, attack bonuses, spell bonuses and DCs; choose two 3rd level items, one 4th level item, two 5th level items, and one 6th level item.  All that to build a single character?!

Whew.  That was supposed to be more positive but it turned into a rant. I’m just about done complaining about this game, I swear.  These things just turn themselves into rants, I swear.

Next time I’ll walk you through the first half of Somberfell Hall!

[atomicgm]

Doomsday Dawn: In Pale Mountain’s Shadow Playthrough Part 3

So last time I walked through our playthrough of the first half of In Pale Mountain’s Shadow.  Now for the thrilling conclusion.  And boy, was it rough.

A few posts ago I talked about making a Ranger as a pre-gen.  We were joined by a fifth player who took over that character, making the full party an animal barbarian, healing cleric, shapeshifter druid, thrown weapon ranger, and generalist alchemist.  We didn’t get much of a chance to measure the performance of the characters since we only had a couple encounters.

The PCs started the session at the entrance to the tomb with the new player being a friend they told to meet them part way.  They safely bypassed the trapped front door and cautiously poked their heads in to each room until making their way to the tomb’s central chamber.  They grew very excited when they found the elemental-themed puzzle that would unlock the final resting place of Tular Seft. Despite some very good rolls they were unable to open.  After some nature rolls I gave them a few hints that they should go kill the elementals, which drop the elemental gems that reduce the check DCs. They headed to the Chamber of Sunken Stones expecting some excitement.

It did not go well.

The PCs spotted the earth elemental but the water elemental rolled very high on its Stealth check. The group worked their way across the stones, effectively separating half the party and letting the water elemental tear them apart.  The Ranger and Barbarian were cut off from the rest of the group by fifteen feet of open water and a stubborn-but-mostly-harmless earth elemental.  The water elemental then launched a sneak attack on the Cleric and the Druid, who narrowly avoided being pushed into the water.  The Druid embraced his fate and turned into a shark, swimming around to attack from behind.  The Alchemist hung back in the central chamber to toy with the puzzle against my cautioning and spent the next two rounds running to the battlefield as things quickly turned south.

What followed was a series of turns wherein the Cleric was pushed into the water, climbed back out, and was immediately pushed back in. Two crits later and the Druid was at single digits and the Cleric was unconscious in the drink.  The Druid was forced to disengage but had more actions sapped from him as the Water Elemental pulled him back in with his vortex ability. After a long swim he transformed back to human, revived the cleric, then resumed shark form.  The Cleric then continued the stalling action as the  Ranger and Barbarian finished up with the earth elemental and everyone finally engaged the water elemental.  What had been a route quickly turned around as the focus fire finished the elemental, the cleric getting vengeance through the killing blow.

The party had exhausted nearly half of their resources in one battle, and the elemental puzzle still remained.  Resolving to skip the second elemental room, they gutted through the ensuing skill checks and passed it in three hours.  That opened the central chamber where of Tular Seft’s crypt was hidden behind a secret door.  They noticed a masked figure floating above, but as it did nothing hostile they preemptively attacked the mummies.  The group had played Skyrim. They knew the undead were going to go on the move.

The Druid wildshaped and divided the mummies, and that pretty much ended the combat.  They didn’t have the attack bonus to hit the Druid’s 25 AC, so the group outnumbered the remaining mummies two-to-one.  Focus fire put them down quick and the battle did little more than annoy a tired and angry party.

The party freed the masked man, learning his name was Mabar.  He was a Janni, and an old friend of Tular Seft.  One expositional onslaught later and the party had broken into Tular Seft’s resting place with Mabar’s help, grabbed the countdown clock, and fled the tomb. Nearly two days later a confused group of Night Herald’s found a ransacked tomb and maybe burned to death in a lava flow in the Chamber of Burning Sky.  No one may ever know.

To summarize, the incredibly difficult water battle completely killed the adventure for my party. Water proved incredibly difficult to navigate, and the automatic push used by the water elemental proved too powerful to beat.  In the end they only managed to kill it by drowning it in bodies.  This only served as a stark reminder to me that action economy is king.  By using an attack to push the cleric into the water, the cleric lost an action climbing out of the water.  By downing her he drained actions through the dying rules. This will be a lesson I will not soon forget.  It is hard to say how much of this was just cruel adventure design and how much was the game system itself.  Regardless, that encounter sapped the groups’ enthusiasm, and despite having only two encounters, the group was ready for the adventure to be over and to go home.

Next time we can discuss what character creation for Somberfell Hall was like.  Spoiler: It was a huge pain.

[atomicgm]

Pathfinder Playtest: Legacy Action Economy Spellcasting

So this isn’t the first time I’ve written about this.  I hate the action economy for spellcasting in P2.  Like, really hate it.  At GenCon I was excited to see the extra action used by martials to open up the battlefield while my Sorcerer struggled to make range with her 30′ spells and a single move action.  Later, she was rooted in place while concentrating on a spell while casting another. Last session my Druid player complained that they crawled through difficult terrain and cast a single spell. 

After some thought on the issue of actions and spellcasting in the Pathfinder playtest, I’ve decided to put pen to the house rule I’ve been kicking around.  I doubt I will be using it anytime soon since I want to, y’know, actually try to playtest the rules without screwing with them right away. If P2 sees print in its current state though, you can bet I will be using this for my home games.

Anyways, here’s the idea.

 Legacy Action Economy Spellcasting

Replace the Material Casting, Somatic Casting, and Verbal Casting actions with the following action:

Cast a Spell

Actions: One or More

You cast a spell you know or have prepared.  If the spell requires a Material Casting or Somatic Casting action, this action gains the Manipulate trait.  If the spell requires a Verbal Casting action, this action gains the Auditory and Concentrate traits.  To take this action you must satisfy the requirements of any actions the spell usually requires, as normal.  For example, spells which require Somatic Casting action still require a free hand or a focus.

The Cast a Spell action takes a number of actions to perform equal to the number of components in the spell minus one, to a minimum of one.  Spells that are normally a free action or reaction remain so. Once you use the Cast a Spell action, you may not perform this action again until the beginning of your next turn.  Spells which have only a single spell component, or are a free action or a reaction to cast, do not prevent you from taking the Cast a Spell action. Such spells may be cast even if you have already taken the Cast a Spell action this turn.

Add the following text to Quickened Casting: “You may cast a spell modified by Quickened Casting even if you have already cast a spell this turn, and the modified spell does not prevent you from taking the Cast a Spell action.”

  Alternatively, “If you cast a spell that requires at least 2 actions to cast this turn, you may take an extra action.  You can only cast such spells once per round.” Cheers.

[atomicgm]

Doomsday Dawn: In Pale Mountain’s Shadow Playthrough Part 2

So last time I laid out the characters: a Druid, Barbarian, Alchemist, and Cleric  This time we’ll take a look at how the adventure itself went.

The roleplaying segment at the beginning was a mild letdown. Nothing eventful there.  Leaving on their journey, the party failed utterly at the DC 19 survival checks to reach the mountains.  They took 6 of their 9 days just walking on a road.

On arrival to the grassy plain in the mountain’s shadow, they annihilated the hyenas. The Druid did take a nasty critical from the Dire Hyena, and the party generally complained about the entire map being difficult terrain.  I don’t think I will personally run a map of difficult terrain like that.

In the desert portion they spotted the Ankheg mound and convinced the Alchemist to scout it out. Alone. The results were predictable, with the Druid rushing forward to help him and getting caught in the quicksand. The Ankheg then went down almost immediately, but not before giving everyone a scare with its acid breath. The party left without checking the mound. I later informed them that they missed the body of an adventurer with several magic items and a ton of silver, and much groaning ensued. Their later attempts at looting gnoll war parties only to receive nothing were like rubbing salt in the wound.

Moving to the Gnoll encampment, the PCs easily forded the river thanks to a toad-form druid. The barbarian was a gnome and had gathered intel on the gnoll’s giant scorpion from a nearby chipmunk that instantly became the party mascot. The barbarian then took a potion of disguise from the alchemist to turn into a gnoll, lured the gnolls away from the scorpion kennel, and the plan sort of worked.  The tanky-as-hell druid penned the scorpion in to its kennel, the gnolls getting only one chance to use their sneak attack-like ability. No one felt much threat here as ganging up on the giant toad proved a futile effort on my part. AC 25, if you recall.

Then there was the mountain.

The climb DC was really high.  The Cleric and Barbarian were trained in athletics and had climbing kits. Those expert climbers got regular old successes. The alchemist got a plain ol’ failure which we fluffed as him needing a lot of help from the experts. That amounted to a minor waste of time.  The druid however, despite being trained and having a high strength, plummeted off a cliff as a critical failure.  He would miss those hit points a lot in the next battle.

The manticore.  It was boring.  It was grindy.  It flapped about overhead, launching spikes.  The animal Barbarian has a prohibition on using anything but his fists, so he couldn’t participate at all.  The manticore slowly whittled down the party, along with its stockpile of spikes. The alchemist and cleric were out of their elements, lobbing bolts and arrows at long distance.  The manticore finally got a good hit on the Druid and would have KO’ed him without a Shield Other from the Cleric. Finally out of spikes the beast landed and immediately regretted that decision as a frustrated party descended on it, red in claw and ax bit. It took off with 1 hit point remaining, the party getting a handful of parting shots as it flew away.  Everyone held their breath.

And it escaped!  Moral victory for me, but I doubt it would have effected things at all.

Incredibly tired and approaching sundown, the party moved into an overhang looking for a good place to camp.  They ran right into the survivors of the gnoll war party that had been teased earlier by the chipmunk.  They moved back and prepared for a battle as the gnolls tried to decide their approach. With none of the party knowing gnoll or having an inclination to talk, the battle was joined. The Cleric took a nasty critical from the leader, went for a heal, and immediately had it stuffed in her face. The gnoll sergeant could make attacks of opportunity, and it made a cruel gotcha moment for her.

With TPK looming above their heads, the Druid and Alchemist desperately healed the Cleric with everything they could muster. Still running on fumes, the Cleric couldn’t get away from the gnoll without taking an attack of opportunity.  She swung her ax, landed max damage on 2d12, and hurled him off the mountain. Two more gnoll lackeys quickly followed, with a single-digit hit point cleric using her party as a shield.  The Barbarian critically demoralized the last gnoll with intimidate, and the cowering monster was beheaded by the cleric.

Setting up camp outside the entrance to the tomb, the PCs have 2 days left on the adventure timer and we ended the session.

There was a lot of decompression afterward. The Druid and Cleric agreed with my earlier assessments on casters. Two actions is too much for a lot of the spells they used.

The Druid felt badly about how powerful Wild Shape had been. After much rules examination we confirmed we had been running things properly.

The Barbarian was pleasantly surprised that his character had performed so well.  He had initially believed he wouldn’t be able to use the +1 hand wrappings for his claws and bite attack. My thoughts were that the alternative is a barbarian that can’t use magic weapons at all.  That would be ridiculous.

The Alchemist was disappointed with the bombs and elixirs.  I’m sure in any other adventure he would have been happier, as the Elixirs of Darkvision would have been amazing in the Ashen Ossuary.  I think he forgot that he could turn off Calculated Splash as well, so that might have helped.

The Cleric was frustrated with the attack of opportunity, and I’m inclined to agree.  With most monsters having no attack of opportunity mechanics, I feel like this should be telegraphed.  I think in the future I will warn players about provoking reactions and whether a monster is capable of capitalizing on that. A desperate failed heal almost cost the party the encounter.

And that was In Pale Mountain’s Shadow! Well, the first half of it anyways. We are debating about running the second half and putting ourselves behind the playtest schedule. We shall see what comes of it. The more I play this game, the more I see a ton of potential being weighed down by some flaws.  Customization is good. Choices are everywhere. Now if they can pare down the ones that aren’t meaningful and smooth out the bumps in the road, this could be a system that really competes with DnD 5e.

Next time, I think I’ll post my idea for house ruling spell casting.  See you then!

[atomicgm]

Doomsday Dawn: In Pale Mountain’s Shadow Playthrough Part 1

So.  There’s a lot to talk about.

I jammed most of my prep into the few hours before the game. It went really well.  I think I’m getting a handle on the system’s intricacies and quirks.  Character building is becoming faster. Picking out the bits of mechanics to study up on based on the encounter design is easier now.  But by all that is holy, the players stomped that adventure so easily.

So I guess I’ll start at the beginning. Party composition.  The alchemist I made saw use, along with a dwarf cleric I made, and a druid and barbarian made by the players.  The alchemist didn’t work out as I had hoped.  Compared to the barbarian, cleric, and druid, the Alchemist’s player felt useless.  Part of that was low damage counts.  Part of that was an unwillingness to bomb his allies with splash damage in an all melee party.  I wish Precise Bombs was a lower lower feat, as I think the player’s enjoyment of the class would have dramatically changed with access to that ability.

I built the alchemist as a generalist with a lot of neat effects like healing, damage, and darkvision, and he comparatively sucked at all of them.  His heal topped out at 3d6.  His bombs dealt 2d8 damage with 4 points of splash. Compared to the other 3 powerhouses, my alchemist player went “meh”.

The cleric was a dwarf, and I built that for two things: healing, and melee damage.  Holy hell, did it perform.  Healing Font, Healing Hands, and Channel Energy were a winning combo, with a 4d8+12 heal 4/day, before using spell slots.  I take back what I said about Paizo nerfing healing.  They just hid it behind a 4th  level healing domain cleric paywall.

One of my favorite things about the cleric was the usage of the shield rules.  She usually held her shield aloft for the defensive boosts, but more than once she hurled it aside as a free action. gripped her dwarven waraxe with two hands as her first action, and slammed the enemy with two attacks.  She got the +1 weapon granted by the adventure, so she had a +8 to hit for 2d12+3 damage.  A few lucky critical hits made her notorious as a boss killer. Spending an ancestry feat and a general feat to get that ax was well worth it.

On to the barbarian, it was functional.  The unarmed animal barbarian provided consistent damage through the use of handwraps.   As a level 2 item, the Barbarian was the only member of the party to start with magic weapons.  Rage is now unlimited and allowed him to shapeshift into a werebeast, which he used to solid offensive effect.  The real highlight were the temporary hit points and his massive pile of 72 HP.  He ran out of rage time and had to reinitiate rage mid combat several times, which was mostly an excuse to hang back and refresh temp HP.  It worked surprisingly well.

But the worst offender was the Druid.  We were sure he was playing incorrectly.  Maybe he added his bonuses wrong?  No. Maybe he was using the wrong spell? No.  What gives?

Animal Shape.  This is the level the Druid gets access to improved wild shaping, and oh boy did it break my game.  The highest AC in the party was a 19.  Actually 21 if you count the shield cleric with shield raised.

The Druid had a 25 AC.

Read the entry!  The Druid automatically heightens Animal Form to 4th level, gaining a 25 AC, +14 attack modifier, and deals ~2d8+9 damage, damage varying by shape.  The druid smashed through most combat encounters, performing better as a melee striker and tank than the cleric and barbarian did.  I’m confident he could have handled some of the encounters by himself.

I was going to keep going, but there is just so much to talk about in this one. I think I’ll split it up into two parts.  Next time, the blow-by-blow on the adventure itself.

[atomicgm]

Doomsday Dawn: In Pale Mountain’s Shadow Char Gen Part 2 and a Rant on Healing

So I’ve made a second pregen for my players for session 2 of the playtest.  This was a specific request from a friend of mine for a Human Alchemist.  It went pretty well actually, much better than the last character.  I will now summarize my thoughts on character creation in general.

DnD 5e character creation is boring.  Seriously. There is almost no choice in the affair. Assign some abilities, pick a race, background, class, archetype, and you’re done. Maybe we get a little crazy and introduce ability boosts, feats, or multiclassing.  Now here’s the thing.  P2 doesn’t expand upon this.  There is no additional mechanical complexity in play, like fighters using maneuvers to pierce armor, shatter stone walls, or provide leadership to their party.  The characters are about the same mechanically speaking.  They have 6 ability scores, an ancestry, a background, a class, and some feats. They hit things or cast a spell, with roughly one class feature per level to mix things up.  The thing is, getting there requires a lot more choices to be made.  A LOT more.

To make a character’s ability scores in P2 you don’t roll or use point buy.  You choose ability boosts which add a +2 or -2 to a score of 10. Feats are also divided up into categories, with general and skill feats being available to all characters and class feats being available only to specific classes.  Class feats function a bit like broken up archetype paths with mix and match features.

So at 4th level you pick an ancestry, a background, and a class, getting 4 ancestry ability boosts, 2 background ability boosts, 4 general ability boosts, 1 class ability boost, 3 class feats, 1 background skill feats, 2 normal skill feats, 1 general feat, your actual class features, weapon and armor proficiencies, between 2 and 10 skill proficiencies, 1 expert skill proficiency, and some combination of familiars, animal companions, spells, powers, and crafting formulas.  Plus there’s gear.  You need one or several weapons with tons of distinct tags useful in different situations, armors that involve a very real tradeoff between protection and high armor check penalties, miscellaneous adventuring gear, and then fighting with the stingy encumbrance system to fit it all on your character without having them collapse under their own weight.

And then there’s magic items!  You get one 3rd, two 2nd, and one 1st level items. Those are all nearly worthless, with the only standout pick being +1 armor in your 3rd level slot. There are some other items I’m overlooking, especially some consumable oils and wands, but the one that really burns me are the potions of healing.  I think those actually are worthless now.  Adventuring parties are experiencing massive hit point inflation because everyone gets max hit points now, for every level.  My 4th level human alchemist with a 12 con has 44 HP, up from 26 last edition.  Pretty close to double.

While I think it might be a good thing in that it reduces the value of your con score from “mandatory for all classes” to “nice to have”, it devalues a lot of choices.  Toughness and boosting your con score now give relatively modest differences in hit points. Consider that a 4th level fighter with a 10 con might be at 50 hit points, and at 70 with an 18 con, a 40% boost. Last edition you’d be looking at 27 base hit points and 47 with that high constitution, a 75% boost.  Healing, toughness, constitution, it all seems less valuable now with that big buffer of hit points added on.

You should almost never have maximum hit points either.  Healing up will take tons of resources, and despite 1st level spells being buffed a la 5e DnD (y’know, the old “Magic missile shoots 3 missiles instead of 1 to make it look worthwhile compared to your cantrip which is basically a bow” thing), despite that buff, Heal (Cure Light/Moderate/etc. is just “Heal” this edition) still does a measly 1d8.  They pretend to throw us a bone by letting you add your ability modifier to that, as if that makes up for losing your caster level added on to it.  What was regularly regarded as the worst possible strategy to take in combat, healing, has gotten beaten with the nerf bat. And besides that, there is less of it going around.  You have Resonance Points limiting the amount of magic items you can use in one day, spells healing less than they used to, fewer spells being available with the elimination of bonus spell slots, healing being proportionately weaker due to hit point inflation, and wands now only carrying 10 charges.

This is an immense and radical shift in how hit points and healing works.  Out of combat healing never bothered me.  Your spell casters would still run out of spells and the martials would still run out of hit points once combat started.  I worry this will just encourage more 15 minute adventuring days as parties will be desperate to return to their full hit point totals. I am open to the idea of keeping on the pressure by slowly whittling down a larger hit point total with less healing available, but boy that is an uncomfortable shift.

Well.  That got away from me.  End rant.

I should probably actually talk about the Alchemist at some point, huh?  He’s fine.  Alchemical formula are neat.  Tons of neat potions and effect are available. Bombs look much cooler than spells and with my 10 resonance points I have up to 20 of them per day before I spend a single copper. The use of resonance points as ammo and doubling your exchange rate by prepping potions at the beginning of the day was interesting, though I worry Remarkable Resonance is a mandatory feat for Alchemists (maybe it should be a bonus feat instead of Studied Resonance?).  Class and skill feats were mostly unremarkable but felt good to choose.  Skill proficiencies seem more impactful when you aren’t hampered by armor check penalties. Weapons seemed relatively worthless when you’re packing bombs, and the lack of Dex-to-damage for non-rogues made it hard to get excited by a d8 damage crossbow at this level.

To summarize, I didn’t hate making this character like I did the ranger.  The Alchemist is almost a wizard lite, with tons of different abilities including damage, concealment, disguise, poison, darkvision, and more. Their skills didn’t fight with the prohibitive armor system because the alchemist wasn’t dependent on strength for damage and put those points into dexterity and light armor. And at least Alchemists gets to take advantage of the formula system without spending hundreds of silver pieces.  At least the alchemy items are worth using, unlike the traps that have a half dozen hoops to jump through in order to deal a d8 damage. (Please just buff the snares or something!)

Next time, we continue prepping for In Pale Mountain’s Shadow.  My wife wants to build a character, so we’ll see how someone who doesn’t focus on system mastery deals with dozens of choices in character creation. I’m hopeful that a little advice from someone with experience will make things a lot smoother for her.  Wish us luck!

[atomicgm]

Doomsday Dawn: In Pale Mountain’s Shadow Char Gen Part 1

So I’m making pre generated characters for the game on Sunday.  Here is what I found.  Feel my pain.

4th level character creation took forever.  Of course there is something to be said for system literacy, but I had 3 class feats, 2 skill feats, 1 general feat, 1 ancestry feat, an animal companion, snares, and 4 magic items.  It was a lot of content.  So much so that two hours got me one useable character.

Weird things of note: All classes use max hit points, so a 4th level ranger with a 14 con had a whopping 58 hit points. Snares are prohibitively slow and expensive (2 to 10 GOLD pieces, per 5 foot square, which cannot be set up before hand or moved in any way, which takes 1 minute to set). The animal companion looks good on paper, which is a nice change of pace from 5e’s terrible companions. Magic armor adds its bonus to all your saves (no more cloaks of resistance!). Rangers no longer get spells.

Armor check penalties are way too high, with a breastplate completely negating my +4 Trained proficiency modifier for Stealth, Athletics, and Acrobatics. This left me with a +2 to a core class skill.  You could argue I should have made a dex focused Ranger if I wanted to use Stealth and Acrobatics in the first place, thus allowing me to get away with lighter armor and a lower check penalty.  That is a fair point, except my Human Ranger and Goblin Paladin had this same issue with their Athletics being similarly handicapped. I get it.  Armor is heavy.  But historically plate armor was not clumsy.  The evenly distributed weight meant it was shockingly agile. Mechanically speaking, when you tighten the modifiers in your game you should really be tightening these penalties as well, and they are huge.

I didn’t mention this earlier, but encumbrance rules are still giving me fits.  A weapon and armor puts most 10 strength folks at their limit before taking penalties, and even high strength characters struggle with carrying a backup weapon and some gear.  This has been true for my Goblin Paladin and my Human Ranger, both of which had 18 strength.

Thrown weapon were my primary for this character (dual hatchets). Their ranges are annoyingly short at 10ft. This isn’t a new issue, and it’s present in both 5e and P1, but dang is that a short range. Thrown weapons also use Dex to hit and Str for damage. This is the same as in P1, but different from 5e which uses Strength for both.  I would have preferred the 5e method, personally.

As far as magic items go, one 1st, two 2nd, and one 3rd didn’t buy much. A Minor Healing Potion healed 1d8 damage, which is a drop in the bucket compared to my max-rolled hit points.  The Returning Clasp looked promising until I realized that all the trinkets are single use only (and it required the user to have quick draw to operate it, because reasons??). Oil of potency was adequate. Wands looked exciting until I remembered that rangers don’t have a spell list (also wands only have 10 non-renewable charges; wtf?).

I did find the doubling rings, which was really exciting.  They were of no use at level 4, but they were neat.  DnD 4e addressed the issue of dual-wielders having to buy two copies of all their weapons (a prohibitively costly endeavor which is no more powerful than a greatsword) by introducing an enchantment that duplicated the weapon. This solution was a bit more elegant, moving the enchantment from the weapon and placing it on a worn item. This flattens the cost and lets you upgrade your weapons as normal.  Still annoying that a fighting style that tries to be equal to the others and was suboptimal in P1 has this extra cost attached to it, but it’s something at least.

All in all, this character creation experience was pretty miserable.  The only positive experience was realizing Agile and Hunt Target stacked, making my attack routine +9/+6/+3 against one target. Unless rangers get something to make Snares or Animal Companions more interesting, especially given their loss of spells, it looks like this will be as boring of a class to play as a Fighter.  Perhaps more so.

Next time I’ll make another character.  Here’s hoping it’s a better experience than this one.

[atomicgm]

Doomsday Dawn: In Pale Mountain’s Shadow Prep

So I’m back at it again. I have a playtest scheduled for this weekend and I’m starting in on prepping for the session today.  Here’s what I’m seeing.

For session 2, the players need to create new characters.  The first session PCs are going to make a return at the midpoint and the end, but the overall module tracks several adventuring parties and their efforts to thwart the apocalypse.  This actually find this to be really cool, and it provides the excuse to play characters from 1st level up to 20th.

This time the characters will be 4th level and start with magic items.  I’m going to have to double check that when I prep my pregens.  The adventure also notes that it will be mostly a race through the wilderness, and I decide I’m going to make a Ranger and a Druid, two classes I passed on last time. Maybe a Monk and an Alchemist as well. I’ll leave that for another post.

The beginning of this adventure finds the PCs being hired to race to acquire an artifact.  The presence of a social scene is surprising, as the last adventure didn’t bother with much of an introduction.  This one doesn’t have any notes on skill checks either, so the system isn’t getting much of a workout here besides some extra free magic items. Let’s skip to something more interesting.

Quick side note: While trying to get to the interesting meat of the adventure, I discover that the battle maps are “just make stuff up”.  The first map is actually a field of difficult terrain, three ten by ten clearings, and two thorn bushes.  Disappointing, given how good the map was last adventure.

As for monsters, they look far more interesting this adventure compared to the last one.

Mummy Guards have a nonlethal version of mummy rot that engages the disease/poison rules again.  All four elementals are present, with the air elemental as a type of high-speed skirmisher that ignores reactions (such as the Fighter’s Attack of Opportunity), the fire elemental dealing persistent damage and exploding upon death, the Earth elemental turtling under the ground using earth glide as a reaction to taking damage, and the water elemental depending heavily on the use of watery terrain to cancel enemy move actions and pull them closer as a reaction.  The ankheg makes an appearance, with an area attack, ranged touch attack, and armor-destroying bite(!).  Hyenas have the classic bite trip with the addition of their bite dragging prone characters away from the party.  Gnolls have a sneak-attack-like pack tactic ability. The manticore from the cover of the adventure is a manticore: a big, meaty flier with a ranged attack. Compared to the other complex encounters, it actually looks kind of boring.

The whole thing culminates with an (avoidable?) encounter with an evil adventuring party.  The ranger is just a walking bow-turret, but the necromancer and cleric have some interesting synergy with a ray of enfeeblement and web spell on their spell lists.  The leader of the band, an antipaladin, looks less interesting.  She trades out the paladin’s defend-the-party reaction for a reaction that triggers when she is hit, but only on criticals. It is possible her ability will never trigger.  Outside that, she has damaging lay on hands, high AC, and a big axe.

It is interesting seeing each creature having such mechanically interesting abilities.  P1 wasn’t a simplistic game by any means, but it is interesting seeing a higher level of complexity creeping in.  Honestly, it reminds me of DnD 4th edition.  In my (unpopular) opinion, this isn’t a bad thing.  DnD 4 was fantastic for mechanical nerds like me, with tons of standardized keywords and rider effects on special attacks. I’m actually hoping the double down on this to fix some of what 4e did wrong and provide for that niche that I think 5e doesn’t really reach out to.  So far, it seems like the monsters are hitting that style, but the characters are leaving me cold.  We’ll have to wait and see how the playtest develops.

Next time, I’m going to have to build those characters.  We’ll see how much more cumbersome 4th level characters with magic items are to build, and whether they’re tactically complex enough to scratch that 4th edition itch of mine.

[atomicgm]

Doomsday Dawn: The Lost Star Playthrough

So I finally got the chance to play the first adventure of Doomsday Dawn!  Here is a summary of my experiences with the new system

Firstly, character creation was a blast.  Ancestry, Background, and Class worked very well together.  I created four premade characters including a Dwarf Wizard, Elf Rogue, Gnome Bard, and Goblin Paladin.  That last one was amazing, as the races have a floating +2 I dropped in Strength. My little goblin knight had an 18 strength!  As long as your race doesn’t have a penalty in the attribute, it’s a viable choice.  Even with the penalty, you can start with a 16 score, which is still pretty good. The party was a goblin sorcerer, gnome bard, elf rogue, goblin paladin, and halfling druid.

As for the adventure, I did an in medias res with the first encounter. The ooze went down pretty quickly, but it did get one good hit in on the Paladin.  He blocked it with his shield, banged the dent out with quick repair, and spent the rest of the adventure with his shield up. Next I jumped back in time to explain the setup of the adventure, the players immediately doubting that Drakus was a vampire.  Two players were goblins returning to their tribe on good terms, so they talked their way past the first group of goblins.  Taking their non-goblin “hostages” they found themselves in the polluted fountain area, completely skipping several encounters that could have netted them some of the few available magic items.

I had Talga accompany the party so I had a voice of some sort during the adventure, which may have made exploration a bit easier.  The second I mentioned that the fountain was clear when the goblins first moved in, they began poking around the fountain and found the idol in the basin. The Rogue failed to fish it out with tongs so the Paladin just grabbed it out bare-handed, releasing the Quasits.  They went down very quickly, but not before damaging the Rogue and Paladin.  The party scanned the fountain for magic, and upon finding it magical everyone drank from the fountain.  The Rogue rolled a 1 and spent the rest of the adventure with 3 hit points.

The party managed to prevent the alarm door from ringing and ambushed the goblin headquarters.  The bard cast a Sleep spell, making me realize I have no idea how Sleep works.  The wording says most enemies immediately wake up in combat, but I had no idea where to find that.  I just had Warriors waste an action waking the Pyro and Commando.  The Paladin triggered the rock trap but made his reflex save, ripped up the Warriors the Commando was using as meat shields, only to drop from a critical hit from the Commando’s horse chopper.

The Rogue tumbled in, trying to protect the fallen paladin, which moved her out of the way of the Pyro’s burning hands.  Half the party got fried, but the Paladin made his death save, returned to 1 hit point, and I realized I didn’t know how the unconscious rules worked.  I let him stand up, he dumped lay on hands on himself, and the fight abruptly ended as the Rogue suddenly had a flanking partner and the Sorcerer got a critical hit with Telekinetic Projectile.

The party then found the back entrance to Drakus’ hideout and found his loot.  The Rogue managed to spot and disarm the trapped lock, but immediately broke her lockpicks.  It wasn’t even a series of bad rolls, the lock’s DC was just absurdly high for 1st level.  She needed to roll THREE 17s, and they had to be IN A ROW or her progress would erode. They scouted ahead, spotted Drakus, and half the party doubled back for the other door.  Everyone had already drank from the fountain so they didn’t even notice the sand trap.  They tried to bluff Drakus that they were bringing offerings, failed to open the door, and he moved into a hiding spot.  As they stormed the room Drakus revealed his true form, to no one’s surprise. The Paladin dropped from a sneak attack , the rogue nearly dropped from a triple attack that hit her and the Rogue, and things started to look grim.  Then the paladin burned a hero point to remove the dying condition, got up, and hit Drakus hard.  The Rogue got a sneak attack, and the Druid nailed a Shillelagh critical.  With Drakus dead they completed the dungeon in leisure and looted everything.  The day was saved, and we were rushing everyone out of our house.  That took five hours.

So, I’m positive I ran some things incorrectly.  Dying is incredibly confusing.  When you drop to 0 HP you are hit with both the dying AND unconscious status effects, and recovering from dying does not remove your unconsciousness.  You actually continue making saves until you fail three times (advance to Dying 4, dead) or roll one success, gaining 1 hit point. When you have 1 hit point you STILL makes death saving throws.  If you succeed at this point you wake up. Now your dying condition decays at a rate of one level per turn, so you can be conscious, fighting, and dying all at the same time.  You also have the option of burning a hero point to remove all of your dying conditions, and with no action specified I can only assume you can do this at any time. I ran it where a single success on a save removed both dying and unconscious, and with hero points you can make my rules good the game as intended.  The Paladin used them to bounce back into combat undeterred, and it was instrumental in their defeat of Drakus.  Playing properly, he would have gotten one fewer reroll, which requires two hero points.  Honestly, those two hero points seem like a waste when you can ignore the damage system of the game.

Edit:  Technically running out of hit points takes away one of your three actions, knocks you prone, and disarms you.  That’s three actions to get back into fighting shape. Maybe not so bad after all?

As far as properly used mechanics, the druid picked Acid Splash and was screwed over by the d4 damage die.  Even the sorcerer grabbed Ray of Frost and started to wonder why he would use anything that wasn’t Telekinetic Projectile.  That d10 is hard to argue with, especially when none of the cantrips come with meaningful riders outside a critical hit.

Our Rogue felt like she was TOO powerful in combat, out damaging the Paladin by a fair margin.  Meanwhile, out of combat she felt useless.  This was partly the fault of some terrible rolls, and partly due to some of the crazy high DCs of traps and perception checks she had to contend with.  I think DCs of 10 to 12 are plenty when you have at most a +5 to your skill check.  The Rogue wants to shine when dealing with their area of expertise, not feel like they wasted their entire character class.   Side note with her, I couldn’t figure out if the players could split their movement with an action, like Spring Attack or normal 5e movement.  It really wasn’t clear.

The whole party had to contend with the utter lack of healing as well.  The hit point inflation from the new racial bonus to HP was not enough to keep the party on their feet.  By the end half the party was down and the other half running on single digits of HP, with no way to recover.  Without a 5e-esque short rest mechanic and no potions or wands to spend their resonance points on, the party ran low by encounter 2 and ran out by 3, sliding to the finish of encounter 4 on their faces.

All in all, the group said they didn’t like P2.  They much preferred 5e DnD, and I would say I have to agree.  I am willing to give P2 another chance and will definitely finish out the playtest.  I know things will get easier as we master the rules, but I remain unconvinced that this edition of Pathfinder will scratch my itch for high-customization, high-powered Dungeons and Dragons-style play.  Complexity is there, but it didn’t seem to provide anything exciting.  I’m still making the same move-swing turns I always was, and I’m losing a lot of the quality-of-life tweaks from 5e DnD. I suppose we shall have to wait and see what session 2, In Pale Mountain’s Shadow will bring.

Whew, this was a long post.

[atomicgm]

Prep for Doomsday Dawn: The Lost Star

First order of business: I forgot to mention Vancian magic! P2 will be unchanged in this regard. Personally, I think that is quite the shame as the 5e update to the mechanic was really nice.  Making all casters spontaneous casters, with prepared casters being able to swap out their spells known, was one of the nicest changes to Vancian magic I’ve seen.  Maybe I’m going to have to start running a house-ruled version of p2 with 5e spellcasting and a converted version of the Tome of Battle characters.

Anyways, on to the main show.  I now have a group I will be running the playtest for, so today I am prepping for it. I start by reading the adventure document and I’m immediately pushed over to the bestiary since I’m running six players and I will need to do some scaling.  That’s mildly irritating.

I find the table for adjusting encounters easily enough.  Based on the number of additional players I know exactly how to adjust my encounter budget and how many additional monsters to add.  I have to calculate this myself, but I don’t mind. The opportunity to mess with the encounter builder is welcome.

Other irritation: for the playtest they do not want players to use the backgrounds in the main book. Players MUST select from 6 unique backgrounds that fit better into the story.  If you’re going to release a playtest document, maybe include this information in the player packet, not the freakin’ adventure.

Final irritation: the final boss battle of the first adventure has a line calling for a dire rat to be in the encounter, but there is no dire rat in the bestiary.  Looking online, the rat is a typo.  It should read giant rat (which is in the bestiary) and it shouldn’t even be in the adventure.  Nice to know that even the big kid publishers make mistakes from time to time.

The adventure looks well put together, though maybe a bit hallway-battle-ish for my tastes.  A few minutes work in InDesign gave me a clean pdf of all the monsters’ combat stats in one handy list.  After reviewing the list of monsters I am seeing a lot of universal terminology pop up.  Confused, poisoned, quick, slowed, all of these are standard terms that do the same thing across many different creatures.  Standardization was one of the many things I loved about 4e DnD, and it gives me a very 4e vibe.  I also think that’s not one of the things people hated about 4e.  In fact, I see a lot of these conditions in 5e as well, so this seems like a good move that I think will be well received.  This list is a lot larger than 5e’s list, though. Side note: The weapon section was extra-covered in key words, nearly a whole page of finesse, deadly, versatile, two-handed, sweep, and the like.

I think I’ll just leave you with this for today.  This is an excerpt from a condition:

“Dead: You are no longer alive. You can’t act…”

You don’t say!

[atomicgm]

More Selections From The Pathfinder Playtest: Spells and Character Creation

So last time, I was torn between digging into the proficiency rules or re-examining the action economy with regards to spells.  As excited as I am to see the proficiency rules take the shape that they have, spells win the day.  My experience with playing the Sorcerer in the playtest at GenCon have definitely colored my opinions of the edition so far.  Here is hoping this will turn things around.

I finally downloaded the PDF version of the playtest materials and ran a search on “Quicken” and found Quickened Spell, a Level 8 Sorcerer/Wizard Feat that reduces a spells casting time by one action once per day, and can’t be used on your highest level spells.  Yay.

Random aside: Looks like everything is now a spell.  Spell-like ability?  That’s now called a Power.  That just a spell you can cast without having levels in a caster class.  Ki strike?  Power.  Formatted exactly the same as a spell.  Crossing my fingers that Fighters have some Tome of Battle/4e-esque Powers.

So, some spell components are a free action.  Why not just make spells with mixed components?  “This one requires a free somatic component and an action verbal component.”  Haven’t seen any of those yet. And now I can confirm, all of the cantrips require two actions.  If they had moved to a two or four action model, maybe they would have made things more balanced for casters, but as is they are being charged most of their turn every time they cast.  I’m going to have to play some more before deciding if this really is a problem or not. Maybe I’m just salty because I was told by the GM at GenCon that I could cast multiple spells per round.

So 10th level spells. Wish, Miracle, Gate, Time Stop, Avatar, Alter Reality, Fabricate Truth, Primal Phenomenon (Druid Wish).  I’m seeing a pattern here. 10th level spells rend reality, dimensions, or time itself.  It’s weird thinking of Wish as the purview of 19th level wizards, and Meteor Swarm no longer being top dog.

The meteors produced by Meteor Swarm are twenty feet in diameter, by the way.  Epic.

And then it suddenly occurred to me I had no idea how races had changed, so I found myself in character creation.  Each character starts with a 10 in every ability score.  Your race gives you two thematic +2s, a floating +2, and a thematic -2. Your also get a +2 to your class’ primary ability (several have a choice between two) and another four floating +2s. Under no circumstance can starting characters have scores higher than 18.  There is also a sidebar that lets you tank your ability scores for no reimbursement.  Y’know, for fun.  I didn’t need a sidebar to tell me I could do that, but I suppose it was worth mentioning.

Races grant you a bonus to your max HP in addition to modifying your starting constitution (double dipping?).  All races grant you a starting Ancestry feat at 1st level.  Humans have half-elf and half-orc in their list, which is neat.  And all races are 5 ft slower than you would expect, with Humans at 25 ft, Dwarves at 20, and elves at 30.  I don’t remember seeing that in my GenCon game.  The bonus HP does explain why my sorcerer had really high HP though.

So that’s it for today. I think next time I’ll be moving in a more linear fashion going forward.  I want to dig into classes, skills, and feats next time.  Seeing how common proficiencies are will be a large part of my enjoyment in this game.  I’m hoping they are very common, with a choice between maybe two legendary, a handful of master, or a dozen expert proficiencies by 20th level.

See you next time!

[atomicgm]

In Which I Read From The Pathfinder Playtest: Classes, Levels, and Core Mechanics

Alright, let’s start digging into the playtest document.  And as is only appropriate, I will do the logical thing you do when you start to read a book: start in the middle.  That’s where all the cool stuff is.

Straight to Paladin. They’re cool as hell, right?  The level progression looks very different.  No BAB, no saving throw bonuses, no spell list. Ancestry feat, Paladin feat, General Feat, Skill Feat, all kinds of feats.  Looks like feats are broken up into non-interfering categories now.  Maybe stinkers like Alertness and other skill-boosters will actually see play.

Cross-checking with Sorcerer, it looks like classes receive most of this stuff at even rates, but the Sorcerer receives roughly half the number of Sorcerer feats as the Paladin does Paladin feats.  These are class features, by the way.  Divine Grace requires you to be 2nd level and grants a +2 to all saves (Side note: +1 and +2 seem to be the rule of the day; is this the Pathfinder version of 5e bounded accuracy?).  Attack of Opportunity is 6th level, so you’ll be able to get that outside the Fighter, thankfully!  Shield Champion is 20th level, and if your shield would be broken, angels sweep it up to heaven to repair it for you, returning it to you the next day. That’s kind of awesome!  (More on broken shields later.)

So that must be a capstone, those bits that entice me to stick with a class until level 20.  I wonder how multiclassing works?

…Well…

So, p2 uses the 4th edition DnD system of multiclassing: giant piles of feats.  I can definitely appreciate the simplicity of folding the archetype, multiclass and prestige class systems into the feat system.  I worry that these feats will be too weak to entice me, especially as power creep sets in four years and twenty supplements roll down the line.  So far they seem fine, though.  One feat nets you cantrips, a second grants 2nd level spells, a third grants 6th level spells, and a fourth and final feat grants 8th level spells.  You do gain only one spell per day of the leveled slots, though (a branch in the feat tree grants a bonus spell slot of all but your two highest spell levels, so that might help).  At least you should be capable of casting some decent spells at high levels when multiclassing.

Each tree is between six and eight feats long.  There is a tree for the classic four classes (Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, Wizard), plus the Cavalier and Pirate archetypes and the Gray Maiden prestige class.  I am looking forward to seeing multiclass feats for the other classes.  I will, however, greatly miss choosing which class I will become when I level up.  The added flexibility that allowed was nice as well, letting you pick a level in Rogue or Fighter if you desperately wanted to pick up a new skill or feat for roleplaying reasons.  Now you might spend 3 levels waiting for a chance to learn underwater basket weaving from the master you just apprenticed yourself to.

And now for something completely different: proficiencies!  I actually knew a bit about this from the playtest, but I got a far more complete picture here.  The Paladin’s Saving Throw section reads thusly: “Expert in Fortitude; Trained in Reflex; Expert in Will”.  Proficiency is now broken into five categories: Untrained, Trained, Expert, Master, and Legendary.  This breaks down to -2, 0, +1, +2, and +3.  (You also add your level to all checks of all kinds. Squee, my wildest dreams come true!) Base attack bonus, saving throws, skill checks, spell save DCs, and spell attack rolls now all run off the same system.  (Side note, you actually add your level to that bonus above to determine your proficiency modifier.  A 5th level Master rank is a +7 bonus.  You add this bonus to your AC when wearing appropriate armor. Autoscaling AC without magic items, double squee!!)

So yes, from what I’ve seen so far, this edition of Pathfinder will be anything but rules lite. It is filled with crunchy baubles and feat slots and trinkets that will give you minor bonuses that will satisfy any fan of Pathfinder.  But the refinement in the core mechanics will mean that these trinkets will all run precisely the same, cutting down on overhead and keeping your game moving smoothly. After the let down that was the action system last time, this was a massive success.  I am incredibly hyped to see more of the proficiency system and how common raising your ranks might be.

Next time, we’ll either look in to ranking up skills, or re-examine the spell section with regards to the action economy.  Either way looks fun.  I’m really being torn in multiple directions with this.

…Ooh, what if casting spells beneath your max level takes fewer actions?

…Is Skill Focus dead now? Legendary skills are mathematically equal to Skill Focus now.

…Okay, I’ll shut up.

[atomicgm]

Thoughts on the Pathfinder Playtest

So I had the opportunity to play a game at GenCon this year, specifically the Raiders of Shrieking Peak.  There were six at the table; myself, two friends, and three strangers.  The strangers were all nooblets.  It sounded like this was their first role playing session, ever.  The rest of us were experienced gamers and dove in to the system pretty quick.  I played a Sorcerer, my wife a Rogue, and my friend an Alchemist.  We were all 5th level.

So immediately, the changes to the action system were the biggest thing I noticed.  Instead of Swift, Standard, and Move actions, plus attacks of opportunity, p2 (that’s what I’m calling it from now on) just has 3 actions and a reaction.  What this means is, anyone can effectively move as a swift action.  Or attack, even.  If you use multiple actions to attack, successive attacks take a penalty that should seem familiar; -5 for the second, and -10 for the third.  That’s right, you can now make 3 swing full-attack-actions from 1st level.  That’s kind of neat.

The alchemist hardly did anything, so I can’t much comment there.  The Rogue, however, managed to take advantage of the new action system to establish flanking constantly.  Martials have way more flexibility than before, flitting across the battlefield and flexing their actions.  I am reminded of the Fatigue mechanic of the boardgame Descent, where you would spend an action to effectively store individual squares of movement for later use.  This means you’re more likely to make base-to-base contact for melee or have that extra square of move to see around the corner.

Moving on, the Rogue also enjoyed the total lack of attacks of opportunity.  That’s right, the ubiquitous attack of opportunity is now a Fighter-only ability.  I wasn’t sure how I would feel about this at first.  I loved the “mark” mechanics of 4th edition DnD and was hoping for something similar in p2.  I had never considered they would use negative design space to achieve this. By limiting attacks of opportunity to the Fighter, they have successfully made the fighter sticky without writing a single new mechanic.  The side effect is fights are far more mobile without the fear of reprisal. Combatants engage in running battles, taking advantage of positioning far more easily than before.  My only concern is that making your full attack routine take 3 actions, players are still discouraged from moving on some level. I had always wanted a standard action to give me my full attack routine.

That third attack is at a -10 penalty, and I was worried when I heard about critical failures. See, they changed the critical mechanic. Roll 10 above and you score a critical hit (side note: good bye variable critical threat ranges).  Roll 10 below and you critically fail.  Thankfully, attacking does not carry a penalty for critical failures.  We did see some critical successes written into the playtest though, and I felt compelled to try to overkill rolls in the information gathering section of the adventure.

Speaking of, I had heard that adventuring was broken into different “segments” or “pillars”.  We saw some of this with an early exploration phase, where we investigated a missing caravan by asking around town using skill checks.  Different skill checks returned different info, and critical successes returned especially useful facts about the coming battles.  The new Society skill seemed especially useful; I believe it was roughly equivalent to Knowledge (Local), but it came up frequently when learning about civilizations.

I guess I should finish off with my personal experience of playing the Sorcerer in the party. I was told you can cast multiple spells per turn now using the three-action mechanic and got very excited.  I saw that the actions are now tied to spell components, with an action required for somatic, verbal, or material components in a spell.  Now, most spells in p1 require two or more of those, you might say.

Yes. Yes they do.

In one of the most frustrating design decisions I’ve seen so far, all spells I had save one (a defensive cantrip) used two actions on casting.  While my companions ran all over the place, double attacking beasts left and right like blenders with their swift-turned-standard-action, all my spells now cost my swift action as well.  Half the time I couldn’t make range on my targets with short range spells, and the other half I was busy concentrating on one spell while casting another, so I couldn’t even take a five-foot step (Step is an action now).  Big spells taking two actions would have been acceptable, but nearly every spell that I saw used two actions.

Other side not, I tried to ready a spell, but the ready action requires two actions to ready a single action, and I didn’t have any one action spells to use with the ready action, so I couldn’t ready anything.  Action. Side note: How do we distinguish between “action” the thing that consumes my actions and “action” the currency I use to pay for those actions?  Like, does Ready mean I can prepare an action that requires two action “points” because it’s one “action”?  Can I spend two points to prepare an action that costs three points?  Should we just change the names, so you pay for Moves using Actions?  Are we just going to leave this a confusing mess?

Blarg.  I was having such fun up ‘til this point, too. Next time, I’ll dig into the book and we’ll see what else I can learn.

[atomicgm]

So It Begins

So I’ve never blogged before.  This will be a new experience here so bear with me.  I am planning on using this to discuss the new Pathfinder Playtest that just released at GenCon this year, though there are plenty of other games I would love to examine about at some point.

But for this post, I would like to talk about the original pathfinder release and my own thoughts on what needs to change going into a new edition.  Y’know, get my thoughts on paper before I get in too deep. So, without further ado, these are the top 9 things I would change about Pathfinder.  Why 9? Because that’s how many I thought of when I started typing.  Also, this isn’t a top ten list and really wasn’t meant to be.

The Numbers Game

First up on my chopping block is base attack bonus and the save disparity.  For the most part, this isn’t too great a problem in Pathfinder. In games like Star Wars Saga, using a Skill Check to create a save DC meant pairing an effect whose math is based off of your level with an effect whose math is based off half your level. Everything should scale evenly. I’m also hoping to see some sort of proficiency mechanic, like with 5e.  Bounded accuracy is nice, but you lose the effect of goblins being unworthy foes to a 20th level fighter if his AC never breaks 20. Unarmored AC should really scale with level too, as being dependent on magic items for your AC as in PF1 annoys me thematically.  A 20th level Fighter should be much harder to hit than a 1st level Fighter, even if they’re both naked or wearing trash armor.

Spells

Next up is useful cantrips. They should really scale with level and remain useful throughout your adventure.  Crossbow wizards are lame.  I really hope magic missile is a cantrip as well.  I hate not being able to missile spam in 5e.

Speaking of spells, we really need to reduce the number of spells full casters get.  5e seems be a bit too few, but Pathfinder had way too many. Maybe just getting rid of bonus spells. I’m actually not a huge fan of heightening spells when cast from a higher slot, so I hope they don’t go in that direction.  I think a 20th level wizard’s scorching ray should be better than a 3rd level wizard’s, hands down.  Otherwise ten minutes into your adventure you’ll have spent the big guns and you might as well have lost ten levels.  Side note, I wonder how auto-heightening all spells to max level in 5e would turn out?  Probably terrible.

Quadratic Wizards, Linear Everyone Else

I am a big believer in the quadratic wizard issue in Pathfinder.  I am really hoping they find a way to make martials and casters stand on an equal playing field, and I don’t mean by nerfing casters.  My max-level caster should still rend worlds and shatter mountains.  I have always found martials terribly boring (I swing, I swing, I swing again, yaaaay). I loved what the Tome of Battle did for martials back in 3rd edition DnD, with the plethora of powerful abilities and a refresh rate so fast that they never ran out.  On the other hand, the 5e version in the battle master lost so much flavor and power in its barely-scaling maneuvers.  5e also nerfed that heck out of its casters so it didn’t need the powerful initiators.  Some happy medium between the Tome of Battle and the 5e Battle Master would be best.

But avoid rocket tag at all costs.  Paralysis, petrification, and save-or-die are no fun.

Encumbrance

I really like simplified encumbrance.  Bean counting pounds is such a pain.  I have been kicking around a few house rules for ages.  If I had to do something quick and dirty, it would be one inventory slot per point of strength, each one representing 10 pounds.  Inventory would list how many of each item fits in one slot. Five-hundred coins per slot, three longswords, whatever.  Maybe that’s too gamey, I’m not sure.

Skills

I am really looking forward to a shrunken skill list.  5e is good, but I feel like it gives out too few skills, leaving me with big holes. Do I want a rogue that can pick locks or lie to people?  I can’t believe I have to make that choice.  Shouldn’t my rogue be able to do both?

Multiclassing

Multiclassing could use a touchup.  Some dips were occasionally incredibly overpowered, and some were trash.  My 18th level Fighter grabbing two levels in Wizard is probably useless.  As far as I can tell, taking 10 levels in one class and 10 levels in another does not a balanced character make.  That’s why you ended up with Hybrid classes like the Magus, who tried to alleviate action economy drain and provide 2/3 casting instead of 1/2 casting.  I was not a fan of DnD 4e’s highly restrictive multiclassing and hybrid classing either.  Besides MAD being an issue, the system was almost perfectly balanced.  It was frustratingly restrictive though, and I hope they can strike a balance between the two options.  Let me keep my Fighter 5/Rogue 2/Wizard 1, but figure out a way to make that Wizard level do some work.  Y’know, besides buff novas.

I think the big issue is when features do not interact with the same game mechanics.  A caster level 3 magic missile is useless to a high-level Fighter. A 2d6 sneak attack or divine favor might see some mileage due to synergizing with a Fighter’s attack rolls. I’ve been kicking around a house rule that Caster level gains a bonus equal to half your non-caster levels to try to keep the spells you get impactful. Figuring out a way to get all your class features, even non-caster features like sneak attack or the like, to scale this way without synergizing in a way that breaks the game would be truly impressive.

Death

Death sucks.  It’s a medical fact.  It’s also nearly unavoidable in Pathfinder.  Negative con HP is not enough.  I could go either way on 4e or 5e DnD’s systems.  Negative HP is fun, but death saves are simpler. Anything besides negative con is good though.

Treasure

Maybe I’m just weird, but I am perfectly okay with the tried-and-true system we’ve been lugging around since 3.0 DnD.  Maybe the Christmas tree could use some pruning, but I enjoy wearing the wealth of a moderately-sized kingdom on my back.  Not to make this a fake out point, but I felt it bore mentioning as the one thing I would NOT change.

Levels

The last thing I’m hoping for is a great emphasis on ease of play throughout all the levels. 20th level is more than a bit cumbersome, and I feel like it doesn’t capture the incredible power those characters are tossing around.  I have been meaning to put-to-pen a setting I once ran where the gods were statted as 20th level characters.  My group became literal gods using only the rules in the core books with some minor tweaks. When commoners are 1st level, those 20th level adventurers are truly terrifying, but I never feel like the rules support that.  Maybe it’s just me.

So, those are my thoughts on the current state of Pathfinder.  Next time, I will detail my roller-coaster ride of an experience with the Pathfinder Playtest at GenCon.