We are starting a beta playtest next week. I thought I would share some thoughts on alpha in the meantime. We had just finished an adventure arc, and had about five weeks left until our pre-oredered copies of beta arrived. What to do? Look at that nice shiny pile of Pathfinder modules I have! :) I sent an email to my players with a summary of each and asked what they wanted to play. The main response I got was from one of the players who requested 'something with dragons'. Hmmm Guardians of Dragonfall it is.
I printed out the pre-made characters from that adventure and one of the others of the same level. One of the players wanted to play a minotaur though. "Why?", I asked(my mistake) He answered, "The horns baby! The (expletive deleted) Horns! OK. So I used the minotaur workup in Savage Species and added three levels to bring it up to the adventure's level. The players and myself all enjoyed the module.
Now, I used some of the alpha rules to introduce them to the group. I will share my thoughts on them briefly.
Channeling. This was liked a lot. It saved players who were in negative hit points from dying more than once. It also dealt some good damage to undead right when it was needed. I think it was used about once/battle and a few times for healing afterwards. I think the power/utility of this ability is just right.
Hit Points. I gave them some bonus hit points for the module. About one per level. This really helped them out as I had players into negative hit points several times.
CMB. This worked well. Good for DMs, I made adjustments to the monsters as needed in my head. Good for players too, they actually used grapple and disarm for the first time in quite awhile.
Sneak Attack. The abilty to sneak undead saved their butts. The rogue finished off one of the dragon skeletons with a sneak right before it was able to unload on one of the fighters who was down to extremely low hit points.
Damage reduction. One of the players decided to use Harsk)ranger w/ crossbow) for the adventure. Several times, he was unable to be very effective due to the DR of some of the creatures. The new DR rules would have made him more useful in combat as the magic weapon would have bypassed some of the DR.
Ok, onto beta next week. We will be rolling up characters on Tuesday, and I will give some feedback from that. I have also informed my players about this thread, maybe some of them will stop by here and leave a few comments.
Ok, so we made beta characters last week. It went very smoothly, but we have been playing 3rd since it came out so that is no surprise. The transition to the new rules is very easy. All but one player has a print copy of the beta. The last guy has the pdf and brought his laptop to the game. It was pretty interesting having him be able to look up rules on the fly with a search, but I think if there was more than one or two laptops at the table, it would prove too distracting.
We used the racial bonus on the hit points. Everyone loved the favored class bonus(including picking one bonus or the other every level). We also used the traits from the Second Darkness player's guide book. One thing I noticed which caused us to reference the old PH was the lack of a list of languages. Many of them are listed with the races, but a complete list under the linguistics skill would be nice.
So far we have:
dwarven cleric
halfling rogue
elf ranger(focused on archery)
halfling wizard-me
It looks like we will have a new player joining us too. The 15 year old cousin of one of the guys will be joining us. This will be his first DnD experience.
We had a little time left over when we finished making characters, so we tucked into the adventure itself. The DM is running Expedition to Undermountain followed by City of the Spider Queen. I am probably going to run a 20th level adventure playtest as a break in between the two, but I am not sure what I am going to use yet.(hint hint, hey paizo, how about a level 20 adventure for us to use as a playtest?)
We get through some light roleplaying and make our way into the dungeon. The first enemies we encounter are a group of goblins. Some highlights from the battle:
I used acrobatics to tumble my way past the two goblins attacking the cleric and ranger and then hit the next two goblins with a color spray. Everyone was rather impressed with a wizard's ability to do that. I took a hit during the fight that would have dropped a 3.5 wizard to negatives but with the new bonus hit points, I was able to keep going and contribute to the fight.
We are using the critical hit and critical fumble decks. The guy playing the ranger archer must have rolled three or four 1s during the fight. The cleric got a crit on the goblin leader, and finished him off. Overall, the decks were fun and I expect we will be using them for a long time.
One note on spells: I used grease as my opening spell. I can see why they downgraded it, but it was almost downgraded too far. Neither of the goblins were affected by it other than making checks to get out of it. I say increase the area of effect for grease, and it will be fine.
That's it for now. We meet again this Tuesday, and the new player may have his character ready to go, so it should be a full night of dungeon-crawling. More next time.