Finally got through the first session of play testing tonight, things went somewhat as expected, but a few things threw us off and left us on tangents scouring the rulebooks for answers which really slowed the game down. We noticed some mathematical truths of the game rear their ugly heads, and I came really close to death. We got through A.7 before calling it a night. Solid 4 hour session.
For the purpose of the play test, given this was all our first time, we decided to play the game 'open hand' with a gentlemen's agreement on metagaming since we were all sort of playing the game neutrally and everyone had different jobs at the table (bribing players to do some of your work for you with Hero points is a really good mechanic) and it served it's intended purpose as it definitely sped up game play, having someone else track enemy HP. Naturally, I'd need to assign something else in a real game. We had 3 players and me, so with respect to the fact that I was letting them help with the rules on DMing, they were fine with me making a character myself to play. Our party consisted of:
Dave (goblin bard): doesn't like the bounded math, he realized that Weapon Familiarity was obviously the better feat choice for him to make only after getting through the second challenge, and made a complaint about the new crit system forcing you to play the most optimal builds just to engage it. Used a whip, 16 STR (planning to go into fighter dedication)
Jason (dwarf cleric): had a great time playing a very strong character with the best race/class combo in the play test. MVP of the night, out shined all of us in almost every way. I want every build to play as good as his cleric was doing, and that's mostly in the character's sturdiness, and more or less invulnerability to trip and knockdown. Channel Energy was really useful, and didn't eat away at the clerics spells so that was intended and played great.
Tony (halfling rogue): seeing the skills in action was great, and the rogue really shines in exploration mode, which I have some opinions about formatting in the future potentially. We discovered that rogue's offense is pretty good, and we love Feint being a single action. I want to see if there's more ways to improve feint and potentially build around it. Loved getting the bonus to hit and seeing crits land with sneak attack. As far as combat goes, the rogue shined. Could contend for MVP if it wasn't for the heals.
Me (elf wizard): I built with the plan of multiclassing in mind, and now that I've played it a little I wish I could have rebuilt the whole thing. I needed a 16 STR, even though I wanted to go with elven weapons and use my DEX, with it having good synergy with Hand of the Apprentice. I was building into an Eldritch Knight/Magus build and seeing if I could keep all my utility as a wizard. Spells were Mage Armor and Magic Weapon. Not a whole lot of other stuff going on, I barely used my spells and stuck with cantrips and school powers until we got to A.7, when I buffed and used Magic Weapon. It's performance was less than stellar, as on multiple crits I rolled many more 1s than any other numbers, doing a measly 6 damage on a crit with a +1 rapier with deadly. I wish multiclassing wasn't so harsh on the stats, and I think class should offer a free bonus as well.
A2. the goblins taught us a lot about the new game. For starters, we got to use the new transition between exploration mode and encounter mode, and the rogue getting stealth for initiative is great. I like that it encourages players to invest in skills to be used outside of downtime or combat. The golbins taught us the hard truth about the new crit system: it's bad. He had the highest STR possible on a bard, and the same weapon proficiency as all other classes but the fighter. Including Inspire courage we discovered on a roll of a natural 18 that he needed a nat 20 in order to land a crit. His to hit was only one lower than the maximum allowed by the game for a single class and the potential to land crits was just not there. My first instincts tell me proficiency needs to scale a little higher and distribute better, knowing how bounded accuracy works, or otherwise more characters need an extra umph to hit. This is the fight we discovered Feint. Feint is an amazing in combat ability, and I see the value in spending an action to increase your chance to hit/crit. I want to see every class have some sort of utility option like this, and I want to see the rigue get feats that enhance feinting like treating a success as a crit success or improving the value of the flat-footed penalty by 1. The rogue scored the best hit of the night, landing a crit with sneak attack for 23 damage instantly killing a goblin. Dying rules got confusing, but didn't derail the night yet.
A.3: someone had the bright idea of launching a flaming arrow into the cavern before going down in there. When we saw the giant bugs swarming around and not coming out, we avoided the area.
A.4: the challenge here was minimal, and we destroyed the skill checks with good dice rolling.
A.5: someone made the check to identify the spores before we went in, we then decided not to go in.
A.6: the Quasits lasted the longest of all the fights this night. AC 15 meant crits were impossible for anyone on the team, and these guys made for a tough challenge. The dwarf couldn't be knocked down though, so I made a tactical error in choosing wolf form it seemed.
A.7: We made the check to bypass the alarm, so the rogue sneaked in and got to use Surprise Attack after we sent in our cleric to tank up the blows. This fight got difficult, but not impossible. My character ended up finally contributing with a crit, but I rolled so bad it wasn't that spectacular. I really felt the dice betraying me all night. This fight I went down to dying 3 at one point, and we could not figure out how dying worked, the cleric used stabalize on me, then the bard used soothe to get me back up, but apparently I still had dying 2? We could not find the rules on how any of this worked and it completely derailed the game. Also figuring out how to adjudicate Recovery Save DCs is the biggest pain. I also don;t know how to deal with enemies anymore, as I usually can leave them alone once they go down, and I'm unsure if that's still the goal here if they can make a save and get back up. Given it was low level I can appreciate hard bosses, but seeing that you essentially need amazing system mastery and a lot of smart tactics to make the game play right it doesn't feel like a bunch of heroes doing amazing things, but like we're using macros to use preprogrammed moves in a video game.
Yeah, dwarf cleric is probably the best combo in the game, I had the very same experience with my group. In fact, dwarf anything (but bard or sorcerer) seems to be the best you can be.
Huh, are you sure about the math on the bard crit? I'm pulling up the numbers to check them myself, and with Inspire Courage, I think from what you're stating he should have a +5. That's an 18 crit on the Pyro, a 19 crit on the Warriors, and a 20 crit on the Commando. If you manage flanking, that would be 16/17/18 respectively. (I think with the crit system, flanking is going to be dangerous in an unprecedented way.)
Dying DCs from an attack roll should probably be 10+level+(Str or Dex) in most cases. From my memory, when you're at positive HP but dying, you still need to make the Fort save to get back up, but your dying condition won't increase from there. When you get up, dying goes down by 1 at the end of each turn.
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Table 10-2, page 337. (My insane decision to buy the collector's edition of the rulebook paid off in an unexpected way: the ribbon bookmark is now permanently placed at pg 337.) The recovery DC is set by the monster that drops you to 0 hp, per the "Recovery Saving Throws" text on pg 295:
If damage that reduced you to 0 Hit Points came from something that doesn’t have a DC, such as an attack roll, use the attacker’s class DC. Though a class DC usually includes the key ability modifier for a character’s class, the GM might sometimes decide a different ability score is appropriate; for example, a wizard’s class DC usually uses Intelligence, but if he knocks someone out with his staff, the DC might use Strength or Dexterity. For monsters, the GM will use a high-difficulty skill DC of the monster’s level (see page 336).
(bolded for emphasis)
The PCs generate the DC of any saving throws you allow the enemies with their class DC, but for bad guys, you need pg 337.
See, we didn't know if you had to keep rolling the fort save even if you were up and moving around.
Death needs to be cleaned up, all my players hated it.
As for the crit, it was on the commando. Still there's not much else to talk about on it, since the math is designed around fully optimized characters with very little leeway in the margins of error fur AC and crit design, it's pretty easy to tell what the rest of the game is going to look like. I'm not sure I like the idea of having 50% chance to succeed for 100% of the game.
Had another session with a different configuration of players, so we skipped ahead to the lvl 4 adventure.
I played a wizard/ fighter archer, and hated it. I learned the hard way just how bad volley is, and I wish I had gone with a composite short bow. It sucks. Compared to the others I was useless, so I'm not as confident in gish builds as I once was.
The barbarian had a jolly old time. Titan Mauler fighter multiclass to alternate between double slice and sudden charge. Doubling Rings made him the obvious choice to receive the magic weapon, thus he got to run around with two +1 Dwarven Waraxes. He could not land crits, but actually did enough flat damage where he didn't care. (I also DM'd) I felt the barbarian, given their lowered attack bonus from being downgraded in BAB and the sluggish condition from needing to use the class ability, felt much more reliable and consistent than other martial characters I've seen. He landed few crits, by design of the game. Very effective character.
The druid was the star of the night, and building for wild shape really shows the class at its best imo. Wild shape I feel could scale by Dex or Str, like the clerics channel. We didn't mess with companions yet.
At the level you get wild shape it shines, but it'll obviously get weaker and weaker over time if you don't invest in it fully. I don't like that. Druid felt almost on par with cleric, so tightening some things up and I'll be pleased.
The night went pretty well. I liked the build your own map mechanics, and I liked how comprehensive the time management felt during exploration mode. More like that please. It seemed like combat took more time out of the night, but imo a major contributor to that was just how smoothly exploitation mode ran by comparison. It seems like you could even add a few more challenges in to diversify the skills required.
All in all, it basically only took two characters to get as far as we did, because I tried building for archery on a half elf wizard and it hadn't blossomed yet. Multiclassing is rough on wizards. Composite long bows enfuriated me, it feels like a weakness deliberately tied to the weapon in order to force a feat tax to overcome it. Even then, volley negates the bonus damage from point blank shot making it garbage by comparison. The dice gods weren't good to me, and I saw low numbers all night.
Got further into the 4th level adventure and it ended in disaster for us:
We started right after the manticore fight, and we decided to rest, using the manticore's old stomping grounds as a safe place to camp since we figured no one would go messing around there for at least a night. We were mostly right, we ran into a monk PC who joined the party tonight (better late than never Tony...)
The Gnoll fight was vicious, the tight corridor made for some weird tactics on our part. My archer was once again useless, though now I had my hands on a composite shortbow, I did manage to steal a kill on the one attack I landed tonight. The druid showed off, as 4th level is a very good level for druids as wild shape is OP at that level thanks to the attack bonuses it gives being equal to an optimized fighter/druid, and even includes attacks that do multiple dice for damage. Animal druids are great at combat, at least when magic items aren't around yet. The barbarian showed off the most consistent and powerful build I think exists in the game, using Titan Mauler to replace old Power Attack and employing Double Slice and Sudden Charge interchangeably depending on the tactical needs of his turn. This is how martial characters should play. He did hate his low AC though as enemies crit him a lot.
This fight costs us most of our available healing for the day, and druids don't get a lot. Especially Dwarf druids who lack resonance. This is the game where we decided on Resonance finally, we hate it. The only character who could use the wand of healing couldn't use it and we had to give up after the second fight, which almost killed the druid.
We made it into the first room with the earth/water elementals. It was HARDDDDD. The druid was the only one really able to fight it, turning into a shark (which was awesome) and basically taking on the water elemental on his own. He was down to 1 HP. The entire party fled the room without dealing with the earth except the barbarian, who, and get this, had to stay in the room and fight the earth elemental or risk falling because of his anathema. His character is literally a 'victory or death' by the looks of it which seems restrictive and it definitely stretched the night out. I also don't like the rage cycle mechanic. It wasn't tactical, as he and the earth elemental just both sat there for a turn. It just wasted time.
Our conclusions are that healing needs to be more available and there should be a specific change to resonance with respect to wands:
they become invested items for the day, but can expend up to all of their charges, thus going through the wand. Given the low resonance, it really seems necessary to give us something. I also think druids need an option to get a pool of healing like the cleric gets, not channel energy, but if they brought back the druidic herbalism in some way to get the herbal healing vibe and created more ways to heal on more than the cleric it would work better and extend the adventuring day.
This pretty much is another confirmation of my suspicion that resonance is screwing up parties which don't have a cleric.
Making the success of the game entirely dependent on one class being present is not a good idea. Resonance should be removed for consumables altogether or made in a way which, as Marshmallow suggests, makes a whole batch of them available.