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## INTRODUCTION ##
Ahoy, fellow Pathfinders! Here's a thread to collect my playtest thoughts and impressions. While I've chimed in here or there on the forums, now that I have a group running through Doomsday Dawn I thought it might be useful to have one location to keep track of everything that comes up in play. We just finished Chapter 1 last night, and will kick off Chapter 2 next week (though we may end up spending our time next week creating characters without getting into the adventure).
Background. I've played a fair amount of PF1, including a lot of PFS play. I was active on the forums for a while, but when I moved to a new state in 2016 I never found a regular gaming group in the new place. So I wasn't playing much Pathfinder and was off the forums for as well. I've been back online following the news since the playtest was announced, and I'm looking forward to playtesting the new system.
My group. I'm starting Doomsday Dawn with a group of 3 players (I'm running a fourth character to round out the party). All of them have some experience with PF1 but not all that much. They are not especially optimizing or strategic players. I'm taking a pretty hands-off approach in that regard, since I imagine feedback from the perspective of more-casual players can be helpful for the playtest and that it's more helpful to get everyone's honest experience with the rules themselves rather than distort it through heavy-handed GM advice. After each session, I've been asking them for their thoughts on what they enjoyed and did not enjoy so much, and I'll be posting those here along with my own thoughts as we go through the adventure. I will also encourage my players to fill out the surveys when we finish each chapter of Doomsday Dawn.
Approach. Much to my dismay, my order of the playtest books was affected by the difficulties at launch. (Ultimately, I had to cancel my order with Paizo and pick up the books from another retailer.) This meant that my first pass with the full ruleset was trying to learn it from the pdf, which I found to be a very frustrating experience. So rather than trying to learn the rules in advance, I did an initial skim to try to situate myself and then have been learning in play, looking up each rule or system in more detail as we encounter it. My players are also "learning by doing," and are generally less familiar with the rules than I am. They also got annoyed trying to learn the rules from a pdf, so we all said, let's just create characters and figure it out as we go. (This got a lot easier once we had a couple physical books, which I picked up after our initial character creation session.)
The upshot of this learn-by-doing approach, of course, is that issues that arise in play could be issues with the ruleset itself or just issues that come up because we don't understand the rules or missed the relevant rule somewhere. Whenever a question comes up at the table I'll spend a minute looking through the book and index to see if I can figure it out and if not just rule and move on. So if anything comes up where it looks like I've mistaken the rule, please let me know. As part of my feedback here I'll be noting questions about the rules that stopped play at the table and especially questions that ultimately stumped us, where we couldn't find an answer or were confused about what we found.
That's it for an introduction! In the next few posts I'll work through our experience with the Lost Star.
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## THE LOST STAR: CHARACTER CREATION ##
It took my group about 3 hours to create characters for The Lost Star. Here are my thoughts and the reactions from my group. (This ends up being fairly long, and covers a lot of ground that's been heavily discussed on the forums—apologies for that.)
Should've used pregens for new players. In retrospect, I think a better approach to a first session for a new player would have been to use pregenerated characters (whether the PFS pregens or GM-created) and just run a few encounters to get a feel for the rules before asking new players to make their own characters. That would get them into the game without the barrier of the 3-hour somewhat frustrating time-sink of character creation, and then they'd have the benefit of that context when they have to make choices in building their characters. (This might be especially useful regarding classes, since classes are pretty restrictive in the playtest rules.) If I were to do it over, or to start a new game with new players, I might run the PFS Quests or convert some straightforward level 1 scenario from PF1 and let them pick between pregens. If I were adding a new player to an existing game, I'd also start that player with a pregen. Starting a new group with new players and doing character creation before play just ended up being a barrier to fun. (I noticed the PF1 Beginner's Box on my shelf last night, and recall that that also provided pregens to let folks dive into the action. It's a good idea!)
Choice structure. Generally speaking, my players enjoyed the choice structure and felt a lot better about it than they did about character creation in PF1. They commented that it didn't feel overwhelming, like PF1 can feel—they appreciated the different buckets each with its own, more comprehensible menu of options to focus on and choose from. (They also seemed to appreciate that they didn't have to worry about the tradeoff between one kind of feat and another—e.g., skill feat, class feat.)
Character creation guidance. That said, the players felt that they could have used more guidance in the rulebook regarding the different choices. As mentioned in my introductory post I'm taking a pretty hands-off approach to advice & guidance. My players ended up a little lost when it came to making some choices in character creation. For example, one player wanted to play a druid who would shapeshift and wade into melee—great!—but he got the message that Wisdom is the key stat for druids so ended up with an 18 Wisdom ... and a 10 Strength. That's probably not going to support his character concept too well. Given the restrictive nature of playtest classes and the fact that each class seems built to support only certain specific concepts, a little more guidance in the class section would be helpful (e.g., "If you play a Wild Order Druid, you might consider a higher Strength score. This will allow you to ..."). This goes to the suggestion below to reorder the presentation of character creation to class-first. If class comes first and if classes give a little more guidance about different builds or paths, new players might be a little better oriented when it comes to making choices like ability score generation. (I do think the goal here is that new players should be able to easily make functional characters on their own, just from the book, without requiring an experienced player or GM to hold their hand through the process.)
Character creation instructions. Players got turned around here and there and felt that clearer step-by-step instructions—maybe even a checklist—would have helped them put their characters together. The "creating your character" instructions in the rulebook didn't do the job for them (at least when encountering the system for the first time).
Ability score generation. For example, two out of the three players missed the four ability boost top-off. They followed the ABC and saw the ability boosts there, but when they got to step 5, "Finalize Your Ability Scores," they missed the cross-reference to a separate section discussing ability scores and didn't realize they got the top-off boosts. I also noticed that they kept losing track of their ability boosts when creating a character and trying to decide between all of the options. I think this was especially bad with the Background ability boost. I ended up having to walk each player through a sketched grid (attribute rows, character creation step columns, total column at the end) to clearly track their stat choices so they could see if they wanted to go back and pick a different A or B to hit the stat totals needed for their concept under the C.
Character creation "flow"; Backgrounds. This touches on some issues I've noted with the "flow" of character creation. While the "ABC" list sounds great in theory, in a system where your class determines so much more about the shape of your character than in PF1, it's only really once you've thought through your choice of class and your class-related character options that you know enough about the character you're going to build (based on the options available to that class) that you have the information needed to select the ancestry and background to support that concept and to give you the ability boosts that you need to make your build. So while "ABC" is how character creation is presented, in reality it ended up being "ABC—oh wait!, AB again." (And then at that point the players had lost track of their ability boosts at each step and had to recalculate.)
One of my big takeaways from this is that I don't actually like the Background system in practice. While I thought it sounded cool from the previews, in practice it hasn't seemed to have any "weight" in character creation or character concept—while players had pretty strong visions of their character's Ancestry and picked that more for flavor than for mechanical reasons, the Backgrounds ended up feeling like nothing more than a purely-mechanical selection—how do I get the right set of boosts?—, a chore that didn't add anything. They weren't especially fun and caused the issues with character creation flow discussed above. (I guess Traits in PF1 ended up with a similar fate.)
My main thought on how to address all of this is to change the order in which character creation is presented. CAB instead of ABC. I'm not sure about bigger changes to backgrounds (I wonder if figuring out a way to take the flexible boost out of the background step might help make it feel more tightly themed and like more of a real choice?)
Picking spells. The issues with character creation flow touches on a bigger issue my players had when learning the rules while trying to create characters: they just kept getting lost and frustrated with the heavily cross-referenced process. This was particularly bad when it came to picking spells. Unlike martial classes, a lot of the important choices in making a spellcaster are not right there in the classes chapter. You've got to go look up spells and powers in a separate chapter. And they hated trying to pick their starting spells: they had to keep open for reference (1) the class section and (2) the spell list and then go flipping through (3) the spell descriptions to learn what each spell does. Players were annoyed with the problem created between the spell lists not offering much hint what each spell did and then each spell not listing what list it was on, so they had to keep both pages for reference. As a result, spell selection was a pretty big speedbump in character creation for my players.
Equipment selection. But maybe the biggest speedbump in character creation was equipment selection. Once players had gone through and made all of these character choices, they didn't mind picking a weapon and armor. But they just gave up when it came to adventuring gear. And really, who wants to think about rope and lamps at that point? They took one look at that list and said, can we just skip this? So we did. Please, please, please add some prebuilt gear bundles in the future so that players can just grab a bundle and move on to the fun part—playing the game!—rather than feeling pressure to get bogged down in a la carte gear selection before they can roll their first d20. If the goal is to get folks playing, this was by far the biggest "ugh" moment of character creation.
Character sheet. Players noticed the issues other folks have noticed with the character sheet: no place for senses like darkvision in the "senses" section; no place to specify Lore; the weird arrangement of the ability scores.
Lore. Related to backgrounds, the Lore skill has felt too narrow. Thinking ahead to character level-up, you only get a small number of skill increases past Trained—why would anyone really spend those on Lore?
Physical Book. Two things about the physical book. (1) The table's immediate reaction to the book was, "oh my gosh that's beautiful." Everyone here is a big fan of the aesthetics. (2) We've all been having a problem navigating within each chapter. The chapter sidebar is very useful, but each of us has had the problem of flipping into the relevant chapter and then not knowing where we are and where we need to go within that chapter. This is especially bad with treasure, where you have multiple alphabetic-order lists with nothing really telling you which list you're in. So a player flipped to treasure to look up alchemist's fire and then couldn't find it ... because he was looking in the magic items not the alchemical items. Some indicator at the top or bottom of the page flagging which section within the chapter that page is might be helpful.
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## CHARACTER CREATION: CLASSES & MARTIAL STYLES ##
Splitting this off into a new post. A lot of folks have said it but it's still worth talking about: the classes felt very restrictive to me. Especially so if I'm looking ahead to the character's build into the future. For example, for this game I waited till everyone had picked and it looked like an archer would round out the group. We already had a Fighter, so I was looking at Ranger or Paladin. The Ranger didn't have much for archery (I ended up with an animal companion despite not really wanting one, because the other options were worse for me—Monster Hunter looks very weak, and the crossbow feat really shows how silly it can be to class-lock everything: 1 of my 4 choices is there only because the iconic was painted with a crossbow 10 years ago? And why can't anyone else use crossbows well?)
But even if Ranger doesn't feel great as an archer (we'll see how it plays over time), the Paladin is much worse for it. All of your fixed class talents (that you're stuck with, since you can't trade out a la PF1 archetypes) are toward sword & board melee—good luck playing a Paladin of Abadar or Erastil using your god's favored weapon. Maybe you could multiclass into Fighter for a few basic archery feats, but then: (1) the dedication feat is just a pure tax for you, since you already have (almost?) everything it gives you; and much more importantly (2) you're still stuck with the inflexible spine of the Paladin class that just doesn't work with archery.
I really don't like feeling like you just *can't* build a warrior who fights a certain way unless you pick a certain class. This is mostly a problem for martials. A spellcaster can always just change their spell selection to get a character who feels and plays differently. But if you're a martial character, you're stuck with the very limited number of styles that your class will support. Even the Fighter, the most flexible, doesn't support a light-armor concept.
This is the area that I'm most skeptical of the playtest class structure. I don't know if this is something that I'll end up getting used to, but I worry about it because a lot of it doesn't look like it can be easily addressed if it's built into the core of the new rule system. Adding more class feats for each martial class: (1) doesn't do anything about your fixed list of class talents, which are pretty restrictive; (2) will be pretty space intensive just to print, say, a set of archery feats, a set of sword & board feats, a set of two-weapon feats for each martial class. Maybe there are benefits to the more restrictive class system that will outweigh these downsides, but if so I'm not seeing them right now, so I'm skeptical. I'm curious to see how higher level play feels when we get there.
Archetypes, perhaps? I think the easiest fix to all of this might be to bring back PF1-style archetypes. Right now the biggest problem I'm having with the system could be addressed if classes had more flexibility to trade out the fixed list of class abilities. There are downsides to PF1-style archetypes, of course. And if you add back PF1-archetypes it probably messes up the feat-based multiclassing ("Now I can't multiclass into that Fighter archetype?"). So maybe some other fix would be better. But I'm convinced that something is needed to give classes, especially martial classes, some more flexibility in terms of that fixed spine of class talents that you can't customize. That's what makes the Paladin so restrictive in terms of build, and I've been pretty frustrated with it and worried about what that will mean for the system and its future if it stays like this.
(That's it for now. I'll come back later today or tomorrow to write up our experience playing The Lost Star. Preview: We really enjoyed it! The system ran very smoothly in play and was for the most part a lot of fun. I remain very optimistic about a lot of the fundamentals of the playtest rules.)
Lots of very insightful stuff here, Joe. You've touched on most of the subjects that are my main points of concern with character creation. A little more organization for the spell list would go a long way, especially.
I'm also not a fan of the restrictiveness of the class roles. I'd like to see an archer Paladin supported, but they are straitjacketed into the tanky role. I like seeing this sort of play style supported, but not when one class is stuck with it. I'd also like to see options for more lightly armored Fighters.
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## CH. 1: THE LOST STAR ##
## CH. 2: PALE MOUNTAIN'S SHADOW (PT. 1) ##
Life got busy and I lost track of this, but my group has continued to work through Doomsday Dawn. We're moving quite slowly since we only have 2–3 hours to play each week and the players are all fairly inexperienced, so we've only gotten as far as the tomb entrance in Ch. 2. So rather than try to recreate everything, here are a few a quick summary posts highlighting the main things that stand out from my notes.
The Party (Ch. 1): Fighter (Half-Orc, sword & board); Druid (Gnome, wild order); Bard (Human); Ranger (Halfling, archer + bear)
The Party (Ch. 2): Alchemist (Elf); Paladin (Half-Elf, greatsword rebuilt to sword & board halfway through); Sorcerer (Human, aberrant bloodline); Rogue (I forget the ancestry)
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# THE GOOD STUFF #
Success system. Everyone has loved the tiers of success system, both for attacks (felt more dynamic and interesting in combat, and less of a play slowdown than roll-to-confirm) and for spells (especially spells that still had some effect when the enemy succeeded on its save, so the turn didn't feel as wasted).
Action system. Everyone has loved the 3-action setup. It's been very satisfying and much nicer than PF1.
Reactions. Everyone has loved reactions. Less mental effort to track, streamlines play considerably, etc. Between this, and the above, it's fair to say that my group has really enjoyed the fundamentals of PF2 combat play. (This is separate from any concerns about particular character options.)
Dying rules. Although the dying rules are in flux (and I still have some questions about how the new rules work!), I think my players have generally enjoyed how the new systems have played. They certainly like it a lot more than negative hp in PF1, especially how the new systems have let players get back into the action much more easily with much less "well I'm down, guess I'll sit out for the next 20 minutes of play." (I think this is a happy combination of: (i) any healing puts you right back in play; (ii) significantly fewer AOOs/reactions to disrupt healing attempts; (iii) the three-action system and the number of flexible basic healing options make it a lot easier to heal unconscious allies.)
Healing resources absent piles of wands of cure light wounds. We're still trying to get used to the dynamics of healing in the new edition but I can tentatively say that we're enjoying the challenge of having to think about it and plan a bit more carefully rather than just "bloop! everyone's back to full!" after every combat that PF1 could feel like.
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# THE BAD STUFF #
The Quicksand. My goodness I cannot emphasize enough how unfun that challenge was for the table. DC 18 Athletics is *tough* for level 4 PCs (who are probably rolling at what, +6 at the very best, given armor check penalties?), and between critical failures and the quicksand's own initiative it's just a really painful and unfun slog to try to get out—even after combat ended, and even with some *very* generous rulings on my part (letting folks holding a rope make a DC 18 Athletics check to drag the sinking PCs out by 1 stage).
Blade-ally Paladin. As a GM PC for our first session of Ch. 2, I ran a blade-ally Paladin. I just grabbed everything that looked like an offense boost and put the character together very quickly. And I felt useless!
So between sessions I went through and looked at it and I've gotta say blade ally looks pretty purely like a trap option unless it's as a second ally at higher levels. The shield is over here giving you +2 Hardness and +2 Dents, for approx. 16 hp extra that you can shield-block each combat (assuming Quick Repair between combats and a sturdy light or expert heavy shield as an early purchase). Meanwhile, the blade ally gives you critical specialization effects and some magic abilities that don't increase damage or accuracy. The magical abilities are situationally useful, but rarely. And critical specialization effects will only rarely trigger (because the Paladin doesn't get any accuracy boosts, the numbers look like for the most part you'll only be critting on 20s and maybe a 19 every now and then) and aren't always the most useful even when they do go off.
I rebuilt as a shield paladin and absolutely loved the way the character played when she got back into action with the new build. Really fun. But I didn't have fun with the blade and I felt pretty crummy that I grabbed one of the 4 Core "I'm a warrior!" classes, picked the obvious "I'm a warrior!" option, grabbed a greatsword, and ... ended up feeling highly ineffective. That's not great!
Intra-chapter navigation in the rulebook. I discussed this above but I want to repeat myself because it's become more and more annoying as I've used the physical books more. Help me find my way around within a chapter, please! This is mostly a problem for the classes & the treasure chapters, since they're quite long and divided into subsections without giving cues to help you find your way to the specific element you're looking for once you've flipped open to the chapter. It's been really tough to use the physical book at the table without some kind of intra-chapter navigation aid for these two chapters in particular.
Treasure tables. Please add more detail to the treasure tables in the treasure chapter. When creating characters for Ch. 2, my group didn't realize that, say, an expert-quality weapon is a 2nd level item and they could grab that with one of their granted items. Who would think to flip between the treasure tables here and the three or four spots in the equipment chapter where higher-level items are slipped in? Generally, including this info and special material options, etc, would make everything a lot easier for both players making higher-level characters and GMs picking treasure to hand out.
What save is that? It's been a bit of a stumbling block to have lost the saving throw from each spell's header information, to have to dig through the text block to find the save. (This is of course tougher when it's a system that's new to everyone and where the spellcaster players aren't the best at keeping track of all of their character rules. So on balance it may well be the right decision. But finding a way to highlight that important info might be helpful.)
How many actions per spell? My spellcaster players were initially taken aback by the fact that casting a spell took more than 1 action ("I thought everything was 1 action!") and didn't like having to hunt down each spell to see how many actions it would take before planning their turn. (This will likely be alleviated as they learn the system. I think there's space on the character sheet to note number of actions?)
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# THE CONFUSING STUFF #
Minimum damage? In PF1, I believe there was a rule that if resistance or whatever reduced damage to 0, a ride-along effect like poison wouldn't apply. There was a situation like that in play and I couldn't find a rule that clarified whether a 0-dmg poison attack would apply the poison or not. Anyone know?
Group stealth? How does that work? The group tried to sneak past the gnoll camp in Ch. 2 thanks to the prompting of the adventure, and I wasn't sure how to handle that. All PCs roll and every enemy rolls? (Not good chances for the PCs!) All PCs roll and use the highest enemy Perception? If there's guidance in the book I couldn't find it when this came up at the table.
Grabbed by a creature with reach. One character ended up grabbed by a giant scorpion with reach. Is he held 10 ft. away, so he can't attack the scorpion? Is he pulled next to the enemy?
Splash damage on a Large creature. Does the Large creature take splash damage from a splash weapon that hits it (because it "splashes" the 3 squares the creature occupies that weren't targeted)? If we have a Large creature with several creatures all around it, do they *all* get splashed? I.e., does the splash weapon now suddenly splash over more squares just because the target is large? That seems to be the rule—which I'm fine with (I don't care about "realism" in my fantasy games, I want rules that are fun and play smoothly so this seems like the better way to do it), but it is a little counterintuitive so I figured I'd ask.
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Enhancements are negated if the attack deals 0 damage. Large or Medium or any other size, you add the splash damage from a hit to the normal hit damage. This gets very nice with the 4th level alch feat that the bomber might have had to increase splash to Int modifier.
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Joe, I appreciate the thoroughness here, especially talking about your approach as a GM. I intend to try and read the rest of this later.
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Enhancements are negated if the attack deals 0 damage. Large or Medium or any other size, you add the splash damage from a hit to the normal hit damage. This gets very nice with the 4th level alch feat that the bomber might have had to increase splash to Int modifier.
Great, thanks!
On the splash (for reference) I was misled by the language in p. 359:
Most bombs also have the splash trait. When you use a thrown weapon with the splash trait, you don’t add your Strength modifier to the damage roll. If an attack with a splash weapon fails, succeeds, or critically succeeds, all creatures within 5 feet of the target take the listed amount of splash damage. On a failure (but not a critical failure), the target of the attack also takes the splash damage. You don’t multiply splash damage on a critical hit.
If splash is discussed elsewhere I couldn't find it in the moment at the table.
Enhancements are negated if the attack deals 0 damage. Large or Medium or any other size, you add the splash damage from a hit to the normal hit damage. This gets very nice with the 4th level alch feat that the bomber might have had to increase splash to Int modifier.
Would that also mean Burn It damage could get applied 3 times? Once for the hit, once for the splash, and then each time on the persistent?
Edit: Also, the rules on page 359 don't seem to jive with what I think you are suggesting.
"If an attack with a splash weapon fails, succeeds, or critically succeeds, all creatures within 5 feet of the target take the listed amount of splash damage. On a failure (but not a critical failure) the target of the attack also applies the splash damage."
That very much reads as though the target doesn't take splash damage on anything other than a failure.
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I think the update indicates that the splash + hit damage is combined into one, but not 100% sure that it does. Regardless, that's the intent.
Should've used pregens for new players. That's a bummer that the group didn't enjoy this. I was able to get my group through it maybe half the time, but I took a more hands on approach and had more opportunity to read the physical book.
Character creation "flow"; Backgrounds. I think CAB is certainly fair when you thinking about what you want your character to be. Class is by far the most important choice and it will influence everything else. That said, I'm not sure if it actually works better when you actually start filling out a sheet. After a few attempts, the method I've settled on is ABCD in order, but only doing the ability scores on the first pass through.
Once those are done, I have people go back to Ancestry and pick their feat, note vision, speed, etc. Then add whatever Lore and Skill Feat you get from background. Then finally do class proficiencies, class features, feats, and spells in that order.
Dunno if that will work for your group or if there's an efficient way to walk folks through that in the CRB, but it seems worth noting.
Equipment, spell selection. I don't think you are wrong here. Adding "adventuring kits" and having each spell list which lists it is on would go a long way to fixing these problems. Also putting powers in their own section maybe. I will note bulk is working pretty darn well so far for us during this step.
Character Sheet. They added that Lore line on the new sheet. There's also now room to jot down senses but not a line for it yet, but I think that should be an easy fix for sheet 1.2.
Lore. Personally, I like Lores as primarily being flavor things that don't do a ton. I agree you should almost never invest skill increases in them. There's an argument to be made for just letting them increase automatically, but some folks are already hella upset about auto-improvement in skills you don't actively use, and in a campaign without downtime you probably won't be practicing your craft as a blacksmith or whatever.
Martial Style stuff. We are going to get more feats to enable more styles in the CRB-- and the goal seems to be to make them tailormade to the match each class. Personally, I don't especially mind there not being an archery feat every level on the Ranger and such. A little diversity doesn't seem to hurt. (The Ranger could probably use another feat or two to round out the first level options though, and Monster Hunter needs a buff.)
I think we are almost certainly going to get PF1 style archetypes at some point, so you can trade out feature's like Retributive Strike on archers and such. Not sure exactly how it ill interact with the class agnostic archetypes though. I will note the multiclass system is pretty good for letting you get different styles of any given character.
However, that bumps up against my big complaint-- we don't get enough feats. Multiclassing only exacerbates the issue. Personally, I'm currently rooting to keep the feat progression mostly the same across the board, but have each class make a choice at 1st level that grants them an entire "feat tree" for free as they level up. (I call them Class Paths.)
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## Finishing Ch. 2 ##
Quick update wrapping up Chapter 2.
Manticore. (Some observations I missed last time.) This turned out easier than I had feared. The party did well with ranged damage output. But what really clinched it was a good use of confusion by the Sorcerer. Manticore failed and the Paladin (rebuilt with a shield ally) delayed till right before the Manticore. Because the confused condition requires that the confused creature attack whoever last attacked it, this let the Paladin draw all of the Manticore's fire to her excellent defenses, while the rest of the party whaled on it the rest of the round.
I did have the confused Manticore charge into melee here. It was running low on spikes at that point, so since the confused says the creature doesn't have its wits about it, I figured a melee charge was appropriate here.
Earth & Water. This fight didn't feel like it went off the way it was "supposed" to. The party walked down the steps and I had them roll Perception against the elementals' Stealth. At least one PC spotted the elementals, and so we used those numbers for initiative.
Rogue hopped out onto the first island and fired at the water elementall (which I had toward the north but not all the way around the corner). Water elemental charged, attacked, and pushed to Rogue back into the water between that first island and the steps. Earth elemental glided through the wall to the steps and started attacking. Then it basically turned into melee on the "landing" of the steps, without really engaging with the water and islands as terrain obstacles. It made sense at the table but I worry that this wasn't what was intended for the encounter.
Generally speaking, the water elemental hit hard but the party was smart about focusing fire and put down one, then the other. They healed up, ID'd the elemental gems, and continued.
Air & Fire. This was almost a TPK, and would have been if I hadn't offered the party a helpful reminder when things got really bad. (My players aren't much for running away and trying later, especially when on a time crunch adventure like here!)
Again, I wasn't entirely sure how the terrain obstacles we're supposed to play here. The air elemental flew close, and the party dispatched it pretty quickly with some focused fire.
The fire elemental was much more deadly. It stood back from the ledge and attacked with it's reach. Sorcerer enlarged Paladin to hit back and Rogue scrambled down to engage in melee. Alchemist and Sorcerer attacked from a distance.
Two problems for the party. (1) After one player tried to recall knowledge on the fire elemental and failed, nobody else tried. So the party didn't learn about, and didn't think about, the elemental's weaknesses.
(2) That persistent fire damage is deadly! I had the fire elemental spread its attacks to everyone it could reach on the theory it would like to spread fire around. Soon 3 of the 4 PCs were taking 2d4 tire at the end of each turn. This added up quickly. Especially tough is that the party didn't have much to help counteract the fire. I let them douse themselves with water from waterskins, but that's 2 actions to draw and use, and I figured each waterskins could only do that once. And that only reduced the DC to 15, and nobody successfully extinguished the fire. So that kept going throughout.
So with all that going on, the fire elemental was dishing out significant melee damage. Eventually the Rogue and Paladin each dropped, one was healed back up but only a little, and it looked like a TPK was imminent.
That's when I, *cough cough*, reminded the players that fire might not like water and they happened to have this handy water elemental gems right here. Water elemental comes out, and given the fire elemental's weakness to water the combat was quickly over. (I think the players had put on about 40-50 damage at that point, out of the elemental's 80 hp.)
Remainder. The rest of the dungeon was quite easy. The puzzle was solved quickly enough between everyone working together and the Rogue doing great sabotaging and knowing things. The mummies were barely a threat (seriously, did I miss something there?). It was late in the evening when we finished so we didn't have any more time to play, and the party was either one or two days ahead of the Night Heralds' arrival (I had lost track between sessions), so we went ahead and skipped that encounter.
(Phone post, please excuse typos etc.)
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## Resonance Test ##
I posted a lot in the blog thread. The playtest thoroughly confirmed what I had been thinking.
The Resonance part is great! The Focus part (in particular the item boosting) didn't add anything to the game and should just be dropped. Nobody at the table was interested in Focus, and nobody used it (the lone exception being a single fire bolt from Kyra).
Probably didn't help that the adventure was a cakewalk (Amiri murdered everything) so we barely dipped into our daily resources.
But still, I can't emphasize enough how uninterested my players were in Focus. All told, the game would be better off without the complication of item-boosting focus.