Gonzo still has his torch out...
So I was speaking with Sugua last night and he brought up a concern that perhaps I'm running the table a but too closely to how I would run my live games, where my players are much more accustomed to how I do things and that I might be running the risk of frustrating you all.
So seeing as we're closing in on 1500 posts I thought I'd open up the discussion to how the game has been going so far.
I'd love to hear from you all, any questions, comments, concerns, positive points, whatever it is on the direction of the game and my style.
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What things are you worried might be frustrating us?
so far im enjoying everything, the difficulty of fights is a tad high sure but as long as you arnt activly trying to murder us and just challenge us im ok with that. the martials are excelling as they tend to at lower levels and us mages need catch up time but i have no real complaints about how the game is being run in general.
See the thing there is... He will murder you if he can.. if you cant handle it.. because he expects certain things.. normally you wouldnt have.. especially in kingmaker where loot isnt very.. common. For most of the High fights its been Random rolls which he has little control over and the ones we stumbled upon were staged encounters. He has no qualms killing people just as he has no qualms about his creatures auto-dying from damage or a spell.
I have no issue with this, its up to us to deal with the challenges presented as berst we can and i havnt found anything to be malicious or cruel which i would take issue with. so honestly thanks to your knowledge of how the GM plays we havnt been blind sided by anything compleatly yet and im enjoying how things are going rthough i cant speak for everyone of course
edit: i should nt i am saddened at the death of Morgrym but death happens and i moved on already, i dont care that he got killed as it functioned as a leasson for the party
In particular to what Sugua was mentioning is the difficulty of fights, but beyond that any other aspect of the game is on the table too.
In particular when I set up Kingmaker I design all the encounters well beforehand. And it's something that I don't touch after that. So if the party wanders into an area that I figure they'd mess with at a later point than when they actually decide to do so, the temple is an example of this, I don't hold back the encounter, it's still whatever I originally made it. To me this makes sense, as exploration is a dangerous business.
Although stuff like four trolls was just the dice gods hating you. Or maybe favoring you (all that exp).
I just don't want the party to go the way of Angor and get frustrated when things beat you up. Because by default I tend to skip the fluff encounters, the Mites at the start of the dungeon here is an example.
So my general rule is, if I'm going to roll for initiative it's going to be a fight. I just want to know how you all feel.
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To be honest, and I don't like to do this because it isn't really fair, but Morgrym died because Angor made a mistake. If he had started his raging song on turn one, Morgrym would have had three more Hp. He would have gotten healed and stabilized and he would have survived. But, what's done is done.
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In the temple encounter it was actually pretty lucky that Donovan didnt heal(Channel).. at all. Because if he had done so as intelligent monks of Zonkuthon, there would have been some CdG'ing going on.
having run a couple AP's myself in RL with my friends i can say encounters do need TLC as they are usually far to easy for people who are even half way compitent (though i prefer to buff HP numbers to make fights a bit more of the back and forth and avoid giving low level fights DR beyond like 2-3 and the same on energy resist)
if you want my oppionion on how fights are going, mostly ok, this one perhaps less DR and more HP would have been how i would have gone, though im not you so to each thier own
I'm OK with using DR. Remember adventurers have heard that nasty things exist in the world. Maybe people know about skeletons having DR. If your character is an adventurer, I think there are things you can expect. The ability to deal both bludgeoning and slashing damage, a way to deal with cold iron and silver DR via a dagger or other small inexpensive weapon.
My smarter characters even usually have blanches and oils.
When I play an archer all my arrows I buy are atleast cold iron, because they cost one gold more per stack of twenty, and it saves lives. That's just me.
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ya its totally my fault but i dont ever think in terms of DR so i dont plan with special matirials in mind, and neither do my friends i play with. its probly a self fufilling cycle there, i dont give monsters DR cuz my people cant handle it and they dont plan to handle DR cuz i dont use it.
If i did plan to start using it more often i would likely tell my players that DR is going to be a thing i use, not all the time but its totally on the table. personally i usually trey to bypass DR with elemental damage not special matirials. and if im a martial i always think "oh a +x weapon will do that anyways so whatevs"
Im totally not the best player in the world thats for sure
In the temple encounter it was actually pretty lucky that Donovan didnt heal(Channel).. at all. Because if he had done so as intelligent monks of Zonkuthon, there would have been some CdG'ing going on.
Wasn't luck. I generally look specifically for positioning that will let me exclude two enemies when I channel and thus try to minimize enemies getting healed. Sometimes it can't be helped when someone in the party is on the edge of death, though.
Though to be fair an archer has a different cost benefit of doing so. They can mistakenly Bypass the DR of say.. Fey without knowing they are fey, because bows confer their ability to arrows and there are spells/items that make this method efficient ((Let alone being at range so often in relative safety)) Expecting your main weapon to be that as a melee specialist is more far-fetched because of the extra cost to enchant it. Though I DO have such things there was less indicator to use it and this guy isnt like some knowledge junky. So if our check said nothing about it he won't use it.
I do agree if your mental scores are say 10+ you might have a little preparation though.
@ Donovan: What I mean is IF you had gotten said chance would you have channeled?
Remember the statistic that only like one in every 1000 warriors ever grows to become a fighter.
How many more of them die before they get a +3 weapon? I don't like relying on being the one in 50000.
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ive never really looked at the stats for who becomes a fighter or not.
differance to me between a fighter and a warrior is simple, warrior lacks the drive or tallent (maybe both) to excell at melee combat. a fighter has the drive and the tallent and maybe some je ne ce qua
I am curious Alphonse then, What do you do for creatures like.. outsiders.. who have alignment DR? Or Regeneration Alignment? Does a Balor become weaker?
Well I think what Alphonse is saying is that by the time he introduces things with DR to the party it's already when they've become trivial to bypass. Either via spell or general weapon enchantment.
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those are higher CR creatures, by the time your fighting those you should have the tools.
more or less i expect a low level party to wail on things as i introduce the general type of creatures they will be fighting then by level3-5 or so i ramp up difficulty with various things.
1-3 is usually just tough enemies with more HP
3-5 or so i start to put in special tactics or some small amounts of DR/energy resist
5+ i make encouters allow for the strengths of the party but punish thier weakness too. no ranged? flying monsters who may or may not have flyby attack. reliant on the spell caster? creatures that can bypass the tank and get to said caster. I also like to mildly use weak status effects around this level too, so despite haveing some class features and abilittes they still dont rock yet
10ish is where i start to expect the A game, cuz they have tools and lots of em, time to put them to use (i may trigger this sooner if the party is excelling sooner than this but 10 is a safe place to start usually regardless)
personally i pull my punches when it comes to killing players, but only if they are trying, if they are dumb ill kill em
Though to be fair an archer has a different cost benefit of doing so. They can mistakenly Bypass the DR of say.. Fey without knowing they are fey, because bows confer their ability to arrows and there are spells/items that make this method efficient ((Let alone being at range so often in relative safety)) Expecting your main weapon to be that as a melee specialist is more far-fetched because of the extra cost to enchant it. Though I DO have such things there was less indicator to use it and this guy isnt like some knowledge junky. So if our check said nothing about it he won't use it.
I do agree if your mental scores are say 10+ you might have a little preparation though.
@ Donovan: What I mean is IF you had gotten said chance would you have channeled?
It's very situation-dependent. If it's necessary to keep the party alive I will suck up some incidental healing of enemies. (Remember the 1-point channel that stabilized a bunch of folks? That could've been much worse if I'd healed more and accidentally awakened enemies.)
Generally I dislike highly gamely dice-ruled scenarios because we (as players) are going out of our way to make characters who have special stories to tell, and it's very unsatisfying to just die because of the whims of randomness. John McClane dies randomly; Die Hard ends after 15 minutes. Frodo fails his Stealth roll while the Nazgul search for him; Lord of the Rings ends in just a few chapters. RPGs are a hybrid of drama and game, so I often shoot for scenarios in which characters have dramatic situations where life and death matters and a character's sacrifice, if it happens, is meaningful.
I wrote a bit about this for DARK SUN games, here: Chance vs. Fate
Yeah I guess the big difference is I won't ever pull punches. Unless it's a TPK then I'll make it a TPK-1. Like in Second Darkness if you all had actually entered the spar, you'd have died. So someone would have lived to continue the story.
In Kingmaker I won't do that even, because the story is literally just explorers coming down here to settle it. I can kill everyone their times over and the story stays consistent.
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I would tend to counter argue though Donovan that those stories only hold merit because they are the outliers, right?
If every halfling was Frodo or Sam then their story loses all meaning doesn't it? It's only by contrasting the failures of others that you can define success. In my opinion.
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Seems Legit. Kill them for stupid reasons. Though the option of death should always be there otherwise there is a lack of belief because people think they can't die normally.. a misplaced crit or move here or there.. sometimes you die.
@ Donovan : (True though luckily they would be prone and one shot from going down still a small issue) I understand that characters dying sucks but truthfully believing that they CANT die because of randomness is also sort of crazy. Every person on Earth has a story to tell and Im sure you wouldnt say they are unimportant but you can easily look up even GREAT people dying from.. random events. Car crashes, disease, depression, getting mugged or murdered.
Just as the GM is going out of their way to create this whole world for you to explore and respectively dismantle in any which way the same can be said of characters from time to time. Especially levels of characters, look at popular or recent depictions. There tends to be a death here or there and oftentimes the viewer KNOWS there should have been more. Or there is clearly a maincast, supporting cast, etc Some people stand out, some people cloak themselves in the background events. Game of Thrones has. ALOT of death.. sometimes random, sometimes alluded. That series has a Show and several books. So it does depends.
Like to me, I'm a very treat others as you like to be treated. Sometimes this is a fault of mine though that I assume things I enjoy other people will also enjoy.
Like to me, my favorite IP is War40k. I grew up playing 3.0 and 3.5 with actual killer DMs. To me, character death is FUN. legitimately 100% I like it. To me, if I know a game I'm in has the deck stacked in my favor, I lose all interest. That's me. That's what my live game players have come to expect from me.
I just want to make sure I'm not hurting anyone feelings or frustrating anyone and hear opinions like Donovan's on the subject so I can Guage where I need to take the game.
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well you have my vote of things are moree or less cool, and that certainly better sets my expectations on how things are to go.
id like to take a second to thank you for actually asking what we think about stuff, and i look forward to our other players thoughts on the matter later tonight
Any comparison of a game with wizards, monsters, and spells to real life is automatically suspect.
There's a continuum of things that people enjoy in gaming. To me, things like random wandering character murder and character optimization are boring. These are either random, meaningless events that destroy your narrative, or problems with clear good/bad solutions, which are boring. If you want to play a game based on best fit applicability of rules, video games are great, because computers must model everything by those rules. But computers do a poor job of modeling things like personal character history and motivation. Human GMs can build stories that account for these, which means you are playing a game that features ideas about who your characters are and how they are motivated. This means your choices are not always between good/bad, but sometimes good/good or bad/bad. This means the players are not making their decisions based on rules mastery, but rather upon their consideration of what motivates their characters as people. Do you save Gwen Stacy or the bus full of strangers? Do you kill the little girl because her brain has the antibodies that can fight the plague, or save her and potentially doom humanity? These choices speak to our values and about how we imagine we, or our proxies as characters, would respond. These are interesting dilemmas.
I really don't care if my character dies; it is not important. But character death without some meaning is, to me, boring. I usually try to make character death natter because of a choice that a player made in response to a dilemma.
If I understand what you're saying Donovan I think an example would be that if a level one sorcerer got charged and critical'd by a level one orc barbarian with a great axe, then he shouldn't die because his death was random and meaningless.
I'm not sure I agree with that. I think all death has meaning, maybe not for the person who died, but surely that death will weigh heavily on the parties paladin who wasn't able to prevent it and shape his narrative down the line.
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Sorry to be curt. iPad bad for essays.
If I understand what you're saying Donovan I think an example would be that if a level one sorcerer got charged and critical'd by a level one orc barbarian with a great axe, then he shouldn't die because his death was random and meaningless.
I'm not sure I agree with that. I think all death has meaning, maybe not for the person who died, but surely that death will weigh heavily on the parties paladin who wasn't able to prevent it and shape his narrative down the line.
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I believe what he is trying to say is just happening upon an enemy who will instakill and dying because, well, he just wanted to kill something. Honestly I feel the same way, no I still believe it should make sense, a charging orc critting me and killing me should kill me, but as a GM who should be trying to keep the game alive and interesting as well as fun and fair for the players should avoid situations that cause such interactions.
Personally I love the challenge, but I also put a lot of work into my characters and would like to know it won't be wasted time because they are gonna get killed in one or two hits. Personally I feel it might be better, at least until we reach higher levels, if we were to fight more weaker monsters as opposed to less stronger monsters. Same CR per encounter just spread out so that each creature isn't dealing 20+ damage in one attack, that is my take on it.
Also, how much XP did we get from those trolls? I didn't see anything about that.
Without going to look at the exp per troll I believe it's 1600 per troll, which is 6400, so a lot.
Between the trolls, the temple, and the mite den, the party will hit level 3. You've been raking in a lot of exp.
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800 per person
Also I believe I've been pretty balanced with using big nasties.
The first encounter the party ever had was spread out. The temple was spread out. The kobolds were spread out.
The roll for the shambling mound and the trolls is the dice, I can't do anything about that.
This is the first instant of a big nasty I've personally thrown at the party.
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Also I believe I've been pretty balanced with using big nasties.
The first encounter the party ever had was spread out. The temple was spread out. The kobolds were spread out.
The roll for the shambling mound and the trolls is the dice, I can't do anything about that.
This is the first instant of a big nasty I've personally thrown at the party.
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Well, I guess I just had bad luck on my timing of entrance into the campaign :P
Medium to my knowledge.
@khargol monster lore just allows you to add your wisdom mod to knowledge checks against monsters
One option for the favored class bonus for half-orcs is to add +1/2 to Intimidate and Monster Lore checks and I've taken that both levels.
If I understand what you're saying Donovan I think an example would be that if a level one sorcerer got charged and critical'd by a level one orc barbarian with a great axe, then he shouldn't die because his death was random and meaningless.
I'm not sure I agree with that. I think all death has meaning, maybe not for the person who died, but surely that death will weigh heavily on the parties paladin who wasn't able to prevent it and shape his narrative down the line.
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I believe what he is trying to say is just happening upon an enemy who will instakill and dying because, well, he just wanted to kill something. Honestly I feel the same way, no I still believe it should make sense, a charging orc critting me and killing me should kill me, but as a GM who should be trying to keep the game alive and interesting as well as fun and fair for the players should avoid situations that cause such interactions.
Personally I love the challenge, but I also put a lot of work into my characters and would like to know it won't be wasted time because they are gonna get killed in one or two hits. Personally I feel it might be better, at least until we reach higher levels, if we were to fight more weaker monsters as opposed to less stronger monsters. Same CR per encounter just spread out so that each creature isn't dealing 20+ damage in one attack, that is my take on it.
Also, how much XP did we get from those trolls? I didn't see anything about that.
I find myself agreeing with much of what Donovan and Gonzo have said. Random encounters as with the trolls are one thing, and can very well be chaulked up to blind luck (bad luck getting 4 trolls, very good luck that the grease caused them to fall on their faces.)
I fully understand that somethings have to change to deal with the action economy of a 8 member party, but have found throughout the years that this is best done by adding to the enemy's numbers (and perhaps minorly advancing the enemy as well).
To me, the significantly advanced baddies just tends to lead to repetitious character death, which frankly gets boring and yields less and less interesting characters as the PCs are put through the meat grinder.
Please do not misunderstand where I am coming from, this is just my opinion on the matter, and not a disertation on how Pathfinder/D&D should be run. There is plenty of room out there for differing styles of play.
Well let me ask you a question therefore Vladimir, how would you rate the temple encounter?
I raised the centipedes CR by two. I could, under the same CR done instead, two centipedes. Which would have absolutely hammered the party into TPK.
The party is level two, but your EL is five, Sugua would argue it's 4, I personally don't believe being minus a Masterwork weapon is worth a whole -1 EL but I digress.
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If there is any criticism I give is that while tasking us to be prepared is actually applaudable, it's the lack of tailoring encounters for our character's strengths, the complete disencouragement to roleplay, and the feeling of us v. you that seems more and more evident.
In this I guess I refer more to what Donovan is speaking to. Each of us has created characters that have a distinct purpose, a planned direction, and varying strengths they bring to the table. Being faced with encounters that so far seem designed only with PCs who are of a rather specific "build" type has given the game more of a MMORPG raid style dungeon feel. I feel that the idea I had for my oracle being and becoming a very useful party member once I can really get all the divination and prophecy type skills and spells allowing a lot of advantage to "preparation" ironically enough is a serious handicap as so far the only thing we have really done is some harsh combats. While Durielle has been very lucky so far, many encounters she has been in have simply negated her few offensive/support abilities by introducing opponents which can easily avoid them barring a really unlucky roll.
To sum that up, I am perplexed why the encounters really haven't been designed with the characters as they are. Essentially allowing a challenging combat that can be overcome with smart thinking based on what talents the party actually has. The trolls encounter is a great example. I myself was at a loss, but Sugua was able to point out that Clousuk's grease could be used to great effect and had a plan even if the grease hadn't brought them all down. I have no doubt we got lucky, but even without that, the battle would probably have been doable if a great challenge taxing what resources we have. And yet, this was not an encounter by design, but rather by chance. I feel you could take something away from that if you choose to do so.
You stated the temple encounter was planned for something to be really tackled later, but you gave us no hint of this. I would say I have conflicting feelings about this. Part of me thinks this a little irresponsible while I can also see how in an exploration game it makes sense for things to just happen because life isn't fair. However, it is telling on how you are viewing the game and our characters which I guess perhaps I was oblivious when I applied for this game. To Donovan's point, most people game with the idea that the GM and the players are telling a story, so the GM keeping the players' characters' personalities, history, and goals firmly in the forefront is a given. I feel that I was unaware that you, DM Tuyena, see this as a more of a skirmish game like Descent in which it is all players v. the person controlling the dungeon's denizens and traps. The goal of that "dungeon master" is literally to try and kill the players, and frankly, your game feels more like this than the former which is more of a collaborative story shaped by the randomness of life (represented by dice).
I designed Durielle as more a story character I suppose and remained true to this when choosing her skills, feats, and spells. I asked myself, what would a woman plagued by visions of the future be like and if affected by a wasting sickness how would her body respond. While my story concept for Durielle is rather sound, especially for the roleplaying aspect, I feel that roleplaying has definitely not been encouraged in this game as many times what roleplay we were engaging in or could have engaged in was simply ended and telescoped over. In some of these instances the party was then suddenly thrust into a combat which could have been greatly improved upon if we had been allowed to do the roleplay. As I myself heavily encourage roleplay in games I GM, I often include how well players' roleplay their characters into the given situation and if it would give the players an advantage (or disadvantage) to have lived up to their characters' personalities and flaws, I modify rolls and DCs to indicate this. Not behind the screen but plain and visible, and players usually accept this without argument because its their own roleplay which created it. So you can only imagine I have noticed how little roleplay has mattered at all in this game so far. Subtracting every word of text I have written so far about Durielle and only leaving the statements of movement, action, and the dice rolls, her effect on the game and its outcome would be exactly the same. Thus I really have no encouragement to continue posting in the fashion I have, and while I can easily keep up the post frequency, you may very well see a serious decline in word count from me.
I feel now that trying to make a story character rather than a character min/maxed for wilderness exploration might have been a mistake. I probably should have saved Durielle for a different type of Kingmaker, and rather made a tough Shaman healer, a Druid, or a Battle/Fire Oracle without the roleplay handicaps I self-imposed on Durielle.
And that is my criticism. So far your game has made me feel like I made my character "wrong," and as that is absolutely the last thing a player should feel in a RPG you may absorb that how you choose.
Let's go back through the encounters the party have had so far and review them.
Opening encounter(cr5): Total routing by the party.
Bear(cr4): Random crit onto Angor, otherwise easily dealt with.
Shambling Mound(cr6): Grabs hold of Gramlag and takes him one Hp from death, unfortunately the initiative order was against him as he went immediately after and bled to death before getting healed. Would have lived regardless if not for another players mistake.
Kobolds(cr6): The party did fine till angering them and provoking them to use their dragon maw and Rage abilities. The party had some trouble here, no deaths.
Wolves(cr5): Khargol unfortunately got tripped. Wolves are pack hunters, they pulled in on him. Pretty standard affair for anyone who hits the ground when dealing with them.
Temple(cr8): intended the party to come here later, and to back off a whole courtyard of monks. You did not. You go bounced around a bit, but ended up relatively fine. Came back the next day, and I smacked you around with a haunt to get you out of there.
Chief Sootscale(cr?): The party has been diplomatic with the Lord of kobolds so far.
Trolls(cr9): Sometimes the dice are mean, Parry still handled themselves well with good application of the grease spell. This could have gone worse, and is the highest cr fight to date. Still given the way the party was utilizing themselves I don't think more than one or two deaths would have occurred.
Centipede((cr5)6 if counting advantageous position) : Bad times.
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While I realize your intent was to actually counter my comments regarding the roughness of the encounters, you are not providing fair summation.
On nearly all of the so-called "easy" or "party was fine" encounters, the only reason for this being true at all is because of one thing:
Sugua
Remove the one person ready for you as a GM, and none of these encounters would have been described as you have listed.
I have been keeping myself entertained with my own roleplay, and the few interactions my roleplay has created. I would have happily continued on this fashion without comment. I didn't mean to offend you. I am just speaking my mind as requested.
Give me a little bit Durielle and I will respond more fully.
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Although one quick thing I'll mention is Sugua is a basic two handed Fighter. It's not like he's using any form of particular class combination or anything to be successful where everyone else is struggling.
Khargol would do relatively as well as him, provided he didn't consistently roll terribly. Angor too before that.
The party has some backloaded characters in it such as Vladimir and Clousuk who don't activate until a certain point.
Ok let me go through this again and collect my thoughts.
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Ok first point. I absolutely do not want the party to feel like I'm against you. I absolutely DO want you all to succeed. I'd like every character to hit level 20 and live out their fantasy. But to me, (and feel free to disagree) if when I got there, it's because I knew the DM made it so, it'd feel kind of cheap. Let me know what you think to that point.
To the point on the temple and expecting you all to do it a bit later. I'm wondering in what way would you suggest I hint to the party that they should come back? I said there was a temple, I informed you there was some monks that are potentially Kuthites. The party began to fight. I'm not sure what I can do to something like that besides going OOC and telling you this hex in particular is dangerous. I think I got the message across the with the haunt. If you disagree, let me know.
In an exploration game I cannot control what you do, if the party decided to use Devon to tell you all where the Stag Lord is, and you all went there, should I tailor that fight to the party? Or should I slaughter everyone because that's life?
If everywhere you go everything is tailored to you, does not the thrill of exploration fall to the wayside? Sometimes you gamble and lose, I'd say.
This last part is kind of hard for me because I would rather love to encourage role-playing amongst you all. But, how should I go about doing this? It seems if I leave you all alone the game stagnates after a few hours and nothing happens. If you'd rather I wait until the party 100% comes to me to advance the story I'm more than willing to do that.
When it comes to this point in particular, that of role-playing, and how to encourage, etc, I'd much rather you PM to me some instances so I can look at some examples and we can talk this part out in depth.
Let me hear back from you.
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i suppose i can agree with Durielle's oppinion on feeling a bit rushed in the RP, i have been trying to bond with her, our wizard whom ever it was at the time and sugua a bit but we always seem to get cut off with moving on, i understand needing to move the aprty forward as im not the whole party but perhaps an RP interupt we can respectfully react too instead of just ending in the middle of it would be better, even if its something like "the night grows late and the party looks to be turning in" leaves me a quick moment to turn in or something before moving forward with the story
Well let me ask you a question therefore Vladimir, how would you rate the temple encounter?
I raised the centipedes CR by two. I could, under the same CR done instead, two centipedes. Which would have absolutely hammered the party into TPK.
The party is level two, but your EL is five, Sugua would argue it's 4, I personally don't believe being minus a Masterwork weapon is worth a whole -1 EL but I digress.
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The initial temple encounter with the monks was fine. If you go back in the chat log on Roll20, I knew it was not going to be easy, but it was a balanced, challenging encounter.
As to the Whiptail encounter, not all CR increases are created equal. The fiendish template is certainly a stronger additon (DR/magic, fire resistance, etc.) than say simply increasing the hit dice of monster.
For what it's worth I agree with Sugua's estimation of the party EL.
In all honesty, I can't say that this feels like Players vs. DM/GM I just feel the curvature of the challenge is a little bit off.
We are all level 2, about to be level 3, Martial classes have a very linear progression where they pretty evenly scale up in ability and strength. Though this makes up only half of our party, the other half, are mainly spellcasters save the Bard, which is both. Like you said the bard just hasn't hit its spot to become really effective, though for us spellcasters, especially me as a wizard (not sure how oracles are) we won't be extremely helpful against a whole lot of intense encounters. Our resources are spent rapidly and our spells don't do much damage. The only reason I was any help against the trolls was because of their weakness to fire. As you saw, I was helpless against the centipede, and apparently Durielle feels she's been helpless for most of the encounters.
I understand spellcasters are pretty crappy at early levels, as they should be, but it just seems like the battles are tailored a bit more for martial classes, at least with where we are in levels right now, once we get higher in level it won't really matter, but this is why I stressed the importance of lower-damage dealing monsters. I think all of the casters have an AOE spell or two, we could definitely work out some teamwork against a bigger group of creatures. Also, another idea that could work is letting each character shine, it would be nice to see Donovan cream some undead. I am not sure how to tailor the fights to fit others but I'm sure you could come up with something.
I agree that once I reach level 20 I would like to feel like I earned it, but at the same time (I am currently experiencing this in a solo campaign I'm playing in) it is not always fun to be barely escaping fight after fight, or constantly having hardships put upon you and your allies. I would like to feel accomplished, but I don't want to feel it isn't worth it either, there should be a balance.
I kind of derailed a bit from my initial point of interest but I know this isn't PvGM because of the fact that none of us have rolled stabilization checks, at least not since I started playing.
EDIT: Just counted. 3 Martials, 4 Casters, 1 bard...(Bards are kind of unique in their own way [even if that sounds redundant idgaf :P])
While I know I speak for myself regarding the PvGM comment, I have a group of online friends who often like what I write so they check my posts and sometimes skim the gameplay threads to understand the context of my posts. They have made a lot of comments regarding whether DM Tuyena is trying to kill us intentionally and have bandied back and forth in our chats about it. I suppose I may have let their comments bleed into my post a little.
I agree with Gonzo, and I said as much in my long post. The encounters seem more fit for combat oriented builds, and those of us who are aiming for something further out feel a little left in the cold.
I would tend to counter argue that, very few divine caster who they themselves don't engage in melee combat at early levels tend to find it difficult to make a large impact.
The inverse of this of course is that you reach soaring heights of power, while the martial classes stay relatively the same.
I had a sorcerer I played about a year ago. You know what he did at low level? He used grease and grappled things, that was the extend of his usefulness.
-Posted with Wayfinder
Keep in mind too, the dynamic of the party has shifted since it's creation. You're down your primary tank, which Sugua has now had to become, and picked up a sorcerer, yes, you're currently weaker than you were.
Later on that same choice could prove to make you stronger.
-Posted with Wayfinder