[PF2 / Farol] #2-13: A Gilded Test (Low Tier) (Inactive)

Game Master Farol

Ok, I need to DM cracked tusk as he has gone silent. Jiki, please remake your action. In theory, it should be Klank who went after you but given his tomorrows availability I hope you don't mind

I just got my 2nd dose today, so I suspect I'll post very late tomorrow after lots of sleep.

I hope you feel well Elsha. I noticed no transformation towards any of the Goblinoids :(

In the meantime I booted Cracked Tusk, he did not come back yet. If he will not come back early next week I might exclude him and recalculate the difficulty :( I hope he is all right

Ok, so far Cracked Tusk did not come back. I hope he will show up soon.

I will give time till tomorrow for Thurk to post (due to Paizo Con and stat holiday on Monday in US).

Hey Folks, good job with the fight!

Cracked Tusk did not come back so I will remove him from the party and scale down the difficulty. Today I will DM the player behind Thurk but I hope it is the PaizoCon that made him away. Hopefully, he will come back.

Sounds good.

Hey I am sorry to have been absent for a while! Back to regular posting for the nearest future.

Hey @Thurk,

Good to have you back! I hope everything is ok.

FYI. The last combat in the scenario towards which we are approaching is considered by others as challenging. Please keep that in mind!

Uh oh. "Tarnbreaker's Trail" difficult?

:D hahaha No. At least as far as I can say.

It is not one enemy with all stats being super high. But most people describe this fight as challenging (but I heard of no one that would say that it killed someone). Given that two first fights were rather easy I don't want you to be caught off guard

Ah s+!*e. I’m sorry team, I totally forgot. Hopefully, I didn’t gunk up the mission up for everyone.

No worries, no harm is done. You were supposed to try to keep it to yourself but at this stage, the enemy already knows that ;)

I just decided to react to that - you don't have enough influence points to make Vionnia join you so she would take off, this looked like a good moment.

That’s a relief. Not that we don’t get her to join us—really cruel dicebot this game—but I’m glad I didn’t screw over the mission. Everyone I play with at home keeps their Pathfinder affiliation secret, often to the detriment of the story back in 1E, so I try to be a proud Pathfinder when possible. Just slipped out this time even though it was explicitly against the mission.

Four cats? Are two off of the map?

You all have 2 eyes with each you saw 2 cats => 4 cats right? Go optics!

Yeah, that is my bad. I read the fight comp from the high tier, and then realized my mistake and removed the cats from the turn tracker and map but not the description.

You fight two cats! Easy peasy

Hehe. Well, we'll see about easy-peasy.

@Klank - I wrote this post at another table when the Lion critted their dwarf with a shield ;) and he decided to block it (destroying his tower shield).

Shield math and its mechanics (I would say it at a table) so I will spend my time writing. Steal and Tower Shields have a Hardness of 5 BT of 10 and HP of 20. This means that in a fight you can block:
- an unlimited amount of hits that deal 5 or less damage.
- 2 Hits that deal 10-14 points of damage
- 1 hit that deals 15+ points of damage

And given that shield gives you +2 to AC I find it more useful to raise your AC than to actually block hits. Personally, I follow the rule to
- Always shield block hits that deal 4-6 damage
- Usually, block hits that deal 7-8
- Almost never block hits that deal 10+ damage (unless it keeps you standing and it is crucial for you to last that 1 round longer).

Basically, it is about optimizing the shield to last the longest. It feels off that you gain more by using shield on weak blows and not the powerful ones but this is how they made the math ;)

As always, the above are my thoughts on shields, feel free to do as you will.

Ya, thanks for posting that. I carry two shields for that reason. I know we're light on healing so conserving HP is going to be pretty important. Likely I'll let the first shield do its work and the second shield I'll get more conservative with. If all that fails I went with a bastard sword so I can up the damage to d12 from the 1h d8 if my shields are all toasted.

This is an FYI that I'll be away this coming weekend, 6/12-13, with no access to computers or phone signal. I should be able to resume Sunday evening (US/Pacific time). Given that it's a weekend I expect minimal disruption.

So it turns out that we might be over before the weekend ;)

This fight went easier than expected. The lions had +11 attack mod with 1d10+6 dmg. Sneak attack 1d6 and pack attack (when at least two allies threaten the same foe) another 1d6, 19 AC, 45 HP.

But what can you do when lvl 1, 16 HP kobold does gazillion of dmg in one round due to magic weapon. And lion rolls 1, 4, and 8 in his three attacks :)

Good Job!

Scuttlesnarp interned as a Tucker's kobold, I guess. He got some serious mileage out of that magic weapon spell.

Ok folks, we are at the end. Please keep on RP'ing, no matter how much more 1's you will roll it will not change the output.

The game is reported, and chronicles are here.

Please check them and make sure that everything is correct.

I would also appreciate any feedback that you might have.

Thanks for the fun run! I am sorry to not have more opportunities to interact with your PC's but this scenario has only 1 NPC who is talking with you all ;)

Everything looks good (if a bit weird - this is only my second of the super-simplified chronicle sheets). This was a lot of fun. Thanks to everyone, especially Farol for running!

Chronicle looks good, thanks.

Klank and I enjoyed our time. Keep up the good work Farol.

The chronicle looks good, thanks a lot for the game! I actually like scenarios with a straightforward premise like this.

Chronicle looks good, thanks for running!

Chronicle looks good, and funny that it doesn't have those "before/after" fields for every stat that nobody liked to fill out :)

I'll have to think on feedback. Given the combat focus of this scenario I don't know what could have been done better. I thought it was a lot of fun.

Out of curiosity, in the 2nd to last fight when the wizard gives up, is that written in?

@Elsha - the wizzard giving up was not written in. In first fight the commoners had a note: when things turn dire she would give up. With the second fight no. However in 2nd fight the guys were mercanries looking to be recruited, when your 6 fighters falls and you are lvl 1 Wizard you may cast till you are down or accept the loss. I imagined that as human being he was not suicidal ;)

======================================
A list of my changes:
- Making the tournament mostly non-lethal. The scenario says that other fighters will give up when they are losing. But it does not say what happens to the fallen. I've added the healers and bets around the fights. Bets made sense and healers seems plausible as the tournament is to recruit folks. Making tournaments deadly would lower the amount of people that would sign up.

Actually, I review the posts, and in this game I did not describe the healers looking after fallen (I did it for the higher tier).

On top of that, there were reviews saying that they felt weird going through poor quarters and slaughtering commoners 'to get to bottom of this.

- I tried and mostly failed, to throw some information about recruitment into the story. The scenario consists of: fights, influence rounds which may give you hints about the fights. The whole plot can be resolved by finding letters and ledgers with Perception check :| I wanted to throw hints from other participants and Vionnia herself. But in retrospect, this would have to be better planned on my end (what information are shared and how often)

- I made a mistake in Fight 2 regarding traps. The fight 2 should be all about traps and leading PC's into them. But I did passive perception check there was very low chance for you to miss DC15 on perception rolls (5 people). That changes the fight into regular skirmish where traps were an inconvenience. The setup of the map is already a bit obvious, I think it could have been a more interesting fight. The traps required for you to use search action for them to be discovered.

- Obviously Sunken Maiden is my ship which I will reuse whenever PC's are travel overseas ;)

Yeah, I guess the thing about recruiting is that while fighting these recruits you're not really going to get a chance to casually ask what they're in it for :)

I suppose one possibility is the party unknowingly (on both sides) bumps into an opposing contestant on the streets along the way. They chat a bit and get a bit of this background (maybe just some general attitudes, the mysterious name of the fighting company), and then awkward they pop out of the shadows on the other side of the fight.

Yeah, on another table. There was a player who was a Medic (archetype) and he wanted to help the enemy team to get them back in shape. This is when I was able to slip a thing or two, but it is a bit 'unreliable'.

I found the influence rounds to be a bit hard to RP. One NPC talking with each and every one of you. I hoped at first that I will be able to make a more natural conversation out of it... but yeah. And I wanted to throw hints and pieces into it... but yeah ;)

It is a pity that we lost Cracked Tusk along the way, but I am happy that we lost only 1 player. On my last few tables, the % of dropouts is higher than it was a year ago.