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Our local meetup group of 8 played PF-RPG today. 12th level PCs all. The GM was very familiar with PF. The rest of us less so, but it was pretty smooth. Some questions came up.
1. How are the fog spells affected by fire spells? Can burning hands or fireball burn away a fog cloud? Regardless of how it was handled in 3.5, it would be nice to have something in the fog cloud description about fire, even if the effect is "none".
2. Please put in the Spellcraft skill table the DC to maintain concentration on a spell while moving. We searched around for this all-important info.
3. What happens when a character puts his ear to the ground in an attempt to hear a creature's tremors? Characters in movies do this!
4. What are the costs of the various poisons. Yes, PCs buy and use poisons? Knowing the cost is necessary to stat. character wealth too.
And some comments:
1. Death to minus Constitution score or -10, whichever is more generous, is a nice change. Alas, it wasn't enough for 2 of us. When a character is knocked from above 0 to death in one blow, perhaps a successful Fortitude save (DC 15?) to instead be reduced to -9 might be a nice compromise. It's what we did.
2. Combat maneuver vs 15+foe's CMB is definitely too high. I realize this isn't a new perspective, but I thought I'd add my voice to what many have said. 10 or 12 felt more reasonable.
3. Half the party was half-elves. Are half-elves the new best race? (Well duh, half-elves ARE awesome, I mean come on! ;-) I'm actually very happy with the current half-elf. But wondering if other gamers are seeing more of this race as well?
4. One of our foes, a level 15 halfling rogue with boots of speed and multiple daggers of returning (and lots of spell scrolls) averaged 180 points of damage per round when he could sneak attack. Is that "normal?" At level 15, maybe so. For some reason, I was expecting to see rogues limited to one sneak attack per round (perhaps I'm confusing PF with 4E?!?) Just checking....
Overall, it was a smooth experience and there are definitely a lot more options for building interesting PCs. I played a sorcerer/aristocrat/eldritch knight, hoping the "gish" archetype was more doable. It was, though I miss the days of the havoc mage PrC which allowed limited spellcasting and weapon attacks in the same round.
One of our number had only played 4E and Neverwinter Nights. Except for the saving throws, which were pretty confusing for him at first, he didn't seem to have any problem. I thought it was funny when he looked at the wizard/sorcerer spell list (by level and school) and, referring to the brief 1-line descriptions that come with each spell, asked "are these descriptions all there is?" 4E is certainly training a new generation of players away from the classic D&D experience!
Thanks!