Bill Dinger's page

Good Morning,

Just got done playing a platest session of the feedback at level 9 as a dwarf fighter, sword/board. Couple notes

* As before, "raising your shield" is a joke among the group. It feels pretty ridiculous to continue to have to spend an action to do this. Wizards and clerics dont need to "spend an action" to raise their staff, or an archer to raise his bow. Feels like an unnecessary action penalty that doesn't magic logical sense within the context of the gaming system.

* On the other hand, the additional class features around shields - such as when raising them being able to move at half speed - are actually really cool. More of that please. Or a gentle suggestion - leave raising a shield as just part of your class but let the warrior "heighten" it like a spell to give you more ac, move half speed, etc.

* The biggest problem remains that tanks aren't sticky. While they do have an AoO it's of limited effectiveness (1 reaction at this level) and the plethora of monsters at this level can/will just ignore it. If your primary purpose is to be a tank, as a sword/board fighter, and enemies can freely ignore you without penalty then .. why.. be .. a tank. I do think 4e got this the most right of any RPG game with its style of flat penalties to enemies ttack rolls, strikes, etc. More of that please

* I also think it's super weird that Armor doesn't scale that good for a fighter. My Monk has nearly as good AC at this level (I believe 28 to my fighter's 30). That's dumb.

* I cannot figure out equipment. On any character. It remains a baffling confusion of runes, materials, items, etc. I loathe how complex it is, how difficult it is for even advanced veterans of a system to understand, and why its this way. Nobody really complained about equipment before, it feels like we are trying to fix something that wasn't broken. This needs more simplification, or an alternate rules (flat progression of bonuses at this point honestly).

* We ended up facing a group of 10 cyclops because nobody among us has decent charisma and well, apparently in this part of the adventure we'll be left with "kill them all" strategy. Anyway, the cyclops took me out in 1 round. With their ability to autohit + do about 20 damage per hit they burned through all 147 of my HP in a single round. Uhhhh maybe we tone that down guys?

I had fun with the goblin shuffle (er... scuttle), that was a cool addition.

I had one PC go down with a shortbow crit (2d6+1d10 is ouch!) from one of the goblins, but he spent a hero point to not get the dying condition.

So this is confusing because there is also a rule that says if you ever take more than double your HP in damage you are dead. Not dying. Dead. So we presumed you had to keep track of it else you could abuse the system.

You can use something like a Druid's stabilize which would bring you back to 1 and depending on how that mucked up you in the initiative order would likely let you get your dying condition reduced by 1 which means the next time you could just take N-1 damage (where N is your HP) , die again, then wait for the druid to stabilize you.

It's just extremely confusing!

Not sure what you mean by «Death tanking», but do take into account that the Dying condition does not just go away when you stabilize them. It is very unhealthy indeed to get dropped again shortly after being stabilized.

I think we misread how death works to be honest, it looks like you continue to take damage up to negative your HP and then you die. Not just you are at 0 and have to make stabilization rolls.

Shield: I figure you'll get used to spending the action. The devs said in their playtest that the shield style is almost too good. Did you use the shield block reaction?

No, I picked up the charge action which is *enormously* fun. Being able to run all over the place and charge into battle with my barbarian counterpart was great fun. It also made the shield reaction sort of redundant.. and the shield reaction would steal opportunity for AoO since, if I remember right, you only get 1 reaction.

AoO does in fact trigger on most spellcasting. It triggers on «Manipulate» actions, and both somatic and material casting actions have the «Manipulate» keyword.

Ah ok, that makes sense. I figured there was just something I was missing.

BTW, I'm going to run my first game on Tuesday. How did you guys deal with the scarcity of healing? Sleep for a week after the first fight...? I'm tempted to allow the players to convince Keleri to hand over some of the pay in advance in the form of a healing potion or two... though that might be breaking the playtest conditions. Actually, there seems to be no pay involved, come to read about it. :\

I think we ran 2-3 fight son average in between breaks. First round, we did pretty good until the caterpillar room, as a tank I missed 5 saves (.. a 2.5% chance) and the barbarian got a couple rounds of poison too which depleted all of our reserves of healing. We ended up sleeping/resting for 2 days and using that + druid to bring ourselves back up. We broke for the night needing another 2 day rest and top off period which puts us at risk for solving adventure in time but there just isn't a lot of healing available at level 1.

There's also a healing potion you discover and um

Party: 1 Dwarf Fighter (me!)
1 gnome druid
1 half-elf ranger
1 half-orc Barbarian

Game Mechanics Stuff We All loved:
1.) Action economy was great! Everybody understood it, just felt natural.

2.) Critical hits are just critical hits! We loved it.

3.) Charge is back baby!

4.) Lack of AOO on most monsters means combat is much more fluid.

5.) More structure around downtime was kind of fun, didn't have much time to delve into it.

Game Mechanics Iffy on

1.) Perception became even _more_ important thanks to init which means god save you if your character has WIS as a dump stat.

2.) Skills are pretty cool! But knowing which lore is which and how it applies to certain situations is complicated.

Game Mechanics Nobody Understood

Death/Dying. It's a half a page, and requires a PHD to understand the save dc. Also 'death tanking' is a legit thing with a druid using a stabilize cantrip to heal you up past 1.. maybe. That seems problematic but it's possible nobody got the rules right because see PHD required to understand the rules ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . Please change to static DC modifier for save dc, and make the rules clearer/give some example situations. A freaking flowchart might help.

Adventure Specific

3 successful 20 thievery check to disable a door seems a bit much at level 1

The Poisons that increase are extremely problematic at that low of a level (6 giant caterpillar things in a tiny room = trouble).

Lot of downtime due to inability to recover HP. 2 HP a night isn't good, especially considering the cost of HP potions and all the rest.

Pathfinder adventures consistently have this problem where if a character misses a DC of a lore check they just miss out completely on the story (like the thing in the fountain). It's a general story-writing problem that leaves huge gaps. Perhaps changing it so more information is revealed rather than virtually nothing if the characters - especially low level who are unlikely to have much in the way of skills - roll bad and just don't miss out on large cool parts of the story.

Fighter Specific

Seriously it requires an action to raise my effing shield? Why even bother using it instead of a 2H weapon?

Why does fighter AOO not do anything against spells and why doesn't it stop movement? Seems drastically underpowered compared to other classes level 1 abilities.