Erik Erikson's page

For the area B5 encounter, what is the savebonus of Tavvar and her aides?

I just finished GMing Doomsady Dawn part 1 (The lost Star). The party opted to play an “iconic” party so I had a wizard, a cleric, a fighter and a rogue. The scenario went relatively smoothly as we did not need to spend as much time looking through the rules as with the first Starfinder tables we had.

The encounters were all hard for the players; there were only 2 encounters (the fungus and the centipedes) where no player went to 0 HP. I had no kills but there were too many close calls and without the cleric the party would have definitely TPKed. (And I thought the “when do they die”- part would be later.) While the design philosophy of more “weaker” enemies seems fine it does require 2 things to work that were not given in this scenario:

1.) The weaker enemies have to be weaker. I hit my players far too often even with the mooks.
2.) The area needs to be so that the enemies can attack multiple party members. The worst offender was the A7 encounter where the enemies all could only attack 1 PC at a time and with the far too high to hit they had the bodies piled up. (At the end all but the cleric went unconscious in that encounter and if I would have played nastier there would have been kills here. For example the goblins had seen that there would be healing involved and they could have made sure to kill some PCs if they aimed their third strike each turn at someone unconscious)

The players were surprised how fast they could create their characters, but as they told me the biggest reason for that was that they felt there were too few options. Another big complaint I heard from all players was that the characters did not feel “competent” the difference between characters was really low and especially the fighter told me that if all he could do is hit stuff but everyone else can hit stuff nearly as good as he can but can also do other things why should he play a fighter.
The Cleric was also massively disappointed how the class evolved from a supporter who could also heal the party out of combat (for money -> CLW-wand) to a pure “healing-b%+!$”. There are too few spell slots at 1st level so she told me that she felt like she was playing a 6th-level caster in PFS but without the upsides. The support spells seemed all nerfed to oblivion, for example Bless is at the same power level than a CANTRIP. And with everyone getting hit the only viable decision seemed to be taking every heal spell she could.

The Wizard had similar complaints as he said there were too few spell slots to really matter. And with enemies having this high boni on their saves the critical failure does not seem to be something that would happen realistically. But he told me that the general idea of variable degrees of success made spells very interesting and a promising upgrade to PF1.

In general the feedback was relatively negative, as the players found the combat too random and felt it was stacked against them. They would not hit very reliably and the enemies all had a better to hit which coupled with their numbers increased their feeling of “The enemy can do everything better than I can”. Another BIG complaint was the healing economy: The cleric felt forced to take all heals she could get and the rest of the party could only rely on her as there are not enough other ways of healing. After the sold some loot and got potions they got massively disappointed as these were far too expensive for 1st level players and they could not even heal full once with their resonance pools. So the party took a 1 day rest where the only thing they did was empty the cleric to get back to full HP and get back to rest. So if the intent is to have resonance to gate the adventure day of healing then the lest that should be done would be an way to fully restore HP for free (WITHOUT ANY CHECKS) once they rested for a day as without it some characters would have needed 2 weeks of rest to be back to full HP. The only system that was praised by everyone was the action economy as the “you have 3 actions”-paradigm felt very intuitive and seemed to solve some problems pathfinder 1 had.

I just finished playing Doomsday Dawn 1 (The Lost Star) and as the Survey is not online (yet) available, here is my feedback.

Party Composition:

We finished the adventure in around 6 hours (real time) and 2 days (ingame time). The combats all felt very random and disappointing, there was no real difference in the to hit between the characters so it only mattered if we rolled good. (The druid and cleric had a +4, the rogue had a +5 and the fighter a +6) The actions of all characters were also the same as most rounds were Stride/Strike/Strike or Strike/Strike/Strike, with only the druid deviating as he used mostly Stride/Strike/Command or Cast or heal Animal/Command. So all classes played the same and there was no noticeable difference. This carried over to the skills where there was no notable difference between the characters, as all had skillboni between -2 and +5 (and the skills the characters rolled were in between +3 and +5)

All the casters complained about that they had far too few spells, especially as taking a healing option felt forced as there is not a real option to buy healing at this level. Even with 2 characters capable of healing someone went down in every encounter (except in A3 and A10)[in total we had at least 10 cases of players down]. The characters felt extremely fragile as nearly all enemies hit us on a 10 or 11, with a lot of them hitting even better. The worst experience had the druid whose animal companion had a 25% chance to be critted by the initial encounter and be instantly downed by it (which happened).

This was not helped with the fact that nearly every encounter was a bottleneck encounter as there was next to no room to maneuver.

The consensus was that the experience was far worse than the low level experinece in Pathfinder 1 (and this comes from a player who does not really like low level Pathfinder 1)

I recently got Haunted Heroes Handbook and very much like the “Pact Wizard” archetype (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-classes/wizard/archetypes/paizo---wiz ard-archetypes/pact-wizard-wizard-archetype) I would love to play him in the society especially because it is a very rare Archetype for the wizard that does not trade out Arcane Bond or Arcane School.

I already looked for the usual reasons to ban an archetype and it is not obviously evil or has some flavor associated that does not fit the society.
For power reasons you get:
Fast study (in all but the name) at level 1: This is a useful feature and I see that the lack of a tradeoff here can lead to some problems because you get a class feature at Level 1 without a clear drawback. This is offset by the tradeoff in the next class feature and the fact that this feature is not really usable on a dip into the class so there should be no problems with multicasting.
Access to a Patron spell List at Level 1: You lose Scribe Scroll (In PFS Spell Focus) for the ability to add 9 Spells to your spell list (6 in PFS most of the time) Most of the patrons offer primarily spells from the wizard spell list so you would get likely fewer spells out of it. With some patrons, you get some very nice spells to your list but most of the time there is only one or two exclusive and usable spells on a patron list.
Great Power, Great Expense:
At level 5 you get a half scaling Oracle Curse, that means in PFS you would only get the lv 5 benefit of the curse at level 10 so this might be a drawback most of the time, especially because most oracle curses don’t offer the same benefits to a wizard than to an oracle.
At level 10 you get a power that lets you roll twice on initiative, concentration, caster level and saving throws 3+1/2 Int times per day. This is likely the capstone of this archetype in PFS-play and a big boost to your combat ability.
The level 15 and 20 powers of the archetype improve the reroll power and give them one level decrease for metameric modifications of his patron spells but I exclude them here because they are not really relevant for society play.

The only big problems for this archetype that I can see are the free discovery at first level that would incentivize dips, but because we are talking about a full caster and the freebee only affects their own spell list this should not be a big problem and the large power increase at level 10 where you not only get the level 10 archetype ability (that seems comparable to the abilities other classes get at level 10 or 11) but also the first improvement of your curse.
I would be happy about a civil discussion about this archetype and if it would be possible to make him legal for PFS.

All these things seem interesting (my poor wallet) but are you sure that December AP is Ap 101?

Edit: Got confused by the missing APs in the mid and saw only the numbers jump up from 96 to 100.

I am prepating the Emerald Spire for my Pfs Group and I have a few general Questions about how to handle the Fact that Fort Inevitable ios the only available town and has less than 5000 residents.

I know that in between the Levels th PCs have acess to everything but my Question is how exactly to handle it inside the dungeon. So far I know that the generic Prestige Awards are 5PP more expensive (Guide Page 26)and that they do not have Acces to Spellcasting-Services more expensive than 3000Gm (Guide Page 24).

But how should I handle the Buying of Itmes during the Levels? The Guide only says:

Is there any general restriction what items to buy in a small Settlement? Is it a Gm decision?
I would say as a rule of Thumb, that they have Acces to every Item on the "Always Available" list and the itmes from earlier Emerald Spire chronicles.

For Reference here is the "Statblock" of the settlement if that would be relevant for an exact answer. This would suggest, that there is no Spellcasting over 4th Level Spells even if they would cost less than 3000GM.

I have two questions about the Mystic Theurge, first can a Sorcerer/Oracle use the "Combines Spells" Ability to cast spells from the other class (at one level higher)-> the rules say that you can only cast spontanusly spells that you have "prepared", so is there a FAQ that allows that?

And second what are the options for the 4th Level entry to the mystic theurge if you want to go Sorcerer/Oracle or Sorcerer/Cleric:

Waht are the Options to get (PFS-legal) a divine AND arcane SLA?
I know about the Aasimar SLA but it seems to cover only one half of the build and this sets your race choice.