Gavri3l's page

My gaming group just completed AD1 for WotR and I'm having some trouble deciding upon my mythic path.

I'm playing Seelah, and our group consists of myself, Adowyn, Enora, and Alain. Due to the lack of either Kyra or Shardra, we've generally found our healing resources to be pretty taxed. To alleviate this, my friends have been pushing me to take the Heirophant path for the healing when spending charges, access to raise dead, and bonus to recharging the cure spell when cast. I don't mind doing this, but I worry about not being able to gain a d20 on my strength checks as we continue through the campaign. The Marshal seems almost built for Seelah, as strength is her combat ability and Charisma allows her to succeed on before you act checks. For those who are playing with her without one of the primary healers in your group, which path did you pick and why?

As a general question, how important has having the d20 been in handling random combat encounters with non-villains in AD2+? And has access to healing remained a major priority later in the game, or do you find that tooled decks later on don't rely on it as much?

One last bit of information, I do plan on taking the Inheritor's Blade role card and putting power feats into the damage reduction ability.

My usual take on this debate:

In the vacuum of a single encounter, the caster should win, because they have a lot of powerful but limited resources. Sure you can double timestop, cast a bunch of spells and murder an encounter, but what happens if you have another encounter 10 minutes later? And 10 after that? What if your party is ambushed in the night and your caster doesn't have time to prepare spells or refresh spell slots? Suddenly the reliability of the fighter is looking a whole lot better. If you want to see the Fighter and Rogue shine in your game, you have to, as a GM, build your adventure with your player's daily resources in mind and make an effort to drain said resources. This doesn't work as well in PFS obviously because you are intended to finish the scenario in one sitting and there's only so many encounters you can work in there, but in a regular campaign, consider having several sessions all happen in one day and you'll see the Martial characters have their moment.

Thanks Vic! How about if you defeat a Villain with the Goblin attribute? Do you get to recharge the Birdcruncher Crown and search the location deck the villain is at before the game ends, or does the game end immediately upon the villain's defeat?

What about straight up reducing the size of the blessings deck? That seems to be the most straightforward approach. My only question would be how much to reduce it by before the game becomes impossible. I assume the 30 card deck was designed with thought in mind to how many turns the designers think it takes to close a location. But my group's approach has been to bomb down the decks that we have the hardest time closing, then spread out and search for the villain in the decks we have the easiest time closing temporarily so we can defeat him as soon as he's discovered, meaning we usually finish with 7-12 blessings left in the deck.

Dropping it to 25 cards sounds like a good start, but has anyone tried this and noticed the difference? Too much/Too little?

Ah. That is more tricky... Is there any other situation that might cause you to reshuffle a bane into a deck after encountering it but without either defeating or evading it?

Hmm... I could see it resolving a third way as well, since the goblin encounter is part of the encounter with Justicar Ironbriar, I could see the ruling being that the two combat checks happen "simultaneously" as part of the same step of the encounter process, in which case you would finish defeating Ironbriar, then trigger the crown afterward. Then the question becomes do you get to search the deck before the location is closed and the remaining cards banished.

Birdcruncher Crown doesn't say it only triggers on encounters, just when you defeat a bane with the Goblin Trait. I'd say you played it right.

It's too bad the necklace of fireballs doesn't have the arcane trait though, so no free recharge. She has a good chance of succeeding on the roll to recharge it, but one bad check and it's gone.

Haven't seen the staff of hungry shadows yet. Is that in Adventure 5?

Title says it all. What items do you put in Seoni's deck to make use of this feat?

I found myself frustrated when putting the wands in her deck because using them doesn't allow her to use her arcane die, making them much less powerful than attack spells. As such I lean more toward utility and protection items and keep multiple attack spells in my deck, but this means I don't have many items with the Arcane trait to recharge.

My current item set includes a Sihedron Medallion, A wand of enervation (the only thing I'm using the feat on right now), a chime of unlocking, a headband of vast intelligence (because our party has no wizard so I've been the one putting feats into intelligence), and a necklace of fireballs.

What do other people like to put on her?

It's all about having something you can use on multiple explores while keeping more blessings in your hand to explore again. If the encounter that comes up is something weak, you would rather save your blessing to explore again and use the amulet. Generally I find that a large part of winning the game requires that each player explore as many times as they can. Even if you run into something you can't kill, you are in good shape so long as you don't discard blessings for damage, so the amulet helps you get potentially further in before you run out of blessings.

At the very least it feels odd that you can have your action blessed by every god with a stake in Golarion at the same time. How often do both Gozreh and Lamashtu sanction the same action?

An idea would be to put the alignment of the deities on the blessings and when blessings are played, they all have to share one alignment qualifier. (So all good, or all chaotic, or all neutral, etc.)

I think the unspoken part of this argument is always that because this is an RPG, where the purpose of the game is to tell and interact with a cool story rather than to just kill monsters, the players do a lot of self regulating. Just because a Wizard or Druid can be build to be ridiculously powerful, doesn't mean that many players do it, as doing so would be boring. Unlike competitive games in which you are encouraged to make use of a broken build in order to win, you are instead discouraged from breaking your build in a tabletop RPG for the sake of enjoying the game more.

I suppose I should ask a real rules question then. Perhaps we have been playing it wrong, but are other players really allowed to each play a blessing and a spell (such as incendiary cloud and aid) to aid the person fighting the villain regardless of what location they are at? Most of our scenarios end with us spreading out to temp close the remaining locations and then putting so many dice into the final person's combat checks that they would succeed at all of the checks even on a roll of all 1's.

Gonna have to try it with the extra location sometime. Generally I think we'd like the difficulty level such that we generally fail one scenario out of every 3 or 4. Currently we haven't failed a scenario since Adventure 1.

What if, instead, there were cards that could be added to the existing scenarios which had a little more story text on them and changed the scenario's special rules as an optional add on? Could do the entire AP in one release and it would allow players who have already played an AP to have a unique experience with it if they want to play through again with some new players.

Could also use this to create higher and lower difficulty modes.

After reading through the thread about difficulties others are having with the game with 2 players, I thought I'd pipe in and ask if any players have found the game to be too easy with 5+ players?

My group is on the last part of adventure 4 and we haven't really felt challenged since the first adventures. We are hesitant to make any changes as each scenarios' special rules make them all very different, which leaves us with little ability to guess at how hard the scenario is going to be before actually playing it. Anyone played through them all and have some suggestions on how to create a "Hard Mode"?