HAximand's page

Thanks for the thoughts, Jessica. You're right, of course, the theming of the AP is necessarily arcane. It was even pointed out in the player's guide as Arcana was one of four "strongly recommended" skills. The main reason we didn't notice it was a hole is that we were coming out of Sky King's Tomb and 3 of the 5 players chose to keep those characters, so we didn't have a full session zero where we usually check for these kinds of things.

I'll definitely allow for some alternative checks (usually with increased DC's) and also let them move some proficiency boosts around if they so choose.

I do apologize for any rudeness. I don't meant to be ungrateful for people who took the time to read and respond. It's just a bit frustrating when you bring up an issue to feel like the responses make tangential corrections without addressing the issue itself.

I was hoping to hear that I had completely misunderstood the encounter, or at least that someone else had had a similar experience. What I got was a few rules corrections that didn't address the problems or change the encounter in the slightest, as well as the creative director of Paizo saying "well why didn't you just change it." I guess it's egg on my face for expecting an AP to be fun without changes.

It's a 7th rank effect for counteract purposes. That doesn't need a 7th rank Dispel. It needs a success on a 6th rank or a critical success on 4th or 5th rank.

That's a great point, I was wrong about that. I'll also point that out to my players, I think they'll be relieved to realize they could have used all of their prepared 6th-rank Dispel Magics and had a 15% success chance with each to dispel one fourth of the trap.

It's not "anti fun" to include chances for a common skill like Arcana to shine, but it IS anti-fun to keep that as-is in a party that, due to choices made during character creation, mean that no one in the party is any good at Arcana.

Yes, of course, I could and should have understood the hazard better on first reading and thought more carefully before running it as-is. But this reads a lot like blaming the reader for an overly specific encounter design. I mean, if the design is going to be that hard for some parties, it warrants at least a comment from the writer suggesting possible changes. That's not an unusual ask from an AP.

...this is one of the first really mythic challenges to face the party in this Adventure Path, it's also maybe a good time to chat with the players about not being too timid about spending mythic points and leaning into their mythic nature and abilities, which should absolutely include you as the GM assuring the players that there will be PLENTY of chances to regain those points during play.

I said in my post that the players were low on Mythic points before this encounter started. The reason they were low on Mythic points is that I, as the GM, did exactly what you're suggesting and encouraged spending them as they will be regained frequently. When in reality, it turned out that they would have been better off saving most of them for the upcoming Mythic encounter.

The point of a mythic adventure is to let the players lean even further into the power fantasy of essentially playing superheroes...

This is exactly my problem, though. Even if we replace my experience with a party well-suited to the hazard, the problem with the encounter is that the players have nothing to do. No recourse, no engagement with the mechanics of the hazard, just wait for crit saves and then four good disable checks. Yes obviously I can reward creative things they come up with, yes of course they might just happen to have a feat for this, but the encounter as written doesn't "let the players feel like superheroes." It lets them feel like gamblers. Gamblers who lose every time.

the arcana doesn't req leg prof, doing dmg to hazards is always impractical, that's not unique to this hazard - i let a PC without leg thievery spend a mythic as if they've rolled and auto-failed, then used rewrite fate, but skipped the 1st roll, they only rolled once though, cause you can seemingly only disable 1 reality per round and they were last, 1 person had arcana - it was very hard & 1 person went down, but they did it! the arcana person used a few mythic probably to re-roll too - it's a mythic hazard, and not the only in the AP...

That's a good point, I had missed that the Arcana check didn't require legendary proficiency. I had just noticed that its DC was even higher than the Thievery and thought it had to be a typo that there was no proficiency requirement at all. Still, the DC is 41 and the highest Arcana bonus in the party was +18 so it wasn't even feasible until the DC's had been reduced several times.

I understand that it's mythic and this party was particularly unfit for its challenges, but the actual solution to the encounter reduced to "wait until we crit on our saves at least 5 times, then wait until we get lucky on 4 Arcana checks that we can only make once per round." After working out the probabilities, my party still would have just waited on 10 crit saves instead of ever succeeding the 4 Arcana checks.

A much better suited party (read: a party with good Arcana) could have succeeded sooner, but it still boils down to waiting on lucky rolls. That's anti-fun encounter design where the players have no method of meaningfully engaging with the content.

I just finished running my second session of this AP and experienced what I can only describe as the worst encounter I have ever seen in a Piazo product. For context, I've run or played through all of Age of Ashes, Extinction Curse, and Sky King's Tomb, among other smaller adventures.

I'm talking about the Endless Realities mythic hazard in the very first chapter. Let's start with how you can disable the hazard: you need to have Legendary Thievery or Arcana or a 7th-rank Dispel Magic, all of which are impossible for a 12th-level party to have. Certain Mythic callings or feats might have made the checks possible, but none of my players happened to have an ability to roll with Mythic proficiency on either of those skills. And even if they did, the party was quite low on Mythic points by the time the encounter started.

But this hazard is destructible, I hear you saying! Yes, this is true. The hazard has 90 Hit Points for each of the four realities, and destroying all four seems to be the only reasonable way of moving on for many parties. Except that with its AC of 39, the party martials have a 25% chance of hitting it on their first attack, and with its Hardness of 20, they each have a median hit damage of zero except for the barbarian with a whopping 8. To top it off, the hazard can regain 20 HP each round, so after two full rounds of whaling on it, the party had dealt zero net damage.

The only saving grace is that each time a PC crits on a save against it, its DC's and hardness are reduced by 2. The DC's don't matter since the PC's didn't meet the required proficiencies anyway. Reducing its hardness will sloooowly allow the PC's to start dealing damage, but as I said, this effect still wasn't enough to deal net positive damage in two rounds. Combined with the ridiculous AC, 360 total HP, and 20 regen each round, there was no way the party was going to meaningfully win; the best outcome was to tough it out until the hardness reached zero and the encounter ended on its own.

My players clearly weren't having fun, so I explained that the Hardness was decreasing with each crit success, and if they got to ten crit saves, the Hardness would reach 0 and the entire trap would be disabled. At this point one player said "in that case can we just take 40d6 damage and say we won?" That was when I realized just how un-fun the entire thing was and decided to move on, pretending the whole thing never happened.

Did I miss something? Was this encounter supposed to be winnable?

Sky King's Tomb does use milestone level advancement, following the recommendations presented in the overview at the beginning of each volume. In short, each chapter involves gaining one level.

Where does it say this? Are you referring to page 7 where it says "Characters should level up between chapters" in the small text under Advancement Track? I had interpreted that as a vague suggestion of when levels should be reached, not a recommendation for milestone vs. XP tracking.

The words "milestone" or "story-based" leveling (the CRB term for milestone) appear exactly 0 times in Mantle of Gold or the Player's Guide. But the myriad of non-combat encounters through the book also never specify XP rewards, unlike every other AP. So it seems that the book was definitely designed with story-based leveling in mind. The writers/editors just forgot to tell the GM in any specific terms.

I'm a little frustrated by the fact that I only figured this out after going through chapter 1, and only by seeing that chapter 2 expects level 3 with only enough XP rewards to reach level 2. Now to keep my players on level for the chapter they're in, my players will level up to 3 after reaching 2 one session ago.

Some more specific wording in future APs would be very helpful.

I noticed the background "Sponsored by a Stranger" in the Player's Guide and one of my players has picked it. The background says the stranger asked "whether an insect hive mind could be manipulated at a distance," which obviously foreshadows the BBEG of the campaign.

However, after doing a Ctrl+F search of all 5 books, there's no reference to the background at any point. What did you choose to do with this background? Or what will you do, since I'm sure most people haven't gotten through the published books yet? Did you choose that the stranger is a specific person who comes up, or is it forever a mystery?

I'm trying to start Hellknight Hill, running a campaign on Roll20 (because in person isn't an option right now) and I'm struggling with the maps offered by Paizo. The maps included in the book, such as the map of Citadel Altaerein, look pretty pixelated if you zoom in to the scale of a single fight. This is workable but I've been looking for alternatives that make our play feel smoother.

In doing research, I found forum posts such as this one where Paizo has stated that it's prohibitively expensive to make much higher resolution maps for every single area in their adventure paths. I understand and accept this.

However, I looked at some videos of a party playing Age of Ashes on Fantasy Grounds and found that the maps included in that content are visibly sharper than the ones in the Age of Ashes PDFs. If you want to check for yourself, view this timestamp and compare it to the same room in the Hellknight Hill Interactive Maps PDF.

Why are the maps included with a Fantasy Grounds purchase so much sharper than the ones included in a purchase of the book and the interactive maps PDF? I would like to use these in my Roll20 campaign because I prefer it to Fantasy Grounds, but as far as I can tell the only possible way to get these better maps is by buying the Fantasy Grounds module. Why are the maps gated in this way? Am I missing something?