Jaunt's page

I have to kick off this playtest report with a few caveats:

1. Way of the Wicked is a weird AP. Sometimes you get days between encounters, sometimes you have no equipment, sometimes you can circumvent difficult combats with stupid tricks. This is definitely not a "go into 4 rooms a day, kill what's in them, take the loot" test.
2. The party consists only of the Slayer and a bomber Alchemist. In light of this, I took the Slayer in a ranged/switch-hitter direction. I know what a ranged Ranger feels like from past experience, and I wasn't ever going to get flanks anyway. I saw the ranged talents and decided to test out the ranged Slayer knowing that it will likely be a minority build, but one that seems to be encouraged by those talents.
3. It's almost a stealth party. At higher levels it will be.
4. 25 point buy. This feels like excess compared to the PFS strictures.

So far the Slayer has been performing decently. He's much like a straight up Ranger with respect to combat, the only relevant difference being his Favored Target, which I have yet to get an opportunity to use in combat. I have yet to find a time I would rather have +1/+1 instead of a second arrow, especially considering that I may very well end up attacking a new target every round. The most use I got out of Favored Target was as a free bonus to Sense Motive outside of combat.

I had a hard time finding a Talent to select. The basic tactic is to go first, shoot a flatfooted guy twice, and then just ignore SA the rest of the combat. Because of this, and because of the natural effects of dex, my init mod is huge and I tend to go first. That makes Snap Shot only guarantee something I usually do anyway, and can't be combined with any form of multiple shots. Surprise Attack is similar, there's almost always something I want to shoot that I act before. Half the time, there isn't even a surprise round, or I'm unable to act in it. I like the focus on initiative, surprise rounds, and catching enemies flatfooted, I just don't believe the talents for it are actually worth taking as it stands. For those curious, I ended up taking Combat Trick, and then Weapon Training (weapon focus) at 4.

I could give a blow by blow, but that's unnecessary. All he did was shoot things. Sometimes, that was great, sometimes I just wished I had another alchemist throwing bombs. I didn't feel underpowered so much as I felt lackluster. I knew exactly what I was doing every turn: shooting, or moving and shooting. Rangers get to sometimes add Favored Enemy, Barbarians can Rage, Fighters...well, there's a reason I don't play Fighters.

Suggestions: Improve the range-focused talents to be more useful. Sniper's Eye would be nice, if I could ever rely on ranged sneak attacks to begin with but this early on I cannot. Snap Shot and Surprise Attack only let me have a marginally greater chance of getting to apply my whopping 1d6 SA at level 3 for one attack. Deadly Range doesn't do much for me since it's a very rare time that a fight starts with at more than 30' but less than 40'.

Make it so that Favored Target is a swift action with some drawback. Maybe it lowers AC a la charging, maybe it's a number of times a day until level 10, but it's just not a worthwhile combat action under any circumstance I've encountered.

It's been said a thousand times, but Bluff as a class skill to take advantage of the Favored Target bluff bonus would be cool.

Hey, I just had a couple questions on traps and how you run them.

First, can you take 20 on perception to find traps? Does it trigger the traps?

Second could I take 20 on perception to find traps, deliberately excluding touching anything? Would this change the DC, or just exclude touch-based information?

Third, if someone takes 20 on searching a room, do they automatically trigger any trap they don't find? For instance, Roger the Rogue takes 20 on searching a closet. There is a set of drawers with 5g inside and opening them triggers a Perception DC150 spray bottle trap? Since Roger can't find the trap even on a 20, does he just automatically trigger it? If not, does that mean taking 20 only involves searching the surfaces of things, and not inside them, and so taking 20 wouldn't find the 5g either (even if there wasn't a trap)? Would your answer change if I rolled a 20 instead?

Thanks in advance.

Another simple question, I hope. If you succeed on your first save, you become staggered. Do you continue to make saves and get staggered in the next 3 rounds? I don't think this is the case, because then Mass Suffocation becomes "destroy target non-caster, at least until combat is over or someone dispels him".

Basically, the conflicting understandings of this spell are: 1) make 4 saves, each staggering you or advancing you down the suffocation track or 2) make one save. If you save, then you're staggered. If not, you make 3 more saves, each failure advancing you down the track, each success doing nothing.

Help a guy out?

After a lengthy, lengthy encounter whose difficulty hinged primarily around the interpretation of stealth, and how it interacts with perception, I've changed my religion to worship DM Blake and his stealth FAQ thing. But second, it makes me wonder if it's only insane generosity that leads not every high level encounter towards being an ambush.

A t-rex, which is only a CR9, has a ridiculous perception check. On an average day, a sleeping t-rex can hear me whispering from 100 feet away on the other side of a one foot thick wall. If the players are quietly arguing about who gets the cloak of resistance +2 and suddenly a dinosaur head caves in the wall during a surprise round and then starts to clean house, I think most players would either interpret that as a DM fiat (probably somewhat cool though) set piece scripted encounter, or as total BS. Smart players who don't know the T-rex has a +37 will probably spend the rest of the session looking for the invisible spotter, or ferreting out the spy in the party.

Is there a way for RAW Perception to be reliable at high levels without being superhuman? Very few parties will be 100% maxing stealth, so it seems that every enemy should be fortifying their room, dimension dooring in, running and hiding, or otherwise not giving the PCs anything resembling a fight on even terms. But when you read the APs, nobody ever writes "if the vampire in room 14 hears the PCs turn the key in the front door of room 1, he turns into a bat, and flies off with the macguffin."

Is there a way for perception to make sense without house rules or just declaring every wall magically soundproof?