RPG Superstar 2015 Top 32. Goblin Squad Member. RPG Superstar 8 Season Marathon Voter. 216 posts (217 including aliases). No reviews. No lists. No wishlists. 1 alias.
First thing first: this free-exploration strategic genre of the game is one of the most favorite with my group, so its playability was of particular important to us.
We used following characters during the playtest.
A goblin sorcerer, dragon bloodline, planned to be “blaster+utility” type of a character. Armored (are there any unarmored casters left around?). Felt overall pretty weak, much like one trick pony, which feels wrong at level 9 (what was the trick, I am going to explain in details for the encounters we had).
A dwarf druid, wild shaper. Turned to be a very decent melee at level 9 thanks to the huge dinosaur form, plus a very good utility character outside combat (Survival skill, phantom steeds for the group, speak with animals, all that stuff). Did not do pretty much any heals. Lack of long-lasting noncombat animal forms to run around and scout felt awful and nondruidic, really a drop in life quality.
A human paladin, sword&shield, blade bonded ally, warded touch, lay on hands - a self-healing tank. Spammed lay on hands like crazy, basically was the most active combat healer. Shield block is not really an option any more at this level, everything you meet just breaks the shield immediately.
An elven alchemist, with racial weapon feats, quicksilver mutagens and some poisons. Pretty much an archer who provided the group with mistform elixirs before fight and lixirs of life after that. All attempts of using bombs (such as bottled lightnings to make enemies flat-footed) in combat proved to be waste of time: lacking weapon-like quality or magical bonuses for the bombs, she was missing even against the TAC of the creatures (more about that when I tell about specific encounters). Using mutagen greatly improved her archery, but we had hard time persuading her to try it: both onset time and the drawback were deterrent.
As a group, we had no problems with heals despite the lack of cleric: the particular adventure layout is about having 1 big encounter per day, which changes priorities a lot. We could just sit after the combat around our knapsack of halflingkind and drink our elixirs of life with toasts and all, in any roleplaying manner we wanted. Btw, Resonance Points were not our weakest spot either. We had different kinds of problems instead, described later.
First explaining why CR13 treachery demons are being discussed at this stage and why I am testing them against lvl 12 characters.
(Spoiler for DD5, Heroes of Undarin)
Spoiler:
2 treachery demons are the 2nd encounter in DD5, Heroes of Undarin. Pitted against 4 12-lvl charatcers , with predetermined equipment (limited customization options).
A treachery demon has +28 to initiative score. A typical 12 level PC has +13 to +17 Perception initiative score. Means treachery demons act first in any fight by default.
A treachery demon casts confusion (at will) with DC 30 and has enormous Intimidate bonus of +26. A typical lvl 12 PC has +16 to +21 Will save bonus (12 for level, +3 for +3 armor, +1-5 for Wisdom modifier). That means they mostly fail saving throws against confusion, critically failing them about 10-20% of time.
When using Intimidate to demoralize, a treachery demon rolls critical success with 11-15 on its d20, sending the target PC fleeing at a cost of single action.
Guess what it means?
Spoiler:
Encounter 2 of dd5. Two treachery demons appear, win initiative effortlessly, each one of them starting with confusion spell (2 actions) and an Intimidate check to Demoralize someone not confused yet (1 action). The group never recovered, getting predictable amounts of critical hits from demons and critical failures on their own saves. Demons repeated the tactics as necessary, then chopped the scattered group using their pincers and claws.
This part of DD claims to be a test of endurance for PCs. In practice, it turned to be Seligman’s dog training for players, who could not do much, having no functional means of resisting the controlling effects. It was a TPK, and should be a TPK with any GM who plays the demons appropriately without cheating in favor of PCs. The group was not anywhere low on their resources, they were just helpless.I doubt DD5 playtest results are going to be telling anything about character endurance if the 2nd encounter remains as it is.
That’s where rules cheating in favor of monsters give some really frustrating results.
“Elven runners” team:
Elf, fey bloodline sorcerer. Technically able to heal as a nature caster, in fact - an energy damage dps build. His ability were strongly underused in this game, since we had trouble sorting how spontaneous heightening works. He should be doing way more 3-round heals the way it actually works. The way he was played, it was a pretty much classic “acid arrow, fireball, lightning bolt” guy, who spent a number of actions just waiting for a better moment to strike.
Elf druid, storm order. Ran out of healing rather fast, but having tempest surges was crucial for the end fight.
Elven cleric of Desna, with Luck domain. Great at using heals, but found himself in trouble as soon as we needed some dps NOT against undead.
Elven cleric of Nethys, magic domain. Having magic missiles on a cleric is sweet, it is like all good spellcaster classes in one pot.
The druid and both clerics were using shields, that somewhat affected our tactics. Since the group consisted of 4 healers, all prepared casters prepared a lot of non-healy spells, rightfully believing it is not healing that is our weak spot…
Overall, I feel like we strongly underused the potential of our characters, mostly because of forgetting rules. By level 7, characters already have a lot of abilities difficult to remember, plus a bundle of magical items. If you played your character for the previous 6 levels, you already know the tricks, but starting with a fresh lvl 7 character in an unfamiliar game system is pain. For this reason, I am not sure any playtests for high level characters created on the fly are going to actually reflect how high-level game goes. 7th level is just beginning; later levels only make it more difficult, double pain for players generally inexperienced in d20 games.
We did not run out of resonance, think nobody even went below 3-4 points. We mostly used healing items and several wand of mending charges to restore broken equipment (namely, thief tools and shields).
Yay , the site is working again! Now trying to post the stuff I have been storing in my word files.
I have GMed two PFS scenarios, “Raiders of Shrieking Peak” and “Arclord’s envy” , with the same group of characters. The group went as follows:
- Dwarf fighter, a dwarven axe wielder who started with shield, but switched midway to 2-handed grip and never regretted that. Had the dwarven Ancient’s Blood feat and minimum Charisma, so next to no Resonance points.
- Dwarf cleric of Pharasma, with Healing domain. Enjoyed channeling, had fun with the blindness spell and was immensely frustrated with searing light one that seemed to never hit (unlike partial successes with saving throw spells, a miss on a to-hit spell is a waste of spell).
- Dwarf rogue, specced for trapfinding (useless in these scenarios) and Nimble Dodge (used a lot, good stuff), Multilingual with Jotun and Draconic language.
- Seoni the premade.
All the three dwarves took the Fleet feat to have speed of 25 (really necessary thing). Two party members picked Battle medic, to never actually use it in the game.
In both adventures, no character ever hit zero Resonance (the dwarven fighter included), cleric providing most of the healing. Partially has to do with old-time player habits of minimizing consumable use whenever possible, relying on spells and powers, as well as nonmagical solutions to the problems. Repeating, zero Resonance trouble in two scenarios. Also, no “10-minute adventure days”: the group rested in the first part of the first adventure because it was late night and they did not want to get exhausted, and never rested in the 2nd one, since it is a one-day scenario. I have little idea on whether people crying about these two subsystems “needing fixes” actually did playtest the system, but at least it looks like they were doing and experiencing something very different from my players.
Overall, all the characters felt like contributing well, some doing better in combat (namely, fighter the Main Battle Dps), others out of combat.
Everything else is highly spoilerish, see below in comments.
Tried this adventure twice, once as a player and once as GM. Telling now how it fells and plays.
Group1 (where i was a player):
Human polearm fighter (furious focus and sudden charge both available)
Halfling cleric of Abadar (with healing hands feat, battle medic and nature’s medicine, totally crucial for group’s survivability)
Elf evoker wizard (with an advanced familiar for scouting. Scouting still works bad it seems)
Gnome rogue (dread striker, using first world magic for ray of frost sneak attacks)
Notice on character creation part: ready-made basic kits are a necessity, as well as a clearer explanation of what is a 1st-level item (is normal healer’s kit 1st level? Or spyglass?).
Spoiler:
At Lady Vord’s the fighter got his +1 glaive, and that was a shock. First “I wasted money on an expert one and now need to sell it for half-price?”, then from others “an extra weapon dice? Lol ,we going to cause next to no dps compared to that”. Last part turned to be frustratingly true, except for certain interesting exceptions.
Survival checks The GM did not make clear how our Survival checks were actually affecting the travel, so we just rolled and moved on. No “game experience” here. We did not use camels then, since were not sure on how riding works, especially during exploration.
Hyaenas and ankhrav fights. GM did not feel like making any tactical maps on the fly, so we just played both encounters without map, using verbal descriptions. That kills most tactical options, so it was “hit-miss-hit-kill, how many lost hit points we have to heal?”. With ankhrav the GM had additional problems, he believed the quicksand to be the ankhrav’s nest, so there was a confusion. We spotted the hazard in advance, so just have not interacted with it. Fighter with magical weapon did exceptionally well.
Gnoll camp. We spotted it from afar and evaded it. In my experience, such extra encounters get ignored a lot.
A treacherous climb Now this is the kind of hazard we liked! Failed at finding the path, did not want to waste time and went hard way, with cleric failing the Athletics check and getting damaged. Creates the “travel” feel.
Manticore A challenging fight! Wizard (acid arrow+magic missiles, had to use wand once or twice) and cleric (spiritual weapon) both turned to be the main dps in this fight, with rogue and fighter crying about the range - they could do little at the distance the manticore retreated to after each shot. The manticore caused some havoc and damage with its tail shots and eventually immobilized fighter. Then it landed to get rid of the wizard it absolutely hated by that moment and took him to 0 hit points in a couple of hits (think one of them was a crit). Cleric and rogue finished the manticore, cleric got some wounds, while fighter lost some time getting mobile again. Overall, that was a long yet fun fight. We healed up and continued.
Gnolls at the dead end. Had a fight, did not make a sincere attempt to negotiate. The glaive-wielding fighter was the king again, while the wizard who tried using flaming sphere (all gnoll saves against it were successes, very frustrating), had to use invisibility and hide midfight, because gnolls just kept hitting him as an easy target. After that fight, we could not heal up fully, spell casters were exhausted, we used one healing potion… all called for rest.
Entrance We searched for the secret entrance, found the lever… and assumed our perception checks should have given us information if there is a trap. Well, GM believed we should have rolled even more dice, so BOOM. Some damage on the rogue who manipulated the lever, the cleric heals him up and we are in. We went the right hand way, so lava room was next. After looking at the lava flows (not exactly sweet place for diving) and finding no passages forth or monsters (flying familiar just checked it all briefly, with no good luck on Perception checks), we just skipped the room and went for the puzzle.
Locking Device. Made a few attempts to solve, only to discover that a DC 24 check is not enough. Tried to bump around a bit, exploring more. The map was confusing, for it showed passage to the maze beyond the secret door as open, and GM did not find the “secret door DC 29” thing in the text fast enough. Basically, we had to playback and decided “we did not found it and never got into that maze”. Still not attracted enough to explore the lava and the water room, we came back for the wheels and just spent 2 days camping there and struggling with the DC 25 checks. Were almost out of foodstuffs and very angry. Eventually we succeeded and went for the next room… at least we were well-rested and with full spell allotment. That was day 9 already.
Mummy room. Easy fight, except that rogue got mummy rot. We did not rescue Mabar; instead we found the secret door and entered the tomb room. Located the tapestry with the detect magic, the rogue covered it successfully, we looted everything and rushed away, back into wilderness.
GM declared the Night Heralds can’t catch up with us. While they were only a few hours behind, they had one of them moving at the speed of 15… not exactly a way to outspeed us, even with some encumbrance. We handwaved the adventurers escaped safely, but decided just to play the fight to see what would happen if Night Heralds caught us in the evening while cooking dinner…
A true extreme challenge fight, very deadly. Could be easier with Mabar around, of if we had prepared a trappy killzone, or if we kept kiting Henah instead of engaging her in melee at all. The way it was, we nearly TPKed - 2 characters dropped to 0 hp, only one of them made a recovery roll, out of spells, used up some items… basically one more crit or good hit from the enemies, and the group is done. This is a good example of an encounter adventurers are better to avoid or prepare well in advance.
Overall, it felt like “would not be doable without good clerical healing”, “magical weapons overshadow their wielders with bland numerical bonuses”, “wizards are cool”, “dread striker+sneak attack is a great rogue option, but not against bosses and manticores”.
Going to continue the story, next time about the group I GMed.
"Your deity also adds spells to your
spell list. When preparing spells, you can select from these
in addition to the spells on the divine list once you can cast
that level of spell."
Abadar adds lock spell that is already in the divine spell list, so this 1st level addition does nothing. Not sure what looks more like an omission: the lock spell being in the divine list or the Abadar adding it to his cleric's list.
Maria Smolina
RPG Superstar 2015 Top 32
,
Marathon Voter Season 8 aka Laik
Shield of Stormwall Aura Faint Conjuration, Evocation CL 5
Slot Shield Price 10,250 gp; Weight 5 lbs.
Description
This +2 darkwood heavy wooden shield is lacquered with patterns of white and gold whirlstorms; it imposes no armor check penalty and is remarkably lighter than normal shields of that size. Its special properties are revealed whenever its owner fights defensively or uses total defense combat action. When the owner makes a full-round attack while fighting defensively, the shield immediately conjures a wind wall (as per spell) 50 feet long and 25 feet high, with at least one of the wall squares adjacent to the shield’s owner. When the owner chooses the total defense option, the shield conjures a storm wall strewn with lightning bolts, that has all properties of the wind wall described above and also hits any creature passing through it or starting its turn in the effect area for 3d6 electricity damage (Reflex save DC 15 negates). The wall of either type persists as long as the owner continues to fight defensively or keeps total defense, but no more than the total of 5 rounds per day.
Construction Requirements Craft Magic Arms and Armor, wind wall, call lightning; Cost 5,125 gp
