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This is great! It identifies a lot of the problems I had when I ran this. I wish this had been around back then. (Having said that, these forums were very helpful in red-flsgging some problems in the early books (like Ralldar)).
Cleaned Up Voz Although it's been a while, I figured I'd post this. My group likes pics of NPCs, but the official portrait of Voz is much too ha-ah-I'm-an-evil-necromancer for my taste. So I made an altered, less-obvious version.
I don't suppose we ever got an answer about when Breachill was founded (the second time)? p. 5: founded in 4550 AR
It's not necessarily a huge deal, but it's bugging me that I can't find the answer. (Also, my players tend to pick up on things like this, so I need to be careful about being consistent.)
Several people have already touched on this, but I was thinking about it as we were playing PF1 last night, so I figured I'd add my two cents. When you get right down to it, CLW wands are not the problem. Rather, they are just one way that players are addressing a different problem: how to keep the party going from one fight to the next without having to constantly leave the dungeon to find a safe place to rest. For a lot of adventures it just doesn't make sense, plot-wise, for the party to do that. The villain shouldn't sit there like a lump on a log while the party takes a week to clean out his fortress of evil, two rooms at a time--followed by 8 hours of rest back at the inn. (The fact that the GM can play intelligent adversaries who respond to the PC's actions is one of the great benefits of pen-and-paper role playing. The villain shouldn't just sit back and ignore the slow elimination of his minions, sitting patiently on his throne-o-nastiness and waiting for the party to come for their boss fight.) The thing about CLW wands is that once a party moves out of the lowest character levels, the wands aren't that useful during most combat encounters. (How many medium-level enemies are dishing out a measly 5.5 average hp of damage per round?) But out of combat the wands can be great for providing quick, cheap healing that lets the party keep going, deeper into the fortress, fighting more minions. The party will still have to stop and rest once other resources are expended, but it won't be due to a lack of hp. Between-encounter healing keeps the adventure going. In our current PF1 campaign, I'm the cleric, and our characters are just moving out of the low-level range. The way things have been working out, my in-combat job, quite often, is to keep the barbarian going: healing him up, giving him combat bonuses, getting rid of nasty status effects, et cetera. Secondarily, I help out the casters if something gets too close to them and bites a chunk out of them. But sometimes I can engage the enemy more directly, if I have a spell that's particularly well-suited to a particular encounter, or if there are undead who need to be channeled at. Although healing is a big part of my job, I have flexibility to do other things as well. What's nice about having CLW wands is that I can save my spells and channels for combat. With CLW wands for between-encounter healing, I can actually use a channel against some undead or a spell that hasn't been converted to healing, without worrying that I'm wasting the party's healing resources. That means that even though I'm the cleric and thus the party medic, I'm not limited to that role. If that last channel is what's needed to help take down the undead monstrosity, I can use it. Out of combat, I can use my plot spells (speak with dead, etc.) when the story calls for them. Without CLW wands, I would have to save most of my spells and channels for healing. That means although in theory I would still have plenty of options (the cleric spell list, etc.) in reality I couldn't afford to use most of them, because I'd be depleting the party's store of potential healing. With CLW wands, I have flexibility in combat--I can convert a spell to heal the barbarian after he takes a nasty blow, or I can use the unconverted spell more directly against the enemy. Back to my original point: even if they feel a bit munchkiny, CLW wands aren't the real problem. There needs to be some healing between encounters, to avoid the in-and-out-of-the-dungeon-to-rest problem. In 5e, the short rest partially solves this by providing an alternate source of healing that every character inherently has access to. In PF1, the most economical solution is the CLW wand. If you don't have the wand, then it falls to the cleric to heal everybody by using up their class resources between encounters. In the process, the cleric's player is chained to that role, because healing is just too important to let the cleric do much else with their spells and channels. At that point, you had might as well just bring along an NPC cleric, because most people get bored with such a limited role pretty quickly. |
