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New Test: Gnome Paladin - level 5
Stats: Str 12; Dex 12; Con 16; Wis 10; Int 8; Cha 20; Hit Points: 47
Saves: Fort: +12; Ref: +7; Will: +6; AC: 23
Feats: Mounted Combat, Ride-by Attack, Spirited Charge
Skills: Diplomacy, Handle Animal, Ride
Equipment: +1 Small Lance, Hippogriff, Light Exotic Barding, +1 Plate Armor, Large Shield, Small Longsword.
First note: have you read 3.5 Charge mechanics? It's pretty ghastly, but apparently Ride-by Attack isn't supposed to do anything because your charge has to be drawn directly into the enemy rather than into a tangent space that you can attack from, meaning that it is physically impossible to continue the line of your charge after you have made your attack unless you kill the target. That is, however, retarded, so I'm assuming that at some point this will be fixed at some point in the process.
Challenges:
- A huge Animated iron statue.
This hurts. Our hero is reduced to making Ride-by Charges with the lance over and over again to get past the critter's Hardness of 10. Meanwhile, a hit deals out disappointingly little damage. The Paladin's best bet is fighting defensively. The Statue has such a low AC that the Paladin basically hits anyway, and he really doesn't want to lower his AC any against this beast. The Statue meanwhile readies an attack back so each gets one attack on each joust pass. The Statue hits on a 14 and deals an average of 16 damage, so our hero runs through all his healing pretty quick. In one of the tests I had the statue try to take out the mount instead, and that is really poor because Mounted Combat negates a lot of hits and the character has a back-up mount. It takes our hero about 20 jousts to drop the statue, and the Statue drops or drives him off slightly before that in the two times that it doesn't attempt to go after the mount. So two losses out of three, but close on all accounts. In the future I think I'll leave the mount alone and go for the rider, it actually works better.
- A Basilisk.
Two options again: Close eyes or don't. In this case weirdly enough the answer seems to be to leave the eyes open. He only fails on a natural 1. The key is actually making a blindfold for the mount and then using Handle Animal to get it to run around anyway. The basilisk is so slow that a mount moving at half speed still outpaces it considerably. 4 rounds later we have a dead basilisk. And only 1 time did our hero turn to stone, so we have a 2 wins for 3 tries.
- A Large Fire Elemental.
This thing is a brute. Hits almost as often as the Paladin does, inflicts more damage, and has more hit points. Also its burn is so nasty that our hero's steed will kill itself if it tries to assist in any way. It would be open and shut if it weren't for the fact that the Paladin can heal himself and partially reset the battle halfway through. But three close fights later, the Paladin still lost all three times.
- A Manticore on the wing.
This guy is also a bruiser. The Paladin felt a little short here, even attacking side by side with mount. That is, until I remembered that Manticores are Evil. Oh heck yeah, a Smite/Charge with a Lance came in for 34 points of damage on the first round, and the Manticore isn't maneuverable enough to keep another Charge from coming in on Round 3. Once I remembered that tidbit, it was all over for the Manticore. 3 wins.
- A Mummy.
With an area too narrow for the Hippogriff to rampage in, our Paladin is coming in Dog Mounted. The first fight, both the dog and the Paladin fail their despair save and the Mummy walked over and coup de graced. Our hero has a great Fort save, but it's not DC 36 great and that was that. The second fight involved the Paladin failing his save again, but the mount not, which meant that the fight started with a queue for the Benny Hill themesong while the mount ran around in circles until our hero woke up. Then it was all about the Turn Undead and the Smite Evil charge. Using both Smites and a couple of turns, our hero won handily on both subsequent fights. So 2/3.
- A Phase Spider.
With the kind of Armor that the Paladin is packing, and the huge Fort Save, this fight is actually pretty anticlimactic. Takes a while of course, because the Spider still phases in and out. And every time it appears, both the hero and the griff get a readied attack, and then it repeats. Losing the Dex bonus is really not that big of deal when your Dex bonus is only +1. The Spider takes long enough to reposition that the Paladin can draw on as much healing as he wants, so it's a race between the Paladin grinding it down and failing a Poison save. 2 wins, 1 loss.
- A Troll.
It's evil, and we know what that means: Smiting for stupid huge piles of charge damage. 2 successful charges drop the Troll. Now that's all non-lethal damage, so the character has to thence jump on it and set it on fire while his mount continues to tear at it (can easily do more than 5 damage per turn). Even without one of the Smites working, he can pretty much grind it down in close combat thanks to the mount's damage output and the fact that his Armor Class goes up to 27 against Giants.
- A chasm.
Our hero flies.
- A moat filled with acid.
Our hero flies.
- A locked door behind a number of pit traps.
Embarassingly enough, this actually defeats our hero straight up. A tough door and a stout lock is actually beyond him unless he has room to charge it. He's just a little Gnome.
- A pit filled with medium monstrous scorpions.
First off, our hero never once made his Perception test to not fall in. I placed it inside so he was at the time riding on his summoned dog rather than his hippogriff (kind of unfair to just never notice the pit trap because you are airborn). What gets interesting though is that the new grapply rules are very favorable to our hero in this battle. Outnumbered 6:1 at the bottom of the pit and taking some damage and being prone at the beginning, the early section of the fight really didn't come off that bad considering. With a Poison save he only fails on a 1, and an attack that only hits him on a 20, it's really not that big a deal fighting them one on one. Of course, the fight opens up with him prone and attacked 12 times, so he's down nearly 25 points by the time he gets up. Sounded bad, but once he's up the baddies are down to hitting on natural 20s. Since he can lay on hands for 25 points anyway, and they already use their AOOs on him standing from prone, the first paladin gimmick is to heal himself up to full. First round is pretty much the same every time: he's at full (sans all or much of his Lay on Hands), and standing in a scorpion pit surrounded by enemies. Meanwhile his trusty sacred dog plus his own mighty sword go through a scorpion every couple of rounds, and with the scorpions back to hitting on 19s without the initial bonuses, it takes a long time for our hero to get ground down. Indeed, while each fight has left him down a lot of hit points and like all of his daily heals, some decent tactics took him through every time. 3 wins out of 3.
So what did we learn from this? Well first of all, I actually like what I'm seeing out of the Paladin Gnome at this level. Unfortunately, I see a number of problems coming out in this test:
- The Celestial Mount is actually way inferior to the normal mounts that characters of this level can purchase in town. The celestial riding dog only shows up when I use arbitrary "you are in a cave" hand waving to make him leave the hippogriff behind.
- Without the mount, there is flat no way that he'd be able to take any of these challenges. To the point that I would say that this character on foot would be fighting at the level of the Monk in the previous writeup. The whole "you can't replace a Mount for 30 days and get horribly penalized in combat if you lose your summoned monster" thing would basically retire the character.
- It doesn't really feel like he has much staying power over the entire day of adventuring. Seriously he uses "all" of his healing and "all" of his smites pretty much every time he dips into them at all.
So I would say that at 5th level a Paladin is about where they need to be for one encounter. They should have much better magic mount options (at least the equal of purchasable options at the level you get them), and a defeated mount should be resummonable the next day without a hassle. Furthermore, the smites and lay-on-hands should come back much more frequently than once every day, because the character kind of needs them to accomplish anything.
And lastly: Paladin Spells are a joke. I honestly couldn't figure out a single thing to do with them, and didn't even use them at any point in this endeavor. So completely was I unable to figure out anything to do with them that I simply dumped Wisdom and never looked back. That seems like a flaw. The character actually gets better if you pretend that you are not a spellcaster.
-Frank
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...A large playtest involving a 5th level gnome paladin...
I am not at all surprised by this. I would wager every 5th level core character will lose a sizeable percentage more times against these threats than win, even given the monsters not being played to the full of their abilities. I wonder though, if the conclusion you would draw from this is the same one I would. From your examination of the rogue, monk and paladin, it would appear that you would say the monk and pally are too weak and the rogue too strong (though there are plenty of issues with that test) but I would only conclude that all characters of all classes need each other to maximize their capabilities and that while individually they are weak against a same CR foe (and we ignore for these tests the definition of CR and the inaccuracies known to be in the CR system), their ability to work in concert, to carry out roughly 4 times as many full round actions as their foe, has a tremendous effect on the overall capabilities and the outcome of each test.
So in a word, I call bullcrap on this approach. It is a fine idea, but hardly applicable to the game we play.
Well no. I would say unequivocally that the Monk is weak sauce on a plater full of weak cakes filled with some kind of total weakness in jellied form. He is not a contributor and you'd be better off letting the character die and be replaced with someone of any other class (even Bard) a level down. But the Paladin was pulling his weight and more.
Only he was doing it by a shoestring, and it all fell back on ignoring his own class features and going out and getting replacements for them with gold and moving on. Basically I cheesed the crap out of the Paladin and it barely worked as advertised on a 32 point-buy. That indicates that it needs fixing, but that the fixes can probably be pretty marginal at fifth level. I know from personal experience that Paladins after 5th level stop getting nice things, so I'm pretty confident that higher level tests will go almost as badly as the Monk's did.
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The Pathfinder Rogue test is harder for me to evaluate. On the one hand it demonstrated a 15th level character coming in reliably at somewhat higher than the 3rd edition standard set for a 15th level character. On the other hand, the Pathfinder XP chart calls for a 15th level character to over come fifteen times the challenges that a 3rd edition standard character would before he reaches 16th level for the "fast" progression. This indicates to me that coming in "somewhat higher" than a 15th level standard for 3.5 D&D may not be enough. I mean, he was good, but he wasn't fifteen times as good.
-Frank
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But the Paladin was pulling his weight and more.
Only he was doing it by a shoestring, and it all fell back on ignoring his own class features and going out and getting replacements for them with gold and moving on. Basically I cheesed the crap out of the Paladin and it barely worked as advertised on a 32 point-buy.
I thought the paladin was cheesy too, so we are in agreement thus far :)
But I find the two statements you made ("he was cheesed out and did it by a shoestring" and "he was pulling his weight and more") to be at odds with one another. What would you say is a "successful test" for a character in these scenarios? 50% victory? 25%? 75%? I considered the test a failure for the paladin cheesy as he was but you saw it differently. I would like to understand why/how.
And to be clear, I think your tests are very interesting even if I do not agree with all of your methods. I have a player returning to my table tomorrow night that wants to make a fighter, and I will be making the class stronger for his use. Thus I am interested in these tests a great deal regardless of some of our disagreements.
I realize what I might say may make me a pariah: PLAYtest the new game. I don't have the disciplined mind or industry exposure to quantify a valid playtest, or prove something wrong in gameplay before I see it (barring somewhat obvious problems). In lieu of these things, my gaming group trusts in what made us sit at the table in the first place: fun and fantasy.
Just recently, my players were envious of the elven wizard who blew-up enemy ships and crewmen in short order. They remembered, however, that she played an evoker, who should likely give spotlight to the fighter during melee, and other specialized events.
We DID wonder if the ship combat scene was disproportioned. We reinvestigated it, and found out that the players had fun, took significant losses to items and health, and uncovered important information as a result of their sacrifices. A key evil group was unveiled, and I believe that the PCs will be more cautious about this group as a result of the heavy combat sequence, ergo, I'm happy about it! I ran no Pareto chart to compare damage vs. levels, nor indexed feats by how loathesome they seemed. They players will tell me if they enjoyed the game, even if it is 100% scientifically sound at creation, because no strategy survives first contact. Let 'em play, and report.
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On the other hand, the Pathfinder XP chart calls for a 15th level character to over come fifteen times the challenges that a 3rd edition standard character would before he reaches 16th level for the "fast" progression. This indicates to me that coming in "somewhat higher" than a 15th level standard for 3.5 D&D may not be enough. I mean, he was good, but he wasn't fifteen times as good.
-Frank
You're not reading the chart right. Using the Pathfinder system, each encounter with a CR 15 monster is worth 12,800 XP, so it takes roughly 13.6 CR 15 encounters to go from 425,000 XP (15th level) to 600,000 XP (16th level).
There are thousands of these discussions on message boards, each proclaiming that thier particular opinion, after dealing with the system, is the most logical and reasoned. But you may come to conclusions that the designers would never accept, so that unless you gain a lot of joy from running these solo fights, you are probably just better off running a campaign using the rules, and enjoying yourself.You are wrong.
Having worked both as a professional game designer (Shadowrun 4th edition) and as a professional playtester (Heroes of Might and Magic, Army Men, etc.) in the past, I can tell you without reservation that there are right and wrong ways to playtest games. You can find bugs in a system by one of two methods: prediction and exploration. The first involves looking at how the game works and making informed guesses as to where the game will fail. The second involves grinding through the game and hoping to run into parts of the game which will fail. You need to do both, but in either case you should do so systematically if you hope to get any real answers out of the deal.
Once you have found something that you think is a bug, you need to regress that bug. Find out how often it comes up, find out the limits of where in the game it comes up and how big a problem it is when it does. That last part is tricky for a pen & paper game because the DM can seriously handwave problems out of existence in an individual game. This means that while in a computer game your top priority are "Crash Bugs" that stop play altogether, in a role playing game your top priority is actually subtle bugs which can gradually become large problems for the game as DMs are less likely to notice that sort of thing.
In any case, reporting of a bug needs to say exactly how the problem was uncovered, as well as a numerical estimation of what the problem actually does. Coming in and saying that you "don't like" something means very little to a developer...
You designed SR4? I might have to check that out... no wonder you're a wiz at this stuff...
Anyway... I've seen what Frank's playtest strategy turns out, and while some of it might get wonky flavour or concept wise, I've seen it work out mechanics wise pretty well, barring my own stupidity(I'm never letting a player play a shadow ever again, for example...)
I have to ask, Why Gnome? A Halfling Paladin would have been a better choice. I think you would have different results with a halfling paladin.
Gnomes get +2 to Constitution and Charisma in Pathfinder. Since the Dexterity Maximum of the character's armor was only +1, getting an additional bonus to Dexterity wasn't of primary importance. The Gnomish bonus against Giants was helpful, probably about as helpful over all as a Halfling's bonus to saving throws.
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And yes, I was fairly generous with the character. I mean, 32 point buy for starters. I want to give the characters who I suspect of being "not good" the best possible chance to prove themselves. With sufficient breaks from me, the Paladin was barely able to squeak by and fight at a level appropriate point. The Monk was not.
That tells me that Paladins are almost where they need to be in terms of 5th level power, and that Monks are not. Both characters required big open spaces to do their thing, and I gave it to them in most of the fights. Locked in a closet with a troll, both characters would lose badly.
-Frank
DC 36 was on the coup de grace, not on the despair or the mummy rot.
10 + Double Damage.
-Frank.