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So I ran a brief Pathfinder RPG playtest on Saturday. We used Wicked Fantasy Factory’s Temple of Blood with four characters: a elf evoker, a half-elf rogue, a half-orc cleric of Sarenrae, and a human fighter (who I ran, in addition to GMing, thanks to a shortage of players). We used standard hit points (max hit die plus Con mod).
Overview
It was, for most intents and purposes, D&D 3.5. I ran Temple of Blood with almost no modification – the kobolds gained a little bit of sneakiness, thanks to the collapse of the Stealth skill, but that is literally the only change I made to any of the stats for the bad guys. The main boss is a cleric, so I could have fiddled with his spells and given him his domain abilities instead, but it wasn’t necessary. He ran just fine without them. (In retrospect, he probably should have tried a rebuke at least once, since he was undead himself and would have healed, but he honestly died too fast for that to really have come up regardless. I’ll have to keep it in mind for the future, however.)
The adventure, however, is 6 encounters long, and includes an artificial “refresh point” after the 5th fight to give the PCs their hp and spells back. Frankly, mine didn’t need it (except the fighter, who did appreciate having his Dexterity returned to its original level). I won’t go so far as to say that the 15 minute adventuring day is dead, but it seems to at least be up to a half hour now.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the biggest changes were evident with the cleric and wizard classes. The fighter and rogue felt very much like their 3.5 counterparts, while the changes to the caster classes were much more obvious – and much appreciated, by and large.
Specific Notes
The cleric was very solid, able to both heal and do damage without touching her spells for the day. In fact, she only cast one actual spell during the entire adventure, when she converted a protection from evil to a cure light wounds to get the fighter back on his feet. The rebuke death ability is extremely effective – a few moments rest and even the most badly hurt ally is back to 0 hp before non-replaceable healing begins. Given that every PC except the cleric went negative at least once (the fighter, thanks to suicidal dice rolls on my part, three times!), this turned out to be very handy. She also made some use out of her fire ray, but preferred to stick to her scimitar for the most part. One thing I noted as I was making the characters (which I did for this purpose, to save time – I won’t next time, though, because I want to see what other people pick) was that it was basically impossible for me to justify not taking Extra Turning.
In much the same way, the wizard ran almost completely on her at-will SLAs. She, too, only used one prepped spell during the entire adventure, preferring instead to rely on her ray of frost rather than use a spell slot. She did eventually use one magic missile, but it probably wasn’t all that necessary even then. One thing I noticed was, despite her shortbow (which did more damage), the player preferred to use the ray of frost exclusively, which says good things about her ability to remain “wizardy” longer. On the other hand, she completely ignored her energy ray, and rightly so – thanks to her specialist ability, her ray of frost, at 1d3+1, was actually more effective than her energy ray at 1d4. Though that would have changed at 2nd level, I can’t help thinking that the ability needs to be returned to 1d6 damage. If balance simply won’t permit it to be a variable energy type, perhaps the character can choose a type from those currently available when she takes her first level in wizard?
The biggest difference for the rogue was the increased hit points from the higher hit die and the favored class ability. The adventure did include one undead, and the rogue was able to use his sneak attack dice against him – I’m not sure the PCs ever figured out that he was undead, though, because he doesn’t really look it. Nevertheless, it was nice from my end not to have to tell the player that his special ability wasn’t working; no matter whether it’s a prepublished adventure or not, I always feel like I’m arbitrarily screwing over the player when that happens.
As for me, it was hard for me to judge the fighter because of how weird my dice were rolling, depending on whether the fighter was attacking the bad guys or the bad guys were attacking the fighter. With the fighter, it felt like I couldn’t hit; with the opponents, I didn’t seem able to miss. Or roll anything less than max damage. Even with the slightly increased hit points from his favored class, the fighter went to -8 hp twice, and -6 a third time. Rebuke death saved him every time, however. I made him a sword-and-board type, taking advantage of the free human weapon proficiency to give him a bastard sword. I don’t really think it helped him much, and it certainly didn’t feel overpowered. I also gave him Power Attack – which I never used – and Cleave, which I tried to use three times, but dice luck only allowed me to succeed with once. I like the new Cleave; though it does pin the character down, since it’s a full round action, it’s nice to have the activation in the player’s hands. It feels like a cool special ability, instead of random and somewhat uncontrolled bennie.
Stuff I Didn’t Get Around to Testing
Power attack. I rarely use Power Attack at 1st level, since the damage boost is not significant and whether you hit or not is so random anyway. Given the way my dice were functioning, I didn’t think I needed any help missing.
Grappling. Until you can do damage with this, I don’t see the point. None of the bad guys were built to grapple, though, thank goodness, so I didn’t have to worry about it for this module.
Any of the other combat maneuvers. Only the fighter was really set up to be able to try any of them, and there never seemed to be a good place for them. I hope the next attempt changes that.
Orc Ferocity. The cleric was the only PC not to go below 0 hp, and so this never activated. It occurred to me that a cleric with this ability is potentially quite effective, since they can heal themselves with the extra action if they need to. I didn’t get to see it happen, though.
XP or advancement. I played with awarding XP, just to try it out, but decided not to bother. It would have been ludicrously easy, regardless, which I appreciated. I always feel a little bad using the XP calculator at [url]http://www.d20srd.org[/url] after ever session to hand out awards…
Stuff at levels higher than 1. Maybe next time… I want to try something in the double-digit range, to see what breaks at high levels.
Cool.
Here's a simple way to think about power attack... If you have 16 Str & 1-handed, a power attack of 1 makes it 5% less chance to hit, but increases damage by 13.3% (from 7.5 to 8.5). So instead of being superstitious about luck, you would almost always want to power attack 1. If you can only hit on a 19 or 20, then power attack 1 would actually hurt.
Bastard sword proficiency increases damage by d2 which isn't very helpful after say... 4th level.
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Cool.
Here's a simple way to think about power attack... If you have 16 Str & 1-handed, a power attack of 1 makes it 5% less chance to hit, but increases damage by 13.3% (from 7.5 to 8.5). So instead of being superstitious about luck, you would almost always want to power attack 1. If you can only hit on a 19 or 20, then power attack 1 would actually hurt.
Bastard sword proficiency increases damage by d2 which isn't very helpful after say... 4th level.
Power Attack is on/off, not variable in PF RPG Alpha. So, if you have a 16 Strength, you reduce your attack by 15% to increase your damage by 40% (7.5 to 10.5), because you automatically take your strength bonus off attack and add to damage.
I would suggest that Power Attack is best left to the two-handed weapon melee fighter with high strength, since you double your benefit for the same penalty. A sword and board fighter should concentrate on hitting as often as possible without being hit him/herself. Feats like weapon focus, dodge, weapon expertise, etc. seem more "Sword and Board" than Power Attack in my opinion.
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Here's a simple way to think about power attack... If you have 16 Str & 1-handed, a power attack of 1 makes it 5% less chance to hit, but increases damage by 13.3% (from 7.5 to 8.5). So instead of being superstitious about luck, you would almost always want to power attack 1. If you can only hit on a 19 or 20, then power attack 1 would actually hurt.
Two things about this kind of analysis. First, at 1st level, I rarely need the extra damage. The kinds of enemies you fight at first level - kobolds (including the ones in this mod), goblins, orcs - have hit point totals so low that you can drop them in a single swing anyway. Extra damage is essentially wasted. With the fighter's 17 Str and his bastard sword, any successful hit had a 70% chance of dropping the kobolds outright. In fact, only once did he connect with a swing and not drop the kobold he hit, and that is without power attacking at all. So going after bonus damage is not necessarily a good plan at the level I'm discussing. Hitting is almost always good enough.
Secondly, saying you have "5% less chance to hit" is accurate, but somewhat misleading - you can't really assess the change without knowing what the actual probability of hitting is. In this case, the fighter had a +5 to hit and the kobolds had an AC of 12, so he had a 70% chance of hitting when he swung. (He didn't come anywhere near that, FYI. Statistics is fun that way.) Working out the math, you get this:
8.5 (average damage on 1d10+3) * .7 (probability of hitting) = 5.95 (average damage per attack)
9.5 (with 1 pt Power Attack) * .65 (ditto) = 6.175
6.175/5.95 = ~1.04
So it's only a 4% increase in damage overall.
Doing the same kind of analysis with the point I made before, you get something that looks like this:
.7 (chance of dropping an undamaged kobold with a successful attack) * .7 (chance of hitting the kobold) = .49 (chance of dropping the kobold on a given attack
.8 (with 1 pt Power Attack) * .65 (ditto) = .52
In both cases, it would have - under the old system, because of course it does't work this way anymore - been technically better to Power Attack, but the difference is not really going to be detectable. At higher levels, where multiple hits and so forth become a necessity to take out enemies, I pay more attention to it.
For the new Power Attack, it turns out to be a little bit better still. Since he would always drop a kobold he hit with 1d10+6 damage, the reduction in to-hit probability - down to 55% - becomes the only variable; if he has a 55% chance to hit the kobold, he has a 55% chance to drop the kobold on a given attack. That's more than a 12% increase in the probability, which probably would be detectable in the long term. Hmm...