We finally got a chance to get to run the new rules in our campaign tonight, and here are some of the results that we came up with from playing. The characters tonight were:
The goliath was originally a fighter/rogue, but when we converted to Pathfinder the goliath's player decided to go straight rogue with the character, due to the fact that the rogue has more combat survivability now.
All characters have average hit points per level.
For this playtest, even though I don't think its a perfect balance, the goliath is "even" with the new races, especially since his CMB is now lower for him being considered large, and isn't quite so over the top.
The first part of the adventure was very role playing heavy, so initially not too many combat results. Some observations:
The goliath player is not quite as thrilled with it, but isn't quite opposed to it. He sees the reasoning behind it, but he's thinking that he might like a less "all or nothing" system, though he does like the simplicity of it as well.
Having the gather information ability as part of diplomacy was a big hit. The paladin enjoyed this. She also used her profession: merchant skill a few times to find a specific merchant and to pick up on who might be willing to buy Ankheg eggs.
The cleric used his craft: carpentry to assess nearly every building he went into, but he has gotten into a habit of this.
Calling for a general perception roll was also pretty popular, and it felt more organic from the DM's point of view as well.
After a lot of roleplaying and investigation, the PCs finally ended up running into one of the recurring groups of villains in the campaign, so we got a chance to test out combat:
Under normal 3.5 rules the necromancer would be a CR 6 creature, but using the Pathfinder NPC rules, he drops back down to a CR 4 creature. The necromancer's bonded object was his quarterstaff, which he invested to +1.
With the new skill system, I could give the necromancer a trained cross class skill in stealth, which allowed me to explain how the necromancer managed to sneak into the house that the PCs were staying in.
The paladin failed to notice the stealthy necromancer, so there was a surprise round where only the cleric and the necromancer could act. The necromancer hit the paladin with an empowered ray of enfeeblement, dropping her chance to hit by -3.
The cleric tried to turn the necromancer right off the bat, but the cleric's chance to drive the necromancer off was pretty unlikely, given the cleric's level.
When the paladin attacked, she managed to strike fairly hard with her smite, and the cleric attempted a bull rush. I'm wondering if I ran this right, though in the end it didn't matter. The cleric charged the necromancer and tried to overrun him.
I had the cleric roll twice, once for the overrun, and once for the charge attack, but only the charge attack hit. I'm wondering if this was suppose to be two separate rolls, and also, if this is performed as part of a charge, does the "sidestep" option only apply to the overrun, i.e. does the charge go off normally and hit, but the potential victim gets to move after that?
It didn't matter tonight, but I was wondering this.
The necromancer could easily make his casting defensively check, and he used vampiric touch on the paladin to prolong his life. On the third round, the goliath was in place, with an improvised weapon, and flanking the necromancer with the cleric.
The cleric and the goliath were both using blunt weapons, and dealing sneak attack damage, and the necromancer lost a lot of hit points. The necromancer managed to once again cast defensively, and blasted both the goliath and the cleric with scorching ray.
The paladin and the cleric didn't hit the next round, and the goliath hit with his stone planter (his improvised weapon). The necromancer missed with his vampiric touch that he "recast" using his quarterstaff.
One more attack from the necromancer with his second scorching ray managed to knock the cleric into negative hit points, almost knocked the goliath into negatives, but the goliath finally managed to hit him and kill him.
The paladin was minimally effective with her -3 to hit and her slashing weapon. She switched to her shield to do blunt damage, but that didn't work out too well for her either. She did, however, use her lay on hands to bring the cleric back so he could heal her.
So by the end of the fight, the cleric was down, the paladin was hurt and having a hard time hitting due to the ray of enfeeblement, and the goliath was almost down. The only reason the goliath lasted longer than the cleric was that the necromancer rolled below average on his scorching rays against the goliath.
The vampiric touch and ray of enfeeblement certainly helped the necromancer, and the "maxed" skills meant that he wasn't going to miss his casting defensive roll often. The cross class stealth actually was a nice touch, as it allowed the necromancer to have a fairly decent chance to be sneaky without dipping into rogue, which made sense for an undead assassin.
At low levels the turning ability certainly isn't over powered, and trying to get the combat over quickly by turning on the first round meant that the cleric had to choose between healing allies later on, or ending the fight quick. In the end, it didn't pay off, but it did a minimal amount of damage.
Once character, almost two down, with the most healthy character being at -3 to hit did feel like this encounter being "challenging." I allowed the assassin necromancer to have false life and resistance cast before combat.
The sneak attack damage from the goliath and the cleric/rogue did make a difference in the fight.
Finally, when it comes to "behind the scenes" DM aspects:
That's all for now. Next session we should have the gnome beguiler and the bard back in action.
Finally some decent feedback. Thank you. Was there much use of combat feats and, if so, which ones? What domains did the Cleric have and were any of those powers used? Is there a reason he/she preferred melee combat?
Did anyone make clever use of skills in combat?
With Overrun, it all depends on whether the opponent avoids you. If he/she just lets you pass (after they get their attack of opportunity, assuming you don't have the improved version) then you can continue your charge or movement and use your attack to attack them or something else. If they are trying to hold the line, after their attack of opportunity then you both make CMB rolls. If you win, you can push passed the bastich and finish your move (but no attacking something else). If you win by 5 or more, you knock them prone in the process. I'm pretty sure thats how it works anyway. Either way though, there is only one roll.
Finally some decent feedback. Thank you. Was there much use of combat feats and, if so, which ones? What domains did the Cleric have and were any of those powers used? Is there a reason he/she preferred melee combat?
Did anyone make clever use of skills in combat?
With Overrun, it all depends on whether the opponent avoids you. If he/she just lets you pass (after they get their attack of opportunity, assuming you don't have the improved version) then you can continue your charge or movement and use your attack to attack them or something else. If they are trying to hold the line, after their attack of opportunity then you both make CMB rolls. If you win, you can push passed the bastich and finish your move (but no attacking something else). If you win by 5 or more, you knock them prone in the process. I'm pretty sure thats how it works anyway. Either way though, there is only one roll.
Well, the goliath appraised the area for something to use for an improvised weapon, but that has been part of his character, in that he never carries a weapon with him, but uses what he can find.
The cleric has Healing and Strength (he is a cleric of Lathander) as his domains. Part of why he wanted to get into combat was that he wanted a chance to try out his sneak attack ability. When the other two party members are there, he often falls into a support roll more, or is defending one or the other of them so they can "do their thing."
No one used combat feats yet, but the goliath is setting himself up to take several of them, but wanted a few "foundation" feats first. Caught Off Guard is one of the first on the list.
I love it when people post up their playtests. I enjoy reading them not only to see the game mechanics in action but also because I enjoy hearing the stories of other groups playing the Game I love. Keep the stories coming.
Thanks. I was anxious to finally get the chance to run the new rules. I'll keep the playtest reports coming as we get to run the game more, and I'm interested to see what happens when the other two players are there for a "full" session, or when we get to play the adventures that I've written from before this playtest began (as I tailored the encounters for the three PCs last night).
One other thing that comes to mind, the cleric had also gotten a little used to being reckless in combat, not so much throwing himself into combat for no reason, but wading into combat to heal and buff and take a few shots, because he had the Renewal domain from the FR Player's Guide, which automatically heals him the first time in a day that he drops down past 0 hit points.
We could have house ruled a Renewal domain ability, but I really wanted to see how the new domains worked before I started tinkering with them, and he was okay with that, so he lost a round in combat trying to heal himself, and still ended up in negative hit points the next round.
Minor point, but it was a change from how things ran under strict 3.5 rules.
Haven't played again yet, but as I have been preparing for next Thursday, I revised the hydra encounter for the hydra to be a dungeonbred hydra from Dungeonscape. I did this in part because my map of the warehouse makes a huge creature problematic, and in part because the CMB goes down slightly, to 22 from 25, which makes it a bit easier for the PCs to pull off a sunder.
This also takes away the hydra's AoO for reach when the PCs get near it, which would have been messy, given the five head trick and the fact that it has combat reflexes and would have gotten another five attacks when the sunder was attempted.
This doesn't have much to do with Pathfinder, but man, hydra's are actually kind of scary for their CR, especially if none of the PCs are designed to Improved Sunder. I'm pretty sure the PCs could have worked this out with their tactics, but as a surprise to spring on them, this would have been more painful than I was planning.
Again, it was pretty easy to come up with a band of rogue thugs and their leader for this session using the encounter planning in the Running Pathfinder section, and when we play, I'll post how closely this worked for the encounter. As I said in another thread, it was so quick and easy to do the skills for the rogue thugs, but they did, admittedly seem a bit "over skilled" under this system. But man was it easy to stat them up.
More once this leaves the "planning" stage and actually gets run for the session.
Remember that in Pathfinder, a cleric's turn attempts also heal any living creature in the area. This can be a great way to keep player characters from dropping, so long as you can do so without healing your enemies.
It will be interesting to see this in action against a larger number of living foes, after their main combat last time was against a Bone Creature Necromancer.
All right, last night we managed to have a full crew, and this is the lineup of characters, and their final decisions on what their characters are and how they are proceeding:
Human Paladin, 3rd Level
Human Cleric/Rogue 2/1
Gnome Beguiler 3
Half-Elf Bard 3
Goliath Rogue 3
The Adventure: The players are still investigating a mystery in Ordulin, a good sized city in Sembia in the Forgotten Realms. As such, there was a lot of roleplaying and investigating early on in the adventure.
Skills: The cleric took diplomacy, mainly because he needs "gather information" for Shadowbane Stalker, which he wants to take as a PrC. The cleric had previously been kind of a wallflower compared to the bard, paladin, and beguiler, but jumped to +7 (trained level bonus plus charisma) in this skill.
The cleric managed to pull off some impressive "gather information" checks among his own order of clerics and among nobility at a revel, and gathered some pretty important information.
The paladin also managed to charm the captain of the Watch into helping he bow out of the revel without causing any social implications.
Also, in a meeting that the PCs were a part of, several of the PCs had perception as a trained skill, and picked up various little clues, since they all had a fairly good chance of finding something one way or another.
Overlapping and Backing Up
Last session, I was wondering if trained class skills weren't too good, since there were a lot fewer failures overall, but I noticed something a little different this time. Between the consolidation of skills and the easy of picking up skill, multiple characters might have a given skill. Some may have it cross class, while others have it as a class skill, but various skills (like perception or diplomacy) have "back ups."
I have noticed in other campaigns, when I place a clue or bit of information in the adventure that the PCs can find, that is geared towards being fairly easy for a given PC with a certain skill to find, if that character happens to fail, no one else even has a shot at picking up on the clue.
Under the current system, with the degree of overlap in some of the skill choices, half of the party has a shot at finding the information, to one degree or another, so one bad roll by one character doesn't miss important clues. With skill points and more spread out skills, the PCs tended to lean heavily on on specialist to be their "go to" guy for skills, now that character might be the "first choice" but others give it a try as well (for example, the gnome with perception, with the bard and cleric as back ups and the goliath and the paladin not being too bad at it either).
Perception Bonues
I had thought that the various perception bonuses (i.e. for touch, sight, sound, smell) would be harder to handle, but everyone seems pretty aware of what type of perception their character is good at boosting, so this was a pleasant surprise, since I liked this in theory, but wasn't sure if it would work in practice. The gnome, for example, was feeling for seams to find a secret door to aid the check with his touch, and this lends to a more descriptive explanation of what the PCs are doing. So far so good.
Wins and Losses
PCs don't seem to fail skills they are trained in often (though there have been varying degrees of success with gather information and there have indeed been a few perception failures from trained characters), but I did notice that its a sharp contrast when PCs try something they aren't trained in at all. The bard tried to climb a rope to get up to a roof, a DC 15 challenge with a +2 for the rope and a +2 for the beguiler helping him . . . and he failed . . . twice. In fact, the bard managed to take 12 points of damage from those minor falls, meaning that his bump up to d8 really helped him in this instance (even though its not often that you roll sixes for damage each dice you roll for a fall).
According to the SDR, climbing a wall using with a rope should have a DC of 5. With help, it should not be so difficult for the bard character to succeed.
Combat
The PCs managed to avoid an ambush because the party split up, with the beguiler and the bard scoping out a warehouse stealthily in disguise while the paladin, goliath rogue, and cleric/rouge went to a revel to gather information.
The gnome beguiler and the half-elf bard decided to check out the warehouse before the others arrived. I knew what was in the warehouse, and knew this could potentially be a disaster, but hey, no plot survives contact with player decisions . . . ;)
After the gnome scoped out the layout of the warehouse with his dancing lights, the two PCs went in, found a trap door next to a crate, and missed the perception check to notice the runes and sigils on the crate. The crate pops open, containing a five headed dungeon bred hydra (meaning its large instead of huge, looses some AC and str, and doesn't have its normal reach).
By this time, the rest of the PCs are on the street outside of the warehouse, not knowing what is going on.
First Round: Since the hydra was in a stasis field, the beguiler and the bard roll for initiative and the hydra doesn't get to surprise them. The bard's bardic knowledge check only lets him know that its is indeed a hydra and a magical beast.
The gnome tries to hit the hydra with a Whelm spell, and fails to achieve any success. The bard uses his wand of Mirror Image. He manages to get the full array of images, in this case five. He then bolts between some barrels, not knowing (in character) if the hydra has combat reflexes or that it can attack with all five heads.
Two of the mirror images get zapped by the snapping hydra heads. The PCs outside don't hear the combat yet, so they stay outside the doors of the warehouse.
The hydra squeezes between some crates and makes short work of the rest of the bard's images, but the bard is unharmed for the moment.
Second Round: The bard runs to the doors and unbars in for the other PCs to see what is going on. The goliath, anticipating the hydra coming out into the street, climbs up into the door frame so he can pounce on it when it comes out.
Having helped to boost the goliath, the paladin doesn't have much to do now, and the cleric steps back and drinks a potion of aid, expecting a desperate battle.
The hydra, having squeezed to reach the bard, only hits a few times and only nicks about six points from the bard with two attacks.
Third Round: The gnome beguiler, well away from the action at this point, starts investigating the trap door (in case he needs to get away fast). The half-elf bard ducks around the corner and starts his bardic music.
The paladin rolls to hit, and score a critical. We're using the critical hit deck, so she draws a card and knocks the hydra prone as well as doing double damage (and since the hydra is only large, and the card doesn't allow a check or save, I let it stand).
I was worried going into this, since the party was just attacking the hydra, and not trying to sunder or anything of that nature. Then the slaughter started.
The prone hydra is hit by the cleric with his sneak attack damage for his rogue level. The goliath asks if he can make a acrobatics check to flip into the room from his perch, and I allow it. The goliath hits and gets his sneak attack damage.
The hydra was having to squeeze in most places in the warehouse, and this was one of the only open spaces, so I decided to have the creature right itself, even though it was going to take the AoO. I figured that its fast healing was about to kick in and was still worried about the PCs, and assumed that a creature of animal intelligence would probably panic and want to get back on its feet.
The paladin, with her AoO, got yet another critical, and this time drew "spun around," leaving the hydra vulnerable to sneak attacks, and allowing the rouges to tear the beast up, doing a total of sixty points of damage in one round of attacks.
Pathfinder Summary: I had thought that a hydra would be a good encounter to see the CMB defense in action, but as it turned out, not so much. Not only didn't the PCs have to sunder the monster, but the combat was atypically cut short by multiple criticals.
Of some relevance was the fact that the bard, having more hit points, didn't fall into negatives while running from the hydra, and the fact that, although the hydra died in one round, I decided that, since I was already changing it to make it dungeonbred, I would try out the new toughness feat, but the extra hit points the hydra gained didn't do much to add to the monster.
Moment of the Evening: After the titanic hydra battle, the gnome was searching the trap door in the warehouse, using his dancing lights again.
The goliath decided to play a joke on the gnome, so he stealthily crept up on the gnome, and the gnome failed his perception check. The goliath thrust the hydra head at the gnome and roared, and I ruled that the gnome should make a reflex check, being on the edge of a trap door.
The gnome rolled a one on the check, fell down the stairs, and triggered the trap on the stairs, and the greataxe that flew out from the trap knocked the gnome to -2 hit points.
The paladin reached him by the time he was at -4, and stabilized him with her lay on hands ability.
The goliath apologized, but his player wanted to know if he got XP for defeating the gnome.
XP for the Evening: Again, really, really easy to assign XP at the end of the session, and assign RP awards for everyone. Really liking the XP charts.
On the fast line, after two three hour sessions with one challenging encounter each night and half the night in RP, the PCs are close to 4th level, after having started at the halfway point of 3rd level, meaning that probably four or five similar sessions from a dead start at 3rd level would have gotten them a level.
According to the SDR, climbing a wall using with a rope should have a DC of 5. With help, it should not be so difficult for the bard character to succeed.
It was in poor weather, but you are correct, that should have only put the difficulty up to 10, although the bard only achieved a 7 and a 5 on those rolls, so it wouldn't have affected this much.
Another skill related finding, sort of, from last night. The appraise + detect magic + identify is pretty well received, and it moves away from "all or nothing" having identify available or not. The bard isn't even that upset that his wand of identify is a much less valuable piece of equipment than it once was.
The +1 quarterstaff that the bone creature necromancer from last time left behind was identified via this method, as was the wand of mirror image that the bard then clutched in his hand from that point forth after the identification.
Also, Linguistics is a big hit. The bard and the beguiler used it to try and figure out accents of various people, even though that's not something spelled out in the skill description. Having skill ranks for a language skill just opens the door a bit to come up with some more investigation/RP options, and my players and I both kind of liked having that to play with.
The players of the cleric and the paladin really like the new skill system and how simple it is, even though they lost a few skills. They would still like some way to have "lesser" skills, but they like how easy it is to figure skills under the current system.
This was a common concern I've been getting too. The inability to pick up a few "lesser skills" like Perform (for a female Varisian fighter who wanted to dance and use them with the special scarves). The instinct was still to revert back to the rogue just to get those "lesser skills."
I've been able to talk them around and point how they do get more skills later.. But they're still looking forward to the Alpha 2 Hybrid Skills system (except the rogue, who unsurprisingly had no complaints at all and is a little bummed).
Yeah, I had talked a little about maybe having a feat that created two "minor" skills that you get +2 on and they don't go up, but I didn't want to tinker or add too many house rules to this, especially given that the skills were likely to change.