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Last night I ran a Pathfinder Alpha 2 playtest using Conquest of Bloodsworn Vale. Spoilers are marked as such.
My purpose of the playtest was twofold. Did the players have fun creating and playing their new Pathfinder characters, and how did the power level stack up against regular 3.5 adventures, of which we all still have a multitude of.
My conclusions are that the party of 6th level Alpha 2 characters were more powerful than their 6th level 3.5 counterparts or the module’s assumed 6th level challenge. They creamed through most of the encounters, and many never took more than a handful of points of damage all night. When we finished, we all agreed, if a 3.5 adventure calls for 6th level PCs (as an example) that 5th level or even 4th level Pathfinder PCs should have no problem with it.
I’m happy to report the players all enjoyed character creation and playing their PCs. We had an elf conjurer wizard, a human shoanti barbarian, a halfling rogue, and a human Chelaxian fighter.
The fact that they each had a little something extra special was a novelty, and proved quite useful. The classes just seem a little extra colorful and have a few more options available, which was nice.
The elf wizard bonded with his wand, which we all agreed was much more open and cool than the 4th edition thing we heard of all wizards needing a wand. Foregoing his familiar, he told me he could have bonded with an amulet, staff, or whatever. As a conjurer he also had an acid dart spell he could cast at will. At first it sounded very 4th edition, but he reminded me this was a feature of the conjurer and not all wizards had such a combat ability. It didn’t get used often but was good in a pinch.
The human barbarian player had an easy time with rage points and the abilities in combat. He thought they gave you enough and the pricing on powers was fair. He mentioned he would not be surprised to see a feat in the future that offers more rage points.
The human fighter and halfling rogue both had a blast, but that was because pretty early on we nixed the whole “can only use one combat feat per round” rule. My whole table just couldn’t wrap their heads around why this was implemented and everyone asked that I write they don’t like it at all. Both characters had multiple combat feats that worked best together, and that it was a shame this was in place.
The human fighter’s player found that the small changes to existing feats all made sense and were a good choice. The halfling rogue’s player enjoyed having a suite of abilities to choose from to customize his burglar.
Two of the players made mention they hoped that a really good proofreading went through before the hardcopy comes out in August. They found a few incidents where there was a cut-n-paste situation. As one example, barbarian rage now works differently, but some text later on referred to the way rage used to work in 3.5. I’ve asked him to forward that to me. Another player said he found similar incidents.
As a DM, running it was a snap. It really does work pretty much like any 3.5 game we’re already playing. Our group already knew grapple and had no issues with it, but this new CMB thing is just lightning fast. We were all very impressed with how it worked, and so folks were trying grappling, bull rushing and the like with ease and smiles. In particular the new grapple and pin conditions and exactly what you could do with such an opponent was elegant and met with success. Being able to maneuver or drag a grappled foe was also a huge hit. We found the DC’s and success rate were fair and had no problems.
Bloodsworn Vale is a really good module. The players were suitably impressed how much it encompassed in only 32 pages. The only combat that caused them no end of trouble was the first one with the sprites. With three of the party having poor will saves and liberal uses of Suggestion and Sleep by the sprites caused a chaos-filled combat that was exciting and problematic for the party.
Not to mention the bad luck of the fighter player, who had a very high fort save, but failed both times when the king of roses cast Poison on her. Her Con score plummeted from 15 down to 1 within a minute.
Here’s a picture of them exploring the caves of the rose sprites: PICTURE
They eventually found the owlbear lair and defeated them without breaking a sweat. They camped overnight and a random encounter brought a party of bugbears on them, even with surprise, the party mopped the floor with them without any trouble. They then tracked the scouts back to the bugbear camp, and took on the lot of them and killed them within short order.
Here’s a picture of them attacking the bugbear camp: PICTURE
In all a very fun time was had by all.
-DM Jeff