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Started my new campaign, Castle Whiterock, using the Pathfinder Alpha playtest rules. I have five players, only three could make it to the first session.
We're using a 28 point buy system for character stats, and the racial hit point bonuses. The three characters that were made are:
- Goldenaxe, a Human Fighter. He took the Defensive Combat Training feat.
- Zoltan, a Halfling Rogue. Plans to multiclass to Hexblade.
- Barth, a Human Fighter. The player was pleased to discover he did not need to take Combat Expertise to take Improved Trip. Plans to multiclass to Wizard.
The first several battles in the campaign are against a band of human slavers, and despite the fact that hitting them would have been far more effective -- they had 6 hit points! -- Barth tripped them over and over again with a bill hook (::eyeroll:: players. feh!). We loved the new system for combat maneuvers. So much simpler and cleaner.
Hopefully next week we'll be adding a cleric and sorcerer.
I love the names! Very old skool. :)
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We had our second session on Tuesday, and completed level 1 of Castle Whiterock. We picked up played exactly where we left off the week before, with the PCs charging through a breach at a pair of slavers with crossbows.
I made no significant modifications to any of the monsters, only calculating their CMBs and redoing their skill and feat lists. Because this is a 1st level adventure, this resulted in few changes.
The monsters were slightly weaker and less threatening, primarily due to the characters better stats compared to previous campaigns, and the extra +2 is pretty useful. The extra hit points also benefited the characters greatly, allowing them to take more hits in a combat.
I let them start off with a wand of lesser vigor, since they had no healer originally, but I'm going to have to take it away now that they gained a new member, the Elven Cleric Brandar. They used it maybe four times over the course of the first level, and gained Brandar halfway through the adventure. He took the Healing domain, and got to use his domain power twice -- once bringing a downed comrade back to 1 hp -- but still ended up blowing all of his spells on spontaneous healings, though this was partially because he managed to roll a 1 on every single use of Positive Energy Channeling. It was amazing.
Brandar used his Positive Energy Channeling twice while fighting a skeletal owlbear, and it played much more smoothly than 3.5 Turn Undead with the whole stupid table look up. The skeleton blew it's first will save, and the -2 to attack from Frightened turned a lot of hits into near misses, so it was still a very effective ability. If only Brandar could have stopped rolling 1's, he might have been able to avoid spontaneously wasting his prepared spells.
The only other significant Pathfinder related report involves a battle with a 2nd level 3.5 monk. Okay, I admit, not much of a threat to a party of four, but what ended up happening was pretty disgusting. The monk was hiding, leapt out and surprised the party, kicked the rogue in the head. The fighter and the cleric both swung and missed. Then the second fighter went to make a trip attack. and that was where something really dumb happened. The roll to trip the monk was easier than the roll to hit the monk. So he tripped the monk. And then the monk had no way to stand up without provoking AOOs, so he got chopped to pieces by the attacks he provoked standing up. Suckage. So, clearly a monk's wisdom bonus needs to be included in the calculation of their CMB.
I'm also thinking that Acrobatics should specify that a character can use Acrobatics to perform any move action without provoking attacks of opportunity. Because there's no reason a first level monk or rogue shouldn't be able to do a reliable kip up, or at least a five foot roll away from a fight. Definitely stuff that should be added to the Acrobatics table at a minimum.
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So we're a few more weeks into the game, and keep discovering new things.
The Cleric has the travel domain, and I think the domain power may be a bit broken. Being able to teleport as a swift action makes the cleric immune to grapples and is really hard to account for storywise (locked doors aren't much of an issue). It might work better as a move action power.
While not specifically Pathfinder related, I've got a (new) player who is taking advantage of one of the cheapest exploits in 3.5. Actually, he's taking advantage of several, but the one that's bothering me is the combination of spiked armor, a pole-arm, and enlarge person, which gives him a 20'area in which he can make AOO. And of course he has combat reflexes. I want to strangle him, because at 2nd level there aren't any creatures that can survive that tactic that won't kill the entire party, and I hate giving XP for encounters that consist entirely of monsters getting screwed over by a cheap exploit and dying without even entering into melee range of characters. And I don't want to have to rewrite the entire campaign just because one player has to be cheap.
There seriously needs to be some sort of nerf on reach weapons. There's no real incentive to not use them, and it's just freaking stupid that the game allows players to swing 30 foot glaives around in dungeons without any penalty.
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The Cleric has the travel domain, and I think the domain power may be a bit broken. Being able to teleport as a swift action makes the cleric immune to grapples and is really hard to account for storywise (locked doors aren't much of an issue). It might work better as a move action power.<snip>
There seriously needs to be some sort of nerf on reach weapons. There's no real incentive to not use them, and it's just freaking stupid that the game allows players to swing 30 foot glaives around in dungeons without any penalty.
In my games i handled the teleport problem by limiting long distance to "glyph rooms" ie special rooms with a unique tiled pattern, if they don't know the pattern they can't teleport to it. Without a glyph room it only worked over unrestricted line of sight (no key holes, etc). Won't solve your grapple problem though :S
As the to player reach problem, i normally ruled any of those kind of exploits out. Thankfully my players were cool enough to realize it just cheating and agreed. You could try talking to your player and if he still won't give in just have low ceilings everywhere and drown him in penalties till he grows up :)
