Disclaimer: I am loving DMing Rise of the Runelords and my players are loving the campaign as well...
We just started Spires of Xin-Shalast and once again haunts came up. My players really disliked having fear effects that still affected paladins and could not be detected as magic or evil. Did I DM it correctly or did I miss something about them?
Chris
Creative Director
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Disclaimer: I am loving DMing Rise of the Runelords and my players are loving the campaign as well...We just started Spires of Xin-Shalast and once again haunts came up. My players really disliked having fear effects that still affected paladins and could not be detected as magic or evil. Did I DM it correctly or did I miss something about them?
Chris
That's the trick... haunts are fear effects. Thus... anyone who's immune to fear effects (be they a paladin or under the effects of heroes' feast or whatever) are immune to ALL the effects created by a haunt. The haunt still triggers and plays out, and in some cases where a haunt actually physically animates an object (such as the chain haunt in the sixth adventure; the chain is an actual monster with a stat block, and therefore not technically covered by the haunt's separate stat block) it can still hurt someone immune to fear, but for the most part a creature that's immune to fear is immune to actual damage from a haunt.
That's the trick... haunts are fear effects. Thus... anyone who's immune to fear effects (be they a paladin or under the effects of heroes' feast or whatever) are immune to ALL the effects created by a haunt.
I liked the wendigo cabin idea but it was a failure in my hands, for level-related reasons.
(1) Heroes' Feast, which the PCs are likely to have, shuts down the haunts completely, pretty much removing all challenge from the scenario.
(2) High level PCs have about a bazillion ways to try to interact with/deal with haunts, but the haunt rules give no way to figure out what happens. I ended with a list of 30 or so questions about haunts, none answered, some very hard to answer sensibly. This turned the whole thing into an annoying exercise in rules development on the fly. (We had the same problem with the traps in Runeforge.)
If I ever run it again I will cut it down and run it for PCs of 8th or less. It would have been cool somewhere around Hook Mountain.
I don't have a good fix for this, though I would *very* much like to see a proper article writeup on haunts that answered some of the "What is this? How does it work?" questions in a little more detail.
Mary
My problem is that I think Paizo is over using haunts. They're in 3 or 4 AP adventures so far, and a major part of two of those. They're like a child with a new toy.
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Creative Director
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I liked the wendigo cabin idea but it was a failure in my hands, for level-related reasons.
(1) Heroes' Feast, which the PCs are likely to have, shuts down the haunts completely, pretty much removing all challenge from the scenario.
(2) High level PCs have about a bazillion ways to try to interact with/deal with haunts, but the haunt rules give no way to figure out what happens. I ended with a list of 30 or so questions about haunts, none answered, some very hard to answer sensibly. This turned the whole thing into an annoying exercise in rules development on the fly. (We had the same problem with the traps in Runeforge.)
If I ever run it again I will cut it down and run it for PCs of 8th or less. It would have been cool somewhere around Hook Mountain.
I don't have a good fix for this, though I would *very* much like to see a proper article writeup on haunts that answered some of the "What is this? How does it work?" questions in a little more detail.
Mary
First of all... it's perfectly okay if PC powers render parts of adventures a cakewalk. There's nothing wrong with a paladin being immune to haunts, for example, nor is it bad if the cleric's heroes'
feast spell gives the party an advantage over some encounters. If you don't let a PCs' powers actually matter (which is what you do if you remove fear effects from the game in this example), then you're sort of punishing the PCs by not letting them feel like their choices were good ones. This is kind of a sore spot with me, btw; if I'm playing a character who is very effective against a certain element and the GM never lets me show that off... I'm disappointed. That isn't to say that you should endeavor to run scenarios and encounters that are NEVER challenging at all... but it's just as important to challenge the PCs as it is to let them feel high level and heroic and actually TOUGH once in a while.Heroes' feast, by the way, is indeed a problem spell. It's far too good. This isn't a problem with adventures, though... it's a problem with the spell. Basically, the fact that it grants immunity to fear and poison shuts down WAY too many encounter options. If it becomes poor game design to give high level monsters poison or to create high level fear effects (such as weird), then that spell needs to change. Which it does, thank Desna, in the Pathfinder Beta (it now grants nice bonuses to fear and poison saves, not outright immunity).
As for the haunts themselves, while I agree 100% that they could use a bigger rules section and more clarification and examples (and I'll be hoping to get them into the Pathfinder RPG along with the traps and hazards)... I think that you're over-complicating things quite a bit, Mary. I find it hard to believe that haunts are THAT HUGE of a train wreck that they completely disrupt the game. As written, they're less troublesome than many illusion spells, I feel. It's easy to get overly obsessed with rules minutiae, at which point it's important to take a step back and look at the situation at hand and figure out why something's in an adventure. In the case of the haunts in the cabin, they're there to offer some creepy flavor and some backstory. If the rules are causing problems, try throwing the rules out. If your party's immune to fear effects anyway, the haunts simply become sort of interactive read-aloud text anyway, indicators that should point the PCs toward the confrontation with the wendigo in order to move the plot along.
Again... I do agree that the haunt rules could use some work, and eventually they'll get there... but it's frustrating to me to hear situations where the rules of the game get in the way of the story and fun of the game.
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Creative Director
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My problem is that I think Paizo is over using haunts. They're in 3 or 4 AP adventures so far, and a major part of two of those. They're like a child with a new toy.
While I don't think we overdid the haunts (I think of them in the same category as traps and hazards), I can certainly understand the viewpoint that we did indeed put too many haunts in. That was more of a response to relatively positive reader reactions to "Skinsaw Murders" more than anything else though; lots of folk loved the haunts, so we decided to throw a few more in there.
In any case, haunts aren't nearly as omnipresent in the next adventure path. IIRC, there's only one (maybe two) haunts in the entire Crimson Throne campaign.
I agree that my Heroes' Feast problem is a problem with the spell and not the haunts. The wendigo cabin was just particularly vulnerable to this problem. I'm glad to hear that PFRPG will fix the spell.
I don't agree that the underspecified haunts are just a rules- obsessiveness problem, though. Illusions are difficult to adjudicate sometimes, but it's very clear that they *are* illusions, which means that there are whole subsystems of the rules which interact with them in a known way. An illusion spell is a spell, so you know what Dispel Magic does, what it looks like on other planes, how it reacts to Detect Magic, what level it is, what spells defend against it, etc.
My player was consistently angry with me throughout the wendigo cabin, because whenever he tried anything outside the apparent intent of the module (plow into each haunt and suffer its effects) I pretty much had to say "That doesn't work." Confront the haunts on the Astral Plane? Doesn't work. Communicate with them? Nope. Figure out what's bothering them as a way to make them stop? No. True Seeing to spot them in advance? Invisibility to prevent detection? Turn Undead? Invisibility to Undead?
This came across as exactly what you were complaining about above--that the PCs were being stripped of their powers in order to keep things on track. Probably I should have had one or more of the things listed work, but which? No doubt this was a failing on my part and I should have been able to improvise consistent, detailed haunt rules on the fly. All I can say is, I'd happily pay for a product in which you guys did this for me; it's hard!
We did not find this a problem in _Skinsaw_ because PCs of that level have fewer options. But it was a show-stopper for me in _Xin-Shalast_.
Mary
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My player was consistently angry with me throughout the wendigo cabin, because whenever he tried anything outside the apparent intent of the module (plow into each haunt and suffer its effects) I pretty much had to say "That doesn't work." Confront the haunts on the Astral Plane? Doesn't work. Communicate with them? Nope. Figure out what's bothering them as a way to make them stop? No. True Seeing to spot them in advance? Invisibility to prevent detection? Turn Undead? Invisibility to Undead?
Why didn't any of those ideas work? The haunt description doesn't explicity declare what effects any of those spells might have, but it also doesn't say that they don't have any effect, which, to me, translates to "Let the GM adjudicate the effects of neat ideas."
For example, if someone were to use Invisibility to Undead, I would allow them to bypass the Haunts without triggering them. Who knows what a Haunt looks like on the Astral Plane? I can't say my players ever used the Astral Plane (we haven't played many high-level games), but maybe you could see haunts there. Why not? Maybe there you could see them coming and stop them before they trigger! In fact, you might even be able to make a cool, physical manifestation of them on the Astral Plane that the characters could fight instead of facing the haunt!
Also, is Turn Undead not the primary way of dealing with haunts?
My main point is that with only a small sidebar to describe Haunts, it is clearly not a comprehensive defintion, and really, it's up to the GM to fill in the blanks for his or her own adventure.
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My player was consistently angry with me throughout the wendigo cabin, because whenever he tried anything outside the apparent intent of the module (plow into each haunt and suffer its effects) I pretty much had to say "That doesn't work." Confront the haunts on the Astral Plane? Doesn't work. Communicate with them? Nope. Figure out what's bothering them as a way to make them stop? No. True Seeing to spot them in advance? Invisibility to prevent detection? Turn Undead? Invisibility to Undead?
From the skinsaw questions thread:
If you command a haunt, it basically has the same effect as turning it; it stops bothering you and your party (or whoever you designate). But it doesn't go away; if an enemy enters the haunt's range, it would lash out at them.
If turn undead works, I would say that invis to undead would work as well...
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And, correct me if I'm wrong, but 'finding out what's bothering them' is largely the point of the wendigo cabin--it is by defeating the wendigo and getting the spirits of the two brothers to reconcile that you finally let the unquiet ghosts of the cabin go to their rest. But the best way to learn what happened is to interact with the haunts.
We've enjoyed the haunts, but it did get a little confusing in Spires once we were higher level and trying to figure out what spells could protect us from the various compulsions. (We played through it just today!) As it was undefined, our DM ruled that Prot from Evil didn't help, but we couldn't find anything else that did - there's the fear effects, which have specific spells that work against them, but also plenty of "want to eat someone" effects which aren't. Clarification of the exact nature of the effects would have been useful.
To the other posters' point, sure the DM can make up what various effects are relevant and which aren't, but a lot of 3.5 works under the rule of "if it doesn't say it works on it RAW, then it doesn't, to maintain game balance." Right, wrong, or indifferent.