So, last Thursday while waiting to gather everyone back in to make up characters for our first session of Rise of the Runelords using the Beta rules, those of us in attendance decided to run a one shot against a great wyrm black dragon.
Yes, I wanted to justify that I bought the damn thing . . .
Anyway, the characters for the session were as follows:
Human Ranger 20th Level
Human Fighter 20th Level
Human Monk 20th Level
Character Creation:
All of them were allowed to have dragon hunting equipment and feats, including feats from the Draconomicon, in keeping with seeing how everything works with backwards compatibility.
I did not make the PCs follow the percentages for gear in the Beta when buying equipment, but at the same time, the numbers kind of break down by 20th level. Its actually damn hard to spend 132,000 gp on consumables at 20th level, and even if you do, most of them won't come into play at all. Its also pretty easy to max out at least one weapon at +10 in total bonuses, as well as armor and shields at +10 as well.
I did notice, probably since this was a specific, dragon hunting test, that the PCs tended to have a maxed out weapon, maxed out armor and shield (heavy shield for the fighter, buckler for the ranger, nothing for the monk), some kind of item that hasted them, and an item that teleported them or dimension doored them.
I'm sure this is no surprise, but it takes a LONG time to make up a character from scratch at 20th level. The extra feats do make for a longer process. Its not a bad thing, just something to be aware of. There really isn't much in the way of a “quick” process to do this if you allow PCs even a fairly open range of sources for feats (we only had the Beta and the Draconomicon at the table at the time).
Also, I probably allowed them a bit too much leeway in specializing their equipment, because most armor was energy resistant to acid as well, and at this level, its not like that gold would have went for something that would have been as much of a problem.
Monster Specs:
I allowed the dragon to get some feats from the draconomicon, specifically quicken breath and clinging breath. He also got snatch, toughness, vital strike and improved vital strike, and improved natural weapon as well as quicken spells.
Quicken spells was especially welcome, because for a monster that gets to cast like a sorcerer, its very hard to figure out when to burn a standard action to cast a spell, even a buff, once combat starts. It allows for a lot more flexiblity and use of those monsters that have spellcasting and powerful physical attacks.
Despite this, I didn't give him flyby attack or any attacks in that chain. Yes, it was a mistake.
Fight One:
I had the dragon and the PCs roll to see if they could spot one another and at what range. The dragon beat the PCs by a few hundred feet, so I gave him a surprise round of attacks, allowing him to toss a fireball and a quickened fireball at them (wow those things have long range).
Given that one PC was a ranger and one was a monk, fireballs meant squat. The fighter took some damage though, since he actually missed one of his saves.
The next round, we rolled for initiative, even though the ranger was the only one that could reach the dragon. The dragon, having no dex bonus, went dead last. The monk, in an effort to distract the dragon, abundant stepped onto the dragon's back.
The ranger, even though he was firing with a range penalty for being in a second range increment, had a fairly easy time hitting the dragon. He declared the dragon his quarry, then anounced that he was using his master hunter ability for the day, and pinpoint targeting, and hit the dragon easily, but the dragon made his save. Still, with strength damage, a +5 dragonbane composite bow, quarry and favored enemy bonues, he made a pretty good opening shot on the dragon.
The fighter drank a healing potion and waited for the dragon to come closer.
The dragon landed, bit the monk for a hefty bit of damage, and sprayed the ranger and the fighter with a quickened, clinging breath weapon, which the ranger avoided with his evasion. The fighter took some damage from the initial breath, but the follow up damage was less than his acid resistance. The fighter then moved up to the dragon, took at AoO from the dragon's bite, and hit it once with his axe, which was not dragonbane, but a +5 vorpal great axe, then activated his boots of speed.
The next round, the monk full attacked the dragon from its back, and used a ki point to get an extra attack, and pummeled it down with his +5 dragonbane holy amulet of mighty fists. The ranger went with a full salvo of arrows and his haste ability from his boots of speed added an extra attack, so he shredded the dragon further.
The dragon was using power attack, which gave it a slight chance to miss. It hit the monk with its tail, and went after the fighter with its Improved Vital Strike bite and its claws (abandoning its wings). It hit with its bite, missed with one claw and hit with the other, but missed its CMB roll to snatch the fighter.
The next round, the monk decided to tumble off the dragon to better assist his friends if they needed him, and made his roll to tumble down the dragon's back and run up to his companions. The ranger unleashed another salvo on the dragon, with three of them hitting. Then the fighter, right next to the dragon, got to attack.
The fighter had dragondoom as a feat, giving him a x7 critical with a greataxe against a dragon. I did allow him his extra x1 from his weapon mastery with the great axe, mainly because once you get to x7, why not go up to x8. Still, the feat strictly does say that it doesn't stack with other critical enhancing feats.
The fighter used a full attack for devastating blow, doing his full x8 damage. The dragon wasn't dead yet, but was pretty close, and then the fighter rolled a 20. Snickety snak. I ruled that he auto confirmed his critical roll since he was using his “mastered” weapon.
What did we learn?
Three 20th level characters are NOT equal to four 15th level characters. Many of the most devastating abilities of the characters (the rangers improved quarry and the fighters weapon mastery) come at the end of the class progression, and do tend to alter the landscape a bit.
Also, characters tailored to do a specific thing really can be a lot better than generalist characters. Still, the killer item was the vorpal axe, not the x8 critical or extra damage from the ranger's bow. Regardless, its unlikely to see characters this speced towards a given foe unless it had been the known BBEG for the campaign from the beginning.
After having run this fight, I would suggest that even auto confirm abilities from classes might not activate a vorpal weapon. It doesn't change things too much, as I'm fairly certain that the fighter would have confirmed anyway, but its something to consider. Also, given that devastating blow does not trigger critical triggered magic item abilities such as flaming burst weapons, I'm inclined to thing that it also wouldn't “activate” a special ability like the dragondoom feat, although the PCs really should get some benefit for the feat, given how many feats you have to take to get to that feat. Still, its easier under Pathfinder than under standard 3.5.
Fight Two:
This time, the dragon came up on the party right off the bat, and everyone rolled for initiative at the same time. The dragon still got hosed for initiative.
The monk charged the dragon and took the AoO on purpose so the fighter didn't have to worry about it. His logic here was that he could pretty much at will avoild movement based AoO so if he got into trouble, he could run out and heal while the fighter took on the solo tanking ability. He also took a shot at the dragon while next to it, and activated his boots of speed.
The fighter also activated his boots of speed, charged in, and attacked the dragon.
Finally, the ranger took a five foot step back, activated his boots of speed, declared the dragon his quarry, and he decided to go for quantity rather than try to use his master hunter ability against the dragon's good saves. Arrows start shredding he dragon. 7 dragonbane favored enemy quarry assissed +5 shots.
The dragon lifts off, taking an AoO from the monk and the fighter, both of which hit, but aren't TOO dangerous by themselves. He lands behind the ranger, within the range of his claw, grabs the ranger and does his claw damage, as well as snatching the ranger and grappling him.
He also uses his quickened clinging breath weapon on the fighter and the monk. Again, the fighter takes damage from the breath, but won't from the clinging. The monk rolls a natural one and takes full damage from the breath and has to worry about the clinging damage next round.
The next round, the monk uses his standard action to save against the acid and stand up again. The ranger pulls out an arrow and tries to stab the dragon, but does nothing to it, and the fighter draws an AoO from the dragon's bite to get close enough to attack again. He hits the dragon fairly hard, but can only make a single power attack against him.
The dragon misses the monk with his claw, and hits him with his tail, and hits the fighter with his bite. The fighter and the monk are both pretty well injured at this point, but they can both easily take at least one more “average” attack if they have to.
The monk makes a full attack the next round, using his flurry of blows, and his ki point to get an extra attack, and his haste to hit him one more time again. The monks blows are pretty impressive this time. The ranger decides to try five attempts to get out of the claw, but doesn't manage to do so (he couldn't actually escape, but we ruled that since the CMB maneuver is an alternative attack roll, a 20 would automatically succeeed, so he was playing the averages).
The fighter full attacks the dragon for x8 damage from devastating blow, and gets an extra attack from haste. The dragon maintains the grapple on the archer, doing automatic claw damage, tries to claw the fighter, hits, and fails to grapple him, bites the fighter and tail slaps the monk.
The fighter is pretty bad off at this point, the ranger is about a third of his hp down, and the monk is around 50% of his hit points. The dragon, however, is nearly dead at this point.
The next round, the monk hammers the dragon but doesn't quite finish him off, the ranger fails to get free, and the fighter gambles that he will take the dragon out this round, and does so with his devastating blow.
What did we learn?
A lot of the good options from the Beta require a full round action to take advantage of, so the dragon actually lasted a few rounds longer this fight because he moved. Even taking the AoO for jumping out of the fight, that wasn't nearly as bad as standing there taking x8 criticals to the face over and over again.
I don't think that the auto confirm issue with vorpal weapons is game breaking, but it may need to be addressed for abilities like ranger's quarry and fighter's weapon mastery.
I think that pretty much any feat that increases the critical range on a weapon under a given circumstance may need to be restricted when used with devastating blow.
Even RAW wise, I probably shouldn't have allowed the extra x1 cricital for Weapon Master to stack with Dragondoom, but I'm betting that extra x1 would have only resulted in pehaps one extra round in the second fight, with no difference in the first one.
Oh, I think if I had gone the "flyby attack" chain of feats route that things would have gone a bit differently, and if I had managed to get one of the grapples on the fighter and shut down his two handed attacks, it would have shifted things a bit.
Also, strange as it may sound for a creature of its size, disarming the fighter would have been fairly easy by RAW, and that would have shifted the whole fight as well.
Plus, they were highly specialized dragon slayers.
I'll probably be running this eventually again with less specialized characters against the dragon, and the dragon using more "mobile" tactics.
Still, I think it brought up some interesting discussion points.
Thanks for bringing up the fight with your dragon. Was there anything specific to Pathfinder rules that changed the fight one way or the other?
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Excellent testing, and thanks for the share.
In my experience creatures such as dragons of size large+ are hugely efficient with CMB-based maneuvers: going for the grapple+pinning or the sundering of equipment is a great way to play one of these beast's strenghts (other than the flyby attack feat chain, that improves the performance of a single creature against a group of enemies, thanks to the hit-and-run attack tactics).
How is that possible? In Beta the Devastating Blow feat is limited to one attack action. Even just one hit from a x8 crit weapon should net well over 200 HPs(more like 300-600 HPs, depending on the amount of min-maxing and allowed splatbooks) of damage. I can't see any non-crit resistant creature take more than a few hits.
How is the second attack possible, or how is it possible for him to take that much damage?
I believe on several attacks he was doing around 200-300 hp on most of his devastating blows.
I ruled that the devastating blow was a "full attack," allowing for a "normal" attack at full BaB due to haste.
I would agree, but I also read most of those "full round attacks" that are resolved as single attacks as counting as making a full attack. Its not really explicitly stated, so I ran it that way.
I will also agree that I almost ruled that you wouldn't get the extra attack, but if that is the case, once the far more useful "full attack with one roll" abilities get used, haste becomes worthless (okay, you still get the movement and other bonues, but not the extra attack). Maybe that's the intent, but it wasn't really clearly stated as the intent.
I'd also be interested in seeing if anyone else falls on one side or the other regarding something like Devastating Blow and haste. Has it come up for anyone, and how do you read the two together?
But its a good point in that its something that might be worthy of being clarified.
Wow, I must have Gen Con lag. I could have sworn that was a "full round" feat instead of a "standard action" one. Sorry about that, and you are correct, had I actually been processing words correctly, the second haste attack wouldn't be happening.
Sorry about that.
It does occur to me now, however, that I'm inclined to disallow a feat that I never saw much harm in before. d20 Modern and the MWP Dragonlance books have "Heroic Surge" which grants an extra standard or move action a number of times per day based on your level.
In standard 3.5, especially since the feat specifies that the standard action cannot be used to cast more than one spell in a round, there wasn't much to worry about, as once or twice a day a cleric might be able to heal and then charge into battle, or a fighter might get one more shot in after one of his attacks missed.
Now, however, unless you worded it properly, you could get a devastating blow on top of some other full round action, which could be really, really out of whack.
Then again, I might try another high level playtest and allow this feat just to see how screwy the combo might get.
