just wrapped up Red Hand of Doom PF Beta playtest


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We just finished a sixteen-month campaign that began fully in D&D 3.5 and transitioned slowly to Pathfinder. I ran Red Hand of Doom for a party of four players that consisted of an elven necromancer, a barbarian (first half-orc, replaced by a human), a human monk, and a human cleric (first of Pelor, replaced by a cleric of Pharasma).

It took us 17 sessions to complete the campaign. We began transitioning to Pathfinder Alpha between sessions 8 and 9 at the end of April, though I did not enforce complete transitions. Basically, we immediately adapted CMB to replace grapple etc., and a few other minor changes, and I gave the players the chance to switch over their PCs or not as they desired. At this point, we were at the end of Part II of Red Hand and the cleric of Pelor was killed...

Spoiler:
The party chased off the black dragon Regiarix from the Ruins of Rhest. The cleric donned the suit of plate that was in Regi's horde, then proceeded to stand as night guard in plain view in said armor on the roof of the town hall that served as the dragon's lair. Regiarix returned and wreaked his vengeance upon the cleric before the rest of the PCs woke up, got up there and finally brought him down.
At this point, the player rolled up a replacement cleric using PF Alpha, choosing to be a priest of Pharasma. Even though we began the campaign with the D&D pantheon, the players had not been to Brindol yet so I simply handwaved the temple of Wee Jas to be a temple of Pharasma instead. At this point the players were just under halfway from 8th to 9th level and I switched over to using the PF XP system.

By the time of the release of the Beta in August, the players were just about to hit 10th level, and were just beginning Part IV of the campaign...

Spoiler:
...the climatic siege of Brindol.
Though I still did not enforce a complete conversion of PCs to Pathfinder, from this point on I used the Beta as the primary rules reference during play, for adjudicating spell effects and anything else that came up.

A few additional PF rules were adopted over the next two months, including adopting the CMB bonus for the monk (who was otherwise a 3.5 monk), and a complete conversion of the barbarian when we lost his character sheet and had to draw him up from scratch (it was a human before and after; the half-orc barbarian had come and gone before PF was ever announced).

We finished the campaign this Wednesday on our 17th session. The party did well against the big bads.

Spoiler:
All PCs were flying as they made their way up the shaft into the inner sanctum, though Trellara (the NPC bard) and the necromancer's undead minions were climbing. The necromancer flew up first, invisible, and learned of the silence effect without being noticed. So the party was able to gain surprise, with the necromancer getting off a fireball from his staff (shooting from within the shaft where he could speak freely), then the barbarian rushed in, reaching Azarr Kul before he could get his antilife shell up, and keeping him from doing so by hammering him down within a couple of rounds. When the Aspect of Tiamat showed up afterwards, the barbarian was the only one in its melee range, and was nearly shredded in one round, but a timely use of a heal scroll by our cleric saved him, and he was able to survive the battle, though he was savaged again pretty thoroughly.


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My players gave the following feedback about the new rules.

CMB - by the end of the campaign, everyone agreed that the CMB rules were an improvement over the old maneuver rules. The monk player had been reluctant when we first adopted them, but seemed to come around. The monk ability to use full BAB for CMB calcs may have helped here.

Cleric - the player of the cleric was fully behind all the changes to this class, most notably the Channeling rules that replaced Turn Undead, which everyone else was equally happy about. Flavor wise, I wasn't a fan of the Selective Channeling feat he took, but it certainly worked well for the party, especially considering that our necromancer routinely had undead allies fighting with us.

Barbarian - the player of the barbarian was reluctant to convert (more to avoid the hassle than anything else, I believe), but once I lost his character sheet (an accident, I swear) and the issue was forced, he definitely appreciated the new rage powers. We used rage points as written in the Beta, as it was not until just before the last session that I was aware of the variant/update that Jason posted here on the boards. I will be happy to try it without the points (which I feel were a book-keeping annoyance and would be doubly so for NPC barbarians) however I did like the rage powers, minus one or two which I disliked for flavor reasons.

XP - the new XP tables (fast progression) worked well enough for us. It was easy to use and I appreciated being able to calculate the standard way for the whole party or assign the individual awards directly by PC without changing the amounts (seeing as it was a 4 PC party). I generally used the standard method but sometimes used the quick method if we wanted to apply XP mid-session. In past campaigns we have generally waited until the party was in a safe zone before applying level raises, but because this sort of conflicted with the time sensitive nature of this campaign, towards the end I allowed a few video-game style instant level raises. However, the party ended the campaign mid-11th level, so they did get a bit ahead of the recommend leveling rate in the adventure (the intro states that they should have achieved 10th level before the final encounters).

No other aspect of the rules loomed large enough that anyone had any comments worth sharing that I can recall.


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Next up, we begin a Rise of the Runelords campaign late next month using straight Beta rules, except for a few very minor house rules. However I am leaning towards not bothering with XP and instead simply awarding level raises at the appropriate times in the campaign. For a party, it looks like we will have two gnomes (one a transmuter, one a sorceror, one half-elf ranger, and one human cleric of Cayden)...and possibly a fifth PC not yet determined. I am looking forward to it.


What kind of combat maneuvers did the PCs try? Just tripping, or did they expand into grappling, sunder, disarm, etc. as well?

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Davelozzi wrote:
Next up, we begin a Rise of the Runelords campaign late next month using straight Beta rules, except for a few very minor house rules. However I am leaning towards not bothering with XP and instead simply awarding level raises at the appropriate times in the campaign. For a party, it looks like we will have two gnomes (one a transmuter, one a sorceror, one half-elf ranger, and one human cleric of Cayden)...and possibly a fifth PC not yet determined. I am looking forward to it.

Btw, I am running RotRL without XP awards and I am loving it! The only problem I have run into so far is that Skinsaw Murders is a little short timewise and it seemed like the characters were going up too fast. I was going to add a separate adventure in between the Foxglove Manor and the Sawmill, but ended up deciding to keep the characters one level below where they were supposed to be because we ended up adding two characters and now have six. But I am loving the flexibility that handing out levels at certain story points is giving me. I highly recommend it!

-Lisa


Thanks for providing these insights. Can you clarify what/where this update is:

We used rage points as written in the Beta, as it was not until just before the last session that I was aware of the variant/update that Jason posted here on the boards.


Elijah Snow wrote:

Thanks for providing these insights. Can you clarify what/where this update is:

We used rage points as written in the Beta, as it was not until just before the last session that I was aware of the variant/update that Jason posted here on the boards.

It is located Here.


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Lisa Stevens wrote:
Btw, I am running RotRL without XP awards and I am loving it!

Thanks Lisa, I am looking forward to it, and appreciate the notice about the pacing in Skinsaw. I have suggested not bothering with XP in the past but at that time it seemed like my players were against it for some reason. However, this time when I mentioned it I got a universal "sure, if its easier for you, why not?" I'm not sure what inspired the change but I am certainly not complaining.

hogarth wrote:
What kind of combat maneuvers did the PCs try? Just tripping, or did they expand into grappling, sunder, disarm, etc. as well?

Mostly grappling, some bull rushing or overruns, and at least a couple of throws...though I can't remember exactly how we handled those, other than that it started with a CMB check, and at least one of them involved the monk tossing someone off a spiral staircase.

I can not recall any sunders, disarms, or trips. I know that in one encounter near the end of the adventure the tactics called for the PC's foes to sunder but I think said foes got trashed before they really had a chance to give that the old college try.

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