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So, last night I decided to devote a session of my ongoing Ravenloft game to a brief playtest of the inquisitor and oracle. An old friend was up in town and he wanted to sit on the session, so rather than make him just sit around while everyone else played, I wrote up an inquisitor for him to play. The party is around 10th level (and I wanted to see how inquisitor looked after the 10th-level upgrades anyway), so he was written up as Inquisitor 10. The BBEG of the evening was Grandmother Thundertusk, a wereboar Oracle of Stone (female human dire wereboar Oracle 8, total CR 11), and her minions were all cursed wereboar warriors and commoners (average CR 3, generally showing up in groups of 4 to 6).
The inquisitor's build was a fairly average ranged-combatant build, designed to take advantage of a class that rewarded battlefield mobility. The player had played no Pathfinder before, but was familiar with 3.5. Granny T. was a melee-caster build, using lots of self-buffs, set up with clobbering strike and earth glide to back up her primary weapon, a vicious warhammer called God's-Fang. (I used her CR as her total level to determine her equipment values.) She had the clouded sight curse, which both helped her (the fight against her started in the dark, so she had a couple of rounds of "seeing" better than the party) and hurt her (they realized early on that she literally couldn't see anyone at range, so the sorcerer focused on nailing her with long-distance spells).
The party had been investigating a village they believed was infected with lycanthropy, when they came across the inquisitor PC locked in a jail cell, awaiting hanging. They busted him out, returned his equipment, and ran for the hills, evading wereboar patrols the whole way. The inquisitor was able to divulge some of the backstory about Granny T. (thanks, monster lore), and the party set out to hunt her down and break the chain of the curse. (As a note for those who don't know: to cure lycanthropy in Ravenloft, you have to kill the original natural lycanthrope who started the chain.)
The inquisitor's tracking abilities came in handy here, and in the several encounters against wereboars, so did his judgments. The player was totally enthralled by the judgment/tactical feat setup of the class and was stunned when I mentioned that some people thought the damage judgment was underpowered. Then I explained to him how paladin smite works now, and his jaw dropped. XD Still, he solidly believes that the judgments were able to help him a great deal, and being able to set his bane to what he needed during the final fight was a huge swing. He didn't get to showcase his spellcasting ability all that much due to the nature of the adventure, but he was glad to have it as a fallback.
Grandmother Thundertusk was a decent challenge for the party. They were able to get her away from her minions through clever planning, so they wound up facing her by herself, and she still nearly killed two of them. Earth glide was a huge deal, since she could withdraw into the ground where no one could follow, spend as much time as she needed underground self-buffing, and come back to the fight nearly fresh. The fact that the party's main healer wasn't around for this session really hurt them; they were dependent on potions, the sorcerer's paladin cohort, and the inquisitor's limited healing abilities.
In the end, though, they were able to put her down with a combination of readied actions and lucky shots. If she had lived through the round, there may well have been a recurrence as she decided to simply run the hell away. Unfortunately, she went from "nearly full" to "dead dead dead" in the space of one round after she popped back out of the ground to whale on the sorcerer.
Overall, it was a fun playtest. I'm not sure how much it proves, but the inquisitor's player said he would love the chance to play one again, and everyone was impressed with the oracle's abilities. Personally, I think that these are the two classes closest to being ready for publication; both just need some tweaking to be done. Particularly, the oracle needs more selection for foci and the curses need to be tweaked, and some of the inquisitor's judgments need to be rebalanced (the player said he couldn't see why anyone would ever use the smiting judgment after about third level).
Jeremy Puckett
Thank you for this interesting post hida-san.
