I DM a group online (utilizing Maptool), and we started a ‘short’ session about a week after the start of the playtest. Between some technical issues, the rush of college finals season, and the fact that one of our players lives across the pond (England while the rest of us are in Central or Eastern time), we didn’t get a chance to finish ‘til this weekend.
The PCs themselves were level 9, built on a 25 point buy with HP as per the PFS guidelines. I wound up with 5 characters spread amongst 3 players (one of whom is brand-new to 3.x) and the adventure itself was hastily prepared, so the actual parameters of the playtest wound up being ‘see how the classes fare in roughly-equivalent CR fights’, which is probably not entirely helpful.
For the curious, here are the charsheets of the PCs;
Amy, a human battle oracle.
Riyn and Asgan, a human shield cavalier and his lupine mount.
Kagata, a half-orc bardic dragon disciple.
Rhys, a human Illusionist wizard who was cobbled together on short notice.
Theil, an aasimar celestial bloodline sorcerer with a focus on summoning (who will likely be converted to/exchanged for a summoner in the next adventure).
Anyway, without further a-do, the playtest itself;
The PCs encounter a man mounted on a large cat on their way back through the forest , heading to the trading town of Fiore after some unspecified adventure. He spun a tale of meeting friends to adventure out into the nearby fens in search of some unspecified treasure in some ruins there; a series of Sense Motive, Perception, and Knowledge (Local) checks revealed that the area was not known for any ruins, there were bandit problems, and there was somebody moving noisily through the brush off the road.
Fun fact: The only oath that was remembered in this session was the enemy cavalier’s Oath of Greed I assumed he had from some earlier heist; The +2 to bluff was counteracted by his rolling a 1, though.
Battle is engaged with the bandits, which consist of a 10th-level Halfling dragon cavalier riding a panther*, an 8th level druid wildshaped as a hawk flying above the fray, and four 8th-level warriors flanking the party.
Being a decent road, a tilting contest certainly could have been engaged by the cavaliers had they wanted to. The (STR-maxed) dragon disciple and the cavalier about matched each other for melee competence while the latter was charging. The oracle had a chance to cast divine favor due to her decent initiative from War Sight and the distance at which the battle was engaged, which granted her a decent punch when combined with power attack against the mooks.
Monkey wrenches entered when the summoning-focused sorcerer blocked charging (which hurt the dragon cav much worse than the PC cav) and the illusionist hit the unlucky dragon cav with a phantasmal killer upon which two will saves (Improved Iron Will requires a non-unlucky streak) and a fort save were blown (the fort save was a 1!) The bandits were cleaned up like the mooks they were, and the druid retreated (as he and the cavalier were originally supposed to do, helped by one fog spell or another.
The group progressed to town, where they learned the mayor’s (estranged) daughter had been kidnapped by a particularly brazen group of veiled bandits. The requisite information gathering and RP turned up that there was a nearby abbey that hadn’t contacted the town in some months, and that some of the dams they had used to claim land from the fens had fallen into disrepair and/or had been damaged. With the blessing of the mayor himself (and with his youngest daughter insisting that the bandits be returned alive to stand trial), the group set out into the fens.
They encountered a group of bog-standard chuuls (no pun intended) hunkered down around some pools along one of the areas of relatively dry land the group was using to traverse the fens. The battlemap was cramped and the ambush was sprung very close to the party.
This time the perception checks are such that only the oracle, illusionist, dragon disciple, and chuul act in a surprise round. Said round is used to buff and fry the lobsters with a fireball. Since by Round 1 the chuul had closed to threaten the casters, the oracle (who had gone first thanks to War Sight) manages to 5 foot step and lay into one of the critters with the extra attack from her divine power, activating her ‘free’ Improved Critical from Weapon Mastery and nearly tearing the chuul apart in one round.
The cavalier, between himself and his mount, lays down a bit of damage (and saves the oracle from a retaliatory grapple). A clever illusion saves the threatened sorcerer, and the meleers manage to lay the chuuls low – permanently – in round 2 after the opposition had been tenderized by fireballs. This didn’t happen before the oracle and sorcerer took significant damage from one of the few lucky DM rolls that night, though.
The group continues toward the abbey to finish off this first short adventure in the series, and face a battle that didn't go anywhere near as planned and was (sadly) largely un-fun. The druid from the first encounter reveals (through a purely ad-libbed sequence as the Halfling cavalier earlier wasn’t supposed to die) that he has been assisting the bandits because they enabled his eco-terrorism against the brothers of the abbey who had so drastically altered the ecology of the fens. Some diplo-mancy leads to him agreeing not to brutally murder the group (and to consider a parley with the mayor of Fiore), but he clues them in that not all is as it seems.
A woman matching the mayor’s daughter’s description steps forth from the shadows, naming herself Mollie McTynker and helpfully informing the group that she has been leading these Black Veiled Bandits for the past months, using her insider information gleaned from connections and tavern hopping in town to get the best shipments and most goods. Villainous monologue delivered, she informs them she has to kill them and aggresses.
The map was originally intended to be a great cathedral-type thing cleared of pews, the main terrain feature being pillars (behind which are hidden four 8th level rogues). The original idea was for the non-cavaliers to skirmish along the sides with the mounted folks tilting and aiding where needed. Of course, my NPC cavalier had died, so I was left with four woefully squishy rogues, the dragon cav's mount (who joined the fray), and a 10th level battle oracle who lost initiative.
Rather than providing a few summons to aid the rogues, Mollie anchored a wall of fire between the northmost pillars, discouraging attack by that route. Mollie slung a few spells from cover, though in my session's-running-late torpor I forgot she had a perfectly functional summon monster iv spell that would have been a big help.
The fact that the player oracle had greater invisibility cast on her gave her remarkable accuracy (especially vs DEX-heavy rogues), and she and the dragon disciple managed to double-team Mollie into oblivion - with non-lethal damage because they wanted her alive. I refrained from using the Combat Healer ability specifically because it would do double duty (healing nonlethal and lethal damage) and needlessly increase the fight time when everybody was quite eager for the session to be over.
So to give a brief recap:
Fight 1 (10th lvl halfling dragon cav, 8th lvl druid, 4x 8th level warriors)
- PC cavalier did well with charging, and with his wolf attacking the player as a whole was able to contribute well enough. Challenge never came into play due to obvious mooks and phantasmal killer shenanigans.
- The oracle’s player enjoyed war sight and had a bit more freedom to throw spells into melee buffs than a cleric likely would.
- The NPC cavalier, on the other hand, was just plain unlucky. He literally rolled a 2 on his Braggart special ability then died due to three consecutive failed saves, at least one of which he had a strong chance to make.
Fight 2 (3x chuul)
- The cavalier’s melee ability was diluted (as he didn’t have much call to challenge here and he couldn’t’ charge), but he held up with the help of his mount again.
- Oracle’s War Sight ability proved useful, as did Improved Critical.
Fight 3 (10th lvl human battle oracle, 10th level cav's panther mount, 4x 8th level rogue)
... was just badly designed and a letdown for everyone; no relevant playtest stuff really came into play (except that, non-surprisingly, battlefield control can give a cavalier a headache.)
OVERALL THOUGHTS and CHARACTER CREATION FEEDBACK
I liked my NPCs. Had Braggart succeeded (or had I done something else) my cavalier probably could have gotten in some nasty damage after he maneuvered around the summons. Mollie (the oracle) had a routine involving tripping with a whip and utilizing her spell list to lay the PCs low for her minions – this didn’t work out largely because the minions were designed before I knew the party’s exact power level and because she lost out on initiative. All in all she had some good numbers and her spellcasting was still pretty decent; better than what I expected for an oracle.
The oracle’s player has been quite vocal in his feelings that the oracle is a somewhat-gimped cleric. The cleric can already spontaneously cast cure spells, which is a big part of their retinue. He also remarked he had some trouble picking up spells that weren’t overly circumstantial (though he made excellent use of divine favor and divine power’s extra castings per day). I noticed this when building Mollie, too. Hopefully this will be alleviated by the spells in the main part of APG. The same goes for the relatively few energy damage spells on the cleric list for some of the revelations of the other cleric types (which is what lead to the selection of the battle focus).
The cavalier player has expressed he had a blast and felt relatively useful (though he did gripe at me for not providing a really good target for Challenge). He glossed over the Oath mechanics, but he really enjoyed Stem the Tide (which kicked in twice) and had some trouble deciding which Order to take (which is a sign of a significant decision).
As an addendum, I've been working on villains for the next adventure, and the other foci seem better than we thought at first glance; I'm probably going to wind up with several oracles showing up just to see how all their permutations look.
All-in-all, despite some grousing, fun was had. We should get some more testing in over the holidays, and I plan to work in all the new classes as NPCs as best I can.