Skinsaw Murders Playtest--Boreal Sorcerer (spoilers hidden)


Round 2: Words of Power Playtest


After playtesting an Alchemist who died in Burnt Offerings for the APG playtest (and posting his findings online), I convinced one of my players in my sporadic home-for-the-holidays game to play a Sorcerer using WoP for Skinsaw Murders. He was hesistant at first because there were very few word family choices and he felt he couldn't find very many to synergise well or match his theme, but I promised him that he could sub out all his words as soon as we saw more (we probably won't play that particular game too much more until Ultimate Magic hits the streets). There are some similarities to what Zurai found with his playtest (the only one I've seen so far, and amusingly also a Boreal Sorcerer), but my player was willing to take some effects that were other energy types rather than stay tight for theming (since he knew there werent many words available), so there were a few differences:

The character was 4th level. Like Zurai's Boreal Sorcerer, he suffered greatly from lack of Mage Armour--his AC was 12 for most of the adventure, 10 flat-footed, and this made him rather easy to hit.

The character build is as described in my thread in the discussion forum--he has Greater Elemental Focus [Ice] and Irrisen Icemage, with the campaign trait from the APG that gives three specific spells a +1 DC and caster level--clarification in the spoiler block

Special note::
I made my own clarification when it comes to that trait, Spell Perfection, and other similar effects that boost one specific spell--"Whenever a feature tells you to choose a spell, you may instead choose one effect word. You only apply the benefits of that feature to Words of Power spells that use the chosen effect word to determine their school of magic (in other words, the chosen effect word must be one of the highest level words in the spell for the effect to count).

He took some non-ice spells as well, figuring he could apply Irrisen Icemage 3/day if necessary to keep his theme.

Right away, we ran into the duration inconsistency, mentioned in other threads--the pdf contradicts itself, saying that two separate durations are tracked separately in one place and that the shorter duration is used for both in another place. We decided that the durations should be tracked separately, since otherwise it needlessly weakens spells that combine the duration acid spells (which already weaken when combined because their SR: None is removed). This was actually never relevant, but it made the Boreal Sorcerer very excited for later levels and some combinations he could do.

Without Word Burning yet, the Sorcerer's only contribution to the adventure so far in terms of spells (he roleplayed and had some ideas in the mystery part) has been Frost Fingers. However, he is very very good at Frost Fingers. His Frost Fingers do 5d6 damage with a DC 20 save to take half and avoid the stagger effect.

All Encounters Summarized:

They're in the Misgivings, having just freed Iesha when we stopped the session, so they haven't had too many encounters. Here's what we have so far:

Scarecrow Ghoul--Norrith rolled low on initiative, but his Cold Snap cantrip finished off the ghoul (it had 2 hit points left by the time he could act).

Ambush by Rogors and 6 Ghouls--Norrith failed Perception and rolled very poorly on initiative, so few ghouls survived to his first turn. He finished one that was almost dead with Cold Snap again. This is more a matter of ghouls being extremely unsurvivable creatures compounded with the Cleric of Sarenrae with the Glory Domain channeling twice to hit all the ghouls.

3 Carrionstorms--I used the updated versions (I think updated by LordFyre?) of these swarms, which were particularly nasty. The entire party would have certainly TPKed if not for Norrith. He shot out a small cone that defeated two of the three swarms outright and left the other one (which made its save) close to final death. The monk finished it off, and the other members managed to stabilize.

Norrith the Boreal Sorcerer will likely become much more effective once he gets Word Burning--this will let him use Servitor II with a 4 point buff as a standard action, which is a great summon option at this level, as well as a few other useful combinations. He also plans to pick up Intensify Spell by level 7 at the latest--clarification in the spoiler block

Intensify Spell clarification:
There's some ambiguity here--I'm fairly certain that the rules do not intend to allow a spell that combines 4 5-dice cap effect words to do 40d6 damage at level 10, so I told Norrith's player that he can choose *one* effect word to have its cap raised by 5, not all of them.
This will let him get good mileage out of his lower-level effect words. He's also really looking forward to the later levels when he will get barrier spells and the ability to combine two non-cantrip effect words to make a new spell.

In total, though he admitted that the ability to pull out the exact shape he needed to defeat the swarms was more useful than he expected, Norrith's player said he still prefers the regular sorcerer. He enjoyed the chance to use a new system because he likes fiddling with new rules, but his main issue is probably immaterial once we see the other families--he prefers playing a Sorcerer with extremely varied effects available (he's particular a fan of fog cloud and other crowd control spells), and as is, he had to take a high number of evocation direct damage spells, which made him feel less varied.

We did not run into the issue mentioned on the discussion board with the calculations being too difficult to use in play, but admittedly I went over the possibilities with the player ahead of time, and he pretty much knew his default combos and what he could change and still fit into the word cost limit by heart.

Hope this helps!--I'm not sure if I will be able to get together a group with someone who can play WoP again before the end of the playtest, but I'll try.

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