Not having been able to attend PaizoCon I hope some of you fellow Pathfinders would kind enough to tell about your experience with the Grand Melee special event this year.
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Not having been able to attend PaizoCon I hope some of you fellow Pathfinders would kind enough to tell about your experience with the Grand Melee special event this year.
Mr. Diego--
You can find my thoughts on the event here.
-Pain
p.s. Please pass along my respects to the Grandmother.
Mr. Diego--
You can find my thoughts on the event here.
-Pain
p.s. Please pass along my respects to the Grandmother.
Thank you Painlord, that was a great battle report.
I understand you had a good time.I will pass it along :)
I would love to hear how other teams fared.
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I played at a 8-9 table with the infamous Kyle Baird as our DM.
Our Lineup (correct me if any of this is wrong):
Bruce Hilga playing Ginsu a tian samurai wielding a deadly naginata.
Todd (last name?) playing Shala a pint-sized crusader and mender devoted to iomadae.
Mattastophic playing Gerard a dragon-touched front-line marshal.
Elora playing her fearsome hammer wielding Ulfen maiden.
George (last name?) playing a supportive gnome erastil cleric.
Myself playing Brom a half-orc warrior roaring thundering warcries.
The Pre-Game:
We go in knowing we have a fight on our hands. Mattastophic, despite being a shameless optimizer, is a good strategist and combined with my Jenksism we come up with a solid list of buffs and consumables for the party to pick up that will give us a fighting chance. This list included:
A scroll of mass bear's endurance
Potions of Heroism for all
Potions of resist energy
Potions of Fly
Potions Lesser Resto
Brom's personal consumables included:
Potions of Owls Wisdom
Potions of Cats Grace
A cracked spellstoring ioun stone
A wand of shield
(More to come)
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Round 1
Challenge: A bunch of flying enemies with class levels. 2 alchemists, 2 archers (rangers or fighters), and 2 sorcerers.
Elora chugs a potion of fly and moves up to meet one of the alchemists. Gerard does the bard thing (inspire courage and extended haste), Shala and the Erastil cleric do some other last second buffs, Ginsu waits hoping the enemies will come down to face us. Brom draws his massive composite bow and shoots the enemy archers.
The enemies open with a strafing bombing run (some new alchemist option), shooting Elora with their bows, and readying to disrupt our spellcasters.
Elora finishes off an alchemist while Ginsu flies up with Gerard and finishes the other. Between Brom's arrows and a summoned giant wasp one of the archers goes down. From there it's just cleanup.
Round 2
Challenge: 2 flying devils and one not-flying devil.
The flying devils immediately summon more not-flying devils. Gerard and Shala quickly dispatch the grounded devils. Elora flies up to deal with one flying devil while Brom and Ginsu fly up and deal with the other. Minimal damage is taken.
Round 3
Challenge: 1 Solar
Gerard digs deep and recalls the opponent is a solar. Realizing the party has no way of exploiting the angel's weakness we resolve to just power attack harder. Avoiding DR is for suckers. Several rounds later the Solar isn't an issue anymore.
Round 4
Challenge: A druid and an archer
If it's not a magus, why bother? The druid bends over and takes it in one round. The archer is ended a couple rounds later.
Round 5
Challenge: PAIN aka two dragons.
The dragons fly into position. Brom manages to go before them. He/I fly up to one, eat an OA for ~30 and then loose a bellowing roar. The dragon pisses itself and takes wing away from the arena. The party focuses the other dragon hard for a couple rounds taking it down by at least half. The lone dragon breathes once and full attacks once mauling the erastil cleric, Elora, Gerard, and Shala. The previously frightened dragon gathers its wits and returns breathing on most of the party again killing the Erastil cleric. The party buckles down and finishes the weakened dragon.
The party struggles to get into position to fight the second dragon. A couple breath weapons/full attacks later Brom is at ~40 hp, Gerard is at ~15 hp, Ginsu is at ~20 hp, and Elora is down at -20hp. The party, realizing this is their last chance to end things before there are some seriously casualties, unloads the hasted full attacks. Gerard hits for ~60 damage, Ginsu hits for ~70 damage, and Brom hits with all three attack for >100 damage. The dragon crumbles under the party's combined might. Team Taldor is victorious and Kyle hangs his head in defeat.
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Thanks for posting that rundown, Feral! Just one correction on round 3:
Fortunately for Lady Scatha, none of that deceptery mattered, as she uses the same strategy for all...furious earthbreaker to the face! ;-)
Thanks for posting that rundown, Feral! Just one correction on round 3:
** spoiler omitted **
psst, it was disguised as an Astral Deva. ;-)
psst, it was disguised as an Astral Deva. ;-)Thanks for posting that rundown, Feral! Just one correction on round 3:
** spoiler omitted **
Yes. That fact was very much confirmed with a Take-20 on a Knowledge(planes) check.
-Matt
Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 4, Legendary Games
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My table was playing at a fairly slow pace (for a variety of reasons) and made it into the 3rd round before tapping out in the face of charging samurai and warhorses. With only 4 PCs (EDIT - I mistyped 3 originally), most 1st level, they just didn't have the staying power.
Time-wise, we were done after 2 hours (probably 90 minutes of actual play time, mustered up a bit late and had a short break or two).
My table was playing at a fairly slow pace (for a variety of reasons) and made it into the 3rd round before tapping out in the face of charging samurai and warhorses. With only 3 PCs, most 1st level, they just didn't have the staying power.
Time-wise, we were done after 2 hours (probably 90 minutes of actual play time, mustered up a bit late and had a short break or two).
I played at a table of 4 players, at tier 10-11. We got to round 5 and ended up everyone tapping out after I died and had Breath of life cast on me. We went about 20-24 total combat rounds in a total of 6 to 6.5 hours of game time. We went longer than the other tables by on hour or two. The higher level games just take longer with so many enemies and effects in play.
The scoring scheme hurts smaller tables with less actions per round and fewer bonus points for living characters at the end of each round. Overall it was a great game though, thanks for running it Dragonmoon.
Kelly
+1 to everything Kelly said - thanks Dragnmoon!
Lots and Lots of fun - really stretched our higher level characters!
I didn't get to do grand melee this year. I heard that the 2 dragons sucked hardcore for most, as they were wiped. If I remember correctly, only 3 tables survived. One of them somehow managed to win the 2 dragon fight in three rounds.
That was us, I think--we finished all 5 challenges in 12 rounds. This was mostly because we were at the maximum APL and table size for our tier to be solely 3-4. The MVP was the Eagle Shaman, who cast Fly on the Oracle of Battle and summoned flying creatures (considering how many flying encounters there were). It was a tough competition--we still didn't win though!
Talking to GMs afterwards, it seems there was a lot of confusion over the minutiae of how to award points because of the many conditionals, so if any other venue runs this special later, be sure to have a pow-wow with your GMs if you can and explain the scoring.