Create Pit
Throw Acid Flasks
Win
Hardness applies to most energy damage. So the hardness 10 will mean your acid flask won't do anything.
Although the create pit and/or grease is an excellent tactic.
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Huh...I've played PFS with a full party of Lems....which had me thinking.
What if this was a party of level 1 pregens?
Lem+Merisel+Kyra+Ezren+?
The only level 1 adventure I know of with robots in it is Trial by Machine;
It might actually be a lot rougher in The Technic Siege and particularly in The Silver Mount Collection, which assume competent and well-equipped PCs. If you're gonna do those with pregens, make sure to bring Amiri for 2H damage.
Adamantine ignores up to hardness of 20, so adamantine weapons should work just fine I think. Adamantine Blanch is different though. It merely treats the weapon as adamantine for the purposes of ignoring DR.
Robot constructs in general are cool, but they should have lower Hardness. I am sure that some people even forget that ranged attacks deal reduced damage, so arrow would need 22 damage per hit to deal 1 damage to a robot with hardness of 10. It's impossible basically to pierce it with ranged attacks, so only option is to wield 2h weapon as people suggested.
Didn't know this, can someone make a link to the rule in the PRD? Or say the Chapter/page, please?
What I always recommend is a few pieces of durable adamantine arrows/bolts/stones. That will go through hardness.
I'm not sure it is PFS legal though. Someone told me you have to buy a full stack of 50 of the dang things. Which then gets back to the 'too expensive for low level' issue.
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Didn't know this, can someone make a link to the rule in the PRD? Or say the Chapter/page, please?Adamantine ignores up to hardness of 20, so adamantine weapons should work just fine I think. Adamantine Blanch is different though. It merely treats the weapon as adamantine for the purposes of ignoring DR.
Robot constructs in general are cool, but they should have lower Hardness. I am sure that some people even forget that ranged attacks deal reduced damage, so arrow would need 22 damage per hit to deal 1 damage to a robot with hardness of 10. It's impossible basically to pierce it with ranged attacks, so only option is to wield 2h weapon as people suggested.
That only apples to objects with hardness. Creatures with hardness do not apply that rule.
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I think "Risen from the Sands" and "Silver Mount Collection" were both created to see how many people they could make ragequit. For most level 1-3 characters it's hard to have an adamantine weapon as spending their first 3,000 on that is not usually their first thought.
Spoiler, I am playing Silver Mount Collection tonight.
I'm not worried though, I'll be playing my Martial Artist, and exploit weakness should get me through.
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I think "Risen from the Sands" and "Silver Mount Collection" were both created to see how many people they could make ragequit. For most level 1-3 characters it's hard to have an adamantine weapon as spending their first 3,000 on that is not usually their first thought.Spoiler, I am playing Silver Mount Collection tonight.
I'm not worried though, I'll be playing my Martial Artist, and exploit weakness should get me through.
Please let us know how much you hated it. I'm sure it'll vary some on how lenient the GM is though. Few PFS locals got extremely upset over the scenario due to some of the insanity within it. Each scenario contains a basic description so I've not spoiled anything that's basic knowledge. :P
A handful of durable adamantine arrows -- one in each ranged attacker's quiver -- and a wand of abundant ammunition go a long way.
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It's was pretty awful.
We managed to take out 3 of the four, but everyone had taken heavy damage.
The barbarian had run away due to being at low hitpoints, I got down to -13 hp with a 14 con, and would have died unless the bard hit me with a wand. At that point I was at -5HP and prone, and then the witch hit me with a cure moderate bringing me up to 5 HP and prone. My gf bard was at 8 HP, and plaidwandering was similarly low.
plaidwandering hit it, and drew another attack, killing his character. The enchanter sorcerer who had been hiding after running out of level one spell slots then used a higher level slot to cast MM and killed the final robot. If there hadn't been so many wasted actions, and the sorcerer used a second level slot to cast Magic Missile sooner, he wouldn't have died.
We were okay through the rest of the encounters, but were unable to defeat the final swarm. We had zero area affect potential other than alchemist fire and acid. Luckily we grabbed Pendleton and ran out.
Don't forget the option of trying to outsmart a construct. They're usually mindlessly obeying a specific command, like "destroy all invaders". So don't be an invader. Be a visitor.
I obviously can not confirm, but I believe the point to that scenario was it was intended for people to have read and taken to heart what is in the technology guide and prepared appropriately.
So if you are going in-
A prepared group should have things like a big strong two-handed weapon guy with power attack, durable adamantine arrows, wand of magic missile, nets, grease, some one with the technologist feat, etc...
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The only construct I'm aware of that breaks weapons is the caryatid column.
For that one, I'd say grapple it, pin it, tie it up, then CdG with expendable weapons. Or adamantine weapons, obviously. Although it can't be disarmed, it's sword can be sundered, in which case it has only unarmed strikes left...
If you suspect you'll be facing a lot of constructs soon, adamantine weapons become a much higher priority.
Amusingly, your weapon's hardness skill applies (which is good). One must remember that the hardness of the weapon is equal to the weapon's base hardness (10 for iron/steel, 15 mithral, 20 adamantine), with an additional +2 hardness for every +1 enhancement bonus the item has. This means that an iron sword with a magic weapon spell cast on it has a hardness of 12, while an iron +3 weapon (hardness 16) is exceedingly unlikely to be broken (and a +4 iron weapon is impossible for said caryatid to break).
Naturally you won't be carrying around any high level magic items while these creatures are relevant, but depending on what you're wielding, you might be able to beat them down pretty well before your mundane weapons (possibly oiled) break down.
Alternatively, just whack them with alchemist fire. They have DR instead of hardness so alchemist fire, acid, and similar things ignore it completely. Their touch-AC is pretty terrible too. Just burn them down.
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A caryatid column has DR 5/- and 36 hitpoints. An average second level martial power attacking with a greatsword deals 2d6+9-5 damage, averaging 11. They'll kill the column in an average of 3.27 hits.
A mundane greatsword has hardness 10 and 10 hitpoints. A hit from the caryatid column deals 3d6-10 damage, averaging 1.458. The column will cause the broken condition to the sword in an average of 3.43 hits.
The odds of the column actually destroying your weapon before you destroy it are exceedingly slim; even if there's only one person in your party attacking the column and they're doing it in one of the least safe ways (hitting it with a normal weapon), they are at almost no risk of having their weapon destroyed. It will likely be broken though, which can be repaired with 10 minutes and mending.
More realistically, the column isn't going to break a weapon at all due to multiple people attacking it (some with non-weapons or ranged attacks).
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Yeah, I'm kinda annoyed with The Silver Mount Collection as well. The difficulty of the fights at high tier was fierce. We hacked our way through it with some work, but our group routinely kills bosses in just two rounds, so that's actually a sign that the fight is pretty hard.
The problem is with the ending. Basically, you have to be reading the scenario designer's mind. If you're looking at it from the writer's perspective it all makes sense. It's just that his viewpoint was not the most intuitive viewpoint; others were more intuitive, and the clues were very easily misinterpreted.
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I obviously can not confirm, but I believe the point to that scenario was it was intended for people to have read and taken to heart what is in the technology guide and prepared appropriately.
So if you are going in-
A prepared group should have things like a big strong two-handed weapon guy with power attack, durable adamantine arrows, wand of magic missile, nets, grease, some one with the technologist feat, etc...
This is the exact description of how to not build a PFS scenario. In a homegame you know the people you're playing with and you can structure a group accordingly. When playing at a local PFS event you typically have anywhere from 10-30 varying people all with varying builds, classes, etc. You may play at one table with 2 clerics, 2 archers, and 2 wizards and another table with 1 barbarian, 2 rangers, 1 fighter, and an alchemist.
To expect every random person that sits down at a table to be a well oiled machine, know all their character to its fullest, and have gear that covers every possible situation that may arise is absurd. This scenario was poorly designed and hopefully the author does get constructive feedback from this if he/she plans to design anymore in the future. Not many people like running this scenario because it's one of those "If I run this there's a 90% chance that I'm going to TPK them." With players at the very low tier quite possibly not having the gold or prestige to resurrect after this slaughter.
I obviously can not confirm, but I believe the point to that scenario was it was intended for people to have read and taken to heart what is in the technology guide and prepared appropriately.
So if you are going in-
A prepared group should have things like a big strong two-handed weapon guy with power attack, durable adamantine arrows, wand of magic missile, nets, grease, some one with the technologist feat, etc...This is the exact description of how to not build a PFS scenario. In a homegame you know the people you're playing with and you can structure a group accordingly. When playing at a local PFS event you typically have anywhere from 10-30 varying people all with varying builds, classes, etc. You may play at one table with 2 clerics, 2 archers, and 2 wizards and another table with 1 barbarian, 2 rangers, 1 fighter, and an alchemist.
To expect every random person that sits down at a table to be a well oiled machine, know all their character to its fullest, and have gear that covers every possible situation that may arise is absurd. This scenario was poorly designed and hopefully the author does get constructive feedback from this if he/she plans to design anymore in the future. Not many people like running this scenario because it's one of those "If I run this there's a 90% chance that I'm going to TPK them." With players at the very low tier quite possibly not having the gold or prestige to resurrect after this slaughter.
I at least partially agree with you on this. But I don't agree that the author was trying to make people ragequit.
Also, as I said, I only partially agree with you.
I hear a lot of complaints at my local that the low level scenarios are too easy. They are boring and just a grind to get through to the 'fun' levels. There is no need to be prepared, make plans, be clever, or work together. The scenarios are actually so easy that it encourages you to not do any of those things, since if you charge/blast you will blow through the scenario faster.
Some of them have been talking about having an 'advanced' table that will rush through 2 entry level scenarios in the standard PFS time block.
Everyone says 'This scenario isn't for noobs. Requires you to be prepared and be clever.' Etc... I've only seen it run a few times. But the only time I've seen a TPK is when the players all ignored those warnings. The time it was run with mostly 0 XP brand new PC's there were a couple deaths. I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing though.
I think a lot of people feel like there should be some intro level scenarios that are tough enough to encourage players to be prepared, make plans, attempt to be clever, and work as a team. However, I do think that the author went a bit too far in this direction.
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I obviously can not confirm, but I believe the point to that scenario was it was intended for people to have read and taken to heart what is in the technology guide and prepared appropriately.
So if you are going in-
A prepared group should have things like a big strong two-handed weapon guy with power attack, durable adamantine arrows, wand of magic missile, nets, grease, some one with the technologist feat, etc...This is the exact description of how to not build a PFS scenario. In a homegame you know the people you're playing with and you can structure a group accordingly. When playing at a local PFS event you typically have anywhere from 10-30 varying people all with varying builds, classes, etc. You may play at one table with 2 clerics, 2 archers, and 2 wizards and another table with 1 barbarian, 2 rangers, 1 fighter, and an alchemist.
To expect every random person that sits down at a table to be a well oiled machine, know all their character to its fullest, and have gear that covers every possible situation that may arise is absurd. This scenario was poorly designed and hopefully the author does get constructive feedback from this if he/she plans to design anymore in the future. Not many people like running this scenario because it's one of those "If I run this there's a 90% chance that I'm going to TPK them." With players at the very low tier quite possibly not having the gold or prestige to resurrect after this slaughter.
I at least partially agree with you on this. But I don't agree that the author was trying to make people ragequit.
Also, as I said, I only partially agree with you.
I hear a lot of complaints at my local that the low level scenarios are too easy. They are boring and just a grind to get through to the 'fun' levels. There is no need to be prepared, make plans, be clever, or work together. The scenarios are actually so easy that it encourages you to not do any of those things, since if you charge/blast...
I think one issue we are both seeing here is that local PFS areas are a bit dynamic in the sense that some places have smaller groups and sometimes more experienced players that group together for scenarios and other local PFS areas having larger group and less organized teams.
The local area that I'm a part of consists of about 30 players with a new player or two showing up every other month. We have about 4-5 tables go off each time-slot and about 2 time-slots in 1 day. People rotate around with different characters in different tier slots so it's not as easy as some places with a smaller pool of players.
I will admit I was hyping it up a bit by saying that the author was deliberately trying to make people ragequit but was only doing so to drive a point across that if the party isn't a group of players that regularly play with each other then you're most likely not going to have a "well oiled machine" of a team.
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In looking at the end encounter, I don't think our party could have defeated even if we were 100% fresh. And while we were random composition - we did not lack a normal amount of appropriate consumables. With seven players even!
I think it would have been mechanically impossible. Even if we knew the exact details of how the monster worked, I don't think it would have helped.
Everyone could have been max level for the tier we were in AND completely fresh for that fight, and I don't think it would have helped defeat it.
If the two bards both had Snapdragon Fireworks, the Sorcerer had taken Flaming Sphere, and the Witch had taken Winter's Grasp, we would have had a chance to whittle it down. But with the spell lists of what people had, there was no way.