The Demon Within - Avenger + Sorcerer

[negativeview]

My daughter is sick and we can't join our normal game. Time for me and the wife to do a strange play test where I play and am DM (less than ideal I know) and the wife is a legit player. I'm playing a variant of a Intimidate-based Fighter I made a while ago, this time with 12 levels of Avenger.

We're doing however much of The Demon Within we can get through. The first thing I noticed is that invisiblity + Frightning Appearance is somewhat ambiguous. Do the enemies "witness the attack" if I'm greater invisibilitied? I'm ruling yes for now. We need the help.

I decide that I expect that the main dude being inaugurated is going to be assassinated, so I can't afford a FIVE MINUTE change time. I have to be here in Vigilante form. I'm hiding in the rafters. My wife has managed to snag an invitation proper and thus is in the bleachers. I'm already nervous because the party is split.

The fight my wife chose (she's making all the choices because I have more info than I should have) is a tough one. I'm moving at a 20 because I needed the AC and Vigilante doesn't have the Armor Training I had been relying on. That might be just a build issue, though it's the biggest thing I've noticed so far. I've intimidated the demon -- my build design is working, he's just very slow to move around the battlefield.

I died. [Edited to add: But the demon was at 3HP when I died and the wife finished him off.] Full attacks from the demon were brutal, and it was my job to soak them all. Luckily, we're literally in a temple full of clerics. We were very ill prepared for demons. That was almost definitely part of character design, but so far everything except intimidate and reasonable but not insane amounts of damage, I suck at.

I'll continue if we continue the campaign, but we're stoping for now because the sick daughter woke back up.

[Cavall]

That's too bad, had hoped a little Shaken may give you the push needed to stay alive. Maybe some cruel weapons would help? That's making something sick that's shaken. Would be a huge boost to an intimidate build.

Hope she feels better soon.

[negativeview]

I think if the party were bigger, it would have helped a lot. Really there's a lot of suboptimal things with this testing, but it's probably better than nothing and there aren't that many people posting actual play tests yet.

For one thing, I managed to frighten the demon. Who ran away, provoking basically no attacks of opportunity because I was the only front-liner. The spell caster wasn't designed to do damage (a character build issue, the character wasn't built to be part of a two-person party, it was just one that was already built when our plans suddenly included a one-shot campaign test) and her one damaging spell was fire based. And the demon has resistance to fire.

Both me and the wife found some things we want to change about the characters, and since this is what it is and not a serious session or anything, we likely will before we continue. She should be more able to deal damage, and I should be better at ranged. When that demon ran way, it basically just bought us a round where he couldn't full-round attack. I wasn't really able to take pot shots at him.

[negativeview]

The wife and I have been binge creating characters and are going to continue this campaign, but with four characters (two each). I'm still playing the Avenger, though I took the opportunity to tweak some things -- mostly gear. My second is a Magus. The wife is playing a Bloodrager and Spell-less Ranger (Third Party). We aren't going for the optimum team, just trying to not die due to being short personed since that's not really a fair test if we do that.

Will make little microposts once we get started. The wife is currently finishing up a companion character sheet.

[Mark Seifter]

Makes sense! I'm actually pretty impressed that you guys had the demon so low with only 2 characters. I'm guessing you were really well-coordinated in your attack.

[negativeview]

We are level 12 and the AP is for level 11. But it's also for 3.5, not Pathfinder, so the numbers might be all kinds of screwy. We're doing MUCH better with four characters. DR 10 is problematic for this round of characters, but even with DR 10 it just takes longer, still not really in danger of dying. We need to get out of this dungeon and go shopping too -- nobody considered healing powers OR buying healing potions. Oops.

[negativeview]

We have made it out of the tunnels. With four members it wasn't difficult, but one of the characters got ganged up on (it was in the description) and is hurt. The wife unknowingly decided to skip going into the room that would have had healing potions because she didn't want to stay in the dungeon any longer than she needed to. Oops! But that's why I let her make all the decisions, because I would have known the right answer and it wouldn't have been fun.

After going into the cathedral, we managed to survive, though my Magus was hiding in the corner near the end because he ran out of spell slots and after DR did 1 point per attack. After that fight, the wife wanted to go back and see what we had missed because she didn't believe that there was so few healing things around. A bit metagamey, but she wasn't wrong and we found the quasi-unlimited healing device and managed to heal up.

We're calling the session now, with the wife asking to sleep in the healing area because it was untainted and she believes that the demons don't want to come in there.

We'll see eventually if she's right about that...

[negativeview]

To make this more about the Avenger, he did a LOT of damage this play test. He basically felt like a fighter. When things are immune to fear (which has happened only once so far) he is basically a weaker fighter. But he's still a valuable member of the party, most of which don't do that much damage. This slight rebuild works a lot better for sure.

I haven't had much opportunity to use anything approaching a social side, but this is a very combat-heavy AP apparently. I had it sitting on a shelf and didn't really think through which one to use for this.

[Mark Seifter]

No worries, sometimes it's useful to see how it works in non-optimal situations. If you're doing well even without social situations, that's good to know!