RPG Superstar Season 9 Top 16
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Minor Spoilers within
You've been warned
The situation
A small group of wannabe vigilantes hope to are trying to make a name for themselves and get established as a force within the Osirion City of Wati. In order to establish their cover as a group of archeologist scholars, they have applied with the Grand Mausoleum to get the rights to investigate one of the newly opened buildings in the Necropolis. Knowing that they may run into undead problems they have brought in the outside adventuring priestess (Kyra Pregen).
General Observations and Comments
1) I handpicked scenarios in round 1 of the playtest that generally had solid social aspects to them. The switch rules resulted in deaths when players got caught in social mode instead of vigilante mode. This time, I picked a good old fashioned dungeon crawl. After securing their contract in social mode, the 3 vigilantes (replaced the Zealot with pregen Kyra since we had 1 GM and 3 players and wanted to remain PFS legal) spent all of the rest of the adventure in vigilante mode. I quickly found this was a poor choice to take 3 vigilantes on.
2) Despite overall decent (not great) perception, the party got ambushed early on, and hit a couple traps that hurt.
Avenger Observations
Dr. Korgen Kain, Chellish Archeologist
aka Hellknight by Night
1) This character really pointed out the need for a social trait(s) to open up skills. In this case, making a scholar as the "day job" and social aspect of the character, he really didn't have knowledge skills available to him. This character ended up taking both Osirionologist and Scholar of ruins to be able to open up some knowledge skill options. That meant no combat traits on the other end.
2) Level 1 avengers are sooooo booooring in a dungeon crawl. At least a fighter has an extra feat to start down the road of an interesting build. In vigilante mode, the avenger is just a level 1 warrior. The character was planned to be a heavily armored tank (that would move surprisingly well) in the future, but at level 1, it didn't have much going for it.
3) 2 Less HP at level 1 doesn't seem like much of a difference, but it was in this case on one occasion. Front lining with low fort saves was painful as well in one case. He took a strength penalty very early in this adventure, and the party had no way to fix it.
4) This character was really hurting when hardness and DR came into play (along with a strength penalty). It made what seemed like an easy fight, a difficult one and a second fight into a deadly one that ended in the TPK.
Stalker Observations
Evalyen of Kyonin, Half-elf Osirionologist
aka Shadowbow
1) See Avenger #1...escept this character had self taught scholar and Osirionologist.
2) See Avenger #2...except hitting slightly less. This character was going to go the sniper route and build around that with stalker talents and feats.
3) He's definitely not as good of a dungeon scout as a rogue (or some other trap-spotting classes) although they aren't that good at it at level 1 either. The stalker found traps using the barbarian method as more often than not, except without the HP to back that up.
4) A trap with resulting in -2 CON was the beginning of the end.
5) Hardness/DR was a real problem. Party got through one fight that way, but a second resulted in a TPK.
Warlock Observations
Alamet Turth, Osirioni Scholar
aka The Sand Sage
1) When it came to skills, first thing that became very apparent was the lack of climb skill. Second was that there were several gaps in knowledges on this character, although with others filling in, this character didn't invest their traits in scholarly stuff, and focused on the knowledges they had.
2) Having spells at level 1, this character actually seemed far stronger than the others at this point. Didn't save him in the end, but he was the hero of a couple encounters where the more martial types weren't effective. Once he ran out of spells, that's when things turned really bad.
Kyra Observations
1) Kyra was the MVP of the party until her death. Part of that is because a cleric which was a good fit for undead. Part of it was because 2 of the 3 vigilantes just didn't bring that much to the table at level 1. Their selection of cool abilities hits at level 2.
2) Kyra burned through healing resources very quickly between traps and early fights. When the party found some cure light wounds potions, they already wanted them badly.
Overall Result
1) 1 Ambush got the drop on the party (in spite of decent perception across the party) and inflicted poison on the Avenger, which hurt damage output.
2) Two different traps used up some healing, but the addition of con damage hurt more.
3) A CR 1/2 combat ended up using up resources, because both the avenger and stalker had issues inflicting damage. The creatures fortunitely don't hit hard, but since the fight went 5 rounds, the damage actually ended up adding up and using up healing from the cleric and offensive spells from the warlock. This is the battle where the warlock actually was most valuable.
4) A CR1 and CR2 fight ran together and had 3 monsters that hit hard, and one of those who they couldn't really harm. Party got trapped between the two fights, Kyra got full attacked (bite/claw/claw/rend) and went down, and things went downhill from there.
5) One interesting item...1 character got branded. The party didn't live long enough to affect social/vigilante switches, but it would have been an interesting situation.
6) TPK happened about 1/4 of the way through the module.
Conclusions
1) This adventure was harder than I remember. (Ran it about a year ago for PFS.) We had no deaths, but I think we had 6 players + animal companions, so the action economy was more in the players favor. The vigilantes really were lacking the tools for a dungeon crawl though. The avenger wanting to go sword and board (to use the shield talent) meant the party just didn't have the damage output to overcome DR, and the warlock was only able to bail them out on that problem once, not twice. So party fit was a little bit of it.
2) Although we covered skill gaps with traits, it would be nice if the class actually had mechanics on the social side to actually get skills that go with your social identity, whether those are craft, knowledge, or profession. The +4 from social grace is nice, but (A) it doesn't help while in vigilante identities and (B) they are still out of class skills in many cases. (FYI After talking through this after the TPK, the party determined if they had to do it again, they'd have all gone into the dungeon in their social guises instead of their vigilante guises since the only witness who they'd be breaking cover for was Kyra. Everything else was bugs and dead stuff. That would have resulted in +4 knowledge or linguistics skills for each character.)
3) The biggest observation I had was just how bad level 1 avenger and stalker was. That WAS NOT what I was expecting or setting up. I've been starting at level 2 or higher in pretty much all builds, so I hadn't really seen level 1 in action. So that was a bit of a surprise for me. (Low fort saves bit the party twice, where someone failed a save they would have otherwise made. Party was 3/7 on fort saves on the whole, resulting in 2 str damage for the Avenger and 2 con damage for the stalker.)
4) At level 1 at least, you can't see much difference in a level 1 warlock and a level 1 wizard when it comes to the casting side, but the warlock has more HP and carries a better weapon.
5) We will lay off of multiple vigilante parties. During both rounds, we've had a lot of vigilante deaths that way. I figured that playtesting that way tests how well the 4 specialties fill the prototype roles in a party by filling them all. However, they all have so much in common, it looks like it leaves a lot of gaps in the party as a result. From this point forward, I'll focus on single vigilantes in more mixed parties. (The other issue with that is only gaining feedback on 1 specialty at a time, because the vigilante parties were good for gathering lots of data fast too.)
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My local game group just started Mummy's Mask. I remember the first few encounters quite well. I played a character with Trapfinding and find it easy to believe the Stalker doesn't fit that role well unless they are working extra hard for it.
You mention that the lack of fort saves were noticed, did you happen to see the good will and reflex saves see much action?
My PFS Stalker is at level 3 and has social grace (intimidate) and likes to demoralize. At early levels, it has been tempting to just do social persona and risk the disguise checks if I'm unable to take advantage of renown.
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RPG Superstar Season 9 Top 16
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Never made a single will or reflex save early on, so ironically, they didn't come into play. However, there were two sources of poison. (One was a creature that struck 2 players, one saved, one didn't...until the third try. Second was a trap, and it took 3 saves before succeeding there too.)
I know for a fact there are will and reflex saves later on, but the party died before we got there.
I'm tempted to just go social mode all the time and not care about consequences too, but it would be out of character for the concept of the current stalker.