Doomsday Dawn - The Lost Star

[Robin96]

So, just took part in a runthrough of the first adventure of Doomsday Dawn. It was fun! Well, when we weren't running through the rulebook, trying to recall what did what at least.

The party was a bit unique - a goblin druid with a wolf companion, two rogues (I was a halfling, and the other human), and a dwarven monk who we realized partially in had not boosted his dexterity.

As you'll note, no cleric or paladin or divine sorcerer to be seen. Our druid always was not preparing any healing spells going in.

We did the adventure in two dives. As a player, I had to say it felt *really* nice to have dex to damage at first as a rogue.. Being able to roll practically every skill with no penalty was also nice - however, I never felt like I was really succeeding at anything too well. Even Perception, which was expert, was often times my lowest roll. As my Wis was only 12, I wasn't expecting a miracle, but it felt odd given how it was 'better' than all those skills I only was trained in. I'm sure as we try the higher level activities this will change, but for now it kinda felt like having a 'You Participated' trophy.

There were struggles though - I would say the biggest was the catacomb/skeleton room. A tight space where 3 or 4 enemies could pile onto one target *hurt.* Multiple players went down in that one, and one nearly died.

It also felt a little off when we came across the Pharasma puzzle/secrets. I'm sure that a player who happened to pick Lore up for her, or was a cleric of her, would have felt pleasantly surprised! But it felt weird knowing that there was probably something that could have been done with the items there, and missing out on it with no opportunity to learn of it (outside of our GM letting us).

One final note, I liked being able to not just have to kill/brute force our way through all our problems. Knocking out the initial guard of goblins and only dealing with the big bad himself was nice. I'm sure if we'd gotten a little luckier, we might have even been able to surprise him and get the leg up, or maybe sneaked by. Either way, more opportunities like that would be great.

[Freder1ck]

We just finished it as well and enjoyed it, for the most part. Our player who usually plays a fighter instead played a sorcerer (demonic bloodline) and did not feel very useful.

The other players were goblin rogue, human bard, and gnome druid. I played the druid and prepared 4 goodberries before going in (they last one full day). We fought the initial goblins pretty quickly (but forgot to loot them until after everything else, oops).

Our bard used telekinetic projectile to throw the statue from the fountain, which was something that the book did not anticipate. So our GM adjudicated that the quasits appeared, replaced the statue, and vanished again. Three of us drank the water and two of those got sick.

We then fought Darkus, which was a pretty tough battle. Our GM elected to do a combination of drain and longsword damage instead of just min/maxing for damage. Three of the characters dropped down to zero in the Drakus fight (hero points, yay). My druid took no damage at all. What turned the battle was a crit with a deadly d10 weapon (short bow) that had magic weapon cast upon it.

[Freder1ck]

I would add that the bard and druid fought at a -2 for most of the fight due to misunderstanding the penalty from being sickened...

[ENHenry]

We also used telekinetic projectile to toss the idol, but our dm just ruled that the statue shattered anyway and the quasits appeared. Literally, if a non-evil person touches it or it’s stricken by a solid blow, it breaks and the quasits appear. Being used as a Telekinetic projectile sounds pretty close to “stricken by a solid blow”. :-)

[Nick Wasko]

We just finished with 5 players: goblin rogue, gnome druid, human paladin, elf ranger, and halfling bard (myself). Once we got over the initial hiccups of flipping between pages to check various rules, we loved the flow of the game with the 3 action system. Our rogue was able to sneak ahead and get the jump on the first group of goblins, and also got the party to avoid the fungus and vermin encounters entirely.

A few adjustments were particularly hard for us. First, remembering to make the GM roll all the Secret checks. We were so used to rolling our own Knowledge and Stealth checks that we kept forgetting not to do it ourselves. Second, keeping track of who had a free Hand available. Our paladin got in trouble with having enough hands to heal himself a couple times. As a bard, my first turn was almost always A) drop the torch, B) pull out the instrument, C) inspire courage, after which I could use my spells freely by playing the instrument. When I level him up, I will almost certainly take light as a new cantrip so I don't have to keep doing that.

A few things stuck out to me. First, there are a few niggling little rules that we took for granted in Pathfinder 1.0 that either weren't addressed, or if they were I couldn't find them. Things like "if I miss with my bow, can I recover the arrow?" or "which weapons/armor are okay for druids to use?" While it's not vital to address these for the playtest, I hope they are included in the final update (particularly the weapons/armor that are acceptible for certain classes, since having a Trait indicating that they are viable seems like a trivial inclusion).

Second, some of the tables could really benefit from page numbers (e.g. the spell lists) to make use at the table more efficient. Hyperlinks in the PDFs would be ideal, but minimally some more page references will help players adapt to the new layout of the book.

Third, encounters with lots of enemies get a whole lot more dangerous with the new action economy. Like Robin96, we got hammered by the crypt encounter. In our case, we botched our Lore/Religion checks to identify a skeleton's resistances and then spent all of the first turn hitting them with attacks that dealt no damage. As a result, we got hit hard when those enemies came up in the initiative count. We also struggled with the goblin spellcaster near the fire pit, but that was mainly because no one could roll above a 10 to stand up after the grease spell. Three PCs were knocked to 0 in that fight, and all the rest fought from a prone position.

Fourth, while the action economy is certainly better for gameplay, chokepoints remain a scourge that slow combat to a crawl. That seems like more of a cartography consideration than a flaw with the rules, but it bears repeating.

Those were mostly small nitpicks, though. Overall it was a great experience, and I can't wait to try the higher level playtests!