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I ran this puppy six times at GenCon. It was a blast! Thanks to my many players for a good time! I wish I had known (prior to doing the survey) that it is only possible to do it once; I would have tried to give answers more reflective of the overall play experience. The session I had in mind when I did the survey was a bit of an outlier with respect to time. With that in mind, lemme give some more detailed feedback.
Spoiler city follows:
I was impressed by the way the upfront knowledge skill checks were handled in this scenario. The ramping difficulty to remember more details felt intuitive, though it might have thrown the players a bit, since it was a brand new mechanic. Too often, these sorts of checks either gate information that the players (not the characters) need in order to understand the scenario’s plot, or provide useless bits of Golarion trivia. The checks here avoided both pitfalls: they either granted a tangible advantage, or provided increasingly specific and useful information about the threats ahead. For what it’s worth, not one of my six tables managed to roll well enough to qualify for the checks about “The Dangers.”
The critical failures on the knowledge checks were great. I did not use secret checks; instead, I used the opportunity to show off the critical failure mechanic. The ability to lie to players, when they know it’s a possibility, is a beautiful thing. It creates uncertainty without the feeling that the GM is cheating or deliberately screwing the party.
A slight gripe: it isn’t clear to me why knowing the caravan’s route points to the Claw District as the location of a safe house, as the scenario implies that all of the caravan routes leave from the same city gate. Perhaps “Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Towns of the Inner Sea” would contradict this information. Dunno. That information needs to be in the scenario.
All of my parties dealt with the minotaurs without casualties, though several PCs got pretty bloodied by their Powerful Charges. It would have been nice to have some reminder text to the effect that the large-sized baddies didn’t treat the river as difficult terrain. This was implied by their tactics (and made intuitive sense), so I ran it that way, but the actual rules are in the Bestiary, which I didn’t get to look at until after the con. Even now, I think a lot of GMs are going to miss that bit, which will make the minotaurs sad.
Having the Minotaurs only speak Jotun was fun, as none of the pregens could understand them. I ended up mooing a lot. Between that, pantomime, and drawing in the muddy riverbank, the Minotaurs were generally able to negotiate surrender.
The super-condensed monster stat blocks are a thing of beauty. Seriously. Much love. It was odd having the tactics elsewhere, but I think I like it this way. The encounter descriptions flow better: “Here’s a thing, doing stuff,” rather than “Here’s a thing, dig through its stats to figure out what it’s doing.” If I needed to, I could note its morale conditions or other details in the margin.
The new, improved party size scaling is great. It’s sooo much easier to remember to drop in some extra baddies than to remove them or apply conditions/templates. Kudos!
More knowledge checks here. Again, nice that they provide actually useful information, as well as lore. Although it’s weird that, among local tribes, only the Gorebreathers worship Baphomet. I thought he was kind of a big deal among our horny friends.
I’m going to confess: I put the dice down and roleplayed this encounter pretty much every time. I mean, we rolled at the end of the conversation, but I didn’t run the sparring session once, even when no one crit the relevant DCs. Maybe I’m a bad GM. Maybe I can justify it as allowing significant situational modifiers for good roleplay.
Anyway, there were two reasons for this decision. First, the combat was nothing more than a rehash of the earlier one, only with terrain more favorable the PCs. To my mind, they’d already proven they could kick the butts of three Minotaurs. Knowing that the fight with Ryolle could run really long, I preferred to buy time by skipping this one. And at least two runs of this scenario went the full five hours, so I’m glad I did.
Second, it wasn’t clear to me why Mildora wanted them to spar, anyway. Now that I’m rereading the scenario, I found the answer (top full paragraph, p. 13). This should be called out earlier, preferably in the paragraph preceding the “Diplomacy” header. I need to know WHY an obstacle is an obstacle when it’s presented to me.
In any case, the minotaurs were fun to roleplay. But I’m an extremely silly person and enjoy being silly with minotaurs; other GMs might feel differently.
Again, I love the tiny stat blocks. They are my friends. What I didn’t love so much was the setup of this encounter. I’m not sure whether I should have allowed some Perception checks to identify the ambush ahead of time, allowing the PCs to set up somewhere other than in the middle of the map. Of course, there isn’t a party starting position indicated on the map, but the monster tactics call out “getting behind the PCs” at the start of combat, which said “smack in the middle” to me. I decided to confess my confusion to the players and surround ‘em.
It totally worked, but I think some players felt a bit cheated. On the other hand, it set up the clerics for some really boss 3-action Heal spells. I love watching Kyra go nuclear.
There were an awful lot of Fortitude saves being made in this encounter. Probably too many. It would have been better if Bolstering were a bit more generous, rather than applying only to a single source. The bookkeeping got hairy, especially for an easily-confused fellow like myself. Of course, that would have lessened the threat a bit, but that could have been balanced through some other means.
This isn’t scenario-specific, but I really like the way that the duration works on paralysis. Most characters were able to bust out pretty quickly (which was good), but even if they hadn’t, they could always see the light at the end of that particular tunnel getting closer as the DC decremented.
Hoo, boy, this was interesting. Particularly when there were two harpies involved. In this case (and I suppose I’m contradicting myself), targeted bolstering was amazing. More than once, I had characters get free from Ryolle, only to join his buddy’s fan club. So many PCs got so much exercise running back and forth over the map! Seriously, harpies should set themselves up as personal trainers.
I loved watching the party bomb each other with Thunderstones and Sound Burst in order to deafen themselves.
Eventually, most parties dealt with mass captivation by sending someone up next to Ryolle and reading an attack vs. him singing. I had to suggest the tactic, and I hope it works the way I think it does.
Several groups attempted Dispel Magic. The mechanics were less than clear. I calculated a DC of, if I recall correctly, 28 for the check, allowing it to (potentially) work against a single target. I do not know whether this was remotely correct.
Speaking of rules issues, I’m still not clear what skills are used for which Recall Knowledge checks, either for creatures or to identify items. What skill is used to know about harpies? Can I use Arcana to ID a flask of Alchemist’s Fire? How dumb do you have to be not to recognize a Tanglefoot Bag on sight? What kind of roll should you make (at what DC) to put together a good guess about the weird interaction with Ryolle’s magic stick?
Twice, the party, upon hearing that there were harpies ahead, decided to plug their ears. Clever! I handed out circumstance bonuses on their saves. It would be good to have some guidance as to how effective that ought to be. I used +4 the first time, and +2 the second. The smaller number felt right, and is what I would use again, barring further clarification.
Anyway, helluva fight in this encounter. The guards were ineffectual, but I think that was intended. The second harpy was a HUGE swing when it showed up, versus the one instance in which I only had five players, if only because of his additional control effect.
The players were kind of salty when they learned how difficult it would be to break free from control—no additional saves, no breaking upon getting hit by things other than the controlling harpy. On the other hand, it forced some really clever play, so I think most folks enjoyed the challenge.
I’m going to wrap this text wall up with three comments that are very not specific to the playtest scenario. First, the three-action economy is great. The players were nearly always able to do something useful with every action. Once things got hot, it often felt like not-quite-enough to do what they wanted, which is probably the sweet spot! It forced tough choices, but still let characters do cool things.
Second, dropping AOOs made for faster, more fluid combats. Yay!
Third... resonance. So much grumble before the game got started. Much less as the game went on. The only character that ever felt checked by resonance was the pregen alchemist, which was probably ok, as that’s his limiting resource. And this was mostly because his starting allocation was low on bombs. The players who adjusted his loadout before heading off into the woods had (as I recall) plenty of boom-boom.
Once again, thanks to my lovely players, and thanks to the creative folks who put this bad boy together.