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This past weekend 8/11-12 at the Cradle of Aviation museum on Long Island was the LI Retro Gaming Con. It was an amazing event where more than 2500 people came out. I volunteered to run the first section of Doomsday Dawn both as a way to get tons of feed back and to learn the game. I did run three four hour sessions and two shorter 2 hour session with the pregenerated characters and in the shorter ones I was able to go over character creation and they played with the characters they made. I got some great feedback about the game from all my groups (about 45 people in all) and here is a list of the things they liked about the game and those things which they didn’t, also understand that those playing ranged from first time every to having played for over 30yrs. Now I will admit this is still a new system to me and I am sure I made a few errors while running it but I will put these in bullet points and give a brief explanation of why they enjoyed or dislike these features.
*First thing everyone said was how they loved and found the Action economy was easy to grasp and made the flow of the game quick. From the aspect of GM I did find it really easy to follow the player’s turn and if arose a problem I could quickly make a ruling call based on the 3 Actions and keep the play moving quickly.
*A massive negative was the dying and unconscious process, in one of my games two players did fall to enemy attack, while the players were healed to 1 hit point by rule they were still unconscious and had to make the fort save against the DC. Now it was a goblin attack the players made 8 rolls and out of the 8 they couldn’t pass the DC and at that point I ruled that probability they should make the save sooner or later. This made the game come to a screeching halt and ruined the flow of the game. After this I ruled that if someone healed you and brought you above one that you would wake up but still retain the dying 1 condition.
*The new critical system was enjoyed by all. Really liking the ability to score a crit even if they didn’t roll a nat. As a GM I did have to do a little book keeping of all the players AC to make sure that I wasn’t scoring a critical hit/miss but when it came to the enemies it was very simple once they figured out the AC they could easily figure out that they scored a crit or miss.
*Something that my players who made characters didn’t like was the layout of the character sheet. There were tons of complaints about how clustered it was and how the important numbers were all the way at the bottom and weapons were at the top. On the other hand they all agreed the layout of the pregen character sheet was way better.
*When I did do character creation they players loved how easy it was to make a character and did enjoy the simplicity of starting at 10 for all the stats and growing or subtracting by 2. Additionally all liked the whole choosing ancestry feats (I had 2 players make Elves and both were completely different) which they all agree felt made them feel individual. A question that came up was why did the dwarf ancestry have what they felt was a free feat with Unburdened skill. I agreed that maybe all races should be given a single racial trait that does set them apart from the others and keep the feats. I did promise them I would make note of it and send it over so here it is.
During the playtest with the pregenerated characters the most loved and enjoyed was the goblin alchemist with the wizard a close seconds. Many of the players felt they had a good amount of versatility with the characters.
*The shield raise action and shield spell were both heavily used and as a DM I did enjoy the dent feature and the players enjoyed damage absorption they had. Also I did notice that the players enjoyed having that autonomy with the shields raising and lowering; you could see the players actually feel like the shield did something other than being a static number bump.
*The trinket that they gain everyone liked. I think trinkets are a great addition because as they went forward I could add a few more in and not have to worry about the players becoming to crazy powerful to fast.
*Additionally something that did slow the game down was the fatigue system. Many of the players who were playing the Wizard would keep up the detect magic spell and under the exploration mode concentrating on the spell would cause them to become fatigued. As a GM I ruled that once they would drop the spell they would maintain the fatigue condition for their first round of combat and then it would fall away. 8 hours of fatigue is a bit too much since casters would focus on keeping their magical awareness up and to have such a penalty is a bit steep. Maybe in the spell add the fatigue tag to certain spells and that might balance this.
Overall these few things were my general impression by the players that sat at my table. I hope this information is received well. All in all I can say those players who were die hard PF1 did say that by actually playing the game they would be more likely to keep on testing it out and those who were new to the system or RPGs in general said they had a blast with the game and would definitely check it out. Well I am off to keep on playing and coming up with adventures for my players, keep up the good work and everyone be awesome to each other.