Doomsday Dawn, Scenario 2: Actual Play Feedback.

[Doomed Hero]

This thread is a continuation of this gameplay experience.

Our Party:

Elf Ranger (me)
half Orc Barbarian Monk
Human Druid
Half Elf Paladin

Character Creation

(Pros)

1) Making an archer is much easier. There's no more feat taxes involved just to be able to do your thing. That's nice.

2) The Druid Orders are flavorful and interesting.

3) Animal Companions are easy to build and all have interesting teamwork options.

4) I expected not to like the new "items ranked by level" system. I find that I like it quite a bit. It makes creating higher level characters much faster.

(Cons)

1) The Trappers Tools are pretty expensive and 8 bulk! I wanted to try out the Ranger's trap mechanics. Right off the bat, I'm running into a serious road block. Our GM agreed to let me split the kit up between my character, my Bear animal companion, and the barbarian. If not for that (possible) house rule, the trap making options are going to be very hard to use.

2) To make matters worse, carrying a Trapper's Tools doesn't actually let you build traps. It 's just the tools you need to use the traps you purchase. Traps have to be pre-bought as items. And they are expensive as hell.

3) In the end, I sunk a ranger feat, a general feat, half my money, and the encumbrance of two characters and an animal companion into my desire to see how the trap making system worked. That seemed like a pretty huge investment of character resources. I was hoping for a big payoff. (I didn't get one, more on that in Gameplay feedback)

4) The early ranger options besides Animal companion are lackluster. I ended up taking animal companion because it was the option that seemed the least bad, not because it particularly excited me.

(Gameplay feedback will follow)

[Doomed Hero]

Gameplay

(Pros)

1) Barbarian Rage is elegant and interesting.

2) Druid Wildshape is super simple and easy.

3) The fight against the Hyenas and Hyenadon was very dynamic. The knockdown/drag mechanics were very interesting and unexpected.

4) The "teamwork" action Animal Companions have is interesting and decently strong. It ends up not really being a great trade off every time, which is probably good because it leads to interesting choices. I wanted to be sure to mention this as a pro because besides this feature, I'm pretty underwhelmed with the animal companion rules (see below).

5) Archery is solid. I'm sure this isn't surprising to most people, but I wanted to mention it. I was fairly disappointed with how my elf ranger played save for this, so the archery system was a bit of a light in a dark place.

(Cons)

1) The Animal Companion/Summoned Creature rules are... frustrating. There is no "default setting" for a companion. There's no simple 'Heel' command for when you don't want them to take actions in combat. Just having them around, no matter what they do, means you are taking one of your actions to tell them to do anything. Even if all you want them to do is follow you, if you don't give them an order every round, they will sit there and do nothing no matter what else is going on.

2) Animal Companions continued. If an animal companion is ordered to attack and enemy, they will run up and attack. Then, the next round, if you don't tell them to keep attacking they will stop and sit there. They'll run up, piss something off, and then do nothing unless told to keep biting. I am convinced that my group must be reading this wrong, but if this isn't the case, it's really unclear in the rules. For me, this utterly breaks verisimilitude. Imagine having a trained attack dog that you had to remind to keep attacking every six seconds. How well trained do you think you could consider that dog? Worse is the assumption or justification that you trained the dog to do that on purpose. Literally no one would do that. I understand the desire to reign in the action economy benefits of having companion creatures, but the system as it stands right now is clunky, frustrating, and makes little sense in terms of realism.

3) Traps. There are very few useful or interesting low level traps. They're a terrible combination of high cost, high character investment, and low effectiveness. At first I took the Ranger feat that grants knowledge of three trap plans, and the general feat that grants 4. I ended up trading the general feat out because there just weren't 7 fun and interesting traps. There weren't even 3. There were 2 that I actually liked, and they were quite expensive.

4) Trap bulk. There doesn't seem to be any. I couldn't find any bulk value for traps listed anywhere. Our group decided that the traps (no matter how many of them there are) are included in the bulk value of the Trapper's Kit. I guess that's a blessing in disguise since the Trapper's Kit is already obscenely bulky, but it strikes me as an oversight.

5) Recovering traps. The rules on this were tricky to find, but essentially you get half their value back if they aren't used when they are set up. I'm picturing this with something like a simple Bear Trap and I'm pretty confused. Why would you have to buy new parts and pay 1/2 the trap's original cost to be able to set it up again? Why are there diminishing returns on unused character resources? Are there any other systems that use this mechanic? (selling items at half value springs to mind, but I'm not sure those systems are/should be comparable)

6) Traps, overall. I'm kinda confused on the design philosophy here. It seems like at every level, the game is discouraging players from using the trap system. Is that intentional? If so, why? From what I can tell, traps do not seem to be a powerful option. They don't even seem to be a useful option. They seem like the highest investment of character resources I've seen so far, for the lowest results.

[Laik]

Doomed Hero wrote:

Gameplay

1) The Animal Companion/Summoned Creature rules are... frustrating. There is no "default setting" for a companion. There's no simple 'Heel' command for when you don't want them to take actions in combat. Just having them around, no matter what they do, means you are taking one of your actions to tell them to do anything. Even if all you want them to do is follow you, if you don't give them an order every round, they will sit there and do nothing no matter what else is going on.

2) Animal Companions continued. If an animal companion is ordered to attack and enemy, they will run up and attack. Then, the next round, if you don't tell them to keep attacking they will stop and sit there. They'll run up, piss something off, and then do nothing unless told to keep biting. I am convinced that my group must be reading this wrong, but if this isn't the case, it's really unclear in the rules. For me, this utterly breaks verisimilitude. Imagine having a trained attack dog that you had to remind to keep attacking every six seconds. How well trained do you think you could consider that dog? Worse is the assumption or justification that you trained the...

I ended up houseruling that a companion (or mount, or just a purchased dog) that gets no orders just behaves as it likes. Wanders aroudn sniffing for food, flees in panic, keeps aattacking an enemy that wounded it, barks at enemies without actually approaching them... anything GM considers appropriate for the species and the situation. That is a step away from the book, but animals that behave like contructs are a no-go for me.

[Doomed Hero]

Laik wrote:

Doomed Hero wrote:

Gameplay

1) The Animal Companion/Summoned Creature rules are... frustrating. There is no "default setting" for a companion. There's no simple 'Heel' command for when you don't want them to take actions in combat. Just having them around, no matter what they do, means you are taking one of your actions to tell them to do anything. Even if all you want them to do is follow you, if you don't give them an order every round, they will sit there and do nothing no matter what else is going on.

2) Animal Companions continued. If an animal companion is ordered to attack and enemy, they will run up and attack. Then, the next round, if you don't tell them to keep attacking they will stop and sit there. They'll run up, piss something off, and then do nothing unless told to keep biting. I am convinced that my group must be reading this wrong, but if this isn't the case, it's really unclear in the rules. For me, this utterly breaks verisimilitude. Imagine having a trained attack dog that you had to remind to keep attacking every six seconds. How well trained do you think you could consider that dog? Worse is the assumption or justification that you trained the...

I ended up houseruling that a companion (or mount, or just a purchased dog) that gets no orders just behaves as it likes. Wanders aroudn sniffing for food, flees in panic, keeps aattacking an enemy that wounded it, barks at enemies without actually approaching them... anything GM considers appropriate for the species and the situation. That is a step away from the book, but animals that behave like contructs are a no-go for me.

Our group considered this, and will probably house rule a fix if the rules don't change by the time of the full release, but for the playtest we decided to stick to exactly the rules as written so we could give a good report.