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With a now built and blooded party, I set them up with a standard style short dungeon experience: a cave with three encounters. One three 0lv monsters, one with two 0lv & one 1lv, and finnally, a mini-boss that was 2lv with a 0lv henchguard.
My observations: Everything was reliant on the dice. Good initiative rolls made the battles much easier, as the enemies were consistently going last. At the same time, half the party couldn't hit anything on first attacks due to roll results. Alchemist was very useful by attacking TAC and adding persistent damage. Our Rogue faced the same stealthy rogue with a noisy party issue that is a common problem of TTRPGs, but the improved Stealth mechanics in the playtest allowed the Rogue to remain unseen until attacking even though rest of the party was as loud as a motorbike. The Rogue also took advantage of the Surprise Attack feature by using ranged attacks and spreading attacks across multiple targets on the first round. Luckily the player was rolling well, so the tactic was effective.
In the mini-boss room, I had left hints that there could be something beyond despite no obvious exit. This is where another issue became apparent: using Recall Knowledge type skills to search. None of the characters had Lore: Mining, Lore: Caverns, Lore: Stonecarving, or any other kind of Lore that would apply to finding a secret door or weakened wall in a cave. Why Perception can't be used as a search skill is a bit confusing.
The game also offered our first chance at Exploration Mode. It was quickly awkward and stilted trying to categorize player actions according to subheadings/groupings, and we reverted back to not using Exploration Mode and simply running non-combat in a more natural free form way.
I ended the night with having the characters advance to level 2, in recognition of their deeds and successes to that point (and so we could test levelling and see how much difference a level would make next session).
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I could be mistaken, but I suggest you can use Perception too to search.
The exploration mode tactic of "Investigation" calls for Recall Knowledge type skills.
But the exploration tactic of "Searching" says it's a meticulous version of "Seek" which is an encounter action described on page 308, which does use the Perception skill.
Investigation and Searching are described on page 317.
Right, but investigation would be the skill for something specific like locating a weakened wall that might be breakable to uncover a new area, don't you think? Searching seems more like general "look the area over", which can then lead to using Investigation for checking something specific.
Sure, but if none of the PCs have that specific Lore skill, might as well go with Perception. Maybe higher DC
Sure, but if none of the PCs have that specific Lore skill, might as well go with Perception. Maybe higher DC
That's what I ended up doing.