| hyphz |
Have just finished a first session running The Lost Star. We did not finish the adventure (there was a lot of rearrangement and looking things up in the book, usually by the players) so technically I can't fill in the survey.
PC roster:
Goblin Sorcerer
Half-Orc Barbarian
Gnome Bard
Gnome Monk
Elf Ranger
Dwarf Cleric
I gave the Goblin PC some of the information that's assigned to the NPC goblin, on the grounds that they would have also lived with the tribe and been through the same thing.
A1: This encounter was fairly ordinary - the Ooze performed Filth Wave in the first round but rolled low on its attack roll. A few things did come up here:
Initative jumping problem: The Ooze was lying in wait to ambush PCs who got close, but the Sorcerer initiated combat by casting Produce Flame on the Ooze while it was still lying in wait on the floor. With no surprise round rules I rolled initiative and it beat them, so I had to rule that it had been readying for someone to get close to it and this had not happened. However, one of the other PCs also beat the Sorcerer on initiative, which confused the issue further. In addition, the PCs managed to detect the Ooze with perception checks before deciding to attack it, and some felt cheated that they then had to make another Perception check to do anything about what they had seen.
Confusingly written Sorcerer bloodline abilities: At this point we found that the sorcerer player had not realized that his bloodline offered only Occult spells. This was for two reasons: a) the sorcerer text on 128 starts with "you learn two 1st level spells of your choice.. as well as an additional spell and cantrip from your bloodline" when in fact, all of these are restricted by your bloodline. Second, it is very awkward that the spell descriptions do not include the type of spell, requiring the player to look back into the spell lists section and search in order to find this out. He switched his bloodline at this point.
On the plus side, the Bard player very much enjoyed the "sing for one action per round" method of Inspiring allies and there were a lot of positive comments about the flexibility of the action system.
A2: Here we ran into the issue that has been mentioned a few times, with the PCs with darkvision being able to see much further than those with low light vision using a standard torch. At this point the goblin PC asked if he could talk to the other goblins and point out that he would be better at overcoming Drakus now that he had the party with him. This was a bit difficult to adjudicate. The Make An Impression act states that it requires 1 minute of speech, but does not address the issue of whether people will stop and listen to you (given that Hostile state does not require an immediate attack and applies only a penalty to persuasion, not impossibility). Since he did have some time to speak and he made a good point - and the Mindfog Fungus is described as making the goblins easy to influence, and presumably isn't selective to Drakus - I allowed the roll and he successfully dropped them to Unfriendly and then just repeated the same roll, persuading the goblins to let them by.
Dissonance in activity restriction: This then resulted in the other PCs talking about the possibility of fighting defensively, purely blocking, for 10 rounds to allow the sorcerer to spend that minute talking to the enemy. This obviously made little sense and the rules explicitly stay that extended Activities cannot be performed during combat, but it was not entirely clear why not - why it would be impossible for one of the characters to choose to spend that time talking, if others were defending him/her and prevented them being hit.
A3-5: The PCs didn't enter any of these rooms, because they had no reason to enter empty rooms when they were after Drakus and the Goblin PC knew where the forbidden area was.
A6: Here things got a bit difficult. The PCs identified that something was up with the pool, but rather than just rolling perceptions, dropped stones with Light cast on them into the pool - which struck the statue. However, the module doesn't give the depth of the pool, so it wasn't clear if the PCs needed to dive to get it out of the pool or just lift it out. And alas, when it released the Quasits we hit..
3D or not 3D: One of my great annoyances with many d20 based systems is that they introduce 3D combat by having flying creatures, but do not follow that up with support in the rest of the rules. The desire of the players to not have 2/3rds of them rendered useless by the creatures being out of reach resulted in play immediately slowing down to a crawl with a barrage of questions about whether a PC being more than 5 foot tall meant their arms were in a cube extending from 5-10' foot off the ground so they could hit a creature flying 15' up with 5' reach, whether they could attack in the middle of a Leap or High Jump (which I'm surprised isn't mentioned - the monk was especially disappointed they hadn't considered cool flying kicks), how many squares a diagonal across multiple dimensions counted as, whether a PC could throw another PC as an improvised weapon, and so on and on...
This then made the encounter quite tedious as the majority of PCs couldn't do anything except ready for the quasits to fly in. I had planned for the two quasits to use Invisibility and their shape shift to set up flanks but the chamber was too small to be able to do this practically, so in practice the PCs sat waiting while the Quasits flitted back and forth trying to sting the ranger (who they considered the only threat) with move-attack-move combinations. Because of their low damage and his good Fort save, they weren't much of a threat to him, so things got rather boring quite quickly. It would also seem that the Quasits could potentially have locked the encounter by turning invisible and using their healing ability repeatedly whenever wounded.
Seek confusion: It was not clear if the Seek action can be taken repeat times in a turn, or if a failed Seek means that the PC believes that nothing is there. In addition, one of the PCs wanted to throw water from the fountain or ash around the room to see if it could land on an invisible Quasit. It was not clear if this would give a bonus to the Seek check - there doesn't seem to be a general purpose bonus for the GM along the same lines as advantage in 5e.
Poison index entry wrong: The Poisons entry in the Handbook index leads to the alchemical items section describing poisons, not to the actual rules for poisons, which would be much more useful.
After that rather long fight we ended the session as players needed to leave. Most of the players said they had enjoyed the game and we will probably continue with the adventure but that encounter was a bit of a low point.
| hyphz |
Another note -
During the Quasit fight, one of the players cast Sleep on one of the Quasits. I ruled that it fell asleep and dropped out of the air. But by the exact rules, falling is not checked until your turn. So technically I would have been within the rules to have it fall asleep in midair, then before its next turn have the other Quasit go first and nudge his buddy awake. I'm pretty sure that wasn't intended!