Lost Star chapter and running back to town


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How many times did your party have to head back to town to heal up and rest/refresh?

From a story standpoint, the characters are on a time crunch, so spending too many days to complete the adventure shouldn't be an option.

From a narrative standpoint, wouldn't the goblins set up barricades and be on the lookout once the adventurers came into their lair and were driven back once? But it seems like the dungeon goes on time stop while the party is in town for a day or two.

But from a mechanical standpoint, it seems that with the amount of enemies, the dangerousness of those enemies, and the power level of the party - that there is no way to actually do the dungeon in one shot.


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My group of veteran players with a balanced group (no Cleric though, but had a Druid and a Bard) all with good AC/Dex, had to head back and rest after 2-3 encounters. Five minute adventuring day all over again.


The slime can be easily walked by, the centipedes, quasits, skeletons, and advanced goblins never encounter. The only creatures fast enough to keep up with PCs that they have to meet are the first goblin enemies, and Drakus - so it's very easy to do in one day if you're gunning for that.

But yes, part 1 shows how terrible PF2's adventuring day issue is, and it destroys any verisimilitude for a group exploring the various combats.


1 Rest with an alchemist being the only char that was able to heal.
However the Ranger one shot Drakus with help of its badger, when they returned.


My players handled everything in a single adventuring day, though due to scheduling issues the wizard had to leave after the fountain and an alchemist player came in. Given that the brunt of the work was handled by the other three PCs though I'm not sure this affected anything. They fought everything except the advanced goblins which, due to encountering after pretty much everything else including Drakus, wound up as a non-combat encounter instead.

Clerics seem incredibly strong, and that's possibly part of why everything happened in one go.

Silver Crusade

Characters retreated once. And were then TPK'ed before they could retreat a second time :-).

There are quite a few encounters that are avoidable. But players are trained to clear the ENTIRE dungeon to get all the loot :-). And some of the avoidable encounters will probably happen due to bad dice rolling or bad luck.

RPG Superstar 2015 Top 32

Our group retreated once, completed the dungeon on the next day. We did not clear all of the side rooms, were not particularly interested in extra treasure or anything.


My group had to leave almost every 2 encounters. Even with a cleric in the party and an alchemist spending resonance on elixirs we ran out of healing very quickly. Rest of the party was a bard, a barbarian, and a wizard.


Pedro Sampaio wrote:
My group of veteran players with a balanced group (no Cleric though, but had a Druid and a Bard) all with good AC/Dex, had to head back and rest after 2-3 encounters. Five minute adventuring day all over again.

I'm surprised to hear of 3 encounters being called a short adventuring day. Historically speaking with other versions of D&D, that's a pretty good rate.

Our party was pretty tapped by the time we killed Drakus, but we didn't ever stop for a rest; we avoided the centipedes, flirted with the spore cloud room but avoided it in the end, and avoided both the sand trap and the skeletons. We were focused on the mission, so intentionally avoided anything that wasn't on Talga's map or directions. To be honest, I think the first goblin encounter gave us more trouble than anything, because those little green ********ers were shooting us while a couple were rolling phenomenally well on athletics rolls to trip and keep the party's two martials occupied. When we faced Drakus, he was only backed by his anomalous little rat-buddy, and we gang-smashed him with pure action economy.


We thrashed everything, barely used any spells and was back with all of the stolen goods in about 45 minutes ingame.

The slime was killed by one hit from the paladin, who rolled highest on initiative.

The goblins died quickly to our combined fire-power.

The centipedes were a bit more challenging, the paladin actually got hurt, but never poisoned. The ranger and my fey sorcerer kept killing the ones in the back while the paladin plugged the hole.

The quasits died without a fuss, the rogue and paladin team took them down with my sorcerer and the ranger keeping the backline.

We snuck past the trap and bluffed the goblins into beliveing that we killed their boss, they surrendered and we left them in the moshroom cave (We alredy burned that one down)

We found the secret passage, took the loot and snuck up on the big bad.
He was dead by round 2, none of us were hit by him, thanks to the paladin killing him with a retributive strike.

We were back before supper.

I was the most useless character, since my cantrips dealt horrendously little damage, and my spells were Charm, Shocking Grasp and Heal. I cast one spell, Shocking Grasp, and missed with it against the big bad. I did however bluff like a god, which made the goblins surrender, so it evens out.


In that the slime has 40hp and is immune to crits, I don't think it's possible to kill it in one hit, and very hard in three (3d12+12 for a greatsword and 18 Str is 15-48 damage).


Our group had to go back once to buy a wand of Heal after we found the first treasure, and I think we decided to sleep for the night, since we were out anyways. Encounters can get out of hand quickly, and with no efficient way to heal up, it's difficult to keep up and spend long days indeed. So far, my group has done at most 4 encounters in a day in the playtest scenarios, which wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that combat is supposed to be very short, and in a dungeon, there is often little else to do but keep fighting until you make it out...

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