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I was just prepping Chapter 5 this morning and it occurred to me:
In both Events 2 and 7, the PCs will face demons of Huge size, but other than the central area of the temple there is almost no way for Huge creatures to move around (not too mention if anyone makes it to Event 9 and faces a Gargantuan Mutilation Demon!)
Even in Event 2, it says the Treachery Demons teleport into spaces that don't seem to be able to contain them.
I can't find any rules for how monsters can squeeze into smaller places or through smaller openings. There are rules for squeezing in the Rulebook, but it is a use of the Acrobatics skill that is not usable in Encounter Mode unless you have the Quick Squeeze skill feat.
My current idea is to have monsters treat openings narrower than their space as difficult terrain to move through, and have them be flat-footed while in such a space.
Its either that or I can just have them Kool-Aid-Man themselves through the walls and pillars! Since it's a crumbling temple, that seems reasonable - and it would add some fun interaction with the map as it evolves. But such a solution certainly can't set the precedent for how to deal with the situation in the future.
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I noticed the issue with the map and huge sized creatures too. Since I didn’t see any aqueezing rules I had the Treachery Demons appear in different spots than suggested in the book and it did impact the fight somewhat making it considerably less dynamic.
I also noticed an issue with Reverse Gravity and ceiling height. Heroes of Undarin states that the treachery demons use Reverse Gravity to cause targets to fall to the roof. I decided to lower the roof as the spell only reaches 40 feet in height allowing the demons to perform their stated strategy.
After 2 sessions we have completed wave 5. Fights are getting longer and are dragging out now. Many more rules are interacting together causing us to look at the rule book more and discuss how they interact with one another. Additionally, more reactions are being used during other creatures turns which interrupts the flow of combat. This was a major issue with 4e and I’m starting to see it become an issue at higher levels.
Another issue in this adventure is that the save DCs of some monsters abilities are so low that during an entire encounter the special abilities were useless. In particular, the dread wraith and the ghost mages suffered from this problem.
Also of note, is that while monster damage generally feels adequate and capable of punishing PCs with crits, the amount of healing at this level is astounding, even without a cleric. I have a healing spec’d paladin, a monk/sorcerer, an alchemist and a sorcerer. With class healing, and some of the magic item healing, I have only dropped one player thus far and they likely have enough healing to get through several more encounters. It feels like too much right now, especially in light of the fact that Treat Wounds exists now (even though players are limited to when it can be used in this chapter).
Lastly, the lich fight was not near as dangerous as I’d hoped. My players did get lucky with some crucial timely saves (dominate for example) but with the ghost mages not being very effective, the lich is quickly worn down with the action economy of 4 players against it.
Overall, this chapter is the least fun to DM and to play in as a player (as indicated by my players). It has nothing to do with the likely impending PC deaths either. It’s the grindiness, staticness, complex interactions of rules (spells, conditions, flight interacting with trip, seen/unseen, etc). It wouldn’t be so bad if the chapter ended earlier but player healing keeps the chapter going and going and our hope is that after the next session (our third which would equate to 12 hours playing time), it will mercifully end. We all understand what this chapter is measuring (it should be noted that I did not warn my players beforehand but they have since figured out the chapters goal and I thought it was fair to warn them of what is likely coming next session in order to mentally prepare them and not have them discouraged). However, it could have been written much differently to add some fun aspects to the chapter. It meets its design goal admirably, but it leaves a bad taste in your mouth, something that I think some playtesters will be unable to separate leading to further negativity of PF2 which I feel is ultimately unfair beyond the criticism I have already mentioned. Despite this, we continue to enjoy PF2. We hope our feedback will bring the necessary adjustments to improve high level play.
I know this post goes beyond the OPs intent but I felt this information might be valuable to DMs running this chapter.
Edit: Something else I often forget is that if you don’t use a fly action, you fall. I’d like to see this in a more obvious spot, maybe the basic action section (despite it not being relevant for a number of levels), Doing this makes this rule more obvious to players and DMs alike.
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A few more points I meant to add to my last post.
1. The slaver demon Take Your Soul ability was ineffective. The DC was to easy to make. Much like the aforementioned ghost mages and dread wraiths.
2. Monks deal an impressive amount of damage at this level. It was the highest average damage dealer.
3. The sheer amount of dice, both gathering them up as well as adding them up significantly slowed the pace of the game and contributed to the longer fights. I believe this is one of the biggest factors of the long fights we are now experiencing.
4. Persistent damage when used on a creature that has a weakness to it can do significant damage each round.
Yeah, I'm running into the same issues with DCs and such. The vast majority of abilities until the lich and demilich were completely useless as the players were easily beating the DCs. Then comes the banshee and demilich and the players were very rarely even managing to hit them with their high ACs (and by then, pretty much everybody was out of spells). The terrifying touch on the banshee was pretty much useless, but it was at least able to pretty consistently do damage to people. Meanwhile the mummies would surround a PC, each attack 3 times (for probably 15ish attacks) and be lucky if they managed to hit even once (I understand they weren't meant to be a challenge, but it would have been nice if they had been at least a bit less useless). Things were such a grind though; the demilich was starting to run out of spell by the time we got down to 1 DMPC and just handwaved that one dying.
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I ran this one yesterday, and the player feedback was really quite negative after the encounter in which they died, I really need to give longer feedback though.
After starting to prep the Encounter 2 I actually checked the stream on how they did it, only to see that they skipped this problematic encounter (just like they skipped the problematic encounters in part 1,). The map really is not overly suited to huge enemies and as written Reverse Gravity does not work. Players just fall up 40 ft and don't even go prone since there is no falling damage involved.
Something else we noticed, is that the Grab Edge reaction is missing a DC, we used the spell DC, but that doesn't really help a GM in other situations where players fall.
Everything just went downhill in the Demilich encounter, 2 9th level spells in without a short number of turns really hurt the party, once the first effect leaves you drained it started a bit of a death spiral since it lowered their fortitude saves and max hp.
Honestly, the main problem was the level 15 enemy, AC/saves/attack bonus was just too high. On top of that he could heal himself with vampiric exanguination, and unless I misread the ability, he can cast it quite a number of times each day.
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So, something I found.
The map has 5ft squares. And the church has nice, big, square floor tiles.
Each of those tiles is actually a 2x2 grid. The lines dividing up the tiles are really faint, and depending on your screen, pdf reader, print quality, etc, can easily be missed entirely, making the clearly-defined floor tiles look like they're 5ft to a side when they're 10ft.
On the offical Roll20 flip-map pack, this is clear, as the grid is integrated with Roll20 and set to the right scale. Apparently, the other person in my group had DM'd the entire module with only 25% of the grid spaces it should have had.
I had two huge creatures stomping through the church with plenty of room on either side of them.
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So, something I found.
The map has 5ft squares. And the church has nice, big, square floor tiles.
Each of those tiles is actually a 2x2 grid. The lines dividing up the tiles are really faint, and depending on your screen, pdf reader, print quality, etc, can easily be missed entirely, making the clearly-defined floor tiles look like they're 5ft to a side when they're 10ft.
On the offical Roll20 flip-map pack, this is clear, as the grid is integrated with Roll20 and set to the right scale. Apparently, the other person in my group had DM'd the entire module with only 25% of the grid spaces it should have had.
I had two huge creatures stomping through the church with plenty of room on either side of them.
Sorry, but no. Paizo actually sells these maps as physical products and they are normal flip mat size. The scenario would be different, and maybe better/worse, but the map we got is relatively small.
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So, something I found.
The map has 5ft squares. And the church has nice, big, square floor tiles.
Each of those tiles is actually a 2x2 grid. The lines dividing up the tiles are really faint, and depending on your screen, pdf reader, print quality, etc, can easily be missed entirely, making the clearly-defined floor tiles look like they're 5ft to a side when they're 10ft.
On the offical Roll20 flip-map pack, this is clear, as the grid is integrated with Roll20 and set to the right scale. Apparently, the other person in my group had DM'd the entire module with only 25% of the grid spaces it should have had.
I had two huge creatures stomping through the church with plenty of room on either side of them.
Sorry, but no. Paizo actually sells these maps as physical products and they are normal flip mat size. The scenario would be different, and maybe better/worse, but the map we got is relatively small.
Interesting that the physical and online products have this discrepency. The online version I'm using seems very appropriate for a large church with huge monsters attacking, and the physical version seems cramped by comparison. Perhaps a scale change late in development (could have been going either way) that wasn't fully implemented?
Interesting that the physical and online products have this discrepency. The online version I'm using seems very appropriate for a large church with huge monsters attacking, and the physical version seems cramped by comparison. Perhaps a scale change late in development (could have been going either way) that wasn't fully implemented?So, something I found.
The map has 5ft squares. And the church has nice, big, square floor tiles.
Each of those tiles is actually a 2x2 grid. The lines dividing up the tiles are really faint, and depending on your screen, pdf reader, print quality, etc, can easily be missed entirely, making the clearly-defined floor tiles look like they're 5ft to a side when they're 10ft.
On the offical Roll20 flip-map pack, this is clear, as the grid is integrated with Roll20 and set to the right scale. Apparently, the other person in my group had DM'd the entire module with only 25% of the grid spaces it should have had.
I had two huge creatures stomping through the church with plenty of room on either side of them.
Sorry, but no. Paizo actually sells these maps as physical products and they are normal flip mat size. The scenario would be different, and maybe better/worse, but the map we got is relatively small.
Whatever happened with the physical map, you weren't wrong. I just zoomed in on the PDF and each of those tiles is actually 4 squares. So there is actually enough room for everything in the electronic version of the map.
So, something I found.
The map has 5ft squares. And the church has nice, big, square floor tiles.
Each of those tiles is actually a 2x2 grid. The lines dividing up the tiles are really faint, and depending on your screen, pdf reader, print quality, etc, can easily be missed entirely, making the clearly-defined floor tiles look like they're 5ft to a side when they're 10ft.
On the offical Roll20 flip-map pack, this is clear, as the grid is integrated with Roll20 and set to the right scale. Apparently, the other person in my group had DM'd the entire module with only 25% of the grid spaces it should have had.
I had two huge creatures stomping through the church with plenty of room on either side of them.
I must disagree. Yes the church floor is tiled, but to me, it is clear that the tiles are just decorative and that the consistent, mostly-opaque grid lines are meant to show the 5-foot squares. It's more clear if you look at the outside area of the map, the study, or the stable, where the floor design is different. No evidence of additional gridlines, in my opinion.
But, this seems like a good solution to the problem: double the scale of the map.
I've already run my game and had the Treachery Demons Kool-Aid-Man themselves through the temple, using actions to destroy pillars in their way. It worked out ok, but probably reduced the Demons' effectiveness slightly (which is fine, because the PCs have much bigger issues coming)
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So, something I found.
The map has 5ft squares. And the church has nice, big, square floor tiles.
Each of those tiles is actually a 2x2 grid. The lines dividing up the tiles are really faint, and depending on your screen, pdf reader, print quality, etc, can easily be missed entirely, making the clearly-defined floor tiles look like they're 5ft to a side when they're 10ft.
On the offical Roll20 flip-map pack, this is clear, as the grid is integrated with Roll20 and set to the right scale. Apparently, the other person in my group had DM'd the entire module with only 25% of the grid spaces it should have had.
I had two huge creatures stomping through the church with plenty of room on either side of them.
I must disagree. Yes the church floor is tiled, but to me, it is clear that the tiles are just decorative and that the consistent, mostly-opaque grid lines are meant to show the 5-foot squares. It's more clear if you look at the outside area of the map, the study, or the stable, where the floor design is different. No evidence of additional gridlines, in my opinion.
But, this seems like a good solution to the problem: double the scale of the map.
I've already run my game and had the Treachery Demons Kool-Aid-Man themselves through the temple, using actions to destroy pillars in their way. It worked out ok, but probably reduced the Demons' effectiveness slightly (which is fine, because the PCs have much bigger issues coming)
I may have some insight as to what happened. Or at least a possible clue.
To get where I'm coming from, though, you should understand how I run my games.
I use Photoshop with various layers turned on/off for "Fog of War", secret rooms, creature Tokens, PC Tokens, etc... In order to run these Playtest adventures, I open the PDF version of "Doomsday Dawn", right-click on the embedded map image, and save it before opening it up in Photoshop to prep it for my run.
When I first did this, the map came out maimed; distorted and stretched. No other map that I did this for (in the previous adventures of "Doomsday Dawn") acted like this. Furthermore, when I went back to do it, again, I would frequently not get this problem.
I'm thinking that it was distorted to fit into the final, published version and, perhaps, this indicates that it was originally larger and of a slightly different shape/proportions. Hence, maybe this points to the floor tiles being truly representative of the initial, intended scale of the place.
But, that said, even in the PDF, the grid that overlays the map clearly says "1 square = 5 feet" on it and those squares contain 2 floor tiles on a side.
So, while it may be that this is a bug that came up when they were preparing the final version of the adventure, we still are stuck with 50-foot-high ceilings, a temple too narrow for 1/3rd of the critters attacking it, and references to 10 events when the adventure says there are only 9.
("THERE ... ARE ... FOUR ... LIGHTS!")
So, yeah: I may re-size my map. Or, I may look into "damaging/breaking things" and see if the Huge-or-larger critters can start taking down the pillars in the temple.
Because, as my friend and co-GM puts it, "I may take up a 5-foot Space but to go down a 3-foot-wide hall, I don't have to squeeze and it doesn't slow me down."
But if we're here to test the rules and adventures, as written and presented, we're finding some real problems...
Yours,
Sylvan
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The RAW for Reverse Gravity implies but doesn't state explicitly that you stop dead as soon as you hit the top.
If it were a real force field, you'd accelerate upwards at 1g until you got to the 40' level (by which point you'd be moving at 15.5m/s = 34 mph) and then decelerate at 1g for the next 10' of normal gravity and bang into the ceiling at 13m/s = 30mph. Because if you then have 10' of normal gravity to decelerate, you'll effectively have fallen 30' (40-10). Then you stop (or bounce slightly) and fall down 10', then decelerate for the next 10' and go back up again, whereupon you oscillate 10' above and below the top of the spell effect cylinder, gently bumping the ceiling every 3 seconds and getting quite seasick.
After a while you might lose enough energy to come to rest as the spell description indicates at the boundary. This could be sped up by deliberately reaching out to the ceiling, as long as it's close enough, but with no ceiling it could take a while: each 80' fall-up-and-down cycle takes 6.3s, lessened while you can reach the ground.
Whether that all makes it a useless tactic for the demons is another matter. Provided the demons can get past it and reach the steps it seems entirely valid to me.
The RAW for Reverse Gravity implies but doesn't state explicitly that you stop dead as soon as you hit the top.
If it were a real force field, you'd accelerate upwards at 1g until you got to the 40' level (by which point you'd be moving at 15.5m/s = 34 mph) and then decelerate at 1g for the next 10' of normal gravity and bang into the ceiling at 13m/s = 30mph. Because if you then have 10' of normal gravity to decelerate, you'll effectively have fallen 30' (40-10). Then you stop (or bounce slightly) and fall down 10', then decelerate for the next 10' and go back up again, whereupon you oscillate 10' above and below the top of the spell effect cylinder, gently bumping the ceiling every 3 seconds and getting quite seasick.
After a while you might lose enough energy to come to rest as the spell description indicates at the boundary. This could be sped up by deliberately reaching out to the ceiling, as long as it's close enough, but with no ceiling it could take a while: each 80' fall-up-and-down cycle takes 6.3s, lessened while you can reach the ground.
Whether that all makes it a useless tactic for the demons is another matter. Provided the demons can get past it and reach the steps it seems entirely valid to me.
Whoa...
You rock! That is an excellent breakdown of how the physics would work in the area of that spell!
I know it goes beyond the scope of the playtest but I think I'm going to use that should it come up in my game when I run it this coming Saturday. :)
Also: I studied physics back in my college days as well as astrophysics but the mathematics was always something that my brain would rebel against. I really respect the work you did on this!
Thank you!
As a side-note, I started looking at how they handle breaking things, now, and am considering having the larger demons just try to break those annoying pillars.
Please note, however, that those reaching all the way to the ceiling are denoted with black tops ... like the walls. The pillar in the north-west foyer (about 25 feet away from the broken-down, main door) is different. In that case, I'm viewing it has difficult terrain or a raised dais: a broken-off pillar that only goes up a few feet.
That said, I've been going over materials strengths via Hardness on page 354 of the Playtest book trying to figure out how difficult it would be to break those pillars. In short, it would take more than 2 dents to give any one of them the "broken" condition.
I'm essentially trying to engineer the hardness of stone pillars which, using the nomenclature of this new system, would be something like a "Structure" thickness of ordinary stone. Since normal (ie: "not thin") stone has a hardness of 7, it would clearly be higher than that. And, looking at Adamantine and other special materials (in the "Crafting with Special Materials" section), it seems that regardless of the quality of the crafting, "Structure" doubles "Item" hardness. Therefore a stone structure should have a hardness of 14, right?
But then we get into thickness of that structure.
A rocky cliff should have more hardness than a rocky pillar and a 2-foot-diameter stone pillar should be tougher (ie: "more hardness") than a pillar made out of stone, twice the diameter at 4-feet across.
So, the question comes to be, "When thinking of a stone structure, what are they thinking of?" I'm guessing walls. And, cross-referencing with the original breaking-stuff rules, stone comes in as having a "per 15-inches thickness".
Therefore, if a standard stone structure (a wall) is assumed to be 15 inches thick and have a hardness of 14. On the map, the pillars are between 4 and 5 feet diameter. For simplicity's sake, I think I'm going to go with their hardness, therefore, to be 3-times normal due to thickness but lessen that, somewhat, because of how old they are and how crumbly the whole temple looks.
Therefore: the temple pillars (in my game) are going to have a hardness of 44/45 minus a fair number of points due to age, structural instability, and overall crumbliness leaving each with a (again, for simplicity's sake) 28-30 hardness (2-3 dents).
Given some of the bigger demons can dish that out fairly easily with a couple blows (ie: "dents"), I'm thinking the roof may be coming down in some sections once the big bads find out that they're too big for their badness to be unleashed, effectively.
Sound good?
Yours,
Sylvan
The RAW for Reverse Gravity implies but doesn't state explicitly that you stop dead as soon as you hit the top.
If it were a real force field, you'd accelerate upwards at 1g until you got to the 40' level (by which point you'd be moving at 15.5m/s = 34 mph) and then decelerate at 1g for the next 10' of normal gravity and bang into the ceiling at 13m/s = 30mph. Because if you then have 10' of normal gravity to decelerate, you'll effectively have fallen 30' (40-10). Then you stop (or bounce slightly) and fall down 10', then decelerate for the next 10' and go back up again, whereupon you oscillate 10' above and below the top of the spell effect cylinder, gently bumping the ceiling every 3 seconds and getting quite seasick.
After a while you might lose enough energy to come to rest as the spell description indicates at the boundary. This could be sped up by deliberately reaching out to the ceiling, as long as it's close enough, but with no ceiling it could take a while: each 80' fall-up-and-down cycle takes 6.3s, lessened while you can reach the ground.
Whether that all makes it a useless tactic for the demons is another matter. Provided the demons can get past it and reach the steps it seems entirely valid to me.
While as a Dynamics Professor I love this explanation! I will post a more detailed analysis later.
Yep, Mudfoot's numbers do check out.
One thing to add though is that he's assuming an inelastic collision with the ceiling, which doesn't account for the PC bouncing on impact (of course, neither do the normal falling rules).
In the extreme case (it is perfectly elastic), the PC would bounce off with an equal velocity of its impact (34 mph) downwards accelerating for 10 feet than decelerating for 40 feet, gently bumping the floor and then repeating the cycle to the ceiling. Also, there would be essential no damage to the PC in this case as all the mechanical energy is conserved.
Realistically speaking, the ceiling will be neither perfectly elastic or inelastic, so the PC will initially bounce back to somewhere between 30 feet high and the floor, "fall" to the ceiling, and repeat, which each cycle decreasing the total distance he bounces back until he oscillates between the ceiling and and the 30 foot mark, and will do so until the spell ends. This should not effect the below analyse of the ending falling damage unless it is dispelled early.
So for game effect, the PC will take 15 falling damage from the initial casting, then somewhere between 15-25 falling damage depending on the exact timing the spell expires. Unless it is dispelled, it should end at the start of the turn (60 seconds after the initial casting), and after running the math, the PC will be 30 feet high with 0 velocity at this time, so he will take another 15 falling damage at this time.
I will more later.
I anyone is interested, I made the math showing the PCs height over time (assuming completely inelastic collision with the ceiling).
breaking of pillars stuff
Interesting work you made there.
I think I'll go a simpler route:
The pillars are already old and in bad shape, so for me / my game, they are already "broken", but not "destroyed" yet (they need one more "dent"). As for hardness, your numbers sound about right, I'll pick 35 hardness.
How much of the roof will come down will be an interesting thing to figure out, but it will do about 4d10 bludgeoning damage (for 40ft height and individual pieces being smaller or larger).
This clearly is a deviation from the playtest-setup, so I'm not too sure how to report this though.
breaking of pillars stuffInteresting work you made there.
I think I'll go a simpler route:
The pillars are already old and in bad shape, so for me / my game, they are already "broken", but not "destroyed" yet (they need one more "dent"). As for hardness, your numbers sound about right, I'll pick 35 hardness.How much of the roof will come down will be an interesting thing to figure out, but it will do about 4d10 bludgeoning damage (for 40ft height and individual pieces being smaller or larger).
This clearly is a deviation from the playtest-setup, so I'm not too sure how to report this though.
I'm going with a hardness of anywhere between 28 and 30 with 2-3 dents required for destroying them.