| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
This is not a full report on In Pale Mountain's Shadow. This is a rant on the events in the room called Chamber of the Sunken Stones in that chapter. The party had just begun the battle against the Lesser Water Elemental when we wrapped up last week and they resumed the battle in today's session. I was sick, so we played for only two hours and quit after the elemental was defeated and after 7 failed attempts at Treat Wounds. The party defeated the elemental, so that was a success. But the players tried to have fun, too, with their usual growing tactical awareness spawning clever battle plans. Despite their efforts, that did not happen. The battle was tedious.
Others have said that the playtest is not to have fun. But one of the goals of the playtest is, "2. Ensure that the new version of the game allows us to tell the same stories and share in the same worlds as the previous edition, but also makes room for new stories and new worlds wherever possible." We had a highly mobile barbarian, a deft ranger, a powerful sorceress, and a resourceful alchemist facing a powerful but clueless elemental in the Chamber of the Sunken Stones. In Pathfinder 1st Edition a little trickery could have the elemental swimming in circles while the party wore it down. It even started that way last week in the playtest. But in the playtest, the battle became a slugfest against a creature built for slugfests.
In last week's game session, my playtest party had glanced into the Chamber of the Sunken Stones, deduced the water theme, and continued on. When they learned they needed elemental keys, they returned to that chamber to find the water key. They figured the key was hidden in the unseen northeastern chamber but the water elemental arose before they reached it and critically hit the alchemist Purl Knit. Haku Na Matata, the Raging-Athlete barbarian with a climb speed and a swim speed, rushed to the northeastern chamber to grab the key while the others distracted its guardian. It would have been a great story, but since the water elemental was the key, it failed. That is how PF1 stories turn out sometimes: the clever idea is the wrong one. Nothing wrong with PF2 yet.
A few Arcana Recall Knowledge checks revealed that they had misinterpreted the clues and that the key was in the elemental. (I always made Knowledge checks strong to straighten out game-stopping misunderstandings quickly.) Haku climbed up to the ceiling out of the elemental's reach. The elemental climbed up onto the 5-foot-tall rock to reach Haku and hit her. Yet Haku saw that it was slowed when out of water. [Question: by the PF2 rules, are the PCs allowed to deduce things without spending an action?] Haku raced along the wall to get out of the northeastern area and back in sight of the others, and then braced herself amongst good handholds (She made a Seek check to spot them) before she fell into fatigue and lost her climb speed.
We ended the game there and resumed today. The fish-shaped water elemental climbed the wall to attack Haku [Question: the water elemental lacks hands, but the fish shape is just ornamental. Can it climb? Does it need a free hand--and remember, no hands--to attack with its Wave attack while clinging to a wall? By the way, the water elemental climbing the wall was what the party wanted it to do.] The ranger shot arrows at the elemental. The sorcerer throw a Lightning Bolt and Rays of Frost at it. The barbarian raged anew, stabbed it with a spear and moved to goad the elemental to keep wasting actions chasing her. The alchemist had retreated to heal. The elemental rolled a 3 against the Lightning Bolt, but no other attack did more than 7 damage and half missed outright. The elemental (as determined by the dice) figured out that chasing the barbarian was a distraction and attacked the sorceress, taking out half her hit points in natural 20 critical hit. She retreated, but the barbarian took to fighting it one on one at ground level while fatigued, taking massive damage but outlasted it when the ranger made the final shot.
If the party had taken down the water elemental just after it hit the sorceress, then the battle would have been a Pyrrhic victory but a victory nonetheless. But the battle continued two rounds after that. It became drudgery, reminding the party that they won not because they were better but because they were four mercenaries beating up an outnumbered creature that an evil elemental wizard gated into a no-win situation centuries ago.
And they have to do this three more times with no clue toward a better strategy. Their best abilities, besides the barbarian's climbing and swimming, merely deal damage. PF2 does not offer much battlefield control. The alchemist had time to invent and prepare something clever, but her formulas did not offer anything useful.
To add salt to their wounds, they rolled on Treat Wounds seven times for five failures and two critical failures. Only the barbarian, the worst at medicine, has not yet had a critical failure on Treat Wounds that day. The barbarian had time for two self-heals via her Superstition Totem. She hopes to soak up the damage in the remaining battles. The rest are limping along on the alchemist's elixirs of life.
For further annoyance, we had to deal with lighting and multiple-mode movement rules and Interact actions and similar nitpicking details when we were trying to tell a story by running a game. Trivial details break the flow.
The Superstition-Totem Raging-Athlete barbarian is working out like we hoped. The ranger is dull. The alchemist fails at damage and has no other meaningful options to use her Intelligence to win. The sorceress was a substitute, a friend running the pregenerated 5th-level Seoni while a regular player was out of town on business. Next week our alchemist's player will be busy at her daughter's wedding.
I am not going to quit the playtest. Something is wrong. Pathfinder 2nd Edition has an elegant foundation, but the little choices don't add up into well-rounde characters that can be themselves during gameplay. The playtest gives me data to find the error.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Interesting Report, sorry to hear it was no fun in the end. I am wondering - where was the earth elemental? It sounds like your group traversed the whole cavern, the Elemental should have popped up somewhere?
The party spotted the earth elemental in the southern corner of the cavern and kept away from it. The chapter said, "They [the elementals] attack as soon as someone comes within the distance the elemental can move with one action," and the earth elemental's speed was only 20 feet, so they never triggered its attack.
I considered whether the earth elemental spontaneously joining the battle would make the battle more interesting, but decided it wouldn't.
Let me compage PF2's lesser water elemental to PF1's large water elemental. Both have similar drench, vortex, and swimming abilities. The PF2 lesser's Waterbound weakness is more interesting than the matching water mastery strength on the PF1 large. The lesser's +13 to hit versus the large's +12 to hit makes up for the difference between waterbound and water mastery. The lesser's 2d8+6 damage is balanced against the large's 2 slam attacks at 1d8+5 with Power Attack and Great Cleave. The lesser's 75 hp is close to the large's 68 hp. The lesser's resistance to fire is more thematic than the large's DR 5/-.
The biggest difference is that the PF2 lesser water elemental has AC 20 and TAC 20 compared to the PF1 large water elemental's AC 18, touch 12. In PF1, a power-attacking (to overcome the DR 5/-) raging barbarian would hit the large water element on a roll of 9 or higher. In PF2, the raging barbarian hit the lesser water elemental on a roll of 11 or higher. That is 14% fewer hits. And an elemental's immunity to critical hits matters much more in PF2, though the AC 20 prevented any critical hits by the +10 rule and no-one rolled a natural 20 to be highly disappointed at the immunity.
Thus, Paizo did a proper job of porting the water elemental to the new rules. It was the characters' lack of battlefield-control responses that was disappointing.
I would agree with your assessment of the game being slugfest. At a certain point, you realize that there's no point in strategizing because nothing really beats DPR. The game devolves into a slugfest at that point.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
My party had the same issue with the water elemental. It came down to an HP depletion race. The Water Elemental was basically guaranteed to hit on its first attack no matter who it was attacking, and it was criting like crazy with its +13 to hit. My players got really frustrated because it was a murderous bag of hit points with no weaknesses and an immunity to critical hits. Its +12 reflex save wasn’t winning it any popularity contests either. Tedious is the perfect word.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
This fight was the most fun I've had in the entire playtest; but, as it turns out, only because we failed to find or enforce a number of rules.
The characters knew about both elementals, but had no meaningful prep to do. The fighter jumped out onto the nearest rock and immediately got knocked into the water. The wizard started casting acid arrow--the persistent damage from this was a big factor. The ranger fired arrows and missed. At this point, the water elemental was hanging back and using its reach. We were pretty sure we couldn't beat it with ranged attacks. I was, I'll admit, feeling kind of fed up, so my dwarf cleric simply walked into the water.
"Make a Swim check--"
"I'm not swimming. I'm sinking like a rock."
We worked out correctly that walking along the bottom was made difficult terrain by the elemental's powers, and also worked out (correctly? I don't know) that its powers were meant to suck fleeing people toward it and did nothing useful to an enemy that wanted to approach anyway. We also worked out that Breath Control meant my cleric had about 100 actions worth of holding his breath. The elemental would probably kill him, but drowning would not!
So the dwarf cleric trudged up and beat on the elemental underwater. We had some argument about the size of a Large creature and whether it was sticking out above the water or not, but decided arbitrarily that the dwarf, in 15' water, could just manage to hit it with a non-reach weapon. (If it could have pulled itself up out of his reach, the dwarf was toast.)
The other PCs focused fire on the earth elemental and beat it. My character did strike/strike/raise shield and managed to hang on, though around here we found out that casting a Verbal spell uses up all of your remaining air, so he couldn't do that. Then the other PCs pitched in some damage, but it was the cleric who finally killed the thing.
That felt kind of good, though I had (and suppressed) a dark suspicion that there should have been huge penalties for using a warhammer underwater. I was right, or at least so the feat which lets you overcome them implies: probably half damage from bludgeoning or slashing, flatfooted, and minuses to hit. In other words, RAW this was a stupid and fatal thing to have done. (I still have not found these rules, except by mention in the feat that lets you overcome them. Maybe they are in the Bestiary.)
I would say that "can't be crit" is one of the more unpleasant powers a critter can have. It was in PF1 and it still is. I don't know if the water elemental was also immune to backstab as we didn't have a rogue, but that would make things even worse. It's not that the power is overwhelmingly strong, but it just makes the players feel frustrated and disappointment as a rare fun thing they were hoping for is now a non-event.
TL:DR I had a good time because I got very lucky with dice AND we had the rules wrong.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
"Can't be crit" is the most demoralizing ability in the game and way too many things have it. If it's not an ooze or a swarm, a creature should not have this ability. Any creature that DOES have it should get either lower HP and bonuses, or some easily procced Weaknesses.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
This is not a full report on In Pale Mountain's Shadow. This is a rant on the events in the room called Chamber of the Sunken Stones in that chapter. The party had just begun the battle against the Lesser Water Elemental when we wrapped up last week and they resumed the battle in today's session. I was sick, so we played for only two hours and quit after the elemental was defeated and after 7 failed attempts at Treat Wounds. The party defeated the elemental, so that was a success. But the players tried to have fun, too, with their usual growing tactical awareness spawning clever battle plans. Despite their efforts, that did not happen. The battle was tedious.
Others have said that the playtest is not to have fun. But one of the goals of the playtest is, "2. Ensure that the new version of the game allows us to tell the same stories and share in the same worlds as the previous edition, but also makes room for new stories and new worlds wherever possible." We had a highly mobile barbarian, a deft ranger, a powerful sorceress, and a resourceful alchemist facing a powerful but clueless elemental in the Chamber of the Sunken Stones. In Pathfinder 1st Edition a little trickery could have the elemental swimming in circles while the party wore it down. It even started that way last week in the playtest. But in the playtest, the battle became a slugfest against a creature built for slugfests.
In last week's game session, my playtest party had glanced into the Chamber of the Sunken Stones, deduced the water theme, and continued on. When they learned they needed elemental keys, they returned to that chamber to find the water key. They figured the key was hidden in the unseen northeastern chamber but the water elemental arose before they reached it and critically hit the alchemist Purl Knit. Haku Na Matata, the Raging-Athlete barbarian with a climb speed and a swim speed, rushed to the northeastern chamber to grab the key while the others distracted its guardian. It would have been a great story, but since the...
This thread feels receptive to a big picture discussion, here goes nothing.
There are four challenges that are connected.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
While waiting for an appointment, my wife and I passed the time by discussing In Pale Mountain's Shadow.. She was bothered by the weird lock setup. It made no sense to have an opening mechanism on a sealed tomb especially an opening mechanism that anyone could unlock by solving a puzzle and killing a few elementals. I said I figured that Tular Seft had been using the Chamber of Contemplation as an arcane lab before he tried to convert it to an attempt at immortality after death. It contained several valuable magical artifacts, so he wanted it locked while he was away.
When I returned home and checked In Pale Mountain's Shadow., I saw that I had misread the puzzle and it did not require killing the elementals. Seriously, the description of the rolls to unlock the stone door is so convoluted that I lost track of how to open the door while describing the room to the players. Phrases such as "The magical traditions and equations spelled out by the runes on each elemental emblem can be deciphered with some difficulty; ..." and "Placing an elemental gem of the same elemental theme as the emblem in the faceted indentation causes several of the runes to pulse and glow while the others fade from view ..." are trying to describe the lock to the GM in terms of the setting while not giving me text that I can read aloud to the players without giving away clues. Please don't mix the setting description with the skill check descriptions.
My housemate, the friend who had played Seoni, said that if a mathematician can't figure out the description, then it is too complicated.
My wife's point of putting such an elaborate lock on a tomb or a lab still stands, too. Thus, I imagine the following scene centuries before, during the building of the tomb.
TULAR SEFT: Here is the plans for the locking mechanism for the Chamber of Contemplation. Not only will it lock the door, it will generate a force field that make the door and walls impenetrable.
MABAR: Is that a combination lock? Remember what happened when you forgot the combination to your sealed lab at Sothis?
TULAR SEFT: I learned my lesson. It's a puzzle lock. Opening it requires advanced occult knowledge of Planar Alignment. I am not going to forget that. Or I suppose impressive arcane knowledge of the elemental planes might figure it out, too. And some religions know a lot about the planes. And someone with an intimate insight into nature might decipher the elemental energies without understanding the runes. But they would have to be some of the smartest people in the nation.
MABAR: How I am going to open the door? I will be overseeing the deliveries to the chamber. You won't want me to leave stuff piled up outside the room.
TULAR SEFT: I have a backup mechanism. I will give you four elemental gems. While they are in place in the lock, it will convert to an easier puzzle within your capabilities to decipher.
MABAR: We ought to add a vault outside the Chamber of Contemplation to store those elemental gems. Those things are valuable and thieves will take them. Remember when I was pickpocketed in Katapesh City?
TULAR SEFT: I have a plan for that, too. The gems will be stored in their native forms as active elementals in the Chamber of the Sunken Stones and Chamber of the Burning Sky that we already built. They will add to the ambience.
MABAR: Restoring them to gem form will be a pain.
TULAR SEFT: I will give you a command phrase that forces them to revert.
MABAR: And if I forget the command phrase? You choose languages that no genie ever heard.
TULAR SEFT: Well then, defeating them in combat will also revert them.
MABAR: Great, just great.
As for the math of opening the lock, Seoni had +8 to Arcana. She has a 20% chance of making a DC 25 Arcana roll. That comes down to:
Immediately align a ring: 20%
Align a ring after 1 hour: 16%
Align a ring after 2 hours: 13%
Align a ring after 3 hours: 10%
Align a ring after 4 hours: 8%
etc.
The average comes out to 5 hours. However, we have three rings at full DC (the water ring will open more easily with the water gem) and four PCs. Their odds should be 20%, 20%, 15%, and 5%. Each one can examine a ring and try to align it immediately. That gives a 48% chance of aligning a ring in the first minute. Then comes one check per person per hour for the next few hours. Unless they roll poorly, like they did with the Treat Wounds, they could finish in the middle of the night, or during the following morning if they camp and sleep.
My wife stated that in any module she wants a Doctor Who solution. She quoted The Doctor from the most recent episode, "brains not guns." She wants a chance to outthink or outtalk an opponent before having to outfight the opponent. Technically, the puzzle as written allows that, but I missed it.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
It does, it's just unimaginingly boring. The fights may be bad, but at least you have Options where something can happen. The riddle? it's just a number of the same skill rolls. Bad, bad, riddle design.
I wonder about what this chapter is testing. Would Paizo have meaningful data if a party said in the survey, "We maxed out Nature, Stealth, and Survival to quickly sneak past all the monsters, even the manticore. The party's only encounter with hostiles was the gnolls at the door. With our high Nature bonuses, we solved the puzzle without battling any elementals. We had a friendly conversation with Mabar, who warned us of other hazards. We left before the Night Heralds arrived."?
My wife would consider that a reasonable player-versus-environment adventure, except for the excessive number of dice rolls.
It was the characters' lack of battlefield-control responses that was disappointing.
The Alchemist in one of my groups has been spamming Smokebombs like no tomorrow. I'd definitely like to see more options like this. I have a sense that they intentionally left most battlefield control responses out to test other aspects of the system...but are planning to bring it back. At least, that's my hope.
"We maxed out Nature, Stealth, and Survival to quickly sneak past all the monsters, even the manticore.
Sneaking past the manticore is extremely unlikely. Even if the entire party plays dexterity-based classes, are experts in stealth, and have no ACP, the chances of successfully sneaking past the manticore with a 4-person party are a paltry 1.5%
"We maxed out Nature, Stealth, and Survival to quickly sneak past all the monsters, even the manticore.Sneaking past the manticore is extremely unlikely. Even if the entire party plays dexterity-based classes, are experts in stealth, and have no ACP, the chances of successfully sneaking past the manticore with a 4-person party are a paltry 1.5%
That is because the group Stealth rules are awful, as Dasrak explained in Pale Mountain - Stealth and zone B4 comment #18. I let my players use terrain to their advantage and pushed the chance up to 5%. It could have been 30% if the barbarian were a high-Dex Stealth expert.
Look at the beautiful art on page 18 of Doomsday Dawn. It shows Seoni and Harsk battling the manticore on tall stones over a narrow, wooded ravine. This picture is non-canon, because the text on page 26 in In Pale Mountain's Shadow said, "If the manticore notices them and attacks, set up the map for the battle to show a 20-foot-wide path traveling in a gently winding route from one edge of the map to the other. Choose one side of this map to be down and one to be up—these sides are steep mountain slopes."
I went with the picture rather than the text. My party was in that ravine, completely out of sight and no Stealth roll required, when the manticore was hunting in the area. However, the barbarian Haku Na Matata had to climb up and look ahead for a good route. She was the only one who had to make a Stealth roll against the manticore. She had only a +3 to Stealth (+1 Dex, +4 trained proficiency, -2 armor check penalty), so that gave her a 5% chance of success against the manticores Perception DC 23. She did not succeed, and the manticore gained a clear view into the ravine when it attacked her, but one party member managed to remain hidden from the manticore until he attacked.
A few more details are at Pale Mountain - Stealth and zone B4 comment #12. In that thread, some people argued that a Stealthed party automatically avoids the manticore, because the text said, "Two-thirds of the way up the mountainside to area B5, the manticore notices the PCs unless the entire party is stealthy in their exploration." The text did not mention a group Stealth check.