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I went outside my comfort zone this time and didn't play a Cleric. Had a Goblin Fighter with a Greatsword, which was actually conceptually pretty cool. Rest of the party was a Ranger, a Wizard, and I think a Rogue? I'm not 100% sure on the last person, but I think it was a rogue. There was a lot of discussion about how we'd do when suddenly the guy who always plays Clerics wasn't playing one and we had no healing, but we figured we'd try it out (we did have treat wounds available as I made sure someone had Medicine).
We did a bit of exploring, heard about the sea monster, and decided we'd go investigate that. My fighter's idea was to take its head as a trophy and go show it to the cyclops we had been told about, so it would recognize our power and join us. My fighter was not the smartest cookie, but she was good at combat.
So we went to the lake, and we built a boat using our three crafters and the Goblin feat to make stuff out of junk. That was thematically hilarious as two of the crafters were goblins and the third (the Wizard) was dismayed at the poor quality.
Then we went out into the lake to explore that hex. We found the sea monster when it made a Stealth check so high that it was literally impossible for us to succeed on Perception to see it. (By a large margin, it beat my max possible by 9 and I think nobody could have gotten within 5.)
On the first turn of combat, it crit the fighter (me) for half my HP. With 16 CON, that was pretty terrifying. I got to attack it and demoralize, which did work. Did 4 points of bleed from the wounding rune, which stayed up for 9 rounds and thus was arguably the most effective single attack in the entire combat.
It then swallowed me. While swallowed, I couldn't use my greatsword... so I tried to cut out with my goblin bite when I realized it was incredibly difficult to succeed on the Athletics to get out, and that only took me back to its mouth anyway (so it would just swallow me again). This really hit home just how big the gap is between a weapon with a potency rune and one without one, because my +2 weapon probably could have cut us out quickly, but a mundane one is just not doing good damage. Also it took several rounds before I could roll above a 3, and I didn't get many chances being slowed and grabbed inside the thing. And also suffocating.
It then proceeded to systematically swallow everybody in the party. The Wizard was particularly ineffective as it critically succeeded on every spell save and thus nothing worked on it except Magic Missle. He was pretty disappointed at how ineffective he was.
Once we were all in, my Fighter took the Wizard's +2 dagger (because why not?) and tried to cut out with that. But then the dying conditions started hitting from the damage every turn, and the suffocation as well. We used hero points. We were allowed to share an air bubble spell although you probably can't really do that (it reduced its duration when we did but whatever), and at one point I stuck my head in my own bag of holding to take a breath since it contains air until I opened it. Our DM was feeling open to allowing creative ideas with how badly this thing was pulverizing us... and that was with him forgetting to roll damage for people already swallowed for half the combat.
To make a long story short, on the last round before I suffocated and went back into dying (permanently, as nobody could get me back up and my wounded value was high enough that I wasn't going to be able to survive on my own, despite beating the DC and getting back up 3 times already in the fight and using a hero point), I hit it and did 1 less damage than required to cut our way out. DM said "here's a couple of her points, I'll let you use them to add an extra d4 damage."
That was done strictly to let us continue the playtest if we want to. Had he not outright fudged the rules, it was a TPK as we had no way to get another round.
With that, we cut ourselves out. With how much damage the wounding rune had done, and the other damage we did, it was blooded and he ruled it retreated rather than attacking us again (because if it had, it would have TPKd us anyway).
He remarked that it was probably the hardest fight, but he also remarked at how high some of the DCs to hit it were and how often we were failing. Of particular note was how low the Wizard's spell DCs were in comparison to this thing and how there was no spell save outcome except critical success. DM actually thought the Wizard had calculated it incorrectly because the number sounded so low in comparison to its saves.
The stats on this thing were WAY too high for our party of four and there was a lot of ineffective people. I think I had the most success, and I was still failing more than half the time (cold dice didn't help but I needed to roll a 12 against TAC with that dagger to cut out, and the number was higher to hit it normally).
I'm not sure if we're going to continue Mirrored Moon. I'd like to test out exploration mode and see how it goes, but I'm not sure people want to get into another encounter where stuff can blast us for half our HP in a single attack without a healer. Course, maybe the Wizard will just change characters and bring a Cleric, since Heal would actually work (unlike every spell the Wizard tried that wasn't Magic Missile). Since we already TPKd officially, the DM didn't mind if people wanted to change things. If not, we'll probably just call it the TPK it should have been and go on to the next playtest.
I will say that my Fighter was fun to play despite how ridiculous that fight was, and I don't usually say that about Fighters. RPing a Goblin was quite a lot of fun, as the other goblin and I played off each other, and someone that small with a greatsword charging in was really amusing.
Of course, there are also no stakes in a playtest. If we had come to end of a 3 year campaign and a fight simply crushed us that totally... maybe I would be more annoyed.
So just a quick first question were you playing the same characters that were used in part 1? Since you said you made a fighter I wasn't sure. Just a small thing since it is supposed to be those characters or at least character with the Doomsday Dawn backgrounds.
That's has nothing to do with this, was mainly just curious.
So that fight is a significantly difficult fight for Mirrored Moon. I believe it's the most difficult fight of the section even after the slight nerfs to the monster due to the level difference as well as the having to fight underwater.
I'm glad to see that your group doesn't seem fully discouraged from trying to keep playing. I would recommend you do and just ignore the lake and restart the part. Though do note, if you can, on the survey that you guys wiped on that fight since that information would be useful to Paizo.
So just a quick first question were you playing the same characters that were used in part 1? Since you said you made a fighter I wasn't sure. Just a small thing since it is supposed to be those characters or at least character with the Doomsday Dawn backgrounds.
That's has nothing to do with this, was mainly just curious.
I didn't play part 1, the group did it with other people. When some dropped out, I joined in part 2 and have played with them since. Two of the people in question (the DM and another player) are players I am also in a 1e campaign of Rise of the Runelords (same DM), and also a D&D homebrew campaign (different DM). So we play together frequently.
The other three players all did play part 1 and used the same characters. I've played two different Clerics and wanted to try something else this time, so I had no option but to make something new. :)
So that fight is a significantly difficult fight for Mirrored Moon. I believe it's the most difficult fight of the section even after the slight nerfs to the monster due to the level difference as well as the having to fight underwater.
That was what our DM said afterward, yes. Being underwater didn't help, but in terms of our combat ability it wasn't that big a hindrance (our weapons largely weren't affected until we got swallowed and the Wizard's spells weren't effective either way).
It was a huge hindrance to our ability to run away, as while it became clear very quickly that we were outmatched, the swim rules had us moving so slowly that there was no viable escape (DM set the Athletics DC pretty low so we were generally succeeding at moving 10 feet, but that thing was way faster and had reach). If we had been on land, the rest of the party likely would have fled and I'd have been the only one to die (and I wouldn't have blamed them).
That's an encounter design issue more than anything else, putting something so deadly in a spot that hinders mobility so badly is naturally going to up the lethality.
Running away is supposed to be a valid encounter outcome when you up the difficulty, but it just wasn't practical here.
I'm glad to see that your group doesn't seem fully discouraged from trying to keep playing. I would recommend you do and just ignore the lake and restart the part.
I'm not sure if we're going to go back to this one or just go to the next playtest, honestly. If we do come back to it, our characters survived thanks to DM fiat and we remember what just happened, so we're not going anywhere near the lake again.
But yes, we have been reminding ourselves that it's a playtest and finding situations like this is part of the point. People have generally taken the problems in stride.
Though do note, if you can, on the survey that you guys wiped on that fight since that information would be useful to Paizo.
That was what our DM told us to do, and what I did. I'm glad he went ahead and fudged it though, because with the number of times I made the recovery save to get up and attempt to stab the damn thing's stomach only to get knocked out again, there was something to be said for "sheer Goblin stubbornness." It made for a fun moment in what was otherwise a pretty ineffective combat situation.
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That was done strictly to let us continue the playtest if we want to. Had he not outright fudged the rules, it was a TPK as we had no way to get another round.
FYI:
Oh, interesting! Thanks for sharing that with me. :)
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Yeah, that note was in there because every fight in Part 4 is really pretty difficult, with no breathers in there (since it's a nova test, and we didn't need to test novaing down an easy encounter), so it explicitly says to let the PCs escape in case it turns rough. It's also worth noting that Spine Rake looks like it should have been a 2-action activity, not a single action, making the serpent a deadly Severe encounter indeed!
Good to know, thanks. :)
Which action is Spine Rake? I didn't hear that term used during the game.
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Spine Rake is a 1-action ability the Sea Serpent has that allows it to stride and deal damage to every creature it moves past as it strides (which, given its incredibly fast movement speed, would be everybody). The damage is high enough that a Rake/Attack/Rake attack routine would easily TPK any party in only a handful of rounds. Really, it's still a wickedly powerful option even at 2 actions; a Rake/Attack routine is still absolutely brutal due to its reach.
However, Spine Rake is only part of the problem. This thing is also absolutely brutal if it swallows you. Swallow is much, much deadlier than in PF1. In PF1 you could use multiple weak attacks to cut your way free, which meant that a high-Str character could break free with a few successive attacks with a non-magical dagger. But in PF2 you must exceed a toughness value. Given that most damage comes from a weapon's potency and you're unlikely to have a heavily enchanted dagger as a backup weapon, most characters aren't capable of breaking free. They're just stuck there, flailing, hoping that maybe a high roll critical hit might get them out before they suffocate or are digested.
Then we have this thing's ranged attack; due to the creature's very high speed, the generally lower range that spellcasters have (few spells can hit something out to 100 ft), and a lack of battlefield control options a ranged-keepaway strategy is far more powerful in PF2 than it ever has been. Few parties would even have a credible means of fighting this creature if it chose that strategy.
And finally there's the issue that even without any of its abilities this monster is just supremely powerful. When I ran this monster I had it fight the party in the shallows where we used land movement speed, I didn't use its ranged attack, didn't use its spine rake, didn't use its swallow whole ability, and I had it split its attacks between three separate party members on each turn. It still came within a hair of TPK'ing them and was by far the hardest encounter of the chapter. It's just that powerful.
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Wow, yeah we didn't even see it use that. That would have been nuts with our no healer party.
And yes, swallow was really terrible. Magic weapons are so critical now that when you lose access (as I did for a while), it's a crippling loss of effectiveness.
Swallow is much, much deadlier than in PF1. In PF1 you could use multiple weak attacks to cut your way free, which meant that a high-Str character could break free with a few successive attacks with a non-magical dagger. But in PF2 you must exceed a toughness value. Given that most damage comes from a weapon's potency and you're unlikely to have a heavily enchanted dagger as a backup weapon, most characters aren't capable of breaking free. They're just stuck there, flailing, hoping that maybe a high roll critical hit might get them out before they suffocate or are digested.
I think I heard in a twitch stream or read somewhere that the intent is for you to be able to wittle away at the hardness.
I think I heard in a twitch stream or read somewhere that the intent is for you to be able to wittle away at the hardness.
If that's the intent, they need to say so explicitly. It does make breaking out significantly easier and less of a death sentence, though. It doesn't help that "toughness" sounds like "hardness", so they should probably use a different term if that's the case.
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We picked this module back up last night. Same four players (Fighter, Rogue, Ranger, Wizard), with one addition. Canonically, we did cut out of the sea serpent, and being blooded (mostly from the damage of my wounding rune), it fled once we did. We dragged ourselves back to shore, made camp, and spent the whole day recovering. During that time, the fifth player showed up as a Halfing Silver Dragon Sorcerer. We have no healer, but do have two people incapable of critically failing treat wounds (so if we have a safe camp, DM will simply let us spam it without making 20 rolls).
I'm going to split this post into two pieces: the combat, and the exploration. So it will not be in order.
Combat
We only did one fight this session, against a pair of Rocs. The Sorcerer cast heightened enlarge on the Fighter (me). Fighter scared one off with demoralize. The other one grabbed the Rogue and started flying away, but the Rogue escaped and took no damage (because Catfall). Sorcerer then hit it with Enervation and rolled a crit on the attack roll, and it failed the save, so that became an Enervated 4 critical fail, which made a huge difference.
Fighter remarked that the new guy was showing up our Wizard, who responded by casting Stoneskin on said Fighter. Fighter then got picked up by the other one and repeatedly attacked, and stoneskin saved my life. So I had to thank the Wizard later.
Ranger tried making a snare in combat, but we found the rules on how to do that hard to find on the fly and the net result was while the snare did get made and triggered, it had no effect.
While Fighter was in the air, the other one moved to grab the Ranger. It then flew up and dropped the Ranger. Both spellcasters hit it with Cone of Cold (it made both saves). Ranger then crit it and killed it.
Meanwhile, the other one was flying away with Huge Goblin Fighter (me). Rather than try to escape, I kept trying to set it up for Shatter Defenses, because any time I got it flat footed, the Rogue on the ground was sneak attacking it with her bow. Although I had a hard time actually hitting it because for some reason I rolled 2 on my attack rolls more than every other number combined (seriously!), I did manage to land shatter defenses a couple of times on the failure effect.
Despite the bad rolling, this actually felt super cool at the table, as I was effectively doing something in combat that was setting up attacks from other people. Fighters are really fun in this edition.
What actually ended the fight is when I critically succeeded on Demoralize. It dropped me and fled. Sorcerer then lobbed a fireball at it and took it out. I fell a long way, but luckily it was over the river so I was able to reduce the falling damage from that.
I ended up at 6HP out of 123, and the Ranger was in similarly bad shape. Nobody went into dying. This combat felt a lot better than the sea serpent, in that it was a real challenge but intelligent use of spells and some team play got us through it. The casters were a lot happier to actually land some effective spells, as well. Overall this was a success for the system, I think.
Exploration
This was discouraging, to put it kindly. According to our DM, one of the updates increased the DCs. He was baffled as to why. He used the new values, the result of which is that those of us without trained Survival needed absurdly high Perception checks to be at all useful. We were trying to assist our Ranger (who does have Survival) when searching the hex. Fighter needed a 19 on the dice. Sorcerer needed a 20. Wizard was using detect magic and not rolling. Rogue needed similarly high numbers, but I don't remember the exact one. Even the Ranger needed something above 10 to succeed. (The infamous "coin flip math" would have been a huge improvement to our odds, to illustrate the point.)
We explored several hexes. We critically failed more of them than we succeeded at, in that I'm not sure we *ever* succeeded in this session. It sucked. At one point, Ranger declared that searching was pointless and we should just follow the river at full speed to the sources and try to find things there. Ranger's player was extremely discouraged by this whole thing, because, to quote her "at 9th level we should feel like we're skilled heroes, not a bunch of chumps with no idea what they're doing."
So that was actually what we did. We walked along the river at full speed until we got to the end, and searched that. Which of course we failed at, but in one case the Rocs found us and in another case we found some dead cultists and a letter despite failing.
We're 14 days in, with 1 research point and zero of anything else. We've been told research points decay at 1 per week, which is twice as fast as we're getting them. So, that is is also pretty discouraging.
At this point, the group sentiment seems to be that we need to find the pool we're looking for and immediately move on it instead of trying to explore to gather research, allies, and treasure, because we're so hopelessly awful at exploration that it's just a waste of time.
It would likely feel better if I had my Pale Mountain Cleric character, who was trained in Survival and has 18 WIS. That guy would actually have a shot at succeeding occasionally with how high the DCs are.
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We picked it up again this week. There were two big changes in how we played:
1. Most of us gave up on trying to assist our Ranger in getting better results, since our odds were so terrible. Everyone rolled on their own and we went fishing for Natural 20s, which is easier with 5 people rolling. More effective, but not very fun.
2. About an hour in, our DM got so frustrated at the absurdity of the updated DCs that he tossed them out and went back to the original published ones. Suddenly able to succeed on rolls lower than 19, we made much more headway.
We found the Red Dragon and killed it, largely because our Sorcerer got up close and was doing all kinds of Cold damage with her dragon claws. That was neat. We took the claws as trophies.
We then found the cultists, but we had a grand total of 1 research point (expiring in 1 day at this point) and zero ally points, so we left. Then in fairly rapid succession we found the Gnomes (who joined us because we'd already killed the Rocs), the Dryad (who sent us to the Cyclops to stop their tree cutting), the Cyclops (who joined us because we'd already killed the Dragon and also agreed to the Dryads request), then back to the Dryad (who joined us).
We also found some treasure at various points in this. As we're not using the Focus playtest and it's awesome new staff rules, of the available options we pretty much went entirely with +3 weapons and armor.
Suddenly flush with allies, we started the march back to the cultists,where we did some scouting while waiting for our allies to catch up to us (and gained some more RP). We'll be attacking them on Day 57 hopefully on Sunday to wrap this up.
Exploration mode is very, very swingy. When our Natural 20 fishing started going well, we got hints to ignore hexes and where to go which massively sped up everything. When we didn't have that, it was a slog.
Looks like your group has recovered from that first struggle with this part and that's great.
Though I do kinda need to question why your group was struggling so much exploring hexes with the new DCs. The new DCs are a 30 Perception check and a 27 Survival. With minimal investment into those skills you should have a +11 for both of those, Trained (9) prof + Wis mod (2).
Now the ranger has had 4 skill increases and so probably made survival expert at the least and so have a +12 but wisdom is an important stat as well so their modifier is probably a +3. For a total bonus, before any magical intervention, of +13. Meaning that they can make the check on a 14 on the die.
Aid is only vs a dc 15 (typically) or 20 (particularly hard) using an appropriate skill and modifier for the roll. Now aid can only be applied once successfully as the bonus wouldn't stack so you would have the next highest modifier person roll. Now even the minimally invested person I described above should be giving aid with a 4 on the die (typically) or a 9 on the die (particularly hard) Also i don't believe there is anything that says you can't aid the aider giving them a better chance of critically aiding adding a +4 circumstance instead of a +2 circumstance
For a mundane total around +15 before applying any magic or feats to the roll.
The Ranger is the only one who has Survival trained. As we were told to level characters from earlier in the playtest, we happened to not have ones with the skill back in the first part of the playtest. If I'd had my Cleric who had Survival and 18 WIS, it would have been less painful.
A DC 30 perception requires my Fighter to roll a 19 on the dice and the Sorcerer to roll a 20. The Wizard is similar. I don't know exactly what the Rogue's required roll is, but it's quite high. With those DCs, critical failure is far more common an outcome than success is (although IIRC critical failure isn't a thing on this). Ranger can beat the Survival with a 13 on the dice, but that's still well below 50% success rate.
It sounds like we just got the aid rules wrong. I'll bring that up next time the group meets, thanks for pointing it out.
At any rate, we had a lot more fun with the old DCs and everybody left in a far better mood.
Finished off last night. Thanks to our allies, the final encounter wasn't too bad.
Sorceress (my wife) cast heightened enlarge on Fighter (me). So now we have a huge Goblin running around, which was pretty great until the enemies hit me with confusion and enervated. I guess being a big target has its downsides. But when confusion went down and I rolled a nat 20 on an AOO, that cultist had a real bad day. ;)
Sorceress also had Shadow Siphon, but it's weird to use it because it's a reaction, but identifying a spell being cast is also a reaction far as we can tell? So you have to effectively guess when it will be effective to cast this as you can't do both at the same time? Seems weird. Maybe we got the rule wrong on that.
Mirror Image on enemies is really annoying for how it slows down combat, although it seems less bad now than it did in PF1.
This part went fine thanks to how well the previous session went. Ending on a high note was great after how long it took us to get this far.
We're skipping part 5 of DD due to lack of interest, so we're jumping to Red Flags next. Sorceress and Rogue want to play the same characters again, I'm going to make something else. Seems unlikely we'll get that done before the feedback window closes, but we will give it a try.
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We're skipping part 5 of DD due to lack of interest, so we're jumping to Red Flags next.
Very prudent. Heroes of Undarin is a group-killer of an adventure; I literally had three people drop out of my playtesting group (effectively disbanding the group) after this nightmare. I sorely wish I'd just skipped this one over.
I think I would have to have a serious discussion with my players if they disbanded the group because their one-shot character died in a playtest.
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I think I would have to have a serious discussion with my players if they disbanded the group because their one-shot character died in a playtest.
Its not so much that characters die, but that the adventure is grueling.
The enemies are able to beat on players for a long time while a cleric or other character outheals the incoming damage.
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I think I would have to have a serious discussion with my players if they disbanded the group because their one-shot character died in a playtest.
No one died; I had a very well-optimized group, and got a lot of lucky rolls in clutch situations (they also got plenty of unlucky rolls, but nothing encounter-ending).
Cellion more or less describes the experience. I think we'd have had a much more positive experience if we had wiped in the second or third battle.
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We're skipping part 5 of DD due to lack of interest, so we're jumping to Red Flags next.Very prudent. Heroes of Undarin is a group-killer of an adventure; I literally had three people drop out of my playtesting group (effectively disbanding the group) after this nightmare. I sorely wish I'd just skipped this one over.
Yeah. My DM actually did it with another group he's doing playtest stuff with, and they were just fine with it. The group I'm in is much more RP oriented and much less fond of lengthy combat, hence why he described it up front and asked us what we thought.
I think I would have to have a serious discussion with my players if they disbanded the group because their one-shot character died in a playtest.
There's a difference between having a character die and having a character walk into something that's simply waves of combat designed to kill them. There's lots of us who simply don't find that kind of scenario fun, and dying at the end of a few hours of "not fun" is certainly going to sour those people on the whole playtest.