Thoughts on exploration, combat, and spells in the Mirrored Moon Playtest game

[Tangent101]

My online group only meets once every three-to-four weeks so we've not gotten nearly as far along with the Playtest as many folk have... but I will have to admit the ending of the "The Mirrored Moon" scenario fell kind of flat for me. And part of this has to do with a disconnect between the people making the module and the game mechanics themselves.

For instance, you have Research Decay. While I can understand part of this (in that you don't want the PCs to just study the enemy several times to max out research), the end-result doesn't work very well. If the group did what mine did, they stumbled across the dead cultists and got one Research Point which FADED before they even found the Mirrored Moon. They then studied the Cultists and gained two more Research Points before heading back to camp. By the time they go to Camp, get the mercenaries, and head back, all of their Research was gone. And even if they HAD traveled immediately to the Cultists' lair after getting the slain Cultists' data, it takes 13 days by river to reach the Cultists unless you have a Party that optimized for speed. So as a result the enemy has all of their Buffs, including buffs that last one minute, while the PCs have maybe one or two Buffs that can last 24 hours.

Next, I didn't find anything valuable on overland travel. All it states is "difficult terrain is half speed, very difficult is one third" while river hexes are simultaneously not difficult but difficult at the same time because they have rapids which mean no boats. (I just ignored the rapids and allowed them to be normal terrain.) The GM has to decide if hills are difficult or not, while mountains are very difficult... meaning a group with an average speed of 20 will take one day to move into a Plains or River hex, and then another 2-3 days to investigate. You need a Natural 20 in order to get an idea of what's out there. Needless to say, my group ended up getting back to the base camp on the late side, but as I wasn't sure if I did something wrong I handwaved it and gave them just enough time to launch their raid.

Seriously. Even on the scenario where each side loses one minute off of the duration of buff spells... that is basically 90% of the buff spells. My group ended up going into the scenario using an Invisibility Bubble, spent their Surprise Round casting Buff spells (mostly Haste), and then the next round attacked. Even if they'd gone into the game with no buffs at all, they likely would have spent their first round buffing on the battlefield.

But hey, those are things the GM can decide for themselves... and then I started with the combat. That's when things fell apart. You see, spells now either suck or are awesome... and spells you might think are actually decent now are useless. Take for instance, Enlarge.

Enlarge gives you +2 damage and reach... but a -1 to hit, a -1 to armor class, -1 to reflex saves, and a -1 to Dex-based checks. My decision to USE Enlarge was based off of my old memories of the spell... and after I spent 5 minutes looking up what Sluggish means because Paizo has to try and save a couple of pages rather than, oh, HAVE THE DAMN BONUSES AND PENALTIES IN THE SPELL DESCRIPTION, I said heck with it (but not in such user-friendly language) and stayed with the spell.

Let me tell you, spell language also influenced my choices. If I have to look up some term, I'm going to skip using that spell. If my players use a spell I have them tell me what the spell does, because a PDF Search for the term comes up with dozens of uses rather than go right to where I need to. If I'm running a game I need the information on hand rather than look everywhere for it. Hell, half the time I forgot to have players be penalized for Frightened because? I had "Frightened" written down rather than -1 to everything.

Having to look up monsters also takes time. All I end up doing with the online group is have a half-dozen copy-pasted Wordpad documents for the monsters... and even then I have to edit in asterisks for Action symbols.

The group prevailed. I suspect half of this reason was fireball is a bit more effective now and Mummies don't do well against Fire. (Also, I might have rolled a 1 for the Brain Collector's save.) While the Rogue was down to below half her hit points and the fighter had taken a tenth of his hit points, the group still did better than expected (and to be honest, if the monsters hadn't rolled 15+ on a d20 for each group of monsters and gone second and fourth (after the Rogue and Sorcerer), the enemy would have been even less effective) even with the Cleric Nerf.

My group joked that they were going to scold Paizo for "making the GM cry" because I will be honest here. I got quite upset at Paizo. Seriously, I was ready to chew bullets on several occasions because it strongly feels like this scenario (and the rules) was rushed out the door.

Paizo? You have some decent basics here. Pathfinder 2 could be the next best thing out there. But you honestly need to take more than half a year to think things over. Maybe take a couple dozen of the Playtest groups here and ask them to continue to do playtests for you, and continue revamping the game. Modify the magic so it doesn't suck nearly as badly, and make it so each spell is worth taking rather than have one or two spells of each level that will be all anyone takes because the rest frankly sucks. Hell, you could probably create a 1st level spell that grants Reach and have it be more effective than Enlarge even without the extra damage. Similarly for other spells that penalize people for using them.

And when it comes to scenarios... the module-builders have to have a better idea of the rules and various things on the spells. Otherwise you end up with frustrated GMs and players who end up playing computer games or YouTube videos in the background because the GM is busy looking up stuff that should have just been printed either in the spells or in the encounter write-up in the first place.

As for me? I'm done with the Playtest. There is no way my Skype group could finish the level 17 encounter in one game session so we're going back to Pathfinder 1 and playing Hell's Rebels. And when the game is published? I'm probably going to wait a year or two before buying it. That way I can get a better idea of what's happening... and if the game is worth buying or if it continues to end up lacking despite a promising start.

[glass]

My play of Mirrored Moon went rather differently, it sounds, but we have a similar complaint about the research-point system. By luck, we found the bad guys' base almost straight away which got us enough research points for the boss lady to commit her mecenaries, which then immediatey started decaying (the points, not the mercenaries), so we had to set off to launch the attack immediately otherwise we would have lost half our forces on route (we had managed to recruit the giants* on our way back, but going looking for other allies would have been self-defeating.

I was a player, not the GM, so I don't know how explicit it is but our GM's reading of the module was that re-scouting the camp would not refresh the research points even though the stated reason for the decay was that things could have changed.

I'm not sure what difference it would have made if we had had more allies, but possibly it would have prevented the TPK that ensued - although to be fair that was partly due to terrible rolling on our part and red-hot rolling on the GM's. The last time the big bad used its breath weapon, it managed to catch all four of us in the area and three out of four roll 1s (the fourth also failed, but at least not critically). Which killed the cleric outright (he was already WOunded 2), and took everyone but me down too. One crit with his melee attack later and I was down too.

_
glass.

(* Were the cyclopes? Something like that anyway.)