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Did a small playtest with a Thaumaturge the other day that ended up taking way longer than I expected due to some technical issues, but figured I'd do a writeup about it.
If anyone cares about the context of the adventure
So, our party for this adventure consisted of a Human Thaumaturge, a Catfolk primal sorcerer, a leshy barbarian and an elf bard. Everyone was level 3.
Encounter 1 has the party arriving at the village and finding it besieged by a group of strange cultist looking dudes (mostly using modified goblin commando and gnoll hunter stat blocks). Combat started pretty quickly.
Round 1 started with the Thaumaturge rolling really poorly on Find Flaws and having to manually set up Antithesis before moving closer to the nearest cultist. The Sorcerer caught two of the mooks with electric arc. The barbarian was hit with an arrow and in return strode up and finished off the shooter. The bard Sang and then missed with a telekinetic projectile.
Other than that arrow the enemies rolled really poorly round 1. The leader of the raiding party also landed a hit, but did minimum damage.
Unfortunately the guy the Barbarian killed was the one the Thaumaturge set up on, so next round he had to stride, Find Flaws (success this time) and strike another mook. The sorcerer's next electric arc finished off that bad guy and pinged a third. The bard Sang and missed another telekinetic projectile. These enemies don't even have good AC just really cold dice today, but Inspire Courage is an MVP all on its own.
The enemies rolled better this turn offensively and nearly dropped the Thaumaturge even with two of them down. One of the cultist archers got a lucky crit for 14 damage and another hit with their sword for 6.
But by round 3 things were in cleanup mode. Another electric arc from the sorcerer, a crit from the barbarian and finally landing a TKP from the Bard downed their leader and left one wounded cultist left... who opted to run the hell away.
Encounter 2 had the party helping out/rescuing the villagers and then questioning them about everything that happened... Having an 18 starting Cha and training in Diplomacy and Deception made the Thaumaturge really effective here, but not in any groundbreaking ways. They did get to use their chalice's 10 minute sippy powers repeatedly over the course of this encounter, both to heal themselves up and to help out a wounded villager. That was pretty cool. They attempted to Recall Knowledge about the cult they were tracking and failed, but the diplomacy stuff all went great.
Encounter 3 had them using the information they gathered to find and then head to where these raiders were based. They arrived to find a camp built outside/along/into a cave that was completely empty until they reached the back and discovered a Gibbering Mouther. Apparently the raiders had been feeding captives to it, but with this most recent failed raid it had apparently gotten hungry enough to break free and katamari all the remaining raiders to death.
Anyways, this led into our next fight
The mouther rolled terribly on its initiative and its Gibbering aura got stuffed by the Bard's countersong. The Barbarian went first, but opted to delay to let the Bard Inspire before running up, swinging their great axe and getting bit for it. The Thaumaturge Succeeded on their find flaws check with a solid roll, discovering its weakness to bludgeoning damage... though this didn't do much for them because they had a warhammer anyways. The Barbarian decided that they'll switch to their fists in future rounds for that reason though. The Sorcerer cast Hydraulic Push and missed.
The mouther responded by rolling on top of the Barbarian, successfully engulfing them, but rolled low on its damage, then used ground manipulation
Round 2 the Bard opted for a bludgeoning TKP, which did decent damage. The Barbarian punched the Mouther twice instead of deciding to try Escaping, doing pretty good damage too. The thaumaturge demoralized the mouther, then hit with their hammer and sipped their chalice. This poor thing's HP is getting kind of shredded to be honest. The Sorcerer cast Electric Arc again and seemed kind of annoyed about hydraulic push missing.
The mouther spit at and dazzled the bard, then hit and bled the thaumaturge, then missed with a third attack.
Round 3 the Barbarian punched twice, the Thaumaturge sipped and swung twice. The bard failed their miss check on TKP but kept singing. The sorcerer calmed down and landed Hydraulic push this time for pretty great damage.
The mouther retaliated again, hitting the thaumaturge hard. They would have gone down at this point if they hadn't been slurping that chalice every round.
Round 4 was basically a repeat of round 3, with the thaumaturge ending up nearly succumbing to their bleed damage before the monster was finally killed
There's more for them to do but that will be next week.
First of all I want to say we both really enjoyed how this class looks. So while I'm going to start with criticisms, it's criticism because the class feels so cool in so many ways to begin with:
The class feels really MAD. Our player started with a 16 in Strength and 18 in Cha and felt like he was obligated to put one of his remaining boosts in Dex just so his AC wasn't abysmal. Which meant he only had one boost he felt like he could freely spend. He said if he was going to rebuild the character he'd probably drop Cha to a 16 so he could get 14 Dex or 12 Con/12Dex/12Wis
I put this observation first because it feels like it ripples into most of the other complaints he had about his character.
-The Thaumaturge felt really squishy. D8 HP is one thing, but again compounded by the MAD issue. He just did not have really any resources invested in his saves and other defensive stats. The Barbarian had 40% more health than him and only one less AC while raging. Saving throws didn't come up too much this session, but all of the Barbarian's saves were better too.
I was intentionally kind of spreading out damage this fight and even then the Thaumaturge was perilously close to dropping, even with heavy usage of Sip.
-The Thaumaturge kind of sucks at knowing about things that aren't monsters. Pretty self evident but, again partly because of how MAD he was, 10 Int felt really bad flubbing lore and occultism checks even though investigating mysterious cults and the like felt like it should be their wheelhouse.
-He wants more stuff that uses Charisma. Right now the only real mechanic that does is Find Flaws. Which is obviously really important, but if Cha is going to be your primary stat, he wishes he could leverage it more in combat. In particular he talked about how the Inventor had some special abilities that relied on their class DC and... kinda wishes he had something like those. Implement abilities that forced saving throws in exchange for debuffs or AoE damage feel like they'd slot into the class really well.
-Fighting that horde of enemies felt awkward. To some extent this is a problem for every martial, but having to spend an action (or two if you fail) to 'set up' on every enemy felt bad when most enemies were dropping within a round. The Ranger kind of has the same problem, but at least it gets action economy enhancing attacks. This is probably where some implement AoE would feel really good.
-The player mentioned it felt weirdly bad to uncover a weakness he could already exploit. Find Flaws on the gibbering mouther felt like kind of a 'loss' to him because he didn't really get anything out of it.
-Chalice felt really good. It's a relatively low amount of THP, but since you can use it every round it really ended up adding up. The out of combat healing mechanic felt pretty strong too.
-Damage was great, when it worked. He was hitting almost as hard as the Barbarian when he got everything rolling on the raiders in the first encounter. Though as mentioned, he felt like he was missing out against the miniboss.
-Heavy investment in Cha made him feel really good out of combat, where admittedly the Barbarian felt less helpful. This party was a little odd in that it had so many Cha characters in it, but it worked out pretty well
Round 2 will probably be next week.
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I like the way you add little personal asides about the sorceror’s general emotional state…
By “some sort of implement AoE” do you mean an effect to counteract the set up time loss by Find Flaws in a burst/area on such hordes? Like shining a…lantern on more than one creature at a time?
I like the way you add little personal asides about the sorceror’s general emotional state…
By “some sort of implement AoE” do you mean an effect to counteract the set up time loss by Find Flaws in a burst/area on such hordes? Like shining a…lantern on more than one creature at a time?
I think they mean something like let's day opening your lantern and mystical flames shoot out in a cone or something.
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Any of the above really could work. AoE damage. Debuffs. Damage enhancers.
Just, as said, the class feels awkward fighting in large groups and the player wished they had more 'weird' abilities that keyed off Charisma and the solution to those could go hand in hand.
In general though, I think having more weird, mystical abilities that aren't spells (expressed through unique activities and actions) is a design space that could really flesh out the class in terms of being magical but not a spellcaster.
I'm gonna try to keep the rest of my posts here focused more on the actual gameplay feedback/playtesting though.