Basically anything from Book of the Dead is going to feel borderline OP in Abomination Vaults.
It is hard to make a terrible party comp. You can make a less optimal party comp, but that is different. They will still be successful, they will just have more setbacks and missed opportunities.
Yeah, a Rogue is nice because of the high number of skills with higher proficiency. But it is certainly not a requirement. Probably best to make sure that a character or two are trained in Religion and Occultism. Other than that, it is a matter of how the players want to approach various problems that are presented to them.
There are undead. Not just undead, but there are definitely undead.So definitely not a dead archetype pick then?
Having one of the undead archetypes or even Dhampir heritage and they will find that they are immune to the negative damage that gets thrown around by a lot of the monsters and traps/hazards in the area.
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Thanks - the player will be happy to hear that her concept is more than viable.
Unrelated to the title but on a similar note, how necessary is a rogue given this is a traditional dungeon crawl type adventure? In prior editions you obviously couldn't leave home without one, but with the game changes is a skill feat based character borderline essential (excluding Medicine) or can the group work without one?
I assume it's the latter, but I just want to be sure before my players all inevitably fall in love with a terrible party comp. :D
Rogues are a strong class in this edition and you won't feel bad for having one who knows what they're doing.
But they're not required. There are some hazards that require a certain level of proficiency with Perception to spot, and a certain degree of Thievery (or sometimes Religion for haunts, or other skills, depending on the hazard) to get rid of.
Notice that fighters, rangers, investigators also quickly increase proficiency in Perception. And anyone can just decide to prioritize Thievery as the first skill they raise when they can go Expert, Master etc.
No sane adventure should require Expert in a skill for something too early, or Master too early. What's too early? As a rule of thumb, too early is before you can pick your second skill of that level. So a level 9 character (not rogue) could have 2 Master skills. Requiring Master Thievery to deal with a hazard before that is definitely too early.
All in all, it actually seems the design trend is to move away from requiring these exact degrees. If a trap is nasty and dangerous, the disable DC will be hard anyway, so you probably want to be Master instead of Trained anyway. Hard-gating it isn't really needed and may be harmful game design.
You need Athletics or Thievery in Abomination Vaults, just in the party somewhere. Most of the Thievery skill checks can be bypassed by making an Athletics check.
In fact you typically only have to make one not multiple, its at the same ridiculously high DC. So actually Thievery seems like a bit of a waste. As a GM I got so annoyed with the numbers I ended up hand waving them away most of the time.
No sane adventure should require Expert in a skill for something too early, or Master too early. What's too early? As a rule of thumb, too early is before you can pick your second skill of that level. So a level 9 character (not rogue) could have 2 Master skills. Requiring Master Thievery to deal with a hazard before that is definitely too early.
Is Abomination Vaults, specifically, sane?
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No sane adventure should require Expert in a skill for something too early, or Master too early. What's too early? As a rule of thumb, too early is before you can pick your second skill of that level. So a level 9 character (not rogue) could have 2 Master skills. Requiring Master Thievery to deal with a hazard before that is definitely too early.Is Abomination Vaults, specifically, sane?
I don't know. I'm just referring to good practice. The hazard creation guidelines from the GMG suggest at which levels which minimum proficiency requirements make sense. They show for example that a particularly difficult to disable hazard at level 9 could require Master proficiency, but at 8 you'd still be limited to Expert.
The important thing for hazards is you have a character with high perception proficiency and preferably a decent wisdom score to be using the Search exploration activity outside of combat. Ideally, have multiple because the stealth DCs are often quite high and multiple people rolling is better.
Once you spot the hazard, any class could have the right skill to disable it. But you might be able to just avoid the hazard by taking a different path or trigger it from a safe range, so this isn't actually as important as spotting the trap to begin with.
The advantage rogues and investigators get is a feat which lets them Search for traps while using another exploration tactic, which can help them to do their own thing better (Avoiding Notice is very good on both classes) but doesn't actually make them better for the party. And is in fact limited just to traps, so you may want another character searching for Haunts too.
Oracle has a feat, Spiritual Sense that lets them do the same for Haunts. But their perception rank progression is pretty bad, and they aren't WIS based.
Oracle has a feat, Spiritual Sense that lets them do the same for Haunts. But their perception rank progression is pretty bad, and they aren't WIS based.
I think the ghost hunter archetype and duskwalker heritage have similar feats but I can't be bothered to look them up.