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Thrawn183
2008-04-15, 04:26 PM
So maybe it was the alpha, I don't remember and it's not important.

This Saturday, my usual weekly gaming group did a one shot with level-1 characters in a premade Paizo adventure. Players were given limited time to familiarize themselves with altered classes and the basic fluff of the setting.

The Changes
All races received significant power boosts. I, for example, played a human. Humans still receive a feat and extra skill point but also are given proficiency in a single weapon of the players choice (guess how often they're going to be exotic weapons?) and a +2 to any single stat of choice. All the races appeared to have had their power boosted a similar amount.

Some feats were modified. The amount you power attack is your strength modifier, no more, no less. It is in no way dependent upon your BAB. I found out the hard way that this means strength damage hurts fighters even more than it normally would. Toughness is normal Toughness and Improved Toughness rolled into one (so +4 HP at first level and +1 every level after).

All characters started with huge hp. I don't know if this was supposed to be the case or not, but instead of adding our Con Mod to HP we just added our Con score. My fighter with a Con of 16 and with Toughness ended up with 30 HP! Sadly, the character with the second most HP was the gnome wizard with something like 24. The math works out to him having the same Con score as my fighter and also taking toughness.

Skills were modified. You selected skills to take rather than distributing skill points. I took Intimidate, Swim and.... something I never used which is why I can't remember it. I just assumed that that meant I had 4 ranks in it as if I had maxed it. I'm pretty sure I did it right, but I make no guarantees.

Grappling and things like it are called Combat Maneuvers. They’re some weird kind of set DC rules rather than opposed checks. You can also somehow cast in a grapple. This came in handy for our wizard in the crocodile fight.

Clerics can use turn undead to heal everybody within a certain range. Combined with Charisma and extra turning that was a lot of healing. All casters got at will spell like abilities. I think the wizard's was a ranged touch to put people to sleep for a round. Quite the power boost. Fighters got bonuses every few levels so that they got more AC, to hit and decreased armor check penalties. Unfortunately, at level one, the fighter didn’t get any of these, so while everybody else got a power boost, my character didn’t.

The speed with which all this got thrown together is why I don’t understand the mechanics as well as I would have liked. I’m doing the best I can to pass on what they were like accurately.

The Characters
CE gnome wizard. Specced for illusion like ghost sound and silent image.
LE human fighter (me). Long axe + scale mail. Power Attack, Toughness and Combat Reflexes. Because of the changed Power Attack, all power attacks were made at a +1 bonus and did 1d12+14 damage (1d12+10 after taking strength damage.)
N Half-Orc cleric. Pretty bland. Tried to make Half-orc's look really dumb. Played as... ok, to be honest this one got on my nerves, that's all I'm going to say.
CN Halfling rogue. Player always plays rogues. Always plays them the same way, but it’s not really a problem because it fits the character.

The gnome wizard was not played as Stupid Evil. My character was a loving husband and devoted father who loves children in general: also not Stupid Evil. This is the first time I've ever gotten the chance to play an evil character and I made certain to do it right.

My character, Jiriyah Sandalwood, was married to a gnome woman, with an open marriage for the purpose of procreation only. He had 8 children. His family was beginning to starve so they sold everything they owned to equip him to work as a bouncer (hence the scale mail and long axe) but that meant that they had literally nothing left except a shack. I might have said they had sheets to cover themselves with while sleeping on the ground but that might be pushing it. Each character was supposed to pick from a list of traits. They provided a RP reason for everyone to work together for a common purpose and a small benefit (mine gave me +1 to will saves, did we really need any more power boosts?). I chose the missing child one; it just fit my character so well. On the spot I made up a ninth child named butters and managed to add in the couple of South Park jokes over the course of the evening because the group loves SP. My character had two long-term goals: to quickly make enough money to prevent his family from starving to death (i.e. I needed to make some money in just a few days) and to open a family owned brothel. I quickly came up with a pub that he had just been hired to work in and where he lived.

In all, this provided me with short term motivation, long term motivation and plenty of npc's with which my character was attached and therefore easily used in potential future plot hooks. I really feel like I managed to get into a role-playing groove for the first time with this one. I really liked the character and wanted to be in character as much as possible. Sadly, nobody else had a real back story because of the limited time to prepare.

The Adventure, Part 1 Caution: includes huge spoilers, you have been warned. Also goes into excessive detail, don’t feel like you need to read it all. You won’t hurt my feelings. Really.
- Each character is summoned by magical means (messages that won't go away) to a meeting. We are met by a woman who gives us the location of our target. In my case, the person who kidnapped my child. Then we were given something that sounded like a “harot” card reading. If this was a clever reference to tarot cards… it wasn’t very good. It gave us a few points to expend during combat, but they were all Dex related and therefore pretty useless to my character. It also took forever! Each character got an individual reading and we just sat there for… well, I stopped keeping track of time after that got boring.
- We then went to launch our assault on a building (that was part of a dock and therefore over water). Reach and combat reflexes showed their worth as I killed the guard dog as it stood up and to try and howl the alarm. We run into a guy that I intimidate into telling us where our target is. He does and then pulls out a wand (of magic missile we find out later) which he fails to activate and runs away somehow not provoking attacks of opportunity.
- We chase him into the next room onto a catwalk and kill him before dropping down into the room and killing a different guy forcing kids to make fish… gruel. I’ll talk about this fight in more detail when analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the new system. We release the kids and one of them turns out to be mine. I send my kid to the entrance of the building with instructions to tell any more kids that we free how to get to my home where my wife will take care of them. We try a different room and free the rest of the kids (something like another 20) and take out a gnome rogue that had been disguising itself as one of the kids.
- This is where things got interesting. The DM couldn’t figure out how we were supposed to get to the lower level of the building. I had to look at it and show him that there was a boat that had two levels we could use to “go down a level.” We do and get attacked by some spiders where I take a bit of strength damage. But we finish them off. At this point, I have struck the killing blow on everything we have fought so far. In addition, I do so much damage that everything I hit is killed in one shot. We try and walk from the bottom of the boat back to the building, having “gone down a level” but I fall through the decrepit dock the very first step I take (no save or anything at all, just boom!). This sucks because we had seen a shark circling. This thing proceeds to slowly eat my face. I manage to switch my long axe with the rogue’s short sword so that I can fight in the water but the thing did around 20 points of damage to me before I just gave up on killing it and finally managed to climb out of the water. Remember how I have a high Strength and took Swim as a skill? Didn’t help me… at all.
- We make it back to the building and had the encounter with the BBEG. A rogue and a crocodile. The wizard destroys the croc with a color spray and I finish it. If not for the new grapple rules, we probably would have lost the wizard. The other characters manage to kill the rogue. Ironically, the BBEG is the only thing that doesn’t die at the hand of my character during the entire session.
Looting happens.

The Adventure, Part 2 Has just as much info about encounters but also has info about the general direction the campaign will take, so this is an even stronger spoiler alert!
- This is where things get crazy. I rig a pallet out of the bunk beds in the building so that I can drag stuff back to my home. I mean everything, even hammocks. My family doesn’t have furniture anymore, so it made sense. We leave the building and the city is on fire. Apparently the king is dead and some people think the queen poisoned him. People are apparently flying around and fighting in the sky. Beginnings of a civil war maybe? Anyway, we’re supposed to go back to the house where we got our information but I want to ensure the safety of my family. I agree to a compromise: to go to the house and see if our quest giver can offer some aid in saving my family.
- An otyugh pops out of the street and I just ignore it. I’ve made it clear, that I want to protect my family and further fighting isn’t going to help. The wizard wants to just run away. I slowly drag my stuff past it as it engages the rest of the party (who want to fight it for some unknown reason) and the DM decides that rough terrain (which wasn’t drawn on the battle map or ever mentioned) from the otyugh popping out of the sewers spills my stuff all over the place. I kill the otyugh in one shot and get back to dragging my new furniture.
- I’m accosted by some old guy. Eventually I just hit him (unarmed strike for subdual damage) but it’s too late, I fail my save and am infected with a disease. Yay.
- We run into some guardsman who has abandoned his post and pretty much just ignore him. We’re told that we missed out on a CR 4 treasure. I don’t really care, I’m just trying to save my family.
- We get back to the house of our quest giver and find that it’s empty. The woman who gave us the location of our target appears and it turns out she was a ghost of someone killed by the BBEG a year ago. Somehow everything in the house was an illusion and we just couldn’t tell even though we ate the food? I decide that since this house is fine, while significant sections of the city are burning, I’ll leave my stuff there and bring my family and whatever kids we managed to rescue there. I don’t ask any of the party members to accompany me to my family’s house, but they volunteer to do so. Thank god.
- We’re crossing a gigantic bridge when were attacked by 4 imps! 4! Yes 4! We’re assisted by 6 pseudodragons but the DM had to rule that somehow the pseudodragons can overcome the imps’ DR and doesn’t have the imps use any of their spell-like abilities (the fluff in the campaign is that somehow the pseudodragons kill off most of the imp population even when they can’t even hurt the things, whoever wrote that needs to at least look at the imp stat block) and we still almost die. In fact, just as I finish killing the last imp, secondary dex damage from the imps drops me. I took 17 Dex damage. I think the DM was rolling d6’s instead of d4’s. Anyway, the problem is that the DM revealed that my disease also just happens to do Dex damage. I think if I fail the first save against the disease I die. I’m screwed, and there’s nothing I can do. The other characters carry me to my home and we stay there to rest because we’re in no shape to make it back to where I stashed my stuff. We level but don’t update our characters. (end of the session.)

Evaluation:
- Ok, so everybody get’s their power boosted. In some ways this is good. It certainly saved my character considering he took ~45-50 damage over the course of a single day at level 1! (Talk about a rough day.) Granted, while this module was very tough, we also rolled miserably. ALL of us did. It actually became kind of hilarious at a certain point. I have to wonder if someone switched all our dice with rigged ones.
- Casters have something to do at extremely low level thanks to spell-like abilities even after they have run out of spells. I think it negates a lot of the problems that people will have with narcoleptic parties, but at the same time, it makes casters even stronger. Though at low level that is probably a good thing. I don’t know if the trend continues at higher levels where casters don’t need the help, but that would probably be a bad thing.
- Casters being able to cast while grappled negates one of the strongest weaknesses casters have. I think this is an extremely bad idea.
- Now, I have played 2 sessions of Iron Heroes on the side with a different group and I have to say, the system they have for combat challenges and stunts is awesome. I tried to bring some of that in to this session with the fight where my character jumped down off a catwalk to save some kids. I had to make a jump check to ‘hop off the catwalk’/’vault over it’s railing’ and then a balance check to land on my feet because the floor was covered in fish… well you know. I failed both checks miserably and ended up taking the only damage my character took if you don’t count being forced into swimming with a shark and fighting an encounter of CR 6 (the imps). My current DM always complains that we never do anything cinematic like jumping on tables or swinging from chandeliers. There are two problems with this: 1) You need to have an environment. If every fight happens in a featureless 10x20 room, what can you do that’s cinematic? 2) The system is almost designed to prevent this. You have to make a huge number of checks to pull something like this off and if you want your character to survive, you learn not to pull stunts like this. It's tough to jump on a table if the system says you stink at jumping.
- The adventure itself seemed pretty average if you don’t count the whole pseudodragons somehow taking down imps thing. Seemed flavorful, but we spent most of our time in a dingy building.
- Now here’s the part that gets me. Class balance should be a communal effort. I know that casters can break games almost on accident but a responsible player will change what they’re doing if a DM or another player asks them to. Most people don’t enjoy ruining an experience for everybody else. So why the effort to power up all the classes? CR is entirely relative. If you power up characters, than encounters will just be powered up as well. It doesn’t really make the game any easier or harder, it’s just some window dressing to make everything appear different. IMHO it actually makes things harder because your old CR’s for published monsters aren’t going to be accurate anymore.

Essentially I ran into the same problems with this game that I have with standard 3.5. My Big Stupid Fighter stayed a Big Stupid Fighter. If you want to take a look at some of the stuff for house rules, go ahead, I particularly like the part about using turn undead to heal people. I just can’t recommend that you spend money on this product when it comes out to try and get something “better than 3.5”

If you have any questions, feel free to ask. I'll do my best to answer as completely and objectively as possible.