A different group of five players met with me on Saturday afternoon to play through the second of the playtest scenarios of the new Pathfinder RPG. This time, the players would make their characters – so we wouldn’t have the problem of underwhelming spells such as acid splash. I’m not running these sessions as official playtest sessions, but rather for a group of mostly 5E players who want to see what Paizo is doing with their revisions. We’re well behind where most committed playtesters are (who are now participating in part 5; this is part 2!)
When I arrived at the session, I was surprised to find that the most ardent Pathfinder devotee amongst us hadn’t finished making his character. He’d been busy throughout the week, but he’d set aside a few hours in the morning to create it and thought he’d be fine. He was still going when I arrived. It took most of the players between four and six hours to create their fourth-level characters. Now, creating a character with a system you’re unfamiliar with is likely to take a bit of time. But, over four hours? Wow.
Part of this has to do with how the playtest rulebook is laid out. There’s a lot of page-flipping. And an index that is less than helpful. If you find an unfamiliar term, it’s very tricky to determine where it is described – and there are a lot of unfamiliar terms. Some terms are conditions, some terms are weapon properties, some are spell properties, some describe are how damage is assigned, and some seem to have different rules depending on where you encounter them. Does acid splash deal splash damage even if it misses? No idea. Less said about how the errata/rules changes are handled the better – there are some significant barriers to overcome just to play the playtest!
We got to know some of the rules better, this session: Rules such as movement and the action economy. I’d missed in my first session that Attacks of Opportunity no longer exist except as a feature of some classes (the fighter) and monsters (none in this adventure). How did I miss that? It’s because the PF2 playtest rulebook has a large entry for Attacks of Opportunity. What I didn’t notice was the small bit of text that described that it was an example reaction that only fighters could use. So, once we worked that out, the players found moving into flanking positions much easier. In the wilderness, it was very hard to protect the squishier fighters, and it was quite all right to fire a bow at point-blank range.
Meanwhile, there are a lot of abilities and actions that keep referencing attacks of opportunity. WTF? If you’re going to remove something from the game, remove it. Don’t keep it in as a “gotcha” and have a lot of things (like the Step action) allow you to circumvent it for the rare session when it’s relevant!
This session highlighted the Exploration rules, a new feature of Pathfinder. Well, sort of. They’re codified more than previously. What’s more, they’re codified in a manner that means that most of them are useless in overland travel. Some of the activities you can participate in are marked as “fatiguing”, which means that after 10 minutes you get tired and can only take the “Wander” activity. Which is a pretty poor name for “you move at your speed and do nothing else.” Most of the other activities are “you move at half your speed and get to do something.” This is fine. Most of the activities are pretty obvious and weren’t used by my party. That you can move stealthily *or* cover your tracks but not both is an interesting wrinkle.
I did like how the adventure stated what happened when the party failed a Survival roll to go in the proper direction: they didn’t progress as far. Unfortunately, this was an adventure-specific rule rather than a rule of general play; I’d prefer if it were a general rule of play!
The classes chosen? Barbarian, Druid, Rogue, Alchemist and Cleric. I think the Rogue had the best AC, but the players may have made some mistakes.
Weirdest class abilities? This build of Barbarian, who couldn’t use weapons. Seriously. When the Barbarian raged, he grew natural weapons according to his totem animal, but when he wasn’t raging, he could just use his fists. This lines up with one of the dumbest design decisions I’ve ever seen, along with the restriction on the original barbarian associating with magic-users. The moment a foe was at range, the Barbarian was useless.
In the three-or-so hours we played the adventure, we had the following encounters:
Reaching the Mountain. The druid and cleric alternated guiding the party to their destination. It was about a 60% chance of any roll succeeding, so they took slightly under eight days to travel 80 miles to get to the area of the adventure. Eight DC 17 Survival checks with a +8 or +9 were failed slightly more than not.
The Gnarled Foothills.1 Hyaenodon and 3 Hyenas. Most of the terrain was difficult, with a couple of spots of terrain that damaged creatures that moved through it – they didn’t affect play much. This encounter ran mostly as “this is how combat works” and the players weren’t that stressed by the combat.
Sand Flats. The party spotted the ankheg before it attacked. Then the cleric ran into quicksand but threw a rope to the party, so he could be dragged out. That was clever. The ankheg managed to get three of the party members (the ones pulling the rope) in an acid cone attack, but no-one went down. We also learnt how the rogue doesn’t do as much damage with their sneak attacks as before. Only +1d6 at 4th level? Didn’t expect that!
Gnoll Camp. The party saw the camp and decided to bypass it.
A Treacherous Climb. A manticore attacked and dealt a lot of damage to the party – who had few ranged weapons, and with the AC 20 of the manticore, it was pretty hard to hit in any case. The players used a scroll of fly to send the barbarian against the manticore. They enjoyed it not being a concentration spell, as in D&D 5E. However, in the second of the “WTF Barbarian” moments, we learnt that the Barbarian’s rage lasts three rounds and then ends. He’s then fatigued for a round before he can attack again. With the barbarian also having no weapons if not raging? I’m not a fan. I kept the manticore a bit too close to the party. The alchemist was extremely inaccurate with his bombs, although both the barbarian and manticore kept taking splash damage. But, with their total hit points of them, 1 point of damage is more a pain to track rather than significant.
The rogue, with nowhere to hide, was condemned to dealing 1d6 or 1d8 damage with bow attacks – one of the two; I didn’t check.
The cleric used their ranged healing abilities effectively. Another sign the manticore was too close.
Overall, the combat against the manticore wasn’t great. It went on too long, and there was a lack of interesting things the players could do to it. Part of this may be poor selection of equipment and abilities, however. I expect the characters to see revision for the next session. We used a battlemat and miniatures!
That next session? In two weeks, after PAX Australia, I expect. We’ll try to see if we can finish this adventure, although it’s very combat heavy and quite long. I am appreciating not having so many modifiers to track as the DM. I’m still not quite sure what to think of these rules – it’ll be better once the players have a stronger handle on how the rules work.