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Merric Blackman
Australia
Waubra
Victoria
Ramping up my reviewing.
Happily playing games for many, many years.
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After five sessions of running the Pathfinder Adventure Path: Council of Thieves, I've been reminded of a lot of reasons why I changed to 4E as my primary FRP system. (And I'm also reminded that 4E still has a lot of problems).
Paizo get a lot of credit for their adventures. I'm not sure it's always deserved. Certainly they have plot, interaction and puzzles, but mechanics-wise, Paizo is a company that I don't trust to get them right. Editing? Urgh.
The second adventure of the Council of Thieves AP is The Sixfold Trial. It has a brilliant first half, where the party become actors and perform a murder play. It's the sort of role-playing brilliance that Paizo occasionally display in their adventures that make them so memorable. The Prince of Redhand (Dungeon #131)) also provided such an experience. (Written by the same designer as The Sixfold Trial, Richard Pett - I love his RP scenarios).
And then the group got to the dungeon - which is nicely constructed - and met the monsters. Pretty much every single one of them had Damage Resistance 5. Some of this could be overcome (silver or good), some of it couldn't (elementals). And at that point, I was looking at a group that couldn't sufficiently damage the monsters. Consider the party:
A halfling monk/rogue who flurries with Sneak attack to gain... 1d4+1d6 damage
A ranger/wizard who Rapid Shots to get 1d8+2 damage
A sorcerer who has to overcome Spell Resistance (50%) on many of the monsters to get his 2d4+2 magic missiles to take effect
A elf cleric with low Str, high Dex who does 1d8 damage
A rogue that can hit for 3d6+2 damage, but exposes himself with fairly poor hp and AC to all the attacks as he's the only threat.
Did these characters have silver weapons? No. Oh dear.
Sigh. It's one of the big things that 4E changed: you have to really work at it to make incompetent characters. Exactly why a halfling monk should be a bad idea isn't clear, but it's very much so in Pathfinder.
Added to that is the dreadful editing of this adventure. Here's a very important line in the adventure: "She tells them that while the PCs have been otherwise engaged over the previous week, the Children of Westcrown have been gathering more information about the mayor and his home. What they have found out so far is detailed below."
If someone has the adventure, could you tell me exactly what they found out? Because, as far as I can tell, there is no such text. If there was ever any such text, it's been edited out. Good job, team!
Because, what it *needs* to say is "there are undead and devils within the Knot. You'll likely need silver and magic weapons to deal with them." I can say that now in retrospect. Just "devils" wouldn't be enough - my players wouldn't have recognised that as "need silver", because they're unfamiliar with the Pathfinder rules.
Likewise when it comes to dreadful editing, you have the appearance of a tiefling assassin. Her introductory text notes, "This adventure assumes that Sian waits for the PCs to reach area B21 before she makes her move, and thus her statistics are presented there."
No, they aren't. They're just after that text, and B21 makes no note of her at all. I happily ignored her altogether as a result. (The sooner the party left this frustrating place the better, but if B21 had noted that Sian will probably attack here, I would have remembered).
The final monster was also pretty good for causing a TPK. Here are the key details:
AC 18, hp 63, DR 5/good or silver, SR 16
Attacks: +8/+3 (1d8+6/17-20) plus +7 (1d8+2/19-20) plus +5 (1d8+2) plus +5/+5 (1d6+2), reach 10', 15' with last two attacks.
The thief, of course, needs to get into melee with it, and he has an AC of about 17. So, the average damage he takes each round is about 20 hit points. And the first three are infernal wounds, which gives bleed 2 and means that the cleric needs to make a caster level check (DC 16) to even heal him!
Sigh. I fudged this adventure massively to allow the PCs to survive. I'm 99% sure that Dave's monk will be retired for the next session as it's Too Weak To Live and Greg's archer isn't far behind it. As it turned out, the party did VERY well at avoiding a lot of superfluous encounters in the dungeon (and are now under-XPed as a result), so being smart and not being drawn into unnecessary encounters also penalises them. I just said "you're fifth level" at the end.
I'll write up a more formal session report soon; I just wanted to vent a bit first.
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Merric Blackman
Australia
Waubra
Victoria
Ramping up my reviewing.
Happily playing games for many, many years.
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Well, I've done something in my AD&D campaign that I've never done before in 30 years of gaming. Yes, I've given one of the PCs a vorpal sword.
This wasn't any of your "choose a treasure package" or "wish list" items; this was one randomly rolled on the AD&D DMG tables. (A 0.11% chance or approximately 1 in 900 chance). The character who took the item is all of 5th level.
And I'm fine with it. Really, really fine. There's no doubt that the weapon - with a 20% chance of beheading any human-sized-or-smaller creature and a 15% chance of beheading any larger-than-human monster with each attack - is an extremely good one which laughs in the face of balance, but it's going to be fun and memorable in the game, and it's rather unlikely that another one will enter the game.
Probably.
If the blasted thing does become just Too Good and sucking the fun from the campaign, I'll take steps, but as I'm mostly running an old-fashioned Dungeon Crawl Campaign, at the moment it's the thing that distinguishes Paul's character from all the other half-orc fighters in the group.
We're sixteen sessions into this campaign, which at times has two DMs, and 22 players have played at least one session. The "core" group is about 12 players who split time between the AD&D game and other games (Dresden Files and Scales of War 4E).
Meanwhile, after a bout of Illness and Easter, we'll finally get to the third session of our Pathfinder campaign this Sunday. Looking forward to that. Even though it doesn't have a VORPAL SWORD in it.
Anyway, does anyone want to guess as to how long it'll be before I get sick of the Vorpal Sword in the game? (And create immune-to-vorpal monsters?  )
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Merric Blackman
Australia
Waubra
Victoria
Ramping up my reviewing.
Happily playing games for many, many years.
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Historically, Armour Class is derived from naval games (Fletcher Pratt, Jane's Fighting Ships) which Dave Arneson incorporated into his own naval design, and then passed on to D&D.
Original D&D Armour Class is not a feature of Gygax's and Perrin's Chainmail. Instead you have a table that cross-references the type of armour with the weapon used, the combinations are as follows:
Armours: None, Leather/Padded, Shield, Leather + Shield, Chain/Banded/Studded/Splint, Chain+Shield, Plate, Plate + Shield
By Original D&D, you get AC of 2-9 and the "to hit" tables give only those values. Of note, Dexterity gives *no* modifier to AC, a magic suit of armour subtracts its value from the "hit dice of the opponent", and magical shields have only a 33% chance of working (in which case they give their penalty to the attacker).
Supplement I: Greyhawk has a much greater range of magical armours, and has one of the clumsiest explanations ever as to how they work, using this table:
(It also has errata: Chainmail and +1 shield should be AC 3)
It's in AD&D that we finally get the cleaned up tables, AC now goes from 10 to -10 (rather than 9 to 2), and it'd stay that way (mostly) for the next twenty years, or thereabouts.
One of the interesting features of this is that every AC in original D&D (sans supplements) is in the range of 2-8.
With the expanded AC ranges from Greyhawk, you get the Will-o'-the-Wisp, with an AC of -8, the highest on the supplement's table, but there aren't many other monsters with negative ACs (the Platinum Dragon, with -3, is the next best).
Blackmoor is back in the 2-8 range, Eldritch Wizardry gives the first AC of actually 9 (the Succubus), and gives Demogorgon a fearsome -8 AC, with Orcus behind on -6. Finally, Gods, Demigods and Heroes incredibly goes back to the 2-9 range, with a few exceptions (and not gods - generally monsters), though some of the gods have magic armour that isn't factored into their AC - Odin has a helm +5 and mail +5!
So, onto AD&D where Gygax is drawing on the various work he and others have done for D&D. There's no AC 10 in the Monster Manual (but, to be fair, there's no AC 9 in the monsters in core OD&D either!) The Will-o'-the-Wisp retains its AC of -8, likewise the Platinum retains -3. Demogorgon and Orcus keep their respective ACs.
The tables in the DMG enshrined the -10 to 10 range of ACs, and a monster came out with a -10 AC not all that long after - Dave Sutherland's take on "Lolth" - from Q1. Also in 1980, RJK's and Jim Ward's revision of the deity supplement gave the gods ACs that weren't generally quite as impossible - Odin has AC -6 instead of his previous (effective) -8, although we get our first breaking of the -10 "cap" - Indra has an AC of -12!!
Indra's AC is actually correctly calculated for his +4 plate, +4 shield and 25 Dex (-6 def bonus).
However, it's debatable how many of these really low ACs belong to beings that will be fought...
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Merric Blackman
Australia
Waubra
Victoria
Ramping up my reviewing.
Happily playing games for many, many years.
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Thirteen sessions in, the AD&D campaign is doing pretty well. We've had 21 separate players, several for just a session, but most for more than one. It's running beside two fortnightly campaigns both of which have different players and who play in my game when they're not in the other, so from week to week the roster changes a lot.
Players Class #Sessions 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 (13) 14
Rich Thief 13 1 1 1 2 2 3 - 4 4 4 4 4 (4) 5
Chris Cleric 10 1 1 1 - 2 2 3 4 4 4 - 4 - -
Jackson Fighter 8 1 1x - - - - C1 1x (MU1) 1 - - (1) 1
Lee Cleric 7 - 1 - 1 - 2 - - (3) 4 4 - (4) -
Reece Fighter 6 - - - 1 - 2 3 - T1 - 2 - (2) -
Tait Fighter 6 - - - - - - 1 1 1 - 2 2 - 3
Shane MU 5 - 1 - 1 - - 2 - 2 - - - (2) -
Paul Fighter 5 - - - 1 - 1 2 - (2) - 3 - - -
Cosmo Cleric 5 - - - - 1 - - - (1) 2 2 3 - -
Adam F/MU 4 1/1 1/1 1/1 - - 1/1 - - - - - - - -
Nash F/T 4 1/1 - 1/1 - 1/1 - - - - 2 - - - -
Callen Fighter 4 - 1 - - - - 2 - - 2 3 - - -
Jesse Cleric 4 - - - - - - - - 1 1x - MU1 - 1
Ben Ranger 4 - - - 1 - 1 1 - (2) - - - - -
Josh Cleric 3 - - - - - 1 - - (2) 3 - - - -
Matt Ranger 1 - - - - - - 1 - - - - - - -
Greg F/MU 1 - - - - - - - 1/1 - - - - - -
Montie Fighter 1 - - - - - - - - 1 - - - - -
Dakota MU 1 - - - - - - - - - 1 - - - -
Stephen Fighter 1 - - - - - - - - - - - 1 - -
Michael MU 1 - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1
It's been fun so far - we'll see how it develops as the year progresses. I'm loving that it's mostly a weekly game!
Values in parenthesis represent a session that Callen has run rather than myself.
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Merric Blackman
Australia
Waubra
Victoria
Ramping up my reviewing.
Happily playing games for many, many years.
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Our second Pathfinder session is scheduled for this weekend, two weeks after our first, our once-a-week schedule already disrupted by other events (in this case, the requirement of Greg to visit his grandmother with his new baby in tow).
I've already gathered the miniatures for the session, placing them in one of my many plastic containers for transport. This one has dividers in it, so I can place miniatures sorted by encounter - except, of course, there'll be a lot of miniatures used in more than one combat, so that doesn't work so well.
We didn't get as far as I expected last session due to character creation taking a full hour longer than my initial estimate. So, the structure of the next session will probably look like follows:
* Meeting the Rebels and planning the Rescue (role-playing)
* The Rescue (combat)
* Meeting the Leader (role-playing)
* Returning the Horses (role-playing)
* The Hellknight Stronghold (exploration/combat)
The group doesn't seem to be very RP inclined, so I expect the RP sections will be very brief.
It took me all of one session to realise that I don't really miss how 3E does low-level characters. A large part of this is compounded by the character selection on the part of the party. I can understand Lee, Michael and Tim making substandard characters, but Dave has actually played a fair bit of Pathfinder already... how is it that he ends up with the worst character of the lot, a halfling monk?
The only competent monk I saw in 3E was one made with the Vow of Poverty, which brought it up to a level of a standard PC. Monks are great survivors, but horrible contributors, especially when they have a 10 Strength and are small. It's part of the MAD of the class: they need good Strength, Wisdom and Dexterity. Yes, he has an AC of 20. But he can't hit anything, and does d4 damage.
Dexterity seems to be a theme of this party. The cleric has a really high Dex and uses a bow (he's an elf). Fair enough, except we were brought down to reality by the effects of PF cover and shooting into melee - an effective -8 to the attack roll. It's a shock to the 4E sensibilities of most of the group.
It should be noted that Lee has been playing in my AD&D campaign, so he's seen the even earlier version of firing into melee: which selects a *random* target from all those participating. Though he's been playing a cleric, and it doesn't come up so much for him.
One of the other features of 4E that isn't in 3E that I miss is the retraining rules; admittedly there is a version of the rule in place for the sorcerer (so Tim will be able to train out Sleep when he reaches 4th level), but I'm very likely to be using some variation of retraining rules with the group. It might well go further than that - especially with Dave's character, because the halfling monk may well turn out to be as I fear, a useless character. (It might surprise me as well, but I'm not betting on it).
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Merric Blackman
Australia
Waubra
Victoria
Ramping up my reviewing.
Happily playing games for many, many years.
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This weekend, I hope to start what will be a long and fulfilling campaign: the Pathfinder Adventure Path, Council of Thieves
I've got two players who are quite eager to play Pathfinder, a third who is eager to play anything, and I'm still looking for a fourth. I was going to ask the D&D players at my FLGS store on the weekend, but quite a number of them were missing due to the long weekend, so I'll have to ask this Saturday if anyone wants to play in a Sunday campaign... which starts the next day. Heh.
I haven't run Pathfinder before, but I'm rather hoping that 8 years of running 3E (often about 6-8 hours a week) will hold me in good stead. There are a few significant rule changes that I will have to worry about, but I'm hoping that mostly the players can handle all the new powers their characters have.
Of course, the first step is to read the adventure, The Bastards of Erebus. My initial impressions of it aren't that favourable, mainly due to the hamfisted way it starts. After a meeting with the NPC who recruits the characters, the group are chased into the sewers where they stay there until they get bored.
No, really: the sewers are generated randomly, and they end as follows:
"The exit to the safe house is not something that can be randomly rolled; you should place this exit once the PCs have had enough encounters to reach 2nd level, or once their resources have run so critically low that going on for much longer becomes too difficult—when a PC is reduced to negative hit points or is otherwise helpless is a great point to have the exit be just around the corner."
Errata to the adventure indicates that the level 2 guideline is a mistake. I have some tremendous problems with adventure design in this manner, because it doesn't matter what decisions the players make!. They can't act well because there are no bad decisions. If there was any section of the adventure that would have been far, far better designed as a 4E Skill Challenge, this is it. (Skill Challenges have their own problems, but well-structured ones are brilliant).
All of this is made worse by how much space is given in the adventure for this set of random encounters: ten-and-a-half pages!
Thankfully, once the party makes its way out of the sewers, the adventure begins to look up.
I'm going to run the first session slightly differently to how written in the adventure. Instead of Meeting, Sewers, Hideout, I'll begin it in media res with the party tracked down by a Hellknight patrol in the sewers, then (after that battle is done) return to where things began and the initial meeting (which will be quite short). After that, it'll be another sewer encounter and then onto the rebel hideout where the actual interesting part of the game can begin.
I'll probably have the exit having a bunch of sewer goblins in the way; Janath (the recruiter NPC) will alert the group to the way out, but the goblins block the path. The sewer goblins - as written - are hilariously incompetent. So much so that they aren't a credible threat to the party except through extremely lucky rolls. I'll have to consider whether I want them that stupidly weak. (-6 to hit, 1d4-1 damage? And still CR 1/2? Yeah, that's blindly following the CR rules.)
We'll create characters and start the adventure in the same session. I expect about 1-1½ hours for character generation and thus 2½-3 hours for play; finishing the session with the Ambush to rescue Arael would be the best ender, I think.
So:
* Character Generation
* Encounter One: The Hellknights (combat)
* Encounter Two: How we got here: the Meeting (role-play)
* Encounter Three: The exit from the sewers (combat)
* Encounter Four: The Rebel Hideout (role-play/planning)
* Encounter Five: The Rescue (combat)
I'll now go and review this part of the module in more depth and the rules I'll need. (As well as getting more familiar with the PC generation rules.)
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Merric Blackman
Australia
Waubra
Victoria
Ramping up my reviewing.
Happily playing games for many, many years.
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When I was at university - a very long time ago now - a rather interesting role-playing game came out: the Amber Diceless RPG. Based on the works of Roger Zelazny, it allowed the players to play Machievellian demi-god-like characters, who would spend a fair amount of time scheming against each other as well as dealing with the latest threat to whatever they held dear.
The campaign we set up lasted about three years (of which I played in a couple of), and involved from 6-13 players each session. We swapped over GMs throughout, as the game was *very* GM-intensive, and some sessions would have a couple of co-GMs just to deal with action in several places at once.
More than any other RPG, Amber taught me about story-telling and role-playing, and about how dangerous DM Fiat is. D&D has always been my first love, and I've very rarely played Amber since my university years, but the games of Amber I played and ran have informed my D&D play since.
On occasion, I get out the Amber books and run a Throne War - a one session game where the player characters attempt to overcome each other in a contest for the Throne of Amber. I've done it twice in the past decade, and I'll be running another such session tonight (in celebration of my birthday). I've got 5 or 6 players lined up for the action, and it should be a lot of fun. Unlike many other RPGs, Amber rather likes having more players, just because it causes more conflict, plotting, cabals and the like. Difficult to DM well, and the way I run Amber today will not be the same way as how I ran it 17 years ago.
Although I learnt a lot about DMing from Amber, running multiple D&D games for the past decade has also left its mark.
Back when I first ran Amber, it was in a very sandbox, freeform style; the players would drive the action. When I ran Serenity recently, I was more structured about the action: dividing the adventure into acts and scenes that I thought would occur. Though I was amenable for the players running off the rails, I gave them a lot more guidance as to how the adventure could unfold.
So, for tonight's session, although I expect it'll be mostly player-driven, I'll have a back-up plan for structuring the action.
In addition, I'll be keeping the players (perhaps not the characters) in one group, so there won't be so much "secret" knowledge... which is entirely due to me not wanting players to get bored while waiting for their turn to come around with the DM and just sitting in a corner. Secret plans and splitting up the group? Yeah, leads to some boring times. Better to have everyone there all the time, being entertained by the plotting (and failures) of the others. There'll be some secret information, certainly, but not at the expense of engagement.
At least, that's the plan. Whether it will come to pass is another thing entirely!
So, here I'm wondering: Have any of you played Amber?
Fri Dec 16, 2011 12:02 am
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Merric Blackman
Australia
Waubra
Victoria
Ramping up my reviewing.
Happily playing games for many, many years.
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Well, I now have most of the core of Pathfinder sitting on my shelf: the Core Book, the first Bestiary (the second is ordered but not in stock at MilSims), the Games Mastery Guide, and the Advanced Player's Guide. Next to that is 40 Adventure Path modules, and sitting on the floor wanting a place to stay is the Paizo Beginner's Box.
What I'll do with all of that is anyone's guess. If my players suddenly become interested in playing Pathfinder, I'm ready for them. However, at present I think it's going to serve more as reference material - mostly so I know what people are talking about when they talk Pathfinder.
I've started reviewing the current Adventure Path (Jade Regent) and it's been an interesting experience. Popping in to research what other people think of the books on the Paizo boards have opened my eyes to a few flaws here and there - the most damning being the problems with the caravan rules. The adventures aren't as interesting to read as I hoped (mainly because there's only so many dungeons that I can take), but the good bits are very good. Alas, there are enough assumptions and plot points that I disagree with that if I ever ran the adventures, I'd have to gut a lot of them... especially the NPCs who accompany the PCs, who, four parts out of six in, haven't yet shown themselves to be worth including.
Meanwhile, I've also been picking up the small selection of Paranoia 25th Anniversary products: the core rulebooks and the adventures. However, Mongoose are having some big QA issues on their major releases (the reprint "Redux" adventures), so I'm feeling rather let down by them.
This is another game that I don't have time to run; unlike Call of Cthulhu, it's a lot harder to run with fewer players (as an interim game). You really want 4-6 players all backstabbing each other... but I may get the opportunity next year.
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Merric Blackman
Australia
Waubra
Victoria
Ramping up my reviewing.
Happily playing games for many, many years.
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Unfortunately, it seems very likely that the D&D Sunday campaign will be on indefinite hiatus. Well, we finished the campaign, so perhaps hiatus isn't the right word, but due to a lack of players, it won't be continuing on Sundays.
Instead, I'll be starting up a campaign on Saturday evenings (7pm-11pm), running 3 weeks of every 4. (On the 4th week, I'll be running Lair Assault). It will begin in December, probably have a couple of sessions where we find our feet before Christmas and the New Year intervene, and then get fully underway in January. The theme of the campaign will be the viking/barbarian game I've discussed before, but we'll use the 4th edition rules instead of AD&D. Probably.
So, this Saturday, I'm running a Lair Assault... and the session after the new campaign will begin.
Who will be playing? Honestly, I'm not 100% sure. My basic impression is that Rich, Chris and Adam are willing and available. Greg - if you're reading this - is very welcome to join in, but I wouldn't be 100% surprised if his job will preclude him from the game. Another 2-3 players will probably join us from the Good Games players. And, yes, the campaign will be taking place at Good Games Ballarat.
I'll be paying some attention to races and classes taken in this game - it's not open season, as there is a particular theme I'm going for. Some of the Feywild stuff is probably appropriate (the classes, not the races). I'm open to running it in AD&D if the players want that.
The adventure will begin in a small village of the Frost Barbarians, a village that isn't doing so well: in the last raiding season, the ship it sent to raid the southlands was sunk, and no-one returned to the village. The village is impoverished, and the young men and women of the village - that's you - are being looked to bring prosperity back to your home.
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Merric Blackman
Australia
Waubra
Victoria
Ramping up my reviewing.
Happily playing games for many, many years.
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I've spent part of yesterday and today creating D&D characters for the new season of D&D Encounters: Beyond the Crystal Cave.
We had 10 people turn up for our Saturday "Let's Create Characters" session, and through a not-the-most-well-thought-out procedure I've ever enacted (we didn't think about it at all), we first got them to name the two roles they'd like to play most; then the role itself; then had the two leaders select people for two "teams" (better yet, "tables"), and so ended up with two balanced - sort of - groups.
All of which will probably be set awry when the game begins next week and not everyone turns up. Oh well!
My table ended up with the following characters being created:
* Human Warpriest - Unseelie Agent - Crystalbrooker (Leader)
* Dragonborn Cavalier - Unseelie Agent - Sybaren (Defender)
* Pixie Hunter - Feybeast Tamer - Sildaine (Controller)
* Eladrin Witch - Sildaine (Controller)
* Half-Orc Berserker - Sybaren (Defender/Striker)
As we'll probably have Rich joining us as well, another striker would be best...
The most challenging thing about this process was the lack of rulebooks. We had two copies of Heroes of the Feywild between the twelve people, and about three sets of the "Heroes" Essentials books. Character creation sessions work best when people actually have the books. It's quite frustrating to try and do it without that - and without access to the Character Builder (alas, the store doesn't offer wireless...)
Because we do have players without the books or character builder, I took home the notes on the characters that three players wanted to play. A large part of time today has been spent writing those up into proper character sheets. I've been using Word for that, because I think the Character Builder character sheets are extremely unclear when it comes to power cards: they are moving into microtext these days. So, the Human Warpriest, Dragonborn Cavalier and one from the other table - a Half-Orc Scout - are now in nicely formatted form on my computer. I'll print them out before the session next week.
The actual Encounters season looks really entertaining, with a lot of role-playing encounters (Hooray!) Callen's warpriest was designed with a lot of skills - at one point, it had taken the Skill Training feat twice, but I realised as I wrote it up we'd forgotten the extra skill humans get, and reinstated Bludgeon Expertise - it's my opinion that D&D is at its best when you don't fail all the time. The warpriest still has a lot of skills, though, and should be very entertaining to play. Passive Insight and Perception of 20 at level 1? Yeah, not a lot will get by him.
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Ramping up my reviewing.
