Pathfinder Playtest: Doomsday Dawn (Redux)

Game Date: 8/12/2018
Location: The Game Keep
Campaign: PF Playtest, Part 1
Module: Doomsday Dawn

System: Pathfinder 2nd Edition (Playtest)
DM: Rusty

The Party:
Alchemite (Nick) - Goblin Alchemist
Corbis (Gary) - Elf Ranged Fighter
Dane (Daniel) - Elf Wizard
Eldal (Jonathan) - Human Cleric
Furi (Matt) - Human Barbarian

The Session:
Same plot as last week - Lady Kendra Questgiver III, mayor of Plothook, sent us to the Sewers of Horrendous Peril to find the MacGuffin of Desna.  This week seemed a little bit easier, probably because we had a Cleric in the party.  The final boss was still brutal, though.

The first encounter (sewer ooze) went by pretty quickly.  Our party's goblin, Alchemite ("Al"), attempted to talk his way out of the second encounter, but the enemy goblins wouldn't have it.  That fight wasn't too difficult either, but Dane did go down to zero at one point.

In the room with the pool, we tried drinking the stone face's tears before they hit the pool, and found they had healing properties.  I don't think we tried that last time.  Nobody found the submerged statue this time, which kept us from having to fight the imps.

We never tried the locked exit, instead going through the door that set off the hanging armor alarm.  Knowing our enemies were alerted, Furi rushed down the stairs to fight the goblins around the campfire.  Dane managed to hit a few of them with burning hands, which was nice - we didn't see enough area spells last time.  Corbin rolled a lucky crit that killed the Goblin Commando.

Dane went down to zero again in this battle, but we healed him later.  Corbin killed the Pyro Goblin, Furi massively slaughtered another goblin with a crit, and Corbin killed the final goblin.  Bow fighters seem to be pretty good in this game.

Leaving this room the way we came, we checked out the room full of skeletons (which we bypassed last week).  Furi was in front, and got surrounded by skeletons.  They didn't do much damage, but Furi still almost went down just because there were so many, and they were attacking three times each.  It was like by 1,000 paper cuts.

Al tried alchemist's fire, only to find the skeletons were immune.  Eventually we finished them off, but Furi was down to 3 hit points.  Healing her a little, we went up the next hallway.  When we passed the hall statue, those of us who had swallowed the tears from the fountain room were able to pass it freely.  But the first time someone who hadn't partaken passed it, a sandstorm trap went off.  And I will rewrite a sentence all kinds of ways to avoid trying to figure out which form of "drank" to use.

To avoid the sandstorm, Furi pushed through the door at the end of the hallway, and found herself face-to-face with the hobgoblin boss.  He was accompanied by a dire rat, unlike last week.  Furi squared off against the hobgoblin, who changed into his Faceless Stalker form right away.  Corbin followed Furi into the room, and targeted the rat.

As the rest of the party gradually entered the boss room, Furi went down hard.  She spent a few rounds unconscious while the boss chased everyone around the room.  Our Wizard, of all people, finished off the rat with a dagger.  Then he tried using Color Spray on the boss, but our foe made his save.  Then Dane went down to zero again.

Corbin managed to do some decent damage to the boss, while Furi kept making rolls to wake up.  The boss started to use a Drain Blood attack on Dane.  Furi finally woke up, stood up, and finished off the boss.  Everyone survived, though it did take a few more rounds to rouse the Wizard.  We did a bit more exploring until we found the quest item.

Afterthoughts:
Last time I tried this module, I played a pregen.  While I did look through all the steps of character creation to see how the pregen got its stats, it wasn't the same as making a character from scratch.  This time I built a character from the ground up, so I could see what that was like.  It wasn't too bad. 

There were times when I was annoyed at having to hop around the PDF so much.  For example, one of the barbarian feats is called "Raging Intimidation" (page 57).  It give Demoralize actions the Rage Trait, and gives you the feats "Intimidating Glare" and "Scare to Death" once you meet the prerequisites.  (This is a system built on feats, and some of the feats don’t do anything but grant you additional feats.)  So now I have to look up those two feats. 

"Scare to Death" has a prerequisite of level 15, so let's ignore that one for now.  "Intimidating Glare" (page 167) allows you to use the Demoralize action by staring at people instead of speaking, which would make sense if you new what the Demoralize action was.  So after checking the index, we jump to Demoralize (page 150) and learn it lets you use an action to cause a single enemy to become Frightened 1.  (On a crit success they get Frightened 2 and flee.)

Okay, I have a pretty good idea what Frightened is, but it's a new system so I have to look it up anyway.  Another jump to the index, then on to page 322 where we learn that Frightened causes the enemy to have a penalty to checks and saving throws, which usually goes away after one round.

Okay, so after flipping around to all these different pages, we learn that this first level feat allows you (if you are raging) to cause a single enemy to take -1 to their checks and saving throws, for a round.  I honestly can't think of a lot of good uses for this.  Maybe if you coordinate with the party wizard, to give a boss a saving throw penalty before the wizard casts a spell.  But how often do raging barbarians cooperate tactically with wizards?

It gets a bit better when you get "Scare to Death" at level 15 (target now gets Frightened 2 and flees, and might even die if you crit), but it's kind of weird to grab a first level feat and then sit on it for 15 levels.  So to me, it seems like a bad feat.  And that's okay, different people play different ways.  My point isn't that it's a lackluster feat, it's that I had to jump to 15 completely different pages in the PDF to find that out.

Instead of having me look all over the place for the definitions of "Scare to Death", "Intimidating Glare", "Demoralize", "Frightened 1", etc, what if the original feat "Raging Intimidation" simply said something like this: "While raging, you can glare at one enemy with 30 feat.  If they fail their save, they get -1 to all checks and saving throws for one round.  At level 15, increase this number changes to -2, and the enemy flees."  It seems like that would be easier.

Perhaps instead of a physical book or PDF, the new edition should just be an app.  Then you could just highlight the keywords you don't understand, and the definition would pop up in a smaller box.  It might be easier than all the page jumping.

But overall, character creation was easier than I thought it was going to be.  I did have a problem where I kept thinking my character was done, and then I remembered something and had to get everything back out.  All told, I think I spent about an hour making my character, but the process should get faster once I get used to it.  I don't think it will ever get as fast as making a character in D&D 5e, though.

I can't wait to play some of the higher level playtests, but at the same time, I'm not looking forward to the time it will take to build and level up these characters.

By the way, "Your Innate Spells" sounds a lot like "Urinate Spells."  I can't unhear that now.