Pathfinder 1E Pathfinder Sneak Peeks (Old thread)

[jreyst]

Yeah, forcing someone to hit something with a club instead of a sword is bad design. What were they thinking? So I lost my chainmail? So what? I'm a hero, not a collection of gear. I suck it up and go on with the adventure. I find leaving the dungeon because of this obnoxious. Yeah, you're less effective, so what? That's what makes it an adventure. Running in, dispatching the bad guy with no problems is boring. But that's modern design, every encounter has to be met with the party at full strength. Why even have anything other than a boss fight? The other encounters are there just to whittle down your resources, absent that, they serve no purpose. I miss the days of the battered and beaten party, struggling onward, against adversity, beating the bad guys, not due to lack of, but in spite of the odds.

I'm with you brother.

 

[jreyst]

I think the issue here is one of approach surely? I use CR as a rough-and-ready indicator of monster strength. To the extent that monster tweakage makes that indicator more accurate I'm all for it. But I don't let CR determine encounters. I am (as I sense are you) a 'sh*t happens' fan when it comes to dungeon strength. Not in a capricious 'oh look you're all dead' way, but in a 'there are bad things in this world that you should avoid, not everything has been balanced up to 1/4 of your resources' way.

Agreed. Call me lazy but I don't often try to perfectly gear each encounter to be just the right level of challenge for the PC's. I generally pick interesting monsters that are *around* the right CR, and then whatever happens, happens. If the monsters are too tough and the PC's don't run, then they die. If the monsters are too weak and the PC's walk over them, then, so be it. I don't imagine myself as "the guy who plans every encounter to suit his story" so much as "the guy who creates a semi-believable world and then let's others explore it and makes rulings on questions". I'm not a story-teller. That's not what I'm here for. I want to be as surprised as the players by what happens. So in that respect, like I said, I just throw random crap out there and then hope the player's are smart enough to know when to run. I'm at the tail end of my third 3-4 year long campaign I am DM'ing and the players keep begging me to continue so either I'm doing something right, or they just *really* don't want to DM next lol

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

This:
But I am not saying in any way that PF is more like 4E than 3E, it is not. It is a houseruled set of 3E (a very professional, well tested, long term supported houserule set, that is!). However it seems they have gone the same way as 4E with many of the fixes, normally not as 'far' as WotC in 4E, but still in the same direction.

Good design is good design.

 

[Windjammer]

I honestly don't understand the reason this change is getting such flak. The allip always appeared to me as a design abberation

You said it yourself. The allip was a design aberration. No one is arguing over that point.

The huge question is why design aberrations are bad for the game.

And why Paizo has taken this stance. Compare and contrast:

[FONT=&quot]EM: One of the things that eats a lot of characters in “The Whispering Cairn” is a swarm of acid beetles that boil up out of an elevator shaft. That swarm killed a character in our playtest; it’s killed hundreds of characters. If you read the Age of the Worms Obituaries thread on paizo.com, you’ll see that beetle swarm has delivered a nice crotch blow to a wide spectrum of D&D players, and I did that very intentionally. There certainly are ways of dealing with the swarm at 1st[/FONT][FONT=&quot] [/FONT][FONT=&quot]level. Maybe your wizard should be packing [/FONT][FONT=&quot]burning hands[/FONT][FONT=&quot]. Bring your flask of oil and be prepared is the message. By having an encounter that people are frequently unprepared for, and by having a character killed very early in the first adventure, that immediately shows people they need to be on guard. I wanted to make this a very 1st[/FONT] [FONT=&quot] [/FONT][FONT=&quot]Edition style dungeon, which means that you could die – at any time. With 3[/FONT][FONT=&quot]rd [/FONT][FONT=&quot]Edition and the challenge rating system, there’s an assumption built in of a social contract between the player, the DM, and the rules of the game, that the players are never going to have anything thrown at them that’s too difficult.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]KQ (Wolfgang Baur): I hate that whole concept[/FONT][FONT=&quot] [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]EM: [/FONT][FONT=&quot]So do I! It’s all going to be basically what they need to encounter over about 4 encounters. Then you sleep, then you go on—and it’s so boring! And it’s so unlike what going into an ancient haunted tomb [/FONT][FONT=&quot]should [/FONT][FONT=&quot]be like, which is that you should be relatively afraid. That’s why 10’ poles used to be such a key item in an adventurer’s arsenal, and why they really aren’t so much anymore. Putting a deadly encounter in the beginning rewards the players who know how to play, and who are prepared, and it puts everybody else on notice that they need to think about what they are doing, or they’re going to die. I think D&D is at its best when there’s a deadly encounter, when the players are standing up around the table, they’re so excited that they don’t know what’s going to happen, so that when one of them rolls that 20 and confirms that crit on the big bad end guy, everyone just explodes with excitement.

[/FONT]
Well, Erik, I hope that your designers also got rid of the beetle swarm as a CR 1 monster, because as you point out here, handling the swarm at level 1 requires player skill. Sorry, that sort of thinking is mightily out of vogue. People's only concern is that a party having failed to come up with a viable strategy in the first place is then forced to come up with a viable strategy for the sake of damage control. And that, apparently, is Bad Design (tm).

 

[bouncyhead]

Well, Erik, I hope that your designers also got rid of the beetle swarm as a CR 1 monster

Was it a CR1 monster though (genuine question, I have no idea)? There's a distinction between use of CR as a ready reckoner and being shackled by it into only creating TOF 'balanced' encounters.

I can't see how refining the usefulness of CR (either by adjusting the rating itself or tweaking monsters so that CR is appropriate) means that I won't be able to stick the occasional nasty surprise down my dungeons and scare the cr*p out of my players/force them to exercise some actual skill and imagination. If anything, it makes it easier to do.

BTW, my experience of running Paizo AP using PFRPG Beta rules is that the party are getting their teeth handed to them in their hats on a regular basis. It's pretty old-school stuff.

 

[malkav666]

Because I'm not always the dm. For those of us that like the occasional creature/trap that challenges the players in unconventional methods, we have no option unless we're the dm. It's much easier for the dm to simply not use the rust monster or Allip if he doesn't like them than it is for the dm to change it. Powering up monsters makes the dm seem like the bad guy, while simply not using the monster does not. We just want some few creatures that make PLAYERS not characters to think outside the box, but sadly, that option is being taken from us, for our own good because we have somehow been deluded into thinking we're having fun when obviously we are not.

I find your post to be humorous. It seems that the idea of wisdom damage vs. wisdom drain does not seem to sit well with you. But the point at which you inferred that one over the other made the PLAYERS think outside of the box is where you lost me. What does taking drain over ability damage have to do with thinking outside of the box?

Sure if your DM wants to put something in with drain at your level 3 party he can always through in a higher CR monster and make the group have to make some very hard decisions. I have been DMing for the same group of folks for 16 years and yes I would agree that diversity in encounter is great for any game, and yes encounters where the players are rewarded for using those noggins are great fun. But a whether or not a monster does drain vs damage at CR 3 has very little to do with encounter design or dynamic. What it changes is the clean up AFTER the encounter. The damage can be taken care of by resources the party has at level 3, where as handleing drain is a level 7 resource (give or take).

As previously stated, if you don't like it, then change it. If it bothers you so much that you feel like you cannot use your head anymore as a player because one monster doesn't do permanent damage to your level 3 toon, then talk to your DM about it. Tell them to turn up the volume on the lethality in your game. I am sure they would be happy to comply. If they wont, then send my a PM and I will make a whole dungeon full of wisdom draining allips for you.Then you can make a crew level 3 characters and think your way around them. It will be grand fun for me. For you, maybe not so much, because everytime one of those critters touches you it will cost you 380 gp worth of resources.

This game is about having fun. It may be fun for you to face harder creatures. I am cool with that. I am sure your group and DM is cool with that as well. What kind of sucks is when a brand spankin' new DM chooses the allip because it looks like cool monster and wrecks the party beyond their ability to recover, all the whole while thinkng it was just a CR 3 monster like the others he had used. Thats not fun for anyone. Because the CR system in the end is about helping DMs build encounters that are appropriate for characters of that level. If I want to have more lethal encounters there is nothing stopping me from using higher CR monsters at my level 3 group, but the allip as is printed in the SRD, is NOT a CR 3 encounter. PFRPG looks like they will be fixing this problem.

love,

malkav

 

[Windjammer]

Was it a CR1 monster though (genuine question, I have no idea)?

I don't have my copy of Dungeon 124 in my current flat either, so for all I know it may be more than CR 1. Not that it even makes that much of a difference when a CR 1 spider swarm (MM, page 237-238), though presumably causing less damage than the acid beetles (still 1d6, plus 1d3 Strength damage owing to poison), still gains the very swarm traits which close off standard party behaviour as a viable strategy. That's what Erik is talking about. Remind the players they don't need to swing swords when they can pick up torches. It's apparently too much to ask for. So:

If it bothers you so much that you feel like you cannot use your head anymore as a player because one monster doesn't do permanent damage to your level 3 toon, then talk to your DM about it.

Nice try turning this round but, sorry, just flatly unpersuasive.

 

[Jhaelen]

Now, I'm honestly a bit amazed about this bit from Mr. Mona's quote:

With 3rd Edition and the challenge rating system, there’s an assumption built in of a social contract between the player, the DM, and the rules of the game, that the players are never going to have anything thrown at them that’s too difficult.

While this assumption appears to be widespread it's not something that is a natural consequence of the CR system as presented in 3E.

Anyone's who's read the DMG should have noticed that it is recommended that 5% of all encounters should be of a CR 5+ higher than the effective party level. It also recommends to include a significant percentage of encounters with CR 2-4 higher than the EPL.
And finally it recommends to include another similarly high percentage of encounters with CR 2-4 higher than the EPL that become significantly easier if the players think on their feet.

So, this assumed 'social contract' was not something that was initially intended by the authors of 3E.

 

[bouncyhead]

That's what Erik is talking about. Remind the players they don't need to swing swords when they can pick up torches. It's apparently too much to ask for.

OK. Understood (I think). But what makes you think PF is going to remove these traits from monsters (e.g. swarm behaviours)?

 

[BryonD]

I think you might want to redirect your ire....

The original post was in response to another post asking "how is animal companions like 4e".

I didn't say anything else about that...

No ire, just amazement.
And it appears the answer to my question is "no" and I will apologize (Sorry about that) and redirect the amazement.