3.5 high level woes and Paizo's hand in it.

[FourthBear]

I will note that complaints on the difficulty of the major encounters in the Paizo Adventure Paths (particularly in Shackled City) were not confined completely to the high level adventures. I recall many people noting that a number of the encounters in Life's Bazaar, Zenith Trajectory or Three Faces of Evil were particular meat grinders, all of which are in the first third of the APs.

 

[TerraDave]

Thinking more on this, it really was not just Paizo. The fact that you had a whole E6/E8/E12 movement indicates that 3E had high level issues beyond the APs.

 

[Rechan]

Funny thing about "Paizo didn't write the rules."

They are now.

Do the rules that Paizo is writing fix the high level problem?

I'd like to see someone take the Pathfinder rules and play AoW and compare.

 

[Rechan]

I will note that complaints on the difficulty of the major encounters in the Paizo Adventure Paths (particularly in Shackled City) were not confined completely to the high level adventures. I recall many people noting that a number of the encounters in Life's Bazaar, Zenith Trajectory or Three Faces of Evil were particular meat grinders, all of which are in the first third of the APs.

God, that's the truth.

I honestly sat in during 1 adventure of the Shackled City path; the Flood one. That literally took at least two months of play. I wanted to tear my hair out.

 

[cangrejoide]

<SNIP>

Those are really good ideas, I think I am going to check out Burning Sky.

thanks.

 

[chaotix42]

I ran the Age of Worms and Savage Tide APs, and both campaigns were full of PC death. In the early adventures the AoW killed my entire party* one at a time until they were all replaced/raised from the dead! Once the PCs got into mid-high levels the casualties slowed down, with Revivify and Revenance keeping true death down to a minimum.

My PCs love to find the most brutal combinations of feats, classes, spells, etc. (anything I'll let them get away with) so I suppose Paizo's APs were perfect for them. Sometimes I had to make encounters more challenging - lots of their undead foes had too few hit points and would go down with a stiff breeze.

I fully blame any high-level woes on 3.x. Paizo just did their best with what they had.

* OK, I admit, it was me.

 

[Rechan]

Ho-le-crap, RangerWickett.

I don't even play 3e, and I don't think I"d be using the WotBS adventure path, but those adventures sound badass. Adventure 7 is right up my alley.

 

[Ourph]

IMO, Paizo tended to play too much of the "arms race" game when creating new monsters or NPCs. I noticed this a lot in the Rise of the Runelords AP. By "arms race" I mean, the general consensus is that good players are using tactic X, so we'll create a monster that is immune to tactic X. Then when players switch to tactic Y, we'll create a monster that is immune to both tactic X and Y.

Eventually you've got an opponent who lasts the 8-12 rounds the designers apparently want it to against the PCs but only because they're all reduced to wailing on it with their most ineffective attacks while burning all their healing powers to stay alive long enough to finish it. Those kind of grindy combats aren't fun for anyone and I only really noticed it against opponents that were custom-made by Paizo.

By comparison, most standard Monster Manual opponents die very quickly vs. fresh PCs with good players. However, our DM was able to simply add more opponents of the same type if he wanted a tougher combat. To me, that's a much better fix to the problem.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

I'm surprised no one has added experiences of high level RPGA play into this discussion.

Also it bears saying that the issue with high level 3.5E isn't so much the difficulty of a Paizo AP but how unfun the game gets at that level, and how the imbalances and wildly varying effects of character generation affect the high level game, especially within published adventures.

 

[jasin]

We started 4E immediately after finishing AoW.

While I wouldn't say we started 4E because of AoW, the annoyances it brought (culminating in the fight against Kyuss lasting less than two rounds, with him not managing to make a single attack) certainly made use more receptive to 4E. High-level play can get tedious, but our other (homebrew) campaign which reached ~20th certainly didn't leave us as drained as AoW.

It's open for debate if this can be blamed on Paizo's adventure writing, or if it's an inevitable consequence of the monster-PC arms race.