We had our second session today of my hexcrawl campaign. This time, we had a full group. I started off helping the player who couldn’t make the first session create a new character. In spite of his newness, walking him through character creation went comparatively quickly to the rest of the group for the first session. I think it really pays when you don’t know the system well to follow your ABCs and build towards a concept rather than trying to look at mechanics first then decide what you want to be.
This was my third session running the game. I’m getting more comfortable with running the skill actions. What I particularly like is the way adjudicating any situation often comes down to narrating what you want in terms of skill actions.
There was a situation when the alchemist noted he could make booze, so if the party could get some bananas, he could make booze out of them. Monkeys had bananas, so the rogue went over to try to convince the monkeys to give him some bananas by offering them some of the squirrels he acquired while Subsisting. That is, he wanted to Make an Impression than Request some bananas. I made the DC for making the impression hard, but he rolled really well. He then rolled just so-so for the Request, so he ended up having to give the monkeys more squirrels than he initially offered. While we were doing this, the player was describing how he was scratching himself and making monkey noises, so I thought it would be totally awesome to just roll with it. Now they have monkey friends.
I made a few tweaks to how I ran my hexcrawl procedure, which seemed to work well. That doesn’t really have much to do with PF2 per se, though exploration activities are still very helpful for clarifying the intentions of the players. Taking something like “I want to keep a look out for danger” and turning that into the Scout activity is very helpful, since it helps quantify the benefits of what they are doing.
Combat-wise, we got into a lot of fights with gray oozes. I need to use the monster creation rules to build them out properly, so I was winging it based on a mix of features from gelatinous cubes and ochre jellies. The only actually fought one, but it was a +2 encounter. That should have been dangerous, but they took advantage of their mobility (and my bad dice luck) to keep it from getting a good shot at them.
Recall Knowledge came up a few times. I made sure to ask my PCs for a topic, and then I determined the results. Mostly, they failed. I handled critical failures by giving them incorrect information. In spite of the fact all oozes they encountered were the same kind (gray ooze), they thought they had encountered a bunch of different kinds, which they called swampsters. During the fight, one wanted to roll medicine to gauge how their attacks was affecting the ooze. It was a stretch (though fitting for his
ancestry), but I gave it to him. It should have been a hard or harder DC, but I rolled great for the secret, so he got a good but basic still idea of how well their attacks were working (mostly confirming what they were seeing).
Overall, I’m happy with how PF2 runs at the table. The more I run it, the better it flows. There is a bit of an initial learning curve, and making a character is not as fast as other systems, but it goes smoothly at the table. I really like the way the action economy simplifies decision-making. If you have an action, you can do something with it. There just aren’t many exceptions or special cases.
Next session, it sounds like the players want to go into the dragon shrine, even though it has been taken over by gray oozes and giant geckos. That should let us do some dungeon crawling, and it should challenge me with making an interesting dungeon out of a frankly strange pairing of creatures (in spite of gray oozes having a 6% chance of coming up on my random encounter table, I rolled them something like five times today).
