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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerricB" data-source="post: 5905156" data-attributes="member: 3586">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 damageA ranger/wizard who Rapid Shots to get 1d8+2 damageA sorcerer who has to overcome Spell Resistance (50%) on many of the monsters to get his 2d4+2 magic missiles to take effectA elf cleric with low Str, high Dex who does 1d8 damageA 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 16Attacks: +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.</blockquote>

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