The Pathfinder Playtest, Part Two

My group finally completed the second adventure in the Pathfinder Doomsday Dawn Playtest, and I really wanted to continue to share our experience playtesting the new system. We have every intention of completing all seven parts of the playtest, but every member of my group is a busy person so it’s going to take us well into next year to complete all of it.

Ongoing Impressions

My overall ongoing impression of the new Pathfinder system is still positive. Most of the system works well and a much of it is a significant improvement over Pathfinder First Edition. However, it looks like the new system shines the most at low levels, and in this slightly higher level adventure some of the flaws of the new system started to show through more apparently.

It’s a Playtest

If anyone is interested in giving the P2E playtest a try, be aware that it is a playtest and is designed to test the boundaries of the game. As such, you and your players are likely to encounter frustrations that aren’t necessarily a problem with the system, but rather just part of the nature of a playtest. For example, there is an enormous amount of character creation involved in the playtest, and that wouldn’t be the case with a standard Paizo AP. Additionally parts of the playtest are going to test extreme circumstances which might try your players’ patience or resolve. I will try to leave out issues we had with the playtesting part of the playtest and focus on the new system itself.

The Adventure

Paizo’s writing continues to be excellent. I had a lot of fun running the adventure and portraying the characters, and my players continue to be very interested in the Doomsday Dawn story. I am confident that the quality of Paizo’s writing will continue to be excellent regardless of the status of P2E’s gameplay system.

The second adventure involves a race between the players and a party of evil NPCs to an ancient tomb to recover an important ancient artifact. The first part of the adventure involves overland travel and some outdoor encounters, and the second part involves exploring the ancient tomb itself. The overland travel portion wasn’t very different from how it would play out in Pathfinder First Edition or any other system for that matter, and it all went rather smoothly. The ancient tomb portion of the adventure involved some combat and some traps, as well as a “puzzle” which was the “roll to see if your character solves it” kind rather than the “see if your players can figure it out” kind.

Positives

There are many things about the playtest system that are still strong positives. The system makes sense and we are easily able to play it, and may of the changes continue to prove to be significant improvements over the previous system. My praise from the previous post still stands, so consider anything I didn’t mention here to be and unchanged opinion from the previous post. In this post, I am going to expound more on some of the positives as they played out in this part of the adventure, and then I am going to discuss several new and returning issues as they became more apparent as well.

Combat

Combat was fun and engaging (most of the time, there are a couple of issues of note in the negatives section). The players always looked forward to combat and enjoyed playing their characters on the map as they took down their foes.

Three Action Economy

The three action economy still shines as one of the best parts of the playtest. It flows very well and is easy to understand. Having three distinct actions frees the players up to get creative and try new and interesting things during combat. It also frees up the GM to allow the players to try innovative things that aren’t in the book by simply deeming them to be an action. You could do this in Pathfinder First Edition as well, but not having to debate what kind of an action the action would be is liberating for both the player and the GM.

Attack of Opportunity

This is a contentious issue on the forums, but overall I think it’s an improvement that all creatures don’t have Attack of Opportunity anymore. Maybe more creatures should have it thank just fighters, but not having to account for Attack of Opportunity from every creature really frees players (especially rogues) to move around the map and get into better position.

Negatives

Playing at higher levels made some of the flaws in the current iteration of the playtest more obvious. All of the positives that I mentioned in the previous post still apply, but I am going to list more negative points in this post since there was more room for them to appear.

Proficiencies

I knew this was going to bother me and it did. I am not enjoying having everything scale with level in the playtest. It makes leveling up characters feel weird. It feels unnatural for all characters who are “trained” in a skill to progress with that skill at exactly the same rate regardless of their class or background. It makes characters feel less dynamic and more like video game characters. It also feels unnatural for characters to keep getting better at things in which they are untrained and have taken no time to practice whatsoever.

I’ll compare it to first edition to try to illustrate my point. In first edition, a character could take a skill point late in a campaign for roleplaying purposes and have some modest capability in that skill, appropriate to the circumstances. Now, if a character becomes trained in a skill at level 9, they are suddenly just as good at that skill as they are in all of their other trained skills.

It just feels less dynamic to have everything flattened out so much. Pathfinder First Edition had more peaks and valleys and that made things feel more meaningful. The proficiency system where everything increases with level makes differences between characters feel too marginal.

Enemy Levels

Directly related to the proficiency system is another issue which I anticipated that has come to fruition regarding enemy levels in combat. In first edition I would enjoy putting my players against a creature much stronger than they are, but with a weakness or vulnerability that my players can exploit in order to overcome it. In the current rendition of the playtest, the pool of overleveled enemies that I can throw at my players is significantly reduced now that AC and Saves scale with level. The to-hit window against overleveled enemies is narrowed from what it would be in First Edition, and now a critical success on a save against a spell often means no damage whatsoever player. Spell casters face a significant risk of their spells frequently doing nothing against bosses.

This issue became painfully apparent in a fight with a Lesser Water Elemental. The Lesser Water Elemental was only one level higher than the players, but had 30 more hit points than any of the players, had AC 20 and TAC 20, had +13 to hit and did 2d8+6 damage, had a +12 to its Reflex Save and was immune to critical hits. This fight was extremely frustrating for the players since rounds would go by without any of them doing anything effective at all.

Seeing how that battle played out, I anticipate that pitting the players against an enemy that is three levels higher than them would amplify these problems even further.

No Surprise Rounds

Another disappointment with the playtest is the lack of surprise rounds. In First Edition, if you were aware of an enemy and they weren’t aware of you, you could perform a single standard action in a surprise round against them before normal initiative started. Now all it means is that undetected characters can roll stealth instead of perception for initiative. This is such a pathetic benefit for going through the trouble of trying to remain undetected it hardly makes it seem worth it. Most characters with high stealth also have high perception. Even worse, it makes setting up ambushes completely pointless for characters who aren’t good at stealth because they’d be better of rolling perception anyway.

This came up in this part of the playtest. My players were in the tomb at the same time as the bad guys, and the bad guys didn’t know the players were there. The players cleverly set up an ambush to catch the bad guys off guard, but with the new rules a couple of the bad guys ended up going first anyway.

The best thing we could come up with is adding bonuses to stealth or penalties to perception to account for the fact that the enemies didn’t know the players were there, but rules for that aren’t spelled out in the rulebook and everyone agreed we’d rather just have surprise rounds back. They were really disappointed that their plan was a flop because of the rules.

Conditions

Another annoyance we encountered was with Conditions. Paizo had tried to make a consistent system where there is a standard list of scaling Conditions. However, there are a ton of them and they all cross-reference each other. It becomes a ton of page flipping to find out the effect of a single action which ground the game to a halt.

This happened when an enemy failed its will save vs Color Spray. This was the process: What does Color Spray do? Blinded. What is Blinded? Creatures are Unseen and can be sensed with a seek action. What is Unseen? What is Sensed? What is a Seek action?

Having to look up each of these things individually was a clumsy and tedious mess. It may be just an organizational issue with the rulebook and not an issue with the conditions themselves, but the sheer number of conditions and how they all intersect seems like an enormous task to memorize.

Persistent Damage

Persistent damage is LETHAL. It seems to be one of the single most powerful effects in the game. Unless the effect has a set maximum duration, persistent damage seems to go on indefinitely.

The players are given a free DC20 flat check each turn to remove the persistent damage. The players and the allies can take actions to reduce the DC of the flat check to DC15 and give them another free check, but it is still very possible for 5 rounds to go by without the affected character rolling a 15 or higher and dying from the persistent damage.

This feels incredibly imbalanced and seems like an oversight. Without a guaranteed method to end the effect (like any healing stopping bleeding in First Edition), persistent damage feels like a dreaded nightmare that forces all the players to stop what they are doing and spend as much time as needed to make it stop. I am not a fan of this in any respect. I think a maximum duration is required for each persistent damage effect, or else guaranteed methods of removing the persistent damage are needed.

The other side of the coin is that you can spend all three actions per round to give yourself four DC 15 checks, which I guess is roughly equivalent to “full round action to remove” but it is a definite possibility for a player never to roll a 15 or higher before they die, and that open ended death sentence doesn’t seem appropriate for something so conceptually minor and so common.

Stand Still and Attack

One of the negative trends I noticed when running this second adventure in the playtest is that a lot of situations devolve into both sides using their whole turn to make three attacks and hoping for that natural 20.

As stated above, one of the points of scaling down Attack of Opportunity and having a three action economy was to steer players away from standing in one corner and attacking monsters back and forth until one of them dies. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened anyway in many cases during our adventure. Both the players and the monsters had repeat situations where their best option was just to roll three attack rolls and hope for a natural 20. I have no idea how this may be addressed outside of encouraging more creativity from players, but I noticed this trend and I suspect it is going to continue.

Resonance

Resonance continues to be a confusing and annoying feature in the game. We had an alchemist and managing her resonance was just plain annoying and tedious. There was nothing fun about it and it felt tacked on and unnecessary.

Fortunately though, Paizo has released a second test of resonance with a completely different rule set. I still am not convinced that their new system will be good enough for launch, but it is an improvement and they did fix one of the biggest issues which was tying your constant-effect magical items and your on-command magical items to the same pool.

I haven’t tested the new resonance system so I won’t comment on it further, but I will say that I am glad that they seem to be working hard on it.

Conclusion

We are having fun with the playtest and I am really looking forward to the release of Pathfinder Second Edition when it’s complete. The second part of the adventure was a lot of fun to play (with a few exceptions) and I’m looking forward to playing the next part.

However, playing at level 4 made some issues more apparent than they were are level 1, and my sense is that these problems are only going to get worse as we get into even higher levels.

GCP

And here is the link to the GCP boys playing the second Doomsday Dawn adventure. I highly recommend you watch it if you have any interest at all in roleplaying games or podcasts or fun in general.