Just How Dangerous Is Combat?

    A question for you dear reader: how many hits does it take to kill someone on average (both median and mean) in Pathfinder?
    If you're like me, odds are you never really thought about it much.  "Not many" at the lower levels to "a whole lot" at the higher levels might be your reply.  While combat starts very deadly it seems to take a million swings-and-misses by the teens, and ironically very deadly again at the highest levels with all the save-or-die effects.
    You also might be asking, so what?  Well, as both player and GM it is very important to know how deadly combat is, because you need to know what is effective.  Let's say weapons only do 1 HP of damage per hit.  Imagine this: two fighters circle, looking for an opening, and they only have 1 HP each - so the first hit will be the last.  Let's look at another example: two demigods circle, looking for an opening, each has 1,000,000,000 HP - so it's going to take a whole lot of hits to end the fight.  In the first case, with only 1 hit to kill, getting that hit becomes all-important.  You would want to take Improved Initiative for sure, and a really high Dex, to make sure you get off that first shot (and it lands).  But with a billion hits to kill, well, that's a more leisurely pace.  You have breathing room, you can try different combat maneuvers and options, since even if you fail and get hit in return, well, no big deal - lots more HP where that came from.  A low hit to kill system has a different focus from a high hit to kill one.  And as a GM, you never want to put the one HP opponent against the billion HP opponent, the lower side has no chance at all of winning, and is going to be a boring fight (well, unless you make it a very bad idea to kill the lower side, but that's another post).
    In our Pathfinder example, at low levels you pick fights very carefully, even bypass them when possible, because combat is deadly.  But by the teens you are wading into the middle of a horde of goblins, slaying them with gay abandon.  At the higher levels you stop worrying so much about armor class and start taking a hard look at your saves.  The different pacing leads to different priorities and behavior.
    But while knowing the hits to kill of Pathfinder is nice, again it is kind of unimportant - well, let's say once you know it you don't really have to think about it.  But there is a time when you have to think a lot about how dangerous your game's combat system is: when you switch to playing another game.

    If you've read the blog you know I've been making house rules for 13th Age, and digging into the structure of the system in some depth.  I started by looking at how the abilities worked, and then moved on to spells, since I want to make sure the house rules I created work within the framework of the game.  As a part of that, I have had to look at spells - specifically how spell damage compares to weapon damage.  From there I ended up taking apart the whole combat system.  And what I found explained something about the system I had felt but been unable to articulate.
    There is sort of a staple in D&D gaming, the goblin.  Virtually every 1st level player will fight the 1st level goblin as a beginning step on the road to bigger and better monsters.  When we ended our Pathfinder campaign and started the 13th Age one, I decided to keep the tradition alive and so the first encounter was between my 4 characters (my 2 friends, me as both GM and player, and the Bear animal companion who I upgraded to 1st level instead of the book 0th level) and 4 goblins.  From my Pathfinder experience I thought this would be a somewhat challenging but predictable win for the party.  Instead the bear went down and everybody was injured and glad to be alive at the end.  Which was when I noticed something, 13th Age combat is a lot more deadly than Pathfinder's was.  But until I pulled apart the numbers, I didn't really know why.  What I did know was that I was going to have to be careful, I've put in fewer monsters and played them kind of dumb (and fudged more than a few dice rolls, my players were just as surprised as me, so I didn't want to punish them for not knowing a system that I couldn't prepare them for).
    The thing is, every game is built on assumptions.  How hard should the players be compared to the monsters, how many hits should an average fight last, what options are available to both sides and how often can they use them and how big an impact do they have?  These are all decisions made by the game designers and usually hidden under all the numbers and feats and attributes and progressions and stuff that makes it hard to see the forest for the trees.
    Let's look at Pathfinder again.  The default attack in Pathfinder is the naked man.  A naked man has a base armor class of 10.  With no other modifiers, the base attacker has a zero modifier and a d20 roll.  You have to roll over, so the odds of rolling 11 - 20 is 50%.  So all attacks, at the most basic level, have a 50% to hit.  Armor and Dex make that lower for the defender, BAB progression and Str make that higher for the attacker, and there are a millions feats and spells that can change that equation.
    Okay, so once we hit, how many hits to kill?  Well, that's a bit harder to track but again, the middle-of-the-road combatant gets a d8 for hit points, and they get those every level.  While the middle-of-the-road weapon is the trusty long sword, which also does d8 damage.  So, about 2 hits on average sounds right.  Well, at first level.  See, while HP increases by a d8 every level, weapon damage doesn't.  Weapons can get an extra d6 or two, from flaming or frost or shock abilities, but mostly weapons get +1 increments (from both weapon abilities and a lot of feats).  So while it may take 2 hits to kill at level 1, by level 10 it's more like 5-8 (I'm going off the top of my head, it's a pain to try to actually calculate given all the variables).  Only spells tend to do the caster's level in damage, making them much more deadly (even without the save-of-die stuff).
    So, base 50% chance to hit, with low then higher hits to kill.

    Thing is, that's not 13th Age.
    I'm not going to go into a fully detailed breakdown, I can if anybody cares and is curious but I want to keep this post kind of short.  In 13th Age our default is still the naked guy, since he is the base chance to hit that we will be modifying.  And there, the odds are a lot different.  It looks the same, naked guy has an AC of 11 (10 plus 1 for first level and no attribute modifiers).  Thing is, the generic first level monster (mook or normal) has a base/default +6 to hit.  And, 13th Age is roll equal-or-over (Pathfinder is over), which means our monster has a base 75% to hit, a bit higher than the 50% of Pathfinder.  Also, there are very few ways in increase Armor Class in 13th Age, it mostly goes up by one point each level - but so does the base monster attack bonus.  So for all levels from 1 to 10, in an on-level fight the average monster has a good chance to hit the average player.
    It gets more fun from the player's perspective.  The average 1st level monster has a base AC of 16.  Again, with no attribute modifiers, the average player gets a +1 for being first level, which means he only has a 30% chance to hit in return.  So things are in the monster's favor by default.  And again, everything goes up by 1 point per level on both sides, so this is a common ratio from level 1 to 10.
    What about hits to kill?  Well this is pretty interesting.  The 13th Age designers seemed to really want a stable system, because even though you add one die of damage per level, even though 5 different spells have 5 different damage progressions, even though there are all these numbers to confuse things - it actually boils down to all monsters and players taking about 3 to 5 hits to kill.  No matter the attack, no matter the level, no matter the circumstances - 3 to 5 hits is about how long somebody is going to be around.
    So, monsters base 75% chance to hit and players base 30% chance to hit, 3 to 5 hits to kill throughout all levels.

    Yes, 13th Age combat is a lot more deadly than Pathfinder.  My gut feeling was right.
    Now, I am not saying that one or the other is better - let me make that clear up front.  There is no "better" or "worse" to this sort of thing.  Either you like your combat deadly or you like it leisurely, it's a matter of personal taste.  But, one thing that is important and indisputable - you have to know which one your system is.  And frankly, games suck at this.  There should be a section in every GM book or chapter on the "combat assumptions" about how hard things should be to hit and how many hits to kill and what kind of fights and player behavior the game expects.  This is vitally important information for both the GM and the players to know up front, when planning characters and gear and teamwork.  And pretty much no game actually does this.  You have to play it, or get a calculator and the book, and figure it out yourself - which is pretty darn stupid when you think that the designers had to answer those same questions and could just write down what the hell they were thinking instead of making you work for it yourself.  And like I discovered, when you switch games, try something new, if its combat assumptions are very different from your experience then you're going to have a hard time playing on either side of the screen.

Looking Under The Hood Of 13th Age

    A little while ago I posted some old work I did looking at the character creation options in Pathfinder.  That got me thinking, what if I took the same look at my current game, 13th Age?  So, here goes...

    13th Age has a much simpler mechanical structure than Pathfinder, one of the things I really like about the game.  I expected that there would be fewer choices and disjointed options than in Pathfinder (which had 3 BAB progressions, 2 save progressions, 4 skill point per level progressions and 8 different numbers of class skills).  In a way I was right, but I was also surprised at how strange some things got.  So let's look at what is nice and simple:

• All characters get 8 Background (ie, skill) points, max of 5 in any one, and they never get any more (instead the character level and an attribute are added to all checks)
• All characters get 3 points for Icon Relationships and an extra point at Champion and Epic tiers
• All characters have 8 Recoveries per day (the fighter gets 9, but through a special Class Feature)
• All characters get 1 Feat per level, which is primarily used to increase the power/options of an existing Class Talent
• All Classes give a +2 bonus to one Attribute, but not the same that is increased by the character's Race
• All characters get 3 Class Talent points to buy extra abilities (though the number of starting ones, and cost, varies)

   
    This is a good foundation, in my opinion.  I like when all the characters are built on a similar scale, with each having meaningful options, instead of some classes having a lot more to do than others.  I don't think that there needs to be a ton of different progressions, I think it's totally possible that every character chooses 5 things for example, as long as they choose from different useful pools of options and each available choice is meaningful, then there's no reason in my mind that shouldn't work.

    Then it starts getting a little weird.
    Let's look at Armor Class.  In 13th Age your class determines what your AC will be for each type of armor (being either None, Light or Heavy).  So instead of the armor itself having a modifier, the class determines the armor modifier - which seems totally backwards to me, but okay.  Out of the 9 starting classes in the core rulebook, there are 7 different armor values:
    None / Light / Heavy-
        10 / 10 / 11    Sorcerer & Wizard
        10 / 12 / 13    Barbarian & Bard
        11 / 12 / 13    Rogue
        10 / 12 / 14    Cleric
        10 / 12 / 16    Paladin
        10 / 13 / 15    Fighter
        10 / 14 / 15    Ranger
    This baffles me.  None of these progressions seem so distinct that they add anything in their complexity.  I mean, there isn't such a huge jump in the numbers that one class will seem totally different from another class, and thus worth taking (except between the very highest and lowest of course).  And the classes that are best/worst get a little weird too.  The Rogue has the highest AC with no armor, a whole 11 instead of everyone else's 10 - wow, what a big difference.  The best Light Armor classes are the Ranger (at 14) and the Fighter (at 13) - neither of which is that much higher than the norm of 12, or even the default of 10.  The highest Heavy Armor AC is the Paladin (16) with the Fighter (15). 
    Also with AC there is weather or not you take an attack penalty from wearing Heavy armor (and only heavy, nobody has a Light Armor penalty).  6 Classes have a -2 to attack in Heavy armor, including the Ranger who has the 15 AC but loses to the Fighter for second place due to the -2 hit penalty.  Now, if you are a Wizard or Sorcerer, both of whom get an 11 Heavy Armor AC, then taking a -2 to hit is totally not worth it - and even the pathetic +1 AC is not worth it without a penalty.  So why would you ever do so?  Why is it even an option?  This is not a meaningful decision.  The -2 hit for +1 AC (since for everybody the Heavy AC is only 1 higher than the Light AC)(the 12/14 Cleric and 13/15 Fighter and 12/16 Paladin do not have any attack penalties, and thus zero reason to ever wear Light armor) is a crappy trade-off that drops your damage output by a lot for a pathetic increase in survivability.
    Finally we have Shields, which are a +1 AC for every class (so no shield specialists) and every class that takes a Heavy Armor -2 penalty also has a -2 to hit with a shield (making it +2 AC for -4 to hit), except for the Bard, who only has a -1 to hit (why, exactly?).
    Now my question is, what do we gain from this complexity?  What do the players get and what does the GM get from having so many different numbers?  With 7 progressions for 9 classes only the Sorcerer/Wizard duplicate, and the Barbarian/Bard almost duplicate (except the Bard is -1 hit with shields and the Barbarian has no penalty), and everybody else has their own thing.  Do the 1 or 2 point differences really make any meaningful difference in the feel or play-style of each class?  Do we really get any better storytelling from the class having the AC instead of the armor type being the same AC for everybody (a la Pathfinder/D&D)?  Because if so I must be the one strange guy who isn't feeling it.  This is a muddle of numbers that do not seem to make any sense, and do not seem to have any worthwhile choices.  Every class should just have their one best armor type, and wearing anything higher gives a +2 (+4 would be better) AC but a -2 to hit and skill checks (so the extra combat survivability means being less useful across the board).  Or, say that No Armor and Light Armor give your Dex bonus + 1 to AC and Heavy armor gives your Con bonus +1 to AC.  That way light, quick fighters will go lightly armored and brawny fighters will go armored.  You could add a little DR, which 13th Age does not have, into the mix saying that Light Armor is DR 2 and Heavy Armor DR 4 - but again each class takes a -2 to rolls in higher armor than they are meant for.  [Normal 13th Age adds the middle of your Con / Dex / Wis, which means having one really good ability score is not much help for your AC - a fine idea to reduce the min/max'ers out there, but also makes everybody feel the same and means having one noteworthy score that should define your character instead has limited usefulness.]  With DR any tradeoff in reduced hit or skills or whatever means a guaranteed reduction in the damage you take, which is a more worthwhile choice (you may be less effective, but you will live longer).  Really, whatever the means, it seems like there has to be a better way to distinguish the classes - these progressions are all so close that they don't feel very meaningful, and they don't scale so even a +1 AC that might be something at first level will be totally inconsequential at 10th level, and they don't seem to ever offer a reason to choose to wear armor that is not the best for your class.  That looks like a bad design to me.

    In addition to armor, 13th Age adds 2 other defenses, Physical Defense (PD) and Mental Defense (MD).  These are like the Fortitude save and Will save of Pathfinder/D&D, and I am glad to see the 13th Age guys choose to make them act just like armor class (roll over by attacker to hit) instead of the strange extra mechanic Pathfinder/D&D used (roll over with different progression to resist).  Here for the 9 classes we have really 4 different progressions:
    10 / 10    Fighter
    11 / 10 or 10 / 11    Barbarian, Bard, Ranger, Sorcerer
    11 / 11    Cleric
    12 / 10 or 10 / 12    Paladin, Rogue, Wizard
    Now, I'm counting the 11 and 10 or 12 and 10 as one line, because weather you have PD higher or MD higher really doesn't matter, you're resistant to one thing more than another.  Again though, is the 1 point difference between the Fighter and the Barbarian/Bard/Ranger/Sorcerer really enough to make an edge case out of them?  And don't Fighters normally get portrayed as being tougher than smart?  Or if you want to say they are tough all over why not make them 11/11's like the Cleric?  Again, with a non-scaling defense do we really get anything out of splitting it this fine?  I'd love to see someone write a computer program to simulate a thousand fights and see if the 1 point difference made a statistically significant difference in the outcome.

    Weapons are a whole 'nother kettle of fish.  On the one had, weapons almost follow a perfect even progression: there are 5 types of weapons, 1-Handed Melee, 2-Handed Melee, Thrown, Crossbows and Bows.  Within each type there are Small, Light/Simple, Heavy/Martial.  Then we get to the exceptions.  Except there are no Heavy/Martial Thrown weapons, and there are no Small Bows (personally, what makes a Small 2-Handed weapon I have a hard time wrapping my head around, but I'll roll with it).
    Now, 1-Handed Melee weapons all do:
        Small:  d4 damage
        Light/Simple:  d6 damage
        Heavy/Martial:  d8 damage
    Except for the Rogue, who gets to do d8 damage with all 1-Handed Melee weapons, and should really have that as a special class talent/feature instead of repeating the weapon table for every class.
    2-Handed Melee weapons all do:
        Small:  d6 damage
        Light/Simple:  d8 damage
        Heavy/Martial:  d10 damage
    These are the same for every class, nice and consistent.  Now, the potentially 2-point difference is not much, again, but damage dice do scale - you roll your level in dice for each hit, so that's a 2 point spread at level 1 but a 20 point spread at level 10, so it might just barely clear the hurdle of being significant.  Barely (since the HP of the monsters also scale, hard to say if it matters much).
    The differences come with that attack penalty, just like with Armor, each class may have a penalty to hit with different weapon types:
        4 classes have no penalties to hit with anything (Barbarian, Fighter, Paladin, Ranger)
        1 class has a -2 hit with Heavy/Martial 2-Handed weapons only (Bard)
        3 classes have -2 hit with Heavy/Martial 1- and 2-Handed weapons (Cleric, Rogue, Sorcerer)
        1 class has -2 hit with Light/Simple and -5 hit with Heavy/Martial 1- and 2-Handed weapons (Wizard)
    Does the Bard really need to be an edge case?  Do Sorcerer's really need to be better with weapons than the Wizard, given that they have the same AC progression (and Hit Points)?

    Thrown weapons are a bit easier:
        Small: d4 damage
        Light/Simple: d6 damage
    And nobody has a penalty to hit, oh, no, wait a minute - Wizards, and only Wizards, have a -2 to hit with only Light/Simple Thrown weapons - really?  "Wizards throw like girls," how mature guys.

    Crossbows are supposed to be easier to use than bows, the book says at one point that while they shoot slower they have lower to-hit penalties (though really Heavy Crossbows take a move action to reload, so you have to stand still, and Small and Light Crossbows take a Quick action, which is essentially free, so they are not that much slower):
        Small:  d4 damage
        Light/Simple:  d6 damage
        Heavy/Martial:  d8 damage
    Bows do the same damage, minus the Small category:
        Light/Simple:  d6 damage
        Heavy/Martial:  d8 damage

    When it comes to penalties:
        4 classes have no to hit penalties for any Bow (Barbarian, Fighter, Paladin, Ranger)
        3 classes have no to hit penalties for any Crossbow (Fighter, Paladin, Ranger)
    Wait, I hear you ask, what happened to the Barbarian?  Well, being a backwards and primitive fool the Barbarian has the highest to hit penalties for any class with a newfangled Crossbow, a -5 to hit with all sizes.  I'm sorry, that's stupid.  The great thing about the crossbow was that it was so easy to use.  Sure, a Barbarian who's never seen one might have a -5 to hit on his or her first shot, but then would realize it is a stupidly simple weapon to operate compared to the bow, and quickly lose that penalty.  Really, guys?

        2 classes have a -2 to hit with a Heavy Bow  (Bard, Rogue)
        3 classes have a -1 to hit with a Heavy Crossbow  (Bard, Cleric, Rogue)

        1 class has a -2 hit with Light and -4 hit with Heavy Bows  (Sorcerer)
        while 2 classes have a -2 hit with Light and -5 hit with Heavy Bows  (Cleric, Wizard)
    Again, do we really need the Sorcerer to be one whole point better with one type of bow?  Why not make him a -2 Light or Heavy and make him significantly better?  Or, the same as the Wizard (again, same AC and HP between them)?

        1 class is -1 hit with Light and -3 hit with Heavy Crossbows  (Sorcerer)
        while 1 class is -1 hit with Light and -4 hit with Heavy Crossbows  (Wizard)
    See comment above.

    Again I ask, are these really that different that they are meaningful?  The Barbarian's whopping -5 to all crossbows is a very meaningful penalty (stupid, but meaningful), but a lot of the others seem to be pretty close to each other.  And is the extra 2 points of damage per level a meaningful trade-off for the +1 AC of a shield?  Or having nothing in the off-hand?  These just feel so close, while they kind of add color they don't really seem to make a lot of difference, or feel from the player's perspective that they are building towards a certain style of fighting.  There doesn't seem to be a lot of reason to take a sub-optimal choice, so why not just print the best choice for each class and forget the rest?  For that one edge case where the party loses all their gear and has to fight with scavenged weapons?  Why not make that situation the default numbers but a -2 hit and damage then?  Two lines instead of a dozen for basically the same thing.


    I'm going to run through the Hit Points since this post is getting long.
    There are 2 parts to Hit Points, the base multiplier that calculates your maximum HP and the size of your Recovery Dice that you roll when you heal, and there are 5 different progressions:
        x6 and d6  (Sorcerer, Wizard)
        x6 and d8  (Rogue)
        x7 and d8  (Bard, Cleric, Ranger)
        x7 and d10  (Barbarian)
        x8 and d10  (Fighter, Paladin)
    Why not drop the Rogue with the Sorc/Wiz and raise the Barb with the Ftr/Pally ?  Let's look at some level 10 characters (no Con mods, raw numbers):
        Fighter and Paladin have 8 x 24 = 192 HP, healing for 10d10 or an average 55 HP (or about 34% of max)
        Barbarian has 7 x 24 = 168 HP, healing for 10d10 or an average of 55 HP (or about 30% of max)
so they heal for about the same and the extra 24 HP might be one more hit, but might not make a difference when the base strike damage in the generic monster table is 135 (the 10th level Iron Golem does 50 damage per attack, and 5d10 damage on a miss, and makes 2 attacks).
    This is what I mean when I ask if there is any statistical difference in the numbers.  Sure, the Fighter and Paladin have bigger raw stats than the Barbarian, but does it really make a difference in play?  Are the players going to feel like they act and react differently from each other?  If not, then why not just use the same numbers for simplicity's sake?


    Lastly, the same thing that was hardest to compare in Pathfinder is the hardest thing to compare in 13th Age: the Class Features, fixed for each class, and the Class Talents, which are purchased with the 3 points every character gets.  Just a few observations:
    The default idea seemed to be that each class would have 3 Class Features and 3 Class Talents.  Personally, I like that idea.  The Bard and Rogue follow that pattern.  The Wizard has 4 Class Features listed, but one is a definition of how a type of spells work, and so shouldn't be in the Class Features section, they should be in the Spells section, and so the Wizard follows that pattern even though he doesn't seem to.  The Sorcerer is the same, he has 6 Class Features listed but really 3 are spell types in the wrong place and so only has 3 real Class Features, thus on the default.  So we end up with 4 classes that follow this pattern, the Bard, Rogue, Sorcerer and Wizard.
    The Fighter only has 2 Class Features, but gains a bonus Class Talent at 6th level, so ends up with the default 3/3 but in a delayed fashion.  Why?  How the hell should I know?  Looks like stupid design to me, but YMMV.  Likewise, and doubling down on the concept, the Barbarian and Paladin only get 1 Class Feature, but get 2 bonus Class Talents at levels 5 and 8, delaying them even more than the Fighter and other classes.
    The Cleric gets dumped on, only getting 2 Class Features and never gaining a bonus Talent, leaving him a little under-powered (in a sense, I know it is hard to compare these Features and Talents directly, which I consider to be another sign of bad design).  The Ranger however, gets hosed with no Class Features and but at least the 2 delayed bonus Talents, and so is the weakest overall character class, hands down.

    Now, complicating the above factors is the fact that some Features/Talents increase and some are fixed abilities.  For example, Cleric/ Sorcerer/ Wizard spells all increase in power at 3rd, 5th, 7th and 9th levels.  So do the Cries and Spells of the Bard, the Flexible Attacks of the Fighter and the Momentum powers of the Rogue.  This makes things worse though.  While the Fighter, Bard, Rogue, Sorcerer and Wizard all end up with their 6 Features/Talents eventually, they are also gaining power at 4 other levels.  Meanwhile the Barbarian and Paladin eventually gain the 6 Feature/Talents that are fixed, at only 2 levels (5th and 8th), but nothing else increases.  And the Ranger gets next to nothing, 2 delayed levels of advancement, and only gets any kind of increasing ability if they choose to take an Animal Companion (which has a minor, incremental advancement each level).
    Talk about imbalance.


    So, looking over this really long post, what do I want you, gentle reader, to take away from this?
    Well, first off that even though something is simpler than something else, does not make it simple.  13th Age is a simpler system than the Pathfinder we played before, but due to similar structures they are equally hard to modify if you don't agree with the choices they were built upon.
    Second, this is a good example of just how crazy I am and why you don't want to know me in real life.  The hours I've spent looking at these numbers (for Pathfinder and 13th Age) have been enjoyable, quite fun really, and the kind of thing my mind constantly works on.  I like this stuff.  I like pulling apart systems and debating design choices and asking myself, how would I do that differently?  I am a sad and strange little man, give thanks to the deity of your choice (or random chance) that you are not like me.
    Honestly, I don't expect anyone to take anything away from this.  Like I said, this is the kind of stuff I like to think about, and I know that very few other people feel the same way.  In fact, if you've made it through this post diligently reading the whole mess then you should get up and go get yourself a cookie for being dedicated enough to parse my madness.  I'm not sure if there is a point.  Now granted I complain about some choices in the descriptions above, but those are just my opinions.  Given the lack of 13th Age house rules on the 'net (do a Google search of the term) it seems that most people who are playing the game like it just fine.  Again, this is my own madness, shared with very few others.  It does mean trying to house rule the system is difficult, since I want to change things in fundamentally different ways, and eventually house rules become a completely different game from the original if taken too far.
    Which is the hardest thing for me.  No other game out there is quite my game, the way I would do it - and while I've tried writing my own games, and have a few times, I still have not found that particular combination of rules and mechanics that really feel right to me.  That I can embrace.  I'm very apathetic in the edition wars or the old school vs new school because neither of them does what I want in quite the way I want.  I guess on top of being crazy I'm also very hard to please ;)

Why Modifying An Existing Game Is So Hard

     I love game design, I've even designed a few of my own RPGs from scratch.  It is a hard, mentally and spiritually challenging slog that your players may look at with disgust at the end.  No one in their right mind should ever do it.  For those of us who are cursed with that mindset however, there is a big dividing line: do you design your own system or modify an existing system?
    I've done both, and designing your own system is easily a few thousand posts of concepts and philosophies - but I want to look at modifying an existing system.  Specifically, since I am house ruling 13th Age, which is built off the D20 System, let's look at Pathfinder.
    A few years ago I got the idea to start working on a tweak of Microlite20.  I spent a lot of time on it, and managed to write 2 or 3 posts, but after many hours driving myself crazy the idea had as many holes in it as I'd started with; so the whole thing kind of fell by the wayside.  Recently I stumbled upon an un-posted article I had written that I want to share with you.

-----here is a post I wrote about Pathfinder:

Deconstructing Pathfinder To Tweak Microlite20 - and creating my own Microlite system

    Ever since I first read Microlite20 I was amazed by it.  It took the Pathfinder/3.5 rules and boiled them down nicely to their bare essence, for a rules-lite, more old school feel to the system.  It's one thing to tweak and twist a system, another to see it well enough to hit it's heart.  However, being me I just had to look at how I could tweak microlite myself.  One thing I thought of was with the BAB and saves.  Microlite does not use the base attack bonus or saves.  Everybody gets their level for the BAB and saves are mostly based on skills.  Which is okay, but I was wondering about maybe adding a system to build classes with the BAB and saves to make them more in line with the core Pathfinder (and since Microlite classes don't do much).  So I started looking at the core Pathfinder classes to deconstruct how they were built, and I was surprised.
    I started with the 3 elements above, and wanted to see how many different types there were in the Pathfinder classes.  So I just looked at the core classes: Barbarian, Bard, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer, Wizard.  Turns out there are only 3 possible BAB progressions, either maxing at 20 or 15 or 10.  There are only 2 possible save progressions, maxing at 12 or 6.  I decided to throw hit dice into the mix at that point, and there are 4 possible hit dice, d6, d8, d10 or d12.  So we have 2, 3, or 4 possibilities for 5 measures (HD, BAB and 3 Saves).  Not very neat.  I wanted to see how they were balanced against each other, so I made a simple system where each possibility cost 1 point (so 1-4 pts for HD, 1-3 pts for BAB and 1-2 pts for each save) and totaled them up.  The highest was 11 points for the Barbarian, Paladin and Ranger.  10 points for the Fighter and Monk.  9 points for the Bard, Cleric, and Druid.  8 points for the Rogue. And only 6 points for the Sorcerer and Wizard.  Okay, not too bad, a spread from 11 to 6 points, but that's not counting skills or abilities.
    Even though Microlite20 only uses 4 or 5 skills, at this point I was just curious about the underpinnings of the Pathfinder system, so I wanted to see how many class skills each class had, and how many skill points they gained per level.  Skill points per level was pretty easy, there are only 4 possible progressions (2,4, 6 or 8 each level, plus Int of course).  The fun was looking at how many class skills there were.  Now, this is counting Craft and Profession as only 1 skill each, and each Knowledge as a separate skill - that's how the book has them listed in the class descriptions and the skill table.  Turns out that for 11 core classes there are 8 different class skill totals- 9, 10, 13, 14,15,16, 21, 28.  What a fiddly mess!
    Having put my foot in it, I decided to go all the way.  Time to total up the weapon/armor proficiencies and the number of class abilities.  Weapons and armor are pretty easy.  There are 2 weapon groups, simple and martial.  Lots of classes have only partial access to a group, or access to a few exotic weapons, we'll call that worth 0.5 point.  There are three armor groups, light, medium and heavy.  There are two shield groups, shields and tower shields.  With each group worth 1 point, and the partial weapon groups worth 0.5, we get a spread from 0.5 for the Wizard up to the full 7 for the Fighter.
    Class abilities are the hardest part.  It's easy enough to just total the number of class abilities, and I'm looking here from levels 1 to 20.  But, some of those abilities increase over time and some are fixed benefits.  Rage increases in duration, but uncanny dodge is a fixed ability (with improved uncanny dodge a fixed upgrade).  So I really want to weigh this total.  I'm going to count leveled abilities, including things like bonus feats for fighters and wizards, as worth 3 points, and all fixed abilities worth 1 point.  I think it's more accurate than a single point for everything.  This yielded the most incredible results.  The Monk has a whopping 11 leveled abilities and 12 fixed abilities - 23 abilities total worth 45 points in my ad hoc scale.  While the poor Cleric has the fewest, only 3 leveled abilities (spellcasting, channel, and domain powers) and 1 fixed ability (swap healing spells) - 4 total worth only 10 points.  Now, here's where things get troublesome.  Spells throw off the whole thing because they themselves are so random and out of balance.  A level 9 spell is god-like Wish while a level 1 spell is only slightly better than a sword-swing.  But casters can only memorize so many spells.  So while in my scale spellcasting is a 3 point leveled ability it's a little harder to pinpoint than that.  Still, going off what I did, I totaled up all the core classes.  And they ranged from the 62 point Monk to the 24 point Sorcerer.  Which actually came out surprisingly close to how I'd imagined.  The monk does have a lot of spell-like abilities at higher level, half of his abilities level up, plus he gets a better attack bonus, better saves, more class skills and more skill points per level - all without having to juggle spell slots like the Sorc.  Again the level 9 god-spell disparity messes the exact comparison, but really the Monk does kick the Sorcerer's wand overall as a class.
    So what have I gathered from this little foray?  Well, I knew that Pathfinder and its antecedent D&D 3.5 had no underlying balance or structure, and this just puts it right there on paper.  Numbers and ranges and possibilities go all over the place.  Class abilities were just chosen and thrown in at random, hoping it would all balance out in the end.  Which it more or less does, because people are smart.  Once they learn the system they adapt to it and make up for its weaknesses.  But having someone Rule Zero your flaws is not a good design strategy.

----- and here is the table I made for myself showing how each class was built:


Class-                Barbarian    Bard        Cleric        Druid        Fighter    Monk        Paladin    Ranger
    Hit Die:                  d12        d8            d8             d8              d10        d8             d10        d10
    # Class Skills:         10         28            13             13               10         14              10          15
    Skills/lvl:                 4           6              2               4                 2            4               2            6
    Max BAB:              20         15            15             15               20         15              20          20
    Max Fort:               12          6             12             12               12          12             12          12
    Max Ref:                 6          12             6               6                 6           12              6           12
    Max Will:                6          12            12             12                6          12              12           6
    # Lvl Abilities:        4          6               3               3                 4          11               6            6
    # Set Abilities         7           1               1              9                  2          12              9            11
    Wpn/Arm Prof        5          4              4.5            2.5                7           1               6             5
Total # of pts-            39        43            27.5          34.5              34         62             47           52

Class-                       Rogue        Sorcerer    Wizard
    Hit Die:                    d8           d6              d6
    # Class Skills:          21            9               16
    Skills/lvl:                   8            2                2
    Max BAB:               15          10               10
    Max Fort:                  6            6                 6
    Max Ref:                 12            6                 6
    Max Will:                  6           12               12
    # Lvl Abilities:          5            4                 4
    # Set Abilities           9            3                 1
    Wpn/Arm Prof        2.5           1                0.5
Total # of pts-            45.5         24               26.5

how the point totals were calculated:

1-4 pts for hit die (d6, d8, d10, d12)
1-8 pts for class skills,counting Craft and Profession as only 1, but each Knowledge skill separately
    (9, 10, 13, 14,15,16, 21, 28)
1-4 pts for skills/level (2, 4, 6, 8)
1-3 pts for BAB (max 10, 15, 20)
1-2 pts for Fort (max 6, 12)
1-2 pts for Ref (max 6, 12)
1-2 pts for Will (max 6, 12)
3 pts/ leveling abilities (ie, any class ability that gains power/level(s), includes bonus feats as one ability)
1 pt/ set abilities (ie, any ability that gives a fixed power/effect)
0.5 pt/partial weapon list or exotic weapons; 1 pt/weapon cat (simple, martial), armor cat (light, med, heavy), shield cat (normal, tower)


-----okay, so why do I drag out all these numbers?

    The thing about modifying someone else's system is that you need to understand the framework, the concepts that make up that system.  Like a skeleton in a body, each game has certain assumptions and relationships that lie under the numbers and hold them together.  In a system like Pathfinder, just looking at the character creation alone (didn't even touch races or combat or spells) there is a complex system of interactions.  And if you introduce a new ability or rule you need to think about how it might interact with that underlying structure and what unintended effects it may have on gameplay.
    Now, Pathfinder is a good example to me, it's complicated but not as bad as it could be (imagine the Hero system analyzed this way - heck, the game really is all its framework out in the open).  And it has the potential for all kinds of crazy as you add new abilities and feats and classes and spells and items into an already complex mix.  Also, it has no rigid framework.  It was a patchwork growth of the old D&D system that they pruned a little.  Which is what's so funny about my modifying 13th Age, itself a modification of the whole d20 tree.  And what makes it such a dangerous rabbit hole of first modifying stuff, they wanting to modify the foundational underpinnings of the game itself.  Which leads to rewriting the whole game in the end - so the supposedly easier way, to just modify someone else's work, ends up with you writing your own game after all.

    Anyways, just a peek behind the curtain of some of the things you have to consider when you want to modify a game, and just how deep the rabbit hole can lead :)

Thoughts on Pathfinder's Rise of the Runelords - Part 2

    So, in my last post I described my experiences with the Rise of the Runelords campaign for Pathfinder.  Seeings how it is 6 chapters long, I made it through the first 3 before my post seemed to be getting a little long as well.  So here is my breakdown of the final half of the campaign.

    I will try not to reveal anything too important (let me rephrase that, the meta-story really is not very important and the encounters are not that difficult), but spoilers ahead.


    Chapter 4, Fortress of the Stone Giants.
    After hearing that the town of Sandpoint, our sort of base of operations, is in danger of giant attack we rush back there.  At this point we are around 10th or 11th level, I don't remember exactly which.  The giant attack on Sandpoint is a very long choreographed affair.  There is a list in the book of who does what on what rounds of combat, including an appearance by a young red dragon.  Now, one spot of trouble here is scale.  There is a map of Sanpoint in the book and it has boxes for where giants/the dragon attack on what turns.  It does not have a grid.  There is a scale, 1 inch is something like 50-100' but that is a little hard to measure on the twisty city streets unless you want to take a piece of string and more time then we cared to devote.  So Aaron as GM had to make a lot of judgment calls on how long it took for us to get from one encounter to the next.  In-between the giants the dragon is supposed to attack.  He did, twice, then Sara and her Astral Construct (or summoned creature) "Mr. Punchy" killed it.  Me and Aaron killed the giants with little trouble.  In all, it was pretty easy.
    So, the book says you can capture a giant alive and has a whole page on all this stuff one of them could tell you.  We, being us, left a pile of giant corpses in our wake.  There is no convenient book pointing to the next boss, but the giant warband's footprints were easy enough for me to backtrack.  We skipped the random encounters along the way, at this point we all knew that an encounter of 6 CR 7 Hill Giants were no match at all for us 3 level 11 characters (plus Sara's summoned Mr. Punchy if needed, who was a brute).  In the interest of keeping things short we just said we killed them all and got to where we needed.
    Our destination is Jorgenfist Fortress.  Now, this was meant to be a very impressive scene.  A giant tower surrounded by giant walls and thousands of giant clans itching for a fight camped around it.  How could we possibly take on that many giants, or even sneak pass them, oh noes!!!  Except, this is one of those points where you need to calibrate your expectations for D&D (as The Alexandrian had a great post about).  Now at 11/12th Level we had a lot of power at our disposal.  I could alter my Astral Suit to give myself Climb, Flight or Burrow, and I didn't need to breathe.  Sara's Mr. Punchy could also be summoned with Flight.  Me and Aaron both had really good stealth skills, with bonuses in the 20s to 30s.  Heck, if we could bottle-neck the giants into attacking only about 6 at a time we likely could have killed all however-many-thousands of them in an incredibly long melee (300-style, <grin>).  I seriously considered trying to find a place we could fight them at and just start killing for the fun of it, to see if we could, but there is no detailed map so Aaron would have had to make a lot of judgment calls about just how many giants we'd need to fight at a time (and that would take many thousands of rolls to resolve).  In the end we just decided to fly around the area and scout, and discovered some convenient caves.  We found the dragon's old lair and plundered it (we had like 3 bags of holding and 3 handy haversacks between us at this point, so we could carry a lot of loot), there were 3 CR 7 wyverns (yawn), and another cave with 3 CR 6 Deathweb spiders (double yawn).  I can't remember if we found the door to the tunnels from the spider cave to the fortress (after all, every fortress has a secret tunnel into it) or we might have just flown over the wall and started killing our way into the tower, it's been a while now.
    Either way, once inside (there was no possible way we weren't getting inside) we start fighting our way through the tower.  The thing is though, the tower is a red herring.  While there is a fairly tough Mummy, who has some super-powerful scrolls for loot, there isn't anything important in the tower.  The action is actually in the hole next to the tower.
    So into the hole in the ground.  We go down and find a friendly giant and her ghostly husband.  She asks us to try not to kill any Stone Giants (all other types are fair game) since they have been under the influence of the evil boss.  Okay, at this point I had put merciful on my soulblade so I could do non-lethal damage if needed (as well as ghost touch, pesky incorporeal things).  There's not a whole lot of Stone Giants in the caves though; Hill Giant, Troll, Lamia, Oger Zombie, yes, Stone Giants not so much.  Would have been a good design decision to put a few Stone Giants in key locations that the PCs have to get through but instead it was something that we mostly didn't have to worry about (we might have rescued a giant or two, that's it).
    Finally we fight down another level into the ancient library that the boss has taken over.  Some more random encounters that aren't too hard and finally we fight the boss.  And, well, we kill the boss, duh.  We find a convenient map pointing us to the next chapter and now we have a whole library of stuff to learn and even a cool clockwork librarian to help us research.  So finally, for the first time and after half the campaign is over, we really start getting some good background information on what the hell is going on with the story.
    After the boss' defeat, the evil super-boss Karzug mentioned that all of his servents were marked with a rune so that when they died he gained power to go free, and that was also mentioned in the last town as well.  By this point we have killed a lot of Karzug's minions, but there is nothing anywhere about that actually meaning anything at all.  While the threat sounds nice, there is no mechanical effect, no change in any of the encounters, no matter how many things you slaughter your way through.  A very cool potential twist that was wasted.  I honestly forgot about the marking thing until I read it in the book while refreshing my memory to write this post.

    Chapter 5, Sins of the Saviors.
    Only 2 more chapters to go.  We've hit level 13, and are all feeling pretty good.  We've got tons and tons of loot and plenty of powers. We're ready to take on the big bad super-boss and turn him into red paste.  But first, back to Sandpoint.  Apparently a sinkhole has taken out part of the town, and as its only capable defenders we get called in to check it out.  Detour!
    The sinkhole leads into the Catacombs of Wrath which we had cleared in the first chapter, but now new sections have opened up.  Our boss here is The Scribbler, a resurrected priest who relies on mobility and stealth.  He's got Dimension Door and Invisibility, Nondetection and Obscuring Mist.  He also has a few CR 6 puppies.  But again, we're level 13 now.  Aaron has True Seeing (well, the psychic equivalent, Pierce The Veils) which sees through all that stuff, and I have Blindsight to 30', so I can pinpoint anything corporeal within that range (we've played Pathfinder before and lots of previous mages have cast illusions).  It is mildly annoying but we kill him.  Then we read his crazy scribblings and find out about The Runeforge, our next destination.
    We head out to find the Runeforge, first we have to bypass 7 statues that hold the keys we need to enter.  It is a DC 40 Disable Device to unlock the statue, which Aaron can do in his sleep at this point.  We wake up a White Dragon, who actually does some damage to Sara - she didn't have any cold resistance (Aaron dodged it and I had resist 30 to any element, which I set to cold).  Still, it is not too bad and we take the dragon out.  Then we loot his treasure, 'cause dragons have great treasure.
    Now into the Runeforge we go, in its own little pocket dimension.  First, a few notes about the upcoming section:

    The campaign has this alternate rule about "sin points" that the GM is supposed to give out based on each player's behavior.  What sin each player is prone to is supposed to have some few not terribly important effects here in the Runeforge (like a +/- 2, woot)  We ignored it.  For one simple and good reson, it is stupid and useless.  How and what sins a player is supposed to get is this vague, "do what you think feels right" thing that is useless for a reliable and intelligent measure of a character's nature.  The book says:

    You should give marks ["sin points" -me] for significant events in your game - don't bother marking minor events.  If a PC loots a dead goblin, she shouldn't gain a point of Greed - such spoils of war are considered a normal part of the game.  If, on the other hand, she gleefully steals the life savings of an NPC and spends all the money on herself, that should certainly earn her a point of Greed.

    Wow, talk about stupid.  Let me tackle the idiocy of that paragraph in a few bullet points:
⦁    If some activities are considered "accepted" then what are they?  List them.  The "looting a dead Goblin" is acceptable Greed, so what is acceptable Wrath or Lust or Glutany?  Also, please include more than one, one is not much to go off of (takes 2 points to make a line).
⦁    There is an important and overlooked part in that example, "gleefully."  Why someone does something, whether willingly or because they feel they have too, could be argued as a mitigating factor in whether or not to award sin points.  That is not discussed anywhere in this section.
⦁    When the hell, exactly, built into the campaign, is a player supposed to be able to find an NPC, to rob and gleefully sell said NPCs life savings?  If you are going to tie this into the behavior of the characters during the adventure then why didn't each major encounter/side quest have notes about how the players might gain sin points during that encounter?
⦁    Even better yet, why the hell, if this is supposed to be an important part of the game, didn't you write in some moral choices and spots to tempt players with?  Why is this a tacked-on afterthought and not built into and throughout the campaign?  Why does it now matter during the second-to-last chapter of the whole campaign?  Little late now guys.

    The book does helpfully list some sample sins, a whole 1 for each sin:

ENVY: Complaining loudly or frequently about another party member's good fortune, skill, or luck
GLUTTONY: Getting drunk multiple times during the game session
GREED: Robbing another PC or hiding a signficant amount of treasure for yourself
LUST: Eagerly acepting Shayless' solicitations under the pretense of hunting rats in her father's shop basement  [the only damn event that is actually a part of the campaign, why aren't there more like this? -me]
PRIDE: Bragging about how nothing in the Foxglove Manor was scary [okay, well, if you made your saves then nothing in the Foxglove Manor was scary, it didn't effect you -me]
SLOTH: Encouraging the party to stop and rest for a day after only having one or two signficant encounters in that day [hell, that isn't sloth, that's being a Wizard -me]
WRATH: Eagerly torturing a prisoner [when would you have to do this, they all wrote everything down -me]

    There's also a list of Virtues that can balance your Sins, which I will ignore since it is just as stupid to track this in the other direction.
    The biggest problem with this is how subjective it is.  My character killed a lot of monsters, not because I was Wrathful - I was a soldier, it was my job to keep my party alive.  If a monster didn't attack me, I didn't attack it.  If anybody had surrendered, I would have let them (but the book had most of them surrender with only a few HP left, and we tended to do more damage than that and kill them outright).  I used non-lethal damage if someone told me to, otherwise I killed everything because they were monsters - not misguded civilized folk.  You can't assign sin to a character without understanding how the player created that character and the circmstances of each encounter.
    Second problem is one of scale.  If "minor" sins are okay and "major" sins are bad then you really need a good dividing line between the two.  Most of the examples given above are so over-the-top they sound like a Jim Carry routine.  Maybe I've just been lucky since I play with characters like I associate with people in real life - stay away from the bad ones.
    Third problem is how divorced from the campaign this is.  If you want this to be important to the game, you need to build it into the encounters.  Have a treasure that a player can get without the others knowing, force a choice between who to save and who to sacrifice, something, anything, that actually creates moments to bring this into the forefront.  The way the section is written it sounds like the GM should quietly be racking up a tally of everything a player does wrong to punish them - and I don't want to play with an asshat GM like that.  At least make it open, explain it is a part of the game and go over with each player what sins their character might be susceptable to, point out during an encounter if sin or virtue is involved, tell a player when they earn either kind of points.
    Oh yeah, having a character creation system that actually said something about a character's psychological makeup might help too.
    Anyways, we totally skipped this crap and didn't lose anything for it.

    Another point is about loot, specifically spellbooks.  There are a lot of Wizards and Sorcerers to loot in the Runeforge.  They have spellbooks.  The campaign book does not give any GP value for those books, and it says to assume that each Wiz/Sorc has the spells known and whatever number of other spells you want them to have.  Only a few characters have actual concrete guidelines for what spells are in their books, and they tend to be "all spells of levels x to y in the Core Rulebook except for opposition schools."  That's a lot of spells, hundreds, literally.  At the end of this chapter I actually sat down and took the table of how much a spell cost to write into a spellbook for each level and used that to calculate the worth of each spellbook (I could have made a case for adding the cost to cast the spell in the first place, plus the cost to write it, but we made a ton of money as it was).  Now, this may be nit-picking, but we didn't have a Wizard or Sorcerer in our group.  We were all Psionic characters - so these spellbooks had no use to us except to sell them.  Since the campaign book didn't give any idea for how much they were worth, I had to do it myself or have the GM handwave some value.  Really annoying.  Couldn't anyone at Paizo have sat down with the books like I did and come up with some general values/ value ranges for all those damn books?  Really guys?

    One last comment and I'll get back to the adventure.  Again, we fought a lot of spallcasters in this section.  We have also fought a fair number leading up to this, but this felt like the right place to comment on something.  Spellcasters in Pathfinder are very, very strange.  A high-level caster can wield godlike destructive powers, as long as they don't require a save DC.  Most of the spell saves were pathetic, we would on average need a 6-10 or higher on the d20 to resist whatever someone cast at us.  Now, again, we've all played Pathfinder and D&D for a while, so we know that getting our saves up was a priority, the moreso the higher level we got.  But casters have very, pathetically few, ways to increase their DCs to compansate - so it is actually pretty easy for the defender to resist than it is for the caster to make it harder.  It takes two prescious, expensive feats to get a +2 to your DCs for 1 school out of 8 in magic.  It takes 4,000 GP for a cloak of resistance +2 that boosts every save at the same time.  It's hard to be a magic-user.
    Secondly, magic-users are actually not very threatening.  Most mages have okay Initiative, but my character took the Improved Initiative feat and got a few more points from somewhere.  So on average I managed to go first, and if not me then there was Aaron and Sara, who both had ranged at-will attacks.  So it was not hard to hit a spellcaster on the first turn for some damage before they started casting.  Once hit, it is a concentration check to cast a spell when injured: DC is 10 + spell level + damage dealt.  Okay, so a concentration check is a d20 + caster level + main stat bonus (and maybe a few points from a feat or ability).  That doesn't sound bad, until we start getting to the higher levels.  When Aaron can hit a caster for 9d6 + 18 damage, that makes casting a level 0 spell impossible (we called him Gazer Beam, loved The Incredibles).   Most casters buffed themselves, per their stat block, and maybe got off a spell that was resisted for half or ignored or worked around, and then we beat them to death.  They actually tended to be the easiest to defeat, and showed how strangely balanced magic is in Pathfinder in general.

    Alright, so enough side comments - back to the story (I'm sure you've been breathlessly waiting ;)
    The Runeforge is broken into 7 parts, one for each sin.  We have been using a very simple method for exploring everything so far - we go left.  We keep going left until we can't, then we go back to the last right, and rinse-wash-repeat until we've explored everything on that level - then we go up, do it again to the top, then we go down to the bottom the same way.
    First up was the section for Pride.  This got kind of hard for a minute.  In the entryway is a mirror of opposition, it makes an evil double of whoever looks at it, and since I was in the front (as the tank), it made a double of me.  I'm kind of tough, as the tank, so this was a fairly good fight (but while I can soak up damage, it was Aaron and Sara who could dish out large servings of it).  It was a cake-walk after that.
    Second was the section of Wrath.  It had an Iron Golem archer who was actually quite mean.  The rest wasn't too bad though.
    Third was Gluttony.  More dead bad guys.
    Fourth was Greed.  The walls were covered in gems and gold, which we debated trying to pry off a few meters of - hey, magic items don't buy themselves - but we just killed monsters.  There was a cool pool that recharged magic items, we charged up all the wands we had been carrying around and never used (okay, I think Sara banged me on the head with a healing wand a few times).
    Fifth was Sloth, which apparently means dirty and icky.  We turned loose the 'evil' water elemental to clean the place.  The bad guy was off the ground in a throne supported by immovable rods - me and Mr. Punchy flew up to him while Aaron and Sara hit him with death-rays.
    Sixth was Envy, most of which had been prevously destroyed.
    Last, thank god, was Lust.  Lots of saves against Charm, a poor guy who had been the succubi's plaything, and more dead monsters in our wake.
    Finally, each sin area has had components for making a Runeforged Weapon.  After defeating the animated statue we all took an item for a dip in the pool.  This caused a moment's confusion.  Our ultimate enemy is Karzug, and we "saw" him when he took over the corpse of the stone giant who had rallied all the giants to attack Sandpoint and stuff.  We've also seen agents of Greed and Wrath previously.  We actually got confused for a moment over which of the two he was.  His actions seem more wrathful, but in fact he's greed.  In part the confusion came from us playing spread out over months, in part it was a telling mark of how badly the campaign had mentioned its main villain throughout (well, and what a weaksauce villain he is too).

    Chapter 6, Spires of Xin-Shalast.
    This is it, the final chapter, the last conflict - 'once more into the breech' and all that.  Thank god.  The campaign was starting to feel long at this point.
    Off to the partially-time/space-warped ancient city of evil in the mountains.  But one does not simply walk to Xin-Shalast, there are the obligatory random encounters first (and here i don't use random in the sense of rolling them, but rather that they do not really mean anything to the meta-story).  We found an old building that some dwarves went crazy cannibal in, fought a wendigo, and a tree.  It was high in the mountains and very cold - I was glad to have always-on cold resist and not need to breath.  Aaron and Sara both had items or abilities that let them adapt to any climate/environment - like I've said, we've played this game before.  There are just some things that are essential for a high-level character, and we were level 15 at this point.
    Xin-Shalast itself is a strange place.  There are a few scripted encounters, and there are huge sections that the campaign book literally says to 'make up yourself' for some extra adventuring either before or after fighting Karzug.  We really didn't want to wait, and didn't feel a burning desire to continue, so we skipped those parts.  One encounter included some Leng Spiders.  They did not immenietly attack, so Sara our grifter/talker rolls a natural 20 on her Diplomacy and the spiders seem quite friendly.  Then she rolls about as good on a Sense Motive and relaized that they are lying and will never keep their word and intend to attack us later.  So we killed them.  So nice of the book to put in the only not immedietly dangerous group of monsters that are really just a fight after all.  Like we hadn't wasted enough time.
    Finally we entered the dreaded Pinnacle of Avarice, dum dum dum, and had to fight through the mini-bosses to Karzug.  Said mini-bosses were pretty easy for the most part, like the majority of the campaign we never got below half health more than a handful of times.  Which led us to the final battle, the culmination of about 40-50 hours of playing, the near-max level 18 players against the evil master of Greed, Karzug.

    "We" killed him in 6 rounds.

    It's kind of a funny story actually.

    So the final room has Karzug, a CR 21 super-boss, and a CR 13 adult Blue Dragon, and a CR 17 Rune Giant, and two CR 14 Advanced Storm Giants.  Lava flows around the room, making it a long run or flying to get to melee range - or even close range, it's a good-sized room.  The range gives Karzug a chance to cast some spells.
    It also gives Aaron a chance to manifest some psionic abilities.
    Aaron has been a very strange character.  Since he has been player and GM he's been in a hard place.  He didn't want to have to put a lot of thought into his character, he's got his hands full running the monsters.  He likes playing thieves, he's a sneaky-bastard like that.  Since we were making an all-psionics group, he took the psionic rogue, the Cryptic.  In a strange twist though, the crypic has the most damaging at-will ranged touch attack of any character I've ever seen in Pathfinder.  From the beginning he played more like a mage, throwing the high damage around and having to stay at a distance since he was kind of squishy.  Cryptics also learn a few psionic abilities.  Most of those he took to buff the party or use in emergencies.  He had a hard time finding abilities he liked though, so by the end he started getting a fairly diverse group of powers.
    So combat begins.  I'm thinking about how I'm going to fly over to the bad guy, Sara's warming up another Mr. Punchy.  Karzug acts.  He attacks us with a Meteor Swarm, not for that much damage.  He stops time and buffs himself.
    Then Aaron stops time.  He teleports over to Karzug and thinks to himself, I've got this ability that controls people's minds.  If I cast it at maximum power it can effect people and monsters, and hit all of the bad guy's minions.  I'm sure they'll make their saves, save DCs are pretty easy, but if it takes out even just one or two guys that will make the fight easier - and make less for me to juggle.  Why not try it?  Since he's playing, he has us roll the saves for everybody.
    I roll a 4.  I show him the die, I'm so stunned by it.  Sara rolls a 1.  And I roll another 4.  Sara rolls a 3.
    All of the minions fail their saves.
    Aaron tells them, "Sit! Stay!"
    Now it's just Karzug and us.

    There is a script for what Karzug and his allies are supposed to do.  It has now been thrown out the window since he no longer has the support of his minions.  Aaron is in about melee range and the three of us are coming.  Aaron-the-GM decides Karzug will try to slow us down.  He stopsw time (the last that he can) and casts a Wall Of Force and a Prismatic Wall to block me and Sara and Mr. Punchy (big room, needs 2 walls to block his side off).  A logical move (we made his Meteor's 30-ish save DCs easily, anything else offensive we probably would have laughed at, I think my lowest save at that point was a 26).  I'm getting ready to fly and carry Sara.  Aaron fires off his Gazer Beam and hits Karzug for something like 11d6 + 38 damage - he's not casting any spells next round.  We get to the wall, Karzug attacks Aaron in melee and does some pretty good damage.  Aaron Gazer Beams him for, like, 10 times more damage - still no spells for mister greedy-pants.  Then Aaron figures he can use a move action to command his mind-controlled dragon to just pick us up and fly us over the wall of force.  More melee (poor Aaron is getting pretty beat up), another gazer beam.  I manage to hit Karzug once (I think, I'm not sure if I did manage to hit him at all - Sara didn't) and Aaron finishes him off with a final blast of ridiculous damage.

    Super-boss wizard dead, he cast like 4 spells.
    Minions never attacked.
    Me and Sara and Mr. Punchy pretty much could have eaten popcorn the whole time.
    And the thief took him out.

    After getting over the shock of it, we laughed our asses off.



Final Thoughts
    Again, while the book had some ideas for follow-up adventures, we were all tired of Pathfinder by that point.  It was time to stop and try a new system, which led to our current 13th Age campaign.  Pathfinder in general has just been getting so big, so full of tracking GP and XP and stacking magic item bonuses that it's really become a headache.  As Aaron once said, as we were shooting the breeze a while ago, "it's more fun to make characters than to play them."  Which is too true.  So much of building a character needs to be planned out, feat chains of prequisites and trying to synergize different bonuses into a cool gimmick - you pre-plan so much of your character that it takes away from actually playing it.  I'm not saying that Pathfinder is a bad game by any means, but it does get a little tiring to work so hard at juggling numbers and progression when you're trying to fit it into having a life and doing other stuff.  Again, not that planning any campaing is easy.
    As for Rise of the Runelords, I would say that overall it was an "okay" campaign, in our experience.  It takes way to long to get up to speed, and the over-arching meta-story gets lost in the weeds a lot, but it is not bad.  Again, if you have plenty of time to tweak sections to your own player's tastes and needs, it would be a lot better then running it straight out of the book like we did - it's pretty basic.  Likewise, role-playing relationships with people in Sandpoint, some stirring descriptions of the other cities and backstory would help; we didn't have a lot of time or desire to explore the cities or do a lot of the stuff that didn't directly move the adventure along.  That is a part of why I rate the experience as just "okay," we could have been a little more involved ourselves.  But also, if there were some side quests or NPC interactions that gave bonuses from learning the backstory or to accumulate sin/virtue points, it would have provided some more incentive to care.  The murder-mystery was passable, but the haunts sucked big time; the haunt system in general is just worthless.  If you have some skilled players who can optimize their characters, add a monster or two to every encounter.
    Overall, I like making adventures - as much as a pain as it can be.  We had a campaign going with rotating GMs and each new GM built on what the last did in a really fun, organic fashion.  And we weren't afraid to play with the rules.  We did a split adventure with our fighting characters in a gladiator ring and our talking characters in the stands (we all have several characters).  We used the Ultimate Combat system for performance combat and said that each point we earned on the field distracted the people we were talking to in the stands, giving the talking characters bonuses on their social checks to gather information and influence the NPCs.  It's one of my favorite adventures.  We've also created plot twists based on things that have happened in each game.  The original adventure featured a city that Aaron didn't like - so he destroyed it in the next adventure.  I filled it with a Drow army.  When our friend Matt mis-read a spell description (don't just read the blurb, always read the whole description) and drank some demon's blood I ended up giving him an evil twin recurring villain/comic relief.  While that campaign took a lot of work to prep and run, it gave us a lot more fun since it grew with us.  That's something that is hard if not impossible to replicate in a canned/pre-written campaign.  In fact, that's why I generally don't run modules or pre-packaged campaigns.  I like it when my players give me their character ideas and I can build a world and story around them.  So that also factors into my less than enthusiastic reaction, my normal way of playing is much more engaged (with, of course, some exceptions - we've had plenty of quick and dirty adventures that were not high art).
    Still, I don't regret the time we spent.  It was fun to play with my friends.  We did it, and just finishing it has its own satisfaction.  If you've got 50 or so hours to kill and some good friends, you should try it too.

Thoughts on Pathfinder's Rise of the Runelords - Part 1

    Well, it took 14 sessions and around 50 hours of play-time, but the three of us (we have a small group) finally finished the Rise of the Runelords campaign for Pathfinder a while ago.  We played it by the book, from levels 1 to 18.  We did do something unusual though in that we all played psionic classes from the Ultimate Psionics book.  I thought I'd share my impressions, both about the campaign and the Ultimate Psionics rules.  First, about the campaign in general.
    I was an Aegis/Soulknife/Metaforge - which if you have not read Ultimate Psionics means that I created my own magic armor and weapon (a big hammer) from my mind.  I was the tank.  Sara played a Wilder, she could cast "spells" basically like a mage but she could also use a "wild surge" to increase her caster level above her class level; she was mostly a Sorcerer in Core Rulebook terms.  Aaron was both the GM and played a Cryptic, who was at first glance a "magic"-using Rogue, but who turned out to be the highest damage-dealer, party-buffer and trap/secret-finder.  The game was meant for 4 players, but the three of us had no problems at all.


    Oh yeah, since I am going to be talking about my experiences with the campaign, spoilers (duh) - though I will try not to reveal anything too important. (and, honestly, I doubt it matters)




    There are 6 major parts to the campaign.
    Part 1, Burnt Offerings, starts with goblins attacking the city of Sandpoint.  Even though I wasn't the GM (well, except for one section), I talked with Aaron about his take on running the campaign and I read over the book after we finished - which leads me to my first comment.  While there is a lot of background information for the GM, it's not very clear on how much the players will discover, and what of that background is really useful.  Before the first page for the players there is a full page about Nualia, the main boss for the first section, and while her backstory is cool-ish, little of it will actually be revealed to the players.  This is a running issue for the whole game, in my opinion.  Having a cool backstory is nice, but if the GM is the only one to hear it, it is pretty much wasted.  Also, if it is not directly relevant to the progress of the story, it is also immaterial.  If investigating this background stuff gave some sort of benefit to fighting a villain (perhaps by revealing a hidden weakness) or allowed the party to anticipate future events, then it would be helpful - but since the players don't even get any real clues of where to investigate there is not much to build on.  I wish there had been a block for each villain with its motivation, goals and means to achieve them, and hooks/key things the players may be able to investigate or ways to explore the villain's background and how that may be useful.  A clear bullet-point list instead of a page of rambling prose.
    Also, thank god every NPC writes everything down and sends letters to each other.  Just about every section ends with finding a letter or journal on the main bad guy that spells out where to go next and points towards the next villain.  This is quite ham-handed, and one of the things I did not like in general about the campaign, and also Pathfinder as a game.  Having to take people alive to interrogate them is a nice tactical and strategic challenge (-4 to hit if trying to go non-lethal, and grappling is hard if you are not a fighter class, or trying to grapple someone who is), and using divination magic to speak with a dead spirit or read the "aura" of an object or place gives the magic-users something to do besides toss fireballs.  While these things exist in the game, they are sub-par choices; being good at grappling means taking at least 2 feats and a fighter class, which is a noticeable investment, while the -4 to hit really sucks at lower levels and divination spells are scarce for investigating.  And for this investment you have to remember, the PCs are likely to be killing more people/monsters then they take alive, so strategically speaking building your character this way will possibly hurt more than help (depending on your campaign style of course).  The game kind of relies on this ham-fisted approach because there are so few mechanical options for doing anything else - and you have to pre-plan and build your character to be good at non-lethal combat.  It makes me like the Brawler class from the Advanced Class Guide (may talk about that book somewhere down the road), the Brawler has an ability where they can temporarily gain a combat feat, so something like Improved Grappling, but only 1/day (up to like 3-5/day max).  This at least gives them some of that tactical flexibility to use when needed instead of having to pre-plan everything.  Would be nice if spellcasters had a similar way to dynamically generate a needed effect, like a speak with dead, instead of having to wake up in the morning and think "hey, I might need to talk to the bad guy we accidentally kill later today, better memorize that speak with dead spell." (and, of course, be a 5th level cleric - the only ones with that spell, guess no wizards ever tried to talk to the Great Majority)  This is a general complaint about the rigidity of character creation, but even more rules lite systems like OD&D have the problem of how to adjudicate taking someone alive (not sure when the grappling rules were added, think it was in 2nd Ed, and if I remember right it was a horrible kludge) or what to do if you accidentally jogged someone's memory too hard.

    Anyways, back to the campaign.  The goblins are a sort of comedy relief with fangs, and their attack is kind of entertaining while also being fairly dangerous for 1st level characters.  There are some random encounters after that, then the next big encounter with the assault on the glassworks.  The final boss there, a monk 2/rogue 2, is a pretty good fight.  The last two locations are the Catacombs of Wrath (which kind of bug me, the main villain at the end is Karzoug, who is a master of Greed - but throughout the game we only see Wrath, with Greed near the end, wish they would have focused on just Greed or more evenly included all the sins) and the goblin fortress of Thistletop.  None of these locations are very memorable, or very difficult, and there is almost no loot until the final enemies at Thistletop, so when you hit level 2 you are likely to be under the "recommended adventurer wealth" until you finish the goblins and hit level 3 - after second chapter, there is plenty of money, our 3 person party ended with level 20 total wealth at level 18.
    One thing we did was ignore XP and just level up when the campaign said the PCs should be whatever level.  This worked out just fine, really I think more and more that counting XP is an exercise in tedium and the party should just level up whenever they feel like it and the GM is ready to up the monsters/challenges.
    Another side note is about accessories.  You really need to have Monster Manuals 1 and 2 (I think there might have been a few from 3, not sure) since not all the monsters are described in the book.  Also, we got the hard-back book with the complete campaign, not sure what differences there are from the six soft-back books originally published.  And if you got the "pawns" collection of cardboard figures for the campaign, also get the pawns for Monster Manuals 1 and 2 as not all monsters are in the campaign collection (or, like we did, just make a cloud giant substitute for anything).
    At the end of Chapter 1 the book says:

Relatively little involving the metaplot of Rise of the Runelords occurs during the course of "Burnt Offerings."  Although the chapter's events are closely tied to Karzug's awakening, and certain characters in the adventure have ties to characters whom the PCs are destined to meet later in the campaign, the adventure's primary purpose is to introduce them to their new home of Sandpoint and to instill in them a desire to protect it and its citizens.

    I have several problems with this goal.  First, my character had no connection to Sandpoint and did not give one good damn about it.  Playing the adventure did not instill any desire in me to protect the town or call it home.  I saved Sandpoint because it gave me XP, and it was scheduled in the campaign.  I think it is generally a bad idea to try to make your characters care about anything.  Unless you know your players very well, you don't know what they will actually bond with.  And, why should they like the town?  What is there about it that is so much more likable than any other town?  Throughout the campaign the players are going to go to several towns, and even long-lost cities, so why care about this one little hamlet?  Mechanically, whether a player likes the town or not has no effect on their abilities or options.
    Second, if you have a metaplot, for God's sake kick it off early and refer to it often - otherwise, as with this campaign, by the time you actually get to the meat of the metaplot your players may feel like they have been wasting time chasing down random side quests.  In media res, "in the middle of action," is the old writing advise- if you have a slow start you make it that much harder for your players to emotionally invest in the crux of the story - worse, you might mislead them into thinking they are playing a different type of game and have them miss options and plot points they should be working on.  Knowing the metaplot means you know why you are doing each individual step, how this current boss is going to get you to the final boss, and thus you feel like you are accomplishing something with each step.  RoR did not do a good job of creating that feeling.  We played the whole first chapter in 2 quick settings, and honestly we could have just started the second chapter at level 3 and not missed anything important (or still better, skipped to the 3rd chapter).

    Having saved Sandpoint from goblins, we kick off Chapter 2, The Skinsaw Murders.
    This was my least favorite chapter, and Aaron the GM disliked one part of it so much that I had to step in and GM a section for him.  It begins with a serial killer known as the Skinsaw Man taking an interest in one of the PCs, in this case our only female player, Sara.  This, I guess, is supposed to be a cool departure from the typical "kill the monsters and take their treasure" paradigm that the rest of the campaign will follow.  Instead the players get to investigate a murder mystery.  Again though, Pathfinder itself has no real structure or rules for investigating a murder, so we get another series of ham-fisted clues and rambling role-playing sessions that just feel slow.  Also, again there is no clear link to the metaplot, so all this feels like a pointless side quest (which kind of fixes itself at the end with the obligatory letter to the next villain).
    I will say though, this section had an amusing accident.  My character was a tank, and a backup thief (he was designed for a different campaign where we didn't have a thief, so Aaron's Cryptic ended up taking over the thief duties and negated some of my character's concept, which was no big deal).  My race was the Forgeborn from Ultimate Psionics, and there was a mention of how the race tended to be interested in history.  Now, as a fighter-type I got pretty good skill points, 4 each level, and my Int was a 14 for 2 more points each level.  So I made Disable Device, Perception, Stealth and Survival key skills that I always leveld up.  I also put a random point into a few skills here and there, and somehow I ended up making Knowledge: History one of the skills I always leveled up.  As the tank that seemed a bit of an odd skill, but I thought it added some interesting flavor to my character.  Well, darn if it didn't turn out to be useful after all in investigating some of the historical bits throughout the campaign.  I actually made the DC 25 check to identify the Sihedron Rune at level 3! (not much I know, but you take what success you can get)
    In our "mystery" you wander around and investigate in the town and the neighboring farms.  One thing happened here that I can kind of clearly remember, but not exactly place.  Since this was a mystery we were looking around at everything, so I was asking Aaron about the description of, I think it was, an insane asylum.  He read me the incredibly long block of flowery-prose and totally non-helpful description.  I got a little miffed since I was just looking for some practical details about the place, not some Steinbeck turtle-crossing-the-road detail on non-important things, to which Aaron replied, "I didn't write this shit."  It was something that we would hear time and time again.  Reading a lot of the descriptions in the book is quite tedious, they put way more detail into it than we needed - we were not looking for a novel, we wanted an adventure.  More nouns (things we could interact with) and less adjectives (since for the most part we didn't care about what things were like, just what they were).  Also there were some times, and its been long enough I can't remember any specifics, when an NPC would do something stupid, or we would comment on the convenience of finding yet another letter to another bad guy in a faraway place, that would elicit once again the refrain of, "I didn't write this shit."  Which was totally true, Aaron is normally very good about describing what's important and keeping the action going logically - he was deliberately trying to run this one straight out of the book, and he works regular overtime so he didn't have the luxury of reading it all and then re-writing it to his tastes.  But it was funny to hear each time he said it.
    So after wading through a mountain of random details and events you finally put together that the evil Skinsaw Man is actually Aldern Foxglove, an NPC you met and saved in Chapter 1, oh noes!!!!  Actually, whatever, it really doesn't mean anything at all - the meeting with Foxglove was to go boar hunting after the goblin attack.  The book says that Foxglove is a "charming character" and can be used to "establish details about the characters" like where they grew up and totally random crap like that.  It does not mention that he is going to become a major enemy and so you should prepare the ground ahead of time.  Also the PCs never see him again.  There's a really bad lack foreshadowing for the GM in the book to make him be an effective villain.  But at least now knowing who you're hunting means traveling to the haunted Foxglove Manor.  Dum dum dum (that's supposed to be dramatic music).

    This is the section that Aaron didn't want to GM.  I don't blame him, since I did.  It is, in a word, stupid.  The Foxglove family and the haunted manor have an incredibly long and detailed backstory going back about 90 years and 3 generations.  You do manage to learn all this backstory by exploring the manor and dealing with the haunts.  Haunts were introduced in the GameMastery Guide, and they are basically traps.  But they can't be disabled like regular traps, instead you have to make one or more saving throws to resist their effects.  Now here's a problem, a saving throw is a passive effect.  You cannot really "role-play" your saving throws or strategically build your character to be good at them (there are a few feats and traits, but a miniscule number compared to the non-saving throw feats/abilities).  So making a saving throw does not feel like you did something clever, it feels like you got lucky.  Making 30 saving throws (one for each room) feels like a chore.  The only good thing about the haunts is that they pull you back in time into the shoes of a previous inhabitant of the house, and show you ghostly images of what has happened in the past, revealing the tragic story of the Foxglove family (well, they did the way I played them, the GameMastery Guide is kind of vague on that and so is the RoR campaign book - it's a possible interpretation that if you succeed on the save you don't see anything, it doesn't effect you at all; since that would rob what little we had to learn, I described the haunt and said the save just meant it didn't get under your skin/force you to act strangely).  Which, again, doesn't mean one damn thing.  This family's story is not connected to the metaplot, so nothing you learn does you any good whatsoever.  It is a long, rambling exposition dump for a different movie than the one you are watching.
    During all this haunting we were also rolling pretty good and only had one failure.  Aaron's character blew a save and contracted the evil "Vorel's Phage," a disease that did Cha damage and if it killed him would turn him into an undead horror.  Except it has an onset time of 1 day and saves of 1/day, so it was very easy after we got done to bop over to a cleric and get a Remove Disease for him.
    Our stay in the manor also ended very badly.  Well, it was kind of funny, we did chuckle, but it was not much of a boss fight.  See, in explorer fashion we went from the ground level to the top of the manor and then down.  But at the top level we found the murdered wife of the boss monster.  She has been turned into a Revenant.  She is stuck staring at her reflection in a mirror, but if you cover the mirror she then wakes up and immediately seeks out her killer (we made the knowledge check for this one).  So she ran down to the basement and the tunnels underneath and into the room where our killer was.  They looked at each other, talked for a sec, and then she attacked.  We decided to actually play this out.  Sara took on the revenant, Iesha Foxglove, and I played her husband who murdered her, Aldern Foxglove.  She butchered me in three rounds, revenants get a lot of hit and damage bonuses against the one who killed them.  Then she died too.  And it was over.  Now, we played this out but remember, our characters did nothing at all to defeat the final boss, and did nothing except roll saves against the haunts of the manor, and really it felt like two hours of nothing.  Some backstory, sure, which was moderately interesting, but not like we actually accomplished anything by our own will or determination or cleverness.  We were observers, not players.  I honestly wish we had skipped the whole chapter.
    But it wasn't over yet.  We watched Foxglove be defeated by his wife, and then found a letter he received from the next bad guy in the neighboring city.  Turns out he was working with another group of bad guys, oh noes!!!!  So we go to the next city, and we have the stupidest ambush ever.  And I do mean stupidest ever, in the history of all adventures of all time, stupidest.  See, Foxglove has a townhouse in the next city, Magnimar.  A logical place to go visit and look for more clues.  But in this city there is the bad guy Foxglove was working with, and he knows that some pesky adventurers might come looking around, so he has set an ambush.  He has dispatched two "faceless stalkers" who can shapeshift, and they are currently mimicking Aldern and Iesha Foxglove.  That's right, the two people we just watched fight and kill each other.  So, the second we see the faceless stalkers we know that they are bad guys of some kind.  I cannot grasp why on earth the adventure would have the bad guy make a shapeshifter look like the other bad guy that he is afraid the PCs will defeat.  That is beyond stupid.  Why not make them look like Long-Lost Aunt and Uncle Foxglove (or even just servants, or the missing sister and her husband?) and invite us in for poisoned tea?  So, needless to say, they did not get the drop on us and we killed them quickly and easily.
    From the townhouse we go to the sawmill and fight the stupid bad guy who left the stupid "ambush" and his minions (of course, thanks to a note in the townhouse).  Kill all them and another journal points to the abandoned clock tower, there to kill the final boss and end the chapter.  This was the first section where one of us was seriously hurt, me.  After a trap in the clock tower (a falling bell) I was left with just 1 HP.  However, the only reason I got so low on HP was because I did not stop once in the chapter to heal myself.  I had been taking so little damage overall that I got cocky and didn't heal myself between fights like I should have.  Still, I drank a few potions and made it out of the chapter alive.
    I know that I'm picking on the campaign overall, but what someone does wrong is easier to see than what goes right (and, honestly, more informative on average) - however, in a campaign that overall was okay, this chapter was downright bad.  Long and boring and stupid and just plain bad.

    So we move on to Chapter 3, The Hook Mountain Massacre.
    Oddly, we don't find a note to move on this time - instead one of the NPCs from the last chapter tells us to go check out the village of Turtleback Ferry, which has lost contact with the nearby Fort Rannick (which was actually a nice change).  On our way to the fort we run into a lost animal companion and then a farmhouse of ogres who have captured the last of the "Black Arrows" Rangers who were manning the fort.  Easy enough to kill and rescue.  Now we get 3 companions, along with another one we met in a previous chapter, to help us retake the fort.  Honestly, we didn't need them.
    Retaking the fort is supposed to be a big tactical problem, how do you few adventurers take on the many more powerful and scary ogres?  In actuality it was a cakewalk.  It got off to a crazy start when our new ranger friends suggested we drive some Shocker Lizards out of a cave and into the fort.  Those damn lizards, as CR 2 creatures, wiped out a half-dozen CR 8 Ogers in a single fight.  But even without reptilian help, two-to-one odds of ogers were a breeze.  We killed them easily and in droves.
    Next we ended up going back to the city in time for a huge flood to awaken a sea monster.  The sea monster is a CR 15 challenge, and we at this time are level 9.  It is only supposed to attack for a few rounds and then swim away, but a lucky critical from me and another lucky critical from Aaron end up killing it.  Then we go to the broken dam in a fairly pointless side quest.  Apparently the dam is controlled by demons, something no one noticed or cared about.  But one of the two demons powering the ancient device is dead and the other near death, thus causing the flood of the town.  This is a whole page for something really stupid.  The magic of the dam, created by evil sorcerers long ago, needs to inflict 1 negative level on some hapless creature in order to control the floodgates.  But it is only 1 level, and on any creature, so you can simply cast a 1st level Summon Monster and feed it to the device.  That's not exactly a big problem.  Station a 1st level Wizard or Druid up here, or heck, for like 500 GP you can make an item that will summon a 1st level monster 1/day and keep a steady supply.  The book sort of seems to make this a big deal but it really isn't, and how the hell has the town survived all this time with no clue that its fate was controlled by a demon-powered device?
    A few more side quests in the forest and we end up in the cave of some giants, whom we kill with little trouble.  Honestly, most of the fights in the campaign ended up being relatively easy, despite there being three of us instead of four.  After taking out the boss a convenient letter warns us that Sandpoint may be in danger (again).  Apparently Sandpoint in Rise of the Runelords is like Tristram in Diablo - that annoying city that is always being attacked.


    This finishes the first half of the campaign.
    Up to this point we were meeting pretty infrequently, maybe just once a month or so.  So this first half took a long time to finish.  Given that we're trying to stop the rise of the runelords, there have so far just been some dribs and drabs of hints as to who exactly the runelords are and how exactly they are rising (also, it will turn out to be only a single runelord rising, not plural).  Most of the fights have been pretty easy, and only my own stupidity at not drinking some of the half-dozen healing potions I always carried brought me to a critically low level (throughout the campaign I rarely got below half)(no, wait, there was the lucky critical by the x4 scythe that did a good number on my health in the bell tower).  Really, while the total experience had not been that bad, there had not been anything more exciting or engaging than the ad hoc adventures we have come up with on our own (in fact, during our own adventures we've tried to push things and make up our own non-combat mechanics to broaden our storylines).  The attempt at some "non-combat role-playing" with the murder mystery and haunted house really fell flat.  They were not very engaging.  And the slow drag of metaplot has made it unclear on who exactly the bad guy is and how we're supposed to stop him/it/them - or, honestly, give a damn whether they rise or continue sleeping/napping/clipping their toenails/whatever they are doing.