MEK OP Game Night: Pathfinder One-Off

OOTS #819 says we're missing a bard

The rest of the summer is likely to be too busy to play anything (we're heading to Alaska on Tuesday for a two-week vacation), so instead of continuing the Guadalcanal campaign, we ran an intro session of Paizo's Pathfinder based on the Free RPG Day module Master of the Fallen Tower. I had some familiarity with Pathfinder -- well, really, I had seen D&D 3.5 as implemented in Neverwinter Nights, but the rules overlap is substantial -- but never actually played through a pencil and paper session. It was the first time my wife had ever seen a (non-computer) RPG, so she was a little nervous and intimidated. Naturally, we put her in plate mail and stuck her out front. (Toss the babies in the deep end of the pool. It's the only way they'll learn!) Three other players added up to the classic quartet: rogue (me), evocation wizard (Kyle), and cleric (Kim). We got through about six encounters, with the last two levels of the tower being compressed into a single boss battle.

Things went smoothly until the last fight, to the point where I felt moderately sorry for the locals who served as speedbumps. A spider was unceremoniously yanked off the ceiling with a grappling hook. A number of troglodytes were dispatched with a minimal number of axe strokes. A shocker lizard got eaten by crossbow damage, and crawled through the door half-dead to be beaten to death by multiple quarterstaff blows. Really, the worst part of the lower levels was taking a javelin in the throat.

Things turned south in a hurry at the top. A couple of bonus troggs had been added to the final battle, beyond the written version of the scenario, and the boss's pet albino crocodile scrambled across the floor to savage me with a single maceration. This set up an extended comedy of errors where no one could hit any of the trogs, while the leader (a druidic sort of a troglodyte) sent a carpet of spiders roaming around the room to writhe all over everyone with their crawly legs for minor amounts of damage and moderate levels of the heebie-jeebies.

Pretty much everyone ended up dead at some point during the fight, and Kim's cleric was ignominiously forced to use some sort of AoE healing ability to heal up the crocodile along with the rest of us. There were several points where any logical person would have gone screaming back down the stairs, but we're adventurers, and so dying repeatedly for the sake of a few dozen gold pieces must seem like a sensible application of cost benefit analysis to people like us. Amazingly enough, everyone lived.

Result: Lots of loot that we'll never use, since it was a one-off. Also, the pride that comes from getting our names on little museum-plaques somewhere in the PFRPG official gameworld setting. Or maybe we all ran to the stinky troglodyte throne at the same time, and the structurally unstable tower collapsed and killed us all, in dramatic fulfillment of the exposition textblock.

Here's the roster right before Princess Leia came out to award medals to everyone who wasn't a wookiee or a droid:

That's a female dwarf, BTW. Pink ribbons in the beard, that's how you tell.

A few thoughts on the Pathfinder game system:

1. If games were anything like the tech industry, Paizo would get bought up by WotC and rebranded back to being D&D 4.0, which is basically the role it's already filling.
2. The thought that a game with a 500+ page rule book is the market leader is pretty amazing. The art probably helps, but that's still an amazing imposition on modern attention spans. I wonder if adding more midriff-baring elvish sorceresses to the next edition of Giancoli would convince my students to actually read the thing? (Answer: Yes, but only for a tiny subset of the class, all of whom already have A's.)
3. I really miss being able to backstab. Yeah, sneak attack works more often, without the need for stealth, and is basically the same effect (well, +2 to hit instead of +4), but it somehow seemed cooler when it was harder to set up and pull off.
4. It's eye-popping how much healing clerics put out in this system. In the old days, there really weren't any AoE heals until something like 7th level. Here a cleric can pump them out multiple times in a game session, with a sort of innate ability that replaces the old Turn Undead. This makes any low-level party with a cleric much more survivable than the equivalent team in 1st or 2nd edition. Even so, the last battle was a nail-biter, despite (what I suspect was) some on-the-fly nerfing of the druid's spell list.
5. Doing a stand-alone module like this feels more tense than playing in a linked campaign like the last one I did (JMO's Aromathus: 711 CE). The sparseness of the narrative makes it feel less likely that the party will be getting ushered past the tough fights by generous allotments of plot armor. I remember thinking in college that things felt less exciting than when I was younger and playing the old basic modules, and wondering if it was just rose-tinted hindsight. But I think it was a more a matter of higher lethality being part of the expectations for the isolated modular adventures everyone played back before the Hickman revolution.
6. My wife this morning: "I woke up with the lyrics to Roll a D6 stuck in my head. Well, really only that one line, since I can't remember any of the others." I guess that means she had fun, right?
7. This is further rekindling my desire to create some kind of persistent strategy-RPG living fantasy world, so that the survivors of a little session like this can pack away their loot to resurface as hired mercenaries and battalion captains in some large-scale battles.