Goodbye D&D 5e! At Long Last!
Well, this certainly took a lot longer to happen than I’d hoped, but at last it seems that we’re starting to leave 5e behind at the local table. I’m still playing in a 5e campaign, a conversion of the Reign of Winter AP, but I’m having my doubts that it’s going to last. The DM honestly doesn’t seem to be that into it, and is easily distracted more often than not. We had one recent session in which we gamed about two hours and spent the rest of the evening discussing tangential topics, not to mention that the guy running it seems to be getting later and later starting.
The last 5e campaign I actually finished was the Savage Tide adventure, which, admittedly, was enjoyable, just not from a gameplay standpoint. Interacting with the guys around the table and seeing what craziness our characters could pull off is always the meat of a campaign, and the story wasn’t bad at all, I just could not get into the mechanics. I played a bugbear rune-knight fighter, and while it was rather amusing to grab targets from a distance and “tank from behind” for most of the campaign, I was soon feeling like I’d done it all before. Because 5e just felt so very much the same in this campaign as the last few I’d been involved in. The casters were flinging the same spells, the archer was using the same feats to deal massive damage, and we were speed-running dungeons like the superheroes we were (or villains in mine and another player’s case, lol), because we simply couldn’t be bothered to stop and smell the viscera. After a fairly early point, I think we only had problems in one fight, and that was because we got ambushed by Demogorgon’s son. During the rematch, we had time to prep and wiped the floor with him. Even the final fight, while longer and admittedly more nail-biting than others, felt lacking in threat.
And thanks to the great WotC OGL Fiasco of January 2023 (because honestly, I’m not convinced their done screwing themselves over just yet, and there’s plenty of time left for them to do it again this year), I got motivated to run another fantasy game in a different system. I’d stopped GMing for a while last year when my 5e campaign ran out of steam. I had intended to run the mind flayer trilogy of adventures from the 2e days, converted to 5e, but even my favorite D&D monster couldn’t keep my motivation up for running the game in 5e. It just wasn’t fun to run the game. So, I started looking around, and specifically focused on Castles & Crusades and Pathfinder 2e. I picked PF2e to try out first mainly because half the players at the table were already familiar with it to some extent, having played a few games with another GM, but also because, after researching it more, it sounded really good. The game balance and mechanics just sounded so much more exciting to play with than 5e ever had been (in all honesty, I was done with 5e a few months after it launched, and for a time, we did go back to Pathfinder 1e, but for whatever reason *cough Critical Role cough* the guys gravitated back to it).
And so, to give PF2e a good tryout, I decided to run with the Abomination Vaults AP, and start things off with the Beginner Box, sprinkling in some of the Troubles in Otari adventures as well. If a megagungeon can’t find the cracks in the system, then what will, right? As of the time of this writing, I’ve GM’ed two games so far, and the PCs have almost finished the beginner box adventure.
Diving In With the Starter Adventures
I began my ill-fated 5e mind flayer campaign with The Lost Mines of Phandelver (LMoP) adventure, which is the 5e starter adventure, so it makes a good comparison with PF2e’s beginner box adventure, Menace Under Otari (MUO). LMoP is much larger in scale, a sandbox adventure taking the PCs to 5th level, while MUO only takes them to 2nd level and consists of a two-floor mini dungeon below the town of Otari. In both cases, I modified the adventures to suit my tastes and those of the players, though with MUO, I used some guidelines I’d found online to merge it with the larger Abomination Vaults campaign and using the Troubles in Otari adventures as sidequests.
LMoP, while a good enough starting point, seems a bit unfocused at times, with sidequests that seem wholly unrelated to the town ‘s plight (looking at you random green dragon quest that sends the party nearly all the way to Neverwinter). Granted, this isn’t exactly a bad thing, as its the NPCs in the town that set the players on these quests, but I would prefer that the quests stick closer to the town and its big finale in the cavern dungeon, and tie into the main quest somehow. Easily enough done, but it did take a little work on my part to shift things around and integrate events into a more cohesive feeling game.
The other big complaint I had with this one is the lack of threat to the party. Granted, I had a group of seasoned veteran players with 25+ years of gaming experience each, but still, the encounters felt weak, even when I tweaked them for a couple extra players and played the creatures smarter than they were presented. The only times my players actually felt threatened was when they encountered “ramborcs”, which used intelligent tactics and traps to combat and funnel the players, and when I introduced other creatures of my own design that wound up killing the thief (he got better) because they wanted revenge for him having killed one of theirs. The original encounters, even with me placing the dragon in the final dungeon and setting it up as a two-stage boss (the drow wizard was also the dragon, just shapechanged, so when the wizard “died”, the dragon popped out to play), barely slowed down the players.
Now, switching gears to MUO, this felt like a much more cohesive starting point. We didn’t use the player aids (again, I’ve got a very experienced group at the table), and I did change things up some, but even as written, this was a much more challenging opening. The adventure is laid out with the intent of teaching the players the various game mechanics and play modes, and while it did feel a little ‘basic’ to me, I don’t think my players felt the same. They were engaged with what was happening, and seemed far more interested in their surroundings than they ever were during the LMoP run. T
Perhaps the most striking moment occurred after the party cleared (most of) the first level. They had faced several kobolds by this point, and were feeling pretty good about themselves, having taken some damage, used a few of the cleric’s spells, but overall were doing good. I got the feeling they were thinking it would go about like a 5e dungeon. Then, the very first room of the second floor, they failed to detect a pair of kobolds laying in wait for them, and were ambushed. This immediately dropped the summoner, and the following round dropped the thaumaturge NPC (one of the players couldn’t make it, so I threw together an NPC to assist so that I wouldn’t have to rebalance the encounters just yet). The kobolds then focused on the monk, and while landing a hit, didn’t immediately manage to drop him, giving the cleric a chance to heal the thaumaturge…only for the kobolds to strike them again and drop them. Getting the summoner up used the last of the cleric’s spells, and suddenly the party was ready to retreat and wait for the other player to continue (he was the fighter). From this point, they did retreat for a time, picking up next game in the Otari Fishery and getting the fighter, and buying a few potions. The cleric wanted to rest, but the party (wisely) decided to venture back down and set up a defensible position inside the dungeon so that the kobolds wouldn’t be able to lay traps for them during a full rest. They only encountered a small patrol, and a second larger trap-making group just starting their mission, instead of facing all the traps I’d intended to have set for them had they rested the full 8 hours aboveground.
Good on them.
How Does it Feel to Play?
After the second game, with the party having cleared most of the starter dungeon now (there is a puzzle that I added from the beforementioned supplement, the room beyond, and the crypt on level 1 they haven’t delved into yet), I have to say that from a GM’s perspective, I had a lot more fun. The Three-Action system in PF2e felt very good in play, and the way the game was balanced really started to click as the party got further along and began using more thought out tactics (for the most part, anyway). I was actually enjoying playing the monsters, too, forcing them to behave intelligently as they tried to take out the party and not just soak up damage and respond in kind as they tended to do in 5e.
I had gotten a little worried as they did a ‘speedrun’ maneuver in the last four areas of the dungeon, though. This started with the mermaid statue trap, which the fighter activated when trying to draw the kobolds out of their warren to ambush them. This caused the group to start beating on the trap until it shut off; I was kind of merciful here and didn’t have the kobolds notice until the device screeched loudly when it was broken. After the party dealt with the kobolds, they had enough XP to level, but due to the cleric having cast Magic Weapon on the fighter, and only have the one casting, they didn’t waste time, rushing through the warren to face the kobold boss, who smartly retreated when attacked and called for its dragon pet. I had heard that this dragon could be a dangerous foe on its own, and could potentially wipe the party even if they were level 2, but going in at level 1, I was worried.
Thankfully, the players pulled off some amazing rolls. The dragon took a crit from the fighter, and with him dealing double damage, was brought down to below half its hit points almost immediately. It was technically finished off by the summoner’s pet, but I cheated a bit and gave it a ‘mutation’, which healed it for 15 hp when it dropped to 0, because I wanted it to actually have a round. Not that it mattered, because I rolled like crap on its turn, and then went down on the following round by a flurry of blows from the monk.
All in all, I was very happy with how things played out.
Player Response
More interesting perhaps was the response I got from the players. They were excited after taking down the dragon (though I hope they don’t get in the habit of their speedrun antics going forward…), as they should have been, and were having a great time. I was most pleased with the response from the guy who had made it his mission to do everything game breaking in 5e, bringing out the worst in the system over the last few years. As would be revealed in a message I got later, he was looking forward to my next game, having seen how impactful his support had been (he was playing the cleric) and how much of a difference his Magic Weapon spell had been in the final fight.
Now that we’re basically done with the starter adventure, I’m looking forward to delving into the true dungeon for this campaign.
Onto the Abomination Vaults
The adventure path proper should be kicking off next session, once the party finishes with their exploration of the starter dungeon and finishes off a few stragglers in the rooms they haven’t explored yet. As long as the players are all there, the NPC thaumaturge will probably be relegated to hanging out in the town’s library, but that depends on the players; if they want to continue having her along, then it’s going to be easy enough to adjust the encounters. From my position as GM, seeing that PF2e has an encounter building system that actually works, and works well, is a godsend. Plus, being able to throw a simple template on monsters to beef them up on the fly is great, especially considering the party is now a level higher than required for the first floor of the dungeon, and likely may be higher than needed in general for the game as I’m adding additional side quests.
Or, I can leave things as is, and let them feel awesome for a while, perhaps even giving them a false sense of security until later dungeon levels. Either way, just looking at how much easier its going to be on me to make the encounters as tough or as easy as I want is going to be great.
I’m excited to be running this game, and my players are excited to be playing it. I might even be getting an additional player joining in the next game in fact. We’ll see if that comes to pass, but for now, things are definitely looking up.
I’ll keep you updated on how things go from here, but the future is looking good!
Till next time, out!