My TTRGP Games, and A PF2e Rant
I’ve kept up with my actual tabletop games pretty consistently thus far. The Abomination Vaults game I’ve been running is still moving along at a steady pace. The players just finished level 4 during the last session, and are beginning some additional content relating to the town’s Founder’s Day festival, which is tying in with the need to retrieve four items that once belonged to the founders. I’ve been keeping track of the players’ progress daily in game, and it has proven very useful in providing additional ideas for new encounters and enemies outside what the AP itself offers.
For example, just last session, the players came across a message scrawled on the door of their home talking about the “New Blood awakening”. I’m making things a little more exciting by not having the denizens of the dungeon be entirely cut off from the outside world with new allies that share their goals.
As far as my playing experiences, I’ve been in an Age of Ashes game for a while now as well, and have been having fun with that, though it is proving to be quite the challenge since we’ve only got three players. Even though we’re dual-classed characters with a free archetype, it’s not enough to make up for the lack of a fourth person and those three extra actions in each combat. We just hit level 11, and after scouting out the dungeon we have to tackle next, I’ve got doubts about our chances at success. There are some encounters in there that will be rough for us on their own, and it’s very easy to have encounters multiply there from what I’ve heard (it’s the Quarry dungeon for anyone familiar with the AP). Thus far, we’re considering our options for a commando-style strike, teleporting into the room with a particular boss and taking them down hopefully without alerting the rest of the dungeon, grabbing the artifact we need to progress the story, and then getting out again; since we’re using milestone experience for that game, it’s really the smartest play. However…due to one character having a very strict anti-slavery stance, and there being quite a few slaves being held captive in the first chamber of the dungeon…our plan has been complicated immensely. Likely we will have to try two strikes, but we’ll see how it goes next session. TPK is always an option, lol.
The two games mentioned here have both been Pathfinder 2e games, and since we started with the system earlier in the year, I’ve had my opinions shift a bit on the system. While initially it seemed pretty fun, I’d heard repeatedly from one particular player that being a caster was just not fun in the game; he’d played multiple casters in these games and others I’m not part of, and had nothing good to say about them. I thought he was just bitching to be bitching, as he’s been known to do that before. Having seen casters in action from both sides of the GM Screen, however, I’m leaning toward the camp of “casters suck” in PF2e.
To put it simply…it’s not a lot of fun if you’re expecting your magic to be effective against enemies. If you’re playing mostly a support caster buffing the party, yeah, you’re probably going to be having a blast, but the way these APs are setup, don’t expect to feel the same if you’re trying to damage or debuff enemies. The way the numbers work, you’ll be lucky if most enemies only Succeed on their saves against your spells and debuff attempts. For example, in the upcoming dungeon, most of the encounters are on the high side of the difficulty scale, and thanks to the numbers, most of the monsters will be able to get a Success on their saves by rolling 5 or better, and most of the time, that means half damage, or they get no effect from the spell at all. If they Critically Succeed, well, it’s just no fun at all. I feel like my spells succeed maybe 1/3 of the time at best, whereas the martial characters are hitting enemies successfully at least half the time, if not more. I’ve dove into the debate and researched what I’m “doing wrong”, but no matter what explanations I’ve seen to the contrary, it just isn’t fun when a system that is so tight in the math, where every +1 modifier can make a difference, is so geared against me as a caster. My numbers are behind the martials on my spell attack rolls, and I have no way of increasing those numbers through item bonuses like they do. I can try to debuff monsters through skills, sure, but it’s usually not enough to matter in my experience (true, I guess the dice rolls are just against me most of the time), and trying to affect them with magical debuffs is just an exercise in futility most of the time.
Take a fight against a golem during one of the earlier games in the Age of Ashes for example: all of us failed our Recall Knowledge checks on the golem, so we had no idea what spells would affect it at all. This led to me hitting the martials with a buff or two, the cleric/champion trying desperately to keep himself and the fighter alive while they were getting pounded, and my summoner pet doing everything it could just to keep the golem knocked down and flank, because it could barely hurt the thing. To put it mildly, the fight was a slog. The second golem fight not so much, since we made our checks, but then the last golem fight was another slog, because we failed our checks again and had no idea of its weaknesses, and nothing I did affected them until I hit them with a cold spell. This didn’t damage them at all, but did slow them, so I just spammed Ray of Frost the majority of the fight while knocking them over with my pet, until I had to pull the pet back, because, even though all summoners are masochists, they have limits, namely their shared HP pools.
I’m enjoying the game, but I’m growing very frustrated at how my experience as a spellcaster has been going, and everyone I’ve spoken to in my circle who has played the game feels the same way, and has similar experiences to share. And yet I keep hearing that I’m doing casters wrong because I’m not supporting enough or debuffing enough, and that casters are super fun to play. Well, I’m not seeing it. Maybe it wouldn’t be so noticeable if we’d actually encounter some lower-level threats from time to time, but pretty much everything we encounter is close enough to our level that at best it’s 50-50 on my success rate or worse. But even that isn’t a guarantee; one of the fights last game had a group of enemies using stats from another enemy we’d encountered 4-5 levels earlier fighting alongside a pair of golems we’d failed our knowledge checks on…these supposed “mooks” either got Successes on their saves or Critical Success when I tossed out a big AoE spell to start that fight, so across five or six enemies, I got a total of about 12 damage. Yeah, really not feeling too great about that…