As a result, I try to make the most of each playing opportunity I get. Many such lessons were given to me the first time I played Paizo products. It was still 3.5, though.
The DM tried to run the Legacy of Fire adventure path. Now - I'm not dissing the DM, he did a great job considering how piss-poor the material turned out to be (and to his credit, he quickly realized how much the AP sucked and fast-forwarded through most of it.)
Now - keep in mind it's our first try at Pathfinder, and in my case, my first 3.x character.
I'm playing a rogue - with the intent of going rogue-wizard, ultimately going for that Unseen Seer/Arcane Trickster combo (or maybe it was Daggerspell Mage? Anyway, you get the general aim I was going for. Yeah - I shouldn't have, but that's beside the point. And anyways, I sucked only slightly worse than the rest of the party over the part we played.
The point is, we have no wizard.
Anyway, so we get started on the adventure path. We're part of a caravan headed for a lost city we have to take back. The very first "encounter" of the path is that something kidnapped the goat of some of the generic caravan NPCs. I like to think that somewhere, a retarded Pathfinder is still chuckling that a kid was kidnapped.
Anyway - lesson one: even if the PCs are level-1, don't give them retarded goals like "find my goat".
So... for the heck of it, we go through the pretense of caring for the goat and investigating. We then learn from another NPC that he thinks it's Pugwampis whodunnit. Despite fairly good diplomacy rolls and the such, we don't learn anything useful about the nasty. I don't remember exactly what we learned, but basically it ended up that gnolls thought of the pugwampis as minor pests.
Now - anyone who's read the Pugwampi's description knows that all of it's technically true - it's just absolutely irrelevant background info. So yeah, sure, it's some sort of goblin stand-in. Whatever, let's track the fucker and get it over with.
So we track the nasty to a cactus patch. It's dark, we can't see shit, but we do spot the goat tied to a cactus in the middle. Now, we're level-1 but we're not retarded, so we figure it's an ambush. We try to spot the bad guys but we can't. The DM sure seemed to roll quite a few dice behind his screen, but still - it's just goblins, so who cares? We go in the patch to get the goat and get the ambush over with.
So we go get the goat - of course, we start failing everything and impaling ourselves on cactii, taking really absurd damage (I think it was 1d4) due to the Pugwampi's Fuck-You Aura of Reroll Every d20 You Roll Plus if You Try to Move You Slip and Impale Yourself on Cactii Because Fuck You.
Lesson 2: If the players actually go to the trouble of investigating your plot - throw them a bone. Your Fuck-You Monster will be just as memorable if the players realize the size of the bus they just dodged by learning of the Fuck-You Ability.
Anyway, we eventually manage to locate the little fucker. Of course, by that point we can't actually manage to do anything about it, because the knight just fell off a cliff into more cactii, the barbarian is down to three hp and can't move anymore, I'm a fucking rogue so I have no HP to start with, and the cleric is trying to go down the cliff to stabilize the knight.
Lesson 3: Look, watching The Three Stooges can be funny (if you're six, or slightly retarded). It is never fun, it's just funny. Being made to act like the Stooges is NOT fun OR funny. Unless you're a mouthbreather Paizo designer I guess.
But still - I have daggers, I can throw those at the shithead pugwampi. Besides I'm a halfling rogue, so I have pluses to hit with my thrown Small Daggers of 1d3 damage... on a monster with DR 2. Yeah - I don't carry all that many daggers.
Lesson 4: I'll go out on a limb and say that a gimmick Fuck-You monster (sorry - a Puzzle Boss) can be fun. If the party has a chance to figure out the puzzle (which we didn't) and if once the puzzle is figured out, the solution is relatively simple to implement.
In this case, I'm still looking for the solution. You can't learn about the Fuck You Aura in advance. You have to get close to the pugwampi to spot it because of the concealment it gets and because of the darkness. So you're pretty much doomed to be stuck in the Fuck-You aura you can't learn about. Then I guess you hopefully have enough HP to still be able to close with the fucker or you waste tons of missiles to shoot it down. But that DR means that it's an iffy proposition at level 1 - quite a few of those shots won't do damage at all.
I guess if you had a wizard you could use Magic Miss... oh FUCK YOU PAIZO! I just realized that the fucker has SR too. Sure, it's just 7, but with the reroll... Ah, just fuck it.
Anyway... we manage to murder the damn thing and save the goddamn goat.
And we get our massive reward - a whole EL-1 equivalent in XP. And gratitude from two irrelevant NPCs. Yeah, the cook likes us more!
Lesson 5: The CR/EL system barely works for simple encounters against regular monsters in a flat, 30x30 empty room. If you have special rules or a weird battle environment, you need to take it into account. A pugwampi in a 20x20 room with no tricks is probably CR 1/2, because it can't do shit. In an environment specifically designed to let the Fuck-You Aura work, it's not just a CR 1.
Lesson 5.5: It's fine to let the party experience defeat once in a while. But setting up the party to fail is unfair. Especially in the first goddamn encounter of the campaign. And yeah, a Pyrrhic "victory" that comes with a "ha ha, you guys barely survived an easy EL1" reward is a defeat in the players' eyes.
Anyways, so we proceed with more adventuring. We eventually get to the first main quest of the first book, which is to secure a base of operation - in other words, dungeon-crawl our way through a monastery.
So, my rogue scouts out the monastery. I do everything but go inside. I obtain no information of any relevance whatsoever. Now, to be fair, the DM might have rolled poorly, but still, I had a pretty good sport roll and considering the piss-poor quality of the module, I'd gamble that there was no info available.
We enter the monastery and go left. We enter the main chapel area and fight our way through a small army of pugwampis. Still, knowing about the fuck-you aura makes it survivable. That encounter is actually pretty good, to be honest. The set-pieces are nice. We're somewhat mangled after the fight, but we make our way to the huge nest the pugwampis have constructed in the rafters...
Where we promptly run into more pugwampis who apparently didn't care about their buddies below, and their advanced pugwampi boss. And of course, these guys lived in perfect silence. In the rafters. Where we have to make Jump/Balance/Tumbling checks to move.
So we wipe against the pugwampis King. Total Party Kill.
Lesson 5.75: Seriously, the EL system DOESN'T work in non-standard environments. And even if it did work, you don't pull an EL3 or 4 encounter on a first-level party just after an EL 2-3.
(as an aside, I don't see a first-level party surviving that encounter without foreknowledge. It's that bad.)
Anyway, since we're what, at the beginning of session 2, the DM rules that the caravan showed up to help us at the last moment and pulled us out. The pugwampis have fled (taking their treasure with them, of course) and we still have to clear the rest of the monastery.
Which we do, without any trouble whatsoever. Seriously. I think we might have taken two or three wounds through the rest of the monastery. We pick up quite a bit of loot, we level up...
Lesson 6: You shouldn't design a dungeon with the idea that the PCs will level-up just before facing the BBEG, or that they'll find the uber-epic magic weapon of Fuck-You Enemies. But if you do, having the first choice be "go left, die at the boss, go right, find more power and riches."
Oh fuck. I'm sure that the mouthbreather designed is laughing now - he must be one of those guys that thinks "going right is always right" is something sane people do when in an unfamiliar environment.
Anyways - we secure the monastery, bringing our success rate to 33%. We somehow manage to completely fail at picking up the backstory of the scenario, but apparently it's just fluff in book 1.
So we have our base of operation to secure the area. At this point, there's a bunch of sidequests the party should do, to get to level 4 or so prior to the finale. According to the DM, it's just boring sub-par clear-out-the-dungeon stuff, so we decide to handwave it, pump our characters to level 4, (I'm now an epic rogue1-wizard3) and head to the city we have to clear out.
First we encounter a closet troll, in the form of a Dust Digger. Our cleric promptly one-shots it, by getting a critical hit from the crit deck that does Int damage.
(Lesson 7: do not use the crit deck)
Then, we reach the city. Now, being the party scout, I try to scout the city. I manage to go about 50' before being detected by another closet troll, in the form of a Dire Boar. Having managed to fail at scouting because of that +zillion to Smell or whatever the boar has, I'm gratified to see the party fail at fighting it. We hastily beat a retreat to base after barely surviving (at some point I jumped in melee to serve as a meatshield for the knight, to give you an idea)
Coming back later on, we try the scouting ahead again. After all, that's two closet trolls in a row. What are the odds of stumbling onto a third nigh-undetectable high-perception monster in a row?
...Pretty high, as it turns out. This time, it was a giant snake. Still, that one falls pretty easily, so we press on.
Lesson 8: Scouting is a valid role, an important part of the exploration game. It's fine to have a surprise for the scout once in a while. But if you keep sticking fuck-you closet trolls to discourage scouting, you'll end up with a door-busting fire-team instead of an adventuring party.
So we clear out the city, slowly hacking our way to the main market area/arena. Along the way, we pick up a bard NPC (best NPC class ever, after healing cleric) and eventually stumble, in an out-of-the-way closet, on the NPC that's the motivation for half the party. I imagine that the scenario had some way for her to join the party if we didn't find her on our own. We manage to set up a couple of fights to our advantage (in which I learn that my character concept has become completely obsolete, but that's another story) and generally fail to suck too badly.
Actually, my character isn't completely useless - I manage to sneak and coup-de-grace a sleeping goblin (a regular one.) For all I know, it was a potential ally but...
Anyways, we (with assorted NPCs in tow) make our way to the top of the arena area, fighting off some dudes, picking up gear, etc. Surprisingly, we attempt to set up some infighting between the officially bad guys and the sorta-just-hanging-there ogres, and it works. I imagine it only did because that was what was intended by the designer, or at least he forgot to say "regardless of what plan the party comes up, it fails" in the room description.
I shudder to think about what happens if the players don't pull of this plan or something else, because the boss fight with the boss of the area is brutal as it is. The thing is a melee monster, able to easily put out 30 damage per round, and he's supported by a fairly tough bodyguard. Having to fight a bunch of gnolls with them is a death sentence.
As it is, we almost beat the thing, thanks to lucky initiative and a first-round save-or-die landing on the bodyguard. Even then the fight was tough, but it came down to our barbarian trading blows with the head dude. Fairly epic battle, all told. Except that in a nice display of shitty railroading, as the battle comes to its climax the bad guy breaks the mind-control of the nasty controlling him and delivers exposition before letting us win.
Lesson 9: Let the party win or lose on their terms. Seriously, I almost threw in the towel at that point. You put in a fucking main battle tank in your adventure, and when we're this close to beating it after a fucking epic battle, you pull a "oh, your victory is only thanks to me not being a wuss after all"?
Anyways, by then we were getting really annoyed by the battle, so we go through the final area, a series of rooms with one entrance and one exit and no exploration or anything of interest except a random collection of pointless undead. I guess the designer realized that the players would just want to get through the shitty adventure at that point. And of course, it's basically a long tunnel, so no scouting, maneuvering or anything.
So we end up in the Really Final Battle against a final Fuck-You Demon. The thing has a Fuck-You Aura of You Become a Moron and Attack Yourself and Shit, is immune to pretty much any form of magic damage you can pull at that level except Magic Missile and Sonic damage, and has a fairly nasty combination of AC, stacking penalties on roll and miss chance. It has saves in the +8/+10 ranges. It has Massive Attacks of Hit on a 2 And do Massive Damage. It flies and/or moves fast on the ground.
Oh, and it's hidden behind illusions and shit, so you can't actually target it without going into the Fuck-You aura to find it.
Lesson 10: Fuck you, Paizo. Why not put a few Pugwampis with that fucker? Fuck-You Auras AGAIN?
But seriously - that thing is the What Not to Do of Boss Fights. It gets pulled out of the designer's ass in the last five pages. It has no motivation beyond being an evil jerkass. It's set up so there's only a couple of boring solutions to the problem (hit it with many, many axes or hit it with a save-or-suck or save-or-die.) The set is a boring, square room.
But the worst thing is it takes away the players' chance to do cool, impressive stuff. Heck - it takes away control from the player with that confusion Aura (and seriously, DC 18 will save on everyone who gets within fifty feet?)
Anyway, to wrap this up... We somehow beat the thing. It was boring as shit and our DM had to fudge things to keep us alive. Basically, he massively nerfed the fuck-you Aura, had the nasty thing use its sucky SLAs instead of its devastating physical attack, and so on.
So yeah - I'm really glad I've played that module. It made me a much better DM.
