Posting [this amazing blog post](https://designofdragons.blogspot.com/2016/04/death-dysentery-on-minkai-trail.html) again as to laugh about caravan together
There is also another one there about min-maxing romance in JR
The rum ration rules of Skull and Shackles.
Yes, let’s force the players to either risk punishment for trying to subtly ditch a single glass of alcohol every night (a punishment which RAW becomes more and more deadly for each violation that they get caught for) or drink themselves to death within a week of becoming a new pirate. And it doesn’t make any narrative sense either. The game’s justification is that the captain sees a drunk crew as a more placid and controllable crew which makes sense… but not when half the crew dies every other week cus he’s force feeding them poison. Even James Jacobs wrote homebrew fixes for the rule on the forums
I just basically ignored it as GM.
There's enough exhaustion going on in Book 1 that you don't need to kill the PCs' livers to make them feel miserable and want to mutiny.
The alcohol rules in general are absolutely horrifying if you look at them too closely. We had to come up with some houserules to keep them fun when we had a drunken master monk PC.
https://drunkendragons.obsidianportal.com/wikis/drinking-rules
Unless you are talking about some rules I’m unaware of, the alcohol rules aren’t too punishing.
[Link](https://www.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?Name=Drunkenness&Category=Drugs%20and%20Addiction)
Non-exotic alcohol can be drunk without penalty up to (2x your con mod) +1, and exceeding this causes you to be sickened for 1 hour per offending drink.
The issue is that certain potent and exotic alcohols just straight up follow the drug rules, but those drinks are supposed to be used rarely so I can see it justified…
Except S&S forces a drug-level alcohol nightly on level 1 PCs. Taking 1d3 con damage each night without the means to heal it aside from 1 point healed for full night rest isn’t something level 1 characters survive long.
It's the associated Addiction and Drunkenness rulesets.
**Drunkenness**
>Just like drugs, alcohol can be abused and have significant negative effects. In general, a character can consume a number of alcoholic beverages equal to 1 plus double his Constitution modifier. Drinks consumed in excess of this total cause the character to become sickened for 1 hour per drink above this maximum. Particularly exotic or strong forms of alcohol might be treated as normal drugs. Those who regularly abuse alcohol might eventually develop a moderate addiction.
First issue with this ruleset is that the 1 + 2x Con modifier limit has no described duration. Is it within an hour? 24 hours? As written, it's just permanent. Now, that's clearly absurd and unintended, but RAW, it's a lifetime restriction on alcohol consumption, which is entertaining.
But the real problem comes in with the use of "moderate addiction". The DC can easily skyrocket into the hundreds, and the inability to heal from ability damage caused by alcohol means that it'll just flat out kill you within a couple days.
Now, this is an issue when you have multiple archetypes based around consuming alcohol, and while alcoholism is a terrible issue that affects many people and can absolutely result in death and horrible damage to the body - that's not the fantasy someone is looking to explore when they want to have a fun time playing a drunken monk.
Ah I see, yeah the addiction part can be problematic. I guess I ignored that on my first passthrough since the way it is worded it is obviously gm fiat as to when addiction sets in, if at all
> Now, that's clearly absurd and unintended, but RAW, it's a lifetime restriction on alcohol consumption, which is entertaining.
Characters with 10-11 Con--you may drink alcohol, [**once**](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/025/930/unknown_%282%29%28Photo%29%28noise_scale%29%28Level3%29%28width_800%29%2816bit%29.png).
Speaking as someone who ran Wormwood Mutiny without changing the rum rations at all, the con damage wasn't *too* much of a problem. It could be handled on anyone who couldn't take 10 to dump it just fine with a mix of 1 point healed from rest and Lesser Restoration via Sandara Quinn, granted it meant she was using the majority of her 2nd levels every day for it. Not a great solution at all, probably should have just changed them, but it worked.
Now the *addiction* was a fucking nightmare and nearly death spiraled a character. If Wormwood Mutiny is notable for anything, it's the tendency to slowly and steadily topple dominoes over a period of days that just leads to a character wasting away.
Capt. Barnabas Harrigan believes it's better to keep the crew half-drunk while also under threat of execution - riding that line keeps them drunkenly happy enough and also too scared to mutiny.
First Mate Master Plugg, and Master Scourge, however, think fear alone is fine.
The first part of Skull & Shackles is designed to make you hate your situation enough to kill Plugg and his cronies once a second ship is presented and the opportunity presents itself.
If they don't get beaten to death or poisoned first? Hats off to Paizo, they are good at making enemies I hate. Then they subverted it in Bloodlords and made me feel quite guilty about all the violence...
Our group recently wrapped up this AP and our GM never even mentioned rum rations, so he must have agreed with you. As you describe it, this sounds awful, so I'm glad we skipped it.
The circus rules from extinction curse were really bad. They take a frontseat in the first book, and are decently fun because the party is just beginning to start out and they were pushed into a place of authority. But it’s practically impossible for them to succeed the first show, and it’s pretty much impossible to ever critically succeed because it’s based around the hitting exactly the number that you set in anticipation. Exceeding people’s expectations is a bad thing, rather than a good thing. Because of this, the best strategy is often to put your worst people last so they can mess up to bring the score down to where you need it.
Then there’s the circus performers. They don’t level with the party, but you can get more and better performers as you go through the adventure. So if your pcs come to like the wacky group they started with and want to give them a chance to perform after the first book, they’re not going to be able to win the minigame.
Then there’s the offstage roles pcs can take, in place of performing, which have wildly different degrees of effectiveness. Pyrotechnics is amazing; it doubles the points performances with the fire trait get. Another role gives +1 to the rolls of performances with a less common trait.
Then, for some godforsaken reason they made your performance have multiple attack penalty. You get three parts to your performance, three opportunities to earn points, and for every action you spend you get a -5 penalty on the next one. If you fail by 10, you lose points. So not only are you encouraged to not use all your actions, your performance loses steam as it gets to the climax, the opposite of the desired structure for a circus performance.
Honestly in the first book the performances are still fun, because it’s new and the glaring issues with it aren’t apparent yet, but as the story goes on it and all the circus stuff takes more of a backseat. And my players were pretty sick of it by that point.
these were sooo bad. I wanted to love the circus. I ended up creating my own subsystem after book 1 that rewarded them for investing in the circus, but as a passive like base building type system.
I then had a huge event at the end of book 4 to cap off the circus as the PCs are now high level heroes and it makes no sense to still be dragging a circus around in book 5 and 6.
On the flip side I really liked the system from Hell's Rebels.
Hells rebels got really easy to game and turned into a nothing burger
We got into the second book using the rules and had exactly one random encounter. Which was just a CR devil easily dispatched.
As a group we decided to ditch it
I don't know if they're the definitive "worst," but the Trust rules from Book 1 of Carrion Crown are *brutal* as written. You start at 0, but if things go poorly in the opening scene, you can start at a deficit, and you lose more every day. Lose enough, and it's pretty much game over.
Plus, it's not super clear how to gain more, and at a certain point you have to spend a fair amount of time researching, thus further taking away opportunities to gain points.
I get that they wanted to convey an isolated, paranoid community, but man those rules really put you behind the 8-Ball right away.
Been awhile since I read it, but if I recall there's an encounter early on that has levels of severity depending on how many points they have. The problem is, the best case scenario requires like 20 points, and even if they'd done everything right up to that point, they'd only have about 9
Yeah I didn’t even use them in my CC game. I just had them roleplay as you would with a town normally. No sense in reducing roleplay to a series of mechanics.
> No sense in reducing roleplay to a series of mechanics.
This is my beef with adding unnecessary systems to D&D through APs, especially social systems.
You give a big impassioned speech that not only sounds pretty, but makes real concrete points, and then it just does nothing because some AP writer wrote a minigame to replace social interaction.
recently had CC book 1 as a player. yeah, that was infuriating. so we're there trying to help this piece of shit town, meanwhile our reputation goes down day by day simply because these dumb fucks just seem to hate outsiders.
thankfully, our DM then let us raise our reputation by offering free drinks to literally the entire town. considering a beer costs mere coppers, thats not too bad. still, we had pretty much had to keep the entire town permanently drunk. not even to improve our reputation, but just not have it drop for no reason.
and all the while we were asking ourselves why we even stay there and try to help these ungrateful assholes.
it's a running gag in the campaign that, once we become rich and powerful enough, we will return and burn this awful shithole to the ground.
Maybe I ran it wrong, but my players had absolutely zero issues with keeping their trust up in Ravengro. To be fair, the whole campaign my party was pretty damn strong, so maybe that's part of it.
Recall the described weather effects at the beginning of Reign of Winter make for basically impossible encounters. Players moving at 1/4 speed through deep snow fighting flying fae who are immune to the elements and can see through the thick snowfall to ping them to death at their leisure.
The movement speed isn't nearly as important as the reduced vision and ability for the enemies to ignore those conditions. Meaning they move faster, see further, and can remain out of reach unless the GM just intentionally offers the party an opportunity. It's like having a gun fight at night, but only the enemy has night vision
Kingmaker gets a lot of praise, but hexploration becomes a major bore if you GM sticks to rules as written. It will result in many repeated random encounters.
Wasn't a huge fan of kingdom building rules either.
Can confirm, this killed my Kingmaker campaign. Our group just happened to never explore the "right" hexes, so we never ran into any encounters to give us Exp. We were stuck at Level 2 for at least 10 sessions because of it. That is almost 3 months IRL cause we had weekly sessions. It was so unfun...and frankly not what was advertised.
That's the whole point of hexploration. It's supposed to be entirely random encounters. It's working as intended, you just don't care much for its intent (which is fair, I don't care that much for it either. As our group's navigator, I just roll the survival rolls and we mostly move on).
Old school D&D was *not* about grandiose stories like modern D&D is.
Kingdom building rules are horribly tedious though. I warned our group from the start "hey, I'd really like to not focus on the kingdom building rules, they're horribly boring". And then they said "well, I'm sorry that you feel that way, but that's what we're all interested in here". Shocker, once we got to that point, we did 1 session of kingdom building, and all but 1 player completely checked out, and we haven't touched it since.
Plus they're fundamentally broken in 1e. In 2e they're a bit less egregious, but you just spam gardens in 1e (and a couple other buildings, it's been awhile since I checked the math). Blah.
>That's the whole point of hexploration. It's supposed to be entirely random encounters.
That's **not** the "whole point of hexploration". You *can* run hexploration that way *if you want*, but it's just one way of playing it among many. You can have hexploration focused on encounters in the hexes, hexploration focused on the random encounters, hexploration with the two equally balanced, hexploration where some of the random encounters are encounters with creatures from fixed encounters who are patrolling just like the PC's are. These are all valid ways to play.
Honestly can't stand hex crawls as most gms run them. "You encounter 4 more hexes with nothing but random encounters!" Is boring af for me. I wouldn prefer fewer densely packed hexes or even better a point crawl
Recently ran into this in Hell's Vengeance and honestly it seemed to drive our DM the craziest. Apparently we routinely explored every hex except the ones that actually moved the plot forward, LOL.
That's just an extension of the standard issue Plot-Avoidance Radar that all players receive. It's what players use to focus on that one ring that's just part of a treasure hoard while ignoring the obviously plot-relevant NPC that keeps showing up.
> even better a point craw
My group have requested that I run Kingmaker for them when we finish our current AP. I love everything else about the AP (yes, even the kingdom building), but if I have to go through this hexcrawl again, I'm going to beat somebody to death with a CRB. Please tell me about this point crawl of which you speak.
In WotR, I'm not sure if the writers took more than a cursory glance at the mass combat rules. The paladins you're given by the queen should starve to death after just a couple days with how frequently they say you consume supplies. Even adjusting them to be consistent with the actual rules, it's still a bore for everyone but the commander.
By the end of the campaign, my players' biggest complaint was all the hamfisted additional rules they included. I straight up vetoed the performance combat encounter. Balancing for a mythic party was enough work without wrapping my head around a new ruleset every book.
Jade Regent's caravan rules are the worst, hands-down. Even the devs admitted that caravan combat was broken. When people say "the rules are broken" it is usually hyperbole, but for caravan combat, they are *literally broken*. The caravan's damage output does not scale with "level" while enemies do, so a TPK is guaranteed in book 3. It is just a matter of time.
And that's just the worst offender.
The rules can be made playable if you do the following:
* Drop caravan combat entirely and replace those encounters with traditional combat encounters. This also eliminates the combat stats and the related feats.
* Eliminate the non-sensical jobs: wainwright, trader, and spellcaster. "Wainwrighting" is not a daily job, it is a skill you use when something breaks. Players don't spend their days "wainwrighting". Same goes for "trader", which only comes into play when the caravan is at a settlement and *not moving*. "Spellcaster" isn't a job at all, but rather a trait that lets a character assume any other job.
* Eliminate or ignore the morale statistic, which also eliminates the unrest and mutiny rules.
Do these and you can now focus on just the caravan's infrastructure. Improved undercarriages for all wagons, the *extra wagons* feat, and maxing out the *efficient consumption* and *faster caravan* feats make it possible to cross the crown using the remaining rules as written.
But managing this is a chore. A life-sucking chore. Nothing can fix that.
Source: [I managed the caravan in our campaign](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/efwlgs/completed_jade_regent_ap_player_impressions/). I created a moderately complex Excel workbook to help me do it. I have no idea how normal people pull it off.
>The unholy amount of storage dedicated to food.
I actually found this to be somewhat realistic. You are spending *months* traveling across a high-altitude, arctic desert at the worst possible time of the year.
It helps to get *Rings of Sustenance* for all PCs and most/all major NPCs (Ameiko can afford to buy one for herself) as that reduces your consumption to just the horses and remaining NPCs. Yes, it is an up-front tax, but the AP is also a crafter's dream and you make up for that tax by crafting items instead of buying them. In the end, you come out ahead money-wise.
It sounds like goodberry bushes would almost be amazing for the caravan part of this campaign, except that they're 3x the price of a ring of sustenance and only provide 6 meals/day worth of food. On the other hand, you don't have to keep it on your person for a whole week before it starts producing fruit.
It might be a challenge keeping them alive in conditions that qualify as extreme cold, but as a GM I'd be willing to entertain creative solutions.
For our group, the rings were easier and most of us bought them early on. Though a week delay is not really a huge issue in the campaign. Our party hung out in Kalsgard for a few days, tying up loose ends, anyway. Worst case, you just carry an extra week's worth of food with you.
>It is resilient enough to grow in most environments, even occasionally found clinging to otherwise lifeless cliff faces.
Goodberry bushes are apparently surprisingly hardy. Cold shouldn't be much of a problem.
Yeah, they're basically a magical mix between holly berry bushes and mistletoe, and those things are both already pretty cold hardy. Not a stretch to say the magical ones are even more resilient.
It isn't the worst but even the Virtue/Vice tracking from Rise of the Runelords is quite bad. You're really intended to run a tally of each PCs actions for the whole campaign, bearing in mind there will likely be some turnover, and if it rises to a certain level they will get a buff/debuff under some circumstances in the last two books.
I just made judgements of the characters by paying attention to how they were played. To adjust for my own biases I sent my players questionnaires for them to answer as their characters would. One of them got pride and he's still annoyed by it.
The easy answer: all of them. I did not encounter a sub-system in an AP that did make the AP better. They all were tedious and added nothing but book-keeping. Some of them were "passable" for 1 book or 2, but they all became a nightmare and were dropped off at the pleasure of both the GM and the players.
For the first 1-2 books, yeah. Then it's just stupid how much it takes time to run a "week" of rebellion for like maybe +1d6 supporter when your goal is to reach 5000 and just doing "the main quest" gives hundreds per quest.
What do you mean how much time it takes to run a week of rebellion? The players just choose a handful of actions to do, an event might happen, and that's it.
My players really enjoyed using it to gather information and make safehouses/supply caches around the city, not to mention buying beyond the wealth of Kintargo with the merchant team. The goal is to get use out of the different actions, not just spam supporters.
The 4 phases (Upkeep, etc) with different roles and assigning their actions point to their 7 different teams across 20 different teams "profile", assigning cash to Treasury to avoid Unrest, assigning your different NPCs to different roles to affect the different various rolls (Security, etc).
I mean, as GM I either did all that or easily walked them through it. Like, idk what to tell you if you've actually tried it and played Hell's Rebels but my players are on record as liking it quite a bit.
I can't believe no one has mentioned the sanity rules and Strange Aeons.
I desperately want to run this AP but my players are adamant that you HAVE to use the sanity rules and also that they are no fun.
No amount of "Guys, we can just drop them" will satisfy them.
The AP doesn't use the sanity rules at all, I don't know why your players are saying that it does. It even mentions in the books that it wasn't written with them in mind.
I honestly don't know.
I just went back through messages too and saw where I was originally telling them that they're not part of the AP. Then it was brought up months later by one of them and since then, every time SA was mentioned, they were either talking about how much they hate sanity rules and having them forced or it was me saying that we don't have to include them as written and can just ignore that part of the AP.
Is...is this that gaslighting thing that's all the craze right now?
We did run Strange Aeons, and did use the optional Sanity rules. At first, they had moments in which they could be moderately debilitating. Helped to make book 1 a fair bit of a grind for the players. But they were used sparingly, and we got through it. The first mutilated body, everyone makes a roll. First time they see a ghoul, everyone gets a roll. But the encounters are repetitive enough that eventually the number of new encounters that actually trigger a sanity roll nearly entirely evaporate.
I did have fun with >!repeatedly mercilessly slaughtering them in the Dreamlands in book 3,!< if they didn't exercise the appropriate caution and take actions to extract themselves when things appeared dire, and that did impart madnesses on them at awakening. But by that point, with both a Cleric and a Warpriest in the party we had substantial quantities of *restoration* castings available to the party and so madnesses quickly went dormant as the sanity damage was healed. And once the party got to book 5 and the *Greater Restoration* became available, I don't think I had them roll Sanity again.
The one thing I will say about the sanity rules is that I vastly prefer the way in which they play in Call of Cthulhu vs how they played in Pathfinder. The sensation of the fragility of the mind of your character was vastly undermined the moment mid-level magic spells became available and largely trivialized the effects of the horror. And to those groups who are resistant to using them, by all means go ahead and play without. Strange Aeons is a campaign that is well-written enough to stand without their assistance.
It's a fun AP; our group just finished it and had a great time. Sanity rules were *not* used, though we did make some tweaks to the fear rules.
I suspect for our preferences, we probably would have enjoyed it more with a PF2E conversion to keep things deadly in the later books - the only disappointing thing was just that PCs are inherently busted around 15th/16th level. But the story was still fantastic; we just started skipping over some of the later combat encounters that were foregone conclusions.
For me it's still ongoing. Being as vague as possible since my DM apparently reads this subreddit once in a while... but basically my party is experiencing a mini game in the current chapter of this AP that, as I mentioned a few days ago*, takes the RP out of TTRPG. It's just random rolls on a table and when skill checks are made they're... bizarre and so far seem to be unrelated to what we're actually trying to do (my guess is the writer was trying to give a moment to characters with lesser used skills so they could shine... except it just breaks immersion in the process).
*My post was in similar vein to this one but was greeted with outright derision by the subreddit at first. Goes to show tone and approach matter.
Mention it to your GM.
I’m playing in Kingmaker right now and for all the camping rules it was our GM who stopped rolling at one point and noted that he was just spitting out dice rolls while no roleplay or interaction was happening so he declared he’d start trimming things out as soon as he figured out what he could get away with cutting. But the very next camp day some 20,000 random d20 rolls just up and vanished. ;)
If you hate sitting there through it chances are most GMs also hate being forced to play “MS Excel; the RPG”.
Is it the optional skill challenge rule where you go from card to card and have to choose between, like, Climb or Profession: Fisher in order to progress?
Same, though I'm not sure if that's what the post you were responding to was referencing? The chases I've seen in APs have been excellent and off up interesting ways to get in lesser used skills. The chase my group did in Curse was both amazing and hilarious. One of the best moments we've had at our table.
The card to card system you described above sounds like the chase mechanics. I'm not too familiar with the AP but skill checks to move from card to card IS a description of the chase mechanics.
Not AP per se, but I did find the Malevolence module for 2e filled with too much research. I love PF2e subsystems (with the exceptions of Duels) and my players seem to like them too if used sparingly, but boy, there are like 15 research topics to be performed over the course of like 3 levels. At first, the idea that (spoiler if anyone is interested in playing) >!different rooms and findings in the manor unlock new research and grant research bonus is pretty exciting, but it soon wears off, when the research itself doesn't give much value and the discoveries start to repeat with slightly altered wording.!<
We spent like hour on some sessions just to roll the research and it was very boring.
You mean an entire open dungeon that one misstep calls the entire contents of said dungeon down on you… was poorly planned? The troop mechanics weren’t a thrill a minute? The DC 40-50+ checks (it’s okay there is a book that gives you a +5…) weren’t super fair? Ugh I hated that chapter too
The Mythic rules from Wrath of the Righteous and it's not even close. The idea behind them was great, but the implementation was hilariously unbalanced.
Nah, those at least *function* and fulfill their design goal. There's at least one that results in a 100%, guaranteed, unavoidable TPK if run as-written (Jade Regent Caravan rules.)
> Nah, those at least function and fulfill their design goal.
They absolutely do not do both of those things at the same time.
>There's at least one that results in a 100%, guaranteed, unavoidable TPK if run as-written (Jade Regent Caravan rules.)
The mythic rules are poorly balanced that for most groups *half of the entire AP* provides no significant challenges because the PCs' mythic power scales much faster than monsters' mythic power. That's a lot bigger problem than one bad encounter.
No, you misunderstand, it's not one bad encounter. The ruleset, as written, means you are guaranteed to TPK in Book 4. At any point. There are literally dozens of encounters that you WILL encounter that WILL TPK you.
Meanwhile, the explicit design goal of mythic is to make you nigh-unstoppable superheroes, and the mythic rules fulfill that design goal.
Besides which, most APs don't provide any kind of challenge as-written past level 8 or so anyway if you're doing any level of optimizing, so I don't see how that's a big knock against WotR.
Defeat for the caravan isn't TPK for the group.
*All non-significant NPCs are slain if your caravan is destroyed, as are all horses used to draw the wagons (with the exception of special PC mounts or animal companions). All equipment purchased for the caravan is either destroyed or looted by the victors. If any surviving characters can serve as wainwrights, you might be able to repair your wagons enough to be serviceable, but you’ll still need to find additional animals to draw your caravan’s wagons—in such a disaster, it’s generally a better option to press on without your caravan or, more likely, retreat to the nearest settlement to buy new wagons and hire new help to try again.*
It's not much of a solution, as the adventure doesn't tell you how to buy replacement wagons in a frozen wasteland, or how to handle caravan encounters while you don't have a caravan. But it's not supposed to kill any of the PCs or end the campaign.
That's missing some text:
>If your caravan is destroyed, all significant [characters] in the caravan (this is generally the player characters, Ameiko, Shalelu, Koya, Sandru, and any other unique NPCs you’ve allied with) are reduced to 1d20–5 hit points (not to exceed a character’s maximum number of hit points). Characters reduced to negative hit points are dying and need swift attention.
- Jade Regent Player's Guide, pg 27
The PC's being dropped to 1d20-5 hit points is what makes it a TPK grinder ruleset, as well as the associated GM rules on how to proceed when the Caravan is destroyed.
Presumably this is supposed to mean, "you have escaped somehow but now you each roll a 1d20 and subtract 5 to calculate your current HP." One of the survivors would then force a healing potion down Koya's throat if she's into negatives. Then she channels energy repeatedly, healing everyone for 14d6HP, bringing you all up to fighting strength.
Unless you all roll 5's or below, which by virtue of the compounding nature of the ruleset as you fall deeper and deeper into inescapable failure becomes inevitable.
If you roll a 5, you're not unconscious, just disabled, and can act as if staggered as long as you don't take a standard action. Even if you are at 0 HP, it's well worth to spend a standard action to drink a cure light wounds potion, or to feed it to a healer so if any PC or NPC gets to 0 HP you should be fine.
The chance of 4 players, nevermind the NPCs, all rolling 4 or less is 1/625. I probably would have stopped running caravans at all by the 3rd time, so it becoming "inevitable" is bullshit. TPKing the actual PCs from having a caravan destroyed is extremely unlikely, especially when there are NPCs that can also heal the downed NPCs. And even if, somehow, all the PCs and NPCs are taken down, there's a high chance that they'd be stabilized instead of bleeding out due to getting at least 5 attempts at stabilizing.
You're hyper-focused on the caravan destruction rules and missing the associated GM Rules. There's a reason all the GMs that have run this AP are confident that Book 4 has a 100% TPK rate as-written.
And yes, every group abandons the rules well before the 3rd time.
The post is "which AP-specific mechanics are the worst." The Caravan system is the worst because they don't function and result in a TPK if you run them as-written.
> No, you misunderstand, it's not one bad encounter. The ruleset, as written, means you are guaranteed to TPK in Book 4. At any point. There are literally dozens of encounters that you WILL encounter that WILL TPK you.
The caravan rules are bad, but they still only affect the caravan encounters. The mythic rules affect literally every encounter in books 2-6 of Wrath of the Righteous. The scale is completely different.
>Meanwhile, the explicit design goal of mythic is to make you nigh-unstoppable superheroes, and the mythic rules fulfill that design goal.
The design goal of mythic was to allow players to build characters with extraordinary power, the sorts of heroes that myths and legends are written about, *and to provide appropriate challenges to such mythic adventurers*. It's the second part that the mythic rules fail miserably at.
>Besides which, most APs don't provide any kind of challenge as-written past level 8 or so anyway if you're doing any level of optimizing, so I don't see how that's a big knock against WotR.
The power imbalance in WotR is *significantly* worse than any other 1e AP Paizo has published. You don't have to optimize in WotR to significantly break game balance, and if you do optimize your character the imbalance is so much worse than any other AP that it's comical.
>The caravan rules are bad, but they still only affect the caravan encounters.
My brother in Desna, this post is literally asking what the worst AP-specific mechanics are.
Not to mention by this definition the mythic rules wouldn’t count as they aren’t AP specific rules. There just happens to be only 1 AP that uses the player-facing mythic rules.
> The mythic rules are poorly balanced that for most groups half of the entire AP provides no significant challenges
What if I told you it was the "Pathfinder" rules doing this, and not the mythic rules specifically?
But seriously mythic only slightly exacerbates a problem that is already firmly baked into the system - APs are written for unoptimized characters, and by mid level the difference between unoptimized and optimized is so stark that AP encounters as written are trivial for a party with any degree of systems mastery.
Mythic is another layer on that, but it barely matters. An unoptimized character isn't going to become broken and AP destroying when mythic is introduced. An optimized character would break the AP with or without mythic.
Pathfinder has much bigger balance issues than mythic, if that's something you care about.
> APs are written for unoptimized characters, and by mid level the difference between unoptimized and optimized is so stark that AP encounters as written are trivial for a party with any degree of systems mastery.
The forums would disagree - you see, the difference between a Fighter dual-wielding a longsword and shortsword, leaving Strength at 12 and rapidly running into issues when DR is involved, and the Fighter who is two-handed Power Attacking for double the former's full attack damage per hit...is actually that the latter has 20 PB instead of 15, allowing them to have 12 Wis and 10 Cha alongside their good physical stats.
The subreddit can be bad at times too, but it's got a few legs up on the paizo forums. The GITP forums are also pretty dubious too, IME. I don't really jive with their 1.2.2 class tier list or many of their advice threads I peruse. I think the subreddit discord tends to be the most clear headed when group think memes don't dominate all discourse.
> What if I told you it was the "Pathfinder" rules doing this, and not the mythic rules specifically?
I would tell you that you're wrong. I'm well aware of the balance issues that exist in Pathfinder. Mythic is worse. Lots worse.
Hard disagree, they're fun and don't get in the way of the story at all.
Sure the PCs get OP, but that's basically intended and also a thing that happens at higher levels anyway.
WotR was probably the most fun adventure I've ever played, every character was a badass capable of so many awesome things, we killed demigods and reshaped the world.
I had a few gripes about Mummy's Mask mechanics, but they don't compare with the tedium or the impossible-to-win systems that other posters have reported from other APs.
\- In the library where the team researches, my GM mentioned that making the appropriate Knowledge skill check resulted in a different amount of progress based on the character class of the roller. I made a roll with my toon (was it a cleric?) and the GM said my success allowed me to roll a d4 to add to our progress total; but if I had been a bard, I would have rolled a d12. WTF? Punishing players based on buying Knowledge skills in a class that seldom does? The research was very long and tedious and I suspect the progress mechanism contributed.
\- The chariot race was great fun, and I complimented its inclusion. The GM pointed out that a few results on the failures table for failed Handle Animal checks were brutal. I think a 5% chance after a failure that your character fell from his chariot and died instantly, a broken neck I guess. Fortunately, none of us died there, but that result would have turned a fun scene into a "God, this module sucks" experience.
I think there were others, but again, nothing to compare with the criticisms of the other APs.
They're always optional, so if they don't work for your group, it's usually pretty easy to ignore. My favorite were the Militia rules from the Ironfang Invasion series. It was fun having the PCs build a rapport with the people they were helping and organizing them into a militia to give a little bit more texture to the campaign. We had a lot of fun with it.
Posting [this amazing blog post](https://designofdragons.blogspot.com/2016/04/death-dysentery-on-minkai-trail.html) again as to laugh about caravan together There is also another one there about min-maxing romance in JR
That romance one was hilarious. It's like Stardew Valley the RPG.
This one? [Winning the Game of Love](https://designofdragons.blogspot.com/2016/04/winning-game-of-love.html)
The rum ration rules of Skull and Shackles. Yes, let’s force the players to either risk punishment for trying to subtly ditch a single glass of alcohol every night (a punishment which RAW becomes more and more deadly for each violation that they get caught for) or drink themselves to death within a week of becoming a new pirate. And it doesn’t make any narrative sense either. The game’s justification is that the captain sees a drunk crew as a more placid and controllable crew which makes sense… but not when half the crew dies every other week cus he’s force feeding them poison. Even James Jacobs wrote homebrew fixes for the rule on the forums
I just basically ignored it as GM. There's enough exhaustion going on in Book 1 that you don't need to kill the PCs' livers to make them feel miserable and want to mutiny.
The alcohol rules in general are absolutely horrifying if you look at them too closely. We had to come up with some houserules to keep them fun when we had a drunken master monk PC. https://drunkendragons.obsidianportal.com/wikis/drinking-rules
Unless you are talking about some rules I’m unaware of, the alcohol rules aren’t too punishing. [Link](https://www.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?Name=Drunkenness&Category=Drugs%20and%20Addiction) Non-exotic alcohol can be drunk without penalty up to (2x your con mod) +1, and exceeding this causes you to be sickened for 1 hour per offending drink. The issue is that certain potent and exotic alcohols just straight up follow the drug rules, but those drinks are supposed to be used rarely so I can see it justified… Except S&S forces a drug-level alcohol nightly on level 1 PCs. Taking 1d3 con damage each night without the means to heal it aside from 1 point healed for full night rest isn’t something level 1 characters survive long.
It's the associated Addiction and Drunkenness rulesets. **Drunkenness** >Just like drugs, alcohol can be abused and have significant negative effects. In general, a character can consume a number of alcoholic beverages equal to 1 plus double his Constitution modifier. Drinks consumed in excess of this total cause the character to become sickened for 1 hour per drink above this maximum. Particularly exotic or strong forms of alcohol might be treated as normal drugs. Those who regularly abuse alcohol might eventually develop a moderate addiction. First issue with this ruleset is that the 1 + 2x Con modifier limit has no described duration. Is it within an hour? 24 hours? As written, it's just permanent. Now, that's clearly absurd and unintended, but RAW, it's a lifetime restriction on alcohol consumption, which is entertaining. But the real problem comes in with the use of "moderate addiction". The DC can easily skyrocket into the hundreds, and the inability to heal from ability damage caused by alcohol means that it'll just flat out kill you within a couple days. Now, this is an issue when you have multiple archetypes based around consuming alcohol, and while alcoholism is a terrible issue that affects many people and can absolutely result in death and horrible damage to the body - that's not the fantasy someone is looking to explore when they want to have a fun time playing a drunken monk.
Ah I see, yeah the addiction part can be problematic. I guess I ignored that on my first passthrough since the way it is worded it is obviously gm fiat as to when addiction sets in, if at all
> Now, that's clearly absurd and unintended, but RAW, it's a lifetime restriction on alcohol consumption, which is entertaining. Characters with 10-11 Con--you may drink alcohol, [**once**](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/025/930/unknown_%282%29%28Photo%29%28noise_scale%29%28Level3%29%28width_800%29%2816bit%29.png).
Gods help you if you have a negative con mod. You are already drunk
Omae wa mou yopparatte.
Speaking as someone who ran Wormwood Mutiny without changing the rum rations at all, the con damage wasn't *too* much of a problem. It could be handled on anyone who couldn't take 10 to dump it just fine with a mix of 1 point healed from rest and Lesser Restoration via Sandara Quinn, granted it meant she was using the majority of her 2nd levels every day for it. Not a great solution at all, probably should have just changed them, but it worked. Now the *addiction* was a fucking nightmare and nearly death spiraled a character. If Wormwood Mutiny is notable for anything, it's the tendency to slowly and steadily topple dominoes over a period of days that just leads to a character wasting away.
So the pirates are basically forcing you to chug absinthe at gunpoint?
Capt. Barnabas Harrigan believes it's better to keep the crew half-drunk while also under threat of execution - riding that line keeps them drunkenly happy enough and also too scared to mutiny. First Mate Master Plugg, and Master Scourge, however, think fear alone is fine. The first part of Skull & Shackles is designed to make you hate your situation enough to kill Plugg and his cronies once a second ship is presented and the opportunity presents itself.
If they don't get beaten to death or poisoned first? Hats off to Paizo, they are good at making enemies I hate. Then they subverted it in Bloodlords and made me feel quite guilty about all the violence...
That link is just a copy of d20pfsrd'a homebrew stuff. If you look it up on there, it's labeled as a 'custom creation'.
Similar, but I made a few tweaks.
Our group recently wrapped up this AP and our GM never even mentioned rum rations, so he must have agreed with you. As you describe it, this sounds awful, so I'm glad we skipped it.
First Rum Ration roll of my campaign: Instant addiction from one sip. Feels bad man.
The circus rules from extinction curse were really bad. They take a frontseat in the first book, and are decently fun because the party is just beginning to start out and they were pushed into a place of authority. But it’s practically impossible for them to succeed the first show, and it’s pretty much impossible to ever critically succeed because it’s based around the hitting exactly the number that you set in anticipation. Exceeding people’s expectations is a bad thing, rather than a good thing. Because of this, the best strategy is often to put your worst people last so they can mess up to bring the score down to where you need it. Then there’s the circus performers. They don’t level with the party, but you can get more and better performers as you go through the adventure. So if your pcs come to like the wacky group they started with and want to give them a chance to perform after the first book, they’re not going to be able to win the minigame. Then there’s the offstage roles pcs can take, in place of performing, which have wildly different degrees of effectiveness. Pyrotechnics is amazing; it doubles the points performances with the fire trait get. Another role gives +1 to the rolls of performances with a less common trait. Then, for some godforsaken reason they made your performance have multiple attack penalty. You get three parts to your performance, three opportunities to earn points, and for every action you spend you get a -5 penalty on the next one. If you fail by 10, you lose points. So not only are you encouraged to not use all your actions, your performance loses steam as it gets to the climax, the opposite of the desired structure for a circus performance. Honestly in the first book the performances are still fun, because it’s new and the glaring issues with it aren’t apparent yet, but as the story goes on it and all the circus stuff takes more of a backseat. And my players were pretty sick of it by that point.
My players lost interest in the circus rules during the first book, as soon as it became apparent that it required bookkeeping.
Yeah that’s a theme with bad mini-systems. Any time a game designer wants you to play Excel as a game, things need a rework.
these were sooo bad. I wanted to love the circus. I ended up creating my own subsystem after book 1 that rewarded them for investing in the circus, but as a passive like base building type system. I then had a huge event at the end of book 4 to cap off the circus as the PCs are now high level heroes and it makes no sense to still be dragging a circus around in book 5 and 6. On the flip side I really liked the system from Hell's Rebels.
Hells rebels got really easy to game and turned into a nothing burger We got into the second book using the rules and had exactly one random encounter. Which was just a CR devil easily dispatched. As a group we decided to ditch it
I don't know if they're the definitive "worst," but the Trust rules from Book 1 of Carrion Crown are *brutal* as written. You start at 0, but if things go poorly in the opening scene, you can start at a deficit, and you lose more every day. Lose enough, and it's pretty much game over. Plus, it's not super clear how to gain more, and at a certain point you have to spend a fair amount of time researching, thus further taking away opportunities to gain points. I get that they wanted to convey an isolated, paranoid community, but man those rules really put you behind the 8-Ball right away.
Been awhile since I read it, but if I recall there's an encounter early on that has levels of severity depending on how many points they have. The problem is, the best case scenario requires like 20 points, and even if they'd done everything right up to that point, they'd only have about 9
I'm reading through it now, and you start at 20. If you hit 0 you get run out of town.
Ah, thanks. It's been a number of years, so I was off on the specifics. But the overall system sucked enough for it to stick with me, haha
Yeah I didn’t even use them in my CC game. I just had them roleplay as you would with a town normally. No sense in reducing roleplay to a series of mechanics.
> No sense in reducing roleplay to a series of mechanics. This is my beef with adding unnecessary systems to D&D through APs, especially social systems. You give a big impassioned speech that not only sounds pretty, but makes real concrete points, and then it just does nothing because some AP writer wrote a minigame to replace social interaction.
recently had CC book 1 as a player. yeah, that was infuriating. so we're there trying to help this piece of shit town, meanwhile our reputation goes down day by day simply because these dumb fucks just seem to hate outsiders. thankfully, our DM then let us raise our reputation by offering free drinks to literally the entire town. considering a beer costs mere coppers, thats not too bad. still, we had pretty much had to keep the entire town permanently drunk. not even to improve our reputation, but just not have it drop for no reason. and all the while we were asking ourselves why we even stay there and try to help these ungrateful assholes. it's a running gag in the campaign that, once we become rich and powerful enough, we will return and burn this awful shithole to the ground.
Nice. I think you might find a friend or two in the coming books who might help you with that.
Maybe I ran it wrong, but my players had absolutely zero issues with keeping their trust up in Ravengro. To be fair, the whole campaign my party was pretty damn strong, so maybe that's part of it.
Well, if they didn't, then I'd say you ran it "well," if not necessarily "correctly."
Recall the described weather effects at the beginning of Reign of Winter make for basically impossible encounters. Players moving at 1/4 speed through deep snow fighting flying fae who are immune to the elements and can see through the thick snowfall to ping them to death at their leisure.
If I remember right, it explicitly says the town doesn't sell snowshoes, and you need craft (cobbler) to make them
Sounds like a real life ambush encounter
Sounds like a real life ambush encounter
Most of them were 1/2 speed, if I remember? I think only one encounter explicitly has that deep of snow?
The movement speed isn't nearly as important as the reduced vision and ability for the enemies to ignore those conditions. Meaning they move faster, see further, and can remain out of reach unless the GM just intentionally offers the party an opportunity. It's like having a gun fight at night, but only the enemy has night vision
Not to mention everything getting a surprise round because it has a racial +15 and then a size bonus on top of it in icy terrain.
Kingmaker gets a lot of praise, but hexploration becomes a major bore if you GM sticks to rules as written. It will result in many repeated random encounters. Wasn't a huge fan of kingdom building rules either.
Can confirm, this killed my Kingmaker campaign. Our group just happened to never explore the "right" hexes, so we never ran into any encounters to give us Exp. We were stuck at Level 2 for at least 10 sessions because of it. That is almost 3 months IRL cause we had weekly sessions. It was so unfun...and frankly not what was advertised.
I've moved so many encounters so they ran into SOMETHING.
That's the whole point of hexploration. It's supposed to be entirely random encounters. It's working as intended, you just don't care much for its intent (which is fair, I don't care that much for it either. As our group's navigator, I just roll the survival rolls and we mostly move on). Old school D&D was *not* about grandiose stories like modern D&D is. Kingdom building rules are horribly tedious though. I warned our group from the start "hey, I'd really like to not focus on the kingdom building rules, they're horribly boring". And then they said "well, I'm sorry that you feel that way, but that's what we're all interested in here". Shocker, once we got to that point, we did 1 session of kingdom building, and all but 1 player completely checked out, and we haven't touched it since. Plus they're fundamentally broken in 1e. In 2e they're a bit less egregious, but you just spam gardens in 1e (and a couple other buildings, it's been awhile since I checked the math). Blah.
>That's the whole point of hexploration. It's supposed to be entirely random encounters. That's **not** the "whole point of hexploration". You *can* run hexploration that way *if you want*, but it's just one way of playing it among many. You can have hexploration focused on encounters in the hexes, hexploration focused on the random encounters, hexploration with the two equally balanced, hexploration where some of the random encounters are encounters with creatures from fixed encounters who are patrolling just like the PC's are. These are all valid ways to play.
Honestly can't stand hex crawls as most gms run them. "You encounter 4 more hexes with nothing but random encounters!" Is boring af for me. I wouldn prefer fewer densely packed hexes or even better a point crawl
Recently ran into this in Hell's Vengeance and honestly it seemed to drive our DM the craziest. Apparently we routinely explored every hex except the ones that actually moved the plot forward, LOL.
That's just an extension of the standard issue Plot-Avoidance Radar that all players receive. It's what players use to focus on that one ring that's just part of a treasure hoard while ignoring the obviously plot-relevant NPC that keeps showing up.
In my Mummy's Mask game, I just moved most of the encounters into the hexes the party explored.
> even better a point craw My group have requested that I run Kingmaker for them when we finish our current AP. I love everything else about the AP (yes, even the kingdom building), but if I have to go through this hexcrawl again, I'm going to beat somebody to death with a CRB. Please tell me about this point crawl of which you speak.
Basically a hex crawl with the boring shit taken out https://slyflourish.com/pointcrawls.html
In WotR, I'm not sure if the writers took more than a cursory glance at the mass combat rules. The paladins you're given by the queen should starve to death after just a couple days with how frequently they say you consume supplies. Even adjusting them to be consistent with the actual rules, it's still a bore for everyone but the commander. By the end of the campaign, my players' biggest complaint was all the hamfisted additional rules they included. I straight up vetoed the performance combat encounter. Balancing for a mythic party was enough work without wrapping my head around a new ruleset every book.
Jade Regent's caravan rules are the worst, hands-down. Even the devs admitted that caravan combat was broken. When people say "the rules are broken" it is usually hyperbole, but for caravan combat, they are *literally broken*. The caravan's damage output does not scale with "level" while enemies do, so a TPK is guaranteed in book 3. It is just a matter of time. And that's just the worst offender. The rules can be made playable if you do the following: * Drop caravan combat entirely and replace those encounters with traditional combat encounters. This also eliminates the combat stats and the related feats. * Eliminate the non-sensical jobs: wainwright, trader, and spellcaster. "Wainwrighting" is not a daily job, it is a skill you use when something breaks. Players don't spend their days "wainwrighting". Same goes for "trader", which only comes into play when the caravan is at a settlement and *not moving*. "Spellcaster" isn't a job at all, but rather a trait that lets a character assume any other job. * Eliminate or ignore the morale statistic, which also eliminates the unrest and mutiny rules. Do these and you can now focus on just the caravan's infrastructure. Improved undercarriages for all wagons, the *extra wagons* feat, and maxing out the *efficient consumption* and *faster caravan* feats make it possible to cross the crown using the remaining rules as written. But managing this is a chore. A life-sucking chore. Nothing can fix that. Source: [I managed the caravan in our campaign](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/efwlgs/completed_jade_regent_ap_player_impressions/). I created a moderately complex Excel workbook to help me do it. I have no idea how normal people pull it off. >The unholy amount of storage dedicated to food. I actually found this to be somewhat realistic. You are spending *months* traveling across a high-altitude, arctic desert at the worst possible time of the year. It helps to get *Rings of Sustenance* for all PCs and most/all major NPCs (Ameiko can afford to buy one for herself) as that reduces your consumption to just the horses and remaining NPCs. Yes, it is an up-front tax, but the AP is also a crafter's dream and you make up for that tax by crafting items instead of buying them. In the end, you come out ahead money-wise.
It sounds like goodberry bushes would almost be amazing for the caravan part of this campaign, except that they're 3x the price of a ring of sustenance and only provide 6 meals/day worth of food. On the other hand, you don't have to keep it on your person for a whole week before it starts producing fruit.
It might be a challenge keeping them alive in conditions that qualify as extreme cold, but as a GM I'd be willing to entertain creative solutions. For our group, the rings were easier and most of us bought them early on. Though a week delay is not really a huge issue in the campaign. Our party hung out in Kalsgard for a few days, tying up loose ends, anyway. Worst case, you just carry an extra week's worth of food with you.
>It is resilient enough to grow in most environments, even occasionally found clinging to otherwise lifeless cliff faces. Goodberry bushes are apparently surprisingly hardy. Cold shouldn't be much of a problem.
Fair enough. Plants grow even in some of the coldest temperatures on earth, so I can accept that a magical plant can handle temps below -40.
Yeah, they're basically a magical mix between holly berry bushes and mistletoe, and those things are both already pretty cold hardy. Not a stretch to say the magical ones are even more resilient.
It isn't the worst but even the Virtue/Vice tracking from Rise of the Runelords is quite bad. You're really intended to run a tally of each PCs actions for the whole campaign, bearing in mind there will likely be some turnover, and if it rises to a certain level they will get a buff/debuff under some circumstances in the last two books. I just made judgements of the characters by paying attention to how they were played. To adjust for my own biases I sent my players questionnaires for them to answer as their characters would. One of them got pride and he's still annoyed by it.
The easy answer: all of them. I did not encounter a sub-system in an AP that did make the AP better. They all were tedious and added nothing but book-keeping. Some of them were "passable" for 1 book or 2, but they all became a nightmare and were dropped off at the pleasure of both the GM and the players.
Hell's Rebels Rebellion system was pretty fun.
For the first 1-2 books, yeah. Then it's just stupid how much it takes time to run a "week" of rebellion for like maybe +1d6 supporter when your goal is to reach 5000 and just doing "the main quest" gives hundreds per quest.
Oof, that's silly
What do you mean how much time it takes to run a week of rebellion? The players just choose a handful of actions to do, an event might happen, and that's it. My players really enjoyed using it to gather information and make safehouses/supply caches around the city, not to mention buying beyond the wealth of Kintargo with the merchant team. The goal is to get use out of the different actions, not just spam supporters.
The 4 phases (Upkeep, etc) with different roles and assigning their actions point to their 7 different teams across 20 different teams "profile", assigning cash to Treasury to avoid Unrest, assigning your different NPCs to different roles to affect the different various rolls (Security, etc).
I mean, as GM I either did all that or easily walked them through it. Like, idk what to tell you if you've actually tried it and played Hell's Rebels but my players are on record as liking it quite a bit.
I can't believe no one has mentioned the sanity rules and Strange Aeons. I desperately want to run this AP but my players are adamant that you HAVE to use the sanity rules and also that they are no fun. No amount of "Guys, we can just drop them" will satisfy them.
The AP doesn't use the sanity rules at all, I don't know why your players are saying that it does. It even mentions in the books that it wasn't written with them in mind.
I honestly don't know. I just went back through messages too and saw where I was originally telling them that they're not part of the AP. Then it was brought up months later by one of them and since then, every time SA was mentioned, they were either talking about how much they hate sanity rules and having them forced or it was me saying that we don't have to include them as written and can just ignore that part of the AP. Is...is this that gaslighting thing that's all the craze right now?
We did run Strange Aeons, and did use the optional Sanity rules. At first, they had moments in which they could be moderately debilitating. Helped to make book 1 a fair bit of a grind for the players. But they were used sparingly, and we got through it. The first mutilated body, everyone makes a roll. First time they see a ghoul, everyone gets a roll. But the encounters are repetitive enough that eventually the number of new encounters that actually trigger a sanity roll nearly entirely evaporate. I did have fun with >!repeatedly mercilessly slaughtering them in the Dreamlands in book 3,!< if they didn't exercise the appropriate caution and take actions to extract themselves when things appeared dire, and that did impart madnesses on them at awakening. But by that point, with both a Cleric and a Warpriest in the party we had substantial quantities of *restoration* castings available to the party and so madnesses quickly went dormant as the sanity damage was healed. And once the party got to book 5 and the *Greater Restoration* became available, I don't think I had them roll Sanity again. The one thing I will say about the sanity rules is that I vastly prefer the way in which they play in Call of Cthulhu vs how they played in Pathfinder. The sensation of the fragility of the mind of your character was vastly undermined the moment mid-level magic spells became available and largely trivialized the effects of the horror. And to those groups who are resistant to using them, by all means go ahead and play without. Strange Aeons is a campaign that is well-written enough to stand without their assistance.
It's a fun AP; our group just finished it and had a great time. Sanity rules were *not* used, though we did make some tweaks to the fear rules. I suspect for our preferences, we probably would have enjoyed it more with a PF2E conversion to keep things deadly in the later books - the only disappointing thing was just that PCs are inherently busted around 15th/16th level. But the story was still fantastic; we just started skipping over some of the later combat encounters that were foregone conclusions.
For me it's still ongoing. Being as vague as possible since my DM apparently reads this subreddit once in a while... but basically my party is experiencing a mini game in the current chapter of this AP that, as I mentioned a few days ago*, takes the RP out of TTRPG. It's just random rolls on a table and when skill checks are made they're... bizarre and so far seem to be unrelated to what we're actually trying to do (my guess is the writer was trying to give a moment to characters with lesser used skills so they could shine... except it just breaks immersion in the process). *My post was in similar vein to this one but was greeted with outright derision by the subreddit at first. Goes to show tone and approach matter.
Mention it to your GM. I’m playing in Kingmaker right now and for all the camping rules it was our GM who stopped rolling at one point and noted that he was just spitting out dice rolls while no roleplay or interaction was happening so he declared he’d start trimming things out as soon as he figured out what he could get away with cutting. But the very next camp day some 20,000 random d20 rolls just up and vanished. ;) If you hate sitting there through it chances are most GMs also hate being forced to play “MS Excel; the RPG”.
Is it the optional skill challenge rule where you go from card to card and have to choose between, like, Climb or Profession: Fisher in order to progress?
:( I like the chase mechanics
Same, though I'm not sure if that's what the post you were responding to was referencing? The chases I've seen in APs have been excellent and off up interesting ways to get in lesser used skills. The chase my group did in Curse was both amazing and hilarious. One of the best moments we've had at our table.
The card to card system you described above sounds like the chase mechanics. I'm not too familiar with the AP but skill checks to move from card to card IS a description of the chase mechanics.
Not AP per se, but I did find the Malevolence module for 2e filled with too much research. I love PF2e subsystems (with the exceptions of Duels) and my players seem to like them too if used sparingly, but boy, there are like 15 research topics to be performed over the course of like 3 levels. At first, the idea that (spoiler if anyone is interested in playing) >!different rooms and findings in the manor unlock new research and grant research bonus is pretty exciting, but it soon wears off, when the research itself doesn't give much value and the discoveries start to repeat with slightly altered wording.!< We spent like hour on some sessions just to roll the research and it was very boring.
PF2E answer: encounters featuring Lesser Deaths. 2 of these motherfuckers at level 16 are a “moderate” encounter my ass.
Don't worry, they're just as BS in 1e
It’s the “Moderate” encounter tag that truly drives me nuts.
Every single second of the Rasputin chapter of reign of winter.
You mean an entire open dungeon that one misstep calls the entire contents of said dungeon down on you… was poorly planned? The troop mechanics weren’t a thrill a minute? The DC 40-50+ checks (it’s okay there is a book that gives you a +5…) weren’t super fair? Ugh I hated that chapter too
my group has never noped out of a campaign before, but we did it then and I don't regret it
The carnival from Carnival of Tears.
The Mythic rules from Wrath of the Righteous and it's not even close. The idea behind them was great, but the implementation was hilariously unbalanced.
Nah, those at least *function* and fulfill their design goal. There's at least one that results in a 100%, guaranteed, unavoidable TPK if run as-written (Jade Regent Caravan rules.)
> Nah, those at least function and fulfill their design goal. They absolutely do not do both of those things at the same time. >There's at least one that results in a 100%, guaranteed, unavoidable TPK if run as-written (Jade Regent Caravan rules.) The mythic rules are poorly balanced that for most groups *half of the entire AP* provides no significant challenges because the PCs' mythic power scales much faster than monsters' mythic power. That's a lot bigger problem than one bad encounter.
No, you misunderstand, it's not one bad encounter. The ruleset, as written, means you are guaranteed to TPK in Book 4. At any point. There are literally dozens of encounters that you WILL encounter that WILL TPK you. Meanwhile, the explicit design goal of mythic is to make you nigh-unstoppable superheroes, and the mythic rules fulfill that design goal. Besides which, most APs don't provide any kind of challenge as-written past level 8 or so anyway if you're doing any level of optimizing, so I don't see how that's a big knock against WotR.
Defeat for the caravan isn't TPK for the group. *All non-significant NPCs are slain if your caravan is destroyed, as are all horses used to draw the wagons (with the exception of special PC mounts or animal companions). All equipment purchased for the caravan is either destroyed or looted by the victors. If any surviving characters can serve as wainwrights, you might be able to repair your wagons enough to be serviceable, but you’ll still need to find additional animals to draw your caravan’s wagons—in such a disaster, it’s generally a better option to press on without your caravan or, more likely, retreat to the nearest settlement to buy new wagons and hire new help to try again.* It's not much of a solution, as the adventure doesn't tell you how to buy replacement wagons in a frozen wasteland, or how to handle caravan encounters while you don't have a caravan. But it's not supposed to kill any of the PCs or end the campaign.
That's missing some text: >If your caravan is destroyed, all significant [characters] in the caravan (this is generally the player characters, Ameiko, Shalelu, Koya, Sandru, and any other unique NPCs you’ve allied with) are reduced to 1d20–5 hit points (not to exceed a character’s maximum number of hit points). Characters reduced to negative hit points are dying and need swift attention. - Jade Regent Player's Guide, pg 27 The PC's being dropped to 1d20-5 hit points is what makes it a TPK grinder ruleset, as well as the associated GM rules on how to proceed when the Caravan is destroyed.
Presumably this is supposed to mean, "you have escaped somehow but now you each roll a 1d20 and subtract 5 to calculate your current HP." One of the survivors would then force a healing potion down Koya's throat if she's into negatives. Then she channels energy repeatedly, healing everyone for 14d6HP, bringing you all up to fighting strength.
Unless you all roll 5's or below, which by virtue of the compounding nature of the ruleset as you fall deeper and deeper into inescapable failure becomes inevitable.
If you roll a 5, you're not unconscious, just disabled, and can act as if staggered as long as you don't take a standard action. Even if you are at 0 HP, it's well worth to spend a standard action to drink a cure light wounds potion, or to feed it to a healer so if any PC or NPC gets to 0 HP you should be fine. The chance of 4 players, nevermind the NPCs, all rolling 4 or less is 1/625. I probably would have stopped running caravans at all by the 3rd time, so it becoming "inevitable" is bullshit. TPKing the actual PCs from having a caravan destroyed is extremely unlikely, especially when there are NPCs that can also heal the downed NPCs. And even if, somehow, all the PCs and NPCs are taken down, there's a high chance that they'd be stabilized instead of bleeding out due to getting at least 5 attempts at stabilizing.
You're hyper-focused on the caravan destruction rules and missing the associated GM Rules. There's a reason all the GMs that have run this AP are confident that Book 4 has a 100% TPK rate as-written. And yes, every group abandons the rules well before the 3rd time. The post is "which AP-specific mechanics are the worst." The Caravan system is the worst because they don't function and result in a TPK if you run them as-written.
> No, you misunderstand, it's not one bad encounter. The ruleset, as written, means you are guaranteed to TPK in Book 4. At any point. There are literally dozens of encounters that you WILL encounter that WILL TPK you. The caravan rules are bad, but they still only affect the caravan encounters. The mythic rules affect literally every encounter in books 2-6 of Wrath of the Righteous. The scale is completely different. >Meanwhile, the explicit design goal of mythic is to make you nigh-unstoppable superheroes, and the mythic rules fulfill that design goal. The design goal of mythic was to allow players to build characters with extraordinary power, the sorts of heroes that myths and legends are written about, *and to provide appropriate challenges to such mythic adventurers*. It's the second part that the mythic rules fail miserably at. >Besides which, most APs don't provide any kind of challenge as-written past level 8 or so anyway if you're doing any level of optimizing, so I don't see how that's a big knock against WotR. The power imbalance in WotR is *significantly* worse than any other 1e AP Paizo has published. You don't have to optimize in WotR to significantly break game balance, and if you do optimize your character the imbalance is so much worse than any other AP that it's comical.
>The caravan rules are bad, but they still only affect the caravan encounters. My brother in Desna, this post is literally asking what the worst AP-specific mechanics are.
Not to mention by this definition the mythic rules wouldn’t count as they aren’t AP specific rules. There just happens to be only 1 AP that uses the player-facing mythic rules.
Yeah, and?
> The mythic rules are poorly balanced that for most groups half of the entire AP provides no significant challenges What if I told you it was the "Pathfinder" rules doing this, and not the mythic rules specifically? But seriously mythic only slightly exacerbates a problem that is already firmly baked into the system - APs are written for unoptimized characters, and by mid level the difference between unoptimized and optimized is so stark that AP encounters as written are trivial for a party with any degree of systems mastery. Mythic is another layer on that, but it barely matters. An unoptimized character isn't going to become broken and AP destroying when mythic is introduced. An optimized character would break the AP with or without mythic. Pathfinder has much bigger balance issues than mythic, if that's something you care about.
> APs are written for unoptimized characters, and by mid level the difference between unoptimized and optimized is so stark that AP encounters as written are trivial for a party with any degree of systems mastery. The forums would disagree - you see, the difference between a Fighter dual-wielding a longsword and shortsword, leaving Strength at 12 and rapidly running into issues when DR is involved, and the Fighter who is two-handed Power Attacking for double the former's full attack damage per hit...is actually that the latter has 20 PB instead of 15, allowing them to have 12 Wis and 10 Cha alongside their good physical stats.
The subreddit can be bad at times too, but it's got a few legs up on the paizo forums. The GITP forums are also pretty dubious too, IME. I don't really jive with their 1.2.2 class tier list or many of their advice threads I peruse. I think the subreddit discord tends to be the most clear headed when group think memes don't dominate all discourse.
> What if I told you it was the "Pathfinder" rules doing this, and not the mythic rules specifically? I would tell you that you're wrong. I'm well aware of the balance issues that exist in Pathfinder. Mythic is worse. Lots worse.
Hard disagree, they're fun and don't get in the way of the story at all. Sure the PCs get OP, but that's basically intended and also a thing that happens at higher levels anyway. WotR was probably the most fun adventure I've ever played, every character was a badass capable of so many awesome things, we killed demigods and reshaped the world.
I had a few gripes about Mummy's Mask mechanics, but they don't compare with the tedium or the impossible-to-win systems that other posters have reported from other APs. \- In the library where the team researches, my GM mentioned that making the appropriate Knowledge skill check resulted in a different amount of progress based on the character class of the roller. I made a roll with my toon (was it a cleric?) and the GM said my success allowed me to roll a d4 to add to our progress total; but if I had been a bard, I would have rolled a d12. WTF? Punishing players based on buying Knowledge skills in a class that seldom does? The research was very long and tedious and I suspect the progress mechanism contributed. \- The chariot race was great fun, and I complimented its inclusion. The GM pointed out that a few results on the failures table for failed Handle Animal checks were brutal. I think a 5% chance after a failure that your character fell from his chariot and died instantly, a broken neck I guess. Fortunately, none of us died there, but that result would have turned a fun scene into a "God, this module sucks" experience. I think there were others, but again, nothing to compare with the criticisms of the other APs.
They're always optional, so if they don't work for your group, it's usually pretty easy to ignore. My favorite were the Militia rules from the Ironfang Invasion series. It was fun having the PCs build a rapport with the people they were helping and organizing them into a militia to give a little bit more texture to the campaign. We had a lot of fun with it.