Six weeks back, I got both the Pathfinder and the D&D starter sets
and got a group of beginners to take a look at what they thought of each. The results, to say the least, caused a bit
of a firestorm, which hadn’t been the intention at the time, and after checking
with a bunch of people, I asked the beginners if they would (suitably bribed
with milkshake and Oreo’s) consider playing through the adventures that were
presented in the sets to see what they thought of them.
They finished last week, and while I’m not going to go through each set
of adventures in massive detail, I will put the blow by blow account of the
first adventures as they went through it.
In both cases, I sat on the sidelines while they played, making notes on
what was going on while they made their own mistakes.
That wasn’t easy…
I’d forgotten in both games how much you just need to know the system
before you can play it with anything resembling fluency, it’s been that long
since I did anything as an absolute beginner that things like hit rolls and
saving throws have been a part of my standard vocabulary for as long as I can
remember.
Not so the beginners…
We started with the Pathfinder adventure, mainly because the D&D
adventure is not so much a single adventure as a whole mini-campaign, and we
did this because the thought had been that if they played one game for a month
and then had to switch to a new rules system, they might find that more
difficult than having a single week on one game and then switching to something
else.
Pathfinder
It’s a dungeon crawl, there’s no other way around it, the paragraph
that the GM read was enough to get them into the idea that they’re going down a
dungeon, there to smack the dragon up and loot its treasure.
So far so good…
The interesting thing here was that none of them had a moment of panic
about the idea that there was a dragon
down here in the dungeon, which I can only put down to them not really knowing
just how dangerous dragons can be at this point. That said, their previous experience of
dragons was the talky bugger encountered in the last Hobbit film, which
couldn’t fry a dwarf to save its own punctured ass and was easily outsmarted by
coinsurfing hobbits, rather than the tank chewing psychotic in Reign of Fire….
First encounter, goblins, mown down like grass, much celebrating,
through to find treasure and goodies in the next room, all is well and getting
better. A fork in the road and the players went right to a room that had
treasure at the back of the room. A
warning of “Approach with Humility and Live” had two of the older players (both
Indiana Jones fans) on their knees and crawling to the edifice to retrieve the
gems and then south to the area below.
Filled with Spider webs, big spider webs…
As one, the players looked at each other, one of them asked if it
looked like the lair of Shelob from lord of the rings, the GM nodded and as
one, the players retreated without looking any further. Next room was a room full of goblins, who
pulled a mind scrambler by talking to the PC’s.
One PC made the charisma check and the goblins talked, telling them
about the dragon and the weakness of it’s belly (many smaug comments ensued,
but all of them were of the opinion that it couldn’t be much of a dragon if it
fit in the small cave…), then through to the Deadly pool and the encounter with
the Reefclaw, which dealt them a few nasty blows before they downed it. The GM followed the instructions on the treasure
section and got the players to find the Dragonbane longsword before they went
on to the Dragons Den…
And it all went a bit Pete Tong…
They’d agreed beforehand to roll all dice where they could be seen, so
there was no suggestion that any of them (including the GM) could fudge the
dice rolls either way. So the Dragon on
turn one turning the magic user into a puddle of dissolved sludge wasn’t
avoidable. The others charged and the
Dragon responded by causing serious damage to all three (there was no doubt
from any of them they wouldn’t be making it through the next round). It took a hit from the fighter with the
dragonbane sword but no one else managed to hit it, but that was enough, per
the encounter, to have the GM cause the dragon to run away.
And thus three of them lived to fight another day, tons of treasure,
magic items everywhere, and only the scooping up of the magic user to consider
the day a bad one, and with a new character rolled up by the time they’d got
back to the town, they weren’t much dismayed by that.
Thoughts on Pathfinder
Thoughts on the adventure were varied, they liked the puzzles, they
liked that there was loads of treasure, the Dragon neither sounding like
Benedict Cumberbatch nor talking in the first place took them all by surprise,
and melted mage on turn one really put their head in the game in a big
way. They agreed that overconfidence was
a bad thing, and that their perception of things being coloured by films
probably hadn’t helped. When they found
out that there was a specific clause in the dragons combat entry that indicated
“Run Away If…”, they did feel a little cheated at the outcome and wanted
another shot at it, only this time when they’d got a few more levels and a lot
more goodies…
D&D Campaign
So thus week one down, it came to the turn of the D&D
campaign. Again using the Pregens from
the starter set, they set out on the road to Phandalin.
First encounter, Goblins, four of them, and unlike the ones found in
the first Pathfinder encounter, the party actually took a few hits from these,
giving them pause for thought. The
comment issued at the time was “If the goblins are this tough, I’m not going
near any dragons”. But, passed the encounter
with no fatalities and a few light wounds and set about searching the area for
the Goblins trail, found it and set off with the fighter in the lead. Noticed the first trap but fell down the
second and passed again for a second, these new, not negotiating goblins were
something that they weren’t happy about…
On and downwards to the Lair, where they found wolves waiting for them
which they proceeded to shoot from a distance before the wolves broke out and
attacked. Not a difficult fight as the
two wolves that made it to the party were both wounded and went down in the
first round without managing to hit back.
The fissure at the back looked too narrow for their liking, so they came
back out and up to the steep passage where it got dark and out came the
torches. Around to the Bridge, where
they spotted the goblin at the same time as the goblin spotted them, wounded it
but didn’t manage to kill it before it got the warning off and a few seconds
later, the torrent of water came smashing down to sweep two of them to the
bottom of the caves, then the second a moment later.
It was at this point that the players got really serious about the
game, these weren’t just creatures waiting in a hole for them to come and loot,
these were intelligent enemies and needed to be treated as such. The PC’s went back up into the caves where
the goblins had been forewarned.
I have to say that at this point, I’d have had the goblins lining the
area above with bows ready, but the person in charge was doing it by the book, so
the goblins were still waiting by the pools, ready, but not being
proactive. One goblin had gone to warn
the boss in the back and they were lying in wait. The two goblins outside didn’t last long, and
the players moved through to the back room where the others were waiting for
them.
It was at this point that the mage asked what point there was in the Sleep
spell...
Burning hands and Magic Missile he understood (having had the same
spells in the Pathfinder game) but what was the point of the Sleep spell,
singular most useless spell ever...
Briefly to the rulebook...
Lightbulb....!
One ambush later, the enemy having got one hit off before the sleep
spell wiped them out wholesale, the players looked over the bridge to areas
unknown, possibly containing far more goblins and traps, then at each other and
voted a short rest to get the slot for the sleep spell back...
An hour later, refreshed and reloaded, they went back up and made a
spectacular run at the remaining goblins, the fact that the gobbo’s were all dead
or sleeping by round two notwithstanding and excellent dice rolls for
initiative cannot be discounted, but now armed with every first level mage’s
ideal weapon, small level encounters suddenly ceased to have real meaning.
Having managed this part of the campaign, they promptly looted the
caves, expecting to find perhaps the same level of treasure that they’d found
in the pathfinder adventure, only to be reasonably disappointed when they found
that the amount of treasure was nowhere near what they’d found in the previous
adventure.
Thoughts on D&D
This was week two, and I spoke to the players both individually and as
a group at this point, seeing what they’d liked about both and what they’d
disliked about the adventure.
They’d very much liked that it was a challenge, they liked that it was
gritty and harsh, rather than the elaborate traps and complex dungeons of the
previous adventure. However, in the next
breath, they also indicated that they’d very much liked the traps and layouts
of the previous dungeon. They’d taken
this adventure much more seriously than the pathfinder one, a combination of
the first fight causing them injuries and then the intelligent tactics of the
creatures they were up against, whereas the other adventure had been a wipeout,
a conversation, then a dragon and death…
Given that the D&D had a number of other stages to it, they elected
to keep going with that adventure and are still playing it at this point in
time, having now got to the stage where they’d got involved in the game and
unlike the pathfinder, there was something else to run straight at. When last we played (this is now week four of
the D&D campaign), they were as far as the ruins of Thundertree and were in
the process of running away when they encountered Venomfang, the general
thought being that so far, none of the creatures they’d encountered had given
them any sort of quarter, and the only reason they got out of the last Dragon
encounter was because it had a run away clause built in...
 |
| Remember what happened the last time we came up against one of these? |
Systemworks
They didn’t find much to discuss when it came to basic game play, they
liked the choices of feats with Pathfinder and they liked
Advantage/Disadvantage (but mostly Advantage) with D&D. The big difference came in when it came to
gaining levels and they checked the different amounts required, at which point
D&D came in for a very large win with the 300 against Pathfinders 2000, but
the thought on it was that the D&D encounters for the most part had been far
more lethal (until they discovered Sleep...), so getting players off that first
level death row was absolutely vital, whereas in Pathfinder, Dragons
notwithstanding, players could get through without really craving those extra
levels.
Conclusions
The interesting thing here is that from an experienced player and GM
perspective, I know that modules, adventures, and campaigns vary wildly, and
expectations from the starter sets can be something that colour perspective
quite strongly, even if the follow up material is nothing like the material you were presented with in the first instance...
However, from an inexperienced point of view, the players liked the
challenge of the D&D adventure but the rewards of the Pathfinder adventure,
something combining the two would have been ideal. They certainly didn’t mind having more
difficult fights and things to puzzle over, but they wanted the rewards that
went with those risks.
From the inexperienced GM point of view, the notes and details on the
pathfinder adventure were very useful, particularly when pointing out ways that
the players could go about things and places in which GM intervention to
prevent TPK (Total Party Kill) may be required.
However, the sheer mass of adventure presented in the D&D set still
has them playing through at the moment, because after the first session, they
got the idea that this might be a little lethal and have been playing
cautiously (Even though they’re at third level now) since that point.
The groups thoughts were that they’ll probably return to pathfinder
after finishing this campaign and see if they can get the same enjoyment out of
taking characters up the levels more slowly than they have been doing in
D&D, but they’re new to all of it and it’ll take time. The main point that was made was that the
D&D adventure may take a little more to get in to in the beginning, but
with the sheer amount of it present, it forms a solid base for the first few months
of play for absolute beginners (which it wouldn’t for experienced players), and
that goes a long way when you’re just getting into something.
Of course, if D&D products start appearing at the speed that
Pathfinder products normally make it out, then they may just stay with the game
that they’ve got going with and that’ll be where the matter rests.
So to continue the Game of Thrones analogy from the first review...
In the matter of Pathfinder’s Viper against D&D’s Mountain, it
looks like the Viper may have just got his teeth knocked out, but it remains to
be seen whether or not the Mountain will come back as Strong...
But more on that in three months, and the good news is that I’m not having to bribe them
anymore...
