Posted a recap of the April 1, 2011 session of the Northridge Pathfinder Game. This is a long one – eighteen pages.
Comments Off on 04-01-2011 Pathfinder Game RecapPosted a recap of the March 11, 2011 session of the Northridge Pathfinder Game.
Comments Off on 03-11-2011 Pathfinder Game RecapPosted a recap of the February 25, 2011 session of the Northridge Pathfinder Game.
Comments Off on 02-25-2011 Pathfinder Game RecapPosted a recap of the February 11, 2011 session of the Northridge Pathfinder Game.
Comments Off on 02-11-2011 Pathfinder Game RecapPosted a recap of the January 28, 2011 session of the Northridge Pathfinder Game
Comments Off on 01-28-2011 Pathfinder Game RecapA friend of my from the Valley Area Gamers, who ran the 1530s Europe Campaign, is now running a Pathfinder Campaign.
The campaign is called “In The Service Of The Empire” and I am playing a half-orc barbarian air elmentalist called Speaks With Wind. As with the previous campaign, I am doing in character recaps of the game session and posting them here.
Comments Off on In The Service Of The EmpireIn one of the Pathfinder Society Games I played recently, one of the other players commented that he thought the new Persistent Spell feat found in the Advanced Players Guide was overpowered. As I feel that most metamagic feats are worthless, I decided to do a little analysis of the feat to see if it was really worth a +2 to the spell level.
A summary of the feat: by increased the level of a spell by two levels, any targets that need to make saving throws need to roll two separate d20s, taking the lower of the two results. To see how this played out, I set up a spreadsheet to roll 5000 sets of 2d20, taking the lower and seeing what the percentage of each final result was. I also calculated the percentage if each was taken singly and compared that to the statistical 5% chance for each value. I ran it multiple times and got fairly similar results each time. I have shown one set of the results below, as well as a graph comparing the values.
| Result | Straight 1d20 | Lower Of 2d20 | Result | Straight 1d20 | Lower Of 2d20 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 5.23% | 10.32% | 11 | 4.53% | 3.90% | |
| 2 | 5.16% | 9.46% | 12 | 4.76% | 4.04% | |
| 3 | 5.26% | 8.96% | 13 | 5.18% | 4.06% | |
| 4 | 4.76% | 7.76% | 14 | 4.98% | 3.32% | |
| 5 | 4.93% | 7.44% | 15 | 5.27% | 2.56% | |
| 6 | 4.96% | 7.66% | 16 | 4.89% | 2.06% | |
| 7 | 4.99% | 6.80% | 17 | 5.03% | 1.96% | |
| 8 | 5.49% | 7.00% | 18 | 4.93% | 1.06% | |
| 9 | 4.81% | 5.36% | 19 | 4.68% | 0.54% | |
| 10 | 5.19% | 5.46% | 20 | 4.97% | 0.28% |
Normally, using 1d20 you would expect a 25% chance of a roll of 5 over lower, 50% of 10 or lower and 75% chance of 15 or lower. The average roll would be 10.5.
For 2d20, take the lowest, the average was a little over 7 (7.07 in the numbers above). The odds of getting a roll of 5 or lower were about 44%, 10 or lower was about 76%, and 15 or lower was about 94%.
| Range | 1d20 | Lower of 2d20 |
| 1 – 5 | 25% | 43.94% |
| 1-10 | 50% | 76.22% |
| 1-15 | 75% | 94.10% |
What this actually means is dependent upon the Difficulty Class of the effect and any bonuses to the saving throw. Still, I think this fairly equivalent to raising the DC by 3 to 4. As I think that +2 to a DC is worth a +1 increase in spell level, I actually think that Persistent Spell might actually be one of the few worthwhile metamagic feats.
The OpenOffice.org spreadsheet I used for the analysis can be found here
Comments Off on An Analysis Of The Persistent Spell FeatI played PFS #3 – Murder On The Silken Caravan last Saturday and PFS #12 – Stay of Execution yesterday. Both were with the same DM and used OpenRPG, so I think I have a decent basis for comparison. About 1/2 the players were the same as well.
PFS #3 – Murder On The Silken Caravan took much, much longer. We started at 9 AM last and finished up a little after 5 PM (without any breaks). One of the players had to drop out a little after noon, because it was taking too long. The last combat was just a number crunching exercise. The big bad would knock a character into negatives, we would heal that person while doing a little bit of damage to him, and then repeat. We also had a new character (a first level druid) who didn’t take any weapons so after his big snake got put down, he wasn’t a whole lot of use, other than for some healing. Despite the length, and the fact that my character can’t seem to make any Will saves, I did have fun with the adventure. I think it was the better of the two overall.
PFS #12 – Stay of Execution went a whole lot faster. We started at 3 PM and were done by about 7 PM. However, it seemed little more than a series of semi-related encounters. While I was playing, the following picture and the words "railroad plot" kept popping into my head:
That isn’t really fair to the DM, though. As I normally do, I bought the module afterwards and any railroading is kind of baked-in. We actually managed to role-play through some of the encounters, despite the module seeming to assume that we would just fight our way through. After reading the module, I was impressed at how flexible the DM had been. My character’s faction missions were laughable. If you had all of the encounters, they would be completed. It was a fun adventure, but that was due more to the role-playing skills of the other players and DM than due to the module design.
In prepping for the adventure, I did learn a bit more about OpenRPG. Some of the plug-ins often some nice features (global variables, et. al.) but I definitely think TTopRPG is a better program.
Comments Off on Two More Pathfinder Society Modules CompletedI have been playing around with OpenRPG, and have one real annoyance. The Status Bar Toolbar keeps getting larger (when docked and then undocked), and there is no way I can find to resize it. Vertically it is too large, and horizontally too small.
On the plus side, it can be turned off and seems to be mostly useless, anyway.
11/28/2009 Update:
Somehow, I managed to turn off the Game Server window and couldn’t get it back; the menu command and Ctrl-B didn’t work. I finally managed to restore it by replacing layout.xml in the myfiles folder with a copy from a fresh install of OpenRPG. Not only did this restore the ability to pop up the Game Server window, it reset the Status Bar Toolbar.
Last night was my third Pathfinder Society Game. Ithuriel, ran PFS #17 – Perils of The Pirate Pact.
It was another fun session. A little longer than the first one, but not nearly as long as the second. The length was important, as this was another “red-eye” adventure, starting as Midnight Eastern Time.
We had six PCs again. There were supposed to be seven, but two were no shows and we had a last minute addition. From my limited experience, six seems to be the perfect table size.
The plot behind the story was pretty blatant, even though the DM toned down some of the hints. The combat was the easiest of the three adventures so far. Only one PC went into negative hit points. The plot was a little more complicated than PFS #7 – Among The Living, but not nearly as much as #10 – Blood At Dralkard Manor. This was more linear – go to one area, have a combat, go to the next area area, have another.
My character’s faction quest actually seemed a little meaningful, in that it really did promote the goals of my faction, albeit in a very minor way. It was interesting that there were two other Osirion faction members present, so we were all doing the same quest. That made it really easy, because if any one of us succeeded, we all did. This morning I bought the module, as usual, and four of the five faction quests seemed like they would be useful to the faction. Only one (Taldor) seemed like it was really a stretch.
We also used Skype again. I think I prefer the games with a voice chat to those without.
The most important thing is that this was my character’s third adventure, so he leveled ;-). Korvan Winterlight is now Level 2.
Comments Off on Perils Of The Pirate Pact