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Tonight I got to try out the new 12/17 packet.  I’d like to start out by saying this packet is bull, I couldn’t roll initiative higher than a 3.  So I updated my level 2 Stout Rogue for the new packet.  After being forced down the combat chute in 4^th edition, I’m letting my flag fly and going for a really iconoclastic rogue.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I like to think of this character as the “Littlefinger Rogue.”  More focused on intrigue.  And this is even knowing that we’re doing Caves of Chaos.  It’s very dungeon crawly.  I don’t mean that as a negative, it’s just not something you would bring to a crawl.  But to me, that’s the point.  If I tried to bring something to a random 4^th edition game that was intentionally bad at combat, I’d get ****ed.  And I know this.  There will be combat, it will take at least an hour, and if you try to avoid the combat in the kind of published game that gets played at public gatherings people stare at you like you’re juggling in a graveyard.  It’s charming but not really the time or place.

So how what’s new and how did it work?  For starters, I like having more stuff.  Benefit, Talents, Tricks oh my.  The fistful of dice thing wasn’t the drag I thought it would be.  You’ve got one die for skills (well two, Rogue) and one die for damage.  It was cool and the math worked.  The fact is many of the goblins and things you fight are minions.  The d6 damage die felt right in combat against an ogre and hobgoblins.  2d6 + Dex felt like I could make a meaningful contribution.

Skill Dice were a bit of a mixed bag.  Rolling two of them felt like a bit much of  a nerf compared to the floor of 16 in the first packet and the continuous expertise die + Training last time.  I definitely felt the sting of fewer successes.  I guess, with this Skill Mastery mechanic, it feels too much like the situation is left to fortune.  Even rolling two dice and taking the higher.  But I think expertise + training may’ve been too much.  I guess this is the best compromise.

So I wanted to come up with my own scheme because nothing had quite the mix I wanted.  I decided to call this scheme, “Chessmaster.”  It lives somewhere between the Rake and the Trickster.   For a benefit, I couldn’t decide between Sneak Attack and Artful Dodger.  I’ll come back to this later, but I settled on Artful Dodger which seems broken good.  I love how Assassinate obviates the need for a separate assassin class.  As for the other thing, I chose to go with the Trickster’s 3 extra skill tricks.  Not to be an optimizer, but this seemed like far and away the best option.  This turned out to be possibly the best option depending on your playstyle, I’ll explain that too.

What this packet and this adventure told me, more than anything else, is that this packet, this version of D&D, is finally and completely customizable to best suit you and your group’s playstyle.  By this I mean, not all Skills Tricks are equal.  Take Unassuming Threat.  This is cool, you boost your AC when adjacent to a friendly.  But, the type of game my group played tonight, really no one cares, notices, or asks if people are adjacent to each other.  Asking would break the flow.  I’d much rather have Gilded Tongue, a simple reroll, requires no asking or gamey-talk.  When it comes up, reroll.  That’s it.  A tactical grid-rewarding trick like Unassuming Threat is cool, but less useful simply by the nature of our table.

This is why I did some off the books retraining at the table.  Sneak Attack didn’t work for me because advantage didn’t really come up enough to make it a viable option.  I’m not saying the DM was stingy with advantage, its that me personally I’m not comfortable asking for advantage.  I find it too reminiscent of 4E having the players tell me all the conditional modifiers.  It’s annoying.  And it would be too artificial to ask, what do I need to do to get advantage?  So I took up Artful Dodger instead.

So the first Skill Trick I snapped up was Charming Presence.  It was also the first one I dropped.  I found the power felt too much like a spell for my taste.  And Charmed is more like a combat condition.  It’s like one moment I make a Charisma check, then suddenly they’re charmed.  Can’t attack.  Can it be done in the middle of a fight?  Yes but I’m not sure it makes sense.  It didn’t fit the more realist oriented nature of this character and our table.  But that’s okay.  There are enough skill tricks for the game to be customizable.  If I wanted a tacticsy grid game, there are skill tricks that speak to that character and I don’t feel weak or inefficient for not choosing them.

Couple general notes.  I didn’t have a problem with healing.  With Artful Dodger and Unassuming Threat I stayed out of trouble.  But with my 2d6 Hit dice I restored a total of 5 of my 12 hit points.  There wasn’t a cleric, and we didn’t really have health potions.  It wasn’t a problem, but I think that was luck and not design.  The other thing was languages.  We were in a dungeon with lots of scheming monsters and no one spoke any monstrous languages.  It was a problem and more importantly, monstrous languages represent kind of an adventure dead end.  You either know them or you don’t.  If the adventure hinges on knowing one, you’d better give the party a way to learn it.  Otherwise, it’s completely useless.  It only adds a pinch of immersion if I can play with it, right now I can’t.

^{(Dragonette: Let's keep the language and references appropriate. Thanks)}