Re: Skill Challenge in H1

tussock wrote:
I ran my first playtest session of it yesterday. It failed pretty
miserably. Encounters A3 and A4 are a disaster. I had modified them to
make them more palatable and reduce the difficulty, and my players still
got plastered. And they got plastered when we reset and reran the
encounters a second time with foreknowledge. They managed to eke out a
victory the third time by (a) splitting up the encounter into several
easier encounters and (b) getting very lucky with a sleep spell.

It's for 5 PCs, otherwise you're supposed to lower the number of
monsters proportionately, not that H1 tells you that. I presume you mean
A2 and A3, where the slinger warns the guys in the cave and starts the
clock early in there.

We had 5 PCs.

Plus, you *need* a Cleric, so when people inevitably go negative you
can Healing Word them back to 0+surge+1d6+3, and giving 3 HP/round to
anyone under fire is handy. Also, Wizard for the minions, Scorch away
(missing with Burning Hands makes things /much/ harder in a big fight).

We had a wizard, but no cleric. We did, however, have a warlord (which
supposedly fills the same niche). The warlord has the same twice-per-
encounter ability to get people back on their feet.

We have a preliminary theory that part of the problem is the inter-
dependence of the niches in a tactical sense: It seemed that once one
character went down, everything unraveled pretty quickly.

The real problem with this encounter, however, is the fact that it so
easily and quickly becomes three encounters all happening at once. The
changes I made to the encounter and the circumstances of gameplay
meant that, effectively, the second wave in A3 didn't arrive until 5
rounds after the first wave attacked (as opposed to 3 rounds as
written in the module).

Despite that, the PCs simply did not have the resources left by the
time the last wave of opponents showed up to deal with it. I mean,
based on subsequent replays, that final wave of creatures is a tough
encounter all by itself even when the PCs are fully charged.

Our last replay was literally just that final wave (Irontooth, 2
dragonshields, and a wyrmpriest) with the PCs having full hit points
and all of their encounter and daily powers. They won... but only
because the wizard got off a sleep spell in the first round of combat
that hit all four of them. This is:

(a) Unlikely, because the wizard only has about a 50% chance of
effecting each of them.
(b) Impossible with the default set-up because they come from
different directions (but I specifically introduced a choke point on
the second wave's approach to make them more manageable).

Then, through sheer chance, the monsters rolled poorly on their saving
throws in such a way that the PCs were essentially fighting them one
at a time. This meant that:

(a) None of the enemies benefited from the abilities that only work
when attacking with somebody else.
(b) The wizard was able to use scorching burst to not only blast the
awake one, but also easily soften up the ones still sleeping.

And despite all of those factors nerfing the encounter, one of the PCs
still went negative.

--
Justin Alexander
http://www.thealexandrian.net
.

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