Mary Yamato's page

Mary Yamato wrote:

the standard for a lot of 2E games I've heard of.

Really?

I mean its certianly possible within the 2nd edition rules but I don't think it was a common issue in 2nd edition otherwise it would have presumably been 'on the radar' when they made 3rd and Monte and the crew would have tried to fix it.

I probably shouldn't have said "2E" as almost all my group's previous experience was with 1E, come to think of it. But my husband's perpetual complaint during our early games together was "You need to think 'dungeon style', meaning one room at a time, retreat, rest, return; instead your PCs try to behave like real people, so of course they die." That was the way his previous groups had taught him to play, and indeed what a lot of published material seemed to expect. We had a ton of TPKs before we adjusted to each others' styles.

He's changed his own tune now, and is a big proponent of "blow through the entire dungeon in one sitting" style. He's remarkably good at it, too, much better than I am. He saves precious rounds on the buff spells by ignoring all treasure--it's amazing what a difference that makes.

I love "five minute workday" as a name for that style, by the way--great description. I loathe the thing itself; it moves the game *so* far from any of the source material. I really enjoyed doing all of _Speaker in Dreams_ as one long night for the PCs (we called it the Night of Terror, and it was the best fight of its entire campaign). Doing it over ten nights instead would just not have been interesting, especially as the town would essentially have been unsaveable after the first night.

Mary

Mary Yamato wrote:

#3 Drop the finale at Hook Mountain; just do the Grauls and Fort Rannick. Remove some rooms from the Fort.

Honestly, I'm cutting the Grauls out of this one. It's a shame Logue's strong ability to evoke powerful images is being used to create images that make me sick.

That works too. There is one set of ogres more than necessary, and it doesn't matter much which one you lose. We had the most fun with Fort Rannick (it was the place we first appreciated that Lel is the Halfling of Wrath--I would not have expected a halfling warmage to be the person holding the lower door against the onrushing ogres!)

Some of the "atrocity art" in Fort Rannick can also be quietly left out; my player let me know he'd heard enough of it already and could fill in for himself henceforth. Artistically speaking, I'd leave *all* of the atrocities out of Fortress, so as to make a clearer distinction between stone giants and ogres--the barrel of eyeball candy in Jorgenfist seemed really out of place. Ogres are hooligans; stone giants are warriors. Otherwise it's just one Big Dumb Thing after another, which is less interesting.

Mary

I have a very pared-down and simple game.

Some spells are outlawed: teleport and fly.

We did this for RotRL (and also lost levitate, dimension door, planeshift, shadow walk, etc.). It was hard to GM in spots because the enemy tactics relied so heavily on fly and teleport, but my player reports that it really improved the game for him.

His comment was along the lines of:

Regular high-level D&D feels like playing a modern elite military squad: pinpoint insertion, destruction of the target, instant escape. I could enjoy that but I'd actually rather do a modern/postmodern game if that's going to be the flavor. RotRL felt much more like fantasy, with real journeys and more sense of place; and we had to deal with the outer defenses, not just skip through to the final target each time. I'd do it again next campaign.

It does make retreat from a bad fight harder, but generally not impossible: the PCs made *heavy* use of spider climb, invisibility and its variants, silence, haste, expeditious retreat, summoning, and area control spells--grease, web, walls of all kinds, black tentacles, and their current favorite, acid fog. And I was really happy that it eliminated the high-end "We teleport onto them with surprise." "They teleport away, and next day they teleport onto *you* with surprise." My player likes the NPCs to use smart tactics, but that one is hell on the PCs if played to PC standards.

Mary

Our experience is that, while Core-only PCs are my preference as a player, we have to scale down the published material quite a bit to make it work. Core PCs are significantly weaker at the high levels.

That said, I went with 5/6 Core PCs for my upcoming CotCT party: fighter, ranger, rogue/sorcerer, cleric, bard. The odd one out is a gestalt wizard/monk, just because the character background was screaming so hard for that combination. I will be very happy if I can advance these PCs in their base classes, avoiding prestige classes completely. (We've found that some of the base classes, particularly paladin, don't work well for that; I tried to pick classes which would.)

People who dislike restricted rules sets tend to assume that the GM is pushing this on reluctant players. For our group it's the opposite. The GM would cheerfully run a splatbook-rich campaign, but I strongly prefer not to play in one. I enjoy the game more when I have a good level of rules mastery, and there are far more rules in those splatbooks than I will *ever* be able to learn.

My SCAP PCs were 5/6 Core also, and the non-Core PC was actually something of a disaster--we didn't have enough experience with the classes involved, and what sounded like a cool and reasonably powerful idea turned out to be nearly unplayably weak. (Oddly, the GM's other group did a similar build, with the same results.) I like character continuity, and gambling on unplaytested splatbooks really bugs me. By the time I knew she would never be any good in combat past 9th level, I was really attached to that PC.

Mary

My untried solution ('cause we took a break from D&D for a while after our last campaign dissolved) is to cut about half the content of the mods I'm running. I'll be taking a hard look at each encounter and making sure it either builds up the story or is at least unique and entertaining enough on its own. Repetitious battles and encounters with too much extranneous background will likely get axed.

Suggestions for cuts in RotRL:

#1 Drop the shadows and one or two of the named NPCs from Thistletop. Remove some empty rooms.

#2 Consider removing the Magnimar arc completely, so as to focus on the haunted house.

#3 Drop the finale at Hook Mountain; just do the Grauls and Fort Rannick. Remove some rooms from the Fort.

#4 Drop the random encounters while travelling. Remove about half the monsters from the lower level of Jorgenfist, and delete the empty rooms.

#5 Cut the physical size of the dungeons a *lot*, especially Gluttony, Wrath and Greed; they are full of useless empty rooms. Don't run the lesser undead in Gluttony. Watch out for the traps, as they can slow play to a crawl: you may want to delete some, particularly the goldfish trap.

#6 Give the PCs a single clear goal in the Lower City and let them slice through to it. Make enough tokens available that the whole party can get them readily; don't make them hunt all over town for tokens.

Mary

I'd seriously consider trying to keep them 1 level ahead of expectations all the way through. Also, with a small party it really helps if everyone can fight at range. Large numbers of NPCs may swamp the small party if it tries to go toe-to-toe with everything, especially in #3 and #4.

Will they take help from NPCs during scenarios? RotRL is unusually well supplied with helpful NPCs, and my player (who had 5 PCs, but they were very sub-optimal ones) leaned on this heavily. (It's the only reason that party survived the end of #2.)

Mary

We didn't put in side adventures initially, and the advancement just chewed the characters up. After Zenith Trajectory it became obvious that this was going to kill the game, so the GM broke out old issues of Dungeon and we did something like seven side adventures between Zenith and the next scenario. After that we aimed for 2 side adventures per main adventure.

If you can get the players to establish something in Cauldron--ours cleaned out the Malachite Hold and started building their own forces there--it's easier to develop local side adventures. I think you lose some of the flavor of this AP if the PCs are encouraged to leave Cauldron too often or too early.

Another thing we did was that when the PCs had developed a grievance against a specific NPC, they'd plot that person's demise--we pulled NPCs out of the later modules as necessary to make this possible. So the PCs went after Jil fairly early, using intrigue to insure that the Last Laugh didn't retaliate for her death (they manuvered things so that she'd become a political liability). They also went after Ashmantle on their own and out of sequence.

It was hard on the GM to do this, but it was the only way to make the AP work; the player flatly refused to continue after Zenith otherwise.

Mary

Thanks for the input so far. I am thinking and tinkering about how to lighten up the dungeon density or combat frequency a bit, but especially Fortress of the Stonegiants makes it difficult.

Without even the first adventure of CotCT in hands it is really hard to tell, but I gues I am too impatient with the next session on the horizon.

How we did Fortress:

I had Mokmurian take one elder from each tribe as hostage to improve his hold over the giant army. The PCs had already made a friend among the giants; they contacted this friend and said, "What would it take for us to turn the army against Mokmurian?" The friend said, "Rescue the elders and destroy the Cauldron. We'll take out the loyalists among the tribes and stage an uprising if you can do that."

This makes it more of a targeted raid and less of a dungeon crawl. My player likes big combats fairly well, so we ended up with a sprawling above-ground battle with mammoths and whatnot running around, but you wouldn't have to.

I also deleted some of the monsters and replaced them with a more organized, larger group of giants inside. They felt kind of random to me, especially the scanderig and the Shining Child.

The one that's really hard to de-dungeon is Sins of the Saviors. My PCs struck a deal with Xaliasa, and later a deal with the Wrathful, but it still played as a big dungeon crawl--just a rather short one (4 sessions).

Mary

We're nearly done.

Things I wish I'd known (does this really need spoilers?)

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised. Compared to any previous AP I've run or played in, RotRL went incredibly smoothly. The overall plot makes good sense, the PCs aren't expected to take ridiculous actions, information flows well, there's no "remind us why we're doing this?" at the endgame. And the setting is very rich.

Mary

The problem lies when something is overpowered for it's CR (Xanesha) or it's after a really really long dungeon crawl (Nualia). If PCs are expected to retreat and rest during dungeon crawls (which may have been the norm back for 2E players but to my group it's an alien concept entirely).

Modern adventure design runs toward more realistic situations, and frequently that doesn't mesh with doing one room a day (the standard for a lot of 2E games I've heard of). Quite a few APs have situations where something bad is happening and the PCs have to stop it *now*. You can't use the same EL mix for a scenario like that as you would for a static dungeon, that's for sure.

Both of the GMs in our group read WOTC's _Speaker in Dreams_ and refused to run it; it seemed utterly preposterous for the listed level. Other groups told us that it's winnable--if you do one encounter a day, thereby allowing the town to be utterly ruined. But we didn't think that would be a lot of fun. We finally ran it for a party +2 levels and +4 characters above what it was written for--at that level, they were able to do it in one day, and it was surprisingly enjoyable.

Mary

Mary Yamato wrote:

I'm not sure how one's supposed to use these modules if the PCs should not have to fight EL=PC level + 4, as every single module ends in such a fight.

Mary

No, they don't. Nualia is EL 6 for a level 3 party. Barl is EL 12 for a level 9 party. The bosses in Sins are EL 16 for a level 13 party.

You're right. I didn't have the books in front of me when I wrote that. (Though--what EL is Malfeshnikor? Higher than Nualia, I think.) But it's apparently always at least EL+3, whereas SirUrza is saying that more than EL+2 is too much.

Also, you're completely forgetting, or outright ignoring, that EL+4 is not only a fight that PCs are supposed to be able to win (albeit by using 80% of their resources, including hit points), but also fights that the DM is supposed to throw at them.

Here I think you are confusing me with the person I was arguing with. I certainly don't argue that EL+4 is impossibly high; I was just pointing out that, if one *does* argue that, the modules become hard to use. You're correct that not every one has an EL+4 fight, but at least three of them do, and the other three have EL+3.

My experience is that *most* EL+4 fights are very winnable for a careful party. You get trouble if the encounter happens to hit the PCs' weaknesses; if they go into it already depleted; or if the GM rolls high and the players roll low. Those aren't really avoidable by the module authors.

But every once in a while there's something labeled EL+4 that chews PCs up and spits them out, group after group. There's one in AoW; there's one in SCAP; and here's one in RotRL. Being able to spot these in advance would be nice. The EL alone doesn't do it: our SCAP party had been reliably able to take EL+4...up until that one.

Mary

Just to chime in on this thread. I too would like to throw my support behind the current format of Pathfinder. An arc that goes from lvl 1-15 is probably (at least for my group and my own tastes) the best fit.

Just as a note: RotRL's final episode does not end at 15th level, it begins at 15th level. It's a longish adventure and I suspect most groups will be 17th-18th when they finish.

I had thought from the ads that the path was 1-15, and I was surprised and a bit disappointed to find out it's 1-17.

We abandoned AoW at 17th and SCAP at 15th. So far RotRL has run better than either, but the now-17th level PCs in my game are too high level for my tastes.

I am profoundly grateful it wasn't written 1-20, though.

Mary

I had a group of ogres preparing a feast for him: after all, what's the point of being King if you just sit on your cold throne all day alone? They didn't trouble the PCs much but they did add action and color.

Also, note that his bodyguard's HP are a typo: should be 117, I think.

The encounter area is large, which will help reduce the Silence problem. The bodyguards (and optional ogres) should try to engage early, to leave Barl some room for manuver.

(It was an anticlimax for my group too, but Fort Rannick was strong enough that the player didn't seem to care.)

Mary

To players, you are the story, and the story will not move without you, so kill the dragons and get the gold, do not worry when the gold was minted.

For some players--I'm one, and the player in my RotRL campaign is another--this advice is just "Have less fun."

We have had so many really wonderful moments that came directly out of thinking about the gameworld and trying to make it make sense. I wouldn't give that up for anything: it's a major reason I play D&D. Otherwise video games would be better for me, as they deliver a lot more action with a lot less bookkeeping.

One bit I really liked: the PCs found a drowned man with a Sihedron mark washed up on the bank of the Skull River on their way up. From that mark plus the information they'd gathered in Ilsurian, they (correctly) deduced what had been going on with Paradise, and that they were probably hunting a lamia matriarch. It was really satisfying having things hang together well enough that they could reach conclusions and act on them, rather than having to be led.

"When was the gold minted?" is actually a pretty cool question--all through RotRL my player asked me that every time they found treasure, and if the gold was Thassilonian, the PCs hoarded it rather than spending it. Several times, it gave them a clear hint as to who they were dealing with: and it was also a nice bit of flavor, to show how obsessed they were with ancient Thassilon. If you told my player "Stop doing that" he'd just roll his eyes. He knows what's fun for him!

Mary

My GM refuses to start until he has the *second* episode in his hands. While I understand his reasons (having gotten badly bitten by RotRL several times) it's driving me crazy. We have characters already, we did a short getting-acquainted adventure, and I want to start now!

He's afraid that the second episode will put strong constraints on how he needs to depict institutions like the temples and wizards' guilds, and he wants to know that before he establishes something he'll have to recant later.

We'll be done with RotRL before we start, though maybe not by very much (the endgame combats take a long, long time). But I'm also finding that I'm more excited by CotCT than by the endgame of RotRL, partly because high-level play is really not my thing, and partly because I've been GMing and I'm really jonesing to get to play....

Mary

Our SCAP game had a unicorn paladin mount who turned out to be more like another PC than like a warhorse--she was a creature of strong opinions. (And kept her faith intact when the paladin, alas, did not.) I was quite fond of her.

Now I'm really attracted to the idea of finding out what sort of paladin would properly ride a nightmare. A paladin of Wee Jas might appropriately ride an undead steed--I picture some kind of skeletal horse--except that her powers might tend to nuke her own mount unless you gave it a special exemption.

Mary

Similarly they would not have put in the Advanced Eye of the Deep in Savage Tide if they had really clued into the fact the creatures stunning gave attack had a DC so high that the whole party would simply be perpetually stunned and dispatched by the creature with ease.

The most reliable TPK in SCAP is a monster with class levels; so is the most reliable TPK in AoW. I haven't played STAP but it sounds like that's another example. They seem significantly hard to rate compared to either humanoids with class levels or regular monsters. It might be worth considering such creatures as "red flag" encounters which need to be vetted with particular attention. It seems very easy for one or two numbers (AC, DR, SR, damage, save DCs) to get out of the normal range.

I'll be interested to see if Mokmurian is a problem encounter when more groups reach that module; his CR certainly seems wildly wrong. (I can't say from my own game, because my player has adopted a strategy of never tackling a BBG without substantial NPC assistance--in this case, most of the giant army.)

For CotCT my GM is planning to make a table of the PCs' to-hits, saves, AC and hp, and to check each encounter against it. The TPKs in the previous APs were so hard on player morale that we really don't want to repeat them. We did a side adventure in SCAP in which a book CR12 creature (leonal guardinal) easily took out 9 PCs and NPC allies, levels 11-13. Since then I really do not trust even book CRs, and ones that have to be extrapolated are much worse.

Mary

Mary Yamato wrote:

But this means I have little idea what level they were expected to be.

They're expected to be within 2 levels lower then the EL written on the descriptor for the room. That's the whole point for having EL. Otherwise adventures would just say "your party gets 10,000xp for completing this room."

Any lower then 2 levels below the EL and your party runs dangerously low on resources before the next room.

I'm not sure how one's supposed to use these modules if the PCs should not have to fight EL=PC level + 4, as every single module ends in such a fight.

My impression is that Paizo does not agree with you on the target EL for a party of a given level.

Mary

One way I've boosted giants in the past is to alter feats to give them Awesome Blow and Cleave and allow the two abilities to work together.

Meaning, if the character knocks his opponent back he can immediately make an attack on another adjacent target? Even if the first target is not dropped? I just want to be sure I understand what you're proposing.

I don't think this would help with the PC party described, where there is only one PC engaging the giants. (Nor with mine, where there are generally 0 PCs engaging the giants--they avoid engaging in melee as much as possible, and are very good at that.)

Mary

My favorite humor bit from RotRL was when the PCs were trying to haul an unconscious giant prisoner down a snowy mountain on an improvised sled. The organizing PC failed his Survival check, and the sled began to slide away from its haulers. The human and centaur PCs dutifully made Strength checks as they grabbed the ropes, reached for handy trees, braced themselves and just barely managed to stop the sled from escaping.

They then turned to look at the sled and found all three of the halfling PCs sitting on it--apparently on the grounds that if the sled was going to make an uncontrolled descent to the bottom of the mountain, they wanted to be along for the ride!

The fact that one of those halflings is now the Champion of Wrath--and really lives up to the name--has also been fun. Watching Lel sweep into the room with his entourage of inhumanly tall bodyguards and air of unquestionable menace--all four feet of him--is pretty cool.

Mary

I've heard a theory once: That theory is that GMs are interested in playing the game to expand the story of the world, while players could care less about the story and only want to get new powers and magic for their characters. I think that theory's not quite right... I think that some players DO care about the game world, but again in my experience, most of those players are also GMs, so they're not really approaching the game experience solely as a player.

I'm not clear on how having been a GM in the past means "not really approaching the game experience solely as a player." My experience with the APs has been rather the opposite. I deal with the (for us) too-fast advancement better as a GM than as a player. The place were it really kills me is where I indulge my desire to have a party NPC (the apprentice wizard in AoW, the half-ghoul fighter in RotRL) and I find out yet again that I can't handle the advancement and maintain characterization. This is a player-level problem; it crops up when I GM specifically because I (maybe inappropriately) am trying to enjoy bits of the game the way a player might.

Players are players. They like different things. I don't think it helps to label one group "not really players."

But sure, I realize that I'm one end of a big continuum of tastes. I just can't help drooling at the thought of getting an AP that would work for us. They've got so much good material, it's perennially frustrating that they don't quite work (though RotRL came closer than any of the previous ones).

Mary

One of the benefits of leveling up fairly commonly is that its fun to work on your character. This can tie in with the aging demographic as well. Family responsibilities might mean that you can't play all that often but every month or so you can 'play' a bit by leveling up your character after the spouse and ankle biters have gone to sleep.

Conversely, my husband and I play from modules because there's no time (we're in that demographic too) and keeping the levels low and advancement slow allows us to spend more time playing and less time doing number-crunching. I find that the older I get, the more I resent being asked to spend my gaming time doing bookkeeping.

Mary

James Jacobs wrote:

Would adding in a bit that says what average party level each of the various portions of the adventure expects be a good thing?

Oh, good god, yes. I'm absolutely shocked that you don't do this already (especially in an AP that has expectations of multiple level gains in a single book). I haven't read the books in exacting detail, so I was assuming you've been doing this already. You mean to say you haven't? Boooooo. :(

Again, to reiterate: Do. This. Now.

It would have been SOOO helpful in Spires.... The structure of the adventure is such that the PCs might do almost nothing in the Lower City, or might do a heck of a lot--mine chose the latter course--and it would be really nice to have a clue what level the Upper City is written for. 16? 17? 18? Darn, that's a huge range.

I'm not tracking EXP; if I was, my PCs' unusual solution to the Lower City would probably put them higher than they ought to be. Wow, a high level party can handle a *lot* of giants. But this means I have little idea what level they were expected to be.

Mary

When I look at it, I can't help but think "The monsters can't possibly actually look like that. I wonder what they 'really' look like?"

I had the same reaction. And then I found the picture of Most High, and I *really* wondered; it's hard to see how the two pictures depict the same species.

I really like the harridan's hair, though.

Mary

We noticed it, and for our large party it's been tactically tricky, but I think my player actually prefers the occasional realistically sized map--he'd been making a lot of snarky comments about how all D&D buildings are built by and for giants.

It does accentuate the weirdness of the 5' spacerequirement, though.

I've had a lot more trouble with the alternating use of 5' and 10' map scales--I know why this is necessary, but I keep missing it. Often the room description implies a normally sized room but the 10' scale map shows an enormous room; this is confusing.

Mary

Aldern's offense block and his special-abilities block disagree on whether it's his bite or his claws that cause disease (should be the bite).

Mary

None of these extras need to be statted out, you have a good idea what they can do, and how many hps they have. When it seems about right for them to go down they do.

All you did was double the number of baddies, maxxed out a couple of them, fudge some rolls that are close enough, and use PC tactics like crazy against the PCs. The encounter becomes much more dynamic and far more complicated for the PCs.

You'll want to assess your players before doing this: some players are violently allergic to fudging, and if you do it frequently the players *will* know (if they are paying attention). I can change the monster's tactics but "when it seems right for them to go down they do" is forbidden at our table--it drives my player up the wall.

Be careful not to go to the opposite extreme and make ever single fight blisteringly hard. A lot of groups get battle fatigue if they don't have easy encounters too.

Mary

The Denizen of Leng's saves don't take account of its 10 outsider HD; they are just its stat bonuses.

In the encounter which features this creature, it is supposed to flank and then alternately attack and "harry the PCs with its spell-like abilities." It has no suitable spell-likes except hypnotic pattern, which is a very poor choice for this tactic as it is broken by attacking.

(We had fun with this creature, though. One of then showed up at a huge PCs-versus-giants fight and quietly watched, walking through the fight to get better vantage points. It had such an air of self-assurance that the PCs left it completely alone. Now they are wondering what it was.)

Mary

Nor will every player survive written product. Particularly when DMs ignore existing labels that tell them the difficulty level of the encounter the party is about to face.

How many CR10 book monsters have AC30 (not to mention AC34, which she should if played by the rules)?

In my experience most unimproved book CR10's can be taken by a well prepared 6th level party after a hard fight, but the AC, SR and mobility of this one are well out of line for her CR. Advanced monsters are a notorious problem.

Anyway, having a TPK with a sign on it saying "TPK--don't run this encounter" is only marginally better than having no sign. You still have a boss encounter that is not suitable for the module it's in.

I guess I'm touchy about this because very similar encounters in AoW and SCAP basically ruined those games for us. Player morale never recovered. Each time, it was a monster with class levels--the CRs for those appear very iffy. The modules indicated CRs which the PCs should have been able to handle, but that didn't turn out to be the case.

Mary

Ok 4 goblins... I look at my handy 3e Monster Manual and Dungeon Mansters guide. See 4 goblins for a party of 4 core characters (the design principle of Pathfinder) is no problem for them in 3E. Ok, I write down how much XP they'll gain from the fight.

This may work at 1st level, but it's going to be a lot harder later on. Try doing the same kind of analysis with Mokmurian. First off, are stone giant wizards even legal, and if not, what are you going to do with him? How will you adapt his backstory, which hinges on most stone giant casters being sorcerers (impossible in 4e)? Can monsters have PC classes at all, and if not, what monster can you use here? Will any of his tactics, which rely heavily on specific 3.5 spells, survive into 4e or will you have to rewrite his entire tactics block? Are there specific 4e spells he'd be stupid not to have, or to defend against? Is there any way to salvage the fact that he's a *specialist* wizard?

How about Runeforge? The whole McGuffin relies utterly on schools of magic. What if 4e doesn't have them? Major rewrite time.

I am running RotRL in a moderately house-ruled 3.5. One major difference: no flight, no teleportation. It wasn't a problem at all in Burnt Offerings. By Spires I'm having to make major changes to almost every encounter. In my experience, any form of system conversion becomes increasingly difficult at higher levels.

I think the estimate of 2x work to put it out in both 3.5 and 4 is approximately correct. If the designers knew both 3.5 and 4 very well it might come down to 1.5x work, but not lower; and it would ramp up module by module. High level spellcasters are notoriously impossible to translate well.

Mary

D&D 3.5 expects 13.33 encounters at or around average party level will level the party. This means about 40 encounters per adventure. I don't have a Pathfinder handy, but that seems about right given the way the adventures are broken down into sections.

My initial reaction was "No way." So I counted them, and you're approximately correct: the low is SotS with about 21, and the high (if haunts count) is Skinsaw with about 42.

But I just can't convince myself that if the PCs make a noise in the courtyard of Fort Rannick, and the ogres come from five directions to see what it is, that's five fights. Or that if the PCs wait until Ironbriar and his men are all together, that's five fights. In practice I found the first 2 modules to have about 20 fights each, and every subsequent one has had fewer. My PCs did all but one of the sections of Runeforge, but they did them *all at once* in a single continuous action scene. I don't know how many fights that would be, but it didn't feel good to go up 2 levels in the middle of it.

For me, character development comes most easily if the characters are doing things. There's a certain comfortable amount of "things for characters to do" in each of the modules before I have to work so hard that I'm basically writing new modules. That amount of stuff is maybe 1 level worth for us; not 3 levels.

My GM for CotCT plans to handle this by inserting a full sized adventure between each AP module, starting the PCs at 4th level, and having 1 level of advancement per adventure. This still doesn't quite make the endgame work out, but it's maybe workable. You can see, though, that it's a lot more than "write a few side combats." Frankly it's more work than I'd be willing to do, though I'm really happy that he's agreed to it.

Mary

Mine came in through the basement, killing Lucrezia, and then split up as well. They wiped out the inside groups very fast, though they lost one NPC ally to a 4x crit from one of the barbarians. They then took up a position with half the party on the roof firing spells and arrows, and half the party in the main keep doors. The ogres outside were in a tough position; they launched ogre-wave attacks on the doors but couldn't get through.

It didn't seem particularly hard, just dicy because of the high damage. The PCs could probably have done better with a little more patience; they didn't treat the Doreena/bodyguards group with the respect it deserved, and that's where they lost someone.

Mary

I also have a large group (five PCs, a permanent NPC ally and usually some temporary allies) and they can dish out damage at a frightful rate, even though individually most of them are not particularly optimal.

I have a post in another thread about Jorgenfist. It didn't make sense to me as an occupied giantish fortress (there's no one to replace the giants on watch, tend the animals, run messages, or respond to alarms) so I more than doubled the number of giants inside. That did make it more of a challenge for my PCs, though that wasn't why I did it--I just needed it to make sense.

You can also, as another poster suggested, try to stack the encounters up: have two encounters happen at once from opposite sides, or otherwise try to split the PCs' attention. The scanderig is a good monster for this, as well as the Hounds. And if an alarm goes up, giants can come from all directions. Don't let things sit in their rooms, as a large party doing a room at a time will never be challenged at all. Mokmurian should not wait around while his troops all die; he should intervene while the PCs are still engaged.

Be sure that the BBGs have bodyguards. Mokmurian should have some, for example. This is much less likely to produce unwanted TPKs than increasing the power of the BBG himself.

Have enemy casters, if they get a chance, use area-control spells to break up the PC group: web, wall spells, blade barrier, reverse gravity, solid fog, acid fog, slow. Confusion can be devastating to a large party. Anything to prevent the PCs from focusing damage.

The lead-in encounters to Jorgenfist are weaker than the later ones, but my PCs still never had any trouble until Mokmurian himself (who they managed to fight up above, with mammoths running wild across the battlefield and giants everywhere). A large party with good control of encounter distance can take on an unbelievable number of giants. The same PCs, now 15th, just took on several iterations of Xin-Shalast's emergency response and slaughtered them all.

When you get to Sins of the Saviors, I *strongly* recommend giving many of the BBGs bodyguards, and allowing the encounters to clump up much more than they are described as doing. The top Greed baddie needs 4-5 bodyguards and a tripwire in adjacent rooms. The two top Gluttony people should be allowed to get together, and given 2-3 more bodyguards. The top Wrath and Lust people have adequate troops but should not wait until the troops are all dead before fighting--they should intervene within a round or two. Pride could use a bodyguard or two as well, but make sure those aren't casters or you'll have too many casters in one place. (Pride nearly wiped out my PCs, after everything else had been very easy for them.)

Mary

The sinspawn in Wrath have had +6 added to their axe damage and +3 to their bite damage for 3-point Power Attack, but have not had 3 subtracted from their to-hit.

Mary

Khalib's saves don't take into account the +3 resistance bonus from his Sihedron ring.

Khalib is supposed to be visiting the Abominable Dome weekly, disguised as the yeti leader. But he can't cast illusions, doesn't own a Hat of Disguise, and does not have Alter Self or Polymorph on his memorized list. He could Enlarge himself and memorize Alter, or memorize Poly, but then he's got only 1 minute/level before he...shrinks! The yeti won't like that.

(I had him use Poly, with the result that the PCs think they killed a yeti, and he'll get Raised shortly. Karzoug is not going to be pleased with him. "You had some treasure that was on loan from Me. I suggest you go out and retrieve it.")

Mary

I had the barghest talk rather than attacking immediately. This is counter to the description, but reduces the chance of a TPK. The PCs get a moment to realize how powerful this may be, and it gets a moment to try charming someone. In my game it successfully charmed the party leader and sent the group off looking for a token to get it out of its binding.

The only good thing about this fight at 3rd level is that the barghest can't pursue, so if the PCs retreat it probably won't be a TPK. But I'm awfully glad not to have to run it, with the almost inevitable permanent death of at least one PC.

Thistletop is shockingly hard, especially after the very reasonable earlier parts of the scenario. If you look at the PC death tallies, you'll see that something like 4/5 of the PCs who have died in the entire AP died at Thistletop!

Mary

My PCs opened the door and looked in at Malfeshnikor, who promptly charmed the party leader. Even though the rest of the PCs strongly suspected that something was wrong, they didn't want to fight Malfeshnikor, and doubly didn't want to fight him with the party leader under a spell. So Malfeshnikor sent the whole group off looking for a "Greater Sihedron Amulet" to get him out of the imprisoning spell.

I gave the Amulet to Xanesha, and the PCs eventually got hold of it. They then returned to Malfeshnikor. The party leader walked into his room, undid the binding, and said, "You're free to leave--if you can get past me alive." Bloodshed ensued, but the PCs were 7th level by this point, so most of it was Malfeshnikor's blood. (And of course the charm had worn off several days previously.)

Not a very safe response, but it gets points for flair. (Probably the sin of Pride.)

Mary

If the party takes time to RP and doesn't progress further through the dungeons/encounters in a given session, can't you just not give out XP that night? If the focus is on RP, who goes "What, I don't level this week?! What a rip-off!"

This is a solution to a problem that I don't have.

The problem that I do have is that I want more fights and other major events between level-up points, as the fast advancement (relative to the number of fights) ruins my grasp on the characters and gameworld. Running pub sessions doesn't give me this. Manipulating EXP doesn't give me this. The AP expects that the PCs will go up 3 levels per adventure, and to our tastes, the adventures are much, much too short for 3 levels to be reasonable. Nothing I do with EXP changes the fact that the PCs were 10th when they went into SotS and needed to be 13th coming out--and my PCs undertook a plan that meant those two points were four hours apart. To me it felt like only two fights (Xaliasa and all of Runeforge, which they did in one continuous raid).

The player flatly refused the third level, and we went into the next module down a level. But it was still a devastating advancement rate for us, especially for me.

What I really want is an AP with just as many fights and other interesting events as RotRL, but 1-9 rather than 1-17. Not less material; not more roleplaying necessarily (though fewer "shut down the roleplaying potential" devices would be nice); just slower advancement *relative to the number of fights*.

Mary

My PCs kept thinking about doing this, but never did it. Would have been hard to give good answers without the material in #6....

If they did it now, I'd say that he was born around the fall of Thassilon and actually never saw Thassilon at its height. His parents, who had, raised him under the ashen shadow of the Empire's collapse and taught him to work tirelessly for its restoration. But he himself, as he'd never been under the rule of the Runelords, was skeptical and a bit cynical. He rose to leadership of a large giant enclave, but they were overrun and defeated by (your choice of icy monster here--remorhaz? white dragons? ice devils?)

Now he's trying to find out about the new world he's wakened into. Initially he's skeptical and a bit rebellious about the idea of Karzoug reborn. Unfortunately for the PCs, the closer he gets to Karzoug the more he's pulled into the old Rune Giant way of thinking, even against his will.

Mary

Do you guys play daily or something? I play once a week at best, and if I had my group going through 2 Pathfinder books and level up once, that would be literally several months of play without my players leveling up. I am absolutely certain they would all get bored and quit on me.

Groups just vary a lot.

We're playing twice a week at the moment, but once a week is our standard. (The combats in Xin-Shalast take so long, if we didn't play more often there'd be nothing but this one combat for a month, and that's frustrating for us.) My college games were all once a week, and we did about 5 levels a year.

I don't ask for slower games out of a dislike for combat and action; I ask for it because I want to see PCs' abilities and personalities more clearly than I can with fast advancement. The current group of PCs went from 9th to 15th so fast, I have no clue anymore about what they can do or what would be a fun challenge for them. (I don't think more or fewer weeks real-time would matter; it's hours playing that count for me.)

I appreciate that a lot of groups feel the opposite. My husband plays with a group that has a big dose of "I've seen this race/class/prestige class/spell list/magic item for two sessions, now I want something new." Their SCAP game raced up to 17th level and then died, because there weren't any more new spells to get. They might be better off running unconnected modules, except that character generation is too timeconsuming.

I didn't think Paizo would do anything for people with my set of preferences at all, frankly, but if there are enough of them maybe a test product would be worthwhile.

Mary

There are some hints in #1 that a sufficiently close Runewell can take your soul whether you are Sihedron-marked or not; the mark allows things to happen at a much greater distance. So the Wrathwell in Sandpoint can claim wrathful souls who die in or around Sandpoint. I'm not sure this is canon: the metaphysics of Runewells have been debated here a lot, and my take on them ended up being very different. (James, I think it was, argued that they don't take souls at all, just sort of launder them--but I much prefer the interpretation where they do.)

Does this help with your backstory? Maybe not, because it's the wrong Runewell.

My PCs are wondering very much why they have seen no one Sihedron-marked in Xin-Shalast. They will be awfully upset if they figure it out: especially Lel, whose besetting sin is certainly Wrath.

Mary

Mary Yamato wrote:

I would personally prefer Paizo to put in encounters that core rules PCs of the stated level can beat in a fair, if hard, fight.

This is something that you can expect to come more and more into play the further we get from the Dungeon days, to be honest. We can't use any of the WotC books to further enhance our NPCs and monsters like we did in Dungeon; to a certain extent we can do that on our own or with open d20 products, but overall I suspect that a heavier assumption that the "Core is the Core" is a good thing to design by.

Yay! Thank you thank you thank you! I am so tired of "you're not really a good GM unless you've mastered 25 splatbooks worth of variant rules and can catch all the problems therein."

But again, in the end, it'll still fall on the individual GM to tailor the adventures to his or her group. My favorite example is the encounter with a half dozen CR 3 shadows. A CR 8 encounter by the books... but if your party is mostly low-strength rogues with no cleric at all... those shadows are gonna TPK the group.

Monsters with extreme strengths and weaknesses can be tricky, and large numbers of them particularly so. You might consider, when looking at such an encounter, if half shadows and half something else (ghouls, maybe, or big skeletons, or a wight) would be a more generally balanced encounter at about the same CR. Probably for simplicity, the AP encounters tend to be homogeneous. While mixed groups are harder to rate and harder to run, they often make for better fights.

But yes, the GM will always have to tailor adventures. The shadows in #1 were a deeply problematic encounter for my group; I turned then into a shadow and a bunch of skeletons.

Accurate CRs would really help here. I know what the rules say about Mokmurian, but--! Take a human necromancer CL14. He's a CR14; a weakish one, perhaps, but still by the rules a CR14. Now add 14 HD of giant to that. +1 CR? Do you think so? I don't think it's an accident that every notorious AP TPK-gnerating encounter I'm aware of involves an advanced monster; the CRs are just not accurate for these. (In this case, I think the reasoning breaks down because the rules consider this a giant fighter with some extra abilities--but if you look at it as a wizard with some extra abilities, it's immediately apparent that the CR is wrong.)

Mary

Skinsaw was creepy. Hook Mountain was a good slugfest but got almost no emotional reaction from my player, except for Myriana. We just don't find gore all that effective.

I wish I'd been able to do more with the wendigo cabin. It looked like it had potential, but for our group that didn't come through in play.

Mary

robin wrote:

I have the same problem with Karzoug.

He is NOT a CR21 Creature, he has a 57 point spreed matrix with all his wishes (which cost him 125.000 xp). I expect to kill everyone there.

Except that Karzoug will never cast Wish, as per the "During Combat" descriptor on page 60. If you play a villian like he's a PC, then the party will always get wiped.

Karzoug has already cast Wish. That's what Robin is saying. He cast it repeatedly (presumably, 10K years ago) to get those stats, which are far above any normal monster-build array. This is mentioned explicitly in his description.

And "never play a villain like a PC" is a rule that works for some groups and not others. My player really hates it if I play villains dumb; I am expected to do my best within the limits of the villain's personality, goals and resources. We have had too many bad past experiences with GMs whose creatures suddenly got dumber (or weaker) when the PCs were having a bad time. If this happens often, for us it sucks all accomplishment out of the game.

I would personally prefer Paizo to put in encounters that core rules PCs of the stated level can beat in a fair, if hard, fight. Not encounters that require the monster to act dumb, the GM to fudge heavily in play, or the PCs to be heavily optimized splatbook builds.

Mary

The useful languages in this path are Thassilonian and Giant. My PCs are speaking Thassilonian among themselves nowadays, they've used it so much. After that, Infernal and Abyssal, Goblin, Sylvan and Dwarven will at least have some chances to be used.

In my opinion, certain parts of the AP will sparkle much more if at least one PC can speak Thassilonian: especially #5 and #6. You can get around this by having a lot of people inexplicably speak Common, but for us it was more fun to enforce the languages.

Mary

I was very surprised at how many pages were devoted to those portions and yet the city itself did not feel rushed or skimpy. Very high quality work.

I am finding the Lower City difficult to run. I'd kill for a good summary of the creatures present in the city. It's given in a few places (500 giants in the giant encampment) but the number of Rune Giants, which is absolutely critical, apparently has to be deduced by counting the stasis cells in the Spires. (For the record, I think there are 34. But a few may be out of town.) The numbers of harridans and matriarchs would also be really helpful, especially after Gyukak tells the PCs (falsely) that they need to fight lamias in order to get the rings!

Practically everything I turn out to need is "beyond the scope of this adventure." A map of the Hypogeum, for example, even a very broad overview map. The House of Divine Consumption. There are places where the module is really coy with the GM: the Lamashtu temple in particular. Also there are apparently dragons in the city besides Ghlorofaex, but where? How many?

It's meant for the players to cut through it, do the set pieces, and get out. Mine...aren't doing that. It's a rich game but an unholy amount of work.

I think that cutting the numbers by a factor of 5-10, so that it's really a lost city with few inhabitants, might have been better. As it is there are over 1000 people (well, creatures) in Lower Xin-Shalast. (This becomes a little more plausible if the lamia priests are casting Create Food constantly, and that in turn helps explain how they can retain their position....)

I eventually asked my player to pitch in, and he did up the plant creatures of the Tangle. A word of warning: if you advance the listed plants to their Monster Manual maximum HD, you get some frightful plants. The PCs charmed a couple of big tendriculoses and shambling mounds, and they are nearly unstoppable. They are much more powerful than same-nominal-CR plant monsters such as battlebriars.

Mary

James, you seem to be saying two things:

PCs should be 6th level going into the endgame of Skinsaw. (And indeed, with normal play this is likely to be the case.)

The last encounter in Skinsaw was designed for 7th level characters.

These don't go well together. The problem's exacerbated by the fact that Xanesha is a very, very strong CR10 in a highly advantageous position.

I have become, after multiple bad experiences, very suspicious of Paizo boss encounters. I encouraged my player to do legwork, find Xanesha's hunting grounds, set up an ambush, recruit powerful NPC allies, and generally do everything he could to make this survivable. It was still a very near thing--for 5 6th level PCs and two 7th level NPCs with the advantage of surprise, on level ground. I am fairly sure the tower would have been TPK.

For a long time afterwards my player was telling me, "This scenario is too hard for my PCs. You asked me to make balanced PCs and not exploit rules, but the scenario is too hard--what now?" It's gotten better since, as the difficulty hardly increased in #3 (in fact nothing in #3 was as hard as Xanesha, and the PCs went up three levels so they were much stronger). But in retrospect I wish I'd cut her down even further.

She wasn't just a bit too strong for us, she was overwhelmingly too strong.

The CR system is iffy enough that I would never recommend relying on it, especially for monsters with advancement. Most of our AP disasters have involved advanced monsters.

Mary

Most High Ceoptra is supposed to be a lamia harridan. But she is listed as Large (harridans are Huge) and the art...well, I suppose that could be a harridan, but it looks nothing like the one in the Monster section. However, the rest of her stats suggest a harridan more than a plain lamia. I suppose the size is a typo.

It must really stink to be a lamia harridan, born with an overwhelming drive to dominate and control others, but with essentially no access to charm magic except for the little bit that clerics get. In contrast, regular lamias and matriarchs have powerful charm abilities. No wonder harridans are bad tempered.

Mary

I haven't read #5 so far, but as far as #2,3 and 4 are concerned, I'm not sure what response you would expect. They do not know anything about the threat in #2 until the PC come and find prove of Ironbriars misdeeds. They do not know anything about the threat in #3 as well (until the PC take their time to inform them, that is). And they have no time to react to the Sandpoint assault, before it is over. And they have no idea about Mokmurian's army (until the PC take their time to inform them, that is).

Wormy

Early in #2 many, possibly a dozen or more, people have been murdered. Perhaps Sandpoint has given up on Magnimar and never mentions this, but it seems odd that they don't ask for help, especially since many Sandpointers are suspicious of the PCs and therefore wouldn't be counting on them.

Magnimar certainly knows there is a problem in #3 as they send the PCs. However, James has indicated (and the module certainly supports) that they never send anything else--they abandon Fort Rannick, and therefore the three upriver towns, with no further efforts.

In #4 there have been multiple reports of giant raiders. If you look at the map, the giants must have crossed a lot of inhabited country to reach Sandpoint; when the PCs retrace their route they find giant raiders everywhere. This must have been noticed, and indeed the module says that Magnimar sent an army--but there is no sign of it anywhere. It should probably have gone through Sandpoint, or failing that, through that town on the steaming lake. Where is it?

In #5 there is a huge sinkhole in the middle of Sandpoint. Again, somehow Magnimar isn't informed. I guess everyone thinks they are useless. I could imagine that Sandpoint is too ruggedly individualistic to ever report problems, though after the giants that seems strange, but in #1 they *do* report problems.

I'm probably overly touchy about this because it was such a big problem for us in AoW. My player took a violent hatred to the series of "useful" AoW NPCs who refuse to actually do anything. The two places in AoW where the NPC refuses to help and then *berates the PCs for not wanting to do it alone* went over particularly badly. RotRL isn't nearly that bad, but I used up 150% of my player's tolerance for this in AoW, so I musn't do it again.

Mary

At some point Magnimar cared enough about the impoverished Skull River towns to built a fort and man it. It's possible that Magnimar is totally losing its grip and will no longer be a dominant city soon, but my player reacted to this as "sigh, just another stupid workaround to keep NPCs from ever doing anything for themselves."

I think you can certainly make a logical and coherent story for why the NPCs do nothing. It's just that I find, if I do that again and again, the alternative story "It's GM fiat" becomes more and more obtrusive until it destroys our belief in the setting. I prefer to look for any chance for NPCs to be capable and competent that still leaves the PCs with adequate opportunities to accomplish things on their own. For me--groups of course vary--having a few Magnimaran soldiers in Sandpoint in #1 and #2 is a small price to pay for not having to run yet another repetition of "The authorities do nothing, of course." My player has me on notice that he never wants to see that again.

Mary