Jeremy Toles's page

Zombified Naga rises up and bites him, he fails fort save and dies at -3 con.

The zombie should have lost it's poison bite...

Artificer indeed does have the supreme metamagic spell trigger ability.

It's so nice in fact, that my DM banned the use of Eternal Wands (MIC) of Swift Haste (SC) in conjunction with persistent spell.

Worry not, Swift Haste is 'Range: Personal', so it meets the prereqs for application of the metamagic.

They might be more powerful than their level suggests.

The group (now 6 PCs) consists of the following:

- Elf Swordsage 2: 17/17hp; AC 20; Str [14], Dex [18], Con [12], Int [14], Wis [15], Cha [12]
- Gnome Rogue 2: 17/20hp; AC 16; Str [13], Dex [17], Con [18], Int [16], Wis [15], Cha [15]
- Human Crusader 2: 22/22hp; AC 19; Str [17], Dex [13], Con [18], Int [17], Wis [16], Cha [16]
- Halfling Dragonfire Adept 2: 23/23hp; AC 18; Str [11], Dex [18], Con [16], Int [14], Wis [14], Cha [16]
- Shifter Barbarian 2: 28/30hp; AC 18; Str [17], Dex [17], Con [17], Int [10], Wis [16], Cha [9]
- Half-Giant Psychic Warrior 1: 15/15hp; AC 16; Str [20], Dex [11], Con [18], Int [16], Wis [16], Cha [13]

As you can see, they are spread across quite a few books in terms of race/class. I don't know what you mean about PHB2, unless you are referring to the retraining rules...

I went with rolling for stats (I don't much like point-buy), which didn't seem to be a problem at the time. [5d6, dropping the lowest 2]

It's not so much a matter of having over-powered PCs, it's more the dice being against me...

Okay. So I added a couple encounters (one at the inn, and one on the road to the cairn) to get a feel for the power-level present with the group.

The encounter at the inn consisted of the following:

Mummified Commoner 2
Human Wererat Ranger 3
Draconic Human Fighter 2/ Human Paragon 3

As he DM, I was able to paralyze one PC for almost the whole encounter, and deal a total of 8 damage to the party...

The second encounter (ranked as "very difficult" using an online encounter calculator) consisted of the following:

Orc Warrior 3
Orc Warrior 3
Orc Warrior 3
Derro Sorcerer 1

Once again, I dealt a total of 5 damage to the party. The combined attack of two PCs dropped the derro with three hits...

Looking at the aforementioned change of making the first encounter 3 worgs instead of 3 wolves...I can already tell it's not going to be any sort of a challenge for them. They aren't focusing on one opponent at a time either. Two broke off to attack the derro, and the other 4 attacked one of the orcs...

Any suggestions as to what a proper level of challenge would be with the wolf encounter?

Thanks in advance!

~Jeremy

Unless you enjoy tweaking all the encounters (and some folks will), there isn't a real need to put that kind of work into it and risk burning yourself out over it.

I had been playing around with some of the encounters before I got a group together to start the campaign. That was one of the reasons I looked to start with a bigger/higher level group in the first place.

From having already had my own PC in an AoW campaign, I had first hand experience seeing that some *a lot* of the encounters wouldn't be challenging for a group of more than four PCs.

If anyone wants a run-down of any particular encounter, I am more than willing to share what I have so far.

¬Jeremy¬

Starting at 2nd level will be self-correcting, and may be needed with the difficulty of some of the early encounters. The extra PCs may warrant an increase of +1 or +2 to ELs, but it's a tough balance to maintain. You'd be better with increasing the numbers encountered in most cases than with making each monster tougher.

Mostly, how difficult the AP will be depends on how effective the players are at tactics and teamwork. An on-the-ball group would be able to do well with four 1st level PCs using 25 point buy and core rules only.

Does having monsters/antagonistic NPCs with max HP increase the EL in itself?

It seems like it might...

I already intended to increase the number of enemies for some of the encounters as there isn't really a way to sub anything from any book for the iconic monsters e.g. the Wind Warriors.

¬Jeremy¬

Hello all!

I don't want to sound totally ignorant. But...

If a DM (myself) were to run the AoW campaign, starting with a group of 6-8 level 2 PCs, would it be safe to say that I could go through and increase the EL for each encounter by +3?

**Slight Spoiler WARNING**

For example, the first actual encounter is with three wolves. Would making this first encounter consist of three worgs be a worthy increase in CR?

I plan on running a campaign as described above, but I am wondering if increasing the EL +3 is too much, or not enough.

The details include adding templates to *almost* every NPC, increasing class/PrC levels for all NPCs, advancing/templating monsters when possible, exchanging feats for NPC/monsters to be more combat-oriented, possibly maxing HP for NPCs/monsters, rolling stats for NPCs/monsters, etc. I know a lot of the changes I am thinking of making are looked at negatively for the most part...Especially rolling stats, and maxing HP. I already have quite a bit of experience playing through the campaign arc. (Had to stop playing because I moved back home from college) And for my character anyway, it was a walk in the park. I don't want that to happen for anyone in my campaign.

Any help would be most appreciated.