My group is currently in "downtime mode" after ending our last session at the Land Farmstead. During downtime we email each other and do general housekeeping items such as sales as well as some a little Diamond Lake roleplaying. I was all ready for the group to do some in town searching for Kullen & Crew, but now an impatient member of the party wants the ranger to use his Track feat to follow the wheelbarrow tracks.
Did anyone else have to deal with this? What does everyone recommend?
I'm guessing the DC is 15 (Soft Ground) + 7 (a week has passed) -1 (4 creatures being tracked) + 5 (assuming Rastophan the evil ranger hides their tracks) for a grand total of 26. I don't see any reason why our party's ranger can't take 20, and with 5 ranks in Survival and a decent wisdom score he's going to make this. Am I totally off on this? I'm surprised there was no mention of this in the module.
Looks pretty reasonable. Even if the party does track the wheelbarrow I don't think it really does any damage to the plot. You loose some of the role playing with Kullen and his bully boys as your PCs are going to get the drop on Filge - but ce le vie. It'll still work out fine and you can introduce them to Kullen and his bully boys as a role playing encounter later.
give them some fights on the way though since they will need the exp to get to the level at which they will survive.
I thought about this while reading the adventure and though that if any of the players tried this they would probably lose the tracks once they get near town, but then I though more on it and didn't think that they would go that close to town with a load of skeeletons, but I guess if they coverd it and gave anybody who looked the least be curious an icy glare they should be fine.
Well, you could always rule that it rained for several hours and the difficulty shoots up as much as you like, if you don´t want him to find the tracks.
An if he takes 20, maybe someone is going to notice him, for taking 20 takes some time. Maybe someone of Kullens band notices him if he gets too close to the old observatory...
I agree with your DC numbers. However, note that according to the Track feat, you may redo a failed roll only after 1 hour has past. Since taking 20 involves doing this 20 times, this is not a trivial process. If you allow for eating and sleeping, it takes more than a day, which also changes the DC.
As a result, I would rule that you cannot take 20. However, let him roll - if he makes it, more power to him. That's a use of skills to solve a mystery, and should be encouraged, not stymied.
Drew Garrett
I say just let him have the tracks to the observatory, then give him the CR 4 story experience for good roleplaying and creative thinking to compensate for the lack of interaction with Kullen.
If you don't want to give them Kullen's XP for skipping right to Filge, then it's their loss- that's a good chunk of XP (espcially if they handle some of Kullen's friends, too) that they'll miss out on. However, that's very metagame thinking. To make some in-game sense out of it, if the wheelbarrow thing is that big a deal, just say they passed over rocks. A LONG stretch of rocks before they got to a road(This is a hilly region, after all). With some weather and the other travelers' tracks, that should do it. I also agree that taking 20 on tracking wouldn't work, since it would take so long as to change the DC the tracker is working on hitting.