Anyone else have to dumb down AoW because the party was just getting rocked?
I've had to scale down several encounters, especially in HoHR because my players kept getting beat down.
Of course it doesn't help they can't hit the broadside of a barn.
After finishing HoHR, I have to take them on a side adventure to gain some easy xp to get them ready for the Championship Belt.
Play got a bit too frenzied in "Wormcrawl Fissure," and I ended up having to take a break, explain that tactics were MANDATORY, and re-run the encounter with the unbelievably gigantic kyuss-spawn undead chimera death machines. Amazing--TPK if they ran in mindlessly, and a fairly easy encounter if they used their brains. Same deal with the 1st "Savage Tide." Make sure your players are using every ounce of brainpower and resources available to them. Make sure they work out tactics in advance. And, for god's sake, make sure they have a WIZARD in the party (who can swap out spells for various contingencies) and a SINGLE-CLASSED CLERIC.
The character classes are part of the problem.
*half-giant psychic warrior
*dwarven cleric/church inquisitor
*human ranger
*halfling rogue
They have no one to cast arcane spells, and the psychic warrior's powers are all melee combat based (even then he can't hit anything....no real cure for poor rolling.)
You could always kill off the psychic warrior and tell the player to roll up a wizard... or maybe it is better to hand him a premade one...
In all seriousness, the tactics part is a HUGE thing. You could even take a couple of sessions to show the PCs some tactics. Or if you want to do it in game, have them watch some fights at the arena prior to the start of the games and showcase some tactics (suddenly letting the players control one side or the other).
Sean Mahoney
You could always kill off the psychic warrior and tell the player to roll up a wizard... or maybe it is better to hand him a premade one...
In all seriousness, the tactics part is a HUGE thing. You could even take a couple of sessions to show the PCs some tactics. Or if you want to do it in game, have them watch some fights at the arena prior to the start of the games and showcase some tactics (suddenly letting the players control one side or the other).
Sean Mahoney
An even more heavy-handed in-game approach to suggesting tactics to players is to use dreams. The forces of Good, afterall, are not necessarily sitting idly by as the world descends into darkness. They just don't like to compel obedience by suddenly appearing in the flesh and saying, do this or that. They're all about promoting and encouraging heroic freedom of choice, but they don't have to be above cryptic and strangely poignant dream hints.
I don't know about killing off characters. My roommate is playing the psychic warrior, and I don't think purposely killing off his favorite character would go over well.
I'm using the beginning parts of the Expedition to Ravenloft as a side quest to get the group up to the levels needed for the Championship Belt.
I've already introduced them to Ashlyn the Paladin, and I'm contemplating giving her wizard levels to help the team out.
I'm using the beginning parts of the Expedition to Ravenloft as a side quest to get the group up to the levels needed for the Championship Belt.
I've already introduced them to Ashlyn the Paladin, and I'm contemplating giving her wizard levels to help the team out.
How are you integrating Ravenloft? Which campaign setting are you using, and where did you place Barovia? I'm also going to use EtR, but am planning to use the long version as a substitution for the Free City adventures, weaving the necessary clues from those adventures into EtR.
I haven't put Barovia in any specific place, but the campaign is in greyhawk.
I had Eligos teleport the group to a "mountain valley" where an old friend of his was town mayor. Eligos says he received a strange letter from the mayor, and asked the adventurers to check up on him.
|
I sometimes prod my players little (i.e. Does anyone have the (whatever) skill?). That's usually enough to get them thinking in the right direction.
There have already been 5 character deaths in my campaign and we're not even done with 3FoE yet.
I don't really WANT the campaign to be this dangerous. I've never seen myself as the Killer DM type. But I've made a point of NOT fudging any dice rolls, for this campaign and my players are pretty roughed up as a result.
I want them to be sneaky, crafty, and over-prepared for encounters. That way, they can take satisfaction in a well executed game-plan, rather than a fly-by-the-pants free-for-all where the only thing they can be proud of were some great die rolls.
I warned my players early on that AoW was deadly. I even did a pre-adventure to get them to 2nd level before starting. After a hard battle with the acid beatle swarm, they realized I was not joking. It would have been a TPK hade the party not been 2nd level.
Surprisingly what has helped them out most is the oddball characters they are playing. We have a marshal/human paragon, a battle dancer, a ninja/sorcerer, and an archivist/savant. Between the archivist/savant and the marshal/paragon, the party regularly gets bonuses to skill checks and combat rolls. This has swung a few fights. That, and the ninja stacking sudden strike with a lesser orb of electricity.
It also helps that the marshal's player has a good grasp of tactics and team capabilities. After a couple of close calls when the rest of the party ignored his warnings, the group has fallen in behind him as a leader.
Personally, I've never played with a group (then again, I've only played with a couple groups) that didn't exercise good tactical planning. As a result, my players have mowed through almost everything in the AP so far. (A small amount of min-maxing is to blame as well, but mostly it's all been proper planning and such.) At almost every important battle (the battle with the Ebon Aspect, the Overgod, the Ulgurstasta in the Champion's Belt, the fight with Darl Quethos, to name a few) I've had to fudge the bad guys' HP to ridiculous proportions just so they'd last more than a couple rounds of ineffectiveness.