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My party just finished City of Broken Idols. The end fight I hit them with Khala ,his 6 skulvens, a summoned retreiver,2 Kopru behmoths,2 skinwalker acolytes, the waistrilith,and 6 skinwalkers.Out of 5 party members only one Pc death,all bad guys dead and Khala gets away with 3 hp.Also the final room had unhallowed and dimensonal anchor on it,not all of the room just the first area the pcs came in to. 2 of my Pcs said it was to much?????? Confused??? THey won!!!! only one Pc death. and Khala gets away with 3 hp??? the battle took 3.5 hours. Looks to me like I ran an excellent end encounter. What do you think > To much ????
Sounds to me like "too much" in the sense of 3.5 hrs of solid dice-rolling, not "too much" in the sense of too hard. Let's face it, the sheer mechanics of combat are not all that entertaining, and after 47 rounds of slugging it out hip-deep in skinwalkers -- when you've already fought like 200 of them -- it can be extremely hard to maintain a sense of caring what happens next. I try to keep fights down to about 1-5 critters that actually matter, with the "mooks" just sort of background clutter (I might roll handfuls of dice for them in advance and then just announce during the fight: "skinwalkers keep swarming over you - 16 damage to Fred, 5 to Bob. Now let's see what the two-headed guy does!")
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If 2 of the 5 said it was too much, and none of the other 3 actively disagreed with them, then it was probably too much. There's more to setting up encounters than just working out CR's and making sure you don't TPK the party, and so on.
As Keith said, that's a lot of dice rolling. 3.5 hours straight of nothing but combat gets a little old. And the bottom line is if your players aren't enjoying themselves, the game is a failure.
Wow, that is insane. I almost had a TPK with just Khala and the skulvyns. And my players are super-powergamers. I'm actually amazed that you didn't have a TPK with all those baddies in one place.
Contributor
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I personally wish I had been a player in that fight. Even the one who died, if it was doing something useful for the fight.
My players sometimes say I make my fights too tough, but when they fianlly win a brutal slugfest and jump up and cheer, I take their opinions with a grain of salt. Players don't actually know what they want most of the time.
And if you don't kill a PC from time to time, they'll start to think you just let them win... that's boring.
YMMV
The fight with Khala in mine was him, his skulvyns, the previously wounded wastrilith, a taboo temple kopru they had missed (who served as a decoy under an illusion) and a summoned retreiver mid-fight.
My party has 4 areas of specialty: heavily elementally aligned (cold sorc, frost troll), heavy melee damage (frost troll), heavy anti-demon ranged damage (ranger W evil outsider bane bow) and heavy healing (cleric W every healing specialization booster).
So the retreiver, having no SR, DR, or energy immunities, goes down the round it came in (the sorc got petrified by one before, and has little tolerance for them now). Khala did a good job of putting the fear into them, especially with negative level acid spit at the troll. But he never got a chance to make a full attack, as the troll would grapple him the moment he got near other party members. Solid teamwork. Meanwhile the ranger pretty much one shotted any skulvyn that got too close.
This fight wasn't so bad at all for my group, and probably could have handled what the OP threw without much more effort.
It is true though, that players often don't know what they want. Mine (some in particular) whine about how they want to see recurring NPC villains, but then they say that its frustrating that they can't ever get them to stay dead (RE Vanthus). Eh, such is life.
The trick there is to create a villain who the PCs come to hate but don't actually fight until the end of the campaign. This doesn't mean a villain who fights the PCs then runs away before they can put the big kabosh on them, but a villain who is working in the background to make their lives difficult. this also works best if the villain know about the villain but can't do anything about him. My current ice age PCs have a list of villains they can't wait to destroy. Of course, they sometimes joke that they have too many villains to possibly be able to destroy them/defeat them all, but I won't let them down.
As for that final fight. Most of my fights are now under an hour in length, but also use less foes. This is partly a time management issue and no one can be perfect at it. I run a COC game and it had been running smoothly for months now, but just last week I completely stuffed up with my time management and players got confused. I plan to rectify that little problem this week with a stopwatch.
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That fight seems insanly tough. Then again PC's have a way of messing up the best laid plans. When are group played through SCAP I discovered that there is a fine line to be straddled. That being that not every encounter should be a fight for the PC's life, but it needs to be just challenging enough that it gives the player's the illusion that they rock.Boss fights in particualr are crucial because they are the culmination of every thing the players are striving for and its anti-climactic to the adventure if its way to easy or just way to hard.In the end if only one PC died from that fight and everyone had fun then you did well.