One note: Paladins are immune to fear effects, but they can still get scared. Seeing a giant flaming manticore hurtling at you is still going to give you a shock, even when you're immune to the damage failing the save could cause.
Also: I think James Jacobs has already posted once or twice saying that paladins are immune to the effects of haunts, that's what they're good at.
I think I'll change haunts to be mind affecting effects that depending on the haunt can cause fear .
So the manticore with its burning touch still affect the paladin, the one who makes characters flee in panic or crash through the windows to his death below would not affect the paladin and the other characters would save better
Any opinion on this ?
I think that's a really good idea. If you want a mechanic, consider the haunts to be like _suggestion_. A suggestion to feel fear will not work on a paladin, but a suggestion to protect the children or to stop the bad guy is perfectly valid, and that's what several haunts do. For the ones that are borderline, I'd consider taking the least fear-like interpretation: "get the child out of this situation" rather than "flee in terror with the child".
Watch out for Iyesha: if the paladin feels morally obliged to get in her way, this is a very hard encounter, possibly a TPK.
Mary
What would I do as a solution if my players sent the paladin in alone?
After the first failure, the house would no longer let the paladin trigger the haunts. Haunted houses can be somewhat conscious. If you don't like that explanation, then maybe the paladin's aura not only makes him immune to fear but also immune to triggering haunts that cause fear. It is a new mechanic after all.
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One note: Paladins are immune to fear effects, but they can still get scared. Seeing a giant flaming manticore hurtling at you is still going to give you a shock, even when you're immune to the damage failing the save could cause.
I had one who would run to a corner and soil himself the first round of any combat, then he would viciously attack opponents that discounted him as a pushover and turned their backs to him.
if you asked him he never felt fear, he was just using his version of 'hide in plain sight'
The paladin was only targeted the first two times. The house thought it was maybe a fluke the first time and tried again a slightly stronger try. Next it just ignored him entirely and just went after the other PC's. This was giving the paladin great trouble because he wasn't able to help fight these things much because the manifestation weren't even showing up to him. Needless to say it became far more thrilling to the players this way.
Creative Director
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A paladin is a GREAT character to have in Foxglove Manor, since yeah, he'd not only be immune to the haunts (they're all fear effects, after all!) but would also grant save bonuses to everyone nearby. Kind of the same way a druid can "cheat" the system in Thistletop by walking through the walls of the southern area. Now and then, we're trying to put in encounters were specific character classes DO get to really shine, after all.
None of my PCs are paladins, but if one wanted to experience the haunts, I would allow him to "open his mind", relaxing the habitual mental barriers that his holy discipline has established. He would become vulnerable to the fear effects of the house, but could sense the haunts as others did and could better assist his allies.
In my group I have nasty do-gooder paladin and one of the other characters suggested tying themselves to him so they couldn't run too far...It started as a joke and then progressed to the planning stage. Luckily they know me as a calculating and vengeful DM so they knew they'd pay for it somehow and cooler heads prevailed.
I actually ran the Manor in a similar way as described above. The paladin wasn't even able to see the haunts and while he was standing in a creaky empty room the other players were screaming for mommy and praying to Jeff the God of Biscuits or whoever the deity-dejour of halfling rogues was that week.
It worked well with my group but I think some paladin players would feel f'ed with. I mean here is their big momment against the spooks and things that go bump in the night and they just get sidelined because of it. If you have players in your group that are apt to get bum-hurt then you may have to bite the bullet and watch as your party trivializes a truly scary haunted house. Although the other PC's are definitely open targets and as such I would be tempted to have the paladin's pressence tick the house off and take it's haunted frustrations out on something weak willed and tiny.
Having been tipped off by James Jacobs that some classes would just have a benefit, I confided that to the players early on in Chapter One.
No specifics, just that "sometimes it will be to be a certain class".
When they got to Thistletop, I just smiled and said, "This is the point at which it's good to be the druid."
Later, against the ghouls in the Hambly fields, I said it is "good to be the elf" (no paralysis).
Likewise, this Saturday, when they enter Foxglove manner I'll point out "it would have been good to be the Paladin." But a single class cleric aint no stick in the eyes, since they have full turning abilities.
I think having the couched fact that sometimes there's an advantage to being a certain class early on has helped them take it in the right spirit. Instead of resenting it, they sort of look upon it as something they have coming.
What's going to suck is there's no point at which it's good to be the bard...
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What would I do as a solution if my players sent the paladin in alone?
The paladin would only trigger whichever type of haunts is assigned to him/her, and universal haunts, right? So all other types of haunts would still only get triggered when the correct PC steps inside the room.
The way I'm planning on playing it, the group's Paladin will be immune to the detrimental effects of the haunts that she "qualifies" for, but she'll still be able to see them.
What's going to suck is there's no point at which it's good to be the bard...
Ours has found a couple of opportunities (spoilers for #3 and #4):
The harpies in #4 are a good chance to use Countersong.
We played up the mysterious songbook in #3. It has 12 songs; the bard is doling them out sparingly, because they turn out to be so catchy you can get a whole town singing them. It's made her fortune, though she's also a little scared by the whole thing. The company of Hellknights who are humming one of "her" tunes during battle is going to bug her a lot.
Mary
RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32
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What's going to suck is there's no point at which it's good to be the bard...
Knowledge is where bards shine. And since knowledge is *always* the key to power, knowledge should always be the most valuable of treasure....
That being said, IMO, a bard should be the character that other characters turn to when all else fails.
For example, the players (not characters) spend 10 minutes discussing how to do something or what they think something is. At that point I, as the GM, slip the bard's player a note saying that their character remembers a vague reference to x, y, or z, and that seems awfully simi8lar to what they are encountering now.
Bards may not be powerful as an individual but their *brain* is what makes them them unique. Added to that their ability to function as a scout, a fighter, a wizard, a healer, and almost anything else and the bard is the most under-utilized class in the game -- especially in small groups.
A paladin is a GREAT character to have in Foxglove Manor, since yeah, he'd not only be immune to the haunts (they're all fear effects, after all!) but would also grant save bonuses to everyone nearby.
Yeah - this concerns me. Being awesome and ass kicking has its points but its not so cool if your in a totally creepy Prett designed Haunted House and its quickly becomes apparent that the house can't hurt you.
The groups that are going to get the most out of this haunted house, by which I mean the groups that will talk of the haunted house in years to come, won't be the ones where the Paladin was immune to the whole thing and it turned into four hours of the DM reading descriptive text, informing them that their immune to all negative effects and would they like to move on to the next room so the DM can read them more descriptive text.
The groups that will have ass kicking sessions will be making diving tackles to save their comrads from throwing themselves out windows, they'll figure out whats going on halfway through and then realize that one of the victims threw herself, burning, out of the building and off a cliff into the ocean below. They'll be thinking of chaining themselves together and the DM will throw in tension release by playing up what happens when their all roped together and trying to move around.
I guess my point is that invulnerability seems a lot cooler to a player in the abstract then it is in reality. In reality it just means that the adventure has its flavour drained from it as it becomes little more then the DM reading flavour text while the players glumly roll dice to see how long it takes for the helpless bad guy to die.
So, yeah, dirty secret of D&D - being unstopably awesome at something that takes anything more then a a couple of minutes to resolve is not actually fun - in reality its pretty boring.
Thanks for all the replies
Some remarks :1) James , I aggree being a paladin character is great in the manor .
Being a paladin player , not so much2) Moonbean , if you make it this way , one quarter of the encounters become in effect CR0 encounters (No danger ). This is a problem . I got no problem if it was only one encounter but one quarter is a bit much for me .
3) I've been surprised by the fact most of you think the house can choose targets . I assumed that Vorelhas just activated the minefield but does not have the opportunity to actually direct the attacks .
Because if so , it's not a good time to be a fighter or a thief ( weak will save )Anyway , my players should reach the manor saturday or next week . I'll let you know how it worked
The house dosn't choose targets. The different haunts only affect the PC that YOU assign them to. As the DM you can pick which type of Haunts will effect the Paladin so that he/she will only have to deal with those and the universal. Flip through each of the haunts and see which of the different catagories has the least and assign that type to the paladin. The party will still have a lot of fun and the paladin will get to shine in a few rooms. If i remember correctly there are six types of haunts. If you have less than six pc's the unassigned become universal. If you want to be realy evil dont assign one to the paladin and double up somebody else.
I thought of reassigning the haunts to the others players but decided this would say to the paladin :
'Since you have an advantage , the others characters suffer instead of YOU '
Actually, I disagree with this conclusion.
Haunts that are assigned to a specific PC are only visible to, and only affect, that PC. The rest of the PCs can't even see what the affected PC is reacting to.
So, the whole issue is solved by doubling up on the other PCs and not including the paladin. And to apply this, you have 2 choices:
1) Don't even assign a haunt set to the paladin, and distribute all the other categories across the other PCs. The paladin can't trigger any haunts (so others have to enter rooms and trigger them), but is able to participate to try to help the others as they are affected by them. In this case, he may not even know that "no haunts" were assigned to him; after all, if he can't see the effects and no one else can either, who's to say his haunts weren't in there somewhere, in one of the rooms/halls/stairwells that doesn't actually have a haunt?
2) Assign one haunt set to the Paladin. Don't let him trigger universal haunts at all (so others have to enter rooms and trigger them), but let him trigger the one set that is assigned to him. Since that's only going to be 2 haunts, the player probably won't be sure he's immune at first, when something actually reacts to his presence for once. But he'll get the coolness, twice, of being immune to an effect that he can describe to the others.
NOTE: I don't personally like the statement in the adventure that if there are fewer than 6 PCs, the extra haunt categories should be Universal. If one PC suddenly tries to commit suicide, the others can stop him; if the whole party has to make that save, and more than half the party is suddenly trying to throw themselves out of the window, that encounter has just become much more dangerous than intended. So I'd recommend assigning all non-universal haunts to specific PCs in any case.