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'Cause I'm running it now, and it is. I play with a little house rule that if your HP dropped under 0, you are incapacitated for an entire 24 hours before coming back to consciousness (assuming you didn't die, of course). well, my PC's are just about to enter Drosakar's Crucible, and the already stood twice on the verge of a TPK- and there were only 3 encounters thus far. they are wounded, afraid, low on food rations and constantly running forward to save the city. is the module supposed to be so hard?
Well, i haven't played it. However, adding that house rule probably makes it a lot harder than it's supposed to be. It almost makes the healer of the party completely useless. If any of the characters goes to negative hp, the fact that they could be healed up to full hp the next round doesn't really matter because he's effectively out of the combat entirely. In my opinion, it's not the module that's deadly, it's the house rule. No offense.
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In my opinion, it's not the module that's deadly, it's the house rule. No offense.
I'm fully aware of the fact. however, I once played with a DM that had a house rule even deadlier- whenever you drop below 0 HP, you are incapacitated for a week. and his adventures aere deadly. even so, we fared better than my players do now. also, the PC's are built to handle such a rule. the cleric is less focused on healing and more on being a tanker/buffer. and they are five PC's. I don't know- something just feels wrong.
'Cause I'm running it now, and it is. I play with a little house rule that if your HP dropped under 0, you are incapacitated for an entire 24 hours before coming back to consciousness (assuming you didn't die, of course). well, my PC's are just about to enter Drosakar's Crucible, and the already stood twice on the verge of a TPK- and there were only 3 encounters thus far. they are wounded, afraid, low on food rations and constantly running forward to save the city. is the module supposed to be so hard?
A module is only as hard as how it is run. The GM is in charge of the module, after all. That said, PCs are 1st level and this is a precarious time for them. Do you ever modify what you roll? A critical at 1st level usually means game over. Are you playing 3.5 or PRPG Beta? The PCs would have a greater chance of surviving 1st level if you were using PRPG Beta.
I've also never heard of a house rule where PCs are incapacitated for a day/week when reduced to below 0 HP. IMHO, such an outcome is unbalancing.
I've played this one two times. First I ran it for four players. Encounters were tough enough, but nothing too difficult. Second time I ran it for two players and they were killed just before they got to the monastery. So I would say it's okay for four players but too difficult for two =). I also think it's because of your house rule. In my four players-game many of them went to negatives in a fight, but were brought back by a healer. If I had the same house rule, I think it would have caused a TPK...
Creative Director
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In my opinion, it's not the module that's deadly, it's the house rule. No offense.I'm fully aware of the fact. however, I once played with a DM that had a house rule even deadlier- whenever you drop below 0 HP, you are incapacitated for a week. and his adventures aere deadly. even so, we fared better than my players do now. also, the PC's are built to handle such a rule. the cleric is less focused on healing and more on being a tanker/buffer. and they are five PC's. I don't know- something just feels wrong.
The question is... is it actually FUN to have this happen? Is it FUN to have your character go out of commission for a game day or a game week, especially if the adventure itself prevents the other players from taking time out to let your character recover?
Paizo adventures are built with the expectation that things work the way they do in standard D&D, and in standard D&D, if you go to 0 hp or lower and get healed back to positive, you're good to go. It might not be realistic... but then, magical healing isn't realistic either. In my opinion, increasing the realism in a game needs to be balanced carefully against the fact that the more "realistic" things get, the less fun the game can become.
I'm not trying to be antagonistic or snarky... I'm just honestly curious to find out if this kind of house rule actually makes the game more fun or if it just makes it more fun for the GM...
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well, my group is made mostly of newbie's, but I have an experienced player with me, whom I have known for years. anyway, we played before (he and I), and just the other day he never enjoyed D&D as much as now. the new players are excited about the game and the adventure, and they constantly beg me to have more than one session per week, and during the sessions they are on the edge of their seats all the time, shouting and jumping from excitement and, I guess, fear for their characters every combat- so I probably got something right with the house rule.
also, the PC's were created using the beta PF rules and the adventure itself is not updated- so they have an extra edge over the monsters. finally, I have created a 1st level spell that allows you to get back to consciousness immediately with your current amount of HP- so the house rule is not that critical.
the thing is, I am wandering- if D0's so deadly, than what about D1, which I intend to run next? and after that, I want to run the STAP, that seems even deadlier!
so I don't know, maybe I should tune down the next adventures a little bit?
I want to run the STAP, that seems even deadlier!
If you keep that house rule, an STAP campaign will be over really quick.
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That house rule is pretty deadly - I think 99% of the people on this site would encourage you to ditch it.
D0 is quite a challenge because of the ticking clock and the same problem exists in D1. It will also be more challenging because you are DMing for new players. New players won't necessarily know what super-effective things they can do. They also might not have the experienced player's sense of; "Hey, this is getting a bit hardcore - time to drop being in character and start making optimal choices at all times."
For D0 I had a smaller party, so I put them on a longer timeline. They had a few days before people started dropping, rather than; "Every second wasted is a life ended."
For D1 I let my players race against time through the first level of the dungeon, but toward the end they interrogated a kobold who let them know that the sacrifice was going to be at full moon (conveniently, the next night). That let the party have a night of rest and spell recovery before tackling the lower level (they also levelled up that night).
Did I mention dropping the house rule?
It pushed my player's party of three pretty hard, certainly. What's giving them a hard time: The wolf trippers? The cloakers? (My player just said the heck with it.) The skeletons were a pain for her, because she had a sap as a bludgeoning weapon and her fighter cohort had few HP while her pseudodragon was worthless against them.
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In my opinion, increasing the realism in a game needs to be balanced carefully against the fact that the more "realistic" things get, the less fun the game can become.
Exactly, once I played Sims2 (so I could help by daughter figure it out)...I woke up, got dressed, went to work, came home, ate and cleaned up, went to bed, and repeated. I never could get ahead. If I tried to have "fun" I was too tired the next day for work. If I worked harder, my house got messy and I got depressed. I couldn't make enough money to buy the really cool stuff or a bigger house.
I realized, this was pretty much like real life...which sucked. I've never played again.
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Creative Director
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finally, I have created a 1st level spell that allows you to get back to consciousness immediately with your current amount of HP- so the house rule is not that critical.
The problem with that is, of course, that it's a bit overdesigned. Introducing a new house rule that requires further house rules to bring things back to basically the way the game was before the house rule came about isn't very efficient. Especially since you're basically at ground zero, but now all the clerics effectively have less spells than they should have because they're using some slots to keep this new spell handy. That creates diminishing returns; the cleric's less than he could be because he's forced to sacrifice some of his resources because of a new rule that makes the game more complex and deadly than it probably should be.
If you're instituting new rules to cancel out new rules, isn't it more streamlined and easier to not introduce that new rule in the first place?
Anyway, in the case of D0 and D1, the ticking clock and race against time elements involved are the big thing that, I suspect, is complicating this particular house rule. And that's as much a design flaw in the adventures as anything else. I try to make sure that "race against time" elements in adventures I develop are flexible enough so that the adventure can be adapted to many styles of game play, and nailing it down to a specific set of hours before it's all over is the worst way to handle it, I think. Were I to develop D0 or D1, I'd probably use a system of points to track the PCs successes and to determine when they run out of time, rather than tie them to a ticking clock. That, or I'd put in a sidebar that says, basically, "This adventure assumes ground-zero; if you use house rules that force PCs to take additional time to recover from wounds or prepare spells or otherwise artificially extend the passage of game time, you should extend the time allotted for success in this adventure as appropriate."