The Game Masters' Bane : Bored Players. CCKS ... sicc an advanced Otyugh named...either you where avoiding censorship or you missed an O from their initials :)
Nawp - those're the initials for that group. ^_^
Strange. The Core rulebook goes out of its way to say you can do it.
I believe I may be crossing my thread topics. From what I can see (your quote of what a spell trigger is, and the fact that wands implicitly use a spell trigger, you would be correct.
I wonder what thread I'm thinking of.
Drat. That's one element of the rules that I've personally always thought made zero sense. How can one complete a spell trigger when one does not have any spell casting ability whatsoever?
Ah well. ^_^
Drat. That's one element of the rules that I've personally always thought made zero sense. How can one complete a spell trigger when one does not have any spell casting ability whatsoever?
Ah well. ^_^
It's probably more for playability than anything else. Of course, you can get into corner cases when characters dip a level of paladin or ranger instead of taking another level of fighter, with a primary casting stat of < 10, for the sole reason to be able to use wands. A wand of bless weapon for example is highly useful and probably worth a paladin dip at low levels for an undead-heavy campaign.
It's probably more for playability than anything else. Of course, you can get into corner cases when characters dip a level of paladin or ranger instead of taking another level of fighter, with a primary casting stat of < 10, for the sole reason to be able to use wands. A wand of bless weapon for example is highly useful and probably worth a paladin dip at low levels for an undead-heavy campaign.
Also pretty cool if you want to go without a dedicated healer class. As far as poisons, curses etc. The party would have to get healed at a local temple or something similar. Its an Urban campaign for the most part in case you have to leave a dungeon in an emergency to get a poisoned or cursed character healed.
Going without a healer or wand user at the least would be bad though (in James Keegan's game).
Drat. That's one element of the rules that I've personally always thought made zero sense. How can one complete a spell trigger when one does not have any spell casting ability whatsoever?
Ah well. ^_^
It makes sense though. The class in question has a latent ability to cast spells but has to wait until a higher level to master it. You can consider a wand as sort of a crutch or training wheels until he can cast spells on his own.
I don't think my group is going to survive this adventure path for too long. After a TPK in RoRL, you would think they would roll up a fairly balanced party (fighter, wizard, rogue, cleric, perhaps?). No, not at all. We have a rogue (totally fine), ranger (has kind of a glass jaw, seeing as she lacks a Con bonus to her hp) and two sorcerers.Wow, what a horribly unbalanced party. As a DM, I always say I'll try to accommodate the party the players want to build, although I secretly hope it is balanced to make my life easier.
I'd lean with Sunderstone and go with an NPC paladin to provide melee muscle, act as a flanking partner, and be the healer. A partial wand of CLW also sounds like a must.
Might also think about tweaking some encounters to help play to the party's strengths, although that isn't possible all the time.
They have two sorcerers - they can suck it up and Use Magic Device with wands of cure light wounds. At 4th level the ranger will be able to use that same wand with perfect reliability.
Janiven saved their bacon a few times in the sewers, which helps to give them the impression that she's competent but doesn't really help the players beyond keeping them alive. I feel like the DMNPC can either hog the glory or wind up as just the personality free healing dispenser. The thing that really disapponted me is that they're basically being payed in healing potions and yet none of them thought to take a five foot step and drink it when they needed to. I even said,"Listen, you can use those during a battle. You know that, right?"
I'll drop a wand of cure light wounds into an encounter and that'll be it. I wash my hands of it; they can learn to roll balanced parties the hard way.
It makes sense though. The class in question has a latent ability to cast spells but has to wait until a higher level to master it. You can consider a wand as sort of a crutch or training wheels until he can cast spells on his own.Drat. That's one element of the rules that I've personally always thought made zero sense. How can one complete a spell trigger when one does not have any spell casting ability whatsoever?
Ah well. ^_^
That I can agree with. After all, if one can mysteriously unlock latent arcane/divine power (aka multiclassing in 3e/PRPG), or finally see that last set of mental tumblers to years of arcane schooling, or get called by some divinely powerful ethos or Gawd, then being able to use spell trigger items is tolerable when the ability is already part of the relevant character class.
I don't think my group is going to survive this adventure path for too long. After a TPK in RoRL, you would think they would roll up a fairly balanced party (fighter, wizard, rogue, cleric, perhaps?). No, not at all. We have a rogue (totally fine), ranger (has kind of a glass jaw, seeing as she lacks a Con bonus to her hp) and two sorcerers.Wow, what a horribly unbalanced party. As a DM, I always say I'll try to accommodate the party the players want to build, although I secretly hope it is balanced to make my life easier.
I'd lean with Sunderstone and go with an NPC paladin to provide melee muscle, act as a flanking partner, and be the healer. A partial wand of CLW also sounds like a must.
Might also think about tweaking some encounters to help play to the party's strengths, although that isn't possible all the time.
They have two sorcerers - they can suck it up and Use Magic Device with wands of cure light wounds. At 4th level the ranger will be able to use that same wand with perfect reliability.
Janiven saved their bacon a few times in the sewers, which helps to give them the impression that she's competent but doesn't really help the players beyond keeping them alive. I feel like the DMNPC can either hog the glory or wind up as just the personality free healing dispenser. The thing that really disapponted me is that they're basically being payed in healing potions and yet none of them thought to take a five foot step and drink it when they needed to. I even said,"Listen, you can use those during a battle. You know that, right?"
I'll drop a wand of cure light wounds into an encounter and that'll be it. I wash my hands of it; they can learn to roll balanced parties the hard way.
You have the right of it - a looted/found wand of CLW doesn't last long when it's the primary source of healing. And, if you read ahead in the CoT, there are already sections of game time ahead of them when they're going to be surviving solely by means of that wand...
First time GM running this module, in the past I've been too lazy to design my own things, so I went with something I could pay for other people to do for me! So far has worked fairly well.
Most of my party consists of one of the new classes (Cavalier/Oracle/Summoner) so things have been fairly interesting going in. Due to my incompetence, I ended the sewer portion of the game fairly quickly, which turned out alright. The PCs pretty much stepped on all the encounters pretty well so I'm aiming to ramp up the CRs in the future.
Going into the rescue mission, my group took a unique approach. The wizard in the group climbed a tree and used a silent image to make the bridge look like it was out of commission, inside the illusion half the party waited silently while two members stood as guards using arminger armor repaired by one of the NPCs, overall it was a well done ambush, through some creative bluffing and well timed interference by Janiven, the horse mounted hellknights were drawn off and the group struck midway through the wagon turning around. In the matter of two turns they had dealt with the entire group without killing a single one through the use of grease, sleep, and many subdual hits. I was amazed at how fast my knights fell, it was far too early to justify the horsemen coming back from chasing the decoy so the PCs got away fairly unopposed.
Overall we had a great time, and I'm considering how I'm going to fill the area between now and the bastards with something interesting.
On running CoT
Pick three or four of the Children and run with them.
It will help you a lot with book keeping and prevent you from being overwhelmed by the dozen or so NPC's you'll be role-playing
Get ready to write your own dialogue
these mods are NOT heavy on written dialogue. Rather they prefer to give you the framework for how things are supposed to play out..which is good (in my opinion) because it lets you color the world as you wish.
Speaking of dialogue
There's a section where they plan an attack on a caravan to free a captured friend...I wrote the pc's small parts to play in the briefing *if they wanted too*. They got to read the parts then if they liked it I'd que them in and they'd read their part. Helps with immersion a bit and stops them from sitting there while you drone on with a briefing.
I play in a party that really doesn't care for dungeons. As such, I've re-written much of the first mod to focus more on side-quests, and I introduced the Bastards as a group of Bandits that tried to rob the players. One thing led to another, and it basically broke out in a turf war between the Children (or the Chelish Inquisition Association in my game...blasted C.I.A.!) and the Bastards. They kidnapped two of the beloved NPC's (Amaya and Ermolos in my case) and it became a kind of showdown at the ok coral style running battle around some ruined buildings.
Mod two is Awesome
the Murder Play is GREAT. It gives you a good excuse to get your party members into the action by casting them in a play (I highly reccomend you have them read out their sections) that they may or may not survive. It's fun.
Difficulty seems a *little* low.
I've found that my party is really cleaning up on the fights as written. I've doing one of two things, either adding extra baddies (an answer I don't like, it slows down the game a lot) or buffing up the existing ones (I ran anwen as a 4th level cleric against the group at 2nd level...the challenge was good and he had some more quirky abilities that helped him stand out).
The dark is not scary enough as written.
I like my players to be afraid of the night dag-nabbit! The shadowgarms are cute but letting the players kill one as fast as they reccomend takes a lot of the feeling of DREAD out of the night...and I think the atmosphere of fright is one of the best parts of the AP. I upgraded them to Shadow Demons, but took care not to hit the players too hard while running them ragged. It's worked, they're exceedingly cautious about nightfall. find another way toget them fame, I highly reccomend NOT letting them kill a shadow-thing, whatever you decide it is!
Even now my players' characters take great pains to avoid being out of doors on unlit streets before the sun sets - pretty impressive for a 6th level group.
CoT so far shows some growing pains as they were written during the 'polishing stages' of the Core Rules and Bestiary. As such, there are some hiccups - minor ones, but they're there. Fortunately, this AP is fairly easy to modify without too much effort.
I recommend the 'advanced simple' template as a very quick toughening up of the 'as written' encounters depending upon your group. Nothing says the GM loves you like a foe that's 4 AC harder to hit. ^_^
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Ran the rescue from Bastards today. Went really well. They are all starting to roleplay now, they used to just be haknslashers.
They tryed to stop them at the bridge. The halfling rogue stayed hidden and lit some oil on the road to panic the horses and stop the wagon. I added 3 armingers because I have 6 players. They tryed not to kill them but the cleric and one arminger went down for good. Hard to pull punches with natural 20 crits.
Then I had them run into the actor at the stable and they had the cleric heal the horses they borrowed to assure him they would not be fatigued for the perfeomance. I thought that was a nice touch and increased his reaction.
We only play every couple of weeks, going slow but everyone is having a blast.
One other question. With 6 players in the party, how much extra treasure should I be giving out per encounter to keep up with party wealth? 50% like the number of people per encounter?
Yes, to keep it simple. Try setting valuable items (gems, jewelry, artwork and so on) at a number evenly divisible by 6 and quantities of loot that are in numbers of 4 set to 6.
For solo guys, advanced template with maximized hp should do the trick as a quick and dirty fix that is very easy to do "on the fly".
PRPG I believe intends to encourage players to 'use what you get' rather than 'go shopping', so it behooves you to change specific items (armor, shields, weapons especially) to those that match up with your players' characters. This will occasionally require to re-spec the critters. I do not believe so far that anything 'as written' will be difficult to do so with.
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Well they had to do some stuff in the city, buy things, ect.. Then They went to the temple area. When they were planning it the dwarf had a good idea of trying to set up a false lead of a big score to lure them out instead of fighting them on there turf. But everyone else thought hitting them asap would be best.
They cleared out a couple of the bulidings and found a couple of the trap doors leading below. Then I had to end it.
I want to wrap this one up and continue, but one of my players is on a couple of weeks hiatus now. Im cursed.
We had to go on a hiatus for a while, too, since half the group went away for the holidays and I had some freelance work to take care of. After the almost disastrous carriage heist, I thought it would be a good idea to switch to another AP. But now I'm not as sure, since one of the sorcerers has volunteered to change his character to a cleric (which will really help) and we may have another player or two join in. And apparently everyone had a great time despite people being knocked out left and right; maybe just making up a plan of their own, seeing it get unravelled and then trying to cope and then just barely succeeding was more thrilling for them than for me. So maybe it was just me getting frustrated that did it, since I was sure I would have another TPK on my hands. I think writing up an attack on Whitechin and some shadowbeast fights will help and then we'll see how they fare against the Bastards.
And by the way, has anyone tried out the item cards with the campaign? I got the set and they look cool, I'm just never sure when I'm supposed to hand them out.
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We finished up Bastards (more or less, we quit with them needing to loot the place) and wow did it turn into a CF. They started out quite well, sneaking to the back side of one of the buildings in town, but then one small statement turned everything all pear shaped. The paladin said to the ranger "Hey, why don't you go see if the door is boarded up". That, followed by a 20 perception check roll by the guard in the bell-tower put the entire facility on alert.
After some dog kicking action, kicking in the door which resulted in four readied crossbow bolts on target, a crit-failure on a bull-rush attempt that caused the ranger to fall down the stairs in the belltower after doing a dramatic climb to the top left them down about three lay of hands and two potions of cure light wounds down before they even had a chance to engage in combat. They also unfortunately let one of the Tieflings get away down into the catacombs which just started cascading their problems.
When they got into the catacombs the ranger failed his Charm Person save miserably and started laying into the party (and being human favored-enemy didn't help). After some defensive fighting with the Ranger and two successful saves against color spray the Paladin gave up charged blindly into the area of darkness concealing the sorcerer. He unfortunately got away and ran to his buddies leaving the group down one friendly and out another couple lay of hands and potions. In order to keep things moving I ruled that (after failing his Charisma check) the Sorcerer did not leave the ranger with very good instructions and as a result he was still charmed (believing the sorcerer was his friend), but not hostile to his usual allies. This turned out to be a real liability as they moved further in, keeping their ally tied up almost to the ambush.
The ambush is where things went downhill again. The group had convinced the ranger to leave her weapons behind and take a purely defensive stance, helping with potions as needed, but when four more tieflings and both sorcerers appeared, they figured it was all over. The charmer sorcerer reiterated his instructions and they again lost their friend to the charm. After a good color spray which took out three of the four rogues, the paladin charged past the remaining one standing, declared the sorcerer which had the charm person on his friend his smite target, and promptly cleaved him in two. Unfortunately in doing so he ran all the way into the last chamber and brought in the guy with the claws and his three allies. The fight lasted forever with rarely a roll above about an eight (enough time for two color spray effects to wear off). The claw-tiefling kept knocking their allies unconscious (the group sorcerer and rogue) and the paladin was on the edge most of the fight. Eventually they got lucky with some ranged attacks and took him down.
Thinking everything was over the party was standing with an absolutely exhausted potion supply (everybody came in with at least three CLW potions and the paladin had a CMW), the paladin was out of lay of hands and smite attempts, and the hit point total in the entire group added together was in the single digits. That's when they decided to open the last door. Oops.
At that point I thought I had a true TPK on my hand. I was amazed at that point that the group hadn't actually suffered one with the sorcerer and rogue going down at least three times each. Interestingly that's when the rolls went completely for the group. Their initial attack consisted of the ranger, rogue, and paladin, of which both the rogue and paladin hit. The BBEG cast spiritual weapon and was about to lay in for the long haul (the group was completely dispersed which left burning hands not a good option). The next round of combat the rogue sneak attacked and hit, the paladin hit, and the ranger crit. The BBEG followed up with a cure moderate wounds bringing his HP total from 6 to 23. The next round the group all hit again but this time the paladin crit and the rogue got in his sneak attack again. Back down to five HP the BBEG tried to cast cure light wounds, but unfortunately two more got in hits on their AOOs (which they had missed every one up to that point) and took him down.
It took an hour to take down the guys with the claw, it took five minutes to deal with the end boss. Curious how that works sometimes.
Okay.. So my group crashed, more or less, through the sewers, they wrecked the poor armigers, one of the players, a sorcerer that for some unknown reason has Wizard Mark, earned an eternal enemy by 'branding' his mark on the forehead of Shanwen...
That's so cool! I like clever players. Sometimes they're too clever for their own good, but when they give you that kind of story hook, who can complain?
Anyway, I'll be running the AP eventually, probably start up within the month and I'm finding this thread to be a good read.
One question about the sewers: How many of you mapped it out (more or less) beforehand, and how many of you simply rolled during play? I like to plan things a little, but I do like the "roll during play and make it feel more chaotic"-approach.
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They finished up Bastards tonight. They went down to the main lair through one of the side buildings, not the temple. They hack thrugh the ambush and other encounters. Then they took out Palaveen and cut his head of to get the others to surrender. The main fighter could not role to save his life thou. Pretty funny.
One of the sorcerers switched to a cleric of Cayden Cailean and we got a new player in who's playing a druid. So far it's gone way better than our rocky start; took down the Bastards with relative ease, everyone survived the play and made a lot of money and now we're starting the mayor's party tonight.
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Ran the party and first part of the Knot. They only madr it through 3 rooms. The shadows were tough but they got through it. They were able to find the secret door so that helped.
After other game me and another friend of the trouble player talked to him a bit. He seems to have read up on rules more. But he was not there for the last session. He had a personel thing to take care off.
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We took a break for the summer. Played a couple more sessions. They are almost done with the knot. They took out the shadows on the stairs without much trouble because they found the secret doors and the mirrors. Then when they met the bearded devil the Dwarf was able to do a trip attack and then they took him out while he was prone. The water zombies were no issues. But they had a major issue with the chains. They could not get past the toughness. They had to retreat from that. The tests were a bit of a challenge but they got through it. They drove Sian away in the heart, They did not go through the lake of filth.
The mummy got a sneak attack, almost took them out. The fighter and rogue got mummy rot though. Then they hit the crux area. I took out the lemiures. It was just the outcast king. It was very tough but they took him down and secured the crux.
Now they have to decide if they want to check out the rest of the knot or just go back. They just hit 5th level.