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The only time I have EVER fudged rolls in a PFS game have been when there was a child at the table who I did not believe would have the emotional maturity to handle a character death. ....I agree with this statement... though I think I would replace "...child..." with "...player...".
I've gamed with some lower age gamers who could easily handle the character death, and some "adults" who could not.
Yeah - but you should just expect the adults to deal with it.
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"I always feel softballing does the players a disservice"
Am I the only one that hears Judge Smails when someone says this?
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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When I played this, it was like a zoo. We had a cavalier/paladin on a dog, a cavalier with a worg, I'd recently acquired a l1 horse but chose to leave that behind, and we had a shaman with a terrifying pig. All in all there were 6 PCs and three ACs. Because one player didn't have a character, he got the l7 Merisiel pregen (l4 looked like suicide), and we ended up playing the 6-7 tier with a party that averaged (apart from the pregen) somewhere between 5 and 6. So for my surprisingly fragile melee paladin, this looked rather scary.
However, this being the Year of the Demon, everyone was pretty much loaded with cold iron weapons. Actually most of us carry both CI, silver and adamantine weapons and two of us had Smites to boot; so we weren't that nervous about DR. We were also able to consistently identify enemies and determine what DR to penetrate.
The aforementioned shaman also dished out some pretty spectacular long-term buffing. I think I got a +8 AC altogether, which made a huge difference.
The encounter outside wasn't very challenging, although it was interesting. This was my first time playing at this tier in a normal PF game (as opposed to the umpteenth low magic home game), so I was wondering what kind of difficulty to expect.
The gargoyle statue animated as soon as we looked inside and I used Detect Evil. This fight was brutal; the other paladin was killed in two rounds, and we had a PC on the other side of the monster bleeding out, with no healer able to get to him. But with Litany of Sloth we were able to get around that and move close enough to attack without eating AoOs. The paladin used a Debt to Society and some ready cash to get back to us pretty soon, while we waited around a bit. We were lucky to have a lot of reach weaponry, too, what with all the cavaliering going around.
We did the optional encounter;
Although the darkness was a hindrance, it wasn't actually all that bad for us. We had such a zoo that even 3 babaus had little chance at serious area control. There were just too many of us. It was a tough fight, and they did do quite a bit of damage, but it wasn't anywhere nearly as bad as the gargoyle. I think about half of us had darkvision, so we weren't as nerfed by it. We used the gavel mostly because we figured it'd probably be demonbane.
Amusingly enough,
By the time we'd gotten to the end scene, only I and the guy playing a halfling sorcerer hadn't clued in about the halfling assassin. In fact, he was talking about adopting the poor girl. And we were the only ones not down there in the pit fighting the yeth hounds. So when "she" turned on the halfling sorcerer, the player was thoroughly shocked and outraged. :P
Although the assassin started strong, he failed his save against the sorcerer's Lipstitch and then got leap-grappled by the shaman's pig-monster; so much for levitation. Stitched, pinned and grounded, Merisiel made the kill just before I could offer terms of surrender.
I think we were well enough prepared that the optional encounter was quite doable, although I do agree that Darkvision seems to be exceedingly powerful.