Simple question: Does Wrath of the Righteous feature an entry for Retrievers where they are listed as something other than evil creatures?
Optional Background: My GM is frustrated by our party's competence. I'm a late arrival to the game, a replacement player for a bard who left, and playing a paladin by request. The frustration presented by my paladin is not entirely the damage he deals, as the ranger puts out more even against my smite. Also, I don't mind. I went Marshal for support abilities.
The frustration stems from his mythic ability to share the benefits of his smite with his party. As a paladin who poured into his charisma, those are exceptionally powerful bonuses.
I ask because it was decided right after I wanted to smite a Retriever that they're not evil and they don't detect as evil. I know that to be a lot of b&%#$~$s in standard play, but it was said, "I'm looking at the description right now, and they're not evil."
Alternate interpretation of the simple question: Is my GM a bad liar, or did they print an unusual exception for normally-evil monsters in Wrath of the Righteous without any plot-based reason to do so?
Yes they're evil. He's a big liar
Alternatively the GM may have made the perfectly legitimate GM decision that in his game retrievers are constructs with no will and so have no alignment.
I considered it as part of my ongoing attempts to keep the game a challenge for my party as all pc's are brokenly powerful with Mythic. In the end I did not , I just doubled their hit points and enhanced all of their attacks.
Unless you GM is making this very arbitrary you should not object to some variation from the published stats and abilities of creatures , had your character made an appropriate knowledge roll to determine that he could smite retrievers and then been surprised? If not then you had no reason to expect it to work In character.
I have changes the stats from the bestiaries for pretty much everything so far in an attempt to keep up with the power curve, including coming up with some reasons why things like Worms that Walk are immune to Smite evil and plan to continue to do so for further opponents.
If you have a problem with your GM talk to him do not seek pseudo justification on the internet. Also be certain he does not read these forums, if he does and recognizes this comment he may well be annoyed, I would be furious.
1. Zombies have no will and are evil.
2. Retrievers are constructs with will (they have int, wis, and cha scores).
3. I'm fine with adjusting the challenge up. Four out of we five have openly discussed with our GM the ways that this could be made harder, from the ranger saying, "Don't let my ranger stand still," to the wizard explaining that he basically never ran low on slots, to me saying, "I can only smite a few times a day."
4. Arbitrariness is a recurring problem in this game. Buffs have been canceled after having run only a tenth to a quarter of their length because they were inconvenient to the GM, with nary a dispel trap for justification. Attempts to see enemies through doors via Detect Evil (which can penetrate doors) were shut down with, "There's a lot of evil in this place, you're getting static." Detect Magic would similarly get shut down as a scouting aide. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't get 'static' on Detect Evil even in the Abyss if I'm trying to distinguish an evil demon from a rock.
5. The wizard made the knowledge roll and relayed the information. Demon spider constructs from the abyss. We'd even made plans around my smite before the fight started because we spotted them a ways off.
6. I too have changed the stats for monsters in bestiaries. I'm fine with that. I'm fine with scaling the power of monsters to match the PCs. I was one of the people who suggested to the GM that things could stand to have more AC, HP, better attack bonuses, and more of them. I don't care about the power.
7. We have talked to the GM about our problems before, as mentioned above. I did not this time because the GM is not an impartial source on whether the GM is lying about the content of a module. I came here to ask if it was described otherwise in the module, or if we were being lied to about something so it wouldn't come off as arbitrary. We'd expressed great dissatisfaction with arbitrariness already.
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Where are you at in the path? I don't want to spoil anything, but some parts of WotR let the PCs take five-minute adventures a little too easily, and if your group is using XP, it would be very difficult to rewrite the adventure to strain your resources so. (At least, difficult compared to running from the book. But maybe he doesn't have the time or desire to rewrite so heavily.)
We're level 11, but this has been a problem since I joined. I think I was level 4? Won't say any more because, again, spoilers. Anyway, I didn't mean for this to turn into a GM rant. I seriously wanted only to know if there was a misprint in a stat block somewhere.
I guess you are in module 3, Demon's Heresy, what with retrievers and being lvl 11?
If so, I've gone through the PDF with "ctrl + f", no actual stat block for a retriever. They just point towards other official sources, and those have them as CE. The only "retriever" specified would be retriever drones and they (of course) don't have an alignment being more or less items, but those you wouldn't be fighting.
To be honest it does sound to me like your GM just doesn't know what to do, is frustrated and tries to create challenges by being a bit too arbitrary. I quite agree with him, and everyone else pretty much, that from part 3 in module 2 Wrath is just too easy - personally I quite like talking to my players about the changes I do, I've asked for their ideas, found some from reading, and for now settled on applying a good few "Advanced" templates, increasing the numbers of opponents, changing some encounters to prevent them from being able to rest and so. But my players know I'll do that and quite like it - they even liked it when I told them "No, you won't be mythic, but the enemies will be". Yeah, my players are manic thrill seekers.
You could try that route, rather than accuse him of lying (though it sounds like he did that). Speak with him, mention that you spoke to someone online who has played Wrath, that player complained of how easy the battles got after a while, mythic being broken and such - and ask him if it perhaps would be an idea to add the advanced template to quite a few opponents, increase their numbers, perhaps have some extra environmental hazards from time to time? :-)