Couldn't someone just snipe the bard? I think, overall, the level 12 wizard is probably the most dangerous thing in this encounter. I'm not sure the trolls are doing much here besides fodder.
Intelligently-used spellcasters with good tactics are exceedingly dangerous and quite easy to TPK most parties with. Your proposal is an interesting one, in that it would actually be a thoughtful encounter if played well. The Wizard and Bard together come out to CR 12, and Trolls with class levels will probably push it to CR 14 or even 15 range, so we're talking about a fairly high-level party that can be presumed to have the tools to deal with an encounter like this. You can incapacitate the trolls, detect and dispel the magical buffs, or just overpowering everything through raw combat power.
If your goal is to TPK your party rather than giving them an interesting encounter, there are far more efficient ways to do it. A relatively simple one (by no means the most deadly, but relatively easy to build and use) is an invisible fireball bombardment. An 8th level Sorcerer is capable of casting Greater Invisibility, Fly, and with a little optimization a very threatening Fireball. I'll spare you the breakdown (just read a guide to blaster Sorcerers) but you can conservatively get 10d6+10 and 15d6+15 on fireball and empowered fireball respectively.
Now, one of these Sorcerers is CR 7, so to be comparable to your proposed Troll encounter that would mean about 8 of them could be working in tandem to make it a CR 13 encounter. On the surprise round, that's 8 x 10d6+10 damage with a DC 19 reflex save for half. Even if you succeed on all 8 saves, that's 180 damage on average on the surprise round, and the next round it'll be 270 damage on average with successful saves when they fling empowered fireballs to finish the job. Anyone without Evasion or substantial fire resistance is already dead, and that's probably 3/4 of the party. Also keep in mind that fireball has a 720 foot range (and we can easily apply metamagic to double it if we really want to, although that precludes using the empowered metamagic) so the ambushers can be positioned a great distance away to make detection and retaliation nearly impossible.
Bottom line is that it's relatively easy to TPK the party if you really want to. That isn't the point of the game, and if you're doing this as anything more than a thought experiment then you're probably doing something terribly wrong. You can also get a lot deadlier than this if you really want to.
I guess it's kind of funny but it seems more tedious than anything.
Well, there's certainly a lot you can do with encounters like these. One thing to note is that we'll probably end up with a fairly high CR encounter when this is over. As I already mentioned, the Wizard and Bard come out to roughly CR 12 on their own, and since the Trolls need to be a credible threat prior to receiving those magical buffs they'll need to be about on the same level. This means the CR of the encounter will probably be around 14 or 15. This is getting high enough that you need to really take a tailored approach to how your own party plays.
First step is to find out what Trolls we're going to be using. There don't appear to be any Trolls naturally in the right CR range for this purpose, so PC class levels on the standard Trol seems to be the way to go. I checked Monster Codex to see if there are any good prebuilt statblocks, and the Troll Berserker (a Troll Barbarian 4 that is CR 9) jumped out immediately for this purpose. It does need a little modification, though; it uses the Superstition Rage Power, and that conflicts if the Wizard and Bard will be buffing them throughout the battle. However, its will save is already low even with the Superstition boost so I'd personally swap out the feat and items to raise it. Iron Will and a Cloak of Protection +2 will bring that will save into a less suicidal range, and if we prop it up a bit more with a Heroism spell it's actually high enough to have a decent chance of shrugging off really dangerous spells.
Now, how many trolls should we have? The Wizard and Bard are 12,800 and 9,600 XP respectively, for a total of 22,400. That gives us a budget of 16,000 (~2.5 trolls) if we want to do CR 14, or 28,800 (~4.5 trolls). I'd probably go for 4 trolls making this an encounter that's somewhere between CR 14 and 15.
Next is the tricky part, and that's the build and spell loadout of the Wizard and Bard. I think keeping with the theme of this encounter they should focus on passive support. Spells like Haste and Mass Enlarge Person would be very obvious choices, but you'd probably need to disrupt the PC's and support the trolls in other ways. There's a whole lot you can do, but only so many spells known and spell slots to fill it out with. However, this is really going to affect the flavor and difficulty of the encounter. You probably should consider your own party here and avoid doing anything that would completely shut them down, but ensure you have counter-measures against common tactics they employ that would shut down this encounter.
Finally, I'd tried to weave this one into the narrative a bit. Who exactly are these Wizards and Trolls, why are they working together, and why are the party their enemies? I love well-built encounters with cool tactics, but it's even sweeter if those mechanics blend in well with the narrative.
Maybe the trolls and the spellcasters just like each other. Maybe they're allied against a common threat. Maybe the bard and wizard work for the trolls, and the trolls have a giant tribe somewhere.
It sounds like what you're really going for is you want to remove vulnerabilities X and Y from Monsters Z, and also have a way for the PCs to be clever and remove protections X and Y.
That can be a fun type of encounter if the PCs pick up on it. After the shock of seeing their trusty fireballs fail to cook the trolls, they'll have to rally. They have to be strategic in who to target and when to target them. For example, the tanks might have to block the trolls from squishy magic-users as the magic-users use divination magic to point out the invisible enemies for the snipers to snipe.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the 3.5 Ravenloft adventure was based around this. The PCs had to explore the BBEG Vampire's Domain, and there were several site-based encounters that, if successfully overcome, each would remove a different protection from the BBEG. (It also had the added benefit of giving the PCs more XP and levels so they would be a match for the BBEG.)
|
Ok, but the idea is covering the trolls weaknesses. If the trolls are ineffective throw the advanced template on them and a few class levels on them, probably Barbarian and make them relevant. Put invisibilityon the wizard and the bard and make the players think it's more of a random encounter tho they start attacking the trolls with fire or acid and watch thier faces when it doesn't hurt them.
You might get a couple rounds out of that, but level 10+ characters are going to have a way to see invisibility unless they have never encountered such tactics. Which by level 10 is highly unlikely. Once the invisible bard is located and ragepounced/turned into a bardbunny/added to the party's rock garden/entombed in ice, the trolls are easily dealt with. The wizard using spells is the real threat, but if he is just invisible and buffing the trolls, he is less of a problem.
You, sir, are evil. :)
Unsure about the Ravenloft reference but yes that is the basic premise of this encounter
If that's the case, you might want to find a larger amount of fire resistance, or change the mechanic somehow. Fire resistance 30 can be shut down by a single average fireball at that level (a little more than 80% of the time on average).
The fire resistance comes from the Bardic Performance and so the 30 is a constant effect that would be renewed every turn so if it gets blown through one turn it will be back the next.
That's no different from a normal resist energy. My point was that the normal way I've seen people deal with trolls is "kill it (without fire), then burn it to shut down regeneration." Having fire resistance of 30 does not help if your troll is at negative CON and then take fire damage (from a fireball) which shuts down regeneration and kills it.
So what you are saying is I need something that provides immunity to fire and acid (temporarily) to put on the trolls that needs to be overcome by the PC's? If so what does that?
If it's a home brewed campaign, and meant to be a BBEG-type encounter (or a prelude to a BBEG encounter), my advice would be to make it a plot device. Some sort of campaign specific minor artifact or ritual magic that grants fire immunity (or improves the Bard's normal aura), or even flatly removes the normal ways to overcome troll regeneration. You can forshadow this in your campaign, and if your players are creative enough, they'll go in forewarned.
Your players can still 'win' the first encounter in a variety of ways, followed by (if they achieve only a 'temporary' or partial victory) some quest / plot development that gives them an advantage for a future, more epic, encounter.
A simpler way to go would be to put a protection from energy (fire) on the trolls (from the wizard), which would add some buffer before you start hitting the energy resistance from the bard.
If the wizard magic jars into a troll, he could put a fire shield (chill shield) on himself too.
Magic Jar, my favorite spell.
|
|
So the wizard just needs to prepare it twice, one for fire one for acid. Then the bard either have no archetype or the savage skald archetype to boost the Trolls even more. Then the bard can do most of the buffing and the only buffs the wizard would need is the protection from energy spells and maybe haste or something, after those he could focus on battlefield control or offensive spells.
You'll need Protection from Energy, Communal. Protection from Energy is a single target spell.
Why not just give the trolls the half-fiend template and class levels in bloodrager. Make sure they have Resist Energy and Protection from Energy on their spell lists.
Simpler and no soft targets for the group to snipe.
In my experience, regeneration is not that difficult to deal with. The trolls still fall unconscious, and once they are down, the melee specialists just keep hitting them until the rest of the party comes up with a more permanent solution.
But you can get really creative with synergizing abilities. I once used a high-level alchemist and a group of glass golems (each equipped with a necklace of fireballs) to great effect.