| Brenden Falke |
I'm preparing to DM hells rebels, and just finished reading through the entire AP for the first time. I was wondering how other DMs ran the final Tower Of Bone encounters, as well as the Barzillai encounter. Specifically I'm not really wowed by Barzillai's mythic stats (and his non-mythic form seems frankly just weak), and I feel like I might be missing something.
Some questions I have:
1) Did you allow your players to rest inside the tower of bone? How do you feel this affected the difficulty of the final encounter?
2) Barzillai (assume his mythic stats) himself seems... alright, power wise. Not great though, just ok. What makes him a challenging encounter? Is it primarily the hounds and pit fiend allies that make it a difficult encounter, or is there something about his abilities to really be a danger to the PCs? Is he designed to be fought by a full strength party (all spells available, fully buffed, etc), or a party that's already spent a chunk of their resources?
3) How explicit were you about the soul points mechanic? I feel that being too open about this might lead to players simply making choices because they are trying to reduce the soul points, turning a cool thematic part of the adventure into a mere mathematic optimization exercise. And since the soul points appear much sooner in the adventure, sharing their existence or significance with the players seems like it would spoil too much. On the other hand, keeping the players in the dark about the soul points seems like it would make them pointless. How did you handle this?
4) How much did you tell your players about barzillai's flaws? How did you portray, illustrate or explain them to your players?