Venture-Agent, Finland—Tampere
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Umm... I'm prepping this early morning and I'm groggy due to sleeping badly, so maybe I'm missing something but...
I can't believe nobody has asked about this: Why does the akata start in cocoon?
I mean, no reason why players couldn't start butchering the animals in middle of combat(...well besides no clue how many rounds it would take to butcher animal :p), but as written, cooking phase starts after combat is over and for every 3 round animal has been dead before end of combat the butchering dc increases... And Akata takes 1d4 minute to claw out of its cocoon. So umm, the dc to butcher two other animals could increase by 10 depending on how fast they fall and how fast the akata claws itself out.
Like sure, they get adamantine knife from supply crate but... Adamantine doesn't ignore hardness of 30 or higher. So umm, the pcs would most likely attack other two targets first and then there could be 10-30 rounds of downtime.
I'm getting feeling I miss something because while that won't be game breaker(they can still otherwise with good rolls get higher points than rival team), that seems kinda punishing for something pcs can't really avoid at lower tier since hardness 30 cocoon again. Like as far as I can tell, only way pcs would do super well in this at low level without good luck is if they both know about mechanics for butchering and recognize akata cocoon and then wait out until it hatches and avoid killing animals until then. Like sure, they would still get akata's meat without penalties and get 2 from other two, but I'm just confused about why to include 1d4 random wait time in lower tier with soft time limit. I'd get it if scenario said that it takes 1 or 2 minutes for it to claw itself out, but I'm not sure akata being in cocoon for 30 or 40 rounds really adds much to the encounter.
In general, encounter seems cool and flavorful but has lot of small details that seems to be just for flavor or complicate encounter further. Like order in which they butcher the meat being randomized but it doesn't seem to matter for butchering dc since that is based on how long it took for combat phase to end. And in general, that means gm has to track each of first two corpses separately. Again not super hard to do, but it is extra busy work and I'm grumpy since I'm morning groggy xD
But yeah, that was really rambling post when I just meant to ask "why the 1d4 minute cocoon in this encounter?"