7-07 Draconic Folly

[The.Vortex]

I am just preparing to run the adventure tomorrow. There are two things that seem a bit off / odd to me:

- The enemies in Encounter A is a bit weird: No matter the subtier, it is always a mix of trolls and ogres, many of those with abilities that are species-specific. For example the Ogre Boss has a buff for all other Ogres. But at low tier, he is paired with three trolls and no ogre (depending on CP). Or the Troll Warleader in High Tier has an area attack that hits anything that isn't a troll.
Are we supposed to treat their allies as the correct type of creature? Or do they just not use those abilities in this fight?

- The secondary success condition states that you need to "score at least half of the possible points in the Victory Point challenge". Are the possible points based on "everyone rolls a success every time" or are really the points for "everyone crits every time" needed? The first would be SIGNIFICANTLY easier to achieve and somewhere between the thresholds that are used earlier in the adventure (which are basicalls "up to one third" and "more than 2/3" of "everbody rolls a success every time". If the target number is based on the CRITICAL SUCCESSES, it would be more than what was needed during the adventure itself

[redeux]

1. I treated Ogre and Troll abilities as-is and didn't let them treat each other as allies for the sake of the abilities. I do think this falls under GM discretion but it is a bit fine line considering that in my matchup (24CP) we had 2 Ogre Bosses and 2 Warlords. The Ogre's getting hit by the Roar wasn't a huge deal, but I was concerned about how things would look if one of the Ogre's started hasting the other 3 NPCs. Could the PC's have handled it? Sure, but this was the first of potentially six encounters with no long rest (without sacrificing secondary objective). So the answer to this really comes down to whether or not you'd think allowing Ogre's and Warlords to treat each other as allies without "substantially increasing difficulty". In my case it did feel like it would be increasing difficulty and while not substantial, I opted to just leave it as-is.

2. I treated it as at half of the total number of rolls. So I had 5 players, 15 total rolls. My party has 12 victory points (rolling quite well in the 2nd round). Since they had at least 7.5 points, I gave them the secondary objective. I don't think it makes sense to consider the max based on critical successes. While there are a lot of skills that can be used, these are still tier-based DC's and to have gotten 15 Victory Points my party would've had to hero point every failure, not just every crit failure. When the game design intends some failures on a level based DC, I don't think it makes sense to have the secondary objective basically expect 1.0 victory points per roll, as opposed to 0.5 per roll (or some number in between).

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That aside, when preparing for this scenario I was a little concerned about the time seeing 6 potential encounters. I was running in a convention and excluding a 10 minute break before area C, we ran 4 encounters and took 5 full hours of gameplay. That was with me resolving combat as quickly as possible and us only having a little bit of time to roleplay at start and in the 2nd Swamp Ruins area. Still had fun and players seemed to enjoy it as well.

[The.Vortex]

I ran the scenario yesterday and didn't allow the abilities of trolls and ogres to be used on the others, either. The fight was already pretty long and hard (due to some lucky rolls by one of the ogres, who rolled 3 or 4 nat 20s while hitting the back line with his deadly hook).

For the secondary goal I went with the more sane option, too. The group of 12 reached 15 or so points, so they weren't even that far off from the harder reading. But it just felt too punishing to require that amount of successes, especially compared to other scenarios.

As for the length: Yes, we skipped the optional one, too and it took us more than 5.5 hours to finish the game. Definitely a long one!

Another note: The final two encounters don't really make sense on that map. Zaluraak should easily be able to see what is happening in the chamber. And the players would see the dragon the whole time, too. It feels like there should be some kind of corridor or other seperation between the two areas.

[thistledown]

For the Greater Demonologist - is the +1 from Demonic Temptation already included in the stat block, or is it not used this day (consequences make me doubt it being used every day). If not used yet, how many actions to activate?