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5 years ago ::
May 18, 2008 - 7:39PM
#31
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Date Joined:
Aug 19, 2007
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I wish you WOULD post your concerns -- that's part of the reason I read this thread! You can always throw up a big SPOILER ALERT for people who don't want the details of the adventure.
Or use spoiler blocks [noparse]Spoiler:
Show
like this [/noparse]
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5 years ago ::
May 18, 2008 - 8:01PM
#32
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Or use spoiler blocks [noparse]Spoiler:
Show
like this [/noparse]
I was wondering how to do that! And noparse is handy, too.
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5 years ago ::
May 18, 2008 - 8:03PM
#33
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Date Joined:
Aug 19, 2007
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I was wondering how to do that! And noparse is handy, too.
Sure is. I was over at the Forum FAQ the other day and picked up some nifty new tags. :D
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5 years ago ::
Jun 01, 2008 - 10:43PM
#34
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Initial Reaction: Holy Bloodbath! Sputter? TPK?.....
Received it at our shop last week, ran through it over the weekend with experienced GM and players (will attempt a repeat this Thursday night).
Whoever put this together as a first level adventure needs to have their head examined. This is far, far out of whack for a group of first level characters. I would not even try to introduce someone to the game with this meat-grinder, nor take anything but a pre-gen into. GM told us that if we were to survive he would have had to NERF the encounters big time.
There are a lot of things we are STILL shaking our heads at with regards to the abbreviated rules that came packaged with the adventure, there appear to be several broken things right off, but I will try another run at it Thursday and see if maybe it was just the newness of the shift or surge rules that threw us. I will post more Friday morning after we have another go at it.
I played this with some friends over the weekend, and our group had a very similar reaction. This is with 5 players, 2 of whom are fairly new to RPGs, but both briefly played 3.5, the remaining 3 players and DM have been playing RPGs for over a decade and are no strangers to D&D.
Everything was going fine until the Irontooth encounter, which resulted in a TPK. It wasn't even close. After that happened, the experienced players were a little puzzled at why this was considered by someone to be a balanced encounter. We figured that our DM must have been reading the encounter incorrectly, but that turned out not to be the case; it's just far more difficult than I would expect in an introductory adventure.
Spoiler:
Show
The PCs are expected to do roughly 300 hp of damage to the monsters, as well as downing 10 minions. This is approximately a 3:1 damage ratio for the PCs (not including minions, who die in one hit). In addition, the boss of the fight, Irontooth starts doing extra damage and gains regeneration when he is bloodied (half hp - he has 108 or so total). The NPCs do a significant amount of damage and Irontooth is a beating all by himself. Without serious DM fudging, I'm not sure how the PCs could survive this encounter. I'm not really sure what to make of this, except to question the playtesting. I'm not even sure if we were to attempt this again knowing full well exactly what we were up against and the NPC stat blocks we would have better than a 50-50 shot. The NPCs are just too difficult to down, and by the odds they should inflict enough damage to kill several PCs. I would expect a DM to have to significantly fudge rolls or tactics in order to give the PCs a chance to survive.
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5 years ago ::
Jun 01, 2008 - 10:46PM
#35
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Date Joined:
Aug 17, 2007
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I ran through it this evening, and did it without a single party death or drop. The spacing between waves is pretty nice; the party was almost done with the first wave when the second showed up, having only a skirmisher and the slinger left.
Irontooth is a pain. I think rangers and fighters work best against him.
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5 years ago ::
Jun 01, 2008 - 11:04PM
#36
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There aren't any rangers in the quick start rules. To clarify, we were just using the quick start characters and did not have a copy of any of the 4th ed books yet.
(I have some quibbles with their feat allocations... I think. In particular, the paladin's feat seems very poor, although I don't know what other options would be available.)
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5 years ago ::
Jun 01, 2008 - 11:14PM
#37
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Date Joined:
Aug 17, 2007
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I ran it using some characters that I built, and some of the quickstarts.
I'm not sure how it would go with just the quickstarts. Maybe they're not fully powered, or maybe I made some of my characters rather well.
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5 years ago ::
Jun 04, 2008 - 1:29PM
#38
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Holy moly! After reading through KotS, I thought it was going to be a pretty good adventure. It reminded me a little bit too much of Sunless Citadel, but that's cool; SC was a good adventure. Spoiler:
Show
I was disappointed with the lack of item lists for the stores. Plus, when the PCs started picking up gear from dead enemies, I had to flip around to see exactly what kind of damage and AC numbers to use. Not cool. Give us the darn numbers, please!
The Irontooth encounter ended in a TPK. The party made it through the outer lair encounter so easily, I didn't think I would have to nerf the inner lair encounter. Boy was I wrong. The party was only able to knock off one skirmisher and about half the minions before the second wave hit. Then, it was a massacre. Shifty kobolds mean lots of combat advantage. The wyrmpriest's 5 HP boost played a big role in keeping the minions and skirmishers alive. I thought the party might have had a chance to live to fight another day until Irontooth got bloodied. Oh boy. That dude is one bad mofo. I hope to play the module again some day. If I do, I'll definitely be making a few changes to increase the survivability of the PCs.
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