In my experience this rarely happens (and I tend to forget it as well). Delaying for optimal team play can have a huge impact on how the battle goes, but it is difficult to predict (on hindsight it is a lot easier to point out how delaying would have been a good idea) or remember. The only times I have seen it happen, and even than rarely, is when the cleric delays until after the monster before healing the unconscious PC
Funny how that works, isn't it? I sometimes look back at fights where I've been a player, and most often the thing I should've done is delay until a certain moment. The problem is some enemies get another turn before me, but a well-timed trick with another partymember can really turn a difficult fight around.
I disagree with the assertion that the fight would've ended badly if you guys had a controller instead of, say, the defender or the second striker. See, your character's power is in his multi-attacks, but those require enemies to be adjacent to you. Over the course of 3.5 rounds, I remember you getting off one Demonsoul Bolts. No thunder jumps, no Flame Spirals, no Cyclone Pulls, no other doubletaps at all. If I recall correctly, you were mostly spamming Chaos Bolts and saving children. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just that your character didn't get to do what he does best because the dragon was at least 20 feet in the air at all times. I think that if a controller had kept the dragon on the ground until it was your turn (delaying to make that happen), the fight would've ended a lot quicker because you would've dealt 150-200 damage in a single turn.
That means of course that you either had to compensate for the damage the other striker brought to bear, or that you guys would've faced the full fury of the dragon because you didn't have the defender. I don't know what would've happened in that case. But this is definitely a creature that gets much, much harder to fight if you have fewer party members.
About the flying thing, by the way: maybe you should invest in a Broom of Flying, Elixir of Flying, an Ebony Fly or a Greatwing Tattoo?
Warning; incoming wall of text on why I fought the way I did (for those interested).
I used lightning daggers at the start of the fight, giving me a double tap each turn if only by the free action attack that daily gives me each turn. It's true that I didn't use the flame spiral nova, but that wasn't primarily because he was out of reach. If he had been theoretically on the ground the entire combat, I still might not have done it. That's because first, I didn't expect the module to have just two combats and hand you an action point for both, which is extremely generous. I expected either that one to be it or for the module to have 3 combats.
Now, if he had been next to me, I'd have had two options of attack; one of staying at range with chaos bolt and lightning daggers or using action point > flame spiral nova.
Staying at range with chaos bolt after turn 2 (no more children meaning reactions are available), means hitting with chaos bolt for 40 or so, then the WLMR chaos bolt for 40, and the regular WLR for 24 to 30 since he attacked me four to five times each round.
Using the flame spiral nova would have hit him four times for a total of 40 + 3d6 + 72 damage (assuming bloodied for the entire nova). thats effectively only 3d6+2 extra points of damage for the cost of an action point, barring extra triggers by party members. I can see one happening if the theoretical controller would pull him back after immediately flying away from me when my turn ended, but that would still be a very poor use of an action point. Ok, I'll grant you that the action point would have given everyone a +3 to hit for a turn, but since the leader and the defender weren't attacking and the avenger was hitting all her attacks anyway, that also didn't matter. This is why I strongly preffered keeping my action point for the next non-solo fight.
Thus, him flying out of reach didn't particularly bother me. Now, on the issue of delaying; I ended the fight at exactly 50 hit points following the last heal and last source of damage. If I had delayed once, and had given the maroon prince a full turn to attack me without the resist 25 all, he would only have to hit me twice in his turn to knock me out, which given the amount of attacks was extremely risky. It really wasn't an option.
I know that my sorceror isn't at his best when fighting solo's, but sorceror's are AOE strikers by design. However, by carefully picking my paragon path/feats and dailies, I can at least do reasonably well so long as I dont fight more than one of them each day. And yeah, maybe investing in an encounter fly would be a good thing; there's a level 16 utility encounter power for sorcerors which gives the entire party flight and hover for a round (two rounds to me). However, level 16 also has the coolest sorceror utility power ever in avatars of chaos (which gets 1000 points on the awesomeness factor even if it hadn't been equally mechanically awesome), so it's a tough sell
Since I'm not particularly troubled by ranged, It would probably be best if the party members who are invest in those, instead?
lieutenants/sidekicks in the skill challenge are supposed to work? It says in the blurb that the PCs are accompanied by them, as a means to better impersonate the PCs, although this is a secret from them, and that the sidekick can make checks for and aid the PCs - but there's no mechanic for accomplishing this. Please could someone clarify how it's supposed to work? Or should I just make it up?
I'll also be moving Feeding Frenzy to the end of the prince's turns, per the above.
I'm sure there was something else as well, but I can't remember offhand what it was...
lieutenants/sidekicks in the skill challenge are supposed to work? It says in the blurb that the PCs are accompanied by them, as a means to better impersonate the PCs, although this is a secret from them, and that the sidekick can make checks for and aid the PCs - but there's no mechanic for accomplishing this. Please could someone clarify how it's supposed to work? Or should I just make it up?
I'll also be moving Feeding Frenzy to the end of the prince's turns, per the above.
I'm sure there was something else as well, but I can't remember offhand what it was...
I ran them as a possible focus of the skill challenge, or otherwise a companion. The sorcerer in the party had to actively work with the orc warlock lieutenant to make the shielding spell happen. So first social checks, then Arcana checks. The rest of the party had the lieutenants trailing them while the players had to make the skill checks. So the bard lieutenant looked on while the paladin made checks to train the Scion warriors, the dwarf lieutenant went with the warlord who made checks to scout the tunnels and prepare the getaway, and the rogue lieutenant accompanied the avenger who made checks to get the flowers. I did miss the opportunity to get the characters in trouble because the lieutenants messed up, which could be fun.
But to answer your question, I didn't have the lieutenants make skill checks or aid. I would only do that if the players suggested it first, because otherwise they're a bit of a cheap 'get out of fail free' card.
Having now run this mod, I have to say I was more than a little disappointed. Spoiler:Show
The good bits, first off: the combat encounters were reasonably well designed and well-balanced. Both of the ones we did (the dragon and the banderhobbs) were challenging but no deadly, and with room to be a bit swingy - and tactically, I didn't play the dragon well at all - he shouldn't have landed, at which point he wouldn't have been trapped on the ground by the Fighter. It's WAY too easy to just slaughter the kids offhand or even by accident (4 blast 5s, at a minimum, through the course of the fight) - however, it was gratifying to see an actually-threatening solo, for once, which wasn't just a grind the whole way through. I did move Feeding Frenzy to the end of his turns rather than the start, though, but with the party we had, it made comparatively little difference. Had I played him sensibly (kept him off the ground, primarily) it would have been very difficult to stop him, gven that he has melee 3 powers, and the only proning power in the group was melee 2. Very group-dependent, and something I accounted for in his tactics, but it does feel a little too harsh and swingy. I'd maybe have made his flight Clumsy, in order to force him to spend more time on the ground, or introduced some sort of terrain mechanic to enable melee only parties to bring him down. As it is, he's outright invulnerable to melee-only parties if played correctly. E: and with the exception of the 'grab and run' option, the in-combat SC options were simply non-viable. Standard action checks with no option to do them as less for harder DCs (Because they're already hard in the first place) seem basically pointless.
The banderhobbs were good fun, and I finally managed to swallow someone this time round! I don't think I've seen that ability used successfully to date.
I liked the Tarandar as a character, although having him as a schrodinger's event (i.e. what he did depends on which route you took), is a bit strange. Similarly, most of the characters are well-described and easy to catch on to.
The bad bits:
poor editing throughout. There's a lot in this module that doesn't make sense, and a lot of bits which aren't where it feels like they ought to be - specifically:
The thief's child you can save: felt like a very tacked-on afterthought, given that there's no room to introduce the thief as a character after the fight where the kid is saved, or before it unless the PCs are hesitant (at which point, he can offer to pay them, but my PCs went straight for the Prince), and it's very difficult to save the kids without the DM co-operating, and the thief isn't mentioend at any point in the rest of the module, so it's easy to forget this part even exists until you reach the story awards. Giving out a story award that says 'a guy you never met who thinks you're dead, will let you buy stuff when you visit his city' is REALLY weird. Also, I do get the feeling that the 'buy 5 x when in y' is getting a bit overused, and will be quite difficult to track once you get to higher levels, plus, has the potential not to mean very much, as you get to the point where you're gallivanting all over faerun, and not really visiting the original places any more. once this set is done, it seems unlikely that any of the PCs will be visitng Abeir again...
The sidekicks are called out in the mod text, but nowhere does it point the DM to the handout with them written on it. I was going into the mod prepared to just make them up out of whole cloth, until I found the handout 10 minutes before I started (a friend of mine printed the mod for me, and usually I don't look at the handouts in advance, because the text of the mod tells me when to look at them - they weren't mentioned in the text, so I didn't look at them). They're a nice bit of design though, and I like the concept here, but it doesn't really account for the callousness of adventurers; there was very little discussion about trying to save them.
The end of the Banderhobb encounter talks about players getting dragged off to the shadowfell. Wut?! This is the only time this is mentioned, and I have no idea why - the Banderhobbs' stated goal is to bring the PCs to Orrlarakh for the bounty. There's also nothing stated about a: why there's a bounty when the PCs are thought dead, and b: what happens if the PCs DO lose this encounter... The conclusion doesn't really account for it IIRC.
The skill challenge: I like the concept of splitting up the party, but it's quite tough to manage in practice - it's difficult to run it without doing each bit in turn (because it's difficult to split the individual tasks up and keep the narrative for each coherent), but it's also difficult to run it that way, because you wind up spending 10 minutes talking to each player in turn, without any joined-up thinking. Good concept, but splitting the party is better left to novels.
Drogen: there's very little mention made of him, he really needed introducing and fleshing out as a character before he turned out to be a mimic. It really wasn't that interesting when he turned out to be a bad guy. And I have to say, not leaving an option for perception/insight monkeys to figure him out is also bad form.
Over-reliance on money in the SC. 250 is a LOT of gold to give to guards to buy them off; similarly it's quite difficult to add the intended haggling mechanic to the social encounters. I can see how it was intended to work, but it's a bit awkward in practice.
The ugly:
The Instigator's start position in the banderhobb fight doesn't account for scaling to 4 PCs. It has to move and charge to get its allies into its aura and into range of its triggered action on missing. Also, leaping double tongue lash; it isn't clear whether this is intended only to be used at-will as a standard once bloodied, as a triggered action when first bloodied, both, neither...? Similarly, some of the other banderhobbs have the minor, move and triggered actions mixed up. Not well proofread, and doesn't seem like it was playtested with 4 PCs, or that mapping issue would proabbly have been picked up.
Random gotcha negative effects in the opening encounter. I really don't like this as a thing. None of the PCs had them in the end, but that was at least in part because I steered them away, and I probably wouldn't have used them anyway, or would have given a counteracting benefit (slowed but gain resist 2 all, say).
Overall, it just doen't feel like a very paragon level adventure. Training some mediocre revolutionaries after being driven underground by a dragon which you handily defeated just doesn't feel big enough. The overall quest chain is kinda cool, but the opening is a let-down, especially when you consider that it could easily be played by a 20th level character who is going on powerful enough that his abilities affect the entirety of faerun, and have impacts across entire planes. Note being able to stop groups of city guards is just a bit bleh.
The major, MAJOR issue I have is that the answer to the question 'well, why don't we just hightail it out of here right now by linked portal, seriously, I have a scroll' just isn't addressed that I could see. There are some implications that the Duchess would chase them down across the whole world, which seems a little ridiculous when you consider that all the other nations of Faerun have powerful enough magical defences to kill off a single marauding green dragon... Accordingly, the whole plot feels really railroady, more so than most LFR modules.
Now, all that said, I don't want to sound like I'm being overly negative. It was good fun. It just wasn't up to the standard I'm used to from LFR. I'll be finishing the chain, because the overall plot is interesting, but I'm just a bit disappointed with this.
I agree with most of your points, although I feel the mechanical ones can easily be handled by a little DME. The story stuff (the child, Drogen, Linked Portal, the heroic feel) less so.
I liked the Tarandar as a character, although having him as a schrodinger's event (i.e. what he did depends on which route you took), is a bit strange.
It isn't very well described, but I assumed that the Tarandar that attacks the base is a doppleganger even if the party fights him. My party did, and although they killed him, they couldn't stay long enough to discover that they fought a doppleganger. If he's the real guy, a part of the story of ABER4-3 won't make sense.
The sidekicks are called out in the mod text, but nowhere does it point the DM to the handout with them written on it. I was going into the mod prepared to just make them up out of whole cloth, until I found the handout 10 minutes before I started (a friend of mine printed the mod for me, and usually I don't look at the handouts in advance, because the text of the mod tells me when to look at them - they weren't mentioned in the text, so I didn't look at them). They're a nice bit of design though, and I like the concept here, but it doesn't really account for the callousness of adventurers; there was very little discussion about trying to save them.
With respect, that's also the DM's job. You can't expect players to take an immediate liking to every NPC they encounter, to the point that they're willing to risk their own lives to protect them. I focused a lot on building relationships between the lieutenants and the players during the skill challenge, and it paid off. The players weren't about to let the brave lieutenants be slaughtered. But my players are a pretty heroic bunch, so there's that too.
I did my best, but my players are often a pretty callous bunch, and this party in particular was almost the quintessential halloween/unaligned-because-we-can't-be-evil party (Tiefling Warlock, Drow Executioner, Vryloka Cleric, Longtooth Shifter Fighter - a devil, a dark elf, a vampire and a wolf-man meet in a teleportation circle...). So yeah, on that point, it's probably simply a party thing.
as regards the Tarandar, I'd agree that it was his doppelganger leading the assault all along - except, he doesn't really seem the type to give up his magical gear to a doppelganger, and you pick up his hat as a reward by going that way...
I did my best, but my players are often a pretty callous bunch, and this party in particular was almost the quintessential halloween/unaligned-because-we-can't-be-evil party (Tiefling Warlock, Drow Executioner, Vryloka Cleric, Longtooth Shifter Fighter - a devil, a dark elf, a vampire and a wolf-man meet in a teleportation circle...). So yeah, on that point, it's probably simply a party thing.
Heh yeah, that sounds like the polar opposite of my party (except they have the exact same roles, funnily enough: 2 strikers, a defender and a leader). Feels good to unleash solos on parties without a controller.
as regards the Tarandar, I'd agree that it was his doppelganger leading the assault all along - except, he doesn't really seem the type to give up his magical gear to a doppelganger, and you pick up his hat as a reward by going that way...
Good point, I forgot about that. Fortunately it never came up during ABER4-3, so he can go all Schrödinger as far as I'm concerned.
Having now run this mod, I have to say I was more than a little disappointed. Spoiler:Show
The good bits, first off: the combat encounters were reasonably well designed and well-balanced. Both of the ones we did (the dragon and the banderhobbs) were challenging but no deadly, and with room to be a bit swingy - and tactically, I didn't play the dragon well at all - he shouldn't have landed, at which point he wouldn't have been trapped on the ground by the Fighter. It's WAY too easy to just slaughter the kids offhand or even by accident (4 blast 5s, at a minimum, through the course of the fight) - however, it was gratifying to see an actually-threatening solo, for once, which wasn't just a grind the whole way through. I did move Feeding Frenzy to the end of his turns rather than the start, though, but with the party we had, it made comparatively little difference. Had I played him sensibly (kept him off the ground, primarily) it would have been very difficult to stop him, gven that he has melee 3 powers, and the only proning power in the group was melee 2. Very group-dependent, and something I accounted for in his tactics, but it does feel a little too harsh and swingy. I'd maybe have made his flight Clumsy, in order to force him to spend more time on the ground, or introduced some sort of terrain mechanic to enable melee only parties to bring him down. As it is, he's outright invulnerable to melee-only parties if played correctly. E: and with the exception of the 'grab and run' option, the in-combat SC options were simply non-viable. Standard action checks with no option to do them as less for harder DCs (Because they're already hard in the first place) seem basically pointless.
The banderhobbs were good fun, and I finally managed to swallow someone this time round! I don't think I've seen that ability used successfully to date.
I liked the Tarandar as a character, although having him as a schrodinger's event (i.e. what he did depends on which route you took), is a bit strange. Similarly, most of the characters are well-described and easy to catch on to.
The bad bits:
poor editing throughout. There's a lot in this module that doesn't make sense, and a lot of bits which aren't where it feels like they ought to be - specifically:
The thief's child you can save: felt like a very tacked-on afterthought, given that there's no room to introduce the thief as a character after the fight where the kid is saved, or before it unless the PCs are hesitant (at which point, he can offer to pay them, but my PCs went straight for the Prince), and it's very difficult to save the kids without the DM co-operating, and the thief isn't mentioend at any point in the rest of the module, so it's easy to forget this part even exists until you reach the story awards. Giving out a story award that says 'a guy you never met who thinks you're dead, will let you buy stuff when you visit his city' is REALLY weird. Also, I do get the feeling that the 'buy 5 x when in y' is getting a bit overused, and will be quite difficult to track once you get to higher levels, plus, has the potential not to mean very much, as you get to the point where you're gallivanting all over faerun, and not really visiting the original places any more. once this set is done, it seems unlikely that any of the PCs will be visitng Abeir again...
The sidekicks are called out in the mod text, but nowhere does it point the DM to the handout with them written on it. I was going into the mod prepared to just make them up out of whole cloth, until I found the handout 10 minutes before I started (a friend of mine printed the mod for me, and usually I don't look at the handouts in advance, because the text of the mod tells me when to look at them - they weren't mentioned in the text, so I didn't look at them). They're a nice bit of design though, and I like the concept here, but it doesn't really account for the callousness of adventurers; there was very little discussion about trying to save them.
The end of the Banderhobb encounter talks about players getting dragged off to the shadowfell. Wut?! This is the only time this is mentioned, and I have no idea why - the Banderhobbs' stated goal is to bring the PCs to Orrlarakh for the bounty. There's also nothing stated about a: why there's a bounty when the PCs are thought dead, and b: what happens if the PCs DO lose this encounter... The conclusion doesn't really account for it IIRC.
The skill challenge: I like the concept of splitting up the party, but it's quite tough to manage in practice - it's difficult to run it without doing each bit in turn (because it's difficult to split the individual tasks up and keep the narrative for each coherent), but it's also difficult to run it that way, because you wind up spending 10 minutes talking to each player in turn, without any joined-up thinking. Good concept, but splitting the party is better left to novels.
Drogen: there's very little mention made of him, he really needed introducing and fleshing out as a character before he turned out to be a mimic. It really wasn't that interesting when he turned out to be a bad guy. And I have to say, not leaving an option for perception/insight monkeys to figure him out is also bad form.
Over-reliance on money in the SC. 250 is a LOT of gold to give to guards to buy them off; similarly it's quite difficult to add the intended haggling mechanic to the social encounters. I can see how it was intended to work, but it's a bit awkward in practice.
The ugly:
The Instigator's start position in the banderhobb fight doesn't account for scaling to 4 PCs. It has to move and charge to get its allies into its aura and into range of its triggered action on missing. Also, leaping double tongue lash; it isn't clear whether this is intended only to be used at-will as a standard once bloodied, as a triggered action when first bloodied, both, neither...? Similarly, some of the other banderhobbs have the minor, move and triggered actions mixed up. Not well proofread, and doesn't seem like it was playtested with 4 PCs, or that mapping issue would proabbly have been picked up.
Random gotcha negative effects in the opening encounter. I really don't like this as a thing. None of the PCs had them in the end, but that was at least in part because I steered them away, and I probably wouldn't have used them anyway, or would have given a counteracting benefit (slowed but gain resist 2 all, say).
Overall, it just doen't feel like a very paragon level adventure. Training some mediocre revolutionaries after being driven underground by a dragon which you handily defeated just doesn't feel big enough. The overall quest chain is kinda cool, but the opening is a let-down, especially when you consider that it could easily be played by a 20th level character who is going on powerful enough that his abilities affect the entirety of faerun, and have impacts across entire planes. Note being able to stop groups of city guards is just a bit bleh.
The major, MAJOR issue I have is that the answer to the question 'well, why don't we just hightail it out of here right now by linked portal, seriously, I have a scroll' just isn't addressed that I could see. There are some implications that the Duchess would chase them down across the whole world, which seems a little ridiculous when you consider that all the other nations of Faerun have powerful enough magical defences to kill off a single marauding green dragon... Accordingly, the whole plot feels really railroady, more so than most LFR modules.
Now, all that said, I don't want to sound like I'm being overly negative. It was good fun. It just wasn't up to the standard I'm used to from LFR. I'll be finishing the chain, because the overall plot is interesting, but I'm just a bit disappointed with this.
One minor thing, if a paragon party is melee only and has no range or flying or forced movement powers, then they deserve to get in trouble sooner or later. It isn't realistic for intelligent beings like dragons to risk themselves in melee when they can just blast them whenever they want. And pragaon level players should be aware of that they are fighter very nasty enemies from time to time. I'm sure it isn't impossible for a few of them to take some powers to account for such circumstances.
