SPOILERS for _Age of Worms_ module #2.
We did the next bit of _Age of Worms_, which I'd predicted to be
a TPK.
It wasn't. It didn't look much like either of us had expected,
either.
Part I (Temple of Hextor):
We'd agreed without much discussion to use the v3.0 version of the
Darkness spell (which makes things pitch dark) and not the v3.5
(which makes them gloomy with 20% concealment, and actually
illuminates a naturally dark area). One of the PCs is of a strange
class (warlock) from one of the expansion books and sees in
magical darkness like a demon. When an NPC cast Darkness on
a coin and threw it on her, she picked it up and carried it
around. For the next ten minutes she effectively had a
better-than-Improved-Invisibility advantage, and she used it
ruthlessly. This screwed up the rest of the PCs nearly
as badly as the enemies; the warlock essentially won singlehanded
except for the final fight against the High Priest, which came
down to a two-on-one fight between him and two PCs. One of the
PCs was badly hurt but not killed. All other foes were killed
singlehandedly by the warlock with ranged magical damage. No
enemy was ever able to target her.
Much bitching from the player about armor class; his PCs had an
inordinately hard time hitting. The warlock hits touch
AC and even without the darkness she would have been doing most
of the damage.
The Darkness advantage was so great that I think the best approach
to this scenario would have been for the warlock to do it by
herself once the first three rooms were finished. It was somewhat
interesting watching her do it, but the player started to become
snappy (I would call one of the other PCs on the initiative
chart, and he would snap "Does nothing, just like last round" at
me). With multiple players I think this would have been a severe
problem.
Part II (Grimlock caves):
The PCs questioned the Hextorites, got high rolls and were able to
get a fair idea how the grimlocks were situated. They killed
five by impersonating the Hextorites and pretending to have a food
shipment. Then they went in, and fought through all the rest.
The two boss fights at the end were solved with Silence, looking
exactly the same, oddly, as the Darkness effect earlier: grimlocks
"see" with sound, so are totally blind in Silence, and this is
catastrophic.
The earlier fights (grimlocks with levels of fighter or barbarian,
krenshars, chokers) gave the PCs considerable trouble and one was
taken to -8 but lived.
The thing I really noticed about this scenario was that, even though
we had agreed to play it as it was written, and I had told the
player that I thought it was too hard, he was continually offended
by how hard it was. I had to keep looking up rules for him.
We found one clear rules violation: the module author beefed up
the grimlocks by giving them shields (making them AC20 and very
hard for the PCs to hit) but left their damage at the two-handed
weapon level. The player also felt that grimlocks should not be
CR1 (I tend to agree).
I kept saying "You asked me to play it as written" because I
felt so defensive. I was also bothered by lots of logic problems:
I had to work hard to hide from the player the fact that the
Hextorites apparently never sleep (everyone is on watch all the
time) and that the grimlocks get their food supplies by walking
past two hungry monsters.
By the end the player was snapping at me whenever I made a rules
call against his PCs, which he usually doesn't do. It was
a very stressful session to run. The PCs "did fine" but the player
and GM didn't seem to be enjoying themselves.
The player's reaction was to tell me that he didn't think his
PC party would be viable past a few more levels, due to less than
optimal character design choices, and I ought to "do something
about that" or he was going to have to abandon these PCs and do
more heavily optimized ones. He also complained that he was
not satisfied with his characterizations.
Toward the end I was forcing myself, with gritted teeth, not to
fudge.
Despite the outcome, I'll stand by my initial evaluation: these
are too hard for us at the stated levels. I don't care too much
about the spell-dominated outcomes, though if it turns out to be
standard for the warlock to win every scenario single-handed (she
will get Darkness at will in a few levels) we're likely to be
unhappy. But the amount of player bitching was hard to take. I
don't fault my player for it. I would have felt the same.
Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
|
