In article <45af4b89@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, tussock <scrub@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> It looks set out for three runs at a minimum, and they'd each be
>insanely hard days for a standard party. I can agree that any partially
>defeated section would likely team up with one of the others, but
>presumably there's an unstated reason the Evil cults don't like to live
>in each others pockets for extended periods.
That "unstated" bothers me a lot. There are detailed tactics for
each section individually, but nothing beyond that. There are a lot
of suggestions that the cult *should* act: the 6th and 7th level NPCs
in town think they will, and those folks aren't stupid. But nothing
on how they'll act, to help the GM out if the PCs do as you suggest.
At a minimum, guarding the single point of access to the complex
would seem like a good idea! Anyone coming down in that elevator
should be very vulnerable. If guard duty is too boring for live
people, undead could be tried, with a ready response force nearby.
And a Glyph or so wouldn't go amiss, or a booby trap. A 200'
elevator sounds like an awfully appealing spot for a booby trap.
Admittedly the Hextorites are the military brains of the bunch, and
the player quite reasonably hit them first. But the Vecnites
aren't stupid either.
I'm also bothered by the fact that nobody apparently ever sleeps, or
changes guard, or anything like that--the descriptions are 100%
static. *Were* they expecting the PCs to hit it repeatedly? If
so, it should really have a non-static description. At a minimum,
when are the food deliveries, and who receives them? Is the night
guard different from the day guard?
>> The module assumes that the PCs don't care what happens to the NPCs
>> most deeply in the grip of the cultists, but in our case, those NPCs
>> are the parents of two of the PCs, and the PCs do care.
> Then it's not the module that's too hard, it's the conditions
>you've added. It's basically linear in each section, there's no chance
>to zip in and do the mission without hitting most of the fights, so
>insisting the missions must be completed in the one run is harsh.
I didn't insist; the player could have tackled it the way you suggest,
though the Vecna-cultists would certainly have had *some* kind of
response. The player insisted, saying flatly, "I can't maintain
suspension of disbelief doing this one room at a time."
And yes, it's a disadvantage that the PCs have family and connections
in Diamond Lake. I warned the player about this, but he finds it's
a lot more interesting that way. There are several "Motivate the
PCs by threatening NPCs they care about" scenario hooks in _Worms_
but one has the impression that they are meant to give the players
an *excuse* for doing the adventure the GM wants, because at every
other turn the module undercuts that kind of motivation.
> Your house rule gimped the whole Hextor bunch, and will do the same
>for most every opponent until you change it. /Improved Invisibility/ is
>supposed to be harder to cast, of much shorter duration, and be avilable
>when enemies have more stuff available to cope with it.
Yes. I know I have to fix that rule, and we have a couple of proposals
on the table to do so.
I think I might have spotted it earlier if the PCs could *cast* Darkness,
but they can't. It's hard to vet abilities the PCs don't have. There
are so many of them!
>Mary Kuhner wrote:
>> The grimlocks would have been, because Silence is a perfect
>> defense against them but only lasts long enough for 1-2 encounters.
> What works so well for one party can cripple another; it's not so
>good when it takes out your own spellcasters in the cramped conditions
>the Grimlocks live in, and you can't communicate at all.
I think this comes partly from the expectation that of course all of
the PCs have to have something useful to do in each encounter. Silence
can really hurt the PC spellcasters, but if you know that, and there
isn't a player *****ing about it, you can very usefully have two fighters
with a Silence up front, and the rest of the party (including another
demi-fighter as bodyguard) in back, outside the Silence. This is how my
player did the last two grimlock encounters. Sometimes the back group
could contribute, sometimes not, depending on terrain, but when they
couldn't they just waited.
>> My experience is that at these levels, encounters do not wipe out
>> your resources all that quickly: the PC deaths come from either
>> single too-hard encounters or from dice, not from resource exhaustion.
> IME death comes when PCs are too cautious with their resources, and
>far too slow to spend anything on really hurting the enemy. That's what
>makes the single tough encounters seem too hard.
Maybe. The two PC deaths were against melee foes that killed them in
one action each. They moved faster than the PCs and had much better
to-hit rolls. More buffs might have helped, but as I recall, the PCs
were fresh when they hit that.
Similarly, the near-death in the grimlock caves was a hidden monster
that no one had Spotted nailing a PC late in the movement order, and
taking him down in a round. He had Mage Armor, but it wasn't enough;
at these levels he's not likely to have too much more.
(I said this to the player, who disagreed. "If I was playing one-room-
per-day, the other 5 PCs would never have been in that room at all. We
would put all the buffs on one PC and have her search every square in
the room." So I guess if you are willing to do that, yes, you can greatly
reduce mortality.)
I am coming to think my sense of "too hard" is not just threat level,
it's other things. In _SCAP_ my rogue hit the first scenario and
was so clearly outclassed by all locks and traps that she quit trying,
and never really tried again until 7th or 8th level. Similarly, I'm
concerned that Jon's PCs will adopt an attitude of "We are so outclassed
as fighters, we can only ever win by spell-backed tactics, so that's
all we do." He's likely to find such PCs "unheroic" (in the capability
sense, not the courage/sacrifice sense) and ultimately unsatisfying.
A mindset of "No one go into the room until the one PC whom we've poured
backing magic into has searched it; and then we'll go home and rest up"
is rather...it's hard to combine it with thinking of the PCs as real
adventurers with real goals, at least for me.
> You know, I get the impression your games are a self-fulfilling
>prophecy. Can't rest or the bad guys will do something horrible, so you
>have to crush the baddies in one go, so they have to make an OTT
>response because they only get one chance. Using higher level PCs would
>be a great idea if that's what you like, they're likely already adjusted
>for long runs about as well as can be.
I put this to the player, who sighed and said, "They're describing
Neverwinter
Nights. I just finished playing that, and it was okay, but I hoped for
more from D&D. Of course you can have no enemy responses and no
connection
to any of the NPCs, but my suspension of disbelief goes right out the
window."
So yes, I think you've hit the nail on the head, but it's not a "problem"
that we can fix. We enjoy the sense of a world being there that was, for
me, so badly missing in Neverwinter and Baldur's Gate--that you can't
just walk away from any threat and never worry what it will do, that there
are NPCs whose lives you really care about and who are genuinely at
risk.
I didn't understand how many levels worth of disadvantage that is. Now I
do: a valuable lesson.
My player is bummed. He was interested in trying to play _Worms_
"straight",
at its stated levels and without GM fudging, as a challenge. But he's not
so interested if doing so requires abandoning PC or NPC complexities that
he enjoys, and I'm afraid that's the choice we face.
I felt that way about SCAP for a while too, but the module broke me of it;
tactical challenge is all very well but the price is way too high. I know
that I would not have enjoyed taking 2 weeks to kill the monsters in the
Night of Terror one at a time; my own suspension of disbelief would not
have survived it. (There's still a town there, with 32 hellhounds roaming
the streets burning things down deliberately? There are still people,
with
bone devils hunting them for s****t? And the enemy neither accomplishes
anything serious on their own plans, nor locates and kills the PCs?) We
did that in two sweeps, taking two days at it, but cleaning up the most
town-killing stuff in the first night. *That* felt like the kind of
heroics
(again, capability sense, not moral sense) I'd play a high-end fantasy
game for.
It's unfair of me, of course, to expect the modules to sup****t my play
style. But it does seem strange that they waste paper on things like
NPC personality sketches, if the best thing to do is ignore them.
Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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