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| #1Coredump00Nov 13, 2014 21:39:07 |
***SPOILERS***
This episode just seems poorly done, and I am hoping I am just missing something.
Room 10 is just a mess. The kobolds are in a 10' deep pit/room, they are 3-4' tall. They are supposed to attack the party when the party gets within 25'. How do they know?? How do they even see the party?
It says the koblolds attack, and then wait for the Roper to help out.
The episode even says to give full XP for talking your way out of the encounter... but if the Roper is just supposed to attack on site, how is that supposed to work out?
Now lets just look at the difficulty. The episode is supposed to be designed for 4 lvl 3 characters. Even if you had 2 lvl 3 and 2 lvl 4.... *just* the roper would be a Deadly encounter. But if it does as mentioned, and drags people down while they are fighting the Kobolds, and thus involves the Drakes.... It becomes Ludicrous Deadly. Not to mention... the Roper is super deadly unless you have a large party, with +7 to hit, even the Heavy Armor guys have a really good chance to get Restrained... so its easy to have 2-3 members rolling Disadv from the first round it attacks, And by turn 2-3 it could reasonably have 6 party members restrained. And this doesn't even consider the Drakes and Kobolds.
Now, I believe they intended to let folks 'talk' their way out, except there isn't a time or way to do that, and the monster *can't talk*.
The Cyanwrath fight is almost as bad. Base is 2K XP, which is well into Deadly. Using the Encounter Multiplier puts it at 4K XP, which is 2.5 Times Deadly for 4 lvl 3 characters.
I can't figure out what they were thinking....
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| #2TyranthraxusNov 13, 2014 23:40:53 | The Roper isnt supposed to attack on site. Its been trained not to attack the Kobolds or Drakes though and you are right.. its currently 'full'.
Lots of enterprising parties decided to feed it using the body parts they get from the battle with the Drakes / kobolds. Our gm just had it say 'Meat' in terms of its lingo. It was pretty guttural. Im guessing that the original writers of the scenario were probably unaware the Ropers wernt capable of speaking. I think of it more as emulating speech.
Either way we didnt work it out either. What happened is that we had a table of 6 and 3 people got wailed on pretty quickly, whilst the spellcasters at the back (me and another guy ) were wailing at long range will spells. WE got lucky.. I got a crit on a Firebolt and did 19 points and the other guy was using Ray of frost so the creature couldnt move. I also had Flaming Sphere and due to DM Fiat he ruled I could park it front of the Roper. So not only was I damaging the roper but the tentacles too as they went up and over the Flaming sphere. As it was in lockdown I was managing to free the guys from their grapples every so often and then they could move into position to do their own thing.
It seems most groups havnt fought the Roper though.
Im not trying to make your plight sound anyworse, and I do also think the encounter was kinda unbalanced but I truly think that monster is really there to tell people 'you dont need to fight ... everything you find'. It was possible to get the eggs, kill the drakes and kobolds and leave and placate the Roper. Its just we didnt do it that way. I did get to say 'I killed a Roper though!' |
| #3Coredump00Nov 14, 2014 17:57:56 | I have no problem with encounters you are supposed to avoid or 'think' your way around. Pretty cool in fact.
But it says, or at least *heavily* implies that the roper will attack while the Kobolds are tossing the glue/fire bombs.
On top of the roper not being able to talk
On top of the kobolds being way too short to see the party
Just seems like a sloppy job...
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