Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 Zardnaar Aug 30, 2014 18:10:27	Today is the second session of D&DN and the PCs have hit level 2. I have been a busy little beaer and have designed roughly 30 heyed loactions for the PCs to explore and thelast one is an 16 room dungeon.    Most of the adventure as such is a hex crawl wher ehte PCs contend with wandering monsters. My aprty has 2 spell casters with access to the sleep spell. I am assuming the PCs will be around level 4 by the time they get to the final dungeon and I have put around 4 or 5 magic items there for them to din. Such items include.   1. A magic spear that can use scorching ray 2/day 2. The Staff of Defense from the lost mines of Phandelver 3. A Cloak of Fire Resistance. 4. A +1 Longsword   ALong with 2 suits of AC 18 plate armor. The setup is the Cult of the Tiamat are looking for a Dragon Orb which they believe is located in the Hall of Kings a site predating the Thyatian empire from ancient times.    Now I am assuming the PCs will be level 4 or so by the time they get there. But if they beeline for it they could in theory be level 3 or even level 2 still. Here is what I have waiting for them.   Level 5 Sorceress  Level 5 Priest A Dragonborn Knight    All using the NPCsfrom the Basic PDF tweaked a bit. The big bad as such though is Lord Kalath an ancient undead Death Knight from ancient times. I tweaked the level 9 mage in the basic PDF and gave it 18 strength, plate armor and shield, and 76 hit points. He my or may not have an artifact such as an Orb of Dragonkind.    Now the PCs are not really supposed to fight him as such as the cult is looking for them and there is a timelimit of sorts. If the PCs arrive to late odds are Kalath has killed the cultists and left. He is more for level 5 or 6 but you never know.    So not sure how it is going to go. I am more or less ignoring the encounter guidelines in the PDF as I have encounters with 12 Hoblins some armed with pikes in a neo Tercio formation. I am wondering if I will manage to kill a PC today, it could go a bit pear shaped for them.
#2 Noon Aug 30, 2014 18:17:57	I think the important part is to have some other part of the world they could go to instead of this. Otherwise they are essentially tracked into fighting the big stuff for wont of nothing else to do.   That and have some hints of the enemies power.   Besides that, not knowing how it is going to go is a large part of the fun!
#3 Zardnaar Aug 31, 2014 3:37:28	Noon wrote:
#4 Noon Aug 31, 2014 4:24:41	I'm not sure what you're expecting - a dead PC every couple of hours of play?   A subtle, unacknowledged trend has snuck into the design - 0 HP is the new lose condition. Instead of dying being the only lose condition, now being knocked to zero is one - and one which is far more conductive to long term characters (without having to make losing impossible).   Most of the difficulties (Except for lethal) are scaled in regard to how likely it is someone will face plant at 0 HP. Or so I'd say.   How many players do you have? If you have over four, I suspect it make it alot more likely no one will die (they may faceplant, but wont die).   I've done some play with just two PC's. At that point I think the XP budget needs to be times 1.50, not times 2. Two skeletons will likely just kill two first level PC's. A skeleton and a twig blight only leads to a rough time.   For groups above four, I think it probably goes the other way.
#5 Zardnaar Aug 31, 2014 5:54:19	We have 5 PCs. Also ran some games with 2 PCs. I think in some cases I was running double the xp requirments for hard and deadly encounters. I think the divner and bard combo is a deadly one and the other 3 PCs (war cleric, pole arm master, dual wielding fighter) keep the average damage up. Even trying to grind them down doesn't work so well with spells like Faerie Fire, Sleep, and some other combos that shut things down or make the fighter types insane. Inspiration and the level 2 diviner ability also debuff everything and vicious mockery wrecks Ogres, NPCs in genral. For skill checks they just aid another and the bard can buff the skill checks if required as well.     I used a selction of undead and things immune to mind spells and it didn't make a huge difference as they just got faerie fire instead. It is some combination of buffs, debuffs and control spells and class based buffs and debuffs that have comboed togather well.
#6 Rhenny Aug 31, 2014 7:45:26	I've been running Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle with my group (boosting monsters to 5e hp) and I'm finding that 5 pcs (with an npc and black dragon wyrmling npc) are still challenged.      We've played 5 sessions, just completing the 1st chapter, and I've had 1 death (when 2 pcs went out scouting as they tried to train the newly hatched wyrmling).   There has been a few knockdowns too.     The adventure itself states that pcs should be at level 4 by the end of chapter 1, but I have them at level 3.  I feel as if the power balance so far is 1 level off. (PCs seem 1 level more powerful than expected).     That said, I feel that it is pretty easy to make encounters more or less difficult to season the game to our taste.     The key to 5e is how and when the pcs can rest.  In our sessions, although the party has been able to take 2 short rests over the last 2 sessions, they have not been able to take a long rest so the wizard and cleric had run out of spells by the end.  I'd estimate that they faced 11 encounters (varied difficulty and types- some interaction and trap like situations) as 2nd level pcs and the final encounter as 3rd level.
#7 Noon Sep 02, 2014 19:11:52	What are you expecting? A PC dead every two hours of play? Every five hours? Every hour?   If it's not going to feel deadly enough unless PC's actually die, then you'd want PC's to die, right?