Forum: Public Forum

Dear Players,

Adventure design.

The Witchwar Legacy has at long last seen its second installment!

On a meta-gaming point of view, the rail-roading goes as follow:

• Two tracks at the beginning (Irrisen or Kostchtchie). You chose Irrisen.

• One track all the way to the room with the (now dead) cursed White Dragon.

• Split to two tracks: The climb/flight with energy drain, and as you will soon realise, a huge trap-like room with energy drain.

• Back on one set of rails all the way to the end.

So far you have gorged yourselves with appetisers, all these poor little monsters of CR less than fifteen were there for you to spend your spells, which some of you have done with wild abandon. Going back from the cliff behind the frozen waterfall, to go through the Giants was over the top! This meant even more easy fights. Worse, you had the option of just talking to the Giants, you had the password. I still do not understand why you let the Druid as an Air Elemental go first!

Alright, I agree that we never play at high level, so all those empowered, supercharged and in fact new spells (for most of us) are indeed appealing and fun to play. You have bought some items that will take negative energy attacks, these items will need to be used at some point.

When I think of it, this adventure should be a one day adventure (in game time). You are all D&D professionals, most of you have played together before, and the adventure is not Gygaxian (no stupid kill-all-no-save situations). Therefore I would strongly invite you to ease on your spell-use and keep going until the last fight.

Balancing for six players.

True, the first serious CR creature was not well designed, most of the Troll Cleric spells fell short of being useful due to HD or HP total consideration. I guess this would have been a great opponent, kind of end-boss type, for a party at LV14, just one HD shy of the minimum for Blasphemy.
So this allegedly first serious threat got wiped out pretty quick. Thus my quick adjustment of "Give him 50% HP on top" to adapt to a six PC party instead of four no longer works.
For low to mid levels, I guess the increase in HP compensates for the number of actions per round (one for the monster, six for the party). It worked fantastically well for the Black Monk in Rise of the Runelords, more HP let him last a couple of more rounds that in turn allowed him to do some serious damage.
However at high level, HP increase does not compensate for the imbalance in the number of actions: too many potential critical hits, not enough monsters wearing amour with fortification.

Your PCs tend also to be min-maxed, I cannot really blame you for that as it is part of the fun to build them at high-level, which in turn is what we all wanted to do: "Play at high level."

Adding summoned creatures to give the GM's more actions per round (to fight the 1 vs. 6 current score when battling unique monsters) is not an option as the party obviously has access to dispel magic (even if its CL caps) and similar tools. And short of always giving the monster three or more rounds of spellcasting before the encounter, not many of the summoned creatures can show up. Also, one knows that summoned creatures are never that great in combat in the first place (always being two or more CR values below standard encounter level).
So... I still need to solve my number of actions mismatch per round. This means adding gribblies or right-hand characters to my single-monster and challenging (CR18+) encounters.
Gribblies would fall to Cleave and other feats in the Cleave chain, i.e. not perform any better than a summoned creature, thus relying on rolls of 20 to hit.
To keep with the adventure's background, I am thinking about bringing in Daemons (Paizo's equivalent to NE Yugoloth) as Irrisen is NE, and definitely not fond of CE Demons like Kostchtchie. Something at one or two CR level below unique monsters/NPCs could work. Although, this has the potential to turn into a bloodbath and TPK as a monster special ability or another could just succeed at seriously impeding an LV17 PC.

If somebody has a better idea, I am willing to listen.

The action (not number of attack) number is very important, because, for instance, to escape a grapple is one action/full-round action (depending on how it is done), whether we play at LV1 or LV17; thus a round during which the monster can neither casts spells, nor have an attack routine nor use a special attack or ability. If a player is grappled, that is one less action out of six for the party. If the unique monster is grappled, the GM has no action to play with for that round. True, it is also 1 action vs. 6 at low-level, but at low-levels the GM can "buy" more round with more HP (at low and mid level, critical hits do not happen as often as at high level, where so many feats can be collected).
Quick fixes like haste and other spell-based solutions are not viable in the long term because of dispel magic and similar effects.

Rolls.

The party got lucky:

The Remorhaz fights were obviously there only to have a cave-in. The cave-in never happened.

At best the encounter could have claimed a weapon or two, all saves but one were made.

The Winter Wolves (even at low CR) were indeed there to inflict at least half-damage and test the protective spells of the PCs. They never had a chance.

Still the game was fun to run, and I hope to play, which is what this is all about.

The game page has been updated; and the event posted.

Laurent,