Author: Bryant

We finished up with Agony on Sunday morning.. Bill W. ran for us, which is cool, since it was fun playing with him on Saturday. We only had four players – me, Susan, Jimmy, and Amanda. This is just about right for a Sunday morning game; keeps it from being over-lengthy, and it’s nice to play with familiar people.

I loved the way this mod brought together almost every Dalelands plot to date, with a sprinkling of Dragon Coast material to boot. I really, really loved the use of Kira and Dayan Nenthyn. Reed happens to be one of my PCs who hasn’t played The Prospect, which is a shame, so he didn’t have the emotional hooks some of my other characters would have found, but it was still cool stuff.

As with the other Pain and Suffering modules, it’s very investigative. This one doesn’t have the same branching that you find in Pain and Discomfort, but it’s still good. It’s a trifle strange as a capstone, insofar as the big villains from some of the previous modules are completely missing, but it does become clear that they weren’t at the heart of the drug trade.

Also, there’s payoff for a very subtle grace note from Arts that I’ve been wondering about for an entire year. Very nice.

We handled the module very well. Much to my amusement, the fate we were fighting so hard to prevent was something Reed could probably have soloed, but that’s just the luck of the draw. Sorcerers sometimes have 20 resistance to just the right damage type. Would have been funny if it’d gotten loose, though.

Reed and Faral end the weekend at level 17, and Collin ends it at 14. Three levels and two tiers gained, and a lot of really fun play. This might have been the best convention we’ve done so far, although DDXP 2009 did better on pure spectacle. Overall, though? GASPcon was great.

J.D. McCoy ran First Strike for us on Sunday evening; the players were the now familiar cluster of me, Susan, Jimmy, and Amanda plus Brian S. as our fifth. Brian played a warforged fighter who did the meatbag schtick, which let’s just say I’ve seen warforged doing it before, but his build was interesting. Lots of focus on defenses. 30 Will at level 14 is quite good. He gave me some stuff to think about with Collin.

We stomped the mod. This one we definitely should have played at high tier. I’d heard something about it being tough, but the reputation is overrated. There’s one of those old-school solos that’s just a bag of hit points, and when you have a fighter to lock down the brute while everyone else slices it up, there’s not much challenge.

I can’t say the story is super-absorbing, but you’re at least doing big important things.

I didn’t sign up for The Blinking Eye of Fire, but there were in theory two open slots and no defender playing, so plenty of room for Collin. Also the experience would get him to level 14 and upgrade his bracers, so why not?

Unfortunately, our prospective leader wasn’t feeling well, so he bowed out, which left us with Kerwin running for me, Bennet O., George O., and Joe G. No leader. If they’d had a fifth player I would have bailed, but without me, no table. I wasn’t too worried about Collin living through the mod, given his self-healing capabilities, but the bracers were a high tier reward and the vibe from the table was a bit weird… ah well.

The run was clean enough. I have no real idea what the story was, and Joe sulked when he found out he couldn’t shift underwater. The first encounter was somewhat tough. The second encounter wasn’t. I did get quasi-dominated a couple of times and rolled two crits while attacking party members, which is always good for a sardonic chuckle.

Also, Collin is now P2, which is very strange. Cool, though.

Enemy of My Enemy is the sequel to Killing the Messenger. That was maybe the best paragon module play experience Susan and I had together so far. This run pretty much lived up to it. Rob B. GMed for us; Jimmy and Amanda played with me, Susan, and Bill W. Mustering was a pain in the butt because people kept overcomplicating it, but in the end I said “look, us four want to play together, we need one defender out of the two available, and Brian over there will play a leader at the other table. Problem solved.” And lo, it more or less was.

We played this on low. This was probably the right decision; much of the party would have had trouble hitting stuff with defenses two points higher, and it’s a mod that can really crank out the damage. On the other hand, we had a balanced party (Bill played a defender) and it turns out that Reed can generate enough damage to function appropriately as the sole striker. Lightning Daggers is very very good.

The module itself rocks. Great roleplay opportunity. Bill’s orc was spellscarred, which made some decisions much more interesting. I also like the coda, which is yet another nice moral decision.

Our GASPcon fun began with a My Realms on Friday night. I don’t mind admitting I was a little nervous about playing some random guy’s My Realms adventure, particularly at P2, but it turned out to be really good. The set up was the kind of thing you’d find in a heroic tier adventure, but the GM – Michael Grancey – really played up the slew of adventurers who’d tried and failed to solve the problem before. Our characters were Baldur’s Gate’s last hope. I liked that.

The fights were also pretty interesting. Not insanely tough, but they had some challenge to them. It’s not that the PCs were uber-optimized, but me and Susan are used to working together, as were most of the other players, so you get stuff like me and Susan timing our attacks to keep a monster dazed with no save for two or three rounds. This is hard on big elites.

Fellow players: Nancy S. and her husband Richard, Ken W., and Joe S. Excellent start to the con.

Ghosts of the Past: Dark Portal – possibly the longest LFR module name to date. I have not done a comprehensive study. Mark B. ran it; Jason B., Susan, Evil Tony, Alan and I played.

The adventure has a rep for being brutal. It really is. We happened to have the right people in place for the stairs fight: I had good necrotic resistance, so I could easily stay static while the warlock disabled the big defensive ability of the problem monster. So that was one of the mean encounters handled.

We also did fine on the last fight. There’s an obvious save or die mechanism available, and I really don’t think the author intended GMs to use it. If you leave that out, the fight becomes really mean but survivable. On the other hand, you don’t want to spring it on players who don’t like bad status effects.

Susan was playing her cleric, Laela, and she threw down Consecrated Ground once we had the situation mostly under control. That meant we could reliably keep her out of the worst of the status effects, and none of us were in any danger of dying. Plus Consecrated Ground is perfect for dealing with the never-ending stream of minions.

If we hadn’t had the right combination of abilities, though, there are a few places where that would have been super-tough. My theme for the week, huh? I think this one is fair, FWIW. It’s a special and it’s reasonable to make it difficult. The one failing is that it’s not really a single slot mod.

Games & Stuff stays open till midnight on the first Thursday of every month so that people can get the early WotC releases as soon as possible. This makes it an excellent time to run those long paragon modules. I volunteered to run Wetwork, and Susan agreed to run Alone – she’d been wanting to GM down at G&S for a while.

My players were Evil Tony, the Bradleys, Amanda, James, and Hudson. You’ll note that’s five out of six of the players I ran for the previous Sunday. Did I wipe the party again? Oh, crap, yeah.

I don’t think there’s a tactical approach that would have saved them. The adventure is written such that the players don’t get a milestone. Personally, I very rarely use an action point in the first fight of a module, because I’d rather have one in the final fight no matter what – but that wasn’t really the breaking point. Not having certain ring powers available hurt just as much.

And the big bad guy at the end is really brutal. There’s a trick in the fight, which I’ve seen two or three times now in paragon modules, so I think I’m going to expect it from here on out. Still: if the trick wasn’t there he’d still be mean. He’s a solo, and he has backup.

I’d make one change in the module. If the party wants glory tier, don’t give them the milestone. In fact, that’s a good way to do glory tier in general. Beyond that, I’d leave things pretty much as they are, but I’d try and make people more aware that certain modules are meaner than others. Both of the deadly adventures I ran this week were run on high. Gotta be careful of that assumption, particularly in paragon.

Matt ran Killing the Messenger for me so that I could get Collin to level 13 before the weekend. (Anvil of Doom, yay!) I was joined by Eltherian, Jay Ibero, jbever, Eladar, and Zharm. Lotta new faces, which is cool.

I don’t have a ton to say about the module, although this was the first time I saw the “destroy the supplies” path from either side of the GM screen. Eladar played his Intimidate-based bard. Very effective, but maybe not quite as satisfying as doing the combats the expected way. Still, I don’t begrudge him his fun.

Collin hit level 13 after this and retrained with some ferocity: he took the Essentials human racial feature, took the new improved Essentials NAD feat, picked up a hammer, got Hammer Expertise for more distance on his pushes, and so on. All of this is awesome. Oh, and he can save against stunned and dazed at the beginning of his turn, even if they don’t happen to be save ends effects.

Pain was our Halloween run at Games & Stuff. I ran it for Jimmy, Amanda, Hudson, the Bradley brothers, and Mike. Hudson had played it before but had an awful experience, so I figured I could improve on it some. It’s a great investigative adventure when run properly.

The investigation went well! So that’s cool. Unfortunately, the plot branch I used has a final fight which went very poorly for the PCs. My monsters caught them in overlapping auras, and they didn’t really have any good way to handle it, which resulted in a sort of cascading failure effect. Not to spoil overly, but there’s a monster out there which creates new versions of itself when it kills a PC, and it’s not like you can decide not to use an aura.

I don’t think the adventure is unfair, although my players might disagree. I think that particular fight is harder on low level characters than most because of the death effect. I also think it’s a demonstration of the importance of mobility and forced movement control: they just had no way to change the underlying tactical disadvantage. You really want that at paragon tier.

Anyways, it wound up being my first… I guess not a TPK, because four PCs lived. The antagonist had no interest in killing people as long as they weren’t in her way. But if you look at it through an MMO lens, you’d say the party wiped.