Tag: 4e

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.

High Infidelity was the first P2 game Susan and I played since Gencon. We needed a little extra experience before GASPCon, plus we always like tuning up our characters a bit. The always-reliable Matt ran (I owe him a run or two), and Eltherian, jredgiant, and misterjester played with us. By some miracle, we had a pretty balanced group: defender, two leaders, and two strikers.

The lack of control hurt a bit, but since Matt’s pretty reliable about focusing on the leaders, it’s always good to have two of ‘em. Reed performed quite well and got a +4 weapon out of the deal. I’m feeling good about the upcoming P2 play.

Aw yeah, Arts. Who doesn’t like Arts? I ran this for jffdougan. It looked like we weren’t gonna have enough players, but then another game fell through so we wound up with him, AussieScum, ceneakor, Tsriel, AequitasXXIII, and Mike Lemmer. Fun group.

They really zoomed through the initial investigation. They found a clue I’ve never seen a group find before, probably because people tend to focus on the social stuff. Sadly, this means they missed out on the teaching. Then they hit the combats, which were appropriately brutal. They almost but not quite died on the final fight, which pleases me greatly, although in retrospect I should have taken it as a bad omen. For reasons which will become clear in the next few entries.

Wait, that was number 100? I should have had a cake. Darn.

Anyway, I got all enthusiastic and played Where Dragons Die right after running The Fardrop Incident. Tsriel ran; Xalcairn, Jay Ibero, Dareus, Elden, Genolen, and I played. There are, for the spoiler-ish record, a lot of dragons in this adventure. I like killing dragons when I’m playing Collin, so I have nothing bad to say at all.

Although the module does need to be fixed because some of the dragons use the preview stats instead of the final Monster Manual 3 stats. They’re a bit weak as is. But that’s not something bad, that’s just a handy tip!

I ran The Fardrop Incident as a favor for Eltherian, so that he could get his barbarian to P2. I think the clever plan was to make sure he’d be available to play High Infidelity with us later on, and that worked out.The other players were Jay Ibero, Darklord, Elden, Knight4612, and Blackmantle.

Since this was a reasonably skilled party, and since they agreed to be experimental subjects, I adjusted all the monsters to the summer 2010 damage expressions. It worked really well; while I didn’t challenge them a ton, they found it much more fun. I wouldn’t recommend this unless you’re pretty sure your group can handle it, but it’s a great tool when used with care. And I did almost manage to get myself a perma-dominated barbarian, which would have been awesome. (“Fardiz. Go kill the cleric.”)

After, let’s see, 18 months, Alesk finally got the chance to finish off the Byar’s Seven quest with Hunters’ Down. Matt J. kindly volunteered to run it for me; eladar, Kazordan, jredgiant, AussieScum, and Dareus were the other players. I think a few of them were also on the quest, so that was nice.

I had fun, although it was kind of a bittersweet run. Alesk is not a stellar character and Essentials did not give me the rebuild potentials I’d been hoping for – he’s a Strength-based cleric, and Essentials is all about Wisdom-based melee clerics. I may yet rebuild him as a Wisdom-oriented character, but that sort of breaks some of the concept.

For now, he’s just hit level 8, so I can stick him on the back burner with a rebuild in my pocket in case I ever make up my mind. I suppose the really wacky idea is to bring him out again as a paladin…