This series will be a DM-centric log of my current D&D campaign, it will not be an attempt at telling a story so much as being a ‘lessons learned’ tool for me to reflect on what was good and what wasn’t so good in the last session. It will be mostly about game mechanics, design choices, and a review of the decisions and calls I made. I will try very hard not to let my neurotic side take over and keep the exercise as constructive as possible.
Preamble: Cast and Screenplay
Rules: A heavily house-ruled version of D&D 3.5 with strong influences by Iron Heroes and the Action Points and Death/Dying variants of the System Reference Document (SRD).
Setting: A Home-brewed classic fantasy world with Ptolus added as a port city at the outskirts of a recently fallen Lawful Evil empire. The world is recuperating from a global alignment-based conflict that was a former campaign focus.
Characters (all good alignments):
- Aravar: 7th level male Elven Duskblade (Fighter/Arcane Spellcaster) played by Mathieu
- Cixi: 7th level Human female Archer (from Iron Heroes) played by Franky
- Lillie: 3rd level female Pixie/4th level Sorcerer (Modified pixie progression from Savage Species) played by Yan
- Nogard: 7th level male human Dragon Shaman ( Melee/Buffer character) played by Steph (The Irony of Steph’s choice of name eluded me until it was clearly pointed out to me)
- Unnamed: 7th level Crusader (Holy Warrior) to be played by Eric who was absent from the 1st session.
Campaign Core Theme: A group of Yugoloths is planning an invasion of the war-torn world. The PC’s know about their intention and plan on being a huge nuisance to the fiends.
Session 1: Harsh Beginnings or ‘Even veterans DM screw up sometimes’
If you define a successful RPG evening by having the participants have a good time, the session was a disaster. I had my load of stinkers as a DM in 2 decades but last Friday night is one for the books.
As mentioned before I had designed the 1st session to be a big fight against what was to be the typical antagonists of the Campaign, a squad of Yugoloths. Since I was aiming for one large combat to get the evening started, I had created a group 6 of these fiends averaging a level 10-10.5 encounter. I went for 10 (3 more than the party) based on the following assumptions (which turned out to be wrong on many levels)
- It was to be the only fight of the PC’s day so I could safely go for an Encounter Level (EL) 2-3 over the party.
- The Character’s power had significant power creep (House rules, Player experience, 5 PCs in party) to consider the party to be equivalent to 8th level.
- The players, having about 5-7 years of playing D&D 3.x together under their belt, consistently beat more powerful foes in our last campaign (Iron Heroes).
I also choose to include only Yugoloths, monsters I had never used and had not completely reviewed. Finally, I chose them mostly on their Challenge Ratings (very approximate gauge of individual power) without regards to special abilities.
Following my usual rule of adventure design (a few mooks, 1 brute and 1 boss), I ended up with 6 monsters: 4 Skereloths (Fiend Folio), 1 Canoloth (Monster Manual III) and 1 Piscoloth leader (Fiend Folio).
The game was set up on a D&D miniatures Battle map (Broken Demongate). Cixi, a Ptolus citizen was standing one one side, defending an elven temple who had a portal to the lower planes opened and Aravar, Lillie and Nogard on the other side, having collapsed the portal’s generator and running to enter the temple before the portal’s closure. Between them stood the 6 fiends.
The fight went awfully for the players. On the 1st round, I had all fiends trying to summon more Yugoloths. While the Skereloth, easily dispatched minor nuisances, succeeded in only bringing one more of them, the Canoloth summoned 3 more copies of itself (A CR 5 creature becoming a CR 9 encounter by itself).
For those who don’t have the MM III book (or play D&D) Canoloths are heavily-armored dog-like creatures that have a 20′ long tongue that cause paralysis and can grapple at will (leading to a bite in the same attack), has a good Damage Reduction and has a strong Spell Resistance.
Paralysis, Repeatable Grappling/biting, Spell Resistance, Damage Resistance….
Wow…
Had I been a teenage, power-tripping sadistic DM, I could not have designed a better encounter to piss players off.
For the record, as written, the Piscoloth has 7 more paralysis attacks per turn than the Canoloth, has better Spell Resistance, better Damage resistance and more numerous, effective spell-like abilities…. sigh. Fortunately, I like to believe that I had the decency of playing it only as a screaming, abusive superior to it’s minions and did minor things with it.
So the players spent more than 2 hours getting bitten, grabbed, dragged, escape the grapple only to be grabbed again. The tanks saw their HP dip below 0 and the spell casters had the pleasure of tasting Spell Resistance. Also add to the fact that I play dice out in the open and I kept playing 18s on my d20. It was awful.
I soon realized that the players were not having fun, but I could not for the life of me imagine how I could salvage this and maintain the player’s suspension of disbelief (memo to self, as your player’s written feedback clearly state now, the suspension was long gone after 1 hour). Once one player dropped to negative hit points, and another only one hit away from it, I finally had the Piscoloth scream for it’s minions to follow it and left the temple to cause trouble elsewhere in the city.
It is a testament to my player’s trust and friendship that they never once burst out in open rebellion or anger. Kudos guys, you’re the best!
So for a 1st session that aimed at making the players look like Rock Stars, it failed miserably. Heck, it went so badly that Cixi actually never saw any of the other players during the fight and the party actually failed to meet!
To Keep this post readable, I’ll conclude with a list of lessons I learned in that session.
- Spell Resistance, Grappling, Damage Resistance: Yes, but not on both the Boss and the brutes.
- Nerf summoning for all fiends. As proposed in the Fiendish Codex II, switch it for a feat or a new Special Ability. That way I maintain better control on the encounter.
- Nerf the Piscoloth’s 8 paralysis attacks, the party does not have a cleric and the Dragon Shaman is not yet able to remove this condition.
- Allow players to rebuild their characters and re-purchase their equipment in light of the Yugoloth’s characteristics.
- Drink less while DMing and have a good night sleep (or a good nap) before the game, I would have noticed the dissatisfaction sooner and would have been more flexible to address it faster.
- We all have to unlearn playing like we did with Iron Heroes (the last campaign) where PCs are more competent to deal with all kinds of encounters than ‘standard’ D&D
- The fight was too hard too soon in the campaign. The 1st encounter should have been with a large number of mooks (no brutes and no boss) to allow players to test their capabilities and experiment (and look damn cool doing it).
Post Mortem
What players liked
- The setup: Brining the fight to the fiend’s Homeworld.
- The Loot from the grateful elven priests
- The Dragon Shaman’s immunity to Paralysis
What players disliked
- Casters HATE grappling and Spell Resistance.
- The lousy feeling of braking a grapple only to be snatched by a 20′ long attack of opportunity in the same round.
- Spending an Action points only to fail
What’s next (Spoiler-free)
- Organize a revenge expedition to kill the fiends, giving all the necessary resource to allow the players to plan a kick ass retribution assault.
- Use the Elven leaders of Ptolus to bring the players together by financing the punitive expedition
- Tie in rapidly with the other non-fiend adventures I had planned.
- Consider the party as high-end 7th level characters and not stronger.
Recent Comments