Previously in Phil’s game:
The heroes struck a deal with the Keepers of the Veil to investigate where the plant-like humanoids, created by the drug Green Welcome, were headed in Ptolus’ Necropolis. Said plant-like beings, called Children of Sehan, were tracked to an ancient funeral mound and engaged. Two were slain, diffcultly, one remains, inside a closed sarcofagous being kept closed by both Nogard and Cruguer…
Last Friday was exactly what D&D as been about for us for the last 7 years, an action RPG. The pacing was perfect. The fights were short and intense. the players met various challenges and each managed to shine in his own way at least once. So okay, the actual story-motivated role-playing wasn’t actually there much, but the guys got to play the role of serious butt kickers all right.
The evening started slowly. I was recovering from a nasty cold and my mental faculties were still dulled. That’s why I restrained my alcohol consumption and it probably contributed for this markedly sharper game.
We ordered some Chicken in a Box and we had a blast watching some of the crazy videos my friends posted on Facebook (Name: Philippe-Antoine Ménard… drop-in anytime, but a lot of stuff is in French) as well as some Flights of the Conchords on You Tube.
As we were done striping the last nanograms of meat from our deliciously incinerated birds, we started shifting gears toward some serious Child of Sehan butt kicking.
I spent a few minutes explaining the new Gaze attack variant rule and we quickly reviewed the player’s plan of attack, which required a look at the Tanglefoot bag rules (this is some serious nice piece of alchemy… when not abused).
We started the fight.
Everybody retreated from the room and let the child of Sehan open the coffin it was in. Cixi, who is an expert at throwing anything, threw the bag and scored a perfect hit while saving against the creature’s gaze attack! One gooed Child of Sehan coming up!
Yan, who was a bit overconfident about his feat-fueled charisma-enhanced save, failed to resist vs the creature’s gaze and left the fight to play the flute somewhere else in the dungeon.
The rest was over real fast, mainly because I mistakenly allowed a player to score a crit against a plant. When I realized it on the next player,s turn, I let it ride as a ‘nice DM’ bonus, preferring to maintain pace over rules orthodoxy. A good call in retrospect I think.
So no one got poisoned or mauled and players were happy!
After, there was a bit of monkeying around where everyone wanted to search different things and go explore different areas at the same time. I intervened and asked the group to act as a more cohesive unit, speaking in only one voice, if only for my poor virus-damaged brain. The group re-snaped into it’s usual efficient unit and remained thus for the rest of the evening.
A secret stairways down was found and explored before finishing the 1st level.
The second room featured a bunch of opened, emptied coffins. One held a Succubus polymorphed into a Necropolis Flower Girl. The Flower Girls are a small Ptolus organization I made up, where people pay then to put flowers on tombstones and pray for the departed (yeah I like to poke fun at outsourcing in my own special way).
Now Succubus encounters are a very hard to play because players see it coming a thousand miles away. I played this one as having been affected by a Str damaging poison still covered by the stuff. Of course, the players casted a bunch of lesser restoration and healing spells on her. Sigh… So I went for their hero’s heart and described how she still failed to get up after those ministrations, probably because she was taking poison damage again.
At that point, Cruguer offered to treat her poisoned state with a heal check (thanks you Eric!). I promptly had her embrace him and started the french-kissing chain of 3 successive level drain/suggestions before the rest of the party decided to attack.
Aside: As with Save or Die effect, level drains are one of the most sucky D&D mechanics (no pun intended). Players work hard as hell gaining levels, spending often 3 or more sessions between level ups. So I have now made level drains come back at the pace of 1 level per day of rest, like Iron Heroes does.
Now here’s the thing, I had made the succubus the exact same one that featured in our last Iron-Heroes-in-Ptolus campaign. She wasn’t a real bad guy, nor was she a clear-cut ally either. I originally planned to have her reveal herself at the end of the fight and offer to trade her life for all the bling she got from the Big Bad when he called her here. That plan failed miserably.
While the demon was in a different form from when she last saw her, I allowed Cixi a spot check, which she failed by a small margin. While Franky caught on pretty fast and called me an Evil DM(tm) he managed to ignore my clever plot, crit her to death and send her back to her prison on Carceri. I had managed to charm Cruguer had a nice party conflict building up…. Oh well so much for interesting plot twists! See Lillee’s take on it here.
I decided to leave the loot behind nonetheless. The players resolved the issue in a different way than I imagined, but they still resolved it. So the players scored a nice Adamantine Masterwork Battleaxe and about 8000 gp worth of bling!
After that, the players found that the doors to this tomb needed really strong people to open, using a lever that called for 4 consecutive successful DC 15 strength checks. Nogard, who is a 1/2 dragon 1/2 orc Barbarian, has a STR of 28… without raging… So yeah he opened the doors easily…
Okay well I’m about to hit the 1000 word mark and I already broke my rule for Tuesday post (you know, gym and all) so I’ll leave the rest for tomorrow!
Ciao!
It was either Cruguer or Nogard who wrongfully crit the plant. I remember clearly you saying that you’ll let it pass for this one and that if Cixi had a crit on her turn it would not work. Franky was about to make is own attack, probably the reason of the confusion. It did prevent this damn plant to make its attack whoever made the crit.
Fixed!
As for the overconfident part, who would not be with a will save like the one Lillie’s got. I’ve got 15 for my will save, which was what I had with my level 18 Fighter/Rogue character and he had a cloak of resistance plus 5!! (weird the plus sign does not show in comments…)
I assumed I had something closed to 5% or 10% chance of getting calmed and it seems it was more like 25% or 30%. This creature was badly design in so many aspect and its DC was another one. No wonder the others where spending action point like crazy against these…
Don’t get your panties in a bunch dear friend. Yes that critter was badly designed 15 ways till Sunday… Good thing they are all dead.
A standard level 9 class with good will save and an 18 in Wisdom would have had a plus 13 will save bonus making the save more than 50% of the time.
A character with a weak save and a 10 in Wis gets a plus 3 bonus so he fails on a roll of 18 or less….
Yeah that sucks big time and reinforces my feeling about the monster being a more suitable challenge as a CR10 than a CR 8.
“The rest was over real fast, mainly because I mistakenly allowed a player to score a crit against a plant.”
See??? Even DMs who know the rules forwards and backwards forget this rule. Cast thee out, I say! Critical Hits for all!
That’s the way things are going in 4e, anyways.
The way I figure it, plants, oozes and constructs are a minority of what we fight in D&D. The only crit-immunes that are very common are undead.
But most undead, IMHO, should be crittable anyways. Has nobody seen the lucky headshot in a zombie movie? Or the stake to the heart in a Buffy episode? With the possible exception of skeletons and incorporeal undead, most undead are shown as having more damaging areas.
So why not allow crits for everything?
And don’t say to balance rogues. A rogue’s job is to get in, strike quick, and do good damage. Crit-immunes don’t balance rogues, they nerf rogues for that encounter. Same as a golem’s magic immunity does to casters.
…
I need to propose a house rule for this, I think…
I’ll post it in a bit.
Okay okay… point taken. I do agree that crit attacks makes players happy and all.
However do note that current rules have allowed making crit a lot more potent with feats, item qualities probably in part because a lot of creatures aren’t critable.
I would be willing to allow critability against almost all types without feats except maybe Oozes and I would ‘balance’ this by increasing HD (or HP) of non-critable creatures much like Ooze get bonus HP (not twice as many of course… maybe 20% just to make them survive a typical crit).
Definitively a subject for a mini crunch post
Same discussion then the magic immunities of the golems just affecting and other sub group of character.
It should be address in a similar way then immunities are. If you allow criting everything you therefore should allow magic to affect anything.
This on the other hand will make your critters easier to kill. So either you lower their CR (by one per immunities lost, should be a good rule of thumb) or they need to be altered. One could add some DR or HP in the case of crits and add a DR equivalent affecting spells or HP to replace magic immunities.
My 2 cents
As discussed over on Gtalk with Yan, How about a bonus to AC agains crit confirmation checks for the now crit resitant monsters?
Let’s say a non skeletal corporeal undead has +2 bonus to AC when confirming a crit while an incorporeal undead has +10?
Posted.
http://criticalanklebites.com/2007/11/21/critical-hits-a-variant/