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Thrawn183
2009-04-07, 05:08 PM
They come in all shapes and sizes; some hard, some easy. Their complexity ranges across the map and some will make you gawk and flap. The DM controls their future while the PC's can only hope the cleric doesn't end up with lots to.... suture? Ok, I'll stop there. Anyway, what was best encounter you've participated in and why?

Xenogears
2009-04-07, 06:26 PM
Well my favorite would be from the first time I tried playing WoD. Everyone else was a new player as well (except one person actually... also he was the only one other than me that had played ANY tabletops but anyways) so I wound up being the DM. So to start things off we had a generic bar fight between one of the characters and a random gand-banger. The fight wasn't that interesting until one of the other players (my fiance actually) decided to toss another character as a weapon!!! Somehow from almost 40 yards away they managed to toss a werewolf in wolf form into the fleeing enemy and break their neck. It was hilarious.

Keld Denar
2009-04-07, 06:42 PM
I'm gonna have to say...1/2 red dragon sheep. You laugh, but thats a hard encounter for a 2nd level party. Not sure where they got the stats for a sheep, but holy crap.

*baaaaaaaah* *woosh* *oh god, it burns so bad!*

That or the small horde of small fuzzy animals with the "of Legend" applied to them. Dire Squirrels with CON drain + the resiliance of the "of Legend" template make low level characters squeal....

arguskos
2009-04-07, 06:45 PM
I think mine might have been when I broke out Anos, the Advanced Pseudonatural Half-Red Dragon Elite Gelatinous Cube. It was like CR 8 and steamrolled a level 13 group. They had to flee with 4 members dead, one crippled, and only one still mobile. :smallamused:

I still catch flak about that monster. They never did manage to kill it.

Saint Nil
2009-04-07, 06:47 PM
In a short caimpagin, we were fighting afemale pirate captain. Not that exciting, I'l never forget it.

Warblade-I take a swift action agaisnt the captain to regain my maneuvers
Druid(myself)-All your actions with women are swift:smallamused:

We couldn't stop laughing for 10 stright minutes.:smallbiggrin:
(His come backs were also great-mainly because they were horrible)

Rhiannon87
2009-04-07, 06:54 PM
Let's see... we've had two particularly memorable fights in one of the games I'm in.

The first one was in Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. It was the first time we were going to the castle, in order to find the Tome of Strahd. The party consists of myself (half fighter, half rogue), a knife-fighter rogue, a cleric, a cleric who wishes he was a paladin, a fighter with an intelligent spear, a wizard/summoner, and an NPC fighter. We charge in the front doors at full health and spells, but with no prep at all. Waiting for us is the following: four gargoyles, two animated statues, two helmed horrors, and one Strahd-in-bat-form. The wizard lets off a fireball and decimates the gargoyles, the knife-fighter and myself make quick work of the animated statues, and the fighter throws her intelligent spear THROUGH both the helmed horrors and Strahd. We beat Strahd up badly enough that he fled within two rounds, the gargoyles were murdered by the fire ball, and we managed to mop up the statues in relatively short order. The DM was kind of bewildered, as we were all at 8th level and that had been, in his estimation, a roughly CR 16 encounter. No one died or was even knocked unconscious.

Second fight happened more recently. It was... well, a 23-to-6 fight. Same party as above, less the wannabe paladin and the NPC fighter, and plus a shadowdancer rogue, and now at level 11. There were twenty fighters, one wizard, and two umber hulks set up at the end of a ridge behind barricades. We opened the fight with our fighter getting a natural 20 critical with her longbow on the wizard and killing him in one hit. The wizard cast fireball, and I tossed a 9d6 orb off a necklace of fireballs, and we wiped out probably 16 of the fighters. We then had to kill the remaining fighters (who were all 10th level) and the two umber hulks. The fighter and the cleric both died, largely because somehow the cleric failed his will save and got confused. Luckily, we were less than a day from a monastery, and the group we slaughtered had been carrying 12,000 gp worth of diamonds on them... along with approximately 160,000 gold worth of armor, weapons, and other magic items. When we finally got to sell all that stuff, we were temporarily the fifth largest trading force in the region.

Lycan 01
2009-04-07, 07:51 PM
Hmm...

Favorite encounters we've been in? What if we're usually the DM? :smalltongue:


Personally, I'm usually the DM/GM/Keeper, so I don't get to actually experience encounters and stuff very often. But I've got 3 good stories... One of which I've never told before because I just now realized the awesomeness of it.

Encounter 1: Father Gregory vs. The Esoteric Order of Dagon


Call of Cthulhu games are usually all about stealth and avoiding trouble when it comes to buildings full of bad guys. That is usually what I encourage my characters to do. But when it came my time to play, I realized that when it came down to it... my character's personality screamed "KILL THEM ALLLLL!!!" with a vengance. The situation in question involved a group of Investigators, myself included, travelling to the mutant-infested village of Innsmouth to rescue a kidnapped college student. Now, its important to note that my character was a very placid Catholic Priest. Its also important to note that he was a Russian immigrant, and he'd been a White Russian (anti-communist fighter) during the Russian Revolution, and he'd migrated to America after his family was murdered and his church was burnt down during one of his sermon's. So while he was very soft-spoken and level headed, he knew how to be a shotgun-weilding Angel of Death when need be.

And discovering that one of his favorite congregation members was about to be sacrificed to a fish demon didn't go over to well in the old Father's head.

Somehow I'd weaseled a double-barrel shotgun into my possession during our first few minutes of being in Innsmouth. Eventually, the rest of the team began to bicker about how to get into the Esoteric Order of Dagon, a large chapel in the center of town. I'd suggested driving a truck through the front door - the Keeper's expression was priceless. Eventually, they decided to climb in through the roof - which was slanted and lacked windows or any entrance of the sort. :smallconfused: So Father Gregory, tired of listening to them waste time and realizing that the poor boy was going to die soon if they didn't do anything, decided to take action into his own hands.

The Good Father simply walked up to the back door, bashed it open with the butt of his rifle, and barged into the back room of the church. He discovered the college student in question tied up on the ground, battered and bruised. Standing over him - a half-human/half-fish guard with a crowbar. I had only a second to respond - the guard could easily scream and bring the whole town down on me, but a shotgun blast would be too loud and have the same affect.

So I shoved the shotty up against his stomach and used him a silencer to his own killing blow. :smalleek:

Death was instanteous. But the dull "thoom!" followed by the splattering of his guts on all the walls got some attention... A pair of pistols appeared in the doorway, and I managed to dodge the incoming hail of gunfire. As I recovered my footing, another Hybrid barged into the room, followed by a hideous humanoid fish creature known as a Deep One. Both were armed with .38 revolvers, and both were intent on killing me. Oh, and seeing the Deep One meant I had to take a Sanity Check, and risk going crazy. So there was a major chance of me ending up as a blathering wreck on the ground in front of 2 gun-weilding monsters.

Instead, I passed my check without losing nearly any Sanity, and proceeded to raise my shotgun and exclaim "BACK TO HELL WITH YE, ABOMINATION UNTO THE LORD!!!" as I pulled the trigger.

The Deep One's head exploded, and the Keeper basically broke. I'd just killed the session's major bad guy with a point blank critical hit that did 40-something damage to a guy with 16 HP. The other bad guy promptly shot me in the chest. However, I survived the injury, and ended up sprawled out on the ground with a broken shoulder blade and limp left arm. I then proceeded to reload my shotgun with one hand and try to fire off another shot. However, the Hybrid was faster than me, and he leveled his revolver with my face and prepared to finish me off execution style-

Only to be blown away by a hail of gunfire, courtesy the rest of my team, who barged in through the doorway guns blazing in an attempt to save my severely wounded butt. They then dragged me and the student out of the church, threw us in the car, and drove us out of town before anybody else could come after us. All told, we "won" the scenario, I eventually recovered from my injuries, and I also got 4 Cthulhu Mythos points due to my trouncing of the Deep One without any Sanity Loss. :smallbiggrin:

Summary: In Call of Cthulhu, my shotgun wielding Russian Catholic Priest blew away a chapel full of monsters with a double-barrel shotgun and survived getting shot in the chest, essentially destroying an encounter that was supposed to take hours of strategy and stealth in less than 5 rounds with 2 shotgun shells and a bunch of awesome Dodge and Sanity rolls. :smallbiggrin:

I'll post the others later. Short version of those:

Encounter 2 - My Star Wars character survived running through a hail of gunfire, jumping in a speeder, and ramping a sand-dune to escape a junkyard full of 50+ mercenaries intent on killing him.

Encounter 3 - My Star Wars character Coup D'Etat'd a house full of sleeping Dark Jedis. :smalleek:

FMArthur
2009-04-07, 09:33 PM
When DMing: The two times I succeeded in making an encounter that forces the party to run rather than fight, without having to tell them to. It's probably the most delicate situation a DM can create, because players will often fight to the death for a TPK, or win the battle against the odds. Worse still is coming up with an encounter that is extremely threatening but not immediately so or they don't have the chance to run. The winning formula was a monster that was not ridiculously hard-hitting but still dangerous, and recovered from everything quickly - so they could defeat it but after seeing it get back up minutes later they decided to run. I was so proud. :smallbiggrin:

And then later in the campaign, they were finally able to kill the monster. A proper climactic battle with their hunter that worked out to be everything a boss fight should be. :smallbiggrin:

Starscream
2009-04-08, 07:21 AM
Last campaign I was in we had a rather weird one. A half-dragon monstrous scorpion. It ended up way more powerful than expected, and killed our strongest combatant in the first round without any effort. We freaked out and ran for dear life.

Then, hiding behind a door and listening, we were surprised when after an hour or so the thing just keeled over dead. The party Warlock had summoned a swarm of bats (back in the single round of actual combat) which had done like one hp of damage to the thing. Because of the bats' Wounding ability the scorpion was losing a hit point every round. It couldn't make the very simple heal check to fix itself because it was mindless.

So it slaughtered one of us effortlessly and then died due to being scratched by a bat. Both the easiest and hardest encounter of the campaign.

Knaight
2009-04-08, 07:34 AM
I was GMing, and it was a robot known as Epsilon. Epsilon had fought the PCs multiple times, with everybody playing non humanoid, round with legs robots. Epsilon ambushed the PC's ship, from slightly under the sand, and then used a quick pop up building to trap them in. Next, Epsilon dumped a bunch of smoke in the room, which blocked the PCs visual and infra red sensors, while still being able to use ultrasonic. The PCs intercepted a signal towards speakers in the room meant to distract, and then took them over, making them replicate the ultrasonic signal. From there, they emptied enough plasma into the fog to allow them to see Epsilon as a shadow, and now that they had visual, they quickly cleaned up.

truemane
2009-04-08, 08:28 AM
When I design big encounters in D&D my preference is to load the field up with bad guys, each of them not too too terrifying, just to increase the ambient chaos.

My favourite encounter (as a DM) was a 2nd Edition game I was playing involving two PC's. One was a Wizard (we called them 'Mages' back then) and one was an Elven Fighter with some extra rules that added up to sort of like a prestige class. They were 12th level or so.

Anyway.

They're hunting a Blue Dragon. Adult. They go into its lair and find that it has an Iron Golem guarding the entrance. The rule back then was that an Iron Golem needed a +3 or better weapon in order to hurt it. There was no Damage Reduction. Anyway. Neither of them had a +3 Weapon. So they had to sort of dodge around it in order to make it into the creature's main lair.

So what they found was an enorous cavern with HIGH ceilings. The Dragon was up in the shadows, clinging to the stalactites. It had a few simple magic items that it kept using to pummel the PC's (Wand of Polymorph, for example), while the Iron Golem wandered around trying to bash them.

There was a sword in an old pile of bones in the corner. The Fighter went for it and the bones animated. So he had to fight the undead creature (who was USING the magic sword, which happened to be a +3 Sword) in order to get the sword he needed to kill the Golem, while the Mage dealt with/tried to survive the dragon.

It was a WHOLE ton of fun. It took hours. We still giggle about it.

Lycan 01
2009-04-08, 01:12 PM
Welllll? How did it turn out? :smallbiggrin:

Zaq
2009-04-08, 02:23 PM
Well, my favorite encounter that I've GM'd was Qwade, leader of the Blood faction of the Black Hand. He was a level 11ish "human" (well, he STARTED human) thing, with levels in a class that was sort of a modified dread necromancer. I gave him a bunch of aberrant feats and a couple willing deformities (he ended up with a 15 foot reach, tentacles instead of legs, and water breathing/swim speed). I was going for a "Zelda boss" feel with him and his arena... you ever play Ocarina of Time? Imagine Volvagia. If you've never played OoT, well, Qwade had a smallish (25' square, I think) room, with nine holes cut in the floor, which led to underwater tunnels. They were all interconnected. The party started on top, and Qwade was swimming around underneath them, popping up here and there and hitting them with spells, his crazy long reach, and other things. Oh, and his quickened Profane Lifeleech every turn or two. He was fun.

Heh, that reminds me, when I was describing him and trying to convey his unnaturally long limbs and freakish appearance, I described his limbs as "far too lengthy, like they've been artificially elongated, or surgically augmented." To which one of the players quipped, "Oh god, we're fighting a bad penis enlargement spam ad?" It... took a while to calm everyone down after that.

RTGoodman
2009-04-08, 02:55 PM
I've had two favorite and really memorable encounters.

The first was entering the moathouse in the first part of Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. The encounter was nothing ridiculous, just a straight-up fight between our party (my Half-Orc Monk, a Human TWF Paladin with pretty godly stats, a Ninja, and a Warlock) and a Blue Dragon (don't know the age category, but I think he was Medium or Large). Well, as a low-level Monk, I basically sucked at ranged attacks, so I stopped in the middle of the encounter, pulled out my bag, and got out the only useful thing I had - 100 feet of silk rope and a grappling hook. I attached it, and after a series of several very high rolls (17+), I had a dragon lassoed. I spent the next several rounds using my high Strength and grapple modifier to fish him down out of the sky and grapple him, even though he go away because of his huge grapple mod. It was awesome.

The second was in our all-Kobold semi-gestalt game. (We were gestalt, but one half of your progression had to be an NPC class. We had a Warlock//Adept, for instance, with a 3 Strength.) I was a Half-Red Dragon/Paladin of Tyranny//Warrior who focused on (of course) wielding a big pick. The BBEG of the adventure (in which we were to swarm a fortification in order to start a new warren) was already statted out before the game started, and was a Gnome Sorcerer specializing almost entirely in fire spells. Again, I was a Half-RED dragon. After getting beat up by summoned Dire Bats for a while, it was down to basically just me and the Cleric/Rogue//Expert, who was trying to save everyone else. The end of the encounter was me making opposed checks with the Gnome (Str vs. Cha) to pick up and hurl his own flaming sphere back at him. It was AWESOME. :smallbiggrin: