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View Full Version : [3.5] DMing "Voyage of the Golden Dragon" [Minor spoiler alert]



Magnor Criol
2009-09-18, 12:17 AM
Hey y'all. A couple quick questions.

First off, I'm a newish DM - I've run a few sessions before of another module, but it wasn't but a handful, and a while ago.
Second off, our group tends to run on the higher side of power - we take full hit points at every hit die, for example, and a couple of the people are fairly good at twinking out their characters.

So keeping that in mind, if I go through this module and tweak most of the main characters and encounters, basically semi-twinking them out (within reason and bounds of character, of course - no major class or race changes or anything), what does this do to the challenge of the module? Do y'all think I'll overwhelm my players?


Also, just in passing, anyone have any particular experience with "Voyage of the Golden Dragon", any things I should watch out for as a DM that might not be covered in the book? For that matter, anyone passing through here have any sage nuggets of DM-based wisdom for me?

AslanCross
2009-09-18, 02:50 AM
From the get go, many published adventures assume average power level and a traditional party (sword board fighter, healer cleric, rogue, blaster wizard), so if your PCs are tougher than usual, tweaking is usually in order. I do this a lot with published adventures and usually end up with rather good results. This is especially true if your PCs are using Tome of Battle; do not think twice about having your villains use those too.

It seems to be an event-based adventure, and so should give the PCs a lot of opportunity to go around the ship on their own.

Thrawn183
2009-09-18, 09:58 AM
Well, the easiest fix I can think of would be to give the monsters max hp as well.

I don't know what level this "Voyage of the Golden Dragon" is, but if the twinkage is pretty heavy, give the monsters a scaling bonus to attack and damge. One or two at low level, three to four at mid level and five to six at really high level. You might want to consider doing something similar with their saving throws.

You could look at the feats of all the opponents and just switch out one bad feat from each with improved initiative.

The net is that that this shouldn't be too hard a change to the stat blocks while it could have a fairly significant impact.

Samb
2009-09-18, 10:24 AM
I'm DMing this module right now in PbP, feel free to take a look and see how my PCs are doing. It is listed as level 7, but if you feel it is too easy then add more guys, of and a few level/feats or add 2 to attack roll and AC.

The hardest part is not blowing up the airship in the begining. Not everyone will have the skills needed to find the way to solve or stall the bomb so hinting to your skill monkey or having a plan B is wise.

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122895

Magnor Criol
2009-09-18, 12:46 PM
No ToB, thankfully - none of us have that book. It looks interesting, and I'd like to try it someday, but not right now.

I think I will give monsters, or at least some monsters (I.e. the important ones...) full hp. Sounds fair.

While we're sorta good at twinking, let me note that we don't choose standard munchkin routes. We don't have anyone who likes to play DMM:Persist clerics, we don't avoid evoker wizards like pariahs, et cetera. We all choose fun, even a little silly character concepts, and then we just tweak them up - so it often evens out because it's a powerful version of a weakish character. =p Also, only two of the people playing particularly do that; the other two are actually fairly new players. One of them is brand new, even.

Improved init is a great idea, thanks Thrawn. Actually, I'll probably do several such variants, switching the weak feat out for Imp Init here and Combat Reflexes there and so on. Throw some variation into the mix...

Thanks a bunch for the PbP link, Samb, that should be mighty helpful. I remember reading the bomb-diffusion scene when I first got the module and being really surprised about that - unless someone's really steeped in Eberron lore and makes their character directly towards that sort of purpose (elemental binding, etc) it seems really unlikely they'll be able to do anything about it...

PaladinBoy
2009-09-18, 05:30 PM
I played that module a while back. I don't remember the bomb scene being too difficult, but then, my character was essentially a Lyrandar airship pilot, so I guess we had the knowledge we needed.

It shouldn't be too hard to manage. It sounds like our party was similar to yours in terms of optimization; I don't know how much our DM had to tweak it, but I don't think he had to change too much about the NPCs.