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Telonius
2007-04-23, 01:14 PM
Hello, fellow playgrounders. I'm looking for a little advice on a current "situation" in my gaming group's campaign. A little background on it. We're running Age of Worms in an Eberron setting, currently at about 16-17th level. We've had a whole bunch of character changes throughout the course of the campaign. We've had a sorcerer leave at 1st level, an Artificer leave at 3rd level; two cohorts taken, and later gotten rid of; a Warforged Barbarian joined at 10th level or so. We had a player switch from a wizard over to a Paladin/Cleric. Most recently, we had a player switch from a Druid/Wizard Theurge over to a Paladin/Cleric/Risen Martyr (from when the Paladin/Cleric died). The current configuration is:

Shifter Wizard1/Rogue6/Master of Masks 10 (me)
Warforged Fighter3/Barbarian12
Human Warblade16 (I think - haven't actually seen the character's sheet)
Kalashtar Soulblade X/Soulbow X
Paladin X /Cleric X/Risen Martyr1

For those of you who have already finished playing Age of Worms, we're at this point in the story. We're on the Druid Island, trying to get the four components; but Filge and his party are there trying to kill us.

In the last fight, we had a near-TPK. Filge, the Sin Twins, the Efreeti on his Nightmare, the Cornugon, and the Kenku artificer got the drop on us. We killed the monks and the artificer, and temporarily disabled the Cornugon, but Filge used two of the Wishes to resurrect them. I'm reasonably sure the DM pulled his punches to allow us to retreat. The warforged, the warblade, and I all died. Warforged and Warblade were victims of save-or-die spells. The warforged rolled a 1 on a fort save, so nothing much we could do about that; he was saved only by a last-ditch revivify. We were able to knock out the artificer and take him with us.

One of the players is severely pissed about the whole situation, and thinks there was no realistic way for us to have survived the fight, given our party's current configuration. The outlook doesn't look good for the next time we face them either, given the Efreeti's 1/day "3 wishes" ability. Everybody's pretty demoralized. I'd give it maybe a 30% chance for this player to leave the group.

So, what do I do in this situation? As you will probably notice, we have a severe lack of arcane casting ability. My own character was originally an Urban Ranger variant (when we had our Artificer and Sorcerer), but then switched over to my Rogue cohort to fill in as a skillmonkey. I took Master of Masks so we'd have some kind of arcane and divine abilities in the group. (Also fit in with my character concept of a completely shameless con-man). We currently have essentially three people occupying the fighter role: Warforged, Warblade, and Kalashtar as the Archer. Should I just leave the dead guy dead, and go Wizard? At this point in the plot, it would be really hard to justify another character dropping in.

Or if I keep playing my Rogue/Wizard, what can I do to help shore up our magical deficiency? I was already planning to go Arcane Trickster from here on out. Are there any other better choices out there? Casting from scrolls has crossed my mind, but that's expensive. And what about the OOC issues? Was this fight supposed to be winnable? I personally think the upset player needs to chill out. He's had issues with the campaign before, but I think this may be close to the last straw for him. If he leaves (even setting aside the upset-ness of it) we're completely out of clerical abilities except for my High Priest mask. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

kellandros
2007-04-24, 12:22 AM
I can't give too much direct advice(unfamiliar with the module or setting), but I would ask you this:
- Do you still enjoy the campaign? Several players have left, you've had to change your character design several times to try to give some balance to the party. Sacrificing your fun just to keep things moving along may not be the best thing in the long run, especially if you are the only one doing so. Are you in the campaign now just to see it to the end?

- If you want to keep going with the campaign as is, sit down with the DM and talk it over with him. Can work out something down to a wish going off to reincarnate your character and redo your levels. You've stated that just changing one or two levels around won't cut it anymore.

My first real campaign that I joined(2nd ed), I decided to play a rogue(wanted something a bit more involved than just a fighter, didn't want to mess with magic system yet). This campaign already had 2 other people join after it began as well. The downside is the party already had two of them, and was horribly unbalanced. DM finally just had lighting strike us dead and made us create new characters as a group to end up with a more balanced party. Granted, we weren't that high level so it didn't take as long. But we actually could work together better, knew more about each other's characters, and actually managed to develop some personality to them.

- On the other hand, you may just have to decide that this is as far as the campaign can go for you, and its time to start something new. If you've had several players drop out already, then there seems to be some issues between the DM and the players. Declaring an end to it could give the DM a chance to review with the (remaining) players what did and did not work well with the campaign. Perhaps can also work out why the other players left, and try to avoid similar problems again. This could lead to a better campaign later on.

PnP Fan
2007-04-24, 12:53 AM
I'll offer up a couple of suggestions for the interpersonal stuff, I don't know much about the adventure path.
1. As always, talking to your DM offline is a good option. Any skilled/ experienced DM should know to scale adventures (especially prepackaged ones) to the group of PCs.
2. Give your friend some time to cool off, the try and figure out what's buggin him about the game. If he's had two or three characters die, he might think that the GM is out to get him.
3. Take a break. If the game isn't fun, maybe you need to go do something else as a group, Spider Man 3 in a couple of weeks :-) Sometimes, in spite of best efforts, players wind up bing adversaries of the DM, and it takes RL events to make you realize why you like hanging around with someone who spends part of their spare time plotting to make your spare time difficult.
4. Your group needs to take time out and assess what happens during combat. From what I can see you guys play to concept, probably with some amount of optimization (as opposed to letting optimization drive your builds completely, or letting fluff drive you into completely ineffective builds). This is pretty typical of most groups. What you may find is that you may not be planning your teamwork very well. Talk about how your characters can complement each other, instead of operating as single units that happen to be in the same vicinity. Maybe you do this already, if not, give it a try.

Just a couple of late night suggestions.. .
goodnight.