Afgncaap5
2016-06-22, 02:35 PM
Wondering if anyone had some advice for how I should treat CR or XP rewards for a 3.5 session.
I'm going to have the players discover a trio of guards (low-level Warriors) shackling a lot of homeless and insane looking people and loading them into a cart in this kingdom that they know is ruled by a powerful enchanter. The guards themselves are no trouble, but these "mistreated" people quickly break their own bonds without the guards there, and begin fighting. The people (low level Commoners for the most part, I think) are possessed by dream demons and violently crazy. When the commoners are beaten, they have the dream demons escape from inside them and fight the players directly.
The party level is roughly 5, but they're capable of handling things a CR or two higher than their level without it being too taxing. This could go down a few ways (up to and including the players saying "Well, the guards probably know there business, no need to fight anyone here", though this doesn't seem likely given the way the players play). I'm thinking of representing the dream demons as the Shadow Sibling symbiont creatures from Magic of Eberron. I'm modifying them a bit as I think, per the rules, a Shadow Sibling wouldn't necessarily emerge from its host and begin fighting if its host is killed (symbionts are weird... they seem mostly passive if their host is killed so that they can be claimed as treasure, but if found on their own they're possibly hostile or at least capable of being hostile? I'm still not sure if I'm reading all of that correctly.) But at the biggest, I'm looking at...
Pre-encounter Encounter: 3-ish NPC human warriors of around level 3 each (CR 4?)
Encounter: 1 Warrior 3 and 4-ish Commoner 1s, all with a modified Shadow Sibling bumping their individual challenge ratings up by 1 (CR... 5?)
Follow-Up: 5 Shadow Siblings, each summoned during combat the moment their host dies (+CR 5?)
So on the surface it looks like... a CR 4 encounter followed by a... CR 7-ish encounter? Maybe dialed down to CR 6 because the dream demons only arrive midway through the encounter (and might be killable before they arrive, something that I'd argue would likely make the commoners more passive?)
Knowing full well that the CR system is messed up anyway, I'm still trying to figure out roughly how I should treat this just so that I don't overshoot or undershoot my general difficulty curve.
I'm going to have the players discover a trio of guards (low-level Warriors) shackling a lot of homeless and insane looking people and loading them into a cart in this kingdom that they know is ruled by a powerful enchanter. The guards themselves are no trouble, but these "mistreated" people quickly break their own bonds without the guards there, and begin fighting. The people (low level Commoners for the most part, I think) are possessed by dream demons and violently crazy. When the commoners are beaten, they have the dream demons escape from inside them and fight the players directly.
The party level is roughly 5, but they're capable of handling things a CR or two higher than their level without it being too taxing. This could go down a few ways (up to and including the players saying "Well, the guards probably know there business, no need to fight anyone here", though this doesn't seem likely given the way the players play). I'm thinking of representing the dream demons as the Shadow Sibling symbiont creatures from Magic of Eberron. I'm modifying them a bit as I think, per the rules, a Shadow Sibling wouldn't necessarily emerge from its host and begin fighting if its host is killed (symbionts are weird... they seem mostly passive if their host is killed so that they can be claimed as treasure, but if found on their own they're possibly hostile or at least capable of being hostile? I'm still not sure if I'm reading all of that correctly.) But at the biggest, I'm looking at...
Pre-encounter Encounter: 3-ish NPC human warriors of around level 3 each (CR 4?)
Encounter: 1 Warrior 3 and 4-ish Commoner 1s, all with a modified Shadow Sibling bumping their individual challenge ratings up by 1 (CR... 5?)
Follow-Up: 5 Shadow Siblings, each summoned during combat the moment their host dies (+CR 5?)
So on the surface it looks like... a CR 4 encounter followed by a... CR 7-ish encounter? Maybe dialed down to CR 6 because the dream demons only arrive midway through the encounter (and might be killable before they arrive, something that I'd argue would likely make the commoners more passive?)
Knowing full well that the CR system is messed up anyway, I'm still trying to figure out roughly how I should treat this just so that I don't overshoot or undershoot my general difficulty curve.