Choose their next opponent, please

[Jon_Dahl]

Testing stuff is always fun. In this thread, we can test some monster(s), villains or some other challenge with my group. I'm the DM and I'm planning to run a short adventure where the players save a hapless gnomish inventor who was trying to visit his daughter (for no particular reason, and the PCs can save the daughter too if you wish). I have no clue about the plot yet. The game is kind of low-fantasy so there isn't that much magic there. I just wanted to mention that before you bring in something too high-magic to the table. The game happens mostly in a peaceful fantasy human kingdom where the gnome was captured (or got lost? Or something?). The campaign world is Greyhawk.

The PCs:
Human Ranger 8 CG
Human Rogue 1 / Scout 1 / Paladin of freedom 1 / Barbarian 1 / Wizard 1 (divination) / Cloistered cleric 3 of Olidammara CG who has schizophrenia
I'm a bit unsure about his details: Human Cleric (and Radiant Servant?) 8 (NG) of Pelor who has severe schizophrenia
Human almost-12th-level Battle Sorcerer (neutral).

If we find some kind of consensus (I have to feel that the monster(s) is appropriate to my low-fantasy setting), I will have the PCs face the proposed opposition and I'll report here what happened. The actual session will be played in about three weeks from now. Or maybe four.

[NecessaryWeevil]

What is the game effect of their schizophrenia?

[Calthropstu]

Side effect of schizo: Seriously... going to visit his daughter? Then why is he covered in spiders?

Edit: Severe: He's not covered in spiders, he IS a spider. Ten feet tall! With nasty sharp pointy teeth. And is pink.

[daremetoidareyo]

That looks like a crew that needs a chariot battle while racing across the desert. I would stat up 75 hobgoblin fighter 2/warblade 4s, and 25 goblin flask rogues 3s, each with wands with 2-4 charges that they can attempt to UMD. 50 of the hobgoblins have chariot feats from

50 hobgoblins have chariot feats from sword and fist. These are charioteers. Half of them are paired with fellow hobgoblins, the other half have flask rogues with 3 vials of alchemist fire and a partially charged wand.

I would also consider making a dragonfire inspiration bard lieutenant. And maybe a hobgoblin were-cheetah general with barbarian and ranger levels. Shooting for 11HD on the general. No power attack or battle jump unless you want to kill a player.

This desert has a peculiar wind phenomenon called "overtow" wherein anyone flying over 10' off of the ground needs to be capable of moving 90' per round or be swept the difference in their flightspeed from 90 towards the sea. The ranger already knows about this.

Give the PCs 30 rounds to make it to the booby trapped hellcliff-pass and something like a 50' head start. When enemy raises alarm to chase PCs, 200 wartrained battlebred half troll horses are accidentally released by a mistake from the hoard. Half of them are hitched to chariots. These horses are stampeding with the PCs as leaders of the stampede. If a Player falls off, they have a 75% of being able to use skills and other tricks to get a new horse.

That should make the players have fun. They can fight or outrun. Battle sorcerer gets a chance to really open up the big guns. The pcs or their chariots can get mountain hammered or flask bombed. Give a bunch of goblins wands of baleful transposition that they attempt to use after jumping into the overtow, they may even target PC horses. Which opens the players up to chariot tramples.

[Jon_Dahl]

What is the game effect of their schizophrenia?

Actual effect: A will save DC 15 or 20 once per game session. If they fail, there will be a "dangerous hallucination that puts them and everyone around them in jeopardy". However, if they just keep making their will saves game session after game session, the effect will be very miniscule: Just funny little voices in their heads saying funny things and that's all.

[Jon_Dahl]

@daremetoidareyo

Wow! Just wow! This is exactly what we need more: wild imagination and bold scenarios with lots of action. I salute you!

However, I'm too inexperienced to handle such a massive battle and more importantly, my PCs would just surrender. Having that many opponents would make them surrender. I just know it. When they realize how many opponents they have up against them, they will either flee or surrender. Sure, the BS can throw fireball etc. but believe: unconditional surrender. I know them well enough.

[daremetoidareyo]

Ok. Different Ideas then.

PSHAW...ITS JUST A PHASE....SPIDER

Fight with trickster entity who winds up hitting the PCs with some flasks full of a clear liquid that smells of licorice. Entity runs away. It is important that this guy survive until the PCs get a chance to really kill him.

The flasks of liquid are phase spider (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/phaseSpider.htm) pheromones. Even if you wash it off, you still smell like a phase spider aphrodite made flesh. Within the hour, the PCs get attacked by one. Then another one. After an ambush or two, give the PCs an NPC who knows what happened to them as well as the two methods to get the smell off: 1.) Be in the presence of a unicorn for 20 minutes, 2.) It must be neutralized by ghost urine.

Haunted factory is 20 miles away and a unicorn is nearby in unluckywood forest. Unluckywood forest is lousy is phase spiders.

Ghosts need etherial things to drink to pee, and they have to be made friendly with diplomancy or rebuke undead. Both of which would be easy if phase spiders weren't fighting to inseminate the PCs during the negotiations. Luckily, there are ghost touch materials (ectoplasm) in the haunted factory to use as weapon enhancers to worry less about missing the phase spiders.

Just exponentially increase the number of phase spiders that will find the PCs each hour (1, 2, 4, 8, etc) until they get to the point of running away towards one of the two solutions. OOC Tell the PCs that the phase spider males coordinate to all attack at the same time.

You may need to change the poison damage or warn the divine spellcasters via special deity dream (you need lots of neutralize poison) or give the PCs a wand of neutralize poison with 50 charges before you go through with this.

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GHOSTS IN A SHELL


A local artificer has made some prototypes that he needs to battle test. He has a number of animated constructs that can fuse their spirits with those of great heros. He has four bots. One should be like a dragonfly with a sonic bolas gun that can deliver touch spells at range, and a force lance that does triple damage on a charge (quadruple if you blow a turning attempt). One could be basically a combination of hovercraft and repeating ballistae, and another could be a 10' tall steampunk werewolf in hybrid form costume that allows the PCs to convert spell slots of one level into initiator moves from the setting sun or stone dragon disciplines. Maybe a hyper-telesonic chamber that projects an invisible sound based version of the PC (ala virtual reality type interface) except that it is a creature type [sonic], with a 1/4 of the HP.

And using these tools or similar ones that play to your PCs strengths better, make them fight an army of undead dragon critters. Go light on the enemy casters, and give the PCs something that can soak a buttload of damage. Like undead frost giants riding undead wyverns. And a giant bat banshee named deathshriek. And a stone golem controlled by a lichificer.

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THIS LINE HAS BEEN CORRUPTED

Illumian truenamer died today. And now, the world is different: There is a divine magic parasite. Each day, one divine spell per character must have a single word changed to any other word with the same number of letters. Numbers cannot be changed unless they are written out. After the PC makes his change, the DM may choose to add a single word to the spell description.

After a few days of this, one of the PCs is tasked with fixing the problem. The gods have extruded the problem and given it life. If the PCs can kill it, the problem is over. All of the gods want this problem to be over. The divine magic hack: It's a corrupted vivacious word archon with the abilities of 9 levels of spellthief.

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[Calthropstu]

They killed a hellcat. The hellcat was a powerful devil's pet. The devil ressurects his pet, and has it come after them again.

While they sleep.

[Jon_Dahl]

They killed a hellcat. The hellcat was a powerful devil's pet. The devil ressurects his pet, and has it come after them again.

While they sleep.

That includes magic a bit too high for mid-level games, but I hear you, I hear you <3

[ace rooster]

That includes magic a bit too high for mid-level games, but I hear you, I hear you <3

A level 9 demonologist (BoVD) can unleash a 12hd outsider, so not too high. By the sound of how the hellcat fight went, a well played bone devil might be a little cruel (CR9), as I don't think that party would do well sectioned off with walls of ice, but a chain devil* or an erinyes could crop up. A squad of mercenary dwarves backed up by a couple of imp scouts could also do some damage, if they went after the party, particularly as the dwarves know about the PCs.

What would a demonologist want with a gnome inventor? Only time will tell, but suffice to say that the hellcat was not there randomly.

*Another good reason for chain devils is that they have a racial bonus to blacksmithing, so they fit well with kidnapped inventors.

[GrayDeath]

Not a bad Idea.

I myself would simply show them how a real party is supposed to work together.
Build a relatively unoptimized but "good-classed" Party of Level 8, play it smart, and see what happens.

I would go for a Cleric of Hextor(ish Evil), a Wizard (Necromancer Specialist) a Rogue/Assassin and a barbarian myself, eventually backed by a Bard Variant.

Should show them how actual tactics and thoughtful paly look ;)

[Jon_Dahl]

Great suggestions. I'd love to hear more.
Something that I found problematic but completely understandable is that everyone has a suggestion but no one says: "Wow, this guy has a good point!" I'd like to have a consensus. But like I said, I understand!

[Calthropstu]

It sounds like the consensus is heading towards tying your murderous hellcat into your campaign by getting it to have a master. A demonologist, a summoner, a higher level demon...

[Jon_Dahl]

Sorry, guys... Something surprising happened... We were supposed to have 4 players, but two of them cancelled at the very last moment. I only had two players and I didn't want them to have more than one character per player and I didn't want to run any of the PCs, so we had 2 PCs (the Battle Sorcerer and the Ranger). The DMPC First Sergeant Dugritt accompanied them.

I couldn't do much and I wasn't able to improvize anything meaningful, but I gave them a trap:
In the middle of a forest there was a hole (8½ ft. deep) and at the bottom of the pit there was a rusty metal chest (locked). The chest was protected with a Greater Glyph of Warding (Spell Glyph: Harm). I had no idea how the ranger and the battle sorcerer were going to handle the situation, but I trusted that the battle sorcerer could handle the situation. I calculated that he basically needed a Knock and Open/Close to bypass the trap, and the BS had a very, very good Will save in any case.

The BS did nothing. The ranger went to the pit and touched the chest in order to check if it was open. He received full damage from the Harm trap (110 points of damage) and he was killed instantly. The player was pissed off but I have to say that this was the only time that I bad been happy to kill a PC, because the player had been a pain in the butt during the whole session.

So an 8th-level ranger got insta-killed by a 7th-level trap. Go figure, right?

Let's see if I can use the chain devil next time, ok?

[Fizban]

I'm fairly certain at this point that you are in fact the troll. While I could attribute the fact that Harm was lethal to the poor wording of the 3.5 version (the 3.0 version was quite clear by the fact that it left you at 1d4 hp it was never meant to be lethal), the rest speaks for itself. You have two players so you run a "session" wherein they find a box in a hole with a lethal trap, with no trapfinders, for no reason. And you were happy about it killing a PC because he'd "been a pain in the butt." Your entire plan was that the battle sorcerer, who has shown lethal amounts of incompetence and cowardice, would "handle the situation," I don't even.

So, yeah. Your players are bad because you're worse. I would not be surprised to hear that the other two didn't show up because they, as the two younger fellows IIRC, realized they don't have to put up with this and went somewhere else. That was not a "session" you just ran, it was a waste of time.

[Jon_Dahl]

I promise you, Fizban, that I'm not a troll. At least not on purpose. Other than that I respect your opinion and what you said there.

[Sliver]

I'll be honest, I tend to agree with Fizban. That trap was awful.

Without trapfinding, you basically set an encounter with a solution that depended on a player that you should have known not to depend on. The fact that the trap is "7th level" is meaningless. It's a level 6 spell cast at CL 11 and capable of dealing enough damage to insta-kill on a failed save. Basically, Save or Die. On a trap.

I don't know what you consider to be "kind of low-fantasy so there isn't that much magic there", but a random chest in the woods with a 6th level spell trap doesn't give me that impression.

A level 11 cleric spent two level 6 spells to trap that random chest. A trap that can be bypassed by Knock + Open/Close?

That's crazy.

And not even that. You are DMing for half the group, a whole of 2 players, the game isn't really progressing because you can't figure out a meaningful encounter for the smaller group, and one of the players is being a pain?

That's the perfect chance to stop the game and talk to him about it. Why is he being a pain? Is he aware of that? Perhaps he isn't satisfied with how the game is going, because you can't come up with anything meaningful and are just looking for ways to waste their time? Did you ask?

[Rangô]

Hey there!
Continuing with the last thread I agree with Fizban as well, it seems to me that you're being very lazy DM.
You brought to the forum a main plot as typical 'damsel in distress' with nothing else, after that compilation of GREAT IDEAS shared by daremetoidareyo with us (Thanks a lot dude, I'll pick them for my own campaign) you didn't even try to use it, instead of that you used a forgotten chest in a pit. It sounds like 'Meh!... a forest, couple of MM's bugs and for treasure... a deadly trap-chest'. You've got three weeks and that's what you got.
Then your answer to manage a hard situation is killing a player (half of the party in fact), that speaks by itself.
To be Dungeon Master requires time, a lot of it, I estimate at least the same time preparing the session than playing it and of course being reasonable and having glibness, you look like to have lack of them.Take my advise, retire and look for another DM, obviusly it's not for you.

[Fizban]

The implication of "less players than expected so I couldn't do much," is that he may have had something prepared but didn't want the others to miss it. Doesn't excuse the rest but it's understandable, I don't want to run anything less than three players myself. The usual recourse is to just abandon DnD for that day and play something else. Considering the state of the game it would have been good to start that conversation, easier to get started with fewer people.

[Rangô]

The implication of "less players than expected so I couldn't do much," is that he may have had something prepared but didn't want the others to miss it. Doesn't excuse the rest but it's understandable, I don't want to run anything less than three players myself. The usual recourse is to just abandon DnD for that day and play something else. Considering the state of the game it would have been good to start that conversation, easier to get started with fewer people.

Well, I got your point but I'm pretty sure that if you really have a plot in mind and you've worked on it you'll come up with something playable more than abandon DnD. If 2 out of 4 players are missed at the first campaign's session it's so easy relocate their characters for the next or maybe as simple as postpone the game until the party is togethere. What I mean is that's better play a good game or directly no play than play nothing rolling dices and seeing how your character is insta-killed by a chest.

[Jon_Dahl]

The player was simply being rude, such as saying one of the group looked 6 older than he was, saying that he looked fat in the shirt that he was wearing.... I got so irritated that I didn't even care anymore.

[Sliver]

I think not caring is a sign that you shouldn't be DMing, at least that session. You could have called him out on his behavior, too. Having a player that you dislike as a person can affect your fun as a DM, which will affect the quality of the game, leading to a less fun game for the others. As you have proven nicely, you threw together a poorly thought out trap and didn't care, because the person was being a douche.

Side note: I wouldn't DM if only 2 players show up, either... If I found out that the others can't show up after the rest have gathered, I'd probably either pack up or have us play some board games.

[Mordaedil]

Yeah, at that point it is your perogative as a DM to simply end the session and say it was null and void.

It's okay. Not everything comes together perfectly every time.

[ace rooster]

The implication of "less players than expected so I couldn't do much," is that he may have had something prepared but didn't want the others to miss it. Doesn't excuse the rest but it's understandable, I don't want to run anything less than three players myself. The usual recourse is to just abandon DnD for that day and play something else. Considering the state of the game it would have been good to start that conversation, easier to get started with fewer people.

I'd second the this, but would probably still play. No matter how well prepared you are, sometimes you have to improvise, and sometimes you get it wrong. No biggy, learn, move on. Ignore the people who are scared of mistakes. I'd say you made a variation on the same mistake as last time, in not considering how ability interactions would affect the CR. Lack of trapfinding here probably ups the CR of a trap. The choice of trap was poor, too, but I will come to that later.

On the other hand, I don't see how you could have made it scream "trap!" louder to a seasoned (paranoid) player. They did not think there was something important in the box, and the box was not going to chase them (I assume?). They probably should have just gone around if they didn't have the abilities required.

A harm trap is not a particularly good encounter on it's own, due to lack of interaction. It will either kill, or do HP damage, and then the encounter is over. If it does damage, then the party heal up. A summon monster 6 trap to summon d3 celestial stag beetles makes a much more interactive trap, and also sets up adventure hooks better. A celestial summoning would imply that the cleric was good, which makes robbing the box more interesting.

The other problem with the trap is the lack of non expended defences. What is to stop a random commoner coming across it and trying to open it? While this would end badly for the commoner, it would also expend a 400gp trap! A solid door costs far less, and is easily justified if it will prevent a single recast of the glyph. A sign saying "magical defences" and a casting of magic mouth should deter all but the most fullhardy of commoners, and something like a CR1 skeletal guard would at least justify why commoners have not set it off. For amusement, but a corpse beside the box, and have a fairly low DC to know that this was a level 7ish treasure hunter who disappeared a while back. The PCs can loot his stuff, for cheap loot, and if they then decide to open the box they have only themselves to blame for the harm trap. A heal check could even give them some information about what they could expect from the trap.

You need to think about why a level 11 cleric would put such a trap on a box, and not put other defences. Either they are defending it, or it is a honey trap. If they are defending it, then a couple more layers would make sense. If it is a tomb of horrors style high level adventurer honey trap, a few layers will exist to weed out the low level characters, as well as slow escapes. Either way, I would expect a mini dungeon crawl around a harm trap.

Generally I find that "why" is a good start to encounter design, and allows quick improvisation. Why was there a harm trap? You can start with a harm trap, but the way to build an encounter is figure out why you have a harm trap, and then build around that why. You might find yourself even discarding the harm trap and leaving the other stuff you have come up with.

[Jon_Dahl]

Maybe it would help (or make things worse) if I explained the strange encounter?

There has been a major earthquake in game that has revealed powerful magical things that were hidden beneath the ground. Not that low-fantasy, but it's ok... There was a 800-year old grave in the woods with several magical items in it, including a Helm of Opposite Alignment. In that very shallow grave there was a fire giant skeleton and a trapped metal chest, that had been hidden by an ancient cult that had practically owned the area at that time. The earthquake made the skeleton "believe" that it was attacked, so it rose from the grave and killed lots of people before the PCs destroyed it.

Now one of the people the PCs had saved, a lawful good cobbler apprentice, had managed to track down the grave (he did some favors). He hid the grave and came to tell the PCs that he found it, but they needed to talk to his master so that he could have the day off and show the grave to them. The PCs gave the master 5 gp in order to have his apprentice for a day.

The apprentice showed them the grave, and the battle sorcerer and the ranger tried to make the First Sergeant Dugritt to enter the grave, but he argued that he was the shortest and tall humans would get out of the grave more easily. The players asked me about the metal chest, so I told them that it was a medium-sized metal chest with a built-in lock. The ranger jumped to the grave and he wanted to try if the chest was locked. He was killed instantly. Then the battle sorcerer went back to the city and hired an NPC trapmaster, who was very expensive (full share, ditto), who came and said that there's no trap (it had been a Glyph of Warding). They shared all the loot after the trapmaster had opened the lock which she could have done with her eyes blindfolded.

The player got his old PC back, who had been turned to stone several sessions ago but the PCs had agreed that they wouldn't bother wasting resources to turn him back to flesh. The player was happy, because he liked that character more than the now-dead ranger.

The End.