DDAL05-16 Parnast Under Siege

[pgsimon202]

I am looking for some guidance on how to run Part 3 of this module, the actual Siege.

Mostly, I am utterly confused by the mechanic they offer at the end of each sub-section regarding the use of Siege Points to determine if any Villagers died.

Here is the language from the module:
"Make adjustments base{sic} on Siege points spent to the number of opponents listed above first. Then compare that number versus any adjustments to the encounter that you would normally make based on party strength. If there are enemies (the first number) over the adjusted encounter strength for the party that indicates that some villagers die fighting those opponents. Note that the party only faces at most the number of foes based on the sidebar below."

WTF?!?!
They attempt to have us use "numbers" math here, but Encounter Strength is a term, not a NUMBER! So their formula doesn't make sense to me.
Also, there is no "sidebar below" in the module, so that was no help at all either.

Did anyone else run into problems here?
I am wondering how other GM's handled this in their groups.

Thank you.

[mgshamster]

You should join the AL Google plus group, as well as the Facebook group. You'll get better answers there. Everyone in this groups plays AL. I'll post your question there and see what they say.

[Navigator]

Saw this on the G+ group. I ran this before and this was a confusing bit.

Using the first encounter, "Testing the Defenses", as an example:

Before making adjustments for the base encounter, there are going to be 12 enemies (8 goblins, 2 wolves, 2 bosses). If the players uses a siege point to eliminate 1 wolf (1 scounting point), then the number of enemies the players will face is 11. Now lets say they are a strong party, which adds 2 more enemies, making their final total 13. Therefore, they will be facing 1 more enemy than the base encounter, so 1 villager would die fighting it.

Basically, the way I read it, this passage only applies to strong and very strong parties, because otherwise the base encounter would never be adjusted up. And even in that case, as long as they use enough siege points to reduce down the number of enemies by at least the amount you had to scale it up because of party strength, no villagers die.

This passage would have made more sense if they made the base encounter the baseline for very weak and then adjusted upwards for weak, normal, strong, and very strong, which may have been the case in a previous draft. It could be meant as a "you should've gotten more siege points" punishment.