PDA

View Full Version : The elves are stealthy, and they come in the night.



Jade_Tarem
2008-04-03, 02:17 AM
The story of a pair of elves who thought they were more subtle than they actually were.

So everyone's been posting lately about this or that bad session. I just had a pretty nice (and funny) one recently and felt that I should put it up, with some of the funnier moments and dialogue highlighted. All this is is a fun story about gaming, though, and so if you're looking for a sound tactical challenge or a rules discussion, I'm afraid you've caught me empty handed.:smalleek: For those wondering why I titled the post like I did but not wanting to read a long story, skip to Just to make it interesting.

A couple things that really helped me enjoy it:

1. I've been DMing forever (except when my group goes out on a lark and does GURPS) so getting to play was a nice change.
2. The DM we did use is pretty good, and he's especially good at running an encounter without slowing anything down, and in running encounters with enemies using different levels of strategy.
3. Our group is normally large enough that games move at a torpid pace at times, but this time we just had a 4 man party.
4. The player who usually plays the chaotic neutral, backstabbing weasel character actually played a lawful semi-good type - and played it well.

A couple more things that make it interesting:

1. The DM is something of a powergamer normally, and expects that his players (when he DMs) are at least fairly competent and built without crippling flaws.
2. The party consisted of a wild elven ranger (The gods may have made man, but Ben and Jerry made the elves.) , a human telepath, a human monk, and a drow warblade (me). You will note that we have no rogue, and no healer. Nobody thought to buy a healing item either. Only the monk has ranks in the heal skill.
3. The campaign is (so far) themed around a Giant invasion. ECL is 7.

The Plot Hook.
So we started out in a skirmish involving the four of us, some marauding ogres and a wagonload of highly fragile friendly NPC's. We won the fight fairly quickly, but failed to save all but one of the NPC's, a young woman who we basically carted to a nearby fort at -9 hit points. We were all in that region in the first place to help with the local efforts to fend off the Giant invasion, with the various characters (we have fairly basic backstories) motivated either by money or sense of duty.

When asked how quickly the giants were advancing, the DM replied "About one kingdom per... now."

The fort was not exactly recruitment-poster quality, though, and was kind of... sad. About a hundred men, and a sargeant leading them all. The big bonus was the discovery of a healer (the actual healer class) who would be arriving later. For now, however, the group drops the young woman off at the first aid tent and talks mission-shop with the sargeant.

Sarge wants us to do a scouting mission, and he wanted numbers and troop types from a fairly distant mountain-nestled giant's camp to the north. This is really no surprise, as at level 7 we're hardly ready to take on the giant army on our own (give us a few levels). We had an interesting time negotiating with him, though.

Negotiations are fun!
Warblade: (remember - drow) "Sargeant, only one of us is a part of the militia." (as a matter of fact, this was true, the ranger was the only one taking benefits/orders from them.) "What are you paying the rest of us?"

Sargeant: "500 gold per person."
Warblade: "1000."
Sargeant: "Sir, is there something wrong?"
Warblade: "What?"
Sargeant: "Care to remove your hood, sir?"
Warblade: "Uhm, no?"
Sargeant: "500 gold per person it is, then."
Warblade: "..."

The Brilliant Plan

It was at this time that the ranger suggested the briliant plan. It is to my great shame that I thought it was a great idea at the time.

The ranger's plan was simple. As it was about 6pm (ish) we, the party, would all rest. However, the ranger and warblade, being elf types, would wake 4 hours before the rest of the party and scout the immediate area to the north (in the dark) to see what kind of local traps and threats there were in the extra time we had. After some debate, the only modification made was that the psion would send his psycrystal with us so we could send messages back to the fort.

The ranger and I set out at the appointed time and started moving north. There were several immediate problems: one of us (the ranger) only had low-light vision, and the forest was a little too dark for him to use it. To be sure, though, his spot, listen, hide, and move silently were quite high. I, as a drow, had 120ft darkvision, which made the job of not tripping over things much easier, and yet, I was more of a warrior type as far as skills went, with things like jump, climb, intimidate, and tumble. My "keen elven senses" amounted to +2 spot and +4 Listen, with my 10 wisdom boasting an amazing 0 adjustment.

Even so, I rolled alright on my move silently checks, and was rewarded with a pair of javelins thrown in my direction, one of which hit for some moderate damage. A pair of ogre scouts had located us and attacked. To make a short battle shorter, we killed one with bows and the other ran off injured and loud.

This was when we decided to hide. The ranger managed to hide both of us nicely.

The waiting game.
It wasn't long before that ogre scout returned with some friends. To be specific, he had another ogre scout with him and a hill giant. The hill giant set up a trap as we watched, and baited it with a live human. Then he cast a spell on the area that we couldn't identify (found out later it was a level 1 ranger alarm spell) and hid in a tree (yes, a tree). We sat there in the hideout discussing tactics with each other to how two injured level 7 elves take out 2 Ogres and a hill giant when along came another, considerably more fearsome looking ogre, who stood around with the scouts. At this point, the hill giant came down (he was done with the spell) and all of them hid. We thought we would just outwait them, but the DM had better ideas.

Just to make it interesting.
A fifth, final giantkin joined the group, this one leading two dogs on chains, attempting to sniff us out. It was at that point that the ranger and I decided sneaking away would be the better plan. We attempted to do this, rolled decently on our hide/move silently, and then everything went straight to hell.

Remember the alarm spell? We tripped it. Instead of ringing or beeping, though, we get war drums. When questioned about how they sounded, the DM replied "Hell's Bells" which caused us to reevaluate the organization and abilities of the giants we knew we would face in the future.

Psion (via psycrystal): "Crap, they have rythm!"
Ranger: "It's ok, we still have a chance unless they bust out the bass guitars."

At that point the ranger and I opted to abandon the hide and move silently in favor of a 40 foot movement speed. So now, our stealthy sneaking mission in the middle of the night has turned into us running for our lives through the woods, war drums echoing through the hills, dire hounds barking and snarling and giants/ogres shouting to each other over the chaos.

And through it all, the ranger is still half blind.

Warblade: "What do I see with my darkvision?"
DM: (Warblade name here), as you run, you take note of what you pass by: tree, tree, tree, ogre, tree...
Ranger: "What was that!?"
Warblade: "Don't worry about it! Just keep going!"

In the end, we made it back to the fort and fought them off.

Aftermath, before polymorph

The next morning, we found out that we would not be getting paid becuase 1) we didn't actually get any information and 2) we'd just screwed over the fort. In addition, we burned through most of the healer's spells covering our wounds, and so the woman we rescued still wasn't up and around yet. Unable to argue with that logic, we accepted our next task - to go and warn the next fort of the impending attack. We took the young woman and the healer (ok, we pretty much hijacked the healer) and took to the roads.

In the spirit of the times, though, we didn't make it very far before we were bushwhacked by a pair of longspear toting ogres and their ogre mage friend. After a protracted battle, we managed to beat them, although in his last round of life the ogre mage turned our psion into a snail, completely so. Our somewhat reduced party rounded off the trip by encountering a hill giant guarding the final pass near the next fort. He appeared to be out of it, though, so our ranger boldly volunteered to go try to finish him with a coup de grace. He gets to within 5 feet before the giant notices him and combat begins. The combat saw some truly amazing feats, most of them from the giant.

1) In a single round (the round where he full attacked me) the giant beat the warblade down 50hp in 2 hits, and the warblade was described as a hood with two feet sticking out running in circles a la Yosimite Sam.

2) In a single round (the round where he missed a lot) the giant beat down the ranger and monk pretty badly. That was just one hit.

3) In a single round (the last round) the monk dropped it with 7 damage, thus seriously hacking off the warblade and the ranger, who did most of the damage.

Thus our merry little bad of single-digit hp adventurers rolled into the next (considerably more upscale) fort-town, and set about looking for a cure for polymorph and a good deal on wands of healing and potions. The session ended there.

And you know what? That's the most fun I've had in a while. :smallwink:

Ascension
2008-04-03, 08:11 AM
That's great. I love topics like this. I find hearing about others' fun is almost as much fun as having fun yourself. If that makes any sense.

de-trick
2008-04-03, 09:15 AM
funny great story, i needed a laugh