James McMurray
First Post
The game was too action-packed and tense for me to take a lot of detailed notes, so I'll just give a basic rundown and follow it up with my take on things:
We started off in the town square and inn, where'd we left off last time. The rogue did a little scouting. I asked him to check out the kitchen because I hadn't noticed any farms in the area. I'm guessing the Vistani bring in food, but want to know we're not eating zombie. He bombs his stealth roll and gets caught by the cook, but bluffs his way out of it.
He then goes to the graveyard behind the church, where the fortune teller told us to enter from. He has no trouble scouting the place, and gets us a basic lay of the land, so we head out. When we get there, the back door is chained and locked, so the rogue unlocks the rusty lock. Me and a newly arrived warlock (another group member made it this week) do our sense magic bit in the graveyard. I roll a 1, but he rolls high enough to sense magic underground towards the back, and strolls around a bit to triangulate which grave its coming from. The paladin looks around and finds a rusty old hoe, and digs up the grave.
When he hits the bottom a trap goes off. Everybody adjacent to the grave takes a minor bit of damage (d4 IIRC) from the ancient trap, and the things they are holding become +3 magic items (or get upgraded to +3 if they were already magic). Not sure what that was about, but it means we now have a +3 Berserker Hoe of Destruction (same stats as a glaive). The paladin stopped using his glaive and now charges into battle with a hoe. The GM and paladin's player were joking about a hoe of destruction from one of the Ultima lines of games, with this being a way to get one into the campaign.
Once the trap went off, the noise alerted the zombies on the other side of the door. We made ready for battle as they tried to blast their way through. The fight wasn't hard, despite there being around 30 minis on the board. Observations:
1) Attacks of Opportunity ream minions. We had the rogue and the paladin up front, and once the squares by them were full of zombies, the rest had to go past them to get to us. At a guess I'd say half of them fell to AoOs.
2) Chain stunning is nasty. There were 6 undead that weren't minions, and Solar Wrath (damage + stun vs. undead or demons) + Pelor's Radiance (damage and stun vs. undead) kept half of them locked down. Turn undead (damage, push, and immobilize) is almost the same as stun when locking down melee undead.
We went inside the courtyard and locked the doors, because during the fight, the shadows from the wilderness outside the graveyard started moving in on us. There were lots of shadow hounds in them, but we couldn't tell how many. At one point they howled, making some folks weak in the knees and giving them -2 to defenses for a turn. Then we were inside and out of danger. After a short rest we busted out a stained glass window and headed in.
The paladin went in first, climbing up and over. When he got inside an old man behind the altar was chanting to Orcus and dominated the paladin. The room was a typical looking church: altar up front, rows of pews, and some vestibules (I think I'm using that word right) by the entrance. However, in the middle of the floor there was a large broken out section, falling to a pit below. The dominated paladin jumped into the pit, taking some damage, getting knocked prone, and finding himself at the mercy of whatever was down there.
I dimension door up and drop down a rope, but it isn't secured yet, so nobody can climb it. The Rogue went up next and threw a dagger at the old man, but some sort defensive field slowed it down so he could dodge. The warlock also comes in. The warlock and thief also get dominated, and the thief jumps in the hole. Then some zombie spewers (artillery) and a poison breathing zombie come out of the vestibules and pin us down with attacks that daze if they hit. From this point on I'm dazed and prone for a looong time. The fight gets too hectic to take notes at this point, because an advanced elite flesh golem and some undead rat swarms are wailing on the people downstairs, while those of us upstairs are pinned down. Eventually we all get dominated and forced downstairs.
Observations:
1) Stacked and chained status effects are even nastier than chained ones. For a long time I (and others) were dazed, weakened, and/or prone. I was dazed and prone for at least half the fight.
2) Auras are mean. The rat swarms were basically getting two attacks because their aura gives them one if you start your turn next to them, and they got one on their turn. Since the attack dazed if they had combat advantage, it was hard to get a chance at taking two actions on your turn.
3) Resistance is sweet, but not a Solution To All Ills. I took hardly any damage from the rats or spewer, but they could still daze me. I made my save a lot, but since saves are at the end of the turn, they've got another turn to try and re-daze you.
4) Elites are nasty. The advanced flesh golem had two attacks with a huge bonus, either of which would daze if it hits. When we bloodied him he went on a trampling rampage, running around and attacking everyone in his path (including a rat swarm once).
5) The Orb wizard is nice. I managed to keep the flesh golem pinned down with an Ice Storm for a long time because his saves were at -5 (-2 for Spell Focus, and my Wisdom is 17). He had a built in +2, but he still needed a 13 or higher, so it was 3-5 rounds before he succeeded.
6) Then again, that might have caused the three PC deaths. Once the golem was immobilized I changed tactics to trying to kill other enemies, and also trying to keep allies alive. Had the golem not been immobilized for that long, I would have been forced to hit him again in an attempt to keep him off of us. We learned a few minutes before the impending TPK that the golem only had 3 hit points left. We knew he was the source of the infection and that he was healing the rest of the undead down there, but he'd been so resilient that it never crossed my mind to use my daze action for a Magic Missile (about all I had left that could hit him) instead of trying to heal allies or hinder undead that were hurting us.
We were dropping and standing back up left and right. The cleric and paladin both ran out of heals. Everyone used their Second Wind twice (the cleric had Divine Vigor, which gives allies back their SW).And even with all that healing we still lost the rogue, paladin, and cleric. A lot of that is because. . .
7) Fights on two fronts suck. For a while we were basically a split party fighting strong foes with multiple status effects stacked on us. The old man (statted as a trap) actually did us a favor by dominating people and forcing them to jump into the pit. We took some damage and got knocked prone, but it consolidated our forces.
After the cleric and paladin died, the warlock used his daily teleport to go outside and sneak around. He was faced with a choice of going through the hounds or a horde of zombies, so he just hid and waited to see if anyone else made it out. The rogue and I ran (me with Expeditious retreat because I was cornered in the basement. As soon as the rogue went into the hallway upstairs he was dominated and jumped into the pit again, where he was forced to try to fight the golem. the remaining spewers moved up and blocked my retreat, so I ran downstairs as well.
The rogue missed a couple times, and was killed. I missed a couple times but was only getting hit once a round and so I managed to survive. One more hit would have killed me as well, but I finally managed to stick a magic missile and kill the thing. The rest of the undead in the town all crumbled at once, and the old man screamed in agony at the death of his "son" and then killed himself. The warlock and I hid for a while, then looted the place and took our friends back to town. We're now trying to figure out how to get them raised. I know Raise Dead, so it's just a matter of getting the ritual components, some of which can be gotten by disenchanting loot. The GM said we were getting another reward from the townsfolk, so not to worry about the logistics of the raises yet.
We all leveled as well. I'm trading out a feat for Improved Initiative to increase my chances of doing some battlefield control before the enemies get their first turn. I'll also be picking up Inescapable Force, which makes my Force spells do full damage + 1d10 vs. insubstantial foes (instead of half damage). The specters we fought were really hard to drop because nobody could do major damage to them. I'm a little concerned that it might be too circumstantial of a feat, so I'm not fully sold on it yet. I might get Danger Sense instead, but I'm not sure what the math is like on having two initiative rolls (take the best) instead of one. Also, that much focus on initiative might be too much, since the numbers don't matter as much once you're cycling. Going first is great on round one, and frequently meaningless on rounds 3+.
I'm contemplating other choices too. So I guess the final observation for this report will be that I'm really loving the array of choices offered by 4e. A few of them have been made for me just because of my concept and the limited number of powers at some levels. But I've never felt constrained like I did in 3.x when trying to qualify for a prestige class and then stack more things on top of that specialty. 3.x offered three baskillion books full of choices, but once you chose a prestige class the optimal choices fell into a line and you didn't have much in the way of variability unless you wanted to gimp yourself a little to add some flavor. 4e only has one book of player options, but they're all so balanced that there's rarely a clear choice of "gotta get this one first." Or at least, there rarely is for an 11th level wizard and a 2nd level cleric. Not sure about the rest. I've read them but haven't tried to make any builds.
We started off in the town square and inn, where'd we left off last time. The rogue did a little scouting. I asked him to check out the kitchen because I hadn't noticed any farms in the area. I'm guessing the Vistani bring in food, but want to know we're not eating zombie. He bombs his stealth roll and gets caught by the cook, but bluffs his way out of it.
He then goes to the graveyard behind the church, where the fortune teller told us to enter from. He has no trouble scouting the place, and gets us a basic lay of the land, so we head out. When we get there, the back door is chained and locked, so the rogue unlocks the rusty lock. Me and a newly arrived warlock (another group member made it this week) do our sense magic bit in the graveyard. I roll a 1, but he rolls high enough to sense magic underground towards the back, and strolls around a bit to triangulate which grave its coming from. The paladin looks around and finds a rusty old hoe, and digs up the grave.
When he hits the bottom a trap goes off. Everybody adjacent to the grave takes a minor bit of damage (d4 IIRC) from the ancient trap, and the things they are holding become +3 magic items (or get upgraded to +3 if they were already magic). Not sure what that was about, but it means we now have a +3 Berserker Hoe of Destruction (same stats as a glaive). The paladin stopped using his glaive and now charges into battle with a hoe. The GM and paladin's player were joking about a hoe of destruction from one of the Ultima lines of games, with this being a way to get one into the campaign.
Once the trap went off, the noise alerted the zombies on the other side of the door. We made ready for battle as they tried to blast their way through. The fight wasn't hard, despite there being around 30 minis on the board. Observations:
1) Attacks of Opportunity ream minions. We had the rogue and the paladin up front, and once the squares by them were full of zombies, the rest had to go past them to get to us. At a guess I'd say half of them fell to AoOs.
2) Chain stunning is nasty. There were 6 undead that weren't minions, and Solar Wrath (damage + stun vs. undead or demons) + Pelor's Radiance (damage and stun vs. undead) kept half of them locked down. Turn undead (damage, push, and immobilize) is almost the same as stun when locking down melee undead.
We went inside the courtyard and locked the doors, because during the fight, the shadows from the wilderness outside the graveyard started moving in on us. There were lots of shadow hounds in them, but we couldn't tell how many. At one point they howled, making some folks weak in the knees and giving them -2 to defenses for a turn. Then we were inside and out of danger. After a short rest we busted out a stained glass window and headed in.
The paladin went in first, climbing up and over. When he got inside an old man behind the altar was chanting to Orcus and dominated the paladin. The room was a typical looking church: altar up front, rows of pews, and some vestibules (I think I'm using that word right) by the entrance. However, in the middle of the floor there was a large broken out section, falling to a pit below. The dominated paladin jumped into the pit, taking some damage, getting knocked prone, and finding himself at the mercy of whatever was down there.
I dimension door up and drop down a rope, but it isn't secured yet, so nobody can climb it. The Rogue went up next and threw a dagger at the old man, but some sort defensive field slowed it down so he could dodge. The warlock also comes in. The warlock and thief also get dominated, and the thief jumps in the hole. Then some zombie spewers (artillery) and a poison breathing zombie come out of the vestibules and pin us down with attacks that daze if they hit. From this point on I'm dazed and prone for a looong time. The fight gets too hectic to take notes at this point, because an advanced elite flesh golem and some undead rat swarms are wailing on the people downstairs, while those of us upstairs are pinned down. Eventually we all get dominated and forced downstairs.
Observations:
1) Stacked and chained status effects are even nastier than chained ones. For a long time I (and others) were dazed, weakened, and/or prone. I was dazed and prone for at least half the fight.
2) Auras are mean. The rat swarms were basically getting two attacks because their aura gives them one if you start your turn next to them, and they got one on their turn. Since the attack dazed if they had combat advantage, it was hard to get a chance at taking two actions on your turn.
3) Resistance is sweet, but not a Solution To All Ills. I took hardly any damage from the rats or spewer, but they could still daze me. I made my save a lot, but since saves are at the end of the turn, they've got another turn to try and re-daze you.
4) Elites are nasty. The advanced flesh golem had two attacks with a huge bonus, either of which would daze if it hits. When we bloodied him he went on a trampling rampage, running around and attacking everyone in his path (including a rat swarm once).
5) The Orb wizard is nice. I managed to keep the flesh golem pinned down with an Ice Storm for a long time because his saves were at -5 (-2 for Spell Focus, and my Wisdom is 17). He had a built in +2, but he still needed a 13 or higher, so it was 3-5 rounds before he succeeded.
6) Then again, that might have caused the three PC deaths. Once the golem was immobilized I changed tactics to trying to kill other enemies, and also trying to keep allies alive. Had the golem not been immobilized for that long, I would have been forced to hit him again in an attempt to keep him off of us. We learned a few minutes before the impending TPK that the golem only had 3 hit points left. We knew he was the source of the infection and that he was healing the rest of the undead down there, but he'd been so resilient that it never crossed my mind to use my daze action for a Magic Missile (about all I had left that could hit him) instead of trying to heal allies or hinder undead that were hurting us.
We were dropping and standing back up left and right. The cleric and paladin both ran out of heals. Everyone used their Second Wind twice (the cleric had Divine Vigor, which gives allies back their SW).And even with all that healing we still lost the rogue, paladin, and cleric. A lot of that is because. . .
7) Fights on two fronts suck. For a while we were basically a split party fighting strong foes with multiple status effects stacked on us. The old man (statted as a trap) actually did us a favor by dominating people and forcing them to jump into the pit. We took some damage and got knocked prone, but it consolidated our forces.
After the cleric and paladin died, the warlock used his daily teleport to go outside and sneak around. He was faced with a choice of going through the hounds or a horde of zombies, so he just hid and waited to see if anyone else made it out. The rogue and I ran (me with Expeditious retreat because I was cornered in the basement. As soon as the rogue went into the hallway upstairs he was dominated and jumped into the pit again, where he was forced to try to fight the golem. the remaining spewers moved up and blocked my retreat, so I ran downstairs as well.
The rogue missed a couple times, and was killed. I missed a couple times but was only getting hit once a round and so I managed to survive. One more hit would have killed me as well, but I finally managed to stick a magic missile and kill the thing. The rest of the undead in the town all crumbled at once, and the old man screamed in agony at the death of his "son" and then killed himself. The warlock and I hid for a while, then looted the place and took our friends back to town. We're now trying to figure out how to get them raised. I know Raise Dead, so it's just a matter of getting the ritual components, some of which can be gotten by disenchanting loot. The GM said we were getting another reward from the townsfolk, so not to worry about the logistics of the raises yet.
We all leveled as well. I'm trading out a feat for Improved Initiative to increase my chances of doing some battlefield control before the enemies get their first turn. I'll also be picking up Inescapable Force, which makes my Force spells do full damage + 1d10 vs. insubstantial foes (instead of half damage). The specters we fought were really hard to drop because nobody could do major damage to them. I'm a little concerned that it might be too circumstantial of a feat, so I'm not fully sold on it yet. I might get Danger Sense instead, but I'm not sure what the math is like on having two initiative rolls (take the best) instead of one. Also, that much focus on initiative might be too much, since the numbers don't matter as much once you're cycling. Going first is great on round one, and frequently meaningless on rounds 3+.
I'm contemplating other choices too. So I guess the final observation for this report will be that I'm really loving the array of choices offered by 4e. A few of them have been made for me just because of my concept and the limited number of powers at some levels. But I've never felt constrained like I did in 3.x when trying to qualify for a prestige class and then stack more things on top of that specialty. 3.x offered three baskillion books full of choices, but once you chose a prestige class the optimal choices fell into a line and you didn't have much in the way of variability unless you wanted to gimp yourself a little to add some flavor. 4e only has one book of player options, but they're all so balanced that there's rarely a clear choice of "gotta get this one first." Or at least, there rarely is for an 11th level wizard and a 2nd level cleric. Not sure about the rest. I've read them but haven't tried to make any builds.
