Adventuring in the Caves of Chaos

[Hussar]

A good point about sleep, unfortunately the BD&D party can only use Sleep once a day (1st level wizards only had one spell in BD&D). So sleep is awesome for one encounter, usually the first big encounter of the day. In play, I remember BD&D being an extremely bloody enterprise, with lots of character deaths, sometimes the same player losing multiple characters in an hour. D&D3.5 is rarely deadly to PCs by comparison.

Yes, because 3e characters are walking around in plate mail at 1st level?

Let's see, in my World's Largest Dungeon game, which just hit session 44 (each session is 3 hours) and average party level 9, I've had 11 permanent deaths and 7 short term deaths. But 3e isn't lethal enough? I beg to differ.

 

[the_dwarf_is_drunk55]

please

can we please role play one of the maps

 

[harmyn]

For the EL affecting XP angle, I am guessing that the previous poster's comment was misunderstood. I don't know how you calculated the XP given with regards to CR, but I have seen your previous threads like this and have faith Q that you are doing it properly.

His point though I think is that the XP listed for a CR 3 encounter is calculated against a party of 4. If the number of characters increase the effective CR can possibly decrease. Now for levels 1-3 XP is the same (something I personally disagree with, a third level character is MUCH tougher than a Level 1 character IMHO). CR also increases for a given monster as their numbers increase. So the art of juggling is involved to try and come up with reasonable numbers.

The other aspect is near the end of the adventures. You are placing characters in 3.5 at levels 4 & 5. This means their ELs are going to be 4 & 5 (before modifications based on number of characters over 4). The increased EL will decrease XP based on a given CR compared to characters between levels 1 and 3. So at the tale end encounters are tougher but the EL of the party is higher.

And the nature of this adventure is very much blitz and retreat. You survive the kobolds and the goblins or orcs there was a very good chance your magic-user was hitting level 2 and giving you 2 Sleep Spells. Makes those humanoid common areas a wee bit more manageable.

 

[The Shaman]

Speaking of misconceptions in need of nipping...

That's ELs 3, ~1.5, ~6, --, ~1.5, ~3, ~8! How well do you think a party of seven 1st-level PCs is going to fair against 18 giant/dire rats all attacking at once?

I'm skeptical of comparing Basic D&D and 3.5 D&D encounters using encounter level or challenge ratings. Nothing matches up directly as written.

For example, the 3.5 dire rat and the 1e AD&D giant rat (sorry, I don't have the Basic stats to compare) don't match up - the AD&D version is easier to hit and has fewer hit points than the 3.5 version, and hits less often and does less damage when it does (and the AD&D giant rat only causes disease 5% of the time on a successful attack, whereas the 3.5 forces a DC 11 Fort save with each bite).

There are too many variables between editions to allow this sort of direct comparison without first developing a means of rendering the underlying mathematics of each edition into a common, unified metric.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

I've been thinking of converting Keep on the Borderlands over to 3.5 so this thread has been rather helpful.

Thanks.

I ran it it 3.0. One of the things I did in my conversion was to adjust the number of creatures in each encouter to result in more appropriate ELs for each encounter, then tweak treasure slightly. That worked out well. The party never explored all of the Caves -- other things caught their attention and the campaign wandered off to other parts, but they had cleared most of the southern caves and were mid-2d level at the time IIRC.