Age of Worms - Deadly

[HeapThaumaturgist]

See, uh ...
I'm being a RBDM, here.

I wanted to capture the down'n'dirty gritty and ugly side of Diamond Lake, and the kind of poverty that the "average man" experiences there. So I only gave them 90gp to work with as starting gold.





--fje

 

[Nightfall]

WOW! That is harsh man! You rock heap!

 

[Al'Kelhar]

WOW! That is harsh man! You rock heap!

Um, "rock heap", as in big pile of rocks? Insult, or some strange compliment known only to thaumaturgists specialising in Earth summoning?

I'm actually intending to give my party of 5 extra equipment when they start. Like, you know, alchemist's fire...

Cheers, Al'Kelhar

 

[tetsujin28]

As for the swarm, seems like a few sleep spells should take care of them.

 

[Bront]

We haven't lost anyone yet, but the first two encounters we had 9 players for. The second encounter was realy tough though.

Good tactics, teamwork, and careful planning can go a long way and make a huge difference.

This is, of course, coming from the player end, I have no clue how it's on the GM's side.

 

[Rugger]

Nope, it's going to bite them all over.

~Qualidar~

And the burning. Don't forget the acid.

-rugger

 

[Rugger]

Good tactics, teamwork, and careful planning can go a long way and make a huge difference.

I can't stress this enough.

My players hadn't played in months (damn you precious WoW!) and were a bit rusty. Plus one newbie.

I think they have had their 'wake-up call' to get their act together. Heh.

RE: the undead later on, the cleric is gonna LOVE it, being crafted as anti-undead. Which means there will be lotsa gnashing of my teeth in frustration

-Rugger

 

[Rokes]

AoW vs. Gestalt Party

I'm looking to start the Age of Worms adventure path in the coming weeks and after talking with the players, we've decided to also give the Gestalt option in UA a try. There are 5 players in the group, and my first instincts are to increase monster numbers (not necessarily strength/levels) to accomodate the party's power. Reading this thread has made me question that some what. Anyone have any advise (either Gestalt in general, or how it would affect AoW)?

Thanks!

 

[Erik Mona]

It strikes me as odd that Dungeon would play balance the adventures based on 8 PC's given that the average group seems to have about 4. I have not started AoW yet but what I am reading here kind of worries me.

It's probably best not to think of our Thursday night campaign as a playtest, since I usually ramp up the difficulty for my party. They faced about twice as many grimlocks and kenkus in the second adventure than in the version we printed.

Basically, it's my campaign, and I decided that it was more important to me to play with the whole staff than leave half of them out so that we could get the balance perfect. The campaign _has_ helped us develop a lot of plot elements, such as making certain things more clear in the final version, but as far as stat fiddling, most of that is done during the editorial phase.

--Erik Mona
Editor-in-Chief
Dragon & Dungeon

 

[James Jacobs]

As for the adventures themselves... they are most certainly for veteran D&D players. They're deadly and rough, but if the players know about the conventions of the game it'll be a lot easier on the characters.

And as Erik said above, we don't really playtest the mechanics of the rules and encounters as much as we playtest the storyline (clarity of plot, effectiveness of forshadowing, etc.). "Playtesting" of the adventures for mechancs is something we leave to our authors to do. All the adventures we publish also go through an extensive development stage between design and editing... it's at this stage that we take a good look at every encounter and every rules bit in the adventure to make sure it all works. It's similar to playtesting in a lot of ways—it just doesn't involve a group or any roleplaying or dice rolling.