Help me be a better DM

[Sporemine]

Hello again, Sporemine here.

Im working on my D&D group's entire gaming style to keep attention on the game for longer and have smoother gameplay. I will be reporting on my game and asking for any feedback that you think may help my dming style somehow. The party is: A Sorcerer, A Fighter, A Barbarian, A shaman and A Spellblade (I can never remember what these guys are called in 4e)

I have begun a campagain with a new style, doing everything closer to the rules than normal.

The main problem with my group is that they're smart - TOO smart, they can destroy the standard dungeons with ease, leading to boredom unless the challenge and treasure are ramped up (the best two in the group managed a third level encounter with a level one hell lock and a level one fighter) The higher difficulty kept the game going well for a long time. That changed when I got the new players. The normal guys are breezing through the standard difficulty while the new guys are struggling to keep up.

I decided to start them off with a relatively easy encounter on the way to town. A strange purple light filtered out of cracks in the tower, drawing them to the prospect of treasure. They fought their way through a large group of skeletons (minions) onto the main floor, opened a chest, got attacked by a swarm of crawling hands, killed them all, and moved to the skill challenge (skeleton dodging in a spiral stairwell) on the stairs. They got to the top and found a group of skin kites coveting a replica human skull, carved from pure onyx, that attracted undead. This was part of an old cult item of great power (the characters figured that out with knowledge arcana) and would draw undead to it's immediate area. After a pitched battle with the kites the characters took the skull and moved it to the nearby town of winterhaven, hoping to sell it to the wizards of rose keep.

On the way to town the characters dealt with the kobold encounter in the beginning of keep on the shadowfell. The encounter lasted about 4 rounds and the characters made it the rest of the way into town. They dropped off the skull, causing a political mess due to the death cult in the area. they rolled a natural 20 on finding somebody who knew where the kobolds were. They wanted revenge for the slight waste of time. On the way out of town, the revenge party of kobolds (keep on the shadowfell, encounter 2) sent to attack them hit them hard but got decimated. The characters were then on their way.

I eliminated the guards from the encounter, knowing they wouldn't withstand both encounters (lair guards and lair) without heavy losses.

They withstood the encounter well, camping just inside the door and forcing the kobolds to come at them in fewer numbers and preventing flanking. That went well for them until the barbarian charged the kobold cultboss Irontooth and was torn limb from limb by the kobold swarm (there was a kobold on EVERY side of his square). The rest of the group defeated Irontooth and the remaining kobolds, seeing their leader dead, fled the battle (for the sake of the other players). The players got the treasure and are now waiting. The barbarian is unhappy and thinks that his death is complately my fault for irontooth (who deals the same amount of damage as him) existing at all.

That's there we left off

I need feedback

-Sporemine

 

[Dragongrief]

From what I could see in your post, the parts of KotS you ran went pretty standard.

1) The first two kobold encounters are supposed to be easy; they're the intro encounters for a L1 adventure.

2) Irontooth is a beast, and rightly tears apart anyone who charges in without backup (4e is heavily focused on teamwork) - even moreso when you charge into a swarm of kobolds to get to him.
The barbarian in my group went down too, but that was due to a crit and hard hit with the double-swing when Irontooth was bloodied.

The only way to challenge the characters/players without simply using higher and higher level monsters is to use smart ones. If two players are seen at the strength of the party, then any intelligent (recurring) foe is going to take steps to minimize their effectiveness. Artillery and brutes vs the fighter and barbarian, strikers and elemental resistant mobs against the sorcerer, etc.

This will give the advantage of 1- being "realistic", 2- allowing the newer players a little space to attempt new things an be creative to help the "powerful" characters cover their weaknesses.

Obviously don't do this every encounter, it gets old quick, but do it often enough to remind them that they aren't the baddest thing in the world.

If you're planning to run the rest of KotS, I recommend playing it as is. My players took the graveyard encounter with 3 L2 characters (paladin/starlock hybrid, assault swordmage and a melee ranger) with a minor alteration to the Second Wind rules since there was no healer.