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WD,
I appreciate the question, I'm happy to rp out the attempt to escape.
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Leaving aside the fact that, in a normal DnD game, should you return to town, there would almost certainly be 4 grizzled new warriors ready and waiting to deliver some serious hurting to kobolds and goblins, .... there are no mercenaries in town.
(i.e. in a normal DnD game there would be four new PCs in town; logically though you'd have to go a lot further than Winterhaven to hire mercenaries. If there were mercenaries to hire they'd already be used to deal with the kobolds.)
At any rate you've basically wiped out the kobolds. They almost certainly aren't going to stay here.
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[sblock=This encounter]
Is sort famous for being a TPK. It's 6th level with an xp budget of 1250xp. 1st level encounters have an xp budget of 500xp or so.
Techinically if you sneak up on the kobolds outside, you're supposed to be able to kill them all before they raise the alarm. Then, when you go inside, you fight two waves. Wave 1 is just minions and ambushers. Irontooth, the priest and the dragonshields come in around round 3.
The problem, really is that the map is too small, and that it "punishes success".
If the fight outisde is close then you may wear the outside defenders down enough that you can pick them off, but if you do well the odds that the slinger makes it back inside are basically 100%.
Then you have do do all 1250 xp at one shot and you don't get any warning about what's in the cave. So you walk through the waterfall and everything is close in with shifty. There are no back enterances or "hints" or anything in the adventure.
[sblock=they needed the xp?]I've read somewhere that, in order for the page count and maps to work and to get people to high enough level quickly enough, WotC had to give out a lot of xp in a couple of pages.
The "upside" of an encounter (3 encounters really) like this is that you get ~300+xp from one map. [/sblock]
The Wyrmpriest is pretty dangerous. He's long range, vs reflex and does an average of 7.5 points of damage a shot. He basically killed Brock (he had some lucky rolls too, but last fight he was also a big contributer to damage and taking out Iridian). It's very hard to pin him with shifty and scads of other kobolds.
Irontooth himself is a big throbbing lump of hurt. Dual attack + goblin tactics means that he's basically attacking twice around (avg. 7.5 per hit) and will often shift anyway. He starts healing as soon as you bloody him AND does an extra 1d10 points of damage when he hits(! - I have no idea why this is balanced...). He 'loses' goblin tactics and has to charge the nearest foe (not that that's really a loss).
You took him to 28ish with Brocks Daily and a good hit from Zaram, then he healed 5 twice and then you did 19.
On one hand you'd cut his hit points to a 1/5th (he starts off with more than 100); on the other? He still had 19 hit points. So you'd have needed to do another 19 to take him down this round, or 24 next round or 29 the following round or etc etc.
A charging creature has a radius of 12 squares more or less. You need to be double move and running to have any chance of escape. And that's just Irontooth.
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[sblock=The non-existent map]I never actually gave you the location of the kobold lair, you were supposed to get it (like three different ways), but I'd intended for the map you received not to show their lair -- I never really explained exactly what it showed though, (just the dragongrave, the town and a suggested ambush point)-- so it's my fault.
I did that because I felt that it was a likely tpk; I'd kinda hoped you'd do everything else, visit the keep itself, get to 2nd level and then decide to go for the kobolds.
But people seemed keen to go for the kobolds; and I figured I'd roll with it. Some groups bulldoze through appearently (though they usually have tactical warlords and wizards who pour action points into clearing the field in round 1 or 2 and/or have DMs who modify the encounter).
I don't think you were "down resources" everyone had an action point and everyone but Iridian had a daily. One or two of you could have been at max hit points but I don't think anyone was too low.
It didn't really seem appropriate to change stuff. For better or worse this is KotS.
You survived the fight a lot longer than I feared. If it had been 200 xp lower you'd have made it.
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I was thinking about this yesterday. With sg already playing kots in real life if we were going to continue then I think that we'd have to re-recruit, and/or change the adventure significantly. The bad guys have the macguffin as well.
Lots of people are running kots games, and/or playing it real life, and/or know about the adventure (chunks of it showed up in the Penny Arcade podcast that WotC was distributing).
So the novelty of running KotS is, for me, a lot lower. It's basically just combat practice (not that I don't like that).
I'd be more interested in starting up a new game with people on L4W, if people are interested. You could either pick a common theme/background and suggest adventure topics I'd run or we could just do something else....
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