D&D 5E Princes vs Tyranny

pukunui · Apr 18, 2015

DongMaster said:
How many players do you have in your group seeing how their characters ended up at 4th level (something I hope mine will be instead of 5th)?

Only three players, but I had been running the dwarf cleric pregen as an NPC ally to round out the party.

They didn't fight the dragon, nor did they encounter everything in the mines, which is probably why they didn't make it to 5th level.

DongMaster · Apr 18, 2015

pukunui said:
Only three players, but I had been running the dwarf cleric pregen as an NPC ally to round out the party.

They didn't fight the dragon, nor did they encounter everything in the mines, which is probably why they didn't make it to 5th level.

I intend to remove the dragon (will change the cultists to some of the ones found in PotA and make another connection there) and one or two other encounters somewhere else to keep them at 4th level (easier implement than 5th level).

Thanks!

pukunui · Apr 18, 2015

That works!

DaveDash · Apr 20, 2015

I have not read through Princes yet.

My experience so far with HoTDQ (currently up to chapter 4) as a player is a mix of meh and frustration. Story line it's OK, we have "bought in" to the whole AP idea, but from an adventure design point of view there are sessions where I really come away feeling frustrating.

It's absurdly high DCs attached to ambushes, railroady fight (Cyanwrath), poorly written encounters (deadly * 3), and being pushed and rushed around from A to B without really time to strategize, recoup, or even really get to know our characters. The rewards are also very poor, we're quite often left wondering why bother even adventuring at all when you only manage to scrape together a couple of coppers after being badly bruised and beaten.

My character is basically getting so frustrated that he is on the path to evil, torturing those he captures and taking it out on them.

Your group might not care, but I know I'm getting frustrated with the fact that many parts of this module from a mechanical stand point do not match the abilities of our characters. Some things are just way too hard, and we're constantly getting our butts kicked for very little reward.

It's not the writers fault since they were creating this module without much guidance from the rules, although they do seem to like to put the players in near impossible situations from time to time. On the other hand, you can probably avoid a lot of these scenarios, but you also miss out on a lot.

Now, I'll be picking up PoTA soon, so I'll be able to have a read through it and compare. I'm making the assumption though that it's a bit more polished rules wise.

Talmek · Apr 20, 2015

I'm getting ready to begin DM'ing HotDQ with my group of longtime players/friends and I'm really curious to see how they manage the encounters. Since they are all experienced (10+ years playing TTRPGs) I anticipate some honest feedback regarding whether the comments on encounter difficulty are accurate from their perspective.

I have read through the majority of ToD and am waiting on PotA to ship so I can determine if that's going to be our follow-up campaign. Based on what I've heard - if ToD is (in a word) linear, then PotA is (in a word) repetitive. Looking forward to finding out for myself, either way.

vandaexpress · Apr 21, 2015

DaveDash said:
I have not read through Princes yet.

My experience so far with HoTDQ (currently up to chapter 4) as a player is a mix of meh and frustration. Story line it's OK, we have "bought in" to the whole AP idea, but from an adventure design point of view there are sessions where I really come away feeling frustrating.

It's absurdly high DCs attached to ambushes, railroady fight (Cyanwrath), poorly written encounters (deadly * 3), and being pushed and rushed around from A to B without really time to strategize, recoup, or even really get to know our characters. The rewards are also very poor, we're quite often left wondering why bother even adventuring at all when you only manage to scrape together a couple of coppers after being badly bruised and beaten.

My character is basically getting so frustrated that he is on the path to evil, torturing those he captures and taking it out on them.

Your group might not care, but I know I'm getting frustrated with the fact that many parts of this module from a mechanical stand point do not match the abilities of our characters. Some things are just way too hard, and we're constantly getting our butts kicked for very little reward.

It's not the writers fault since they were creating this module without much guidance from the rules, although they do seem to like to put the players in near impossible situations from time to time. On the other hand, you can probably avoid a lot of these scenarios, but you also miss out on a lot.

Now, I'll be picking up PoTA soon, so I'll be able to have a read through it and compare. I'm making the assumption though that it's a bit more polished rules wise.

Yeah, I eventually caved and wound up awarding a few uncommon magical items. I found the HotDQ plot to be good, but I didn't like a lot of how it was presented, and ended up freestyling a lot of my own stuff into it, taking it way off the rails. For my group, this has proven to be a better experience than when I was pushing only what was in the text.

I guess my best advice for running it is, as Chris Perkins says, don't be a slave to the text.

DaveDash · Apr 21, 2015

vandaexpress said:
Yeah, I eventually caved and wound up awarding a few uncommon magical items. I found the HotDQ plot to be good, but I didn't like a lot of how it was presented, and ended up freestyling a lot of my own stuff into it, taking it way off the rails. For my group, this has proven to be a better experience than when I was pushing only what was in the text.

I guess my best advice for running it is, as Chris Perkins says, don't be a slave to the text.

Yeah, our DM has tried to take the rails off which is good, but I think he's still running a lot of other stuff "as written". For example, we walked straight into the fight outside the camp in Chapter 2, because they have an absurdly high DC to spot (20!). For a group of low level characters that almost ended up being a ridiculously deadly fight. He ended up pulling punches in that fight which just cheapened the whole thing.

Then later on in Chapter 3 in the dungeon, there's so many creatures there, despite trying to be as stealthy as possible, we just ended up pulling the entire dungeon on us. So we survive all that, great, by using some of the badly written cheesy traps against the monsters (poison which confuses for one minute, no save each round, seriously?), and as our reward we find a few pitiful little trinkets (after seeing off a very tough trap as well, which no one spotted - even though two of our party members have +5 and +7 perception).

I don't know if it's just me, but I'm not finding it a very satisfying experience. I'm all for hard encounters, hard adventures, and making the players think, but it just feels like this module pushes you into certain scenarios that punish you quite heavily, without much forewarning (lots of traps in places that are heavily used by the cultists, for example). The only other alternative seems to be just to avoid certain parts of the module all together.

Anyway, what you say is absolutely true. Don't be a slave to the text.

vandaexpress · Apr 21, 2015

DaveDash said:
Then later on in Chapter 3 in the dungeon, there's so many creatures there, despite trying to be as stealthy as possible, we just ended up pulling the entire dungeon on us. So we survive all that, great, by using some of the badly written cheesy traps against the monsters (poison which confuses for one minute, no save each round, seriously?), and as our reward we find a few pitiful little trinkets (after seeing off a very tough trap as well, which no one spotted - even though two of our party members have +5 and +7 perception).

For all the flak that the first episode gets (especially the fight with Cyanwrath) I, and others, seem to have found that the Hatchery is really where the difficulty seems to spike. The exact same thing happened with my group in having the dungeon get pulled in on top of them, it was a TPK that culminated in their being captured by Mondath which is where everything went way off the rails (in a good way). From what I'm seeing and reading of the later segments, the difficulty curve eases up a bit once you make it out of the hatchery. In fact, I'm finding myself having to bump the difficulty of some of these later fights, once the party hits level 5, it's a whole different ball game.

The only part I can see later on where I'm going "wtf is going on with this encounter balancing" is when the party is supposed to face Sandesyl in the last chapter. Sandesyl is a vampire. I could be wrong, but it seems really strange to me that they would just casually throw her in there when, and maybe I haven't analyzed the other encounters closely enough, that fight would seem to be much more difficult than the boss battle with Rezmir?

Especially given that she life drains, which is a straight up kill when the PC gets reduced to 0, no stabilizing, no death saves, insta-death.

Has anyone actually run skyreach with Sandesyl? Is it as brutal as it looks or am I overestimating the difficulty of that fight?

Zaran · Apr 21, 2015

vandaexpress said:
For all the flak that the first episode gets (especially the fight with Cyanwrath) I, and others, seem to have found that the Hatchery is really where the difficulty seems to spike. The exact same thing happened with my group in having the dungeon get pulled in on top of them, it was a TPK that culminated in their being captured by Mondath which is where everything went way off the rails (in a good way). From what I'm seeing and reading of the later segments, the difficulty curve eases up a bit once you make it out of the hatchery. In fact, I'm finding myself having to bump the difficulty of some of these later fights, once the party hits level 5, it's a whole different ball game.

The only part I can see later on where I'm going "wtf is going on with this encounter balancing" is when the party is supposed to face Sandesyl in the last chapter. Sandesyl is a vampire. I could be wrong, but it seems really strange to me that they would just casually throw her in there when, and maybe I haven't analyzed the other encounters closely enough, that fight would seem to be much more difficult than the boss battle with Rezmir?

Especially given that she life drains, which is a straight up kill when the PC gets reduced to 0, no stabilizing, no death saves, insta-death.

Has anyone actually run skyreach with Sandesyl? Is it as brutal as it looks or am I overestimating the difficulty of that fight?

Yeah, my players killed the dragon and Rezmir before they met the Cloud giant and because they found out the giants weren't really into serving Tiamat, they made a deal with him, take out the last remaining cultist (the vampire) and he will turn the castle around and not feed them to ogres. It was a tough fight but not so bad for 5 7th level characters. I did set up the fight where they were in her tower during the day and beams of light gave them some terrain features that helped them deal with her regeneration.

MerricB · Apr 21, 2015

vandaexpress said:
The only part I can see later on where I'm going "wtf is going on with this encounter balancing" is when the party is supposed to face Sandesyl in the last chapter. Sandesyl is a vampire. I could be wrong, but it seems really strange to me that they would just casually throw her in there when, and maybe I haven't analyzed the other encounters closely enough, that fight would seem to be much more difficult than the boss battle with Rezmir?

Skyreach Castle is very much not a case of "enter a room, kill everything in there" if run properly. Rezmir might be encountered alone, or encountered with all his henchmen.

In the case of Sandesyl, it seems that the changing CRs of the game probably tripped Steve and Wolfgang up, but my adjustment to this was to have her sleeping during the day, and the party destroying her when she slept - after dealing with her minions. (Vampires were CR 7 during the playtest, btw).

Cheers!

D&D 5E Princes vs Tyranny

pukunui

Legend

DongMaster

First Post

pukunui

Legend

DaveDash

Explorer

Talmek

Explorer

vandaexpress

First Post

DaveDash

Explorer

vandaexpress

First Post

Zaran

Adventurer

MerricB

Eternal Optimist

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