DnD Encounters

[Caliber]

So is anyone else playing Encounter on here? Anyone else finding said encounters mind blowingly, soul crushingly difficult?

My group just wiped on the plant encounter (DM called it Wizard's Lab?) for the second time. And this is after another wipe to the weird far realm face hugger things, and ANOTHER wipe to the wraith and his undead buddies.

Without taking the time to add it up, I'm guessing we've had 20ish deaths, four almost TPKs, and everyone is on at least their third character (me and another player are on our fifth!) except for the two poor newbies that joined last night (of course, they died). All of this in maybe 7 or 8 nights of play.

Are our experiences atypical here or what?

 

[Insight]

I gave up after week four. It just wasn't worth my time anymore. One encounter can go for an hour or five minutes. Blarg.

 

[Jdvn1]

I started off playing, and am now GMing.

It sounds to me like your GM isn't doing a great job of scaling the encounters. The rule of thumb is that the game should be made fun for the players. If your group likes tough encounters, then great! I don't think your experience is typical, though. Neither of the two tables at my location has had a TPK, nor have we gotten that close (not even any deaths, though we've had people get to 0). Encounters 7 and 8 were a bit tough, though.

 

[hutchback]

I've been running an Encounters group and this has not been my experience. A few players have dropped to 0, but no actual deaths. How many are in your party? We are running a group of 6, and I have tweaked each encounter to make them more challenging.

 

[DogBackward]

We've got some of the pregens, and my half-orc Monk, and we're breezing these things. Normal 5-person group, and we haven't had a problem yet. I dunno what's happening with other folk, but I don't think it's a problem with the encounters themselves. We almost had the paladin die in the fight with the blue ball o' fire, but I got my renown for Healing him up, and we finished it off the next round. That's the closest we've come to anything bad happening.

 

[Caliber]

Party generally hovers around 6, although the composition has changed with people quitting in frustration and new people coming in. Our GM is scaling encounters for party size as far as I'm aware; without reading the modules I assume he is doing it correctly.

Are most groups Leader heavy? I'm willing to accept tactical blunders as the reasons for some of the deaths, but I'm not sure I'd go so far as saying that for ALL (or even most!) of them.

I mean, look at the Wizard's Lab encounter we wiped on last night. I'll spoiler it in case anyone else hasn't played that part yet ...

[sblock]Four Myconid Guards, with an At-Will Close Burst 1 vs Will that does small damage and makes you unable to use Standard Actions? Combined with two (or did we have three?) Myconid Rotpriests who hit REALLY hard and were able to transfer damage from themselves to the guards? Combined with a Gasbag that exploded for some funky damage, AND a Green Slime that was engulfing and doing ongoing acid the entire fight.

Nearly every enemy seems to do 2dX+Y damage, and with our beefiest characters having 39 HP, with most of the group high 20's, low 30's, only one or two hits lays them out. And then with the Myconid Guards taking away Standard actions left and right, our damage output wasn't nearly enough to carve through all those guys.

For those who are past this point, how did your party make it through? Did the Pacification Spores not rock your world? Did you just back out of the room and make them come at you 2 at a time down the bridge?[/sblock]

 

[Jdvn1]

[sblock]Four Myconid Guards, with an At-Will Close Burst 1 vs Will that does small damage and makes you unable to use Standard Actions? Combined with two (or did we have three?) Myconid Rotpriests who hit REALLY hard and were able to transfer damage from themselves to the guards? Combined with a Gasbag that exploded for some funky damage, AND a Green Slime that was engulfing and doing ongoing acid the entire fight.

Nearly every enemy seems to do 2dX+Y damage, and with our beefiest characters having 39 HP, with most of the group high 20's, low 30's, only one or two hits lays them out. And then with the Myconid Guards taking away Standard actions left and right, our damage output wasn't nearly enough to carve through all those guys.

For those who are past this point, how did your party make it through? Did the Pacification Spores not rock your world? Did you just back out of the room and make them come at you 2 at a time down the bridge?[/sblock]

[sblock]Assuming you're correct on what you fought, that's a little tougher than written. He might've scaled it for a party of 6, but it's also designed for an average party level of 2. And, I'm guessing that due to the number of deaths, you don't have an average party level of 2.

Still, I wouldn't have thought that was a TPK. Maybe he always rolls really well?
[/sblock]

 

[occam]

I've had the opposite problem. We've been skating through the encounters, and I'm jonesing for some tougher fights. Some characters have been knocked out (including mine, against the undead last week), but no deaths, and I don't think we've ever gone more than 3 or 4 rounds.

 

[Wycen]

Link?

 

[Asmor]

I've been playing since the beginning, usually as the DM, but as a player 3 times (including the crazy TPK-fest that was this week's encounter).

I can't speak for the first two times I played, because there were 8 or so PCs and it was incredibly annoying (the whole reason I started DMing, so we could split into two groups), but when I've run the encounters have been nearly perfect. Nothing was a breeze and there were a couple which really tried the PCs' skills, but didn't force them to expend too many more resources than they should have.