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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jfdlsjfd" data-source="post: 9631654" data-attributes="member: 42856">Bypassing the six gnolls would have been, as you said, a fight in another book. Which makes me think that HP in this book are basically irrelevant. There are no fights, there are either total success with barely a consequence outside of crossing off a spell on the list, or death. This makes the game much less gamey and more narrative than what we're used to. Even the skill and stats allocation is barely relevant given the low number of skill checks we've encountered.The gnoll fight might be a tough fight, 2 vs 6 (though honestly, the cleric could buff us so it's more 2 buffed, high-level adventurers vs 6... CR 1/2 gnolls. Carr is what, 10th level? And Dalris even more) but it should at least be offered as a choice in the game design.While I liked the story, and the book you narrated, I don't think it offers a particularly satisfying game experience vs a good reading experience. It's more "guess the right choices" to be made. And it's infuriating because if you're "good" at the game, which means that somehow you guess correctly each time, you bypass a lot of content that consists of long (but interesting!) path leading to your demise. Learning cool lore should be on a path that allows victory. I have the same peeve with The Other Series, but it's minor points that are explained only if you die...It is also a very short path. We don't get information on Landor's Tarrasque, we don't get any information on Pazuzu... it's not that we miss information (I already complained about that) it's also that the optimal (ie, shortest and safest) path is also the one that doesn't advance the Plot.1. We fight a manticore (cool, I guess)2. We're informed by a NPC about the plot of the game, without doing anything.3. We take the most dangerous route that offers no obvious advantage, so we fumble our way...4. We fail to identify the Marid as a friend (mostly because of its behaviour) and being ineffective against him, which saves our lives. Note that this "ally" kills us, while knowing full well who we are, if we attack him obviously by mistake, using a magic that doesn't hurt him that much. He could, I don't know, BERATE us instead and order us to stop...5. We are told we need the twin crowns.6. We meet Garrn and can probably get very little information, except that the cult has been corrupted (which we know).7. We fail the infiltration sequence and learn nothing7. We leave by boat and make the less efficient choice of destination, learning nothing.8. We stumble upon the dead NPC 1 and the useless NPC 2 we met, and they tell us to get to the village9. Somehow, despite us not having learnt anything on the plot, know that Estla is wearing it and Dalris is able to tell the whole story and off to book 3.Basically, we didn't accomplish anything meaningful. A clever investigation to locate crown, find it was... already removed by landor, investigate teh college arcane to learn it was given to Estla, would have been much more satisfying. Plus, the sceptre from book 1 didn't help at all, which means basically the whole effort of book 1 was useless. Once we joined the College Arcane and started to learn magic, we knew that Beldon was nowhere near to recover our father's books. So we could just have kept studying, maybe Arno would have offed himself after thinking he was great enough to walkk in the footstep of Landor. Or we could have dared him to do so.</blockquote>

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