Adjusting Irontooth encounter to be harder...

[Jack99]

Our Human melee Hunter went down, and the party retreated, since I only had the hunter make one death save(which he made) I ruled he was captured by the remaining Kobolds.

Played a bit too much WoW have we?

 

[mikegillnz]

First up hi everyone - long time lurker, first time poster.

I just ran the Irontooth encounter in almost identical circumstances last week (party of seven at second level). I bumped each part of the encounter and my players had no real trouble with it. However, they backed off and rested before entering the cave, despite seeing the surviving skirmisher slipping inside to warn Irontooth.

I added two kobold pikers to the outside encounter, two more pikers to the first wave of the inside encounter and a wild mage to the second wave.

Since they rested before entering, giving the kobolds time to prepare, I ran the waves closer together than suggested in the book - essentially staggering it into three waves with the priest and mage hiding behind walls and popping out to target the strikers and only Irontooth and the Dragonshields arriving in the third round.

Obviously, this wasn't as extreme as keeping the n+5 format, but I found it provided a challenging fight that used all the party's encounter and daily powers. A lot of luck was involved there though, as Irontooth made twelve attacks against the Dwarven Fighter and hit a grand total of once (I rolled nothing above a 4 for him) so he wasn't anywhere near as lethal as intended.

 

[Jack99]

Just a quick update: I ran it last night at as a 1800 xp encounter, and while they thought it was a great fight, saying it was hard would be the exaggeration of the year. They had 1 person bloodied when it was over, and no-one had been really close to going unconscious at any point. In short, Irontooth got hit really hard, as soon as he poked his ugly nose out, and he never really recovered.

Actually, my players were great, they started out in a crappy position, but managed to turn it around superbly, and from there, it was just up-hill for the kobolds (and the goblin).

Cheers

 

[fnwc]

Nice. I think your experience running the encounter runs the other end of the spectrum. I think there was some poll around here that had the Irontooth encounter TPKing more than 50% of all groups at some point.

The major danger of Irontooth is that he has the potential drop an undamaged character each round, unless you happen to hit him with a good status effect (e.g., sleep).