AoW - one session to go.

[RichGreen]

Hi,

I've DM for this kind of level before and it does get very complicated. By the sounds of it, your fights are running quicker than hours did. On the whole though, have you enjoyed the campaign and would you recommend it? You gave some of the adventures some quite low scores!

Cheers


Richard

 

[MerricB]

Hi,

I've DM for this kind of level before and it does get very complicated. By the sounds of it, your fights are running quicker than hours did. On the whole though, have you enjoyed the campaign and would you recommend it? You gave some of the adventures some quite low scores!

Overall, I recommend the campaign. I give it a 4 out of 5.

Yeah, if I ever had a chance to do that one over again, I would've had the elevator lead to an isolated section of the Underdark and a weird village of Underdark refugees who sell supplies to the three temples. Each temple would've been located in various, nearby areas of the Underdark, allowing the PCs to tackle them one at a time. The village would've had some sort of developing plot, giving the PCs someone to interact with between adventures.

I like TFE, but I needed to happily adjust bits and pieces of it to make it work better. My group did it in the order Erythnul, Vecna, Hextor... as I understand, the original idea was to make the other temples "locked" and Hextor was meant to be the first encountered...

Spoiler

The dangler there is the two tiefling guards on the elevator. After they die, if the party didn't do it all at once (what party would?), and especially if Hextor isn't taken out first, shouldn't the temples do *something* more to react if the PCs are still in the area? Although I'm fond of dynamic-style dungeons, the set-up here is too complex to handle readily.

Cheers!

 

[Nightfall]

Mike,

See I'm fond of it the way it is. *thinks Merric is being a tad harsh with some* Spires I liked cause it was like "Let's go to the heart of evil and find out what we can!" That, to me, was cool. I will agree, Lizardfolks = hardly a threat. But I completely disagree about Redhand, that was dull, dull, dull! Wormcrawl was by far more fun than the end, except of course fighting Kyuss.

 

[Quartz]

just in case you're considering modifying Kyuss, read the end of Jollydoc's Age of Worms and see how he accidentally made it nearly impossible for the characters to win.

 

[Nightfall]

Quartz,

A tougher Kyuss?! Dude...that's just WRONG.

 

[Emirikol]

Paizo also are guilty of overcomplicating things. Encounters with four different spellcasters are not fun to run. In the tactics section, note the 4 or 5 spells that a spellcaster will use. A list of 20+ spells is too much.I simplify greatly at this level when running monsters. A spellcasting dragon? Forget the spells. It uses melee weapons and breath, that's all. If that can't be scary enough, something is wrong.

Merric:

I hear you on the overcomplication. It's unnecessary to do stuff like that. I know it's to make the creatures "look" more interesting, but it' doesn't do anything useful for the game.

BTW, I officially ENDED AoW last session. We played Lost Temple of Demogorgon instead and modified the plot significantly to end next session.

AoW pretty much ground-out with Alhaster[REDHAND]. It was like a bad Living Greyhawk interactive.

The massive overpowering of the upper level sessions for the game after that was simply just a giant game of Math-vs-Calculus nightmare. Each round was taking waaaaaaaaay toooooooooo lonnnnnnnnng. Forget high level in 3.5. My time is too valuable to be having 2-hour combats. Nevermind "let's go kill a god."

The sessions were fun, but they were so intensely dungeon-oriented that they really lacked any plot complexity. In place of plot complexity was the example you posted..encounter/monster over- complexity. I'll take the former.

To avoid being totally unconstructive with this post, I'd suggest that DUNGEON have sidebars for the DM who wants to make the monster more complex. They'd look like RECIPE lables like this:
Alternate Suggestions for the encounters:
Add a level or ten of wizard to the red dragon.
Give the yellow dragon warrior a wand of fireballs
Have the salamanders in the magma for 50% cover and out of reach of the PC's initially

Etc.


I give the campaign a 3/5 for what we played. (average)

jh



..

 

[Pants]

Mike,

See I'm fond of it the way it is. *thinks Merric is being a tad harsh with some* Spires I liked cause it was like "Let's go to the heart of evil and find out what we can!" That, to me, was cool. I will agree, Lizardfolks = hardly a threat. But I completely disagree about Redhand, that was dull, dull, dull! Wormcrawl was by far more fun than the end, except of course fighting Kyuss.

I give Redhand props for being something other than the standard dungoncrawl, but I'm not sure how it handles in actual play. I think, the one BAD thing about Redhand is that it sticks out so much. Every other adventure is a fairly linear combat-fest of death and destruction and then there's this one interlude that's... fairly open-ended and pretty role-playing intensive. It almost sticks out like a sore thumb.

Harsh Reflections is great, too bad the final boss is a lame monster like an illithid. I like illithids but they're probably the most boring creatures to DM. Mind Blast sucks beyond all belief.... for everbody.

I personally, thought that the Champion's Games was the highlight of the AP and I ported the event over into my own campaign, with some small changes. Being Gladiator's is cool.

Whispering Cairn is a great adventure to start off a campaign with. Cool, flavorful dungeon that keeps the players on their toes. The encounters with the swarms were fun.

I actually thought that Library was the worst, but I'll admit that I think this way because it feels so slapped together. Still not a bad adventure, just the weakest in a fairly strong set.

"Ooh, let's throw in the Hand of Vecna!"
"Yeah, awesome idea!"
"Let's throw in a bunch of 8th-level pirates too!"
Me: "Oh my god... c'mon!" *groan*

 

[amethal]

Because I felt like our party was nearly bled dry by resources in that one.

Funnily enough, that's my definition of a great adventure. (Emphasis on the "nearly".)

 

[Rystil Arden]

Funnily enough, that's my definition of a great adventure. (Emphasis on the "nearly".)

I hear that our group is unusually efficient in these Adventure Path adventures, although we have a rather ragtag crew that isn't particularly optimised (Ranger, Mountebank, Illusionist, Archivist, Cleric). Particularly, I still can't believe that we did [SBLOCK=Spoilers]the Cleric/Fighter girl with minions and a trapped vise door, the Spider Wizard halfling (Wizard 7) with a Harpoon Spider, several Ettercaps, and tons of monstrous spiders all fought at once, the T-Rex skeleton, a Gnoll Heucuva, some Spawns of Kyuss, the water demon thing, the water reptile thing, tons and tons of rooms with Fighters and Rogues, leeches, traps, zombies....30ish encounters in one day.[/SBLOCK]

 

[MerricB]

I give Redhand props for being something other than the standard dungoncrawl, but I'm not sure how it handles in actual play. I think, the one BAD thing about Redhand is that it sticks out so much. Every other adventure is a fairly linear combat-fest of death and destruction and then there's this one interlude that's... fairly open-ended and pretty role-playing intensive. It almost sticks out like a sore thumb.

I ran HoHR a lot like Redhand; and I was able to do that because I could use my experiences of playing in a City of Greyhawk game and put bits of that to enliven up HoHR. Thus, there was all this extra stuff interacting with people in Greyhawk.

This didn't[/i happen so much with Diamond Lake, and it's a big flaw of the Adventure Path structure: Paizo spent a lot of time describing Diamond Lake, but the town is almost completely incidental to the adventure. You interact with it a very small amount in The Whispering Cairn... and that's it. TFE you're underground the whole time, and after that you're gone from the town.

I don't do much extraneous roleplaying. I don't throw in characters just to have them interact with the PCs. However, I enjoy roleplaying: I just need the structure of the adventure to incorporate it. So, both Redhand and Wormcrawl Fissure had some great roleplaying in them that was part of the adventure. I'm not so fond of an adventure which has "hack, hack, hack, talk... huh?"

Kings of the Rift has that. When you are fighting a lot of giants, having *one* giant that will talk to you throws the pace too much. (Kings has other structural problems as well, including the "PCs need to cast Commune to figure out the plot" problem).

Cheers!