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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Liminal Syzygy" data-source="post: 4596426" data-attributes="member: 1373">Hi all,I've been a 3.0/3.5 player for years. When 4e came out I purchased the books, and a couple months back started a play-by-post game with some friends. My expectations for 4e were not high, but I've liked 4e more than I thought I would... until our most recent encounter in which I had a very bad experience as a player. I'm interested in people's thoughts on if is an example of bad encounter design or more of an endemic problem with trying to balance 4e encounters.The story follows (if you are playing or plan to play The Scars of War) adventure path, there are spoilers below, so you probably want to stop reading.Our first level party (warlord, wizard, warlock, rogue, fighter) is on a mission to rescue some people and find some items in a dungeon. We've been through three or so encounters, and find a room with some kind of magical portal. We approach the portal cautiously to investigate (we'd not yet heard any hint of such a portal so we know nothing about what this might be or why it's here), and without warning an ochre jelly spills through the portal and attacks. We engage in combat, fighting a couple of rounds, the jellies split, we try to force one back though the portal unsuccessfully. We dispatch one half of the jelly and it appears things are going well for us, but then the fight suddenly takes a turn for the worse.Out of no where and with no warning, two specters which had apparently been invisible simultaneously appear and unleash their AoE power on much of the party. One does 11 damage to four of us, and another does 8 damage to three of us. At the same time, the remaining jelly attacks hitting our warlord (who had also eaten both of the specter AoEs) for 9 damage. All of a sudden our fighter and our warlord (who has our only healing) are down, and it's pretty clear there are going to be deaths. We started talking about having the survivors run and having the players of the fighter and warlock roll new characters.We ended up having the character of another player who wanted to join conveniently join the party at that time with another fighter. Then blowing her daily and encounter powers. But this felt like a complete deus ex machina and left me feeling cheated as a player.At the end of the day, with the new fighter's help, we were barely able to squeak out a victory with no deaths. But this fight left a very bad taste in my mouth as a player.There was no way we could have anticipated the appearance of either the jelly (which 99% of parties would have engaged in combat with) which conveniently got us embroiled in the room, or the appearance of the specters.Was it just the encounter design? My DM says he played it as written and I believe him. Is it reasonable to expect a first level party to be able to survive these kinds of odds?</blockquote>

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