Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Oryan77" data-source="post: 3019260" data-attributes="member: 18701">Well, we just played through it lastnight and I'm surprised at how well it turned out. All 5 of my players said they had a blast and one of them said it was the funnest session she's played in. I was actually worried that I'd blow the game since I barely had an idea on how I was going to run the encounter. I kept looking at my NPC's info thinking, "Man this bard is going to get his butt handed to him". Which is what I hoped, but I wanted it to be challenging.The rundown of the scenario was that I am leading up to a short published adventure. In the beginning of the adventure there's 2 bounty hunters that hand over a human criminal to the local authorities. I actually have my own 2 reocurring bounty hunter NPC that I was able to use in place of the generic bounty hunters. Then I wanted to spice up the criminal npc by making him a Satyr instead. And to make this NPC more important to the PC's, I ran a "random" encounter in the woods where the Satyr woes the 2 female PC's in the group and robs everyone.So the PC's encounter him and one male PC really hated the Satyr because he got charmed by him. Then they asked about him in a town they passed through. I told them he has an 18k bounty on his head. That just made the players excited and they made it a mission to capture this guy. So rather than steal their thunder by having my own bounty hunters bring the Satyr in to start the adventure, I let the players hunt him down.They spent about 4 hours yesterday just trying to track him down. They finally encountered him in town and the encounter began. This encounter lasted at least 6 hours! They just could not kill this guy. They wanted him alive because his bounty was worth more alive, but they said they'd kill him if they had to. I used a few ideas I got from this thread (like caltrops, boy did those help out!). He used Ventriloquism to throw them off and managed to jump a PC with the Hideous Laughter spell and run away with his Expeditious Retreat. We thought it was over when the Sorceress got him with Evard's Black Tentacles. But then I remembered he has a great Escape Artist skill and got out of them. He was lucky too that he was within 1 square of freedom from the tentacles, so he got most of his movement to run away. Then she hit him with a second Evard's Black Tentacles & the cleric got off a blindness spell which pretty much ended the bards chances. Funny enough, I rolled really good again and escaped the tentacles and blindly ran in a straight line out of them. They finally caught up to him and tried grappling him. And in 3 rounds, 3 PC's could not grapple this 10 Strength bard! It was hilarious. The encounter worked out perfectly for a fun time with such a non threatening NPC.I learned something lastnight; players can feel like an encounter is extremely challenging even when they aren't taking physical damage and coming close to dying. After they captured him, they really felt like they overcame a huge obstacle....and I think I did a total of maybe 10 hp's of damage to one player  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

Verification