Cauldron Born Naval Battle Question

[gideonpepys]

[MENTION=63]RangerWickett[/MENTION] - Am I right in thinking that the naval battle with Borne is only 6 naval rounds long?

The way I'm reading it is that it takes the king 30 mins to complete his ritual once its started, and each naval round is 5 minutes.

Running this next session and I've not really paid much attention to it until now!

 

[RangerWickett]

Naval rounds are a little flexible, from 1 to 5 minutes. We did say 6 rounds, which I need to take another look at to make sure that's not too easy. Are you going to involve Lavanya, so the party has someone more interesting to fight than witchoil monsters? I'll admit, when we were working on the end of that adventure we wondered if we should have held back some antagonist for that scene. But ultimately I feel like the climax is taking out the Cauldron Hill facility. Dealing with Borne is wrap-up, with relatively low risk to the PCs, but very high risk to bystanders and the city.

 

[RangerWickett]

So I can't find my notes, but I'm sure at some point I ran a mock-up of this, and it almost certainly needs to be more than six rounds. Consider:

Start with 12 ships. Each round roll d20 +2/ship vs. DC 35. On a success, the colossus is too confused by getting shot from all directions to attack anything.

So to start there's roughly a 50% chance of confusing the colossus. If you fail, the colossus still only has speed 10 vs. the Coaltongue's speed 18, so it'll probably only get within range 20% of the time.

Now each round you fail to stall it, and that the Coaltongue's out of range, it destroys another ship. So doing some rough (Ryan hasn't taken Statistics in years) math, maybe it destroys a ship one out of every 3 rounds, and gets to hit the Coaltongue once every 10 rounds. The Coaltongue can probably survive 3 attacks by Borne, but lucky hits might sink it.

Either it needs to be more like 30 rounds, or I need to give Borne some other form of attack. Perhaps it innately controls the lightning in the storm around it, and calls it down at ships. This is actually the very last scene that I'm doing tweaks on for the hardcover (everything else is ready to go, pending layout), so now's a great time to suggest changes.

 

[gideonpepys]

Naval rounds are a little flexible, from 1 to 5 minutes. We did say 6 rounds, which I need to take another look at to make sure that's not too easy. Are you going to involve Lavanya, so the party has someone more interesting to fight than witchoil monsters? I'll admit, when we were working on the end of that adventure we wondered if we should have held back some antagonist for that scene. But ultimately I feel like the climax is taking out the Cauldron Hill facility. Dealing with Borne is wrap-up, with relatively low risk to the PCs, but very high risk to bystanders and the city.

I haven't decided what to do with Lavanya yet. I was surprised that the party let her ride off on the Colossus. Don't know whether to run a combat on top of Borne's head, or have Lavanya vanish to show up again later. But she won't be in the naval battle, no.

 

[gideonpepys]

So I can't find my notes, but I'm sure at some point I ran a mock-up of this, and it almost certainly needs to be more than six rounds. Consider:

Start with 12 ships. Each round roll d20 +2/ship vs. DC 35. On a success, the colossus is too confused by getting shot from all directions to attack anything.

So to start there's roughly a 50% chance of confusing the colossus. If you fail, the colossus still only has speed 10 vs. the Coaltongue's speed 18, so it'll probably only get within range 20% of the time.

Now each round you fail to stall it, and that the Coaltongue's out of range, it destroys another ship. So doing some rough (Ryan hasn't taken Statistics in years) math, maybe it destroys a ship one out of every 3 rounds, and gets to hit the Coaltongue once every 10 rounds. The Coaltongue can probably survive 3 attacks by Borne, but lucky hits might sink it.

Either it needs to be more like 30 rounds, or I need to give Borne some other form of attack. Perhaps it innately controls the lightning in the storm around it, and calls it down at ships. This is actually the very last scene that I'm doing tweaks on for the hardcover (everything else is ready to go, pending layout), so now's a great time to suggest changes.

This is exactly what I was thinking - that there really is very little threat in the encounter. It looked like a foregone conclusion, but I thought I might be missing something. 30 rounds is dull, though (as I'm sure you realised when you wrote the encounter).
I might make it 10, and add an attack form to Borne in the water.

How about a 'charge' attack, and/or huge waves that take out ships and slow down the Coaltongue?

 

[RangerWickett]

What day do you run? I can talk to Thurston and some other friends and see if we can come up with a nice design.

Heck, maybe go nuts and change things so the PCs take the dwarven radicals' bomb, sail alongside the colossus, and jump onto its legs (flying with Gale is discouraged due to lightning). Then they have to climb and fight off a few dripping witchoil monsters while moving between the sparse areas with wide footing, a la Shadow of the Colossus. They have to get to its chest and plant the bomb in the spot where the Wayfarer's Lantern is supposed to go, bolt it in place, then get off. Oh, and the whole time the bomb is ticking down to detonation.

The flavor here is that the colossus might be indestructible, but it still needs to be weakened for the king's ritual to work. So you've got all these moving parts, and if anything goes wrong the whole affair is ruined.

Or, yeah, just keep it to six naval rounds, and we could tweak the mechanics and scenario so there's about a 50% each round that the colossus gets to attack? Maybe hand-wave the first twenty-four minutes as the colossus tearing through lesser ships that move between the king and the colossus, and have each of the last six rounds be one minute long.

 

[gideonpepys]

What day do you run? I can talk to Thurston and some other friends and see if we can come up with a nice design.

That's really very kind of you. We run on Tuesday, but the ideas you've already presented are just fine - and knowing that I need to shake things up a bit is enough.

Heck, maybe go nuts and change things so the PCs take the dwarven radicals' bomb, sail alongside the colossus, and jump onto its legs (flying with Gale is discouraged due to lightning). Then they have to climb and fight off a few dripping witchoil monsters while moving between the sparse areas with wide footing, a la Shadow of the Colossus. They have to get to its chest and plant the bomb in the spot where the Wayfarer's Lantern is supposed to go, bolt it in place, then get off. Oh, and the whole time the bomb is ticking down to detonation.

The flavor here is that the colossus might be indestructible, but it still needs to be weakened for the king's ritual to work. So you've got all these moving parts, and if anything goes wrong the whole affair is ruined.

Or, yeah, just keep it to six naval rounds, and we could tweak the mechanics and scenario so there's about a 50% each round that the colossus gets to attack? Maybe hand-wave the first twenty-four minutes as the colossus tearing through lesser ships that move between the king and the colossus, and have each of the last six rounds be one minute long.

Love the idea about the radical's bomb. Shadows of the Colossus is my favourite console game and it was that I had in mind when trying to provoke a fight on the Colossus. (But the cowardly players didn't follow Lavanya...)

What I might do is leave it all up to the players and let them decide what direction the session goes in. Now I just have to make my mind up about Lavanya. I figure that, because they didn't take her on during the Borne to be Wilde encounter, they almost don't deserve the chance to pick on her when she's solo. Maybe she could vanish and return to plague them later? Or even join up with the Ob leadership and see them all again in Schism? But would she get that far up the chain of command? You see, I have an idea that she might not turn out to be an eladrin woman after all. (I mean, for a world where most of them have died, the players have sure bumped in to a lot of them!) My idea is that she is really a hag - part of a coven allied to the Voice of Rot who are trying to find out what the Ob are up to and take advantage of it if they can. (This all links in to the buffer adventures I'm running between episodes.)

Hm. Now that this has turned into a meditation on my campaign, I kind of wish I'd stuck to that thread! I don't suppose anyone could make that happen could they?