Challenging my high-lvl group (NPCs and monsters; my players shouldn't read this!)

[Graf]

Been thinking about Agar a bit. Nothing brilliant (or even interesting) really springs to mind.:

The demons have spent a lot of time and effort to get someone married to Agar. They were willing to wait…. Demons don’t do waiting as a matter of course. In fact I have difficulty seeing them wait unless they absolutely had to. So the demons have little power over the situation. And again it’s marriage, not control, not breeding but they are specifically having him –MARRY- a demon.

So to reverse engineer an answer:
*It’s specifically something about our favorite insane halfing arcanist. In the many years since his birth they could -easily- have found another high level alienist (or wizard) or halfing or what have you. So if they’re fulfilling a prophesy it’s linked very closely to either Agar’s family or his village.
*The demons don’t want to control agar, or rather, if they did there are many other easier ways of accomplishing this goal.
*It’s not about children or breeding something.
*Demons don’t marry themselves. Marrying is a mortal (or at least a prime) thing. So they are probably fulfilling some requirement related to the mortal world.

Marrying is basically joining together two families. It is possible that these demons are trying to join a mortal family to fulfill some sort of prophesy, or requirement.

The only thing that really seems like it melds together all of these threads (unless I’ve made a mistake) is some sort of prophesy or iron-clad-magically-enforced-rule. Anything else could have been circumvented more directly. And unless something pretty dangerous is preventing the direct route then I see a Pit Fiend as being pretty direct.

not really a cool answer but maybe this will set a spark in somebody's head.

 

[Piratecat]

Ooooh. Graf, you just gave me some ideas. It's that "family" point; I had been leaning towards a "children" theme, but now a will/inheritance thing might make sense, especially when a dead parent's possessions will automatically pass to Agar, and a dead Agar's belongings will automatically pass to his wife in lieu of children.

Oooh. More ideas.

Gotta go write.

 

[justinsluder]

Hello PirateCat,

I was wondering, do you need anymore ideas?





PS What're you gonna do with Tao?

 

[Elocin]

Oh how I so love this thread.

I am VERY curious to get the new stats of the Shadow and the Undead Deepwood Sniper. I am currently playing a Wild Elf Ranger (Monte)/Deepwood Sniper and I would love to see how you stated him out. I can do some crazy damage to my favoured enemies (Humans and shadowlands - OA adventure) but I would still love to see your stats.

When you have time anyway.

tyia

 

[Piratecat]

Gladly! Didn't I post them ages ago, though? I'll have to check.

So, do you folks have any good ideas on how to manage complex combats with lots of complicated NPCs? I'm at that stage, and I feel like a juggler. Sheesh, too much to keep track of.

 

[Elocin]

Gladly! Didn't I post them ages ago, though? I'll have to check.

So, do you folks have any good ideas on how to manage complex combats with lots of complicated NPCs? I'm at that stage, and I feel like a juggler. Sheesh, too much to keep track of.

Why yes you did but I am not sure if raised thier levels or not. If you had not then there is no need for you to re-post them.

Thanks again.

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

Gladly! Didn't I post them ages ago, though? I'll have to check.

So, do you folks have any good ideas on how to manage complex combats with lots of complicated NPCs? I'm at that stage, and I feel like a juggler. Sheesh, too much to keep track of.

A few simple things help, which I presume your party does already.

1) Have someone else be in charge of initiative and marking spell durations. I'm sure your players are 'professional' enough not to try and take advantage when you tell them "that spell will last for 5 rounds, make a note". It'll also help to keep a track of what spells are active on everyone.
2) Always roll to hit dice with the damage dice. You've no idea how much this speeds up play. I do it in my game as a player, and the difference between me making three attacks and someone else making three attacks sure adds up during the session.
3) Different colours on NPC sheets for different effects? Might help you out when you're looking for something.
4) Non-spellcasting villains.

 

[DanMcS]

So, do you folks have any good ideas on how to manage complex combats with lots of complicated NPCs? I'm at that stage, and I feel like a juggler. Sheesh, too much to keep track of.

The most complicated in-game combats I've been at have been at the columbus gamedays. For one, we had upward of a dozen players, plus all the NPCs. When we rolled initiative, we shuffled ourselves around the table to be in the proper order, which helped keep things rolling and make sure nobody got skipped. It wasn't bad for the DM, because he had relatively few NPC combatants, and they all went on the same initiative for simplicity. May not help you. You could, I suppose, mark an index card for each major NPC, and place them around the table as flags to remind you where they go.

When I played in Ashockney's Halls of the Fire Giant King game, he had all his NPCs in a spreadsheet, and could hit a button and have it roll initiatives, another to do a full attack, etc. Not quite sure how he did all that, my excel-fu is weak.

When I'm setting up NPCs for a game, I create them like they were a PC, and then make a combat cheat-sheet for each of them, on the back of the character sheet usually. I summarize their info in logical groupings. So init bonus goes first, that's the first thing I'll use. AC and defenses (resistances, SR, DR) goes second, since I'll use that a lot. Attacks are summarized in order of preference for the character.

If there's a good chance the character will get buffed or alter forms during combat, those alternate forms get their own mini-cheat-sheets. Creatures that could be summoned get cheat-sheets too, those are often reusable.

This is harder to do for spellcasters, since there's so much more variety in what they can do, but you can guess what their most probable actions will be and summarize that beforehand, maybe like the typical attack actions from the 3.5 monster manual.

If at all possible, use mook rules for the minor combatants, the rabble ghouls or kuo-toa or whatever the PCs are fighting now. Summarize thusly- "AC 17, hit a PC only on a 19-20, for d8+2 damage, fort save DC XX or paralyze for 1d6 rounds." You don't need hit points for them because if a PC hits them, they're assumed to be toast, and the non-PCs (the backup mook dwarves that have been following the Defenders around, for instance) could kinda be glossed over at this level anyway. They're unlikely to hurt a big bad when attacking him, and the evil mooks don't matter except as map filler, so why roll for them at all? Narrate it away.

 

[Liolel]

THe party is still sleeping in their instant fortess thing right. Something I've noticed in 3.5 is earthquake deals 100 damage to a building no save no hardness. The instant fotress magic item has 100 hitpoints. I leave the repurcussions of this for you to figure out. I'd be to softhearted to destroy it though but I wanted to point it out.

 

[MerakSpielman]

If I have a complicated NPC or group of NPCs, I try to work up some battle plans for them ahead of time, complete with plans A, B, and C for if things start to go really badly for them, akin to the tactics in the 3.5 monster manual but a bit more detailed. If they have forknowledge of the PC group, have them min-max their tactics specifically for killing the party.

High-level NPCs are too complicated to actually run intelligently in the middle of battle, especially if you have more than 2 of them, so advance tactics is pretty much required.