Combat encounter rebalancing

[ST]

If it's just a judgement call (if I was GM), I'd say "My bad, guys, I screwed that up," and double the XP.

But really, the changes made that fight so nasty that I don't think you can even give it an encounter level. It was just broken that that much extra damage was heaped onto the PCs. So you're out of the "rules" area entirely and it's more negotiating something that everybody can live with.

 

[Ceylin]

About his dice - You should look into buying him a new set. I've recently discovered how bad some decent looking dice can be. One of my friends is capable of rolling a 20 on his d20 a vast majority of the time if he rolls it gently allowing it enough movement to settle on its side of least resistance. It looks like a normal roll, but he crits all the time.

We replaced his die (with some gamescience dice with hard edges that don't tumble as much)

 

[Baumi]

About his dice - You should look into buying him a new set. I've recently discovered how bad some decent looking dice can be. One of my friends is capable of rolling a 20 on his d20 a vast majority of the time if he rolls it gently allowing it enough movement to settle on its side of least resistance. It looks like a normal roll, but he crits all the time.

We replaced his die (with some gamescience dice with hard edges that don't tumble as much)

That remembered me of my d30 (yeah the rare one) that rolled a 20 at lest half the time (really more than 50% of the time!) without cheating! I let the others try it too with exactly the same result, afterwards I canned the die.

 

[renau1g]

No one died, whats the problem?
An encounter which almost kills the party, but in the end doesn't, sounds awesome to me.

It seems like it would be angering and frustrating to have your hit chance dropped to like 25-30% (lots of wasted rolling) and the fight itself didn't seem that dramatic. Now a fight against a red dragon, with archers peppering you from balconies, and terrain features that hinder you or damage, sounds more like an awesome difficult battle, rather than a fight against a goblin and 4 skeletons in a featureless 8 x 6 room.

 

[tmatk]

Skeletons were moving around tactically, making sure they made full use of the cloud and avoided unneccesary oa’s and whatnot.

BTW, I wouldn't consider this a mistake. The game is much better when it's played tactically on both sides of the screen, your DM is not be obligated to play low int monsters as if they are mindless

Keep in mind many low Int monster, such as Skeles, have a fairly decent Wisdom.

 

[Infiniti2000]

I find that many mistakes unforgivable. It wouldn't have been much worse if he had the book opened to the wrong page. No less than 6 major errors?

I certainly don't see any extra XP being rewarded because the players are just as culpable as the DM, since this is a known newbie-DM game. Instead, I think the best option would be a retcon and rerun the enouncter without burtchering it.