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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheClone" data-source="post: 5198856" data-attributes="member: 90399">Hm, with an average cleric number of 1.5 you do have a notable amount of healing available. Clerics do make a quite good fighter replacement in 3.5, especially with the right spells. But usually they do have lover attacks and don't deal much damage compared to a fighter or even a barbarian. But they can make up the front line in battle most of the time. I think you should try to bring in monster with no too high AC and HP. Then your player's shouldn't miss a fighter and the rogue will be able to deal some damage (as rogues don't have that high attack bonuses, too).  Maybe you can try to use some more monsters of a relatively low level and boost their attack a little (thus increasing their CR). With the sorcerer the group will be able to clear the battlefields of large amounts of low levels fast. By that you don't run into an accidental TPK and if the fight is too easy, you can just increase the number of enemies. You can also mix a main monster with a group of smaller ones. But too much hard to kill monsters in one encounter may be tricky, although the sorcerer might counter that partly, because they usually do their damage in some way.As for making player assumptions: Try to break your habit <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /> Try to think more of people and places or events that give the party knowledge about whats going on and how to link them. That also helps in knowing where the PCs will go during the session to plan some events. But it takes some practice to predict on which hooks the players will bite and which they ignore. Seems to be the great myth of dungeon mastering <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />If your hook is simple, it doesn't matter. As you said you are just starting to write your own adventures, so just keep it simple and straight forward (which definitely applied to your hook, the players can't avoid it). If you try to make it too complex, the players may not catch an important hint and then the whole plot might break. Also - according to my experience - you should avoid events with fixed time, like when the PCs don't reach the villains castle on day 10, their friend dies. This can be difficult to handle some times and may be an option for later, when you can predict your players behavior better.So talking about simplicity, maybe you shouldn't mix the crystal and killing spree things to deeply. But there may be some sort of connection, which provides the PCs with additional hints about the crystal plot. Maybe the assassin had a mission for the High Priest or someone else that was connected to the crystal finding plot and when the PCs track him down they find a hint to that. Maybe one of the killed nobles knew something about the crystals (which makes sense if the prince wanted him dead). That knowledge could have survived the killed noble or was known to his relatives anyway. It may be a reward for tracking down the nobles murder (if it makes sense to offer it). One question you should have an answer to is "Why is the prince killing all the nobles?" He should have some reason for it otherwise it may seem unrealistic or constructed just to have a threat.</blockquote>

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