D&D 5E Curse of Strahd (and limitations on 1st level play)

[Retreater]

Twig blights have Blindsight 60' radius.

BTW, according to the book, they start 120 feet away. So they are effectively blind to the party's approach (per the rules).

How high do you think the ceilings are?

Looks like 15 - 20 ft. Which is enough to kill a 4 hp twig blight.

It's a pseudo-medieval winery - you think it would have glass in the windows?! Even if it does, a glass has window has AC 13 and 3 hp.

No windows on ground level. Would have to scale to the balcony, break a window, etc. That would take a couple of rounds, if they could even do it. They have a 50/50 chance of hitting the window and can barely break it with their damage.

 

[Retreater]

And I think that's your problem, you want a published adventure to match your playstyle out the box, when your playstyle isn't even close to average.

Like wanting a challenging, thrilling fight that lasts more than a round? Balanced encounters? That's not a typical playstyle for D&D?

you had that, there were several proposals for slight changes (off the top of my head: 3 druids instead of 1, replace 12 blights with one shambling mound)

After the fact. For future reference, my base encounter is going to be 5500 XP. This means that I'm going to pretty much re-write the entirety of the combat encounters in the book. And that's fine. I just need to figure out what to do to make this adventure thrilling and exciting.
When it's a cakewalk, that loses the theme of the adventure.
And if they get used to a cakewalk and then you have a randomly very difficult encounter, that is just inviting a TPK.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

BTW, according to the book, they start 120 feet away. So they are effectively blind to the party's approach (per the rules).


Looks like 15 - 20 ft. Which is enough to kill a 4 hp twig blight.

Roof beams are at top of wall height, not apex height. So 10 ft. The PCs are 6 ft tall, so that's a drop of 4 feet if they hit. If they miss they take 1d6 falling damage, which has a 50% chance of killing it (and it's prone). But if you want this to be a challenging encounter the number of blights has to be effectively infinite, so it doesn't matter if some fall, there are always more. That's how horror works. You think George Romero says "right, we have 30 zombies, if they all die the protagonists can take a long rest"?

No windows on ground level. Would have to scale to the balcony, break a window, etc. That would take a couple of rounds, if they could even do it. They have a 50/50 chance of hitting the window and can barely break it with their damage.

It doesn't matter how long they take, you said the PCs where taking a long rest, so they have 8 hours to stage their attack.

Frankly, if you want it to work you have to put in the effort to make it work. Chris Perkins can only write the book, it's the DM's job to make the game work, no book can do that for you.

 

[mamba]

BTW, according to the book, they start 120 feet away. So they are effectively blind to the party's approach (per the rules).

Until the party comes within range, that is how vision generally works...

 

[DEFCON 1]

Yeah. And the cleric too.
The Passive Perception of the blights was a 9 ... no way that could fail.

And you didn't have any of the Needle Blights outside in the fields actually making Active Perception checks because...? If they made Active Perception checks, at least a few would probably have seen/hear the Paladin and Cleric.

I mean if you know your party is just sneaking around and ambushing every encounter... and you don't WANT them to just sneak around and ambush every encounter... then you just DO something about it.

This is all just standard stuff. But it seems like you aren't even trying to do any work to stop your players from having an easy time of things. You tell them or hint at them to turn around against high CR encounters, you let them just stealth around ambushing people without having anyone on watch, you aren't having other encounter areas hear the combats and coming in to assist, you aren't adding in extra encounters or extra enemies into the fights because you think it's "heavy-handed"...

I'm sorry, but I don't think this is a Chris Perkins design problem, the problem is probably just you and your method of DMing. You don't appear to me to be DMing in the manner that you want the game to go. And no one can help you if you aren't going to help yourself.

 

[mamba]

After the fact.

I do not believe that you asked beforehand

For future reference, my base encounter is going to be 5500 XP.

If you go with official guidelines I'd go with Xanathar over DMG. Not sure what you have access to, I believe the UA for it is 1:1 in Xanathar

https://media.wizards.com/2016/dnd/downloads/Encounter_Building.pdf

This means that I'm going to pretty much re-write the entirety of the combat encounters in the book. And that's fine. I just need to figure out what to do to make this adventure thrilling and exciting.
When it's a cakewalk, that loses the theme of the adventure.
And if they get used to a cakewalk and then you have a randomly very difficult encounter, that is just inviting a TPK.

agreed, double check the encounters, adjust as needed, even add / remove as needed. It's not hard once you have a little practice - and pretty much unavoidable

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Well this is illuminating. I have interacted with the OP in many threads on encounter design.
As someone that runs WotC adventures and I do not have issues like the OP.
So I think 5e can be run. And I have not found issue with low level encounters.
That said, most encounters are easy to medium and rarely hard.
If you want deadly you have to make the encounter deadly.
I will echo what others have said about doing the encounter XP calculation, this gives one a metric about the parties combat capability.

I find this knowledge very useful in calibrating encounters.

 

[Shardstone]

Van Richten Survivor Rules are everything Ravenloft fans should want IMO.

 

[Larnievc]

They were running away at level 1, and then again at level 3. So far with one session at level 5, they haven't had the need to run away.

At level 1, they stuck and fought it out with a few berserkers (random encounter) and had essentially a TPK - they were saved by Vistani.
At level 2, they had a close call with a shambling mound, but defeated it (an NPC veteran helped a bit).

Why didn’t you reduce the power of the berserkers?

 

[dave2008]

Yeah. The threat at the winery is over. If it's not, well is the group supposed to just move in and operate it for the Martikovs?
Likely next they'll need to go to Yester Hill to take care of the "real" threat. And hopefully there I can make something cool happen.

First I thought you said their we 30 blights outside still. Regardless of that, the threat is only over if you want it to be over. Ravenloft really should be light on safe havens and, IMO, the winery is not one of them.