Die Hard in Sharn

[Serensius]

Okay, so I'm wondering if I'm going blind with my concept here, tell me when (if) it stops being cool and starts being cheesy. I'm going to run a Die Hard adventure in Eberron, where the characters are brought to a huge (but not entirely finished) skyscraper in Sharn for some kind of party. It's all fun and games, until fifteen or so terrorists/robbers arrive and hold everyone inside hostage until their demands are met (though secretely they're just there to rob the vault). The players obviously slink off and have to defeat the thieves.

Now, I'm pretty much going to rip off everything from the movie, and I think most of it fits. The terrorist band is going to be led by an enigmatic but evil gentleman (quite possibly named Hans), there will be the quintessential melee-fighting henchman, and there will be lots of mooks. It's going to be a building of 34 or so floors, complete with a rooftop and unfinished floors, and there will be elevators inside (by the way, are there any magic-stopping items that can be used by the bad guys to "freeze" the elevators?). I will stat the important floors, like the lobby, the party locale and the rooftop, as well as random floors for when the PCs start climbing the building There will be police airships and bone-headed police officers with Amplified voices, and yes, quite possibly policemen storming the front doors (unsuccesfully).

The goons themselves will have stones of sending to communicate with eachother, some will have wands and crossbows and some will have swords and clubs. In the movie, they obviously have to reload their guns now and then. I was trying to come up with a way to recreate this, and since there is an obvious parallell between guns and wands, I thought, what if you had to reload wands? It actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Instead of making one wand with 50 charges, you make one wand and ten containers with 5 charges, which can be split between different people, and more importantly doesn't put all your eggs in one basket. These charges would be little glass containers filled with blue-ish arcane energy, they would be cylindrical and fit into a wand. That means you could get off five shots (and I'm considering to allow multiple shots to be fired in one round, in exchange for some kind of penalty or having to succeed on a ranged touch attack or something).

And finally, in case you wondered, this is (most likely) a one-off, 3.5 eberron game using the wounds and vitality system. The mooks will have NPC classes, in other words they will only have wound points and so die easily. Well; any feedback?

 

[Serensius]

No replies in three days? Hans Gruber disapproves.

 

[Michael Silverbane]

I think that Die Hard would make a fine adventure for the Eberron campaign setting...

However, I think that you might run into a few stumbling blocks... Mostly, they'll be your players.

The first problem that you're going to have is how to get your players to have their characters slink off into the uninhabited areas of the tower when the bad guys show up and start causing a ruckus. Backing down from a confrontation is not something that most players are going to want to do.

There's a couple of ways that you might be able to do this... Each one might pose further problems of its own.

First, you can make the threat of the combined force of badguys seem quite overwhelming, so that the players don't want to risk the confrontation when everybody if all together. This approach can definitely be tricky. If you are too subtle about demonstrating the power of the bad guys, your players might bot take the hint, and may go immediately on the offensive, anyway. Then your adventure will be real short. If you are too heavy-handed about this, then the players may become discouraged and refuse to engage against your badguys at all. This will also wreck up your adventure. Further, the more powerful you make your badguys... the more powerful they will be, which then translates to power for the PCs later (as you mentioned that this might be a one-off, that's not too big a deal).

Second, you can make your characters feel like they aren't prepared to deal with the large group of badguys immediately. You can do this by making their equipment unavailable to them. This, of course, causes a couple of problems... Players hate to be without their equipment, and some of them will go so far as to refuse to do so under the threat of death. Which can be annoying and troublesome. Further, some classes are more able to operate without their equipment than others. Warlocks, Artificers, and other magic-using classes are definitely at less of a disadvantage when denied access to their equipment than fighters, rogues, and other non-magic classes. This can create an unpleasant disparity between the pcs. One thing that you might do to mitigate this problem is to make the equipment available through a brief interlude in the adventure (maybe the equipment is stored away in a hotel-room in one of the towers lower level, the PCs merely need to gain access to a stairway so that they may retrieve it).

And... That's about all I've got for right now. It should be a pretty cool adventure, but you're going to need to do some adapting of the story-line in order to make it fit within the tropes of D&D and to allow it to be abused by your players, without falling apart.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Would'nt fancy doing this in 3.x meself.

Couple of questions

What is stopping the police SWAT team from teleporting/dimension door/passwalling into the building.

any particular reason that the terrorists don't drop a couple of cloudkills down the stairs and ventillation system to clear to lower levels.

How do the hostage takers establish communication to the authorities?

 

[Serensius]

So I ran the adventure, it went more or less perfectly. Small party though, only two spell casters. We were using the wounds and vitality points system, so the NPC class mooks were fairly easy to take down. Also, I had drawn the levels with OCD-level detail, which actually turned out to be really useful and made the adventure much easier to control. Now, to comment:

I think that Die Hard would make a fine adventure for the Eberron campaign setting...

However, I think that you might run into a few stumbling blocks... Mostly, they'll be your players.

The first problem that you're going to have is how to get your players to have their characters slink off into the uninhabited areas of the tower when the bad guys show up and start causing a ruckus. Backing down from a confrontation is not something that most players are going to want to do.

Yeah, I was kind of scared of this as well. I obviously tried catching the players unawares, by actually giving them a different mission in the tower though I later regretted this, as they saw that as the main adventure and not the interloping bad guys). Another thing I tried though was to replicate the way John McClane is shoeless throughout the movie: the PCs travelled to Sharn with the lightning rail, which, as it is commonly known, loads people up with static energy, to much discomfort. An NPC advised them to take off their shoes and socks, and make "fists with [their] toes" on a carpet. Just as they did, though, the "terrorists" burst in. My players actually got the gist of it, and quickly hid in the air duct I had previously described. Of course, they tried to take up the fight when only two people entered the room, but more arrived and they eventually had to escape. So, that worked out nicely, I just had to show them how many enemies there actually were.

First, you can make the threat of the combined force of badguys seem quite overwhelming, so that the players don't want to risk the confrontation when everybody if all together. This approach can definitely be tricky. If you are too subtle about demonstrating the power of the bad guys, your players might bot take the hint, and may go immediately on the offensive, anyway. Then your adventure will be real short. If you are too heavy-handed about this, then the players may become discouraged and refuse to engage against your badguys at all. This will also wreck up your adventure. Further, the more powerful you make your badguys... the more powerful they will be, which then translates to power for the PCs later (as you mentioned that this might be a one-off, that's not too big a deal)

Yeah, exactly. I think it worked because it was demonstrated early on that even though the bad guys were easy to take on one or two at a time, the PCs had no chance against every one of them at the same time.

Second, you can make your characters feel like they aren't prepared to deal with the large group of badguys immediately. You can do this by making their equipment unavailable to them. This, of course, causes a couple of problems... Players hate to be without their equipment, and some of them will go so far as to refuse to do so under the threat of death. Which can be annoying and troublesome.

"Fists with your toes."

Further, some classes are more able to operate without their equipment than others. Warlocks, Artificers, and other magic-using classes are definitely at less of a disadvantage when denied access to their equipment than fighters, rogues, and other non-magic classes. This can create an unpleasant disparity between the pcs. One thing that you might do to mitigate this problem is to make the equipment available through a brief interlude in the adventure (maybe the equipment is stored away in a hotel-room in one of the towers lower level, the PCs merely need to gain access to a stairway so that they may retrieve it).

A very good tip. Of course, I was lucky enough to be able to design the adventure towards these two specific characters, and them both being spell casters this wasn't really a problem.

And... That's about all I've got for right now. It should be a pretty cool adventure, but you're going to need to do some adapting of the story-line in order to make it fit within the tropes of D&D and to allow it to be abused by your players, without falling apart.

It was Obviously some adjustments had to be made (Karl the crazy henchman is not a German martial artist but a warforged monk, the hired geek is an artificer etc) but it worked surprisingly well "out of the box".

Would'nt fancy doing this in 3.x meself.

Couple of questions

What is stopping the police SWAT team from teleporting/dimension door/passwalling into the building.

Apathy/lack of knowledge of the situation/range (it's on the 30th floor, lower floors are locked down magically/terrorists will kill the hostages if they do/dramatic convention and the fact that the players are too busy with their own problem to worry about what the police are doing

any particular reason that the terrorists don't drop a couple of cloudkills down the stairs and ventillation system to clear to lower levels.

Not really, apart from the fact that the lower floors are completely empty due to this party being held in the evening

How do the hostage takers establish communication to the authorities?

Sending stones that can broadcast a long way as well as between the stones.

 

[Michael Silverbane]

Excellent! I'm glad that it turned out well. Maybe I'll try this out for my group sometime (of course, I will have to use all sorts of tricks to keep them from engaging in a bloodbath right from the start.

 

[FloatingDisc]

I love this idea!

On a related note, what other modern-day-setting movies would translate well to a D&D adventure? I would dearly love to run a one-off adventure like this to introduce some friends to 4th edition, and they are all big action movie fans.

 

[Serensius]

I love this idea!

On a related note, what other modern-day-setting movies would translate well to a D&D adventure? I would dearly love to run a one-off adventure like this to introduce some friends to 4th edition, and they are all big action movie fans.

Unfortunately all my notes and drawings are on paper, or else I could have sent them to you.

I think a lot of modern-day movies could be used as templates for adventures, the challenge of course is to get the players to "follow" the plot without railroading them I recommend watching the movie in question a few times so you know the plot and maybe remember a few key spoken lines. As for other movies, off the top of my head, I'm thinking Predator, with an invisible monster, lots of mooks and low-level PCs. In the same vein, Alien could be really awesome, or maybe even The Thing with doppelgangers. Maybe Speed, if your setting has airships or other fast vehicles (this is why I love Eberron). Any of the Terminator movies would be awesome as well, setting the PCs up against a night-invincible bad-ass enemy. Maybe Blade Runner as well? The Indiana Jones-movies are inherently very D&D-ish, so I think they would make great adaptions.

Another problem is that these movies usually only have one star, whereas in D&D you're probably going to have at least three or four. You also have to keep up the pacing and get the PCs engaged when there is downtime in the plot (which makes it very important that you know the plot, so that you always know what's happening in the background - I had some trouble with this seeing as there are some lulls in the action in Die Hard when the villains are opening the vault, and the players didn't know what to do. Sending someone to kill them got them activised again, though ). All in all, I really recommend this way of running an adventure, it's loads of fun, and remember, don't be ashamed to plagiarize, your players won't really notice if they're being kept busy.