Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5857129" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've been prepping some version or other of the Heathen encounter for a couple of years now!, but had thought the party was about to skip it. I was getting ready to improvise a fight with the massed army, and it was only when the wizard player indicated he was using his Sceptre to take control of the chaos that I pushed things back towards a path where the doppelgangers made sense.It was partly an experiment to see how hard I could push without an extended rest. The answer turned out to be "fairly hard" - about 6 EL or higher combat encounters, about 3 skill challenges (including one which robbed them of an encounter power until their next extended rest), plus a couple of lower-level encounter powers, plus some resource consumption in the course of exploration.My players trust me not to screw them over more than the rules allow. And the rules are robust enough that they set pretty reasonable boundaries!I've never run behind-the-scenes shapechanging like that. The last time I used a doppelganger, it was haunting the ancestral home of one of the PCs. The bulk of the party had encountered it, failed to defeat it, and moved on. The PC whose home it was hung around to try and defeat it, however. He lead his troop of men-at-arms into the library in pursuit of it. When the doppelganger ducked behind a shelf, the PC went after it - the men-at-arms heard the sound of swordplay - then the "PC" came out and assured them that the doppelganger was defeated, before picking them off one-by-one. Classic stuff! (And another situation of player buy-in - the player of that PC was about to head off overseas, and was happy for the chips to fall where they might.)</blockquote>

Verification