E3: Prince of Undeath final skill challenge is bad (Spoiler)

[Elric]

Major spoiler alert for E3: Prince of Undeath. I’m going to assume people can follow along in the module.

The final skill challenge in this module (indeed, the whole final encounter set) is appallingly bad. I haven't seen any reviews or discussions highlighting this point. It's amazing that the writers couldn’t come up with a decent skill challenge or encounter to conclude their adventure path.

The skill challenge: level 30, 8 Successes before 3 failures. The Raven Queen has been pierced by a Shard of Evil, and you have to remove it to save her. The key problem is that there’s essentially no benefit from completing the challenge, given the number of actions it will take, and an enormous penalty of failure.

Success: remove the shard without killing the Raven Queen. Orcus takes 100 damage. Unless Orcus gets his hand on the shard again during this encounter, his plan for seizing death's power fails.

However, beating Orcus is going to entail beating him in the combat part, not taking away the shard. Even holding the Shard is quite dangerous for the PCs.

Failure: The Raven Queen dies. Orcus is fully healed and gains a +10 bonus to damage rolls, a +2 bonus to all defenses, and 400 additional hit points.

Note that failing the skill challenge is the only way the Raven Queen can die in this encounter; you can just fight Orcus before attempting it. The encounter becomes much harder if you fail, but there’s no real benefit to success, given the number of actions it takes. Indeed, even if every standard action was guaranteed to succeed on the skill challenge, it wouldn’t be worth giving up 8 actions for (12.5 damage per action).

Back to this broader set of encounters: the instructions for running them are contradictory. In L2 (the monsters in the room), it suggests running this encounter first, with the obelisk trap if the players trigger it. Then segue into L4 when the players attempt to save the Raven Queen.

However, in L4 it says that Orcus stays out of the fight until the adventurers get past the obelisk traps or once they begin to remove the shard from the Raven Queen, but he joins the battle as soon as the adventurers attack him.

Suppose you get to L2 and the archery ranger takes a shot at Orcus. If you follow this direction, the next thing you know you’ve triggered Orcus’s encounter (complete with him summoning minions), plus the previous encounter, and the obelisk traps are still in force. So this advice should be mostly disregarded. It shouldn’t be disregarded entirely; if the party sits back, doesn’t try to save the Raven Queen and doesn’t disable the obelisks, they shouldn’t be able to shoot Orcus with impunity.

A better set-up would build Orcus not joining forces with his previous encounter/obelisk trap to overwhelm the PCs into the plot. As written, the earlier Orcus joins the fight the worse it is for the PCs (this failing of multiple encounters that should obviously combine into one occurs in other published adventures). If Orcus doesn’t join the fight, the party can take a short rest after defeating his initial guards.

Another particularly poor feature of the writing is that Orcus has a damaging Aura 20; his stat block is in L4 with no mention of the aura in the earlier encounters. It should say whether it’s supposed to be on in L2 (and give the details of the aura if it is).

I’ll go into a few ways the skill challenge could be improved in another post.

 

[Elric]

Hmm- is this [WotC adventure path is bad] too obvious to even need posting? I guess after the quality of the other modules in this path, and the severe problems with skill challenges in general, this isn't surprising. Still, there were a lot of modules to learn from by E3, and if there's one encounter in E1-E3 you want to get right, it's the last one.

Some easy fixes for the skill challenge:
1. 3 failures means you fail the challenge, but the Raven Queen doesn't die. You just can't gain any more successes. "Your efforts have buried the Shard more deeply in the Raven Queen's side. You can tell there's no way to remove it any time soon (until the end of the encounter)."

1b) Even easier fix: You can't fail the skill challenge. Failure on rolls just wastes valuable actions, itself a penalty. This is a key insight of Stalker 0's Obsidian skill challenge system, iirc.

2. Each roll that succeeds on the skill challenge should do something. The simplest is just damage: Each of the first 7 successes deals 20 damage to Orcus. Completing the skill challenge should do something beyond damage: 100 damage to Orcus, and he's stunned until the start of [the PC who completed the challenge's] next turn.

 

[Meek]

Honestly I found the entire module very underwhelming. If I had to pick on just this skill challenge alone, I would say your concerns are right and I would pick Option 2, and have the players never fail the challenge. They can keep trying until they win or Orcus pulverizes them all, and the reward for winning the challenge should be greater. 100 damage is nice, but that's like 2 dailies from the PCs on average, and they're likely saving them all up to dump them on Orcus, and Orcus has like a thousand a half Hp, so it's not great. But ultimately what I'd do more than that is just avoid this module.

 

[Nai_Calus]

What's really wrong with it is that it assumes that nobody in the party *wants* the RQ to die. Every 4e character I've played so far would, were they to be there, focus on whipping Orcus' arse and then the instant he died, get to work on finishing off the RQ.

 

[frankthedm]

What's really wrong with it is that it assumes that nobody in the party *wants* the RQ to die. Every 4e character I've played so far would, were they to be there, focus on whipping Orcus' arse and then the instant he died, get to work on finishing off the RQ.

Any particular reasons?

• Character wants the job themself?
  
• Character feels RQ is too much an uncaring fence rider? "Guard the dead or Jail the dead, PICK ONE!"?
  
• Character want to bring about "stranger eons" triggered when "...Death may die."?
  
• Characters are Primordial supporters with plans of Mass Deicide?
  
• You feel the RQ is an interloper to D&D canon?

 

[Piratecat]

Elric - haven't read the module, so I'll not comment, but I'm glad the thread title edit stuff got worked out.

 

[Elric]

Honestly I found the entire module very underwhelming. If I had to pick on just this skill challenge alone, I would say your concerns are right and I would pick Option 2, and have the players never fail the challenge. They can keep trying until they win or Orcus pulverizes them all, and the reward for winning the challenge should be greater. 100 damage is nice, but that's like 2 dailies from the PCs on average, and they're likely saving them all up to dump them on Orcus, and Orcus has like a thousand a half Hp, so it's not great. But ultimately what I'd do more than that is just avoid this module.

I haven't read through the rest of the module that carefully. Your post raises another issue, which is that Orcus has tons of HP/high defenses, but aside from his Touch of Death he doesn't have the offensive capabilities to threaten a level 30 party, particularly one with necrotic resistance.

Necrotic damage is common among published monsters and many items give necrotic resistance, so if you're on an adventure path where Orcus is the main villain, the party will likely all have it. Resistance in general is too high relative to damage, meaning that encounters that are reasonably threatening to a party without resistance can be trivial to a party with resistance (keterys has done some good calculations on this here).

Orcus has better offense in E3 than he does in the Monster Manual, but it's still not enough.

Elric - haven't read the module, so I'll not comment, but I'm glad the thread title edit stuff got worked out.

Specific lesson learned: the "advanced edit" button lets you edit the title; you don't need to PM a mod about it

 

[Wolfwood2]

Note that failing the skill challenge is the only way the Raven Queen can die in this encounter; you can just fight Orcus before attempting it. The encounter becomes much harder if you fail, but there’s no real benefit to success, given the number of actions it takes. Indeed, even if every standard action was guaranteed to succeed on the skill challenge, it wouldn’t be worth giving up 8 actions for (12.5 damage per action).

I wasn't sure I was getting this right at first. So you're saying that the Raven Queen doesn't start dying from the shard _unless_ the party formally agrees to participate in the skill challenge?

Well.

All I can say is that if I actually wanted the PCs to be trying to do the challenge at the same time as they fought Orcus, I would rule that the skill challenge auto-starts and every two rounds that nobody has gotten at least one success or failure on the skill challenge (because no one is trying) means that it accumulates an automatic failure. Because, you know, she's still dying whether the PCs are interested in helping or not. I'm surprised the module doesn't give that advice.

 

[Elric]

I wasn't sure I was getting this right at first. So you're saying that the Raven Queen doesn't start dying from the shard _unless_ the party formally agrees to participate in the skill challenge?

There no "start dying" stage, even. The Raven Queen won't die unless the players attempt the skill challenge and fail it (3 failures before 8 successes). If they get to two failures and stop making more checks, the Raven Queen will definitely survive.

The module doesn't give any advice about requiring the players to attempt it; indeed, they're better off ignoring it entirely. Your rule means that players will probably only attempt the minimum number of rolls if they have an idea of the costs/benefits (which they probably will; there seems to be a pattern of in-combat skill challenges that aren't worth the time to attempt in modules).

With the fixes I outlined above, you could further encourage the players to attempt the skill challenge by giving Orcus an action he can take until the party removes the shard. E.g., "Drain Divinity, Minor Action, recharge 5/6; Orcus regains 50 hit points and gets +10 to all damage rolls until the start of his next turn. This power cannot be used if the players have completed the Removing the Shard challenge."

If you want to add further urgency, make it clear that Orcus will eventually kill the Raven Queen in this way, triggering the listed benefits of her death (Orcus is fully healed and gains a +10 bonus to damage rolls, a +2 bonus to all defenses, and 400 additional hit points). You don't want this to happen too soon; 6 uses of Drain Divinity kills the Raven Queen would be a conservative number.

 

[Appleseeth]

I would say this challenge needs serious re-working. As Wolfwood2 said, not participating should be tantamount to failure. And to motivate the PCs furthur, I would take off, say 50 HP from Orcus for every success achieved. That way with 8 successes, plus the 100 HP stated originally, they would knock off a total 500 hit points, which is nothing to scoff at. That would probably balance out with what he would gain for failure at the skill challenge better.