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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Amaroq" data-source="post: 5123392" data-attributes="member: 15470">Actually I really enjoyed the encounter our DM tossed at us on Saturday. Our party druid is locked in an epic battle with a particular forest spirit gone evil, and we learned that a potential NPC ally was in trouble .. deep in the evil forest.A teleportation Circle got us within a mile or so ... but as soon as we touched foot in the forest-spirit's woods, the trees began to come alive around us. Our goal was to race across a succession of battle maps to reach the cave where our NPC ally was making her last stand against more enraged trees. The maps consisted, usually, of 2-3 paths of "clear" terrain between 2 to 4 squares wide, with the remainder of the map comprised of Difficult Terrain.At the end of each round, 2-4 new trees would "come to life" between us and our goal, usually 1-3 squares ahead of the lead character, in or adjacent to Difficult Terrain, imperfectly bunched but blocking our progress along the clear terrain in such a way that one had to concede an Opportunity Attack against them. Additional trees were coming to life all around us, so anybody who was lagging would tend to have a couple move trees placed off to the side or behind him, maybe 4-5 squares away and in Difficult Terrain. Each individual tree behaved much like a Soldier, with a strong Opportunity Attack, a "Mark anybody he hits" power, and a "Mark attack" power which allowed him to swing at anybody moving away from him. On his turn, he had Move 5 (ignores Difficult Terrain), but was explicitly prohibited from the Run action or from taking a second action which Moves him in his turn. (E.g., no Shift-then-Move tactics, no Move-then-Charge, no Run, and no double-Move.)  They were Vulnerable 10 Fire, I think, and had a "Grab" attack for restraint but no damage, as well as a "Slam" attack for pretty painful damage. Their Basic Melee Attack did fairly low damage but applied a stacking -1 penalty to AC and defense against Grab.Clearly, "running the gauntlet" was a better strategy than "standing and fighting" - especially as the DM wound up instantiating 34 of these guys over the course of the battle!!Our resources were:Every character Mounted on a mount with move 8 or move 9.Mounted characters could take a Standard action (must be taken by the rider), a Standard action (must be taken by the mount), a Move (either), and a Minor (either). (Aside: that's our house rule for mounted combat, assuming the rider has the Mounted Combat feat or equivalent. Riders without said feat use the standard Mounted Combat rules.)The druid had a magic item which could fire a Burst 2 Within 10 area effect, which reduced the creature to a Super Minion. First hit knocked it prone and Bloodied it; second hit would shatter it into toothpicks. A fire keyword attack would kill it outright unless it made a saving throw.A prone tree could only attack the Mount, not the Rider, but more importantly, since it couldn't move twice on its turn, we were guaranteed of getting away from it.Trees recovered from the effect at the end of a Round. . . . .This played out brilliantly, it was one of the best encounters in a long time. He didn't reveal the mechanics to us ahead of time, we had to discover them as we went .. but once we did, we did the smart thing, delaying our initiative(s) until after the druid but before the trees, so a round tended to look like: druid zaps twice or three times, moves once or twice .. everybody else knocks down and escapes from the trees haranguing us, then makes best available speed.Often, "best available" meant cutting through the Difficult Terrain, but with the possibility to make a Standard attack and then have the Mount move twice, you could still cover eight squares or so even going straight through Difficult Terrain .. which was enough to outpace the 5-square trees .. If somebody got too far out ahead of the druid, the "zot" wouldn't arrive, so that person would get badly slowed as more non-minion trees showed up in front of him, and the druid's zot would arrive in time to get him free. Likewise, if somebody fell too far behind, usually Restrained by a tree, the druid would have to wait (or even go back) for them, so that would stop the front end of the party.The druid never did try "zot"ting a tree twice to see if it would put it further back to sleep ...  . . . The final encounter saw an in-combat Skill Challenge to complete a Ritual which would "blind" the evil forest spirit. Until that was complete, "zot" didn't work as well with the fully-awake-and-enraged trees at the final battle, but would work with the never-ending stream of trees from behind us. So, we wound up with one Defender in a bottleneck, assisted by "zot"s to keep the reinforcements two-hit-minions, while the other Defender and the rest of the party tried to keep the super-nasty full-strength trees off of the NPC and the Druid while the druid cast her ritual. Once the ritual was complete, the full-strength trees became two-hit-minions and the reinforcements stopped coming.  . . . Absolutely exhilirating, from my seat as a player: I hadn't been as tensely "into" a session in quite a while!!</blockquote>

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