Forge of Fury: Deathtrap? (spoilers)

[qstor]

I'm thinking of running this for a home game in the near future. Thanks for the tips guys.

Mike

 

[Darklone]

Our group of 4 fourth level characters monkey-stomped the roper.

Same here... but only because the group had a lot of fire based spells. It moved, they shot... roper dead.

 

[Rel]

Fifthly, I have to respectfully and strongly disagree with an above poster who suggested that you provide some "intelligent sword" to the party as a way of dropping hints, etc. Never, ever do this.

Yeah, that guy has got a ton of posts here and he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about most of the time.

I ran this module for my group and it is noteworthy that the whole top level of the place is designed to come rushing at the party in waves over the course of several rounds. If your group sets up in a poor area to defend against these numbers, they're likely to get crushed. I also think that it is timed so that, just when things are getting pretty nasty and the party is running out of resources, Ulfe shows up.

I heavily modified the next level of the place but my players were diplomatic with the Duergar and got through to the Dragon. I expected this fight to be really ugly but the NPC Barbarian traveling with the group critted it on the first round for upwards of 50 points of damage. That set the tone for the battle and they managed to kill Nightscale without any PC deaths.

 

[Mystic_23]

Please reconsider NOT to include the Roper - the party I dm:ed - wich btw are seasoned players and good friends - somehow belived that a Roper was no match for four 4 lvl characters.. well obviously it was a TPK. It wasn´t even close. To bad - it was a great gang with lots of cool characters.


Asmo

Yeah, I replaced the Roper with a small group of...Um...I think they're called Dark Mantles. They cast darkness and drop down over someones head to strangle them to death. Even that killed one of the party members. But that's okay...no-one liked that character anyway.

Oddly enough, that player's first character died on the Rope Bridge when they were retreating from the Orc threat. I managed to kill off 2 of...er...ahem...I mean, 2 of his characters met an unfortunate end in the Forge.

Yeah, that's it.

 

[wedgeski]

I have few lasting memories of this adventure (make of that what you will!), except for the dragon battle, which was great. This was mostly due to the fact that it was my first 3ed dragon fight and I had done all the necessary homework. It also opened my players' to what you could do with 3ed battle strategy; they all survived, but it was a close thing. More than one has said that they really enjoyed coming so close to getting a TPK.

 

[Seule]

I ran it early in 3.0, and it was a learning experience for everyone.
The players as you represent them would I suspect do well with exactly what you are already doing: Stomp them with good tactics if they use bad (where appropriate, puddings shouldn't flank for instance), and talk with them afterwards about what you did to be effective, and what you saw that they could have done. They can then modify in the future if they choose.
Be aware, however, that not all parties want to be tested all the time. There's a significant number of players who just want to win, and the story of what happened along the way is what's important in play. For groups like that, it's best to just run modules that are intended for characters a level or two lower, and softball any very nasty dicerolling (big crits against them, for example). This insures that they are challenged, if not too far, and still feel like they are in danger, even if not too much. One or two levels difference makes a small enough difference in challenge ratings that they are unlikely to notice.
I would however, if you decide to go this route, never let the players know, or the game will lose even the appearance of danger, and that robs it of excitement.

--Seule

 

[Balsamic Dragon]

I ran this module for my group and it is noteworthy that the whole top level of the place is designed to come rushing at the party in waves over the course of several rounds. If your group sets up in a poor area to defend against these numbers, they're likely to get crushed. I also think that it is timed so that, just when things are getting pretty nasty and the party is running out of resources, Ulfe shows up.

I think that's right, it's a nice set up The first time I ran this adventure, the party sneaked in through the chimney, but in the first fight, the Barbarian raged. He slaughted the first few orcs, moved to the next room, and kept going in a killing frenzy! The rest of the party was quickly left behind (the Cleric only had a move of 15 vs. the Barbarian's move of 40). He finally ran out of steam and his rage ended, right when he turned the corner and came face to face with the ogre! He proceeds to turn tail and run away, leading the ogre right into the rest of the confused and frustrated party! Call it too much roleplaying, but it was damn funny

This is the same Barbarian, by the way, who sucessfully _grappled_ the dragon later in the adventure, and held on for most of the combat (taking massive damage, of course!)

Balsamic Dragon

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

It sounds to me like the adventure went about like it should have.

For a recap of how our group fared (which really wasn't all that different from yours, except we survived), see Wulf's Story Hour in my sig.

Wulf

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

We're using the modules to re-teach me how to DM and them how to play before moving on to a homebrew campaign. So I'm trying to let the dice fall where they may. I'm worried that I'm being too critical of their play, but when I present the case to them of "what I think youve done wrong" they all agreed with me. So...

is learning from their mistakes the best way to teach them?

I think you're going about it the right way. Especially due to your stated reason as to your purpose in running the modules. So long as you players know it's going to be fairly deadly, and if you kind of use the aftermath as an opportunity to debrief yourself and the players, it's all good. I would be pretty strict about tactics and player death, but having a dialogue to see what they did wrong is a good idea - in addition, since you're doing this to boost your DM'ing chops, you might want to ask for ideas on how they fell you're doing. Sometimes players perceive the environment differently from the DM, as they misinterpret his descriptions. Or they may not realize how the rules affected what they did. In this case, it may be useful to fully explain the NPC's actions, maybe even show the PC's the bad guys stat blocks after the module is finished so they can see with their own eyes what the bad guys can do.

My group did something along these lines when we first started 3E. We created several pure combat scenarios, rolled up some characters (of various kinds and levels) and ran through some fight scenarios, letting the dice fall where they may. This way we ran through most of the new rules, learning them as we went. Since we knew we were playing primarily to familiarize ourselves with the rules, we rolled totally in the open, stopped mid-combat to make sure we were getting the rules exactly right, and tried all kinds of wierd manouvers to make sure we had bent the system as much as possible.

 

[WizarDru]

Some lessons are best learned with PAIN. These guys are obviously more in the 'boot-to-the-door' mode, which is fine, if they do it well. But they need to learn that things have changed. This was a painful lesson, but I'll be they're much more cautious next time out.

My players had a different experience, as they entered from the chimney and worked their way backwards. They learned an important lesson, too...that a mage with a quarterstaff should never, ever enter melee combat with just a shield spell and a vague notion of fighting an orc. That marked, I believe, the last time that the party wizard EVER attempted to engage in melee....and that was 20 levels ago.

You can read about it in my story hour, if you scroll down the first page. My group never found the roper...but the battle with Nightscale still stands as the high-water mark for epic battles in the game. It was an 8-hour session, and the first real dragon encounter in the game (Calcryx doesn't count, IMHO).

As for the roper...unless I'm misremembering, you can't actually even see the roper without being within the 50' reach of his tentacles. The room was made as something of a deathtrap.