So, while worthley makes a new character, I'd like to discuss our options here. I've been talking to michael_noah and Ti about this some already.
The adventure is difficult. Those wolves were an EL 3 encounter. This is, obviously, above you guys, but still within the limits set by the DMG. In short, while you wouldn't want every encounter to be like that, it really was winnable. But, in any case, the game is going to degenerate fast if we lose a character every encounter. And there WILL be encounters more difficult than three wolves.
There are three obvious ways to deal with this: 1) make you guys more powerful somehow; 2) make the encounters less difficult; 3) make the party bigger. Option 1 doesn't seem logical. I guess we could retroactively increase the point-buy, but I don't think that would do it. I haven't thought about it much though. Option 2 is ill-favored by both me and mn. If there's no sense of challenge, I suspect things will get boring. And, again, the encounter with the wolves could have gone much better. It makes me think of what happened against the swarm the first time compared to the second. Sure, adding burning hands to the mix helped, but the biggest change was tactics. In my opinion, the same thing happened with the wolves. (Well, the early problems were because of tactics; later it was just a stream of bad rolls.)
So, in my opinion, we should add a 5th character to the party. It wouldn't make things unbalanced. Hard stuff will still be hard. But there will be another set of hitpoints to take a beating and another set of actions that could turn a bad situation around. If you guys agree that we should add a 5th, we need to decide how to do that.
1. Find a specific person to join us
I don't think we know anyone else in RL that would be interested/motivated sufficiently to get involved. If you know of anyone, let me know.
2. Getting someone from here
We could open a recruiting thread and try to find someone to join us. In the alternative, Ti suggested perhaps specifically asking someone we played with before to join us. Here's the thing (and if anyone from the EN World community is reading, this is only my experience), unreliability abounds and is easy to mask. As Ti can attest, I painstakingly chose the players for the first time I ran this adventure here. Everyone seemed rock solid. At the end of the day, each and every one of those players (that I didn't personally know) ended up dropping out. I also play in other games here, and, it bothers me to say it, but in my experience such unreliability is the rule, not the exception. There is no way to sufficiently screen for that sort of thing. If you guys want to go this route, we can try it, but I'd be leery.
3. The horrible, always-to-be-avoided DMPC
I think we sufficiently know what bad things can happen with a DMPC (I know worthley remembers "Kitty"). I also think that it MIGHT be our best option at this time.
Thoughts?
