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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Primitive Screwhead" data-source="post: 6399128" data-attributes="member: 20805">Game session last night went well. I am running a hex-crawl sort of scenario with less focus on combat and more on exploration. The group is adventuring across a large plain so the encounters have been mostly normalish creatures. One note, as the PCs quite reasonably focused on defenses they add to the swingyness of combat.  The Small-Folk can't be hit by creatures that roll 3D6 to attack, but gets severely wounded if hit for 3D6 damage. The Ogre might get hit by the same critter, and his soak really helps survivability.  The Mage just picked up MasterCraft Plate,  which would give him a SOAK of 17 on top of being harder to hit.  This takes pretty much all the level 4 and below monsters out of the mix.  The battle last night that drove this home was 9 Giant Fire Beetles who ambushed the party. Round one the beetles flailed around biting at the PCs, if they did get lucky enough to hit they didn't do enough damage to penetrate the SOAK. The Fire Mage toasted the beetles taking them all to half health.   Round two, the group retreated and the Druid cast a blast of cold, killing them all. Unfortunately,Fire Beetles explode in a blast of heat and flames when they die, and flame bypasses armor soak... the Ogre was next to three beetles and he lost over half his health in the resulting conflagration.Assuming the PC's remain at their current health/defence/soak ratings, to challenge them I need to ramp up the enemies To Hit through tactics and straight boosts, but also to find a way to penetrate the high SOAKs without using high damage.. else the low SOAK characters will suffer.I have decided that the BBEG they are pursuing is a Dragon.. so I will be working on building a dragon up within the next 4 weeks {dragon for Halloween!} Mainly because I think that they can definitely handle that level of fight..and might actually be able to walk over a dragon, especially if the Mage is at full power.  Part of this is due to the XP payouts. I have been using the NEW math for XP values and I think that they are too high. Even split 5 ways the last four combats ended up granting over 1,000 xp to the PCs.  I think the XP awards needs to be scaled by threat level. The Fire Beetles lasted 2 rounds with 9 of them at 289xp each. They were not a threat, except when they all went Kabloom. If the Ogre had moved out of melee range he might have taken 5 points of damage instead of half his health.I am looking forward to seeing the new playtest document and trying out the new math/combat in its full glory!A question:  - MasterCraft Shield and Armor. Do these require skill to use the benefits? If so, what does the skill of 'Shield use' do besides grant access to the MasterCraft shield?</blockquote>

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