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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5749516" data-attributes="member: 996">The ship was 5 squares wide, and the tentacles 4 high (whatever that's supposed to mean, exactly), with close blast 3 attacks.  It'd be /possible/ to array a party lengthwise down the middel of the ship, so that none are in a 3x3 AE with another, but it'd seriously hinder their ability to support eachother or for the melee types to concentrate damage.   The obvious tactic is for the tentacles to gang up on any bunched PCs, killing them pretty quickly.  They do brute damage with an AE in a confined space.  That's pretty vicious, I'm sure you could opitimize around it in a variety of ways, but on a first run through going below decks seems like a really good idea.  I'm surprised that there was no provision in the module for the tentacles damaging the ship, tough... it could have been as simple as a time limit.  The 3rd round below deck, you hear the timbers creaking and see tentacles stretched over the grating, 4th round the hull starts cracking and taking on water.  5th or 6th the Kraken crushes the ship and drags it under, something like that.  :shrug:Two things really struck me about this adventure.1) It was a great premise that might have been really exciting and fun in a campaign, or if executed differently.  But, on a second play through, it was dull.  'Avoid a fight' is cool and all, but avoiding the same fight repeatedly gets a little too paint-by-numbers.  Part way through the 1st encounter in week 2, we felt like hand-waving it.  If we had decided to play a 3rd time, we probably would've just done the second encounter.  2nd encounter, similar problem.  In a campaign, with the idea of needing to keep the ship afloat and get where you're going, and maybe some NPC crewmen you know and care about, it could be quite exciting, but once you figure it out, it's cake.  You only get the fun of figuring something out the once.   It just doesn't hold up to re-playing.  I'm looking forward to using the poster map of the ship - well, sloop - though.2) It had a very paleo-D&D feel.  4e gets some flack for not 'feeling like D&D.'  Well, this adventure sure felt like D&D.  The unlimitted ritual funding, for instance, got a lot of vaguely worded rituals into play.  Powers are written tightly and clearly, rituals not so much.  Having players wrangling with the DM over Silence and whether Hand of Fate could be cast behind Silence just off the map and so forth, that really felt like aspects of the prior eds of D&D - the boring, frustrating aspects....  "can I use Enchant Item?" (Hey, unlimitted components, make all the same-level items you want!) "uh... let me think about that, /NO/."   The puzzle aspect was also kinda old-school.  You had a series of move silently and find/remove trap rolls to make, success gets you out with no losses, failure brings down an extra-tough encounter on your head.  Beat the right monster the right way, and it's cake.  That kinda thing.  Oh, and of course, Save-or-Die.</blockquote>

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