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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5763352" data-attributes="member: 996">The crow's next is 4 high, and the tentacles are '4 high' (which is seriously unique, for a monster, to have a 'hight' different from it's space), so a pixie at it's altitude limit over the 'nest would be 6 above the deck, 7 above the water, and still in the blast 3 of a 4-square-tall tentacle rising out of the water (asuming 4-square-tall works the obvious way).   He'd definitely be out of any blast that could catch non-pixies on the deck, and impossible to pull into the water, though (I'm not sure the one pull available to the DM would even work on a flying character).Their flight helps them avoid being dropped in the water, though.  The only mechanic that puts you in the water is a pull 3, that gets a regular character over the side from anywhere but the middle of the ship.  For the pixie, that just gets him hovering above the water, another square is required to get him in - if the railing is a hard corner (and it logically would be), another two squares.  And, the pixie just zips away after being nearly pulled into the instadeath water.Teleport was crazy-broken in the old days, but 4e teleport is just great at getting you out of grabs and across hazards.  The LoS rule, for instance, really minimizes abuse - even legitimate use, at times.  It's clear that flying was considered more a paragon level power in 4e.  Giving it to pixies was a bad call, and not the only one - not that any 'good call' was possible, since anything that was right for balance and playability would have seriously de-pixie-afied the race.  It was just a bad idea for a PC race.  Fortunately, everything else in HotFw is pretty good, and the pixie is easy enough to ban - or use in an all-pixie party. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  I ran FotDT, and I felt it gave me plenty of options to change things up on each re-play.  Different monsters, different monster and trap placement, plenty of room for different tactics, and extra monsters on 'nightmare mode.'Nod, the story was good, the encounter concepts of raiding a pirate lair and excaping a seamonster were fantastics - but the implementation just fell flat.I didn't run it, this time, but the DM who did complained that it gave him no lattitude with the monsters - numbers, types, tactics - or anything else, and that 'nightmare mode' just gave everything a damage bonus.  So there was nothing to change up on a re-play, and, as both encounters could be avoided or trivialized once you hit upon the right 'trick' ToU was much less re-playable than FotDT.FotDT:  I don't recall seeing lava or pools of flaming oil inhabbitted by fire-damage-negating goldfish 'a lot' before.  And, sure, the fire-spitting statues weren't exactly cool - though the dying-PC-controlling statue was pretty cool, it litterally /never/ worked all the times ran it.  Splitting the party a little was just barely possible on the 4th round, when some of the floors collapsed rather dramatically.  It did happen, once, at my table.ToU:So, um... there was a magical trap (alarm) on one of the chests, there was terrain that instantly killed you, the party could end up split between different rooms (because splitting up to steal more than one chest at a time could seem like a really good idea) or above and below decks.More to the point, ToU was nothing like a slugfest - really, that was part of the problem.  Once you tuned your party for stealth & arcan, the 1st encounter was cake - you might murder a few minions if you felt like it, but you could avoid the actual combat entirely.  Similarly, the second fight could be ended early by focusing fire on the Barron - an alpha strike, but not exactly a slugfest.  Not only that, but the use of rituals opened all kinds of hinky possibilities.  For an extreme instance, if you could talk your DM into allowing a Circle of Protection (natural) to be inscribed on the ship, a party of Fey-origin PCs (like, oh, pixies) could render themselves (and the talon) virtually immune to the attackers in the 2nd encounter, who were all 'natural' origin.I can sorta agree with that.  I think the idea behind Fountain of Flame was to make the Essentials Mage more forgiving in the hands of new players than the 4e Wizard.  I don't think that was a great idea, since creature-targetting AEs were something of a 4e wizard hallmark, and, in a sense, gave them some added 'soft control,' tending to encourage enemies to engage the party's melee types closely.  Even if it seems a good idea to make an AE enemy-targetting, making it 'each enemy you can see' (like the martial close bursts) would make some tell-friend-from-foe sense.Similarly, monsters almost always get enemy-targetting rather than creature-targetting AEs.  Presumably, that's to make the DM's life a little easier.  But, I think it misses out on a lot of tactical and even RP potential.  Evil elites that casually catch thier 'allies' in AEs for instance, are fun both tactically and in their sheer uncaring evilness.  In this case, the Kraken - an epic monster helping an heroic-level 'ally' - getting selective with it's flailing tentacles was both less sensical, and less fun, than having it flailing away 'blindly.'  Also, a time limit - because the Kraken might just get bored, crush the ship, and take the Talon for itself, eventually - would've made some sense.</blockquote>

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