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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vayden" data-source="post: 4649132" data-attributes="member: 57791">Why not use zombie and skeleton minions? Keep them spaced out so that the wizard can't get them all in one turn and bring the pain. Make sure the PCs get to enjoy at least one night as heroes of the town first though. By the way, thanks for saving me from having to perform necromancy on my own thread, since I was planning to drop in my paragon update after DMing paragon for the first time this afternoon. I've been playing in a level 16 game for a couple of weeks now, and once we re-specced our characters to do some more damage we haven't seen much grind there. DMing paragon for the first time today was a lot of fun. It's a new campaign for us - the PCs are captains of a privateer ship working for one of the noble families of Amn. We started out with them docking the ship in Athkatla and going to meet up with their boss. Before the session started, I had each of them roll two perception checks and kept those in reserve on some note-paper, since I knew I was planning to ambush them. Their pre-emptive checks failed to notice the knife-slash in the coat of the coach-man waiting for them, so they didn't realize their employer's coach-man had been killed and the coach was an ambush. One of them did make the 2nd perception check, to notice that the carriage was taking the wrong way, but that didn't help much, as the false coachman ran the carriage down an alley way and bolted the doors closed. They were still wondering what was going on when I set the carriage on fire - they spilled out quickly after that though - I went with 4 Banshrae (2 warriors, 2 dartswarms) which I re-skinned as wooden men controlled by a hidden flute-player, and two human thugs and a human mage (all level 4) as the ambushers. (I personally have a little bit of hard time making generic human thugs higher than 4-5th level - if you get past level 8-9 as a member of a PC race, you're something special). Anyway, those monsters, combined with the ambush and the fact that the wizard blew some of his powerful spells on the humans before realizing they weren't the threat, ended up being way too much for my 3 11th level PCs, so I had the Banshrae knock them out, stop their bleeding, and drag them off to the dungeons. What did I learn here? At-will Stun/Daze affects are especially powerful, and you should generally avoid having too many monsters that can do this. Not just that they can be extremely lethal if they keep hitting, but the player(s) who get stunned repeatedly don't have a lot of fun. They're fun and nasty in moderation, but try and make sure you keep it in moderation, and spread it around so that you don't do what I did and have a player who never got a chance to use a single power in the entire fight (stunned or unconscious all the way from turn 2). Thinking on my feet, I quickly mocked up a basic dungeon in the basement of the house of the rival noble who'd kid-napped them, and dropped them into the basement, naked and in chains. I gave them a few hours to see if they could manage an escape on their own (one escape attempt check/hour), and the rogue managed to pick the locks on the manacles and pick the door open (we had an interesting discussion on where he stores his lockpicks). They quickly overwhelmed the 2 level 4 guards outside and the rogue and fighter took their weapons. I had decided that the noble wasn't very used to having prisoners, especially powerful ones, so all he had guarding them were the two guards and a golem in the next room. The golem was mostly an interesting fight from the point of view that they were nervous without their gear - I halved his hitpoints to keep it from going on too long and putting me to sleep. After that, I let them sneak up through the basement into the mansion, over-hear a conversation between two of the nobles who had captured them, then vault the garden wall and lose themselves in the city. All in all, not too different from heroic tier on the first brush, though I think the hitpoints may be a little high. We'll see. The two main take-aways for me were the note about stunning I mentioned before, as well as the satisfaction of being able to adapt and move on from my mistake of throwing too much at the party. It helped that I had a general idea of the power factions and motivations of everyone involved in my head, so that I could quickly spin up an alternate path after my planned adventure knocked the party out.</blockquote>

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