NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue" data-source="post: 7991167" data-attributes="member: 20564">So, we had an Epic last session. Epic is the particular catchphrase of a friend of mine, and we resurrected a finished campaign to do a one-shot special surprise game. (Well, ended up being a two shot.)The campaign had ended quite well, but one of the loose threads was the blue dragon Al'Tinine we had killed in the finale was known to have a huge stash of sapphires that he had been paying a rival group with. And the lost kingdom we refounded was awash with refuges and needing funding.The birthday one-shot was hearing rumors of another blue dragon taking up the title of Al'tinine, in the rough area we though he had his lair. It was the original five party members, plus two guests for the one-shot who were not as well equipped nor used to the party dynamics - a second barbarian and a battlemaster.Cool stuff, challenges to get through a whole unnatural lightning storm, a trapped lair, etc.  But we came across a blue wyrmling in it's lair, claiming to be the brood of Al'tinine and willing to parley.We started to talk, actually planning on making it relocate from where it was now (hurting allies) to a nation we wanted to eradicate.  Anyway, the sneak attack came, but it was from our side, pre-empting the parley.  Suddenly the who floor disappeared and we all fell 40 feet to the real floor - with seven of it's larger brood-mates.  Whom because of how we were positioned above were already among us so we couldn't get off effective AoEs of any sort.We had 6.5 10th level characters (one player was several hours late, so 6 players for the first few rounds) with decent magic items but not a single bit of lightning resistance among us, already worn down a bit. Outnumbered by eight Blue Dragons. Who then proceeded to win initiative, and breath weapon us all to crap. By our first action, no one was above half HPs and one barbarian and the fighter were both down. (Sad note - that barbarian rolled the best initiative of us. What this ended up meaning in practice is that the dragons would knock him out, he's miss his turn, get healed, the dragons would knock him out - lather, rinse, repeat. He didn't have an action for half the combat.)So we had this amazingly tough encounter with the spawn of our old enemy. Just for shiggles I ran the DMG encounter numbers. Seven CR 9 (5000XP) plus one CR 3 (700XP) is 35700 XP. When you include the multiplier for 7-10 monsters of 2.5, that's 89250. Deadly for seven level 10 characters is 28,000 XP, so that was more than three times the deadly rating, with advantageous positioning and terrain for them.We were victorious, but it was close and we had people going down every single round, especially when they started making sure the cleric was down. But the bard went right before the cleric in initiative, and both went before most of the rest of the party. So the glamour bard would stand our life cleric back up and use Mantle of Inspiration to give tHP and repositioning, the life cleric would hit us with a Mass Cure Wounds, and we'd do what we could to defeat them. Our rogue was quite hurt when the bard turned her into a Giant Ape who was very effective for the rest of the combat. (Yes, there are higher CR beasts, that was what the character had seen except for a T-Rex and the bard reserved that form for the King. It's right there in the name and names are important to Jillian.)Anyway, I enjoy combat but am fine with sessions without it, but this was the most skin-of-our-teeth bang-out battle I think I've ever had in the years since I switched to 5e. So much tension, risk, and imminent death that overcoming that and snatching victory was very sweet indeed.</blockquote>

Verification