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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9222178" data-attributes="member: 6877472">We may have finally lost a player in our Scarlet Citadel game.  The encounters are getting more and more dangerous, where we struggle to fit two fights inside 5 hours (in fact, we went over by half an hour today).Encounter 1 was with "Deep Ones" (Great Shadow over Innsmouth, Batman!), 8 regular and 1 "priest" (who didn't do a lot of healing and cast things like Ice Storm and Sleep).  The fact that we were on a boat and they could pop in and out of the water was annoying, but outside of the Ice Storm, they weren't individually dangerous, but ye gods, so many hit points!  By casting a buff on the Monk/Rogue, they were able to crank out 52 damage in one turn (there was a critical hit in there) and still failed to kill any opponents!That fight took 2.5 hours, and the only leveled spell I ended up using was Web, just because it was difficult to avoid hitting my companions in such close quarters (the boat being all of 10' wide...technically 12' but yeah).Then we entered a sealed room with the mark of an evil god on it and the words "DO NO" scratched on it by a long-dead adventurer.  But going into places one shouldn't is what adventurers do, right?Well pretty quickly we regretted it, as we found ourselves facing a LICH (we're only level 7!).  Any nova spellcasting was foiled by the Lich using Silence (they won initiative) and we quickly found that they had a Legendary Action that let them cast Sacred Flame at the end of an opponent's turn, up to 3/turn.But it got worse from there, as each turn, 4 Wights joined the fray.  I cast Mirror Image after leaving the silence, and that proved to be the smartest move I could make, as it saved me from a life drain critical (I only have 44 hit points to begin with, I don't need my maximum hp lowered, thanks!).A few rounds in, we'd downed the lich, but were surrounded by wights.  Even turning them didn't help that much, as they kept spawning (until we finally had 15 of them...would have been 16, but we managed to kill one) and of course, these wights had extra hit points (the DM told us this when we wondered why they were proving to be hard to destroy).  Oh and the room was filled with choking smoke that forced a Con save at the start of each turn or you took necrotic damage and had your maximum hp lowered!I was finally forced out of the room, where I started chucking fireballs into clumps of wights and scoring fairly mid damage.  I'd rather use control spells, but again, friendly fire isn't, and with saves vs. damage each turn, I didn't know if I could maintain concentration for very long (and I'd only be able to lock down at most four wights anyways).As we'd swiped a MacGuffin from the lich, we decided maybe it was time to bail, but then the lich GOT BACK UP and hit the Ranger with Hold Monster...and he failed.So now we were like "uh, we can escape, but we'd have to leave the Ranger behind!"  So people went in to save the Ranger.  This led to the Monk being dropped to 0 hit points (though the Cleric got the Ranger out).  Then the lich gave us an ultimatum- "give back the MacGuffin, or your friend will become my newest champion!".And that's where the session ended, with 8 wights dead, 8 still up, 1 lich at an unknown hit point total, and we won't meet again until the new year.  I'm down to 1st and 2nd level spells, the Ranger is still paralyzed, and the Cleric is fuming on hit points (a little better off thanks to my Healer feat), and also pretty much out of juice.So now we can either sacrifice the Monk but use the MacGuffin to gain assistance in dealing with the threats ahead, or claim the Monk and admit defeat.  It may be that we weren't meant to win at this time, and there are other areas we can explore- I'm not silly enough to think every fight is winnable.  But after the session, the other guys seemed a bit bummed- we did our best, and it wasn't nearly good enough.</blockquote>

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