Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rod Staffwand" data-source="post: 6396887" data-attributes="member: 6776279">I finally got a chance to flip through a friend's copy of HotDQ and see what all the fuss was about. I like the cult raid setup, but I thought the action and events were far too scripted for my liking.The dragon encounter is not even close to combat as war. The setup mentions that the soldiers can't hurt the dragon, which is directly counter to the stats of both the dragon and the soldiers. It goes on to say that the dragon is deadly and to demonstrate it's deadliness beforehand so they know what they're dealing with. Sounds way too contrived to be combat as war.The half-dragon champion encounter is equally contrived. I would never run such an encounter as a DM for the express purpose of giving the players crappy options so they have a vendetta against a villain. It's clumsy and manipulative. I only use "No Win" or "Very Unlikely to Win" scenarios if they occur from bad luck or poor decision making. As a player, I've ended up in my fair share of such scenarios. I Kobayashi Maru'd my way out of some of them and flat out ran from most of the others.In one game a high-level death knight/lich put a wall of force around himself and my level 8 character. I lasted a round or two before getting soul-drained. The matchup isn't that different from the half-dragon scenario, except that we went looking for trouble (and found it). The lich became a hated one organically, rather than being forced upon us with "YOU WILL HATE THIS RECURRING VILLAIN!" in big letters. We came back about 4 levels later with an undead-killing staff and had at him to fun results.</blockquote>

Verification