Brown Bear eats adventurers
toberane said:
In Forge of Fury
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In the same adventure there is a brown bear. Just an ordinary, run of the mill, lone brown bear. We went swaggering up to it thinking "It's just a bear, how tough could it be?"
We ended up running like crazy crying every step of the way with our hit points at dangerously low levels across half the dungeon level to escape a TPK from an ordinary brown bear.
Ahhh yesteryear.... My group playtested 3E, Forgotten Realms and Forge of Fury (and a few other things).
Forge was their first expeditition into 3E besides some scratch paper vs fights for CR (like pitting a regular 1st level party against a CR 1 for testing the creatures CR assessment).
The party was rocking that dungeon, dropping in through the chimney, attacking the orcs from the "inside" etc. They were ruthless powergamers. 1/2 Orc Barbarian, Dwarven Cleric, Human invocation Mage and a rogue/ranger... They were pounding that dungeon and then they ran into the bear.
The party had already run into one encounter since resting. They saw the bear and decided based on 1st and 2nd edition thinking that the bear was no match for a fearsome group of adventures such as them. The 1/2 Orc Barbarian charged ahead of the group with his movement and missed the bear on a charge. The rest of the group closed to withing 30-40ft, but couldn't get to melee and didn't think the bear was enough of a threat to missile or spell. Then the bear went- 3 attacks on the barbarian- hit, hit, and a crit. Barbarian to -9 and bleeding out. Cleric rushes in with a CLW or CMW to stabilize the barb, rogue and MU unload arrows and missile weapons. Next round- Bear only hits heavily armored cleric once and adjusts 5 foot step toward rogue. Rogue prepares for melee and sets up for sneak attack but can't quite get the move and attack. Mage magic missiles again. Bear crits cleric, putting him unconcious, rogue no longer has flank and gets attacked by bear. Bear mops up remaining non-melee victims. It was TPK (the mage could have gotten away, but chose to go down with the ship). Brutal...
from then on the watch word was..."look out for bears".
Much later they ran into a dire bear again with a barbarian, it nearly took the barbarian out, but the party opened with their strongest gambits. They take no prisoners against bears now.
-E