Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5586161" data-attributes="member: 82106">Just going by the Hill Giant stat block (which appears to now be revised to the MV version in Compendium. I didn't compare it to the MM1 version, but the defenses are IIRC AC 25, FORT 27, REFLEX 23, WILL 25. Club damage was upped from 2d10+5 to 3d10+11in MV. I guess it is a bit hard for me to imagine a level 3 controller doing much to slow down the giant for long, but at the same time I don't imagine the giant was ultimately super threatening by itself, just tedious to hit enough times to wipe out. I mean level 3 fighter should be in the high 40's hit points. Assuming AC around 20 he should just about last 4 rounds toe-to-toe, maybe 5 (this is assuming some minor leader support). Obviously I don't know what the goblins were, so I'd assume it was a challenging fight. However, there's a point here, which is that it isn't a fight that would challenge a higher level party. This fight was built specifically to challenge a level 3 party or thereabouts. I've done a few fights that weren't too far off from this either, but I did find that if I was making a fight specifically for lower level PCs it was more interesting if the monster was deleveled and promoted to elite or solo. My original point kind of got lost, but it was really that 4e is pretty tight on the levels of encounters you can handle. The range is pretty level+0 to level+4. Anything beneath your level is pretty much trivial, anything over level+4 you can run from (which is a plus) but you will NOT win, at least not without some clever strategic plan etc, and even then you're not ever going to win a level+7, unless we're talking really high level play. Now, in 1e I've seen higher level parties laugh off weak encounters, and then roll a couple bad saves and TPK. I've seen parties do the opposite and win much higher level encounters with a bit of luck. It is just the inherent swinginess of AD&D. Didn't make it better for sandbox play, but it did make for some crazy and interesting results. Overall I think 4e really almost demands a modified sandbox, or at least not a strict one.</blockquote>

Verification