Keep on the Shadowfell - Irontooth

[Wystan]

My party found this fight hard, but found the Rat Swarm to be nastier....

 

[ki11erDM]

. It's really really bad, just like the entire module. You'll either need to gimp it, play the monsters VERY stupidly, or take it out, otherwise the party will TPK.

/wrong

Our group did it the worst possable way. The outside kobolds were able to get IT to come out, we had a full fight with almost all the monsters on the board. We won. With no DM hanky panky. Was it hard? Yes. Was it the hardest encounter? Yes. Was it really bad and horably broken? Not for our group. *shrug*

Oh and the rest of the adventer fun.

 

[Nytmare]

My players aren't children they can enjoy and learn from loss instead of fly into petulant rages

It's a shame that everyone can't follow their lead.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Thats fine. The perception check for noticing your friend standing 30 feet from you in line of sight falling to the ground fountaining blood is pretty easy.

Yup - once you're killing kobolds in direct line of sight of other kobolds, they're going to be alert. However there's not going to be a chain of alerting: it's going to be the guys that saw him die that respond, unless the second group spend time running over to their buddies to communicate what happened.

Incidentally - fountaining blood: that was a crit, right?

That is only true if the kobolds a) forget they have javelins, and b) don't know the layout of their own home so that they can simply walk around the small wall sections. Perfectly reasonable if you gimp them to having a 1 intelligence.

So... your kobolds are all going to pack in shoulder-to-shoulder in order to throw those javelins? That's pretty much the definition of bottlenecking.

It may be fresh depending on what the 13 kobolds outside do to them, and again there are 10 kobold minions with javelins, which are capable of 1-rounding characters with weak AC. Wouldn't it be ironic if the dwarven battlerager bites it here?

10 kobold minions at +5 to hit aren't likely to one-round anyone except a wizard with no con bonus who stands out in the open. In my book, that pretty much counts as tactically deficient.

My players aren't children they can enjoy and learn from loss instead of fly into petulant rages and quit playing. Plus they're pretty used to poor quality modules by now.

If you were describing the encounter as extremely difficult, your defense here would be valid: your players are simply fighting a tough encounter.

But you don't - you state that this encounter is an example of bad encounter design. Are you really trying to deny that running what you already recognise as a bad encounter verbatim is bad DMing?

 

[Infiniti2000]

It is a bad encounter but it also is beatable.

I simply don't agree. Either you need a specialized party makeup, incredible luck, or both. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm certainly getting my money's worth from the module and I don't think it's crap, but it's simply a useful tool for us to learn the rules while I develop my own campaign and we restart. That said, this encounter was terribly designed. I think it's completely unwinnable. The PCs MUST be able to have a short rest between the outside and inside encounters. Without that break, it cannot be won. Having run it twice myself with a group of 5 veterans, I refuse to believe otherwise (call me stubborn). If you wish, I can try and getting the electronic files of the PCs, post them, and you can try it for yourself.