KotS -- built for 5 PCs?

[Blackbrrd]

im gonna dm it and play a cleric at the same time- my group is new, and i am too- is it weird to have a dm play a char in combat?

I wouldn't recommend DMing and having a character at the same time. It will feel a bit like being the lawyer for both sides in a trial... If you have too few characters, just reduce the amount of monsters.

PS: if you are down to 3 or fewer characters, you might want to scale the monsters even further back than you would think from the encounter xp. You loose quite a bit of party synergy going from 5 to 3 characters.

 

[Plane Sailing]

What is there to track? I find remembering which goblins have used their interrupt and which haven't to be a lot more annoying. Kobolds you just do one turn at a time anyway, so it should be pretty easy to know if the guy you're activating has used his minor shift or not.

Maybe he's thinking of the dragonshields shifting in response to someone moving up to them?

 

[Klaus]

Maybe he's thinking of the dragonshields shifting in response to someone moving up to them?

That too.

My group doesn't have a controller, but the dragonborn and the ranger have area attacks (breath weapon and dire wolverine strike), so they can drop several minions when well-placed.

 

[Foxman]

I'm running it with the following:

Tiefling Warlord
Eledrin Wizard
Halfling Roge
Human Fighter
Dragonborn Palidin

I killed the human fighter by accident at the dragon site - we didnt notice you could use a heal check dc 10 to trigger second wind in another character (you can do that right even if they are down?)

It was a hard battle for the PC's but they beat Irontooth without loosing anybody.

Dropping an average of 100 xp per PC less than 5 or increasing it 100 xp for PC greater than 5 (at 1st level - 125 @ 2nd) should work.

If you are using the missing mentor hook, if the PC's find him (and get the quest xp) then it is possible they could level up after all the encounters outside the keep itself. (nothing wrong with that just pointing it out)

 

[Mengu]

It was a hard battle for the PC's but they beat Irontooth without loosing anybody.

Wow, impressive. Most people have to at least loose the fighter and the rogue on the big bad goblin to bring him down.

 

[Foxman]

Wow, impressive. Most people have to at least loose the fighter and the rogue on the big bad goblin to bring him down.

The paladin is in heavy shield/plate and marking irontooth. Irontooth doesnt really want to attack anybody else.

The fighter bases irontooth, and the warlord is commander striking the fighter onto irontooth.

The party was *out of healing*, and the three front lines were under 10 hp each by the time they won. A critial hit on Bastion of Defense (3[W]!!!) from the Warlord at a critical point HELPED a great deal.

 

[Mengu]

*face palm* I was just trying to make a funny with your misuse of the word loosing instead of losing. (sorry, I'm demented that way, see my sig)

The paladin is in heavy shield/plate and marking irontooth. Irontooth doesnt really want to attack anybody else.

When we were fighting Irontooth, he didn't mind taking damage from the paladin's mark at all. It got him bloodied faster, and he started really waling on us.

 

[brehobit]

No it's not; it's Medium and only takes up one square.

*crys*

 

[brehobit]

hey man, how did you scale it back for 3 pcs? i'm running KotS on saturday and one of my players dropped out. am a bit nervous as its the gangs first 4e session and i want it to go well (i.e. not too easy, not too hard).

I intend them to do all the kobold stuff, finishing with Irontooth in the session; am worried the Irontooth fight is going to decimate them.

Let's see, first encounter I dropped a minion and a dragonshield.
A1 I dropped a dragon shield.
A4 I dropped a guard drake

For A2 I'm thinking of dropping the skirmisher and 2 minions.
For A3 one skirmisher and 2 minions from wave 1 and 1 dragonshield from wave 2 as well as dropping irontooth's hps by 20. and moving his blood crazed to d6. That should move him to about 250 EXPs and make the whole thing around 925....


In A4 they got totally ambushed. Perhaps a miscommunication on my part, but the party walked up and talked to the gnome and never said anything about being worried about an ambush. So I gave them a DC 18 insight check to avoid being surprised and they started out surrounded. The party warlord dropped before he got an action, but they still pulled it out (mainly due to a nat 20 on his 3rd death save.)

Party is:
Dwarven fighter (maul)
Eldrin (sp?) Warlord (int based)
Human wizard (20 int)

I'm allowing the Commander’s Strike to affect any ally in range 3, and so the maul fighter is really cleaning up 2d6+9 damage from the warlord's at will in effect). All told, the 3 person party is very effective. A Paladin and warlock will be added soon....

 

[Zsig]

im gonna dm it and play a cleric at the same time- my group is new, and i am too- is it weird to have a dm play a char in combat?

Back in 3.X and earlier editions, I used to run a NPC as a PC pretty much 90% of the times, sometimes even more than just one (2-3). And it worked pretty well to me, I never really had any problems with that.

Now, on 4E I tried to do the same. On the first session we're playing I had only about 3/4 of the party with me (or more precisely 4 out of 6 players), and I wanted to fill in the "missing" spot with a character controlled by me (an Eladrin Wizard). It didn't work, in fact, by the end of the session all players wanted to kill the NPC ... the fighter even considered using Tide of Iron to drop him on a pit ... ... ...

From what I could notice, it didn't work out too well because:

• It's quite hard to manage resources of the NPC when you know what they're up against...and pretend you don't know. In 3.X it wasn't such a problem when they'd rest after the encounter anyway.
• 4E encourages team play rather than individual thinking, and it's hard for the PCs to communicate with you what they'd like for the NPC to do, without effectivelly controlling your NPC for you.
• Most of the times, the players won't be fully aware of your NPC potentials, this means that they'll most of the time elaborate tactics witout considering the NPC's actions.

For these reasons mostly, the NPC ended up being more a hinderance than actual help.

That or maybe the Wizard was simply a bad choice for the encounters I set up for them. Regardless, I'm not doing it again.