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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James McMurray" data-source="post: 4374751" data-attributes="member: 743">After we beat back the undead Strahd himself showed up in a fiery carriage. He thanked us for helping him, and dropped off a chest with some nice stuff in it. I didn't complain, even though we didn't realize we were working for him, and I still plan on heading to the castle fort he arcane relics he's rumored to have. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />We raised the dead and headed to the gypsy camp to sell stuff and buy reagents from a merchant Strahd had given permission to trade with us. We mostly stocked up on reagents, but also bought a little bit of mundane gear like rope and whatnot. Then we headed towards a nearby waterfall to investigate two of the prophecies (one dealing with flying water and another with water raining on wood, earth, and itself). On the way the rogue managed to step into a bear trap, but got himself out. When we got there we (and by "we" I mean "the untrained athlete rogue") experienced the joys of aquatic movement. He swam out into the pool to the waterfall to check if there was a cave behind it. He failed many times, and several of those failures cost him a healing surge. He finally made it though, and there was nothing there. so he used his boots of Spider climbing's daily power to walk up to where a tree was growing out of the cliff behind the falls. Nothing there either, so he went to swim out. He failed several times again, losing the last of his surges.So we headed up the mountain to find the top of the falls. On the way were more traps, but we avoided them. At the top was a cave, and just inside that cave a stuffed bugbear. Farther in are two dire bears, a stuffed wolfman, a dwarf with a crossbow, and a stuffed human in armor. We fail to notice that the wolves aren't stuffed, and they attack as the paladin goes to prod them to see if they're alive. Farther in the cavern we see an Indiana Jones style rope bridge over a chasm. We decide it must be trapped and ignore it.It's yet another fight that's too busy for me to take good notes. I'm sensing a trend here. A good one. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The fight goes on for quite a while, and eventually I notice a pit trap. Unfortunately, I notice it because I've sprung it and am sliding down a Goonies shoot. At the bottom is a thin (10' wide looks thin on a battlemat) ledge by a slow flowing river. In the river (I soon find out) is an otyugh. It grabs me and drags me under. I dimension door away and blast it, but it drags me under again. A cover slides over the pit.Up above the dire wolves finally drop and the dwarf ranger executes an acrobatic leap off of the carved stairs and over the thief. He then shoves the thief one square, onto another pit and he falls down another chute to be grabbed and dragged under with me. The cleric runs around jumping on pit covers trying to break one open while he and the paladin finish off the enemies.Down below I'm resorting to multiple magic missiles in an attempt to finish the monster off. The thief can't get away and stay away, so he's slowing getting beaten to death and drowning. After he's knocked out I manage to kill the thing. I grab the thief and drag him to the shore just in time for him to fail his third save vs. death and die in my arms.In the cavern above us they find a button and press it, resetting the traps and allowing them to slide down after us. We stop to rest and raise the halfling, and leave off at that point. My spellbook is partially damaged, and it remains to be seen what will be salvageable.A couple of observations:1) Elites with backup are nasty. This is third time we've fought one, and the third time we've had a PC die. The first (in Keep on the Shadowfell) was a pseudo-TPK because some of us were captured instead of killed. The second (the flesh golem in the church) was almost a TPK, but the GM didn't want to run the combat all over again so he told us how low the golem was on hit points and put undead between us and the door. 2) Not only do shouting matches over the rules suck, they're also sometimes pointless. The thief's player and the GM got into it over how drowning works. The end result was that the thief was still dead (the player's interpretation was wrong). But later that weak in an unrelated thread on ENWorld someone pointed out that you can give a character their Second Wind with a Heal check even if they have no surges left. It only raises them to 1, but that's enough to retroactively save the halfling and in the process keep 5,000gp worth of religious components from disappearing.3) NPCs jumping into bottomless pits instead of letting you kill them is ludicrous. It may turn out later that the NPC dwarf has some sort of flight and invisibility combo, but we dropped a sunrod off that ledge and it went out of its 20 square light radius. The dwarf was crazy as a loon, but it was still annoying to hear the GM say he'd "jumped with all the loot."I'll probably keep doing these, but in play report instead of game report mode. The system issues are cropping up less and less.</blockquote>

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