My hat for my d02 know no limit!

[Cheiromancer]

Eyeballing the CR numbers, it looks like the Bebilith should have been a pretty tough but not quite overwhelming encounter. He has revised the bebilith to be CR 14 in v5 of his PDF, but let's use 13.

Let's see (looks up various tables)- a CR 13 is an EL 15 encounter according to UK, and 5 7th level characters is an EL 17, so this is an EL-2 encounter; a tough encounter, which should use about 50% of the party's resources.

My variant of UK's system (the "CHI-RHO system") is just to square the CRs of the monsters, and compare it to the sum of the squares of the characters' ECLs. Via various mathematical contortions, it ends up being quite close to UK's method.

So the Bebilith's power is 13 * 13 = 169
And the players power is 8 * 8 * 5 = 320
(Or thereabouts- the actual levels should be used, not the average level. I am adding +1 to each of the player's levels, because of the elite ability scores)

169/320 = 53%, compared to the 50% that UK's method will give.

If you use CR 14, UK will say it is an EL-1 encounter, say 75% of party's resources used, while my method would say a CR 14 encounter is 196/320 = 61%. So tough, with a real risk that the party would get mauled, but not overwhelming.

 

[Mystery Man]

The second round saw the sorcerer again failing his Fortitude save and dropping to 2 Con and -9 hitpoints (not bleeding though).

I thought you couldn't be brought into negative hit points from con loss?

 

[diaglo]

Real Hat of d02

 

[KB9JMQ]

Did your party think they could get away with only one character dying ?
If so, in my experience they will stay adn fight to keep the one from dying.
Of course this may be just the way my players act.
As an aside, I have never had a "teach them to run" encounter actually work

 

[Darkness]

I thought you couldn't be brought into negative hit points from con loss?

Well, low Con can't reduce you to negative (or even 0) hp per HD. That's the only restriction I can think of.

 

[WayneLigon]

Never assume they're going to run. Most people I've ever played with equate 'running' with 'losing'.

 

[TerraDave]

As a player, my last encounter was of the overwhelming, type: 4 (or was it 5) wolves+a worg vs a party of 5 1st level PCs...we couldn't really run or hide, since they could of course track with scent...the DM took mercy: after we took out the worg and some of the wolves, the others ran away. Not that unrealistic, but if they had gotten in one more attack, it would have been ugly.

As a DM, I had a classic case, the dragon, on its last legs, makes one more big attack, I role two ones...It was still a good encounter, and did what it needed to do, but would have better without those ones!

 

[Henry]

I thought you couldn't be brought into negative hit points from con loss?

As Darkness said, it can if you also have damage on top of that. You can be reduced to minimum one hit point per hit die, and then whatever damage you have can outright kill you.

 

[TerraDave]

Ohh, and on the first encounter with the dragon, the PCs did run and attempt to negotiate at the same time...but it is not something I have seen a lot of (actually, neither is something I have seen a lot of)

 

[jmucchiello]

Bless does not make arrows "good". Align weapon makes arrows "good".

How did the fireball get maximized? 70-38 = 32 = 7*6 - 10/fire
If it was a rod of metamagic, where was the rod when the sorcerer was unconscious? Did he have to draw it? Was it in hand and potentially dropped?