moritheil said:
First off, beautiful build. I'm intrigued by the idea of using UMD to pull something off - it's really not something one would think of, as it's a cross class skill.
It's not really UMD. It's getting a few ranks in UMD and then using Divine Insight to pull it off. Very different
.
Second, I want to address this:
This group (admittedly, a few levels ago, but 10 players strong then) nearly got wiped out by a single air elemental, and fled from a crysmal after wasting all their remaining resources without managing to damage it. I am therefore curious about your statement. Is this an issue of an appropriate EL encounter becoming more of a joke as they advance into the mid-levels, or is this something that you feel applies at all levels? If it's the latter, I'll have to wonder if something campaign specific makes that conventional wisdom not apply. If it's the former, thanks for the warning!
Hmmm. Basically, it's my experience from now about four years of writing modules for RPGA campaigns. But it does play into the EL system too. RPGA mods are written for 4-6 characters and my experience is that an EL=party level +2 encounter is a kinda challenging encounter in the same way that playing the 49ers has been a kinda challenging game for most pro football teams over the last few years. It's not like they're playing college teams or high school teams. If they let their guard down or play their second string all game, there's the possibility that the 49ers might just beat them, but realistically, there's not much chance of the 49ers beating a top tier team unless all of the stars align perfectly. And that's really what the EL system says should happen: it's a challenging encounter, but there isn't a big chance of PC death or loss until the EL=party level +4 or +5.
Now, the EL system is written for a 4 person party and the RPGA adjusts the average party level by 1 to account for the additional power of a six person party. (This reflects the premise in the EL system that a 50% increase in the fight's difficulty is a +1 EL modification and a doubling of the difficulty is a +2 increase). So, when I calculate your eight player party, I figure that they're probably about as good as a four person party of 8th level characters and that an EL 8 is one of those appropriate challenges that will use up 20% of their resources. Since the fight is supposed to be with a single CR 8 critter, that's an EL 8 and should be a cakewalk. (20% of resources is a cakewalk IME). So that's where my estimate is coming from.
As for your party having trouble with some specific creatures, there are a few possibilities I can think of.
1. Your party may not be balanced very well. (You said yourself that you don't have any clerics in the party--just a healer or something like that). In that kind of situation, some challenges may be much more difficult than others. For instance, in party where everyone is focussed on melee, healing, or enchantment spells, a single Erynies could be a devastating encounter. She flies out of melee range and shoots the party with her bow or spells until they die or flee. Since she's an outsider, most low-level enchantments don't work on her and she has good SR to boot. Because the party mix didn't include archers or anyone with the ability to cast fly, what would be a moderately challenging encounter could become very challenging. The EL system doesn't account for a threat that plays to the party's weaknesses.
2. Your players may have made ineffective characters. I remember one game I ran where there was a bard, a rogue without weapon finesse, a low-level sorcerer, a 1/2 orc cleric 2/wizard 1 who wore fullplate (and lived with the spell failure), and an archer ranger. The only effective character was the sorcerer and she was only effective because it's hard to go wrong when you only know two spells and one of them is magic missile. No matter how good their tactics were, a group of anti-power-gamed characters like that wasn't going to perform at character level.
3. Your players may suck. Well, that's a little harsh, but remember how I said that group could have had the best tactics and still would have underperformed. They didn't have the best tactics. They had some of the worst tactics I've ever seen. When confronted with the fiendish centaur chieftain, the rogue spent the entire combat hiding, moving to a tree, climbing up it, loading his crossbow, realizing that the centaur was out of sneak attack range, climbing back down the tree, looking for somewhere else to hide, etc. The cleric tried summon monster I for a small celestial dog that couldn't beat the centaur's DR and died in one swing. It was early in the fight that they discovered the centaur had DR/magic. At the end of the fight, the cleric comments, "all I've got left is my magic weapon spell...." As I said, it was horrible. If your party's adventures resemble a comedy of errors, then that could be your problem.
3.5 Maybe your party doesn't suck but they're just not familiar with the options available to them. If you don't ready actions in your games, then an air elemental with spring attack will be pretty hard to deal with--especially if your characters don't carry bows or other ranged weapons (see explanation 1).
4. Some monsters are mis-CRed (or are a much greater challenge in certain environments). The Hezrou for instance, has a blasphemy ability at a higher caster level than its CR. So, against any party equal to it's CR, a pair of Hezrou (supposedly an EL=APL+2 encounter) will kill the entire party. No save. One does blasphemy and the other drops an unholy blight or a full attack on the party while they're dazed. Repeat for two rounds and then switch so the other Hezrou does the blasphemy to keep the party from acting. I don't think there's any party out there that could survive six rounds of uninterrupted mauling and then pull their fat out of the fire while eating what's likely to be a -10 or so strength penalty. Now the Hezrou is a pretty obvious example, but a melee monster like an earth elemental in close quarters where there is no room to manuever is another example. So, if the monsters were mis-CRed or the circumstances favored the monsters, that would also explain why your party had such trouble with creatures they
Either way, I do agree that NPC survivability in this situation is really low, which is part of why I gravitated towards things like vampires (which have a built-in escape mechanism, enabling them to dish out negative levels and then escape into the night) or mummies (whose curses might kill a low-Fort save character or two even after the mummy is itself destroyed.)
Thoughts?
My thought is this: if you're taking the challenge head on, you shouldn't be trying to escape. If the vampire escapes, the PCs hunt it down again. That doesn't make it more of a challenge it just lets you use the monster again. I think you should be looking to create a cleric who is going almost guaranteed to take down one or two PCs. If it does, you've won the challenge even if the party beats the monster eventually. After all, the challenge was that he could actually off some party members not that he would survive after doing it. Secondly I think that, if you're going to win, you should be making sure the PCs have an escape route rather than the bad guys having one.
And third, if you use my suggestion, be prepared for discussing some houserules disallowing Divine Metamagic and Spikes (or at the very least, not letting spikes stack with greater magic weapon and brambles). All of those, by the way are good ideas if you ask me.
