Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="ExploderWizard" data-source="post: 4476686" data-attributes="member: 66434">Ok, so we had our first 4E TPK. The encounter in question was with the Irontooth gang. I wished that the waterfall entrance to the cave included a swirling portal, at least that would have been some type of warning.  4E as a whole may not be completely a videogame but this adventure sure is. Without a doubt, this encounter is a mini instance with Irontooth as a boss mob. 4E needs expanded rules for recovering your corpse or at least a spirit healer in Winterhaven.  The fight was more than a good challenge before Irontooth showed up. We had a warlock and cleric down, and the ranger (me), a rogue , and the fighter (badly wounded) still fighting. There was a dragonshield, the kobold caster, and a skirmisher still up when Irontooth came out to kill us. The fighter and rogue went to work on him ( I was busy trying to keep the other guys occupied) and were already hurt , having used second wind (the cleric used both healing words before dropping). They managed to get him bloodied after doing enough damage to just about KILL 2 dragonshields. We laughed at that point knowing we were doomed.  Thats when the fun really started. Now Irontooth was healing every round (just because) and doing about double damage per hit. It only took about four rounds of action to finish the party off. The entire encounter lasted 16 rounds, consumed the the whole session and wiped the whole group and it wasn't even the ultimate showdown encounter. After the adventure we started discussing tactics and what we could have done differently that would have made a real difference in the outcome. The only thing that would have had a major impact was if we all targeted Irontooth at the start (somehow knowing exactly where he was) and focused our At-will powers on him till he was bloodied (knowing to save our high impacts for this moment), then threw out the encounter and daily powers to finish him off. Not having read the module, were there sources of information available in town that would provide any clues or information about Irontooth's capabilities? We interrogated a kobold and found out that they had a leader named Irontooth who was "not a kobold" and that he scared the kobolds but thats it. Was there something in town that could provide info about what Irontooth could do that we just missed? If not, then aside from using metagame knowledge, the same thing will happen to the next group of PC's. Unless the next party "knows" where Irontooth is at the start of the encounter and exactly how to target him, and to save big powers till the bloodied stage the same thing is likely to happen. This is why the adventure reminds me so much of a videogame. Its designed so that you need to die a few times to learn the boss fight. In a video game its expected that this kind of stuff happens but in a tabletop rpg it just ruins continuity.</blockquote>

Verification