Originally posted by Pauper:
I played DDEX 3-2 last weekend at GenCon and, while I mentioned in the GenCon blog thread that it was a bad experience, only part of that can be laid at the feet of the module itself. I'd give the module 3 stars out of 5, not because the whole thing was 'meh', but rather because a number of really cool and interesting things were counterbalanced by seemingly thoughless or pointless design choices that undermined the cool stuff. This is a module that could be so much better if the bad stuff were smoothed over or weeded out and the good stuff allowed to shine.
Caveat: I haven't read the module, and am relying on the DM who ran the mod's descriptions of some of the mechanics. It's possible he either misread or misunderstood some of the mechanics, in which case I'll apologize in the sense that the issues are less issues with the module itself and more issues with how obvious how to operate the mechanics are to inexperienced DMs (our DM said this was his first time DMing at GenCon) and/or DMs short of prep time.
Also, last SPOILER WARNING -- if you want to avoid spoilers, stop reading now!
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The module starts off well, with a nice take on the 'you meet in a tavern' trope -- the party is invited to a puppet show in the basement of a tavern outside Hillsfar, and meets their contact there. She informs you that a family of halflings who have helped her faction have disappeared and she'd appreciate you investigating their farmstead.
When you get there, you find a human and his sons, who claim they've lived on the land their whole lives, yet are in the midst of building a log cabin in the shadow of smaller, burned out buildings. A bit of pressure reveals that his brother, a member of the Hillsfar city watch, gave him a tip that the land was available, so you get ready to head off to Hillsfar. Before you get far, though, an elven voice from the brush whispers that she can take you to where she's hidden some of the halflings before they could be captured. If you agree to follow the elf, she leads you to a small village where you're ambushed by a dozen mooks and their leader, as she disappears into the nearby woods.
By the end of the first round, though, you find out the mooks aren't really mooks -- they're likely higher level than your party, with the ability to make two attacks per round and as many or more hit points than your party fighters likely have, plus crossbows that fire bolts coated in sleep poison. Yep, it's the old 'unwinnable fight to capture the party' trope!
I'd like to point out that this is an example of a larger issue pointed out by Sorsohka in another thread(x): a single player who is motivated to do so can troll an entire party, and there isn't a whole lot the rest of the group can do about it. In this case, the adventure designers seemed to want to reward parties that recognized the unwinnable fight and gave in with bonus XP, but our single uncooperative 'chaotic neutral' player refused to give in, costing us both adventuring time and XP. While folks in that other thread point out that a regular game group in a store should be able to deal with such problems on their own, I'll respond that in a convention setting, where players and DMs are likely seeing each other for the first time, such issues are harder to identify in advance, and much more damaging to player experience if not caught and resolved quickly. Handing trollish players the tools they need to troll the adventure (and 5-6 other players' fun) is only useful if you do it quickly enough, and empower the DM to kick the troll out of the group before he ruins the mod. If you're not setting one of these 'troll traps' to make use of it to improve the gaming pool, think very hard about including it in your adventure design.
The tragedy of this encounter is that it's probably unnecessary -- our DM pointed out that our group was the first he'd run all weekend that had any humans in it at all, and even the humans could probably pass themselves off as half-elves or half-orcs in a pinch. Had the initial contact simply pointed out 'we think the halflings were taken and are now sitting in the arena dungeons and we'd like you to go in and confirm this', it's very likely the party would have agreed to go in and be captured in a non-combat encounter, saving time for the more interesting fights later in the mod. As it stands, the module didn't burn any resources (because we had three days to heal up after the fight while we were taken to Hillsfar, and the rules for spellcasting don't require you to re-prepare your spells every day, though most classes actually can even if captured, and even the wizard got her spellbook back the day before the arena fight so she could swap out her own prepared spells). We didn't even lose attunement to our attuned magic items! We did pick up a level of exhaustion for being ill-fed and getting poor sleep on the road, but our captors gave us just enough food and just enough straw in our cell to heal that level the night before the arena fight, so pretty much the only point of the encounter is to provide XP by dropping the leader and then surrendering, neither of which our group did (which was apparently the biggest reason our group earned the minimum XP for the module).
The other possible purpose of the encounter was the betrayal by the elf -- because she's forced into the cell with you right before you begin the big arena fight. If you let her live long enough to tell her sad tale (groups with evil Zhents or Lords Alliance members might not), she'll likely reward you with a magic rapier (or you can probably take it off her corpse). So she's an emotionally manipulative treasure dispenser, and drops the name of a drow who is likely to be an NPC in future adventures so you're less likely (or more likely, depending on what you thought of her) to attack the drow when you finally do meet him.
The arena fight is the highlight of the adventure -- a retelling of a bit of Realmslore in an intriguing setting: a flooded arena with platforms, zip lines, and a giant bell in the center. Plot-device elf finishes her task by diving into the water and revealing that it's filled with ravenous flesh-eating fish who immediately devour her, which is a bit of a downer but hey, ravenous flesh-eating fish in the water! You also end up fighting a bunch of goblins and kobolds who turn out to be halflings dressed in goblin and kobold disguises, so folks with powerful ranged attacks might end up dropping a few before the deception is revealed, which is a nice thing to torment good-aligned players with. For some reason, though, these aren't the halflings you're looking for, as if that detail would be the one that would strain credulity to the breaking point. Good-aligned parties will probably want to help break the halflings out of the arena regardless, so you can either openly defy the leader of Hillsfar or fake the battle so well that you drive the bloodthirsty audience to riot, providing cover for your escape (a legitimately nice option there, especially for parties with high Charisma characters and/or illusion-based characters).
Your escape is interrupted by some demonically-empowered dude and a rematch against some of the guards who ambushed you in the first fight (at least mechanically -- there's no indication they're the same actual guys), and then the adventure is over. Want to figure out where the halflings you're actually looking for are, which was part of your mission to begin with? Well, we can hand-wave that you break them out in the chaos, or we can point out how suicidal it would be to go back into the dungeons in the midst of a riot where being discovered will likely lead to quick execution, given your demonstrated ability to escape the arena, depending on how motivated you are to pursue that line -- there's no bonus reward for doing so or not doing so.
Lastly, and this is something of a nit-pick that won't apply to most groups, the 'flooded arena fight' seemed less special to us, because we'd played the Season 3 Epic the night before where the highlight of the module was...a fight in the flooded Hillsfar arena, though this time set up for a mock naval battle. Running around on platforms and ziplining to other platforms seems a lot cooler when you didn't spend the previous evening taking over a platform full of clockwork armor golems, getting them on your ship floating in the arena, and sending them as your vanguard on an amphibious assault on the next island in the chain. It felt like 'going to the well' once too often.
How to make the module better? Our DM had the first and probably best idea -- tweak the order of the combats. Have the first combat be the arena fight, the second be with the guards as you try to get the halflings you came for out of the arena, and the last combat be the ambush as you're turning in your mission with the rescued halflings -- only instead of an unwinnable fight where your goal is to surrender, it's an unwinnable fight where your goal is to buy time for your faction contact and the halflings to get to safety before you run away yourselves, so you don't actually have to beat your unbeatable opponents to 'win' and even if you're defeated, you can still feel like a hero.
Anyway, that's my $0.02US -- curious to hear how others who played this at GenCon felt about it.
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Pauper
I played DDEX 3-2 last weekend at GenCon and, while I mentioned in the GenCon blog thread that it was a bad experience, only part of that can be laid at the feet of the module itself. I'd give the module 3 stars out of 5, not because the whole thing was 'meh', but rather because a number of really cool and interesting things were counterbalanced by seemingly thoughless or pointless design choices that undermined the cool stuff. This is a module that could be so much better if the bad stuff were smoothed over or weeded out and the good stuff allowed to shine.
Caveat: I haven't read the module, and am relying on the DM who ran the mod's descriptions of some of the mechanics. It's possible he either misread or misunderstood some of the mechanics, in which case I'll apologize in the sense that the issues are less issues with the module itself and more issues with how obvious how to operate the mechanics are to inexperienced DMs (our DM said this was his first time DMing at GenCon) and/or DMs short of prep time.
Also, last SPOILER WARNING -- if you want to avoid spoilers, stop reading now!
.
.
.
.
.
The module starts off well, with a nice take on the 'you meet in a tavern' trope -- the party is invited to a puppet show in the basement of a tavern outside Hillsfar, and meets their contact there. She informs you that a family of halflings who have helped her faction have disappeared and she'd appreciate you investigating their farmstead.
When you get there, you find a human and his sons, who claim they've lived on the land their whole lives, yet are in the midst of building a log cabin in the shadow of smaller, burned out buildings. A bit of pressure reveals that his brother, a member of the Hillsfar city watch, gave him a tip that the land was available, so you get ready to head off to Hillsfar. Before you get far, though, an elven voice from the brush whispers that she can take you to where she's hidden some of the halflings before they could be captured. If you agree to follow the elf, she leads you to a small village where you're ambushed by a dozen mooks and their leader, as she disappears into the nearby woods.
By the end of the first round, though, you find out the mooks aren't really mooks -- they're likely higher level than your party, with the ability to make two attacks per round and as many or more hit points than your party fighters likely have, plus crossbows that fire bolts coated in sleep poison. Yep, it's the old 'unwinnable fight to capture the party' trope!
I'd like to point out that this is an example of a larger issue pointed out by Sorsohka in another thread(x): a single player who is motivated to do so can troll an entire party, and there isn't a whole lot the rest of the group can do about it. In this case, the adventure designers seemed to want to reward parties that recognized the unwinnable fight and gave in with bonus XP, but our single uncooperative 'chaotic neutral' player refused to give in, costing us both adventuring time and XP. While folks in that other thread point out that a regular game group in a store should be able to deal with such problems on their own, I'll respond that in a convention setting, where players and DMs are likely seeing each other for the first time, such issues are harder to identify in advance, and much more damaging to player experience if not caught and resolved quickly. Handing trollish players the tools they need to troll the adventure (and 5-6 other players' fun) is only useful if you do it quickly enough, and empower the DM to kick the troll out of the group before he ruins the mod. If you're not setting one of these 'troll traps' to make use of it to improve the gaming pool, think very hard about including it in your adventure design.
The tragedy of this encounter is that it's probably unnecessary -- our DM pointed out that our group was the first he'd run all weekend that had any humans in it at all, and even the humans could probably pass themselves off as half-elves or half-orcs in a pinch. Had the initial contact simply pointed out 'we think the halflings were taken and are now sitting in the arena dungeons and we'd like you to go in and confirm this', it's very likely the party would have agreed to go in and be captured in a non-combat encounter, saving time for the more interesting fights later in the mod. As it stands, the module didn't burn any resources (because we had three days to heal up after the fight while we were taken to Hillsfar, and the rules for spellcasting don't require you to re-prepare your spells every day, though most classes actually can even if captured, and even the wizard got her spellbook back the day before the arena fight so she could swap out her own prepared spells). We didn't even lose attunement to our attuned magic items! We did pick up a level of exhaustion for being ill-fed and getting poor sleep on the road, but our captors gave us just enough food and just enough straw in our cell to heal that level the night before the arena fight, so pretty much the only point of the encounter is to provide XP by dropping the leader and then surrendering, neither of which our group did (which was apparently the biggest reason our group earned the minimum XP for the module).
The other possible purpose of the encounter was the betrayal by the elf -- because she's forced into the cell with you right before you begin the big arena fight. If you let her live long enough to tell her sad tale (groups with evil Zhents or Lords Alliance members might not), she'll likely reward you with a magic rapier (or you can probably take it off her corpse). So she's an emotionally manipulative treasure dispenser, and drops the name of a drow who is likely to be an NPC in future adventures so you're less likely (or more likely, depending on what you thought of her) to attack the drow when you finally do meet him.
The arena fight is the highlight of the adventure -- a retelling of a bit of Realmslore in an intriguing setting: a flooded arena with platforms, zip lines, and a giant bell in the center. Plot-device elf finishes her task by diving into the water and revealing that it's filled with ravenous flesh-eating fish who immediately devour her, which is a bit of a downer but hey, ravenous flesh-eating fish in the water! You also end up fighting a bunch of goblins and kobolds who turn out to be halflings dressed in goblin and kobold disguises, so folks with powerful ranged attacks might end up dropping a few before the deception is revealed, which is a nice thing to torment good-aligned players with. For some reason, though, these aren't the halflings you're looking for, as if that detail would be the one that would strain credulity to the breaking point. Good-aligned parties will probably want to help break the halflings out of the arena regardless, so you can either openly defy the leader of Hillsfar or fake the battle so well that you drive the bloodthirsty audience to riot, providing cover for your escape (a legitimately nice option there, especially for parties with high Charisma characters and/or illusion-based characters).
Your escape is interrupted by some demonically-empowered dude and a rematch against some of the guards who ambushed you in the first fight (at least mechanically -- there's no indication they're the same actual guys), and then the adventure is over. Want to figure out where the halflings you're actually looking for are, which was part of your mission to begin with? Well, we can hand-wave that you break them out in the chaos, or we can point out how suicidal it would be to go back into the dungeons in the midst of a riot where being discovered will likely lead to quick execution, given your demonstrated ability to escape the arena, depending on how motivated you are to pursue that line -- there's no bonus reward for doing so or not doing so.
Lastly, and this is something of a nit-pick that won't apply to most groups, the 'flooded arena fight' seemed less special to us, because we'd played the Season 3 Epic the night before where the highlight of the module was...a fight in the flooded Hillsfar arena, though this time set up for a mock naval battle. Running around on platforms and ziplining to other platforms seems a lot cooler when you didn't spend the previous evening taking over a platform full of clockwork armor golems, getting them on your ship floating in the arena, and sending them as your vanguard on an amphibious assault on the next island in the chain. It felt like 'going to the well' once too often.
How to make the module better? Our DM had the first and probably best idea -- tweak the order of the combats. Have the first combat be the arena fight, the second be with the guards as you try to get the halflings you came for out of the arena, and the last combat be the ambush as you're turning in your mission with the rescued halflings -- only instead of an unwinnable fight where your goal is to surrender, it's an unwinnable fight where your goal is to buy time for your faction contact and the halflings to get to safety before you run away yourselves, so you don't actually have to beat your unbeatable opponents to 'win' and even if you're defeated, you can still feel like a hero.
Anyway, that's my $0.02US -- curious to hear how others who played this at GenCon felt about it.
--
Pauper
