Poll: Irontooth Total Player Kill

[Nonalla]

I ran the kobold lair with only 4 players (elf ranger, human paladin, human wiz, tiefling cleric), and considering how badly they were doing with the kobold road encounters I figured it was a definite wipe. However, prior to the session I spent a bit of time emphasizing that teamwork and tactical movement were so important to 4e, I guess it sunk in. They used the ranger's stealth to scout the outside of the lair (risky) and were able to kill the slinger and dragonshield before they could act by using a surprise round and winning initiative. They demolished the outside kobolds in 3 rounds, and stealthed in for another surprise round.

Even still, Irontooth nearly killed them all. The paladin was tanking like a pro, and the ranger was using his elven racial to shift through the difficult terrain of the waterfall using nimble strike to basically make himself untargettable (I ruled the waterfall blocked line of effect). The wyrmpriest took heavy damage early and retreated to a corner, and only had a clear shot at the cleric who "tanked" the fireballs with the tiefling racial resistance. All in all, it was very close. They missed with all their dailies, sadly, and had to chip away with at wills and burn a couple healpots I let them buy before leaving town on the paladin.

 

[Nifft]

Think Irontooth is tough? I think we're going to start seeing a lot of threads about the gelatinous cube soon.

We only fought one Cube, and it was a Solo. (I could tell by the two Action Points it spent.) It was in

Spoiler

a water-filled fungal room

.

Maybe that's not the one you mean?

Cheers, -- N

 

[howandwhy99]

Checking the stats, does this guy look like a Troll to anyone else? The high HPs and regeneration whenever bloodied. Plus he gets Barbarian-like bonuses when bloodied too. With 3-digit HP just hacking him down to zero would be a trial, but every round regeneration must just make this guy last interminably.

 

[Vayden]

I've run the Irontooth encounter twice now - once w/ 5 pcs (the pre-gens) and once with 4. I pulled the dragonshields out for the 4 pcs to scale it back. Each time the party made it through - the first group didn't have very good tactics, so 2 of them died; the second group had rock-solid tactics and made it through without anyone even dropping, though they all had single-digit hp at the end. Irontooth actually falls pretty quickly if the whole group concentrates fire on him.

 

[frankthedm]

That many people have Netflix now?

thanks to gas prices, movie store rentals could be free and netflix would still be cheaper for a lot of folks.

As long as you cycle movies once a week, 3 at a time / $20 month is less than $2 a rental. And if you have esoteric tastes, that is a steal for the selection they have.

 

[drscott46]

I admit that I, as DM, took a couple of preventive steps- such as making sure the PCs were rested and had all their powers after the first half of the encounter in the woods. At level 1, the five of them took everything out with a couple of PCs going down. Nobody out-and-out died, though.

It seems like a wise strategy in these types of battles to take out the minion-types first- it clears the way to surround the bigger guys and prevents flanking, etc. Sort of the reverse of what you would think.

 

[Wolfwood2]

Spoilers!

Think Irontooth is tough? I think we're going to start seeing a lot of threads about the gelatinous cube soon. My party survived it only because they fought it solo--through luck and a bit of caution they didn't activate the rest of the encounter until after the GC was down. If they'd had to deal with the entire encounter at once--especially if they'd been surprised by the GC at their rear--it would definitely have been a TPK.

DM tip: Leave your GC mini in the box and just use a 2x2 dungeon tile. My characters were in and out of that thing so many times I would have worn my fingers down opening and closing the mini. . . .

Since you've run that section of Shadowfell, maybe you could give me some advice. What motivation is there for the party to actually explore that part of the first level of the Keep? Just hope they blindly stumble there while looking for the way to level 2?

I am thinking of putting some sort of objective there, but I'm not sure what.

 

[vazanar]

I ran the encounter with 4 players all pregens (dwarf fighter, halfling rogue, dragonborn paly, and tielfling warlord). I think I removed a skirmisher. By the third round they had finished most of the first batch (dbreath is nice). Paly and rogue took the wyrm priest down fast w action points. Then Irontooth got pretty smashed. The Warlord's daily means just about every attack is a hit. Add in the +2 to hit and +4 to damage when action points are used they clean a lot of monsters out. The paly went down in the end. The rest were in pretty good shape.

 

[silentounce]

DM tip: Leave your GC mini in the box and just use a 2x2 dungeon tile. My characters were in and out of that thing so many times I would have worn my fingers down opening and closing the mini. . . .

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Once the PCs become aware of it they should know where it is? And once they take damage they should know what's up. Were you taking HP from them without telling them or something? Or was it that they kept failing perception checks? Oh, I think I get it now. I don't have the mini so maybe that's what confused me.

We only fought one Cube, and it was a Solo. (I could tell by the two Action Points it spent.) It was in

Spoiler

a water-filled fungal room

.

Maybe that's not the one you mean?

Cheers, -- N

No, it's not. What you fought was a

Spoiler

Blue Slime, Level 3 Solo Brute

. The Cube is

Spoiler

in the second level of the dungeon and is a Level 5 Elite Brute. The encounter also contains a few other monsters

.

Since you've run that section of Shadowfell, maybe you could give me some advice. What motivation is there for the party to actually explore that part of the first level of the Keep? Just hope they blindly stumble there while looking for the way to level 2?

I am thinking of putting some sort of objective there, but I'm not sure what.

As I mentioned above,

Spoiler

the cube encounter is on level 2 of the keep, the slime encounter is on level 1

. If you don't have the kind of players that have to explore every nook and cranny and you really want to have them face such an encounter, you could always have it block their way on the way out. Granted, it wouldn't be in its normal section, but you can easily come for a reason for why it got out. Unless of course, you are talking about the monster on level 1. I mean, if the PCs don't want to fully explore then they just won't benefit from that XP or treasure. You could also have one of the combatants from an early fight run away to those areas. A lot of PCs like chasing bad guys down. What about Splug? Maybe he can try to lead them there as part of his betrayal. Let the monster take them out and he could get their stuff. Or, if you don't want him to betray them, you could have him tell them about those monsters and that the other goblins rumored that they had "rooms full of treasure!" but that they were too cowardly to try and get to it. Alternately, the PCs could find a note mentioning the problems that the normal denizens of the keep have been having with said monsters, etc.

 

[AGFlynn]

My players fought the Irontooth encounter yesterday (4 pre-gens - Dragonborn Paladin, Tiefling Warlord, Halfling Rogue and Half-Elf Cleric - and one Human Infernal Pact Warlock). They managed to wipe the outside forces with no problem at all. Things went well against the first wave, with the skirmishers being a nuisance, but then the second wave hit, and the characters had a hard time dealing with the dragonshields, the wyrmpriest, and Irontooth.

They survived because the warlord used his daily to grant a +5 to hit against Irontooth, and because the bloodied Irontooth rolled two 1s in a row with his action point double attacks. However, the crit that came right after knocked the Tiefling Warlord out of play. The Half-Elf Cleric fell soon after. Their salvation came when the Halfling scored a crit on a backstab against Irontooth, taking him down.

The rest of the battle wasn't so easy, though, with the wyrmpriest's energy orb attacks being quite a hassle. The Half-Elf Cleric died, driving home their first lesson to pay attention to death saving throws, and not leave it until the last minute to tend to a fallen comrade (when they might fail a healing check as well).

Feh. The warlock nuking everything that moved from orbit gets no mention? Even after dishing out oodles of pain? Disintegrating the fleeing wyrmpriest? Whadda I gotta do to impress ya, T?

Seriously nasty encounter. Our tactics weren't all that great and we seemed to waffle on who focus on too much.