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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SabreCat" data-source="post: 5468062" data-attributes="member: 76245">Scenario: Escape from Carceri, Dune Style[sblock]XP Encounter Difficulty: Level + 2 strictly by the numbers. 6-character party of 14th level characters, some 8650 XP when all correctly totaled up.Brief summary: Tethered to a battlemap-sized Purple Worm, the heroes fight critters birthed from pustules growing on its back.Area setup: The worm is drawn in colored Sharpie on a sheet of 1-inch gridded paper, about 30 squares long and 7 squares wide. The characters, thrown into Carceri after defeat at the hands of their nemesis, have harnessed this abomination (bit of a fluff rewrite there, heh) from the spawning grounds of Agathys to make their escape. Before the encounter begins, each player gets to place the spike to which their character is tethered, and decide how many squares of slack to give the cord running between the spike and the PC.During the fight, no PC can move farther away from their spike than the length of their tether. A minor action adds or subtracts 1 square of slack. At the top of each round after the first, I roll 1d6 to see how the worm behaves:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">High speed. At the end of each character’s turn, they slide toward the back of the worm until they reach the end of their tie line. A Moderate Acrobatics check negates this forced movement. (First round it's this without rolling.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Moderate speed. As high speed, but the difficulty is Easy.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Whip to the left. As high speed, but characters slide diagonally right-back instead of straight back.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Whip to the right. As high speed, but characters slide diagonally left-back instead of straight back.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Sudden stop. All characters immediately slide toward the front of the worm until they reach the end of their tie line. A Moderate Acrobatics check negates this forced movement. Characters may move freely to the extent of their tie lines this round, no slide.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Violent thrashing. Each character is randomly subjected to “whip to the left” or “whip to the right”. In addition, all characters must immediately make a Moderate Acrobatics check or fall prone.</li> </ol>Enemies:At the top of rounds 1 and 2, roll 1d8 and add this many Abominate Pustules (14 Minion Brute) to the map.At the top of rounds 3 and 4, roll 1d4 instead.At the top of round 3, add a Pod Demon (15 Elite Artillery) to the map.Nothing special happens in rounds 5 or 6.After Round 6, the worm crashes into its destination and the fight ends.Enemy setup: Pustules don't attack the first round they're in play, they just grow. On their second turn, they explode, making a close burst 1 attack and becoming either a Neogi Spawn Swarm or a Stirge Suckerling Swarm (both 10 Brute), determined randomly.How it went: Most of the party (Rogue, Warlock, Wizard, and one Paladin) spaces out evenly along the length of the worm, choosing 3 squares of slack. The cowardly Bard|Psion puts himself at the very rear with a single square of slack. The second Paladin puts herself 2/3 of the way back with a 15 (!!) square lead. The group debates briefly whether they have that much chain, but I allow it. More rope to hang herself with, really: she flies to the back of the worm and has to make a saving throw to avoid falling off (she succeeds). Over the course of the battle, there's a variety of successes and failures on the Acrobatics checks, and some times when the players decide tactically not to try, to get free movement without opportunity attacks! The Paladin with the unwise tether choices has to make several saves vs. falling; she succeeds on one only by dint of Heroic Effort, and the last one she fails, meaning she's dangling off the side when the worm crashes (I give her single-target limited damage for the road rash). Unfortunately, the two most interesting worm movement results (5 and 6) never come up.Three Neogi Spawn Swarms end up being created from the pustules; the PCs pick the rest off before they burst. The Pod Demon is unpleasant, but takes an enormous amount of damage from the Warlock when he manages to bloody her: she has a Ring of Fury and a Backlash Tattoo, meaning three Eldritch Blasts in counterattack, one of which crits. So he doesn't last to round 6. Two swarms remain standing when the fight ends.Actual Difficulty: More like even-level. Given they had no real attacks, the Pustules gave way more XP than they were worth (I should have given them a damaging aura or something). The party took a fair amount of damage, with about half the party staying bloodied for a while and the Paladin closer to the front nearly going to 0 but not quite getting there, but there was no danger of defeat.How well did it work(on a scale of 1-10):8! We had loads of fun (I even played a track from Shadow of the Colossus when we started, hehe)--but as mentioned, the pustules needed to be more interesting. And to make all the cool worm-movement effects come into play, I should have stepped through them round by round rather than rolling them randomly.[/sblock]</blockquote>

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