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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6469679" data-attributes="member: 82106">Right, we finally finished mopping up Phandelver in the 5e game my sister is now running, and the very last action in the whole module was running into the wraith. Our cleric turned it twice and we used the time to bomb it with ranged attacks each time, so we pretty well maximized what our 3rd level party of 5 could do to the thing, but it still caught up to us (I guess they have real fast movement, and of course can just go through any obstacle). The wraith came for the cleric, hit, instantly knocked the character from 100% hit points to below 0 and then apparently they kill you outright with a single save, so the character was insta-ganked with a single hit by a monster that there was just literally no escaping (and for which we had no foreshadowing, though we probably would have still attacked it if we'd known). Its not a big deal, character's die. OTOH it seemed like a somewhat pointless and arbitrary death where the mechanics of the creature and its placement in the module conspired to make it pretty much a gotcha! death trap sort of situation. Once the cleric died we quickly offed the beastly thing, so it really was a pure 'luck of the dice' thing, if she'd made the DC13 CON save she'd have survived.I'll note, I also didn't feel like the fighting of the thing itself was all that dramatic. We didn't have any really clever tactical options, just basic obvious tactics (keep falling back and turning the thing so it stays at range where it couldn't attack us). I hankered for the 4e version of wraiths, which when I sprung them on a 5th level party were QUITE memorable. Honestly though I still go back to the writing of the module. The SOD effect would have been a lot more interesting and dramatic if the wraith had been plot relevant vs being basically just a random room-filler and if we'd been say hunting it and building up tension. Then having the thing swoop in and gank the cleric would have been TERRIFYING and fun. It was OK as is, but it was a waste of a good insta-gank really.</blockquote>

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