Shackled City questions - some possible spoilers

[Sunderstone]

1) Lack of a Rogue is not a good thing in any party.
Besides for the standard trap finding/disarming, a Rogue can also scout ahead at times and inform you of the opposition (at least my groups Rogues always do this). Seems like the group wasnt very concerned with what character classes might be needed when they created them.

2) Being able to work together is a must in any campaign, and as you noted, most people say the Shackled City is a difficult campaign. This makes teamwork even more vital.

a)Having a Ranger go off on his own is a definite pre-order for TPK after TPK.
b) Your Wizards seem conjure/summon heavy. Low-Level summons rarely last very long, you might be better off with some usefull AoE based spells until you can memorize a decent amount of spells. Sleep, Color Spray, and Burning Hands have saved my group many times.
c) One dedicated Cleric is a good thing but if he goes down you are in deep pucky. Your archer/healer might help some but having a Rogue or Bard (which you dont ) with Use Magic Device and a spare Wand of Cure **** Wounds in a poke is a godsend. Based on your account, your funds are too low and you may not be able to afford to buy or make such a wand anyway, also not good.

3) Your DM may have pulled a few punches at the end, but his rules will kill your enjoyment more than it is now as the campaign continues. You should talk to him or (sorry to say) Lose him as a DM, and let someone else try to run it. Definately stick with the SC if you can, the campaign is excellent. Good Luck.

On another note, ask your group of players if they are happy with their characters so far. If someone isnt, maybe he can create another character that the party really needs, like a Rogue. I would only do this AFTER talking to your DM about his rules. Making a new character while the DM is still using his rules wont help much.

 

[Saeviomagy]

3) Your DM may have pulled a few punches at the end, but his rules will kill your enjoyment more than it is now as the campaign continues. You should talk to him or (sorry to say) Lose him as a DM, and let someone else try to run it. Definately stick with the SC if you can, the campaign is excellent. Good Luck.

Your DM sounds like he's a bit of an idiot. Really.

Talk to him. Say "Hey - you've had to pull your punches in fights to avoid just wiping us out, haven't you? Did it ever occur to you that charging training dues is crippling us, and that everyone would be having a lot more fun if you just used the rules instead of making stuff up? We'd be able to take these challenges on ourselves and actually feel like we matter, not to mention have a bit more fun with some interesting magical gear. Not to mention the additions to stop us from resting and healing."

You might also try snarky comments about how being stabbed with a dagger (by someone with average strength, but it's still a knife in the arm or whatever - not exactly painless) while casting a spell would only require a DC 11 to DC 19 concentration check, but memorising 1st and 2nd level spells while there's a little bit of noise requires a DC 20. Point out to him that loud howling would be at best a listen DC of -10, meaning that your characters inside a temple stand a good chance of failing to hear him howling at all (at least -15 to listen checks, significantly more because the guy is standing at least 10ft away from the sleeping characters)! Ask him if you can yell loudly during combat to distract enemy casters...

Not to mention that if the guy was out howling all night as well as fighting during the day, he shouldn't have been regaining hitpoints or spells, and should probably be making saves to avoid starting the next day fatigued or exhausted.

 

[farscapesg1]

1) Lack of a Rogue is not a good thing in any party.
Besides for the standard trap finding/disarming, a Rogue can also scout ahead at times and inform you of the opposition (at least my groups Rogues always do this). Seems like the group wasnt very concerned with what character classes might be needed when they created them. .

We originally started the campaign with two warriors, the favored soul, my conjurer, and a psion (kineticist). This was largely due to the DM stressing "play what you want to play, not what you think the group needs." No, the grou wasn't created with the attitude of "what would be best for the group". We were in the process of still looking for more players and assumed they would fill in some gaps. That was our first mistake

2) Being able to work together is a must in any campaign, and as you noted, most people say the Shackled City is a difficult campaign. This makes teamwork even more vital.

a)Having a Ranger go off on his own is a definite pre-order for TPK after TPK.
b) Your Wizards seem conjure/summon heavy. Low-Level summons rarely last very long, you might be better off with some usefull AoE based spells until you can memorize a decent amount of spells. Sleep, Color Spray, and Burning Hands have saved my group many times.
c) One dedicated Cleric is a good thing but if he goes down you are in deep pucky. Your archer/healer might help some but having a Rogue or Bard (which you dont ) with Use Magic Device and a spare Wand of Cure **** Wounds in a poke is a godsend. Based on your account, your funds are too low and you may not be able to afford to buy or make such a wand anyway, also not good.

Yeah, the ranger thing is a big PITA. Things are getting better though with him (except for a few occasions).

I'm not sure about the other wizard. He hasn't been in the group long enough to get a good feel for where he is going. My conjurer has been with the group since the beginning and has honestly saved the party several times with summoning creatures into strategic positions to help out the other characters. Not to mention some pretty heavy hitters with 3rd level spells. Granted, I took the summoner variant from Unearthed Arcana to cast the spells as standard action spells. I also took the regional feat from Dragon to be able to swap any non-conjuration spell for a summoning spell of equal level. I dropped Enchantment and Necromancy spells, and with a 12 AC anything that requires getting close (color spray or burning hands) is very dangerous since the group insists on spreading out instead of trying to stick close to protect the non-melee characters.

The favored soul is actually a very competent healer. In fact, he does a lot more healing than the dwarven cleric (who is more of a war cleric). He has taken a couple feats to enhance his healing ability.

On another note, ask your group of players if they are happy with their characters so far. If someone isnt, maybe he can create another character that the party really needs, like a Rogue. I would only do this AFTER talking to your DM about his rules. Making a new character while the DM is still using his rules wont help much.

Well, I've been thinking about this and actually hoped for at least 1 or 2 character deaths against Drakthar. We've talked about it as a group and everyone realizes that we need a rogue. The problem is that I don't think most of them could play a rogue correctly. A ranger should be able to do a lot of the scouting ahead aspect, but ours has a habit of wanting to take on anything he finds, and worse than that he keeps forgetting to state that he is trying to be stealthy (moving silently and hiding). Heck, he was the one to set off the alarm at the entrance to the dungeon in Drakthar's way.

I already planned on playing a rogue (or rogue/fighter) if my conjurer died, but I've put a lot of work into the character (including a custom prestige class) and would really like to see him continue on.

 

[farscapesg1]

Well, I've talked to DM a little and he hasn't been having much fun as the DM lately either. We may end up scrapping the whole thing and starting the Age of Worms campaign. Part of the problem is the members of our group have finally come to a semi-reliable state, but before now we've had enough players come and go from the campaign that many of the current players don't have a high enough stake in the game. At least that is the DM's view.

I hate to loose my character, but I can always try to resurrect him (r at least the idea) in some future campaign/group.

 

[Sunderstone]

Well, I've talked to DM a little and he hasn't been having much fun as the DM lately either. We may end up scrapping the whole thing and starting the Age of Worms campaign. Part of the problem is the members of our group have finally come to a semi-reliable state, but before now we've had enough players come and go from the campaign that many of the current players don't have a high enough stake in the game. At least that is the DM's view.

I hate to loose my character, but I can always try to resurrect him (r at least the idea) in some future campaign/group.

Sorry to hear that your crew is leaving Cauldron .Good Luck in your next campaign. FWIW, the first Age of Worms addy looks pretty tough as well. Hopefully your party will be more teamwork oriented and balanced this time around.

Are you keeping the same DM for the Age of Worms?
If so, have you talked to him about his rules (if not you may wind up in the same boat again)?

 

[farscapesg1]

Well, he has already said that if we start a new campaign that he will be involved with character creation this time. The whole group will sit down and create characters together, tying their backgrounds to each other and creating a reason for us to decide to take to the adventuring lifestyle as a group. Hopefully this will remove the tendancies of social ineptitude that plagues some of our members.

As to the training, we will see. After discussing this a little on our private messageboards, other members of the group have finally joined the chorus that the training system, for lack of better words, sucks. From a "realistic" standpoint (yeah, like that fits DND) the DM wants to keep it. I think that he needs to either restructure it to cost a lesser amount so it doesn't bite into the character wealth as much, or realize that he will need to supplement the treasure found in any adventures to overcome this huge expense. I guess we will see what happens. I'll probably only be gaming until mid-March before I have to take a short hiatus due to becoming a first-time daddy.

 

[delericho]

Shackled City is very much designed for the 3rd Edition rules as presented in the Core Books.

This is the crux of the problem being encountered by the original poster, I think. My group consisted of 6 characters for most of the campaign (we had 4 to start, then a player dropped out, so each of the remaining 3 players took on a second character. Later, the player who dropped out rejoined the campaign, so there were 7 characters for the last quarter of the campaign).

We stuck to the wealth guidelines almost exactly (largely by chance - the campaign is pretty good in that regard, although I did allow the sale of masterwork and magical items for full, rather than half, value). Since we had more than 4 PCs, the average party level was generally 1 lower than the recommended level in Dungeon (and we used the magazines, not the HC).

We had no problems with excessive lethality, although a couple of the later encounters seemed to be almost guaranteed TPKs as written, due to spellcaster levels on monster spell-like abilities.

It expects PCs to have magic weapons by second (and certainly by third) level.

James, if you're about, can I query this?

A +1 weapon costs upwards of 2,000 gp. Per the DMG, a 2nd level character is likely to have 900 gp, and a 3rd level 2,700 gp. It seems awfully unlikely that even the primary combatant of the group would have a magic weapon by 3rd level (I would have expected magic armour to be more common).

Unfortunately, I don't have the old character sheets from my group, so I can't tell you when they started getting magic weapons. I would be surprised if it was much before 4th level, though.

 

[JoeGKushner]

My group is 4th level after Life's Bazzar and they ain't got squat except some potions. No magic weapons on this bad boys. (That might change after I finish Fane of the Drow mind you...)

 

[farscapesg1]

Life's Bazaar is fine without magical weapons. Our problems in that module were all related to party cohesion and the lack of any trapfinding/scouting abilities.

The first part of Flood season also didn't require any magical items. Tongue-Eater's DR is not that strong that we couldn't get by it without magical items. We postponed the rest of that adventure right after the Inn for Drakthar's Way (since the DM got his hands on the hard back instead of just running it from the magazine).

I honestly think that Drakthar's way is perfectly playable without magical items. However, after our encounter with some wererats, we were under the assumption that we needed silver weapons. When trying to purchase them, we couldn't find anything better than daggers (and maybe one short sword), and the cost for the weapons was quite high (higher than standard book value by 50%). With our already limited funds, we couldn't really afford them and the players didn't want to take "sub-optimal" weapons :\ so we mainly got silver arrows and bolts.

It didn't help that no one could make a knowledge check high enough to know that Vampires were resistant to weapons that were not magical AND silver. We tried some silver arrows without any result, and we even tried enchanting one of the characters weapons with Magic Weapon, but it wasn't silver to begin with so that didn't help either. Of course if we allowed metagaming then we would have known and it would have been much easier to handle

Of course, energy drain adds a whole new level to the game at the moment. Since each Restoration spell only removes one negative level, and each casting costs around 500 gp (280 for the spell + 100 for the material component + additional fees from the church), we are talking about almost 1500 gp for my character alone and at least one other character in the group has negative levels also (our primary fighter). Again, with our limited funds, this option is not going to be possible so we are looking at at least two characters loosing levels from the adventure

 

[James Jacobs]

Actually, you have a 24 hour grace period with negative levels, during which a single restoration removes all negative levels from a single victim. If it's been more than 24 hours and some of those negative levels have "stuck," then restoration will only restore one drained level.

As for PC wealth... A 1st or 2nd level character probably won't have a magic weapon. But by 3rd level, I'd expect one or two magic weapons to be in a party of 4 (when I said "expects PCs to have magic weapons" I should have said "expects some PCs in a party to have a magic weapon").