Shrieking Terror - CR too low?

[moritheil]

Excuse me, please, while I go look at this spell again. Sounds like a must-have. Then again, if it's Cleric only, that's bad, because there's only one PC cleric in the whole campaign world, and no abundance of NPC clerics, either.

I, personally, would say that this is your problem. An absence of clerics usually leads to deaths in the party, regardless of what pre-epic level the campaign is at.

My player group started out with 10 assorted characters and 1 cleric. They got so worried that 2-3 of them rerolled as clerics, because they were certain they would get massacred otherwise. It worked for a while, then, 2 of the 4 clerics left, and soon after we had multiple deaths in what was to be a routine fight.

 

[Arbiter of Wyrms]

Between psions, druids, and other, incedental healers, not to mention a fairly liberal policy on natural healing, hit point loss is rarely an issue for PCs in this campaign, but just about any spell exclusive to a class other than druid generally doesn't see use in my campaign.

(There are a handful of fairly adroit wizards, too, and a whole slew of PC rangers, but only one or two PC bards, one or two sorcerers, two PC paladins, and no PC warlocks, or shugenja.)

 

[DungeonMaster]

Heroes feast is a good spell, but it doesn't balance this monster.

So um, why didn't you coup-de-grace them all again?

 

[the Jester]

...I suppose that Heroes' Feast isn't broken, but playing for as long as I have and neglecting it all this time indicates that I might very well be broken (in an entirely different sense).

Duct tape. Fixes everything.

 

[Arbiter of Wyrms]

Heroes feast is a good spell, but it doesn't balance this monster.

So um, why didn't you coup-de-grace them all again?

Honestly, two reasons not to coup de grace:

1. I didn't think of it. We hadn't played for months and it just never occurred to me.

2. (More Importantly) I just wanted a relaxing evening of fun with my wife. Killing off one of her favorite characters, and another character she had just spent 4 hours putting together in the very first encounter of the evening would not have yielded an evening which was fun or relaxing. Had I coup de graced these characters, I would have been hospitalized, at best, or, at worst, divorced. Imagine my poor wife in jail for Murder 2 or Assault on a Spouse or Cohabitant, trying to explain to other inmates that she murderered and/or mutilated her husband because he threw together an adventure at the last minute and didn't examine the CR closely enough.

 

[jgsugden]

Yes, it was too hard.

I suggest more preparation before sessions. Know your party's saves, AC and other limitations. Don't put in anything that will be an autokill.

This is sometimes hard to do. In one game I run, there is a PC with a will save of 17 and another with a will save of 2. If I put a DC22 will save effect into the game, it is a breeze for one PC and almost a sure fire failure for the other PC. This makes it hard to plan adventures where the low will save PC won't be knocked out of action every time they find a spellcaster. I have to configure battles so that he is an unlikely target for will save effects (though he still manages to get nailed in a bunch of them). Right now, his party is fighting their way through an illithid lair ...

Heroe's feast is very useful, but not overpowered. How much does it help you against a Cloud Giant? Not much at all. About like an aid spell. It makes cleaning out a wyvern lair a lot easier, but has only a minimal effect if there is no poison or fear going on.

 

[jgsugden]

Double post

 

[Nail]

This is sometimes hard to do.

Hah!

Understatement. Big time.......


.......my poor, "diverse Fort saves" group of PCs........

 

[Arnwyn]

I, personally, would say that this is your problem. An absence of clerics usually leads to deaths in the party, regardless of what pre-epic level the campaign is at.

I agree with this - the lack of clerics is a significant problem.

And "hit point loss" won't be what's doing the killing at higher levels.

 

[Arbiter of Wyrms]

I'm not going to tell my players "Well, you're all gonna die if somebody doesn't play a cleric, so one of you probably ought to do that." Nobody wants to give up their neato character concept to play the pill-rolling support character. I'm not saying that's what it has to be, only that that's what my players seem to envision. The group I'm running right now is the first one with a PC cleric in a long time. The player hadn't played since 1e, and then only briefly, and I told him to come up with a concept he wanted to play and that we'd figure out together how to make it work with the 3rd Edition rules. The concept he came back with was this:

I want to play a priest, 'cause I've never gotten to play one before, but I really want to play an elf, too. Is there a way I can play, like an elf/priest thing, somehow? He said it like it was some super-powered gestalt character. Needless to say, he's really happy with his character.

I do try to encourage the players to sit down together for character creation, and instead of building four PCs, to build one party, with all of the requisite parts. I've played in one group where we did this, and it worked out unbelievably well. They refuse to do it.

I hate the idea of taking off the kid-gloves and just killing PCs, but I'm afraid that's what's going to have to happen.

I have a favorite DMPC that I confessed to recently in another thread. I'm not the only one who feels attached to this character. I think that I'm going to have to put the PCs into a situation where a cleric could have saved them and take my DMPC along for the ride and let him get killed off because they didn't have a cleric.

Maybe first I'll send along an NPC cleric with the party as a support character and then just let them mop the floor with everything they meet. I want to make sure, though, that they get to see just how much difference the cleric makes. If the cleric's buff only gives them a +1 to attacks, I want to make sure that they consistently hit the bad guys by as small a margin as possible.

I think that I'm going to have to have the player with the cleric PC over to the house to help him pick out the best spells. They're only 2nd or 3rd level, so it shouldn't be hard, but I want to start him off right and show him how to be the party's backbone.