Solo Adventure Scenario in Dungeon!

[Joshua Randall]

Played through it with a half-orc warlord.

I disobeyed Splug's instructions (to use Cringe all the time) in favor of setting up flanks for the tasty +1d6 damage. Plus, he had a higher attack bonus than my character.

My warlord didn't have Commander's Strike, but with it, you could end up with some cool combat interactions using Splug:

Splug's Turn
* Splug: Move into flank, Standard to use Cringe (+2 Splug's defenses, and...)
* Player: ... Free Action Commander's Strike...
* Splug: ... Melee Basic Attack

Player's Turn
* * Player: Standard Action Commander's Strike...
* Splug: ... Melee Basic Attack

Two attacks per round at +10 (including flanking), and 1d8+2 + 1d6 + (your Int) damage. Not bad.

= = =

My chief complaint about the adventure was that the

Spoiler

Wisps

were exceptionally annoying -- the kind of monsters where I wasn't having fun fighting them. Their

Spoiler

insubstantial

ability meant that a series of bad die rolls made it take 9 (!) rounds to kill them in the fight with them and the

Spoiler

Zombie, which died on round 2

.

Also, there's an awful lot of

Spoiler

undead

in this adventure. Seems like characters with anti-

Spoiler

undead

options, such as

Spoiler

Turn Undead, Rebuke Undead, etc.

would have a significant advantage.

 

[Ruined]

I'm going to take a stab at this tonight, probably with an Invoker.

Did anyone enjoy the Choose Your Own Adventure books enough as a kid to try and write your own? It was much more difficult than expected, as I didn't have a computer back in the day. Now I might have the perfect venue!

 

[Derulbaskul]

(snip) Did anyone enjoy the Choose Your Own Adventure books enough as a kid to try and write your own? It was much more difficult than expected, as I didn't have a computer back in the day. Now I might have the perfect venue!

I loved the Fabled Lands books by Dave Morris much more. Your character had six traits (combat, thievery, sanctity et al) as well as defence (armour class) and wounds (hit points). You could own a ship and do trading (very cool) as well as a townhouse where you could store things.

There were six books published out of ten that were planned. Get this: you could go from book to book during the course of your adventures because the books linked into a whole.

I picked up the six books again secondhand only a week ago and am really looking forward to going through them again. There is also a Yahoo group for the books that has legal scans available.

 

[Dausuul]

Well, that was a fun little adventure. The combats weren't too hard - it helped that the dice loved me, I had plenty of AoE goodness to burn down the minions, and my genasi happened to have a very good resistance for the boss fight - but it was definitely entertaining. I especially like the way it gives your skills a workout. I got to use all four of my trained skills, including the social one.

Strong recommendation for anyone about to play it: Print off the map tiles, cut them out, and tape them together before you start. It's far more fun when you can simply slap the map down, place your minis (or tokens, if you haven't got minis) and go; stopping to sketch out the map on a battlemat really kills the excitement.

I would be very interested in any more adventures WotC might have along these lines. I wouldn't say no to a full-length one in book format, either...

My chief complaint about the adventure was that the

Spoiler

Wisps

were exceptionally annoying -- the kind of monsters where I wasn't having fun fighting them. Their

Spoiler

insubstantial

ability meant that a series of bad die rolls made it take 9 (!) rounds to kill them in the fight with them and the

Spoiler

Zombie, which died on round 2

.

Uh, dude, you realize that special ability of theirs is an encounter power, right? They only get to do it once each. After that, you can beat them down just like anything else.

As regards the

Spoiler

undead

, it depends on which way you go. The only ones I fought were the ones in the final battle. Everything else was plants and oozes.

 

[Kzach]

Uh, dude, you realize that special ability of theirs is an encounter power, right? They only get to do it once each. After that, you can beat them down just like anything else.

Every single one of mine passed their check. It was quite annoying

As regards the

Spoiler

undead

, it depends on which way you go. The only ones I fought were the ones in the final battle. Everything else was plants and oozes.

You didn't go up the ladder?

One question for those who have played through it:

Spoiler

What the hell are deathchill wisps? I just assumed it was a typo and used the Tainted Wisps since there was no reference of them in the Compendium.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Uh, dude, you realize that special ability of theirs is an encounter power, right?

*facepalm*

That would certainly make fighting them much easier. Reading comprehension fail on my part.

 

[karlindel]

I played through it as a Dragonborn Cosmic Sorceror, which I think is one of, if not the, best choices to play it with. With plenty of AoE for minion killing, and enemies adjacent to me taking auto-damage at the start of my turn (when in the correct phase), I ended up making it through without spending my daily and with 3 surges to spare.

It reminded me of the Lone Wolf books that I used to read when I was younger. I like that there were a number of options and different paths in the adventure.

My only complaint is that there are a couple of typos (I was misdirected to the wrong spot once, and one pushed me back to an earlier encounter rather than back to the one I had actually come from). Encounter 5 was very odd, as in the encounter section it asks if you have a light it says it doesn't do anything, then as you explore the darkness it asks if you have a light and then you can see. In addition, if you have darkvision, the darkvision doesn't help, but you somehow know that monsters with darkvision would be able to see in it. I also think that the directions for Splug could have been clearer, though. It states that he uses cower whenever he can, but there doesn't seem to be any reason for him to ever not be able to use it. I think it would have been very annoying if I had been playing a leader class.

 

[Joshua Randall]

I've now played it three times, as a warlord, cleric, and psion.

As expected, the cleric's

Spoiler

turn undead

was awesome against certain enemies. In general, having bursts or blasts is very good in this adventure, given the high number of

Spoiler

minions

.

My psion was able to Dishearten (area burst 1 within 10) his way to victory in most encounters, especially with Splug giving me the ability to do that twice per round. Or three times per round with an Action Point.

Also, I am now a huge fan of the psion's Distract power (minor action, Effect: one enemy within 10 grants CA to its next attacker). Using Distract twice per encounter, with the Discipline Adept feat, almost feels like cheating. Free CA + ally who does extra damage with CA = profit!

Speaking of almost cheating, Splug's Cower ability is incredibly powerful. If Cower just granted you a melee or ranged basic attack, it would still be good. The fact that it grants you the use of any at-will power makes it, well, incredibly powerful.

Edit: the "boss monster" can be swingy, because his most powerful attack depends upon you and/or Splug being

Spoiler

immobilized

. If you both

Spoiler

always make your saves against the immoblization as soon as you can

, then the boss can never even target you with his powerful attack.

 

[Turtlejay]

I played it with my 5 year old daughter. To try to make it as simple as possible, I brought a Dragonborn Dragon Sorcerer. She turned down every name I suggested until I blurted 'Skeletor', so he and Slug (she never got his name right, I stopped trying) went camping together.

As an intro to folks totally unfamiliar with 4e, and gaming (and driving, and math, and. . .) it works pretty well if you change things on the fly a little. Occasionally it will give you some options as to what your next step is. Twice I ran into the weirdness where you were asked to make the same check twice. I understand that for Arcana, you might be a) detecting the magic, and b) examining the magic, but for a little one-time thing, that level of distinction is not really needed.

Sorcerers are great, they can get their striker bonus damage even on granted attacks, and she managed to Encounter+Breath+AP At-Will= kill a guy in one round. Pretty cool since it was to save Slug. She got really attatched to him, and almost always used her free actions to get him out of a bind.

It was also interesting to see how she acted. Since Skeletor's mini looked like a bad guy (a Draconian, I think) she sometimes made him do bad things. At one point, out of magic potions, she tried lying to Slug to get his potion. When she failed, and Slug got offended, I had her explain to him why she had done it. The resulting +1000 bonus to her Diplomacy check won her the potion.

Her disappointments would be:
- No Dragon. She was playing Dungeons and Dragons with daddy. Where was the Dragon?
- We skipped a 'level'. Not to spoil anything, but there is a chance you will not do every encounter. She noticed. After we finished she wanted to go and clear it out.
- Missing three or four times in a row on the final guy stinks. Even worse when he keeps hitting, and you are out of Magic Potions, and Slug is also out. Luckily, he had a *hidden* potion he was saving for a special moment (the second DM fudge of the night).
- Daddy wouldn't keep playing when we were finished.

Overall it was a win. It would be cool to see some more of these. The balance was pretty spot on, since Skeletor was out of surges when we finished. Slug had a few left. Since he mostly cowered behind Skeletor and asked him for help, that fits.

Jay

 

[Iron Sky]

Jay, that's awesome that your daughter played! Man, when I was a kid I would have killed to play DnD (had battles between my legos, GI Joes, drew pictures of big battles instead, and played boardgames like Risk with myself instead).

When I was in 5th grade, my teacher had this big board on the back wall of a fantasy kingdom. Each week, if you got an A on the weekly spelling test, you got to roll the dice and move your "character" down the path, fighting monsters, getting treasure, and running into other encounters. I'm pretty sure my teacher must have been a DnD player now, but back then I didn't even know it existed!


I just ran through the encounter with the only level 1 character I had premade in the Character Builder: a Shadar-kai Wizard. Took on the first fight without taking any damage, then failed the DC5 Athletics check and fell in. My wizard lost 3 surges in that fight(including the falling damage), then another in the next fight.

Splug didn't take any damage at all 'till the 3rd fight when he died (random monster attacks all ended up targetting me, not Splug until the 3rd encounter when ALL targetted him). He bled out as I fought off the Root.

Entered fight 4 with no surges and 8hp left. Died pretty quick, without even getting my daily off since the monsters got their initiative off first.

Was fun, I'll have to make a more soloable character and try again.