Speaker in dreams advice

[DWARF]

My advice for playing this module, make sure you have munchkins!
My group brought their non-optimized roleplay heavy characters into the module, as run by a fairly new DM, but still. It was an almost TPK bu the end of the bookshop.

Our only recourse, new characters munchkinning like nobidies business. Half-Orc fighter with a greataxe and 22 Str, Legolas style archer with 22 Dex, etc, etc...

And we still had trouble with some of those encounters...

 

[D+1]

D+1, I think you can safely assume that anyone who's read thus far is unworried about spoilers .

You can safely assume whatever you like right up until somebody complains. But I was just playing around a bit anyway, trying out the spoiler code. I'd seen it used before but never had any need to use it.

As I said before, although this encounter looked tough on paper, in play it was a cakewalk for my PCs:

And that is The Key - you're providing anecdotal evidence. What happens when the party doesn't HAVE 3D combat capabilities as yours apparantly did? Or simply doesn't have them ready because the encounter along with the preceding one were intended to catch them off guard? Or if, as DWARF mentions was the case, the party are not heavily combat oriented in the first place (especially since the adventure is as much investigation and mystery-solving as it is bloodletting)? Or the DM is operating under the reasonable understanding that the module has proceeded well so far and doesn't see the encounter's high lethality potential?

Speaker is not without it's problems, but it's a useful module, easy to plug into an ongoing campaign, and mostly plays out well. It's just this one encounter that was, IMO, quite stupidly designed. The aims of the encounter can be handled far better with a much lower EL and without the, "There's definitely a small chance the PC's will survive," approach to its design.

When I ran it, I recall that I adjusted the EL down by removing the two rog5/asn1 assassins and then ran it as being a bit of a rushed, disorganized assassination attempt making it actually an easier fight than I had intended. But then the PC's faced the missing two assassins later in a seperate attack and that had the added bonus of making the PC's actually paranoid about being assassinated. They stayed awake and locked in a house for the next day and a half. The purpose of the ambush was thusly accomplished without having run an encounter where the intended goal of the PC's is merely to escape alive. A goal they have to figure out after they're already knee-deep in the fight which is otherwise intended to kill them handily.

 

[Pielorinho]

Fair points, D+1. My advice for folks worried about the encounter is to pace it cheatily; rather than figuring out that BBEG #1 shows up on round one, #2 shows up round two, #3-5 show up round 4, etc., just have additional bad guys start showing up whenever the PCs are starting to get a handle on the situation. This will give you, the DM, better control over the combat, minimizing chances that unlucky dice will kill everyone; it'll also make the PCs wonder just how many bad guys there are, and might freak them out.

Again, I wasn't able to do this when I ran it, due to my flying PCs, but I think it would've resolved the situation well.

Incidentally, about half my group was roleplay-optimized, which led to a few problems. The worst was when the new PC, a priestess of an Aphrodite-like goddess, went alone back to the PCs' HQ. The bad guy sent a couple of barghests to the HQ with instructions to use emotion to cause a mob to attack the PCs (figuring that the PCs might kill the mob and thereby earn the enmity of the town); when this completely non-combat-optimized PC showed up alone, it took all my DM wiles not to have her killed within the first fifteen minutes of her being played. Even so, she got knocked down to 0 str and spent the next session in a coma, and the player went ahead and created another PC .

Daniel