Terrible experience with Troll Haunt Warrens module

[HP Dreadnought]

So a few days ago I started this thread "monsters not dishing enough damage" because we were breezing through everthing that was thrown at us, using characters that while effective, were not uber-optimized.

As it turns out. . . the monsters aren't the problem. Its the module writers. Richard Baker and Logan Bonner should be ashamed to put their name on this thing. This is the second module that's had the wrong treasure levels in it BTW.

Anyway. . . here is what I was going to post on the other thread, but its really more about this module now.

If you want to read the background, here is the original thread:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/d-d-4th-edition-rules/266165-monsters-not-dishing-enough-damage.html


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OK. . . so after playing today I am ready to change my tune on this issue.

Until now we'd been playing through a module, and the DM had been running things straight out of the book. After discussing the utter lack of challenge over the last few levels, we had the DM go back and repopulate the dungeon - swapping out encounters that looked likely to be ridiculously easy (about 75% of them) and replacing them with equivalent-level/experience encounters of his own devising.

We agreed that he would only use book monsters, and not create any new ones using the monster builder tool through DDI. We wanted to get a feel for whether we really had to make any changes to monster damage or not.

So. . . we played today using the revised encounters. One of the first things he did was eliminate every minion and replace them with equivalent non-minion critters. So. . . in a word. . . the result was we got pwned.

1st encounter of the day was vs. a roper and a teleporting drow artillery chick. The drow couldn't hurt us much, but she kept most of the party out of the fight until the very end with this nasty hole-in-the-sky power. This left me to go pretty much mano-a-rocko with the roper. . . while he had be grabbed and weakened.

I wouldn't say we were seriously threatened in terms of losing people. . . but we burned through a TON of resources before we were able to put them both down. (Level +1)

At that point (since we were not fresh when we started the session) we were OUT. . . of daileys, nearly out of surges. . . and just in general having a bad day. But. . . due to storyline issues, we were on a deadline, and were pretty sure we had only one room left. So we pressed on.

. . . and got creamed by the denizens of the next room. Lots of nasty artillery hurling lighting bolts and doing area damage, and a grell in the back. . . plus some particularly tough grimlocks up front to keep us busy.

After about 3 rounds of getting plastered and the cleric getting dropped, I called for a general retreat. We attempted a fighting withdrawal, trying to extricate everybody from the room. I was doing a lot of pulling critters off other people so they could get out w/o drawing AoOs, since they just couldn't take them. I'm the fighter, so that meant it was my responsibility to get everyone out and be the last out of the room. The last round or two it looked very likely that I would manage to get everyone out, but get killed in the process. Fortunately, some dice fell my way and I was able to escape along with the rest of the group.

So. . . headed back to town. Got in a full rest. . . ahhh. . .everything was back where it should be and we were ready to take on anything. . . we thought.

During our journey, ran into two trolls and three winter wolves. . . SEVERELY underestimated this fight. We'd been creaming trolls and their allies up to that point without breaking a sweat, so we were assuming more of the same. Wrong. . .

Trolls were using domination powers against me, the paladin, and the ranger. Very bad news. And we REALLY underestimated how tough the winter wolves were. Between their breath weapon, and their "cold burst" powers. . . 30 - 50 points in area damage EACH was fairly typical for them. . . and they had north of 200 hit points apiece.

But because we were expecting an easy time of it, and a big fight back at town, we didn't uncork a lot of our nastiest stuff until it started to be too late in the fight. Everybody in the party except me and the cleric went down during the fight. . . sometimes 2 or 3 times. Both the warlord, and the paladin got to the point of having failed 2 of 3 death saves!

I think I must have taken in the neighborhood of 300 - 400 damage in that fight. At least twice, maybe three times I was down to about 10 hp (out of my 121). So this one was partly our fault, because we didn't start breaking out the big guns until too late. . . but even so. . . we got schooled. (Level +3)

So. . . short answer is. . . if this is the future of encounters for us. . . I am ready to eat my words. Its not the monsters that are the problem, its the module writers who don't have a clue what they are doing.

Did we mention that the DM already had to go back and re-do treasure for the entire module because we discovered we were only getting a fraction of what the book said we should be?

So. . . I'd say if you buy a wizards module. . . be prepared to do a lot of work to get it to where it needs to be. This is ridiculous from my point of view, given how much of DMing is so clearly spelled out and not left to judgement/experience these days. Wizards really needs to get their act together on modules.

We are playing King of the Troll Haunt Warrens for the curious.

 

[f.e.n]

We actually had this adventure cut short for the very same reasons. It wasn't fun for the p.c's or the d.m the way it was written and rather than spend time attempting to balance encounters our dm (first time 4e dming) simply quickened the whole thing and gave up the reigns to play a p.c. And, much like your un-altered encounters, we smashed face all the way through.

Not to say we didn't have a blast playing through it, or that it had one of the most epic endings to a campaign we could possibly have, it was sad that it was written so poorly (encounter challenging-wise)

Most d.m's who buy pre-writtens know what they are purchasing. A shell of a campaign that needs to be molded into something fun for everyone. If you're not modding from the beginning, you run into all kinds of problems.

At paragon, there are fights that should be easy and fights that you really have to work for. And going into any fight without resources (dailies etc) can be difficult. Now that you guys got encounters to threatening levels, you can remind your dm that there are encounters in which you should stomp faces in. It's no fun to run through an endless gauntlet of brutal encounters (kinda like h3).

So yeah... We had the same problem. But it's awesome that your dm is trying to do something about it. And it's great that the group mentioned it. Sometimes, players will secretly not be having fun at the table and not tell the dm what's up. As a dm, i hate that. Speak up. Let's change things.

 

[Jhaelen]

Hmm, thanks for the warning. Reading through the module I liked it quite a lot. It's a pity the encounters are messed up like this.

'Fortunately', I have to redesign encounters (and treasure parcels) anyway, since I've got 7-9 players...

 

[WalterKovacs]

A few comments based on my experience DM'ing all the modules up to the end of Trollhaunt:

(a) All the WOTC modules are messed up as far as treasure is concerned (at least from the ones I've seen so far).

(b) The Roper fight, straight out of the book, was extremely difficult for our party, mostly because the party was very melee focused.

(c) The Trolls, on the other hand, were not much of a threat, especially since the party had a fire weapon and picked up the acid weapon, in addition to the wizard having access to fire damage (eventually taking the feat to give cloud of daggers fire damage to be retrained once the trolls were done) and so rarely did a Troll actually get to Regenerate.

Based on the other modules, Trollhaunt was 'as is', quite a lot easier for our group than the earlier stuff. It was a running joke that if a Troll had a name, they wouldn't survive long enough to get an attack off.

Only a few encounters into the Queen's Enclave we experienced a PC death ... so I would say that the high number of Trolls was part of the problem. The PCs were already very good at tactics, and facing Trolls constantly can be a bit too easy. When you have countermeasures in place, their survivability goes away, which makes them generally useless as brutes.

 

[Obryn]

We're having a very good time with Trollhaunt so far, but I've been upping the stakes by keeping my party from taking extended rests. I've also been pretty ruthless with focus-firing on soft targets, so there's that too.

About the only insanely easy fight they've had has been versus the black dragon. On the other side of the spectrum, the big Raid sequence was pretty stellar, and I had several PCs out of healing surges by the end.

But yeah... I never run WotC modules out of the book anymore. I always, always modify them to make them more interesting, give the PCs more hooks, and modify the fights to make them harder. I also occasionally do a treasure correction so that the party at least has Big 3 items somewhere around their level.

-O

 

[OchreJelly]

I ran this adventure also. In general, I would agree that unmodified encounters were pretty easy for the PCs. The dragon encounter was a joke. It was a complete lockdown-fest. I am a bit puzzled by the OP's note regarding minions. I don't have the adventure in front of me, but I honestly don't remember there being that many minion encounters.

All that being said, there were parts of the adventure that were pretty challenging. Here are some of my notes, which may help others run this:

*SPOILERS*
- If it looks easy, then make it really easy. We have a time contraint of 3-4 hours of play-time. Sometimes it's ok for the PCs to have a really easy encounter, and if it looks easy, you may as well turn it into a fast encounter. Cut back on the number of trolls from some of the more standard encounter areas.
- modify the trolls. There are so many trolls or warren trolls in this adventure, that it can get dry pretty quickly. This was my first field test of the monster creator, and man did it work out well. I changed up so many of the trolls with weird variants that it didn't get dull seeing another troll. Plus it's fun to plug in your own creations!
- Make edits. Again, because we do 3-4 hour sessions, I like things to move along. Therefore I completely cut some rooms from the adventure. That helps cut down on feeling like they are stuck in the Warren forever.
- Punch-up some key encounters. If they look interesting, make them more interesting. The ones I enhanced were the forge, the hag room, and the raid encounters. In hindsight I wish I punched-up the dragon encounter more, because it was sort of a let down.
- Change up Skalmad. I mean they fight this guy 3 times! I gave him some crazy abilities, especially in his final form.

 

[Destil]

I've read that you actually end up very very over the GP recommendations at the end: http://www.enworld.org/forum/d-d-4th-edition-rules/265721-platinum-pieces-trollhaunt.html

Sounds like the designers may have forgotten what PP are worth these days...

 

[Jhaelen]

Sounds like the designers may have forgotten what PP are worth these days...

They're not the only ones...

I found this especially confusing since I banned platinum pieces in my campaign. Instead I've been using conversion rates of 100 cp = 1 sp and 100 sp = 1 gp.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I have an on again off again game running the whole story h1-e3...next week we start e2. So far I have found the following about the mods (If you want mor einfo just ask)

H1...has spike of encounter...2 or 3 really OMG encounters with alot of nothing major inbetween, as the first mod though I rate it 7 out of 10 (special points given for first try)

H2... is pretty good challenge wise, and has a nice story. The problem I have is it is way too easy to miss the story until the final fight. all in all 5/10

H3... god it was soooo boaring. this is my fault I knew going in it was a mega dungeon andd we (as a group) don't like that style so I skip ratein it do to prejudice...

P1.... the worst mod. Infact they seam to build worse as they go from h1...the fights are easy (way too many level 9 brutes in an 11 or 12th lelvel game. I have to say though I have trie over and over agian, but trolls just are not very scary in 4e. I think the MM1 guy who made trolls are to blame though. It took 4 extended rest to make it through here, and the last fight was single digite rounds long... -2/10

P2 Like h2 it has a great story but it is too easy to skip the story...I feel it has heart though, and good challenging encounter...6/10

P3 like h3 (notice a pattern) it feels mega dungeon like...but it altest was fun...5/10

 

[Obryn]

I decided to experiment, and up the stakes a bit after reading this thread, to pre-empt future problems.

So, I've been mixing in various types of trolls in place of the ubiquitous Warren Trolls.

* In the later dungeon, I'm replacing many Warren Trolls with Bladerager Trolls. They deal a bit more damage, but their low attack bonuses are a pain.

* I replaced 3 Warren Trolls with 1 up-leveled (to 13th) Two-Headed Troll. 300+ HPs or no, he still died way too fast.

* I've added some Warden powers to Skalmad II. Namely, Font of Life, the Warden marking power, and the Warden Immediate Interrupt. And changed his basic melee attack to ... heck, one of the At-Wills that gives him temp HPs. I've also - and I think this might be the most critical thing I've done - replaced one of his boring Warren Trolls with a Troll Witch, which I think will massively change up that fight.

* I plan on modifying Skalmad III as well, when it's time, and maybe making some Cauldron-Born minions spring forth every round.


Mostly, though, I think it's the trolls' to-hit bonuses and abysmal defenses that are causing the biggest problems. I have a Swordmage and an Avenger with 30 and 31 ACs, so a +15 to attacks just doesn't cut it. (Also, the Swordmage is a Fire Genasi, so the trolls basically never get to regenerate.) I've found the Nothics extremely effective, though, and hope to include more of them down the road.

-O