Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Faolyn" data-source="post: 8855103" data-attributes="member: 6915329">Sure. Of course, back then, Ravenloft was literally a "weekend in hell." You played an adventure there and then went back home. You'll note that nearly every single spell that "doesn't work" is one that allows you to teleport or scry outside of Ravenloft, and "screws you over" is a 1-2% chance of having the Dark Powers notice you. Also? Many of the spells that worked weirdly in the Black Box set were removed from the altered spells list in Domains of Dread--because by that time, the game had changed from weekend in hell to a setting you could be native to and have an entire campaign in.I hadn't read Feast of Goblyns before because I generally don't use pre-written adventures (I have rewritten the heck out of CoS, which is the only RL adventure I've ever bought). So I'm not going to defend it if it was a badly-written module. That being said...This is, indeed, all bad DM stuff. It's bad DM stuff that may be written into the game because there wasn't much in the way of balancing encounters back them, but a sensible DM would read this and realize that it was OP. Of course, since there wasn't much balance back then, it's quite likely that these level 4-7 players have several magic items. There was no magic item budget then, only warnings about not going Monty Haul. Also, as a note, I looked up the adventure. Wolfweres and a greater wolfweres were on an optional encounter table with a note saying that the encounters weren't necessary and were to be used primarily for flavor:In fact, the adventure goes on to say that they are optional encounters and not random encounters. A DM has to actively choose to put one in the game. They can't hide behind "it's a random encounter table, I had to roll on it."FoG also has this note:Emphasis mine. So right away, the game makes it pretty easy to let the PCs be properly armed against wolfweres. The DM has to make the conscious decision to have the PCs be useless against wolfweres. The game also states that if your PCs are weak/low-level, then you can use werewolves in place of wolfweres and standard wolves in place of dire wolves (and conversely, if your PCs are higher level, to substitute loup-garou and greater wolfweres in place of regular werewolves and wolfweres). There are a lot of examples like that in the book. "Your PCs encounter the master of the wolves. He can be a werewolf or wolfwere if you desire." Or he can be a normal person.What this means is, if you played in this game and were killed or almost killed by an OP random encounter, then that indicates that the DM wanted to put you through a meat grinder, rather than actually produce a horror game. Perhaps this will surprise you, but in the close to two decades I've run Ravenloft, I've had three PC deaths, and two of them were because the players wanted their character to die (one person had to leave the game entirely; another player didn't like her character). Only one of the deaths was in combat--and it was a boss fight, in 5e.</blockquote>

Verification