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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Graf" data-source="post: 4255788" data-attributes="member: 3087">Heh.There are some minor KotS spoilers in the following... I've been circumspect about it and put it in a another spoiler tag... no names of creature types or specific details....[sblock=Success!]I agree. He's definitely a solo. I also agree that he shouldn't be "not challenging" because of our success. The point was to get to him vs. having him slip away, no more no less.As for 2 failures... I don't know. There are a bunch of different ways to look at it.My instinct is to say that DnD only has binary success and failure. The point of the number of successes required vs. failures allowed is to set the difficulty. If the test is supposed to be harder then the number of allowed failures goes down.The published skill test in KotS works like this. You get 4 before you fail x and you get a "success result". Fail and you get a "failure" result. That makes a degree of sense to me. If you've got, say, a 875 xp 4th level solo brute then that'll be pretty tough for 1st or 2nd level characters.If, on top of that, each failure adds a trap... then two failures adds two traps. The cheapest traps (False-Floor Pit and Rockslide) are 100xp... so that'd make the whole encounter 1075 xp. So adding the two traps makes it a 5th level encounter.You can adjust for the presence of the traps of course, by lowering the solo (so it's say 600 xp and the encounter is still  in the 4th level range) but that'd be a bit weird... effectively the more you succeed the stronger the solo creature gets.At the same time I'm open to having the failures mean something and negotiating it in this case. KotS is obviously an introductory adventure, a staged skill test is a natural sort of progression.I'm just suggesting that doing that as a matter of policy could put you in a weird situation. (what if we find Shalmanisar after 3 failures? that'd be around 1175 xp, closer to a 6th level encounter).Just for the record the "it's too dangerous; forced tpk!" encounter everyone is talking about on the 4th ed rules board weights in at a full 1275 xp).[spoiler]Since wotc put that in for first level characters maybe that's the upper range of what they consider acceptable -- of course, it's got some other stuff going on (if people are careful, it's staged... so you don't fight it all at once).[/spoiler][/sblock]</blockquote>

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