The Ogre Killed the Dwarf in 3 Rounds

[gambler1650]

Sounds about the right challenge level to me, if not still a touch too much in favor of the players! My personal mental image of a battle with an ogre and a balanced party of 1st level characters would be something like:

Ogre should be able to beat any single character it faced, with a chance of knocking out all but a fighter in a single round, and possibly outright killing a magic user.

Working together, a party with full resources (magic user and cleric with full array of spells) and using intelligence should probably beat the Ogre pretty easily, but have a few moments of worry.

A party with low resources and/or not working well together could easily see 1-2 characters killed and then the others decide to run away.

 

[B.T.]

So the Ogre with a greatclub doing 2d4+6 damage got angry at the dwarf in the party and only focused on attacking him. With only 20 hit points, the Ogre was able to beat him literally into the ground dead in 3 rounds.

When a character has 20 hit points and a monster can do a maximum of 14 points damage with 1 hit (I'm not even including a critical hit here) the game requires balancing.

I would prefer it if monsters in the game could kill a character in 5 rounds and not 3. If the Ogre did 1d6 damage like the weapons table suggested with a +4strength modifier to hit and to damage, it would have been better.

Take the average likely roll of 4+3=7 and it would take the Ogre at least a round longer to kill the Dwarf.

The Ogre also killed the Wizard Elf in 2 rounds after dispatching the Dwarf.

The point of ogres is that they're big and dangerous to low-level characters. The ogre smacking down the dwarf in three rounds is probably two rounds too many.

 

[Boggs]

So the Ogre with a greatclub doing 2d4+6 damage got angry at the dwarf in the party and only focused on attacking him. With only 20 hit points, the Ogre was able to beat him literally into the ground dead in 3 rounds.

When a character has 20 hit points and a monster can do a maximum of 14 points damage with 1 hit (I'm not even including a critical hit here) the game requires balancing.

I would prefer it if monsters in the game could kill a character in 5 rounds and not 3. If the Ogre did 1d6 damage like the weapons table suggested with a +4strength modifier to hit and to damage, it would have been better.

Take the average likely roll of 4+3=7 and it would take the Ogre at least a round longer to kill the Dwarf.

The Ogre also killed the Wizard Elf in 2 rounds after dispatching the Dwarf.

I think that having the Ogre in there is perfect. We encountered that Ogre also (I was DMing), and the group had little trouble with it.

First of all, the CoC description says right off that it is not a typical balanced 4e adventure and that there will be encounters where the party should recognize eminant death and act accordingly (tactically fight or run) if the DM doesn't intervene in some way.

I thought my group handled it really well. The Wizard kept the ogre frozen in place. the halfling thief would hide around the corner every other turn and pop out using ambusher and sneak attack damage. The dwarf fighter stood at the edge of the ogre's reach and took tank and damage duty while the cleric of moradin stood behind him. The cleric would use defender on the fighter to minimize damage to him and then would step out, swing, and step back behind the fighter. We had 3 players slinging damage at the ogre while it could only swing at the fighter who was defended every time and hardly took any damage at all.

The only time it got scary was near the end of the fight when the wizard finally failed to freeze it in place and the ogre beelined for the wizard. It died the next round however.

It was a very fun encounter.