Our latest session of the 4E Tomb of Horrors adventure saw us beginning the second part of the quadripartite adventure. Not that I told my players! Anyway, we were missing Nathaniel's ranger for the session, so were down to three characters: a paladin, a druid and a bard.
The hook for this part of the adventure required a bit of massaging from my part; I used a variant of the "death curse" hook, giving all the PCs a penalty analogous to the penalty you get from returning from the dead. I realised after I got home that this was probably the best time to introduce the Despair Deck from Gloomwrought and Beyond, so it might substitute next session.
However, it was once we got to the first encounter that my on-the-fly adjustment of adventure difficulty hit something of a snag. The original adventure has a difficult fight against two wights and four zombies. Well, I was with 3/5 of a group, so I chose to make it one wight and three zombies. That's close enough, surely?
Ahem. It wasn't. As the group slipped closer and closer to a TPK, I frantically reviewed the XP budget, and found out that I'd slipped the encounter difficulty up a level. And that the group was actually of a slightly lower level than I'd assumed. And the encounter, in any case, didn't adjust the XP for the extremely punishing environmental conditions. Nor could they flee, due to those aforementioned environmental conditions.
An unhurt zombie mysteriously became bloodied, and thus allowed them to finish the encounter alive, although somewhat scratched. Adam went from having 7 surges to only 2. Rich is happy he is a paladin, and Martin had taken Durable and was very happy with his feat choice.
Where did I put that deck of Despair cards?
Cheers!
The hook for this part of the adventure required a bit of massaging from my part; I used a variant of the "death curse" hook, giving all the PCs a penalty analogous to the penalty you get from returning from the dead. I realised after I got home that this was probably the best time to introduce the Despair Deck from Gloomwrought and Beyond, so it might substitute next session.
However, it was once we got to the first encounter that my on-the-fly adjustment of adventure difficulty hit something of a snag. The original adventure has a difficult fight against two wights and four zombies. Well, I was with 3/5 of a group, so I chose to make it one wight and three zombies. That's close enough, surely?
Ahem. It wasn't. As the group slipped closer and closer to a TPK, I frantically reviewed the XP budget, and found out that I'd slipped the encounter difficulty up a level. And that the group was actually of a slightly lower level than I'd assumed. And the encounter, in any case, didn't adjust the XP for the extremely punishing environmental conditions. Nor could they flee, due to those aforementioned environmental conditions.
An unhurt zombie mysteriously became bloodied, and thus allowed them to finish the encounter alive, although somewhat scratched. Adam went from having 7 surges to only 2. Rich is happy he is a paladin, and Martin had taken Durable and was very happy with his feat choice.
Where did I put that deck of Despair cards?
Cheers!
