Trolls/Fire

[kinjiru]

For those who use trolls in your campaigns, do you even bother with the "can only be killed with fire/acid" deal? It's a cool facet of trolls, but PC's are bound to say "oh, well, we have torches and flint, no problem". Thoughts?

 

[DarkLord Of DForce]

For those who use trolls in your campaigns, do you even bother with the "can only be killed with fire/acid" deal? It's a cool facet of trolls, but PC's are bound to say "oh, well, we have torches and flint, no problem". Thoughts?

Hmm, in our campaign it wasn't that they could only be killed by fire/acid, but that the fire/acid stopped their regeneration. Which did help a lot mind you...

Our players had various means - some had flaming weapons, some had attack powers with fire/acid keywords, and some had caustic whetstones.

HTHs.

 

[keterys]

The current design of trolls (which I actually kinda hate) makes the fire/acid thing a very, very big deal. It's not "oh, we need to make a fire with a flint in the next minute" but "God, will someone please get a fire on this now, so it stops being a bloody nuisance"

 

[OnlineDM]

Yes, I run trolls as requiring fire or acid in order to deal with them. If they take fire or acid damage, it turns off their regeneration for their next turn. If they are dropped to 0 hit points without receiving fire or acid damage, they'll rise up the next round via regeneration.

So far I've only run them with parties who already had ways of dealing fire damage, but in the first 4e campaign I went through as a player we had a situation where we knew we were going after a troll. It definitely added to the immersion that we learned about the fire issue and therefore had our characters buying fire arrows and so on. Of course, the fact that the troll was standing on the bottom of a lake as he fought us made this all more challenging...

 

[kinjiru]

Sure, but is a single torch and flint enough to do the trick? It seems like one player's single turn can likely take care of it without needing to have any special abilities or gear since pretty much everyone has some torches and a flint.

It's definitely an urgent issue, but unless the party is preoccupied and can't finish off the troll, it seems like a foregone conclusion that the next turn after the troll falls it's going to get a torch to the back and be truly dead.

 

[The Little Raven]

Sure, but is a single torch and flint enough to do the trick?

An improvised melee weapon is 1d4 damage, and with it being a lit torch, most DMs would probably rule that as fire damage.

As for it being a foregone conclusion, that depends on the amount of people who have fire to bring to bear, and whether they can do it in a round before any of the trolls act again. I "ended" one encounter with a couple PCs who were dazed, and because of the lack of actions, they weren't able to get all the trolls burned in time and two of them popped back up and went for another round, killing a companion NPC. If I ended the encounter with everyone fully able to burn a troll, it would have just been glossed over.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Troll regeneration has two facets in 4e: regen hp, and coming back from below 0 hp.

The first is the real big issue. Unless you're able to do fire damage every round, it will regenerate. Plausible if you have a wizard, say, but how often do you fight only one troll? Other classes can, of course, do fire damage by wielding torches or what have you, but that's a lot less damage.

Once a troll is down, keeping it down is easy, just do a little fire or acid damage and it's over. (No need to, as in 3.x, to do its full hit points in fire or acid damage!) However, that takes an action which you might use to engage another troll that's about to eat a squishy.

 

[the Jester]

For those who use trolls in your campaigns, do you even bother with the "can only be killed with fire/acid" deal?

Uh... yeah. Even if it is easy for one pc to finish off a downed troll, that's one pc losing a turn when there are likely still active enemies.

 

[Samurai]

Not a troll, but similar... I ran a Hydra encounter this week, and decided to go with a special Hydra that could only be killed by chopping off its heads and cauterizing the wound... attacks to the body had no effect at all. We had 4 characters in the party, they did enough damage on their Sunder checks that if they hit they were guaranteed to lop off a head, and they had a sorcerer specialized in fireballs. However, the Hydra had some spell resistance, enough that the sorcerer only had a 50% chance of penetrating it, and he was rolling very badly. So they'd lop off 3 or 4 heads, wait for the Sorcerer, and the spell would fizzle, allowing the Hydra to regrow 2 heads in place of 1. Not one single character had a non-magical form of fire... no torches or lanterns or anything. It had 17 heads at one point...

 

[kinjiru]

Thanks for the replies, all!