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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Truename" data-source="post: 5086894" data-attributes="member: 78255">Session 3 (Scenes 2-3, 2-4, and 2-5)Well, that was a surprise.I expected this session to be fairly uneventful. After last session's intrigue-heavy (and somewhat poorly-paced) content, I thought some nice, unambiguous beat-downs would be fun for the players without being a lot of work for me. Nothing went quite like I thought it would.First, Flaganus Mortus. I thought the players would try something creative to save the baby, but they were feeling a bit squirrely, or something. They didn't believe Flaganus's threats, and taunted him: "Go ahead, kill the baby. You'll be the next to die." You know what happened next.I played up Torrent's reaction afterwards a bit, describing them as finding her with tears streaming down her face, saying, "I couldn't save him. Maybe that's what Lee meant... I focus too much on fighting, not enough on saving."The scene at the temple went pretty well. I ran the Mulysa encounter and Cwndydd "defused" it by first trying to complement her--she just lashed out verbally in response--and then by slicing the strings of her lute with his sword. I had the teens come in at the same time and start harassing her. Cwndydd interposed himself and Mulysa slouched away, muttering "no house, no lover, no lute... I guess I have everything I need now."The roleplaying stat blocks I made in advance really paid off in this scene. There was some free-form roleplaying and I felt like I knew exactly how to respond. I think Mulysa's final comment hit home for the players that these characters aren't just two-dimensional antagonists--that their motivations run deeper than "give the players an obstacle to overcome."For reference, here's the stat block I used:Appearance: Dark-haired, dark-skinned female half-orcVoice: Rough, angryKey Traits: Grieving, miserable, lashing outGoal: Misery loves companyMotivation: House bombed, lover missingFears: What comes nextWeaknesses: Passive aggressive, socially ineptFinally, we played the warehouse encounter. I started by playing up Torrent's concerns with the party--a few of them stumbled into the meeting at the Poison Apple, and one of them is Cwndydd, the eladrin that negotiated the fey bargain in our last session. I took two of the players aside and had Torrent tell them that she didn't trust the others and feared the fey bargain had involved them in something dark and dangerous. She was going to go scout out Gabal's school on her own, and wanted the party to do the warehouse mission as a sort of test.The encounter itself... well, the party is the victim of bad editing and my rushing, unfortunately. The encounter is marked as being 1,200 XP. I have six players, so I added another guard and bandit (275 XP) to balance it. Unfortunately, that took this from a N+3 encounter to an N+4.5 encounter. When we stopped, we were well on our way to a TPK.You see, the actual encounter budget is 875 plus two 100xp pit traps (which my players avoided). So the correct scaling factor should be one extra monster, not two. If I hadn't been rushed, I would have noticed that adding one PC shouldn't add two new monsters, but I was doing it on the fly during the game. Add in some bad tactics and some very bad rolls, and we've got one PC down, the leader out of healing, two other PCs on the ropes, and the two heavy hitters split off from the party. It's not looking good.I think a big part of what's going on here is my players are still used to the consequence-free railroad of Scales of War. They're not taking the world or its characters seriously and they're stumbling into all kinds of problems as a result. That's even true of the warehouse encounter. In SoW, the adventures followed a very predictable difficulty curve--throwing in a really hard fight as the first fight of the day just wouldn't happen, at least not until the adventure's climax, and they underestimated it.The good news is that I think they're starting to notice, and I think they'll realize that they can't just be a bull in a china shop. The game will be better as a result.As for the TPK... if there is a TPK, I think I'll have the terrorists knock the PCs out and summon the Black Horse to come deal with them. Kathor will recognize them and free them out of a sense of reciprocal duty. They'll have a chance to talk with him and win him over to their side at the same time.</blockquote>

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