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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Storminator" data-source="post: 4741968" data-attributes="member: 305">Our group seems to love flirting with the TPK. We run right up to the ragged edge... every. single. session.And yesterday was no exception!We are headed for the cursed tower in the swamp. It's making animals and lizardmen go insane, it's polluting the swamp, and spreading the swamp towards civilization. So naturally we charge straight in.We fight some "tainted" dire boars. We dispatch them rather handily, tho a poorly timed push allowed one to escape and run off into the forest. Just a boar! No matter.We then get ambushed outside the tower by some tainted lizardmen. A couple are huge, and one picks up the warlord and beats the rogue with him... pain all around. We end up using a couple of dailies, and a few healing surges all around, but nothing too serious. We press on!To the tower... it's across a sinister moat... which does nothing. It's encased in poisoned thorns at least 10 feet high. We walk around the outside, probing the thorn hedge. My cleric isn't too bright, so once again I'm "detecting ambushes" the hard way. And I get jumped by some giant snakes. Down to 8 hp with 5 ongoing in the surprise round...A couple of elite soldiers and a thorn hedge hazard. It's about 6 squares between the thorn hedge and the moat (difficult terrain). And we got our tails handed to us...The snakes had high defenses (not fortitude!), lots of hp, big attacks with secondary attacks of ongoing poison damage, and they'd tailslap you into the thorns... which would make poison attacks. According to the XP budget, it was a level 3 encounter, against 6 level 3 PCs.As soon as the first snake tail slapped one of us into the thorns my cleric (who's recently multiclassed as warlord!) organizes the group to use all our push powers to get one snake away from the thorns so we can beat it down. We focused every attack on the one snake until it was dead. Unfortunately moving it away from the thorns put it in the water and we seriously suffered from inability to shift around it.It took every scrap of PC power and ingenuity to survive. We used every daily, every magic item power, every encounter power except one Fey Step, and had a collective total of about 30hp (with 2 PCs negative, one 4 from -bloodied when he saved vs ongoing 5 poison..., oh and he failed 2 death saves). Half way thru we were certain it was a TPK. Then we made sure every single move, power choice, every shift, every push, each delay, was optimized. Very, very tight work at the end.I love this game!PS</blockquote>

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