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<blockquote data-quote="Karma Kollapse" data-source="post: 7482026" data-attributes="member: 6693505">See, there's a lot of assumptions here - the party's Slayer has 8 skill ranks, +3 from class bonus, only +2 Dex (but an additional +2 from Cat's Grace, possibly), so that's only +13. There's no technologist, and unless I say outright 'you can use detect magic', it's not really guaranteed that someone would think of that possibility. The heart of the problem though is that the encounter is basically roll 7 times, if one roll fails then a nuke goes off and everyone dies - a recipe for tension but not necessarily the good kind, as it wouldn't be about clever strategy or creativity, but flat out dice rolls. I could lower the difficulty but then we'd be in a situation where the encounter can't be lost, which seems rather unexciting. I definitely don't think I want to run the encounter as written; I'd either have Zubov not set off the bomb whilst he is on the train, OR, change the encounter so that it continues to be a 'disarm the bomb on the train' encounter, but instead of a failure being terminal, have a flat DC for each check instead of escalating, and a failure on each type of ingredient resulting in some sort of penalty (splash damage, lowering the time limit, increasing the difficulty on the next check, etc.). Hitting the time limit would still result in a catastrophic explosion, but the party could decide whether they themselves want to bottle it, or try for those final checks.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Karma Kollapse, post: 7482026, member: 6693505"] See, there's a lot of assumptions here - the party's Slayer has 8 skill ranks, +3 from class bonus, only +2 Dex (but an additional +2 from Cat's Grace, possibly), so that's only +13. There's no technologist, and unless I say outright 'you can use detect magic', it's not really guaranteed that someone would think of that possibility. The heart of the problem though is that the encounter is basically roll 7 times, if one roll fails then a nuke goes off and everyone dies - a recipe for tension but not necessarily the good kind, as it wouldn't be about clever strategy or creativity, but flat out dice rolls. I could lower the difficulty but then we'd be in a situation where the encounter can't be lost, which seems rather unexciting. I definitely don't think I want to run the encounter as written; I'd either have Zubov not set off the bomb whilst he is on the train, OR, change the encounter so that it continues to be a 'disarm the bomb on the train' encounter, but instead of a failure being terminal, have a flat DC for each check instead of escalating, and a failure on each type of ingredient resulting in some sort of penalty (splash damage, lowering the time limit, increasing the difficulty on the next check, etc.). Hitting the time limit would still result in a catastrophic explosion, but the party could decide whether they themselves want to bottle it, or try for those final checks. [/QUOTE]

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