The Griffin's Crier

After yet another amusing/frustrating expedition to Maure Castle, I've come to the conclusion that six people is just too many for this dungeon. Between characters with a thousand choices, and a dungeon with a thousand ways to die, things just take too long with six characters (or, as we've done on occasion) seven.

The next time we run it (and the urge to dungeoncrawl will hit us again, even if it's six months or a year in the future) I think we should limit the expedition to five players, with four being even better.

hmm. Do you really think that any mix of 4 characters will be capable enough to survive in Maure Castle? I have my doubts.

And how do we work that logistically? Should we only run Maure on weeks when we don't have a full complement so that we don't have to tell people not to come?

EvilGenius wrote:hmm. Do you really think that any mix of 4 characters will be capable enough to survive in Maure Castle? I have my doubts.

That won't be a problem. As is, I typically have to scale up encounters for it to be a challenge, so this will be the adventure more as it was designed to be run (all three combats last night were not scaled up, and were essentially cake walks, with only half the party really fighting anyway).

And how do we work that logistically? Should we only run Maure on weeks when we don't have a full complement so that we don't have to tell people not to come?

Yes, exactly.

And actually, I could even sit some of the adventures out, if the opp for you guys to play (e.g., No dwarves campaign, Ken has the day off, etc.).

No offense meant. It's not that I do not like the DMing or playing... I'm not a 'dungeon' fan and I can't really understand why my character would even go in this place. I totally understand it's a dungeon-crawl but it's not my style... because you can get frickin killed down there. Insert visual of Sladious shaking other characters... "Why are we here? Death is all around" [this action can only result in a smack from one of the many BlackRazors]

What I do like it that I'm learning some new tricks or seeing where magic can be used. My spell selection for the character and magic items are totally off. I'm not really an arcane mega-wizard type, not even the wizard type. Jess made some suggestions which were good and I like them for future characters - if it really is needed (maybe for NPCs). I really look at this adventure as 'practice'. I also do not want to be the totally 'maxxed-out' character utilizing various rules / ideas and Maure - I feel the need to have that type of character.

NukeHavoc wrote:That won't be a problem. As is, I typically have to scale up encounters for it to be a challenge, so this will be the adventure more as it was designed to be run (all three combats last night were not scaled up, and were essentially cake walks, with only half the party really fighting anyway).

I didn't think the clay golem or the chimera was a cakewalk.
the clay-golem was 2 rounds away from finishing off korem and andulf

the chimera was 1 round away from finishing off korem and hogarth
i would say that was pretty challenging.

i am very dissapointed in jon being jon and not following through on an awesome idea he had. if he would have rammed the chimera back into the blade barrier fontaine would have stole the show!

also if possible don't be afraid to have some nearby monsters coming in to investigate. try and take a few minutes to go over the monsters if you aren't familliar with them. if you would have known how weak the chimera's breath weapon was compaired to it's melee attacks you probably would have taken out korem and hogarth. or if a demon came wandering by when fontaine and macentyer were making out in the hallway that would have made things interesting!

malphas wrote:I didn't think the clay golem or the chimera was a cakewalk. the clay-golem was 2 rounds away from finishing off korem and andulf

In all of these combats, three-to-four people participated while the others either didn't or couldn't act. My point is more that six characters is overkill more than anything else.

also if possible don't be afraid to have some nearby monsters coming in to investigate.

IMHO, adding more monsters means the combat will take even longer, which makes people even grumpier ... particularly at 1 a.m. That's not always the case, but Friday, well, I think it was.

try and take a few minutes to go over the monsters if you aren't familliar with them. if you would have known how weak the chimera's breath weapon was compaired to it's melee attacks you probably would have taken out korem and hogarth. or if a demon came wandering by when fontaine and macentyer were making out in the hallway that would have made things interesting!

For the previous levels, I've done this extensively; the Statuary is new though, and while I have read through the whole dungeon several times, I forgot that some of the monsters on this level need to be stated out by the DM based on template upgrades. I didn't have time to do the standard encounter on the fly, so I through out the already statted chimera.

In any case, I'll continue to argue that this isn't something that can easily solved by adding more monsters. It's also a function of player interest, and how time-consuming combat can be at this level. I think 4-5 characters would just run better in this dungeon.

As much as I like dungeon crawls and as much as I like playing Hogarth, I'll probably also volunteer to not play if we need to drop players for Maure. High level 3.x D&D is sssssllllllllllllllooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwww.

I just wanted to play this time since Jess was attending and since this was Jon's last session for a while.