Saturday, June 9, 2012

Training Wheels (and Near Party Wipes)

So I've finally wrangled another group together in my new location. It was a long and disappointing wait to start playing again, but in the end it worked out.

This new group is almost entirely composed of brand new players who had barely heard about any sort of tabletop rpg at all. We decided to go with Pathfinder and they're playing in the Dual Throne campaign setting though the story will be taking place on the far away Northern Continent (with its far more intense focus on eastern cultural traits).

The party is currently composed of:

Olaf Blunderbuss: Half-Orc Barbarian and all-around beatstick.
Perses Ares: Elven Rogue, he stabs people in the back with barely contained glee.
Zane Corvenus: Human Ranger, or the single unluckiest character I've ever seen.
Vale Saezon: Aasimar Cleric and band-aid applier extraordinaire.

Now, being that Vale Saezon is the only veteran player in the entire group (though his first time playing a caster), I began this campaign with everyone at level 1 and the primary enemy of the day being Kobolds. My reasoning: Kobolds are pretty much incapable of effectiveness and only the truly unlucky wouldn't drop 80% of them on the first strike.

It really is frustrating being consistently incorrect about these things. One day I'll be decent enough to be able to account for luck (or the lack thereof) in my session planning. For now I make do with either cakewalk encounters or sadistic challenges of endurance.

But I digress; the session started out promising enough. The party was hired by the small village of Tianjin to investigate the disappearances of people who had been traveling the roads between it and the larger city of Wu Jin.
They were directed to the wreckage of a wagon that was also the most recent of the strange occurrences. After a careful investigation the Ranger managed to track down the creatures that committed the deed to a small cave about 10-15 miles out of town.
Two guards, who weren't paying as much attention as they should have been, stood at the entrance to the cave. The Rogue acted quickly.
And gleefully

 Before the kobolds even knew what the hell, they were gunned (bow'd?) down; the entrance was clear and gurgling before death sets in hardly counts as an alarm.

They enter and find themselves in an encampment, complete with little lean-to's and frantic, angry lizards.

My memory is a bit fuzzy on the exact number of kobolds that rushed out to fight the intruders, but I do know it was between 12 and 15. I threat to be sure, but hardly one that would threaten the party as a whole, I mean, adventurers murder these things by the dozens by themselves let alone with friends. There was just no way this couldn't be a triumphal slaughter!

What raised a warning flag in my head about this entire dungeon crawl was when they got to the first room and I didn't really roll below a 17 (which was enough to hit everyone but the Cleric). What started making sirens go off was that no one could manage to hit any of the little buggers for at least 3-4 turns.

Illustrated here is the cleric's complete inability to do anything other than hide behind his shield
Yep, it was going to be one of those nights. The ones where neither side seems capable of overcoming the other and combat is just one long string of misses and ineffectual amounts of damage.

Indeed they slogged painfully through the cave, getting bogged down by stragglers who didn't make it to the melee at the entrance. I did remain hopeful throughout though; thinking that maybe the boss fight at the end would inject some much needed energy into the game.

The Adherer waited at the end, locked in a room, eternally pissed off at everything, and nearly killed them. All of them.
In my defense, I built the encounter before really knowing the party make-up. I had talked about character concepts with each player before and thought I had a strong idea of what they'd likely go with. When it came time to actually build the characters, they had went with different ideas. Less hard-hitting ideas. Additionally, the cleric hadn't fully grasped what he was capable of at the time and so hadn't prepared his more useful spells.

Long (boring) story short, they won when the last two conscious party members, in an act of desperation, set the Adherer on fire.


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