WAR! - DM Comments - The Fight's On...Mission

Okay, about six encounters in about seven hours with four major battles. I had a great time and hope you all did too. The battle with the Holy Soldiers of Pelor was a little warm up EL 9 encounter. Was a little surprised that Cedarick didn't get a little more help sooner than he did. Drained a lot of healing surges here.

I wasn't sure how the Bounter Hunter encounter was going to play out. Being large size restricts movement a lot more than I remember, I'll have to keep that in mind. Hayden was able to evade better than I expected, especially against the two Avengers but despite that he still ended up at zero hits at one point. This was an EL 8 but I think it played easier than that.

The Basilisks were only an EL7 and they went down fairly quick. The party concentrated fire power here well. The stone turner wasn't nearly as tough as I thought it would be...still better save the Stone to Flesh book.

Hayden makes me laugh. Pretty gutsy (or stupid) to go after the barge all alone. If something had gone really wrong, this would have been a good chance to get killed. Anyway, he did manage to pull in some loot. Yeah, the party wanted to avoid fighting the infantry squad and the barge crew together, that was an EL13 or 14 (too tough).

I think the party played the whole lair encounter well. SF Black gained a lot of good intel. Attacking the Bane/HoS group would have been tight. You can be sure it was EL10 or higher..better to attack the three stay behind reptilemen elites that are only on EL6.

Although the group could have easily evaded the final encounter, EL9, you elected to fight. Not a bad decision as the party had enough resources left. Might have been a different decision if this encounter had taken place early in the adventure and the party could have been trying to save resources to complete the encounters that were more vital to the completion of the mission. I'm not sure if I liked this encounter more, from a DM standpoint, or the fight in the ruined temple, one of these two were IMHO the best battles of the night.

A little surprised that Alton hardly got touched, he was battling a lot. Not surprised that Hunter barely got scratched as he is suppose to stay out of range. With Hayden hiding, Hunter stalking, Alton on point, and Kebru in the infirmary, that pretty much left Cedarick (the leader and healer) in the middle of the group for the monsters to swarm around with only Walster to run direct interference. Somthing about the team dynamics was quite different than previously, but I haven't quite figured it out. Cedarick and Hayden were basically out of surges, Alton and Hunter were basically untouched. Walster and James were somewhere in between. Maybe some team members might want to deliberately take some damage to prevent the healer from getting too low on surges; just a thought.

Comments, feedback, smart remarks?

Teramotos wrote:A little surprised that Alton hardly got touched, he was battling a lot.

I think this was due to him staying close to the warden. Pairing a defender and melee striker together allowed us to take down opponants pretty quickly. Both of us have high AC, but enemies marked will usually go after the defender or suffer a minus to hit and an attack from the defender. The only time I got hit was from the archers that got two arrows per attack. The archer's burst attacks would probably have hit, but they always had better targets that were bunched up...

Cedarick got hit up during the "angel" battle because he has low defenses and the enemies just teleported in adjacent to each PC. The warlock and ranger scattered leaving the leader to handle three. Each drained surges on a hit and he doesn't have many to start with...

Hayden got hit up in the "bounty hunter" battle because most of the enemies were after him and would go after him in preference to other targets. He did pretty good considering the attention he was getting.

Actual I played the angel encounter wrong. I could have gotten out of it without even being bloodied, but hadn't played him in awhile so forgot what to do. Remembered it after I went down of course.