Monsters of the Trollhaunt: Index

I have been working for months in an article series updating the monsters in adventure P1: King of the Trollhaunt Warrens to modern (i.e. post-MM3 standards). Here is a list of the articles released so far.

Introduction

1. Trolls
2. Encounter 1
3. Encounter T2
4. Encounter W1
5. Encounter W4
6. Encounters W2, W3
7. Encounters W5, W6
8. Encounters I1, W7

Read More......

Monsters of the Trollhaung VIII: Encounters I1, W7

Monsters of the Trollhaunt: Index – Previous - Next

** SPOILER ALERT**
These articles update monsters in adventure P1: King of the Trollhaunt Warrens – reading them may spoil encounters in the module!

A couple of big, bad trolls…

Skalmad the Troll King (Level 13 Elite Soldier)

The players at last get to meet the King, and it should be a scary fight. The original stat block for Skalmad is surprisingly decent, though it suffers from outdated stats (i.e. poor damage) and a real, Elite-like double attack. With a few updates, it should prove a worthy foe

1. Changes introduced

• Toned down Troll Healing - see previous article about trolls as a race. Since Skalmad is an elite, I gave it twice the usual amount of regeneration and had Troll Healing bring it back with more HP.
• Modern Elite: Elite monsters should have roughly as many attacks as two standard monsters, so I gave Skalmad an at-will double attack in Dual Axe, and boosted the encounter and recharging powers to a more impressive level. I also added a bit of damage to Baleful Eye.
• Modern Soldier: Aside from lowering attack bonuses, I changed the basic attack to mark as an effect. Toppling Swing became a downright scary attack with the addition of a daze (on top of the existing prone effect), but I made it target only marked enemies. This prevents Skalmad from using all its most powerful attacks in the first round, and adds quite a bit of strategy to the monster.
• Removed redundancy: The claw attack was pointless, so I deleted it.

 

Warren Troll (Level 11 Brute)

See Encounter W1.

Nothic Gazer (Level 11 Artillery)

See Encounter W6.

Thurk, Troll Smith (Level 12 Soldier)

1. Changes introduced

• Toned down Troll Healing - see previous article about trolls as a race. Since Skalmad is an elite, I gave it twice the usual amount of regeneration and had Troll Healing bring it back with more HP.
• Modern Soldier: Aside from lowering attack bonuses, I changed the basic attack to mark as an effect. Toppling Swing became a downright scary attack with the addition of a daze (on top of the existing prone effect), but I made it target only marked enemies. This prevents Skalmad from using all its most powerful attacks in the first round, and adds quite a bit of strategy to the monster.
• Removed redundancy: The claw attack was pointless, so I deleted it.

Redspawn Firebelcher (Level 12 Artillery)

1. Changes introduced

• Updated defenses, attack bonuses, and damage. This is a simple yet serviceable monster, so a couple of straightforward number tweaks should leave it ready for use. I upped the ranged attack accuracy, increased damage all around, and boosted some defenses which where excessively weak.

Grimlock Minion (Level 14 Minion)

1. Changes introduced

• Added Role (Brute). As an old minion, this one was missing a role. Brute was the most fitting, by far.
• Updated defenses, attack bonus, damage. This monster’s stats were unusually low, to the point that they wouldn’t have been out of place in a minion with several less levels. Now it’s up to par with modern minions.
• Added Trait (Grimlock Resilience). I stole this one from the Human Slaves in Dark Sun, and I think it’s an amazing design. This lets you have threatening minions even if you don’t use any special houserule for minions. With our house rules, they were pretty impressive, though not to the point of becoming unbalanced.

All images are (C) 2010 Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. These statistics blocks were generated using the D&D Adventure Tools, despite the tons of bugs. Except for the ones where I gave up, and used MS Word instead. Read More......

Monsters of the Trollhaunt VII: Encounter W5, W6

Monsters of the Trollhaunt: Index – Previous - Next

** SPOILER ALERT**
These articles update monsters in adventure P1: King of the Trollhaunt Warrens – reading them may spoil encounters in the module!

There’s one of these in every dungeon…

Adult Black Dragon (Level 11 Solo Lurker)

The template for fun, challenging dragons has been laid out in the Monster Vault, so the following stat block won’t be much of a surprise to anyone. Still, not all levels of dragons appear in that book, so I’ve had to scale the Young version all the way to level 11. For the most part, I left the original design untouched, except for one significant exception.

If you are interested in further discussion on dragon redesign, I recommend my previous articles on black dragons (now obsoleted by more recent books) and white dragons.

1. Issues identified

• Acidic Blood is a beating. Seriously, I’m all for tough solos, but acidic blood can wreck any party moderately reliant on melee attacks, unless they are loaded with acid resistance potions. Shroud of Gloom aggravates this to ridiculous proportions.

2. Changes introduced

• Level up: I used the Young Black Dragon from Monster Vault as baseline, and increased its stats.
• Acidic Blood nerfed: I simply changed the damage to ongoing damage. This prevents multiple triggers from stacking, but is still painful enough for PCs to try and find a workaround, particularly if Shroud of Gloom is active (which it will).

3. Errata

• Breath Weapon is enemies only. I missed this from my stat block (didn’t realize it had changed!), but it was not an intended change on my part. Note that I haven’t simply fixed the stat block due to the way the Monster Builder works (it doesn’t) – once I have saved as an image, I’m pretty much done with the monster, unless I want to start again from scratch. Incidentally, this is why I have switched to Word for stat blocks of later monsters.

Option for Encounter W5: one Water Elemental (Level 11 Controller)

I felt like the dragon encounter could use some spicing up, so I decided to add a Water Elemental lying in the pool. In this case, I merely took the monster from Monster Manual 3 and used it as written – I love when I can do that!

Warren Troll (Level 11 Brute)

See Encounter W1.

Boulder Troll (Level 9 Artillery)

One of the trolls is supposed to stand back throwing stones, so I switched it for a more appropriate artillery version. The Boulder Troll is described in Encounter 1

Nothic Gazer (Level 11 Artillery)

1. Issues identified

• Lack of variety. Rotting gaze is not a bad attack, but it’s the only one. I usually like some encounter or rechargeable attack, to make a monster more interesting.

2. Changes introduced.

• New power: Rot Burst. This is a strong area attack that requires rotting gaze to be active on a target. Typically, it will take a nothic gazer several turns before rot burst can be active, since an enemy can save against the rot before the nothic’s next turn. However, when you have multiple nothics in an encounter, they can focus fire on a target so that the second nothic will be able to use rot burst if the first one hit. Then again, a significant portion of the damage from rot burst is non-stacking ongoing damage, so a third nothic might prefer to use rotting gaze against a different target. At any rate, the mechanics encourage players to keep away from rotting allies, which is a flavorful and fun effect.

All images are (C) 2010 Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. These statistics blocks were generated using the D&D Adventure Tools, despite the tons of bugs.

Read More......

Saving the game

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I never play long D&D sessions. I have this amazing gaming group who meets with regularity, takes turns for the DM role, and is kind enough to come play to our house and patiently wait for us to put the baby to sleep (often after several attempts) before we start with the dice rolling. Pulling off multiple encounters in a single evening is plainly impossible for us, and we are are often hard pressed to find the time for properly closing one fight. Still, we have managed to get by, and slowly level a party well into the paragon tier in these small increments, without finding any major trouble – that is, until last night.

This is how the table looked, like, when disaster struck.

It was a combination of several factors: poor planning, a late start, and an epic (though not Epic – we’re still stuck at level 12) encounter involving a large map and waves of minions. To be fair, it was a blast of a fight, where everything came together perfectly except for one niggling detail: it just wouldn’t end. A climatic moment where the party Assassin was brought down with no healing available wasn’t properly appreciated by the Assassin player, because she had fallen unconscious (save ends) in the sofa a while before that. The adventurers eventually started to drive back the hordes of foes, but there was more yawning than shouting with excitement. I tried to press on, to give this session a proper end but eventually it became obvious that we’d have to leave it unfinished with just a few monsters standing (but still resisting boldly against the worn down adventurers). And thus, a game that would have been all kinds of awesome had we started playing at an earlier hour had to be interrupted anticlimatically due to lack of time.

After my players left, I was left wondering how we could have addressed the situation better, other than turning the encounter into a more conventional and brief skirmish. It’s not like our scheduling allowed us to start playing much earlier, anyway. And then, looking at the untidy table covered with dungeon tiles, dice and miniatures, the solution dawned on me – I could save the game state at any point and continue the fight the following day!

Ok, so it’s not a huge revelation or anything (and besides, the post title was kind of an spoiler). Stopping games mid-combat is a straightforward concept, and one that I had already implemented as early as 20 years ago (don’t try to play Rolemaster in 15-minute school breaks, kids!). But it’s never been an efficient solution, and it only gets harder with a game as complex as 4E, with its rich tactical map, and the zillion variables to keep track of for each character. So, for practical considerations, I had erased that idea from my mind, when it came to my 4E campaign. But thinking about it at that moment, it all started to click.

The map status is easily taken care of, in this digital age – just take a handful of photographs, and use them to reconstruct the map at a later point. But what about the game status? How to handle the initiative order, spent HP and surges, PC conditions, and used powers for PCs and monsters? It turns out I had solved that problem months ago. As the group DM, I’ve been experimenting for a while with aggregating all game data on an excel sheet, which I update in real time. It’s a bit cumbersome, but you get used to it, and it is by far the most efficient way I’ve found for keeping track of all game variables. I figured out that with the data I had filled into that sheet, plus a couple of photos, we would have no trouble continuing an interrupted encounter.

This had two interesting consequences. The most immediate one, that I will actually be able to play through the demise of the mighty Ssark and his cohorts next week, making up for the failure of last session. And the second, that I will no longer need to force my patient players through a few more rounds just to prevent leaving a fight unfinished. I am now free to close a session whenever we feel like it, which is quite a relief. Hooray!

So, is there a lesson to be learned from all this? I don’t think this specific method for pausing and resuming encounters will be useful to all groups, as there are uncountable ways of keeping track of game status, and I suspect most wouldn’t lend themselves to this. But maybe you can do the trick by taking some notes, or it doesn’t matter so much if some information is lost along the way. The important thing is, there is a definite temptation of trying to push a game beyond the time your players should be going home, just because you only need one more turn (or two). When that time comes, it’s good to know that other options exist.

Read More......

Monsters of the Trollhaunt V: Encounter W4

Monsters of the Trollhaunt: Index – Previous - Next

** SPOILER ALERT**
This is a series of articles about the monsters included in the adventure P1: King of the Trollhaunt Warrens- so you may want to stop reading, if you intend to play the module anytime soon.

 

Our party keeps delving into the dungeon. Here are the updated monster stat blocks for their second encounter there.

Blackfire Flameskull (Level 10 Artillery)

Aside from its outdated stats, this flameskull isn’t as broken as you’d think by looking at my extensive list of revisions. Several of the changes I made were due to my personal preferences and expected party composition, rather than things that were inherently wrong. If you want to remain more faithful to the original monster, just changing the Fireball and updating damage would do the trick.

1. Issues identified:

- Flying Artillery. Your mileage may vary, but I find that combining flight and monsters that can attack at long range can often lead to annoying encounters unless a DM deliberately makes poor strategic choices. This is particularly true at heroic and lower paragon levels, where melee PCs can’t be expected to have a method to counter flying enemies other than ranged basic attacks. Given that 60% of the enemies in this encounter were flameskulls, and that my party was very melee-heavy, I really wanted to change the monster to prevent turn after turn of throwing javelins.
- Lack of reach. I only realized this after playing the encounter. Once the monster’s near immunity to melee was taken away (by limiting flight), we found that it could become extremely vulnerable to certain varieties of defender, on account of having reach 0 on its melee attacks. Typical artilleries get screwed enough when engaged by a defender, on account of having terrible AC and HP, and lousy melee attacks, but flameskulls are even worse off. Against a defender that punishes shifting (like fighters or cavaliers), reach 0 means that you can’t even make a bad melee attack without taking damage.
- Devastating opening attack. As bad as it is for wizard PCs, Fireball makes for a great monster power. It is not rare for a flameskull to target all PCs with its fireball on the first turn of an encounter, dishing out quite a bit of damage. This is particularly troublesome in multiples, though - put two (or three, like in this encounter) of these monsters together, and you can end up with most of the party bloodied before they even know what hit them!

2. Changes introduced.

- Added maximum altitude. Maximum altitude is a mechanic I’d like to see on more low-level flying monsters. Setting this at two stops flameskulls from sitting comfortably at the dungeon ceiling without worrying about melee attacks, though they retain an amazing level of mobility.
- New melee power: Fiery Assault. This is not particularly elegant, but after seeing three (!) skulls locked down by a cavalier, unable to do anything without taking considerable amounts of radiant damage, I am persuaded that they need a method to use their humble bites against defenders.
- Blackfire Ray blinding toned down. Blinded (save ends) is way above the power curve for an at-will attack from a non-Controller monster. I opted for gradual blindness instead.
- Fireball now has ongoing damage. After lowering Fireball damage (or, rather, not increasing it) to leave it as 100% of a normal attack instead of 125%, I was still worried about the effect of multiple instances of the spell burning down a party in a single round. By making part of its damage ongoing, we penalize this course of action, and create an interesting decision for the DM: use all fireballs at once, or try to wait to maximize damage?
- Tweaked resistances and vulnerabilities. I prefer to cap monster resistances at 5/tier unless there is a very good reason, so fire resistance took a small hit. I also dislike how radiant vulnerability can have an excessive effect on undead monsters; having radiant damage shut off regeneration instead of hitting harder is still good, but not as crippling.
- Tweaked damage and defenses. Damage was brought up to MM3 standards, ranged accuracy was increased a little, and I slightly reduced reflex because having defenses much higher than AC doesn’t feel quite right, to me.

Dire Bear (Level 11 Elite Brute)

The Dire Bear was one of the lucky monsters to get revisited in Monster Vault, so I didn’t need to change much for its stat block. Still, I was not entirely happy with how the side effects of its attacks worked.

1. Issues identified:

- Grabbing enemies is too difficult. An effect that relies on hitting with two consecutive attacks might end up not triggering at all during a whole encounter, particularly if defender PCs are involved. Since this is the only special ability of the bear (apart from Ursine Crush, which only works against grabbed targets!), there is a definite risk that the monster will end up excessively boring, in play.

2. Changes introduced.

- Make the grab trigger off a single hit. Letting the bear get a sucessful grab almost every turn doesn’t break anything, and makes for a far more compelling monster. There is even a remote chance to have multiple grabbed enemies at a given time, which led me to tweak Ursine Crush in order to affect “all grabbed creatures”. It won't come up all that often, but it should feel great when a DM gets to live the dream.

Troll Vinespeaker (Level 14 Controller)

1. Issues identified:

- Thorny Burst provides excessive control. I am usually wary of ongoing action-negating effects for at-will attacks that target a single character. On an area attack, it definitely crosses the line, particularly when attached to a permanent area of damaging difficult terrain. Something has to go, or be moved elsewhere. There is also the concern that the troll has four standard action attacks, and very little motivation to use anything but Thorny Burst.

2. Changes introduced.

- Toned down Troll Healing - see previous article about trolls as a race.
- Added Forest Walk. This is a minor change, but I thought it would be fitting for the troll to ignore difficult terrain from his own.
- Tweaked damage and defenses. Will defense in particular was extremely low, so I raised it by a whopping 5 points to leave it at standard levels.
- Redesigned Thorny Burst. Since the bramble zone was the coolest part of the power by a mile, I left that and took away the absurd immobilization effect. I turned it into a slow, which still has huge synergies with the permanent zone. This also allowed me to turn Ray of Thorns (the ranged attack) into a tempting option, by granting it the immobilization rider, but only against slowed enemies.

All images are (C) 2010 Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. The formatted statistics blocks have been generated using the D&D Adventure Tools. But not with the last version, which lacks a Monster Builder. The one before that, which works despite the billions of bugs. Read More......

Monsters of the Trollhaunt: Introduction

After enjoying my brave human fighter for a whopping 7 levels, I’ve found myself once again at the DM seat, in time to introduce our group to the wonders of Paragon Tier. The module of choice is the King of the Trollhaunt Warrens, the fourth one in the official adventure path, and easily one of the best I’ve read so far. It still boils down to a huge collection of combat encounters, of course, but the simple backstory is interesting enough, the use of the main enemy makes a lot more sense than in previous adventures, and there is a good variety of environments. It also helps that the transition to Paragon is well portrayed through the abundance of large enemies (i.e. trolls), but also with the way that the fate of an entire city is put in your hands (which, in theory, also happened in Keep on the Shadowfell, except that now it feels more real, rather than a mere excuse to enter a dungeon and slay a baddie) and the use of exotic settings.

Anyway. Trollhaunt is great, but it suffers from the fact that it was written two years ago. In that time, the game has evolved quite a bit, particularly regarding monster design, which has benefited from a change in general philosophy, followed by amazing books such as Monster Manual 3, Dark Sun Creature Catalog, and Monster Vault. I knew from the beginning that, in order to enjoy the module, I’d need to take a long, hard look at every monster stat block, updating them to the new standards. This would take a good deal of effort, but I thought that I could find it enjoyable (I did), and maybe turn it into an interesting article series. Of which you are reading the first entry.

It goes as follows: in the following weeks, I will be sharing with you the redesigned monsters I use in the campaign, along with the reasoning behind the changes, and comments on how they play out. I will present them in chronological order, as they come up in the adventure encounters. Inevitably, I will spoil the composition of all encounters in the module, so non-DMs may prefer to keep away from the series, if they expect to play in the Trollhaunt anytime soon.

Before I start with the monsters, here’s a summary of my design goals:

- Use Monster Manual 3 guidelines. I’ve talked about these at length; they include significant revisions for Solos and Elites, rebalancing of Brutes and Soldiers, and an overhaul in damage progressions.

- Use ideas from Monster Vault, such as redesigned classic monsters (most notably, trolls and dragons), a more creative approach to resistances and vulnerabilities, and lurkers that hit hard, but only every other turn.

- Redeem Fortitude. Too many monsters have absurdly high fortitude defenses, particularly in earlier books, making powers that target fortitude a poor proposition. I’ll try to mitigate this effect, by making sure no monster has a fortitude higher than its level + 14 (or Reflex and Will lower than level+10, for that matter), and by making each monster’s best defense depend on role - controllers will tend towards high will, skirmishers and lurkers will have high reflex, and artillery will go for either will (for magic-based monsters) or reflex (for the rest). Soldiers and brutes would still favour fortitude.

- Keep it fair. Some monsters end up with abusive abilities or, more rarely, with pathetically weak ones. I’ll try to address both cases.

- Make them fun. As the DM, I like monsters that are interesting to play, with some variety of tactical options and reasons to move around the battlefield.

Next: Trolls

Read More......