The Elfsong fight needs to be handled carefully by the DM. I'd either change the number of combatants, or the ease with which the PCs can get tavern patrons on their side, or something. I think it could be handled socially with really smart players, but if they just engage in a toe-to-toe fight, as written, they'll be annihilated. And of course, finding out at the end that speak with dead was always an option is kind of a drag. It changes the calculus of how much risk the players need to take.
Overall, I think it's navigable with smart players who like to think laterally. But if you have players who just like to hit stuff, yeah, the DM needs to help out a bit. Same goes for the fight under the villa.
It's like each fight can leave a party spent if rolls go badly. One of the fights early on can literally end on turn one if you enter the room and the creature just fireballs. And if you don't kill it in one turn, it fireballs again next turn.
Addressing the fireball issue, unless the characters look like a massive threat, the monster will likely test their strength for a round or three, because it doesn't want to spend its fireballs if it doesn't have to. While you know the characters are capable of killing it and it won't be facing any greater danger later that day, the monster doesn't. By the time it realizes it's in trouble, it'll use its fireballs, but by then the party should be spread out enough that it can't hit all of them with a single use.
I've just gotten through the Dungeon of the Dead Three in my read through and oof, could it be a tough one. I haven't even gotten to the rest of Baldur's Gate.
I've got a party at Level 5 right now that I'd like to run through "Descent"...are you all talking about a lower level/brand new party having deadly fights in this module? I tweeted at the writer and he said that I'd need to revise/level-up the encounters to challenge a level 5 party.
I've got a party at Level 5 right now that I'd like to run through "Descent"...are you all talking about a lower level/brand new party having deadly fights in this module? I tweeted at the writer and he said that I'd need to revise/level-up the encounters to challenge a level 5 party.
Cheers y'all!
Yeah, the first few encounters of this module are VERY tough for level 1 & 2 simply because the characters have very few hitpoints and resources. Level 5 will be a breeze as written so you'll definitely need to increase the difficulty of them.
We did a test run with the tavern encounter during a session Zero of sorts, when we where only 2 players and the DM, waiting for the other 2 to make their characters.
So one Artificer and One Paladin+ a NPC Cleric( since the other two took Monk and Ranger, so...)
for the Session 0, just us 3...
My pally managed to kill 3 of them and lasted till the end cause of his higher AC( 18 AC at lvl one is HUGE), but once the Artificer was out( darn those are weak and pathetic at lower lvls...) and the clerci bit the dust, the 3 remaining pirates made short work of me.
The turning point was when the Dm started to use the crossbows rather than have the pirates bumrush us with their swords..., i mean 1D8+3 to PC's with max 12/13HP...thats just freakin brutal...
So he was like" Know what?, maybe i'll start you guys at lvl2...", wich helped for the first encounter, we also kinda found out that we could persuade the Patrons to come to our aid if we over bid what the Captain gave them...
Wich made the fight hilarious..., when my Pally managed to recruit the Half Ogre bouncer and 3 of the patrons...
Now i don't really see how the Dead Three dungeon is "hard"?..., yes there's one CR4 creature, but that master of Souls is alone, and even though it has Fireball prepared, if you sneak close enough of her before she sees you, there's no reason for her to use it, since it would also burn her seeing how small the morgue is.
So once that is out of the way, she is easy as pie...
What did a number on us was the Head of Bhaal Uber Assassin...
Critted with that Aura of Murder thing, darn, never saw my character go down so quick..., but it all worked out.
Some fights where kinda close or tight, but we did okay, and thats with a party of mostly amateur D&D player, the only D&D they all played was in our other campagin wher i'm the Dm and i run CoS for them since january.
I guess smart playing, and luck plays a huge role in the first chapter
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"Normality is but an Illusion, Whats normal to the Spider, is only madness for the Fly"
i have a group of 7 going into the bath house next week all level three. on paper i think they will have an easy time of it all, thinking i need some extra punch to make it all more threatening.
Tl;dr yes it feels like every custom monster is power creeping: mages do crazy melee damage, everyone has spell resistance, melee mobs often have one attack more than they should, and plenty of them have special abilities that double damage etc.
My experience (before actually dming very long):
Elfsong would have wiped the party if hadn't pushed them to get patrons to help and prevented the captain from doing the same.
Dead three dungeon is a death trap. First cr4 mage tpk with a fireball but the party was all just unconscious and woke up at his altar and could get away. But even heavily injured he managed to get 1 hit in on our bard and insta killed him.
Basically when I check all the custom monsters in the adventure it strikes me that many have way too high damage output for their CR. It seem that they have just added an arbitrary 4d6 or something to their attacks which just makes everyone deadly. And just like in Dungeon of the mad mage is everyone and his mother resistant to spells and often to alot more.
I could play this adventure with a carefully crafted group with alot of necrotic resistance and temp up etc and an optimized dpr or two but without that survival is only granted by kind DMs. Also with risk of spoilers: although end game allowes for non combative resolutions there is no described path to this end all other lead to a level 13 party facing off with cr 25+ if they haven't died at before level 10 while facing power creeping cr 13+ mobs.
Dead Three Dungeon is ABSOLUTELY impossible for a 4 players party at lvl 2. My party consisted of a fighter, a paladin (me), a bard and a wizard. We kind of got lucky because we took a path that let us avoid a significant part of the combats (never met the fireball guy for example). But we were completly spent (just the fighter was full, we made 2 short rests along the way) when we reached the guy with the skull at the end. Even with the help of the other guy with the great club we were quickly dispatched, like no chance at all. Even if we had made a long rest (wich I think is kind of ridiculous to do imersion wise), I don´t see much chance either, the guy just stuns you and evicerates anyone (except a barbarian) with 2 1d4+5x2 (because of the vulnerability) resulting in an average of 28 damage per round (and at least 24). That combined with his magic resistance, ability to deny damage (he completly ignored my smite) and his 60+ HP makes the encounter just IMPOSSIBLE. That's the most umbalanced encounter I've ever seen the WotC do, and I played Princes, Stradh, Tomb and OotA...
This is exactly what I see happening. From my 30 years of playing D&D i think there is splat book style powercreeping at play. Every one making adventures make their npcs just a bit "cooler" than the average adversary.
I mean just the fact that the firrballer has major league melee damage, the bhaal assassin has stat points like he rolled dice when noone was looking and then read every tome of x in the game twice and then added an insane feature that noone in the world has that doubles all damage plus powerful defensive abilities. Nine fingers has dagger that hit like great swords and attack with them like an 11 level fighter. Why?
Some high CR mobs are just in different categories of power entirely and even though they have nearly the same CR, one might be able to handle couple of the other one at the same time literally blindfolded.
Everyone is a yuanti on their mother's sisters uncles side for some hard to get spell resistance except those that just splatbooked some rare class to grant them everything-resistance.
Everyone's magic weapon s are non lootable and everyone is so broke that you really understand why they live in soggy dungeons but not why they use their near genius level intellect to NOT rob the people they murder on a day to day basis.
Are the new generation of we-are-all-buddies game designers at the coast not passing their game balance courses with flying colors any more?
This seem to be a thing lately with all the UA classes as well. Almost all of them are so ridiculously strong that they could almost be used to survive the Dead Three Dungeon. Allowing any of the later UA additions would make old classes seem like hard mode or unfair.
Now that I'm reading the campaing I have to say I'm really disapointed with the Baldur's Gate part. Everything seens rushed, storywise seens like some content has been cut out, or that the Baldur's part was shoved in the campaing to capitalise the BGlll hype. The plots and hooks are shallow, generic and quite disconnected with the rest of the campain (in my opinion). I liked the maps of the first chapter but the encounters are made for way stronger parties and the Dead Three Dungeon seems to be way harder than Low Lantern and Vanthampur Villa, as if intended for a later apperance in the campain, also the new creatures (who I really like, new quality content is always welcome in my opinion) are way downgraded, giving the feeling that the mechanics were disregarded (either by care or lack of time), there's no way a Death Head of Bhaal is only CR5, the same goes to the Reaper of Bhaal and Master of Souls, just to mention a few. And I totally agree that their stats are waaaaay overpowered. A Death's head of Bhaal has stats that put a Warlord (CR12) and a Drow Shadowblade(CR11) to shame and rivals DRAGONS! So it all seems that they left all this in the arms of the "the DM can change all he wants" excuse (giving a impression that, if you disagree or criticise you are a bad or lazy DM) , wich is not really my point. My point is, and that's what shocks me the most, is that the team behind it was huge. Much bigger than OotA for example, a campain that I DMed and love. Four developers (Jeremy Crawford, Dan Dillon, Ben Petrisor and Kate Welch), a playtest coordinator (Bill Benham) and over 30 named play testers letted this slide.
They let it slide cause even though its Named Baldur's gate, the real show is in Avernus.
Baldur's is just the Introduction or the Tutorial zone of the game if you put it in video game terms.
Now there's enough information about Badlur's and its workings for the people that want to expand on it and have more to do in BG, but the focus is all About the Nine hells in this module.
And if the BG part was too dense, then it would have delayed the adventure in Avernus, and brought the whole thing over the lvl cap of 13-14.
Remember WotC is allergic to content over lvl15, and having enouhg in ONE module to go from 1 to 20, would be too much work and too big.
They could've gone the Tyranny of Dragons and do 2 modules, one in large part in BG and maybe some kind of finale in Avernus, and the 2nd module have the party go back to Avernus and finish it there.
But there's already Waterdeep as far as City dwelling goes, and imo they din't want to just have another module taking solely place in a City, so from a designer point of view, it was better to just shorten the stay in BG and focus more on Avernus, at least for this one.
My DM asked me why they gave so much informations about BG (cause the BG gazeeter section of the module as EVERYTHING in it), evne though they would not use even 30% of it seeing how the plot is going in BG.
My only guess is that its all there so that people have all the tools neccesary to expand and make new adventures in BG.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Normality is but an Illusion, Whats normal to the Spider, is only madness for the Fly"
I agree with most of your points. But here are some considerations:
They let it slide cause even though its Named Baldur's gate, the real show is in Avernus.
I know that Avernus is the focus, but I'm not talking about the whole module, just the Badur's part. And if that's their reason to do such a poor and sloppy job, I'd be more than disapointed, I'd be furious.
And if the BG part was too dense, then it would have delayed the adventure in Avernus, and brought the whole thing over the lvl cap of 13-14.
Have to disagree, Phandelver was HUGE and ended with the players around lvl 4-5. Same lvl (recommended) that the players descend to Hell. And I not saying it should be this big either, just that it should be well done. There is no excuse to disregard ANY part of any module.
honestly i see Avernus portion easy going to 20 and being remarkably difficult even to extreme characters. just the idea of the other layers of hell taking notice to such strong souls, the demon incursions and not to mention the bending and influence of magic from either of the two mentioned. The bonus of it all is Tiamat is literately right there with her entire bluster.
I added in the tap rooms and tavern with a bounty board and a hunts board to keep things fresh and open ended not to mention, devils notice meat sticks in the back yard.
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Is it just me or is baldurs gate a death trap? No spoilers but the fights so far seem super deadly.
The Elfsong fight needs to be handled carefully by the DM. I'd either change the number of combatants, or the ease with which the PCs can get tavern patrons on their side, or something. I think it could be handled socially with really smart players, but if they just engage in a toe-to-toe fight, as written, they'll be annihilated. And of course, finding out at the end that speak with dead was always an option is kind of a drag. It changes the calculus of how much risk the players need to take.
Overall, I think it's navigable with smart players who like to think laterally. But if you have players who just like to hit stuff, yeah, the DM needs to help out a bit. Same goes for the fight under the villa.
I think the most deadly place is the dungeon of the dead three, it is huge and stocked with a huge amount of monsters up to cr4
It's like each fight can leave a party spent if rolls go badly. One of the fights early on can literally end on turn one if you enter the room and the creature just fireballs. And if you don't kill it in one turn, it fireballs again next turn.
Addressing the fireball issue, unless the characters look like a massive threat, the monster will likely test their strength for a round or three, because it doesn't want to spend its fireballs if it doesn't have to. While you know the characters are capable of killing it and it won't be facing any greater danger later that day, the monster doesn't. By the time it realizes it's in trouble, it'll use its fireballs, but by then the party should be spread out enough that it can't hit all of them with a single use.
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
I've just gotten through the Dungeon of the Dead Three in my read through and oof, could it be a tough one. I haven't even gotten to the rest of Baldur's Gate.
The rest of baldurs gate is not that bad, it’s really just elfsong tavern and the dungeon of the dead three
I've got a party at Level 5 right now that I'd like to run through "Descent"...are you all talking about a lower level/brand new party having deadly fights in this module? I tweeted at the writer and he said that I'd need to revise/level-up the encounters to challenge a level 5 party.
Cheers y'all!
Yeah, the first few encounters of this module are VERY tough for level 1 & 2 simply because the characters have very few hitpoints and resources. Level 5 will be a breeze as written so you'll definitely need to increase the difficulty of them.
We did a test run with the tavern encounter during a session Zero of sorts, when we where only 2 players and the DM, waiting for the other 2 to make their characters.
So one Artificer and One Paladin+ a NPC Cleric( since the other two took Monk and Ranger, so...)
for the Session 0, just us 3...
My pally managed to kill 3 of them and lasted till the end cause of his higher AC( 18 AC at lvl one is HUGE), but once the Artificer was out( darn those are weak and pathetic at lower lvls...) and the clerci bit the dust, the 3 remaining pirates made short work of me.
The turning point was when the Dm started to use the crossbows rather than have the pirates bumrush us with their swords..., i mean 1D8+3 to PC's with max 12/13HP...thats just freakin brutal...
So he was like" Know what?, maybe i'll start you guys at lvl2...", wich helped for the first encounter, we also kinda found out that we could persuade the Patrons to come to our aid if we over bid what the Captain gave them...
Wich made the fight hilarious..., when my Pally managed to recruit the Half Ogre bouncer and 3 of the patrons...
Now i don't really see how the Dead Three dungeon is "hard"?..., yes there's one CR4 creature, but that master of Souls is alone, and even though it has Fireball prepared, if you sneak close enough of her before she sees you, there's no reason for her to use it, since it would also burn her seeing how small the morgue is.
So once that is out of the way, she is easy as pie...
What did a number on us was the Head of Bhaal Uber Assassin...
Critted with that Aura of Murder thing, darn, never saw my character go down so quick..., but it all worked out.
Some fights where kinda close or tight, but we did okay, and thats with a party of mostly amateur D&D player, the only D&D they all played was in our other campagin wher i'm the Dm and i run CoS for them since january.
I guess smart playing, and luck plays a huge role in the first chapter
"Normality is but an Illusion, Whats normal to the Spider, is only madness for the Fly"
Kain de Frostberg- Dark Knight - (Vengeance Pal3/ Hexblade 9), Port Mourn
Kain de Draakberg-Dark Knight lvl8-Avergreen(DitA)
I put the drop from the other tavern in elfsong tavern and had them jump to the party’s aid
i have a group of 7 going into the bath house next week all level three. on paper i think they will have an easy time of it all, thinking i need some extra punch to make it all more threatening.
Tl;dr yes it feels like every custom monster is power creeping: mages do crazy melee damage, everyone has spell resistance, melee mobs often have one attack more than they should, and plenty of them have special abilities that double damage etc.
My experience (before actually dming very long):
Elfsong would have wiped the party if hadn't pushed them to get patrons to help and prevented the captain from doing the same.
Dead three dungeon is a death trap. First cr4 mage tpk with a fireball but the party was all just unconscious and woke up at his altar and could get away. But even heavily injured he managed to get 1 hit in on our bard and insta killed him.
Basically when I check all the custom monsters in the adventure it strikes me that many have way too high damage output for their CR. It seem that they have just added an arbitrary 4d6 or something to their attacks which just makes everyone deadly. And just like in Dungeon of the mad mage is everyone and his mother resistant to spells and often to alot more.
I could play this adventure with a carefully crafted group with alot of necrotic resistance and temp up etc and an optimized dpr or two but without that survival is only granted by kind DMs. Also with risk of spoilers: although end game allowes for non combative resolutions there is no described path to this end all other lead to a level 13 party facing off with cr 25+ if they haven't died at before level 10 while facing power creeping cr 13+ mobs.
Well if the mage necroballs the shit out of them things might look different. But we entered 4players at level 2 as recommended and that is death.
Dead Three Dungeon is ABSOLUTELY impossible for a 4 players party at lvl 2.
My party consisted of a fighter, a paladin (me), a bard and a wizard. We kind of got lucky because we took a path that let us avoid a significant part of the combats (never met the fireball guy for example). But we were completly spent (just the fighter was full, we made 2 short rests along the way) when we reached the guy with the skull at the end. Even with the help of the other guy with the great club we were quickly dispatched, like no chance at all. Even if we had made a long rest (wich I think is kind of ridiculous to do imersion wise), I don´t see much chance either, the guy just stuns you and evicerates anyone (except a barbarian) with 2 1d4+5x2 (because of the vulnerability) resulting in an average of 28 damage per round (and at least 24). That combined with his magic resistance, ability to deny damage (he completly ignored my smite) and his 60+ HP makes the encounter just IMPOSSIBLE. That's the most umbalanced encounter I've ever seen the WotC do, and I played Princes, Stradh, Tomb and OotA...
And I Shall Fear no Evil
For I am Evil Incarnate
This is exactly what I see happening. From my 30 years of playing D&D i think there is splat book style powercreeping at play. Every one making adventures make their npcs just a bit "cooler" than the average adversary.
I mean just the fact that the firrballer has major league melee damage, the bhaal assassin has stat points like he rolled dice when noone was looking and then read every tome of x in the game twice and then added an insane feature that noone in the world has that doubles all damage plus powerful defensive abilities. Nine fingers has dagger that hit like great swords and attack with them like an 11 level fighter. Why?
Some high CR mobs are just in different categories of power entirely and even though they have nearly the same CR, one might be able to handle couple of the other one at the same time literally blindfolded.
Everyone is a yuanti on their mother's sisters uncles side for some hard to get spell resistance except those that just splatbooked some rare class to grant them everything-resistance.
Everyone's magic weapon s are non lootable and everyone is so broke that you really understand why they live in soggy dungeons but not why they use their near genius level intellect to NOT rob the people they murder on a day to day basis.
Are the new generation of we-are-all-buddies game designers at the coast not passing their game balance courses with flying colors any more?
This seem to be a thing lately with all the UA classes as well. Almost all of them are so ridiculously strong that they could almost be used to survive the Dead Three Dungeon. Allowing any of the later UA additions would make old classes seem like hard mode or unfair.
What are your observations?
Now that I'm reading the campaing I have to say I'm really disapointed with the Baldur's Gate part.
Everything seens rushed, storywise seens like some content has been cut out, or that the Baldur's part was shoved in the campaing to capitalise the BGlll hype.
The plots and hooks are shallow, generic and quite disconnected with the rest of the campain (in my opinion).
I liked the maps of the first chapter but the encounters are made for way stronger parties and the Dead Three Dungeon seems to be way harder than Low Lantern and Vanthampur Villa, as if intended for a later apperance in the campain, also the new creatures (who I really like, new quality content is always welcome in my opinion) are way downgraded, giving the feeling that the mechanics were disregarded (either by care or lack of time), there's no way a Death Head of Bhaal is only CR5, the same goes to the Reaper of Bhaal and Master of Souls, just to mention a few. And I totally agree that their stats are waaaaay overpowered. A Death's head of Bhaal has stats that put a Warlord (CR12) and a Drow Shadowblade(CR11) to shame and rivals DRAGONS!
So it all seems that they left all this in the arms of the "the DM can change all he wants" excuse (giving a impression that, if you disagree or criticise you are a bad or lazy DM) , wich is not really my point.
My point is, and that's what shocks me the most, is that the team behind it was huge. Much bigger than OotA for example, a campain that I DMed and love.
Four developers (Jeremy Crawford, Dan Dillon, Ben Petrisor and Kate Welch), a playtest coordinator (Bill Benham) and over 30 named play testers letted this slide.
And I Shall Fear no Evil
For I am Evil Incarnate
They let it slide cause even though its Named Baldur's gate, the real show is in Avernus.
Baldur's is just the Introduction or the Tutorial zone of the game if you put it in video game terms.
Now there's enough information about Badlur's and its workings for the people that want to expand on it and have more to do in BG, but the focus is all About the Nine hells in this module.
And if the BG part was too dense, then it would have delayed the adventure in Avernus, and brought the whole thing over the lvl cap of 13-14.
Remember WotC is allergic to content over lvl15, and having enouhg in ONE module to go from 1 to 20, would be too much work and too big.
They could've gone the Tyranny of Dragons and do 2 modules, one in large part in BG and maybe some kind of finale in Avernus, and the 2nd module have the party go back to Avernus and finish it there.
But there's already Waterdeep as far as City dwelling goes, and imo they din't want to just have another module taking solely place in a City, so from a designer point of view, it was better to just shorten the stay in BG and focus more on Avernus, at least for this one.
My DM asked me why they gave so much informations about BG (cause the BG gazeeter section of the module as EVERYTHING in it), evne though they would not use even 30% of it seeing how the plot is going in BG.
My only guess is that its all there so that people have all the tools neccesary to expand and make new adventures in BG.
"Normality is but an Illusion, Whats normal to the Spider, is only madness for the Fly"
Kain de Frostberg- Dark Knight - (Vengeance Pal3/ Hexblade 9), Port Mourn
Kain de Draakberg-Dark Knight lvl8-Avergreen(DitA)
I agree with most of your points.
But here are some considerations:
I know that Avernus is the focus, but I'm not talking about the whole module, just the Badur's part. And if that's their reason to do such a poor and sloppy job, I'd be more than disapointed, I'd be furious.
Have to disagree, Phandelver was HUGE and ended with the players around lvl 4-5. Same lvl (recommended) that the players descend to Hell.
And I not saying it should be this big either, just that it should be well done.
There is no excuse to disregard ANY part of any module.
And I Shall Fear no Evil
For I am Evil Incarnate
honestly i see Avernus portion easy going to 20 and being remarkably difficult even to extreme characters. just the idea of the other layers of hell taking notice to such strong souls, the demon incursions and not to mention the bending and influence of magic from either of the two mentioned. The bonus of it all is Tiamat is literately right there with her entire bluster.
I added in the tap rooms and tavern with a bounty board and a hunts board to keep things fresh and open ended not to mention, devils notice meat sticks in the back yard.