Three Battles-One Fight

I'm going to start this post off positively: newer and younger players are amazing. They don't come to the table with preconceived notions about gameplay; they they will surprise you with something people way more scholarly than me about gaming call emergent play. In normal speak it means playing a game in a fashion other than how its meant to played, but in a way it can be played. Table-top RPGs are great for this (in theory), because at its heart, they're about cooperatively creating a story about fictional personas in a fantasy universe.

However, table-top RPGs still often have very gamist roots, where the "story" is a challenge created by the DM that the players are trying to win, and its expected that the players will have a fighting chance, provided they don't do something stupid like splitting the party.

So for last session's game, Nathan and his half-elf warlock were back. He chose two very "tanky" warlock invocations: Armor of Shadows and Fiendish Vigor. The first lets him cast mage armor at will (a spell with an 8-hour duration that sets your AC 13+ Dex mod), and the second lets you cast false life at will (a spell which grants you 1d4+4 temporary hp for an hour). Sadly Ethan and Andrew were absent. Especially since Andrew's character, Tarkir, a paladin, would have been super effective in this fight. More on that later.

We had some new players: Alec, and two kids he takes care of: Hilary and Jake. Alec made a human wizard named Cugel, opting for the School of Necromancy arcane tradition. Hilary made a wood elf fighter named Sarra that specialized in two-weapon fighting. Jake made a wood elf rogue named Amrus.

The problem with new players and the Death House adventure is that its set up to be a bottle; the PCs can't get out until they finish the adventure. Presumably, then, no one should be able to get in. Being a DM for a shifting roster of players involves stretching narrative credulity to its breaking point; so the Mists of Ravenloft lured these three people in and drove them to the Death House, and they stumbled on the party just as the fight was beginning. As a DM, I think player participation is more important than narrative credulity.

One last thing: I read the DM's guide to the Ravenloft season of Adventurer's League, and discovered how the one-time return to life works. It provides the resurrected character with a benefit and two drawbacks. I already gave Joseph's resurrected Ap a drawback (a long-term madness with the flaw "I don't like the way people judge me all the time.") I added the perk: he's reading other's surface thoughts, but the first thing he hears is all their judgmental thoughts. So he has advantage on Insight checks, but hence the madness. I'm planning on introducing the second drawback later, when they emerge from the Death House and being interacting with Barovia in general.

So, Lop had grabbed an orb off a statue in a creepy basement, summoning some shadows into the room. The party bottle-necked themselves in the corridor into the room, leaving poor Lop alone to face the shadows.

Shadows are pretty tought for challenge 1/2 creatures. They're resistant to most things, including nonmagical weapons, and flat-out immune to necrotic and poison damage. They are however vulnerable to radiant, and take normal damage from force. They only have an AC of 12, but they have 3d8+3 hit die (averaging 16 hp-I use the averages from the stat blocks to save time). They're attack is only +4, but it inflicts 2d6+2 necrotic damage and does 1d4 Strength damage, which is healed with a short of long rest. The only other balancing factor is Sunlight Weakness, which gives them disadvantage on most rolls (mainly attacks and saves), so daylight (a 3rd level spell) could stop them cold. Still, as kobolds with Pack Tactics and CR 1/8 is a bit of a gross underestimation (see ALL of my posts on Tyranny of Dragons), I think these guys at CR 1/2 is a gross underestimation. Of course, as a DM I know the stat block, so I'm privy to good tactical choices. In this case, focus fire on each shadow in turn to take it out. Players, being players, react to what they can see. So most players (myself included) often see a mob and think: crowd control spells.

Their only source of radiant damage was Tathora, and their otherwise best damage dealer was Sarra, who was hampered by not having magic weapons (no surprise at 2nd level in a bottle adventure designed to take the party up to 3rd by the end) and by a couple of hits that brought her Strength down to 8 early in the fight. On top of that Cinis, Nathan's warlock, boldly stepped into the middle of the fray and was quickly taken to 0 hp. The astounding thing is that he self-stabilized in just three rolls. It also didn't help that (and I didn't realize this until the end of the session!) Alec thought spell slots are spell-dedicated like they were in previous editions. Now that its cleared up for him, I expect he'll play a little differently next session.

The shadow fight would have greatly benefited from Tarkir. Paladins have a nice spike in capability at 2nd. They get their fighting style feature (idenitical to previously discussed fighter features), spellcasting, and divine smite. This feature lets a paladin spend a spell slot after hitting with a melee attack. Spending a first level slot adds 2d8 radiant damage to the attack, adding 1d8 for every slot above 1st spent. Shadows have low AC, 12 to be precise. Plus they're vulnerable to radiant damage. Averaging 9 damage, doubled the 18, plus half of whatever he rolled on the attack's initial, halved damage, Tarkir could have taken out 2 shadows in as many turns.

So the fight with the shadows was a grind. I realized this early and started fudging rolls to have things go a little easier for the PCs. Then Jake and his wood elf rogue Amrus decided to go exploring. His reasons for doing so were right on target for role-playing: his character wants money, so he was looking for valuables to loot. He discovered a den and then a bed chamber with a footlocker. So, looking for valuables, he opened the foot locker. He found some. After grabbing the first item, a potion of healing, he awakened the ghasts of Gustav and Elizabeth Durst, the leaders of the cult that built this basement lair.

Ghasts, for those not familiar with D&D, are tougher palette-swaps of ghouls. They have a few more hit points, hit a little bit more often and hit harder when they do hit. Plus, they can paralyze even those pesky elves. On top of that they have a Stench feature, which can poison anyone standing next to them. Last but not least, they have resistance to Turn Undead, something that they also grant to nearby undead. I fudged the feature a bit-PCs should have had to save against both ghasts before being immune to the feature for 24 hours. With the in-game reasoning that this was already a grind, and the narrative reason that this was a husband and wife team, I let one save work for both ghasts. All these upgrades earn a ghast a Challenge of 2 compared to the ghoul's 1. However, since ghasts aren't resistant to any particular damage type the party was dishing out, their hit points were effectively "lower" than the shadows'. Especially since ghasts' AC is also low, 13 to be exact.

Fortunately, Jake was smart enough to play another rogue tactic right: running, hiding, and sneak attacking from hiding. One particularly lucky damage roll took Elizabeth Durst ghast down to almost bloodied in one hit.

In the meantime, the party's shadow fight continued to grind. First burning hands and thunderwave were used. Unfortunately, shadows are resistant to fire and thunder. So successful saves effectively quartered the damage. Some low rolls led to some shadows taking a measly 1 damage from the attacks. In a bit of role-playing more than tactics, will had Lop use prestidigitation to turn the sheet he had taken into a "ghost." This didn't really slow the shadows down, but it provided some entertaining moments during a tense battle.

Once they had cleared most of the shadows, the Gustav Durst ghast arrived in the room. Cugel disabled it with tasha's hideous laughter, which made dropping it a mere chore rather than a grind. It had a particular string of bad saving throws, too. Other party members decided to help Amrus with his battle with the ghastly Mrs. Durst.

Without maps, it will be a little difficult to explain what happened next, but this it. There are two ways into the shadow room from the cult den and bedroom nearby. One a twisty corridor, the other a short corridor with a door. Gustav Durst took the twisty corridor when entering the shadow room. None of the players noticed the significance of this (they're all kicking themselves for how obvious it was in hindsight, now). Ap decided to open the door.

In a classic moment of the 1st-edition adventure design standard of "The DM is actively trying to kill the PCs," the door turned out to be a mimic. These mean D&D standbys imitate furniture, usually chests but also (sometimes) doors and other frequently used items like tables or chairs, ambushing PCs with sticky skin, psuedopods, and biting jaws. Ap hadn't used his action yet, so he pushed the mimic away with a thunderwave spell. At this point I flat out told the players that I had hoped they didn't pull this monster.

In this edition, mimics are CR 2. They have a low AC (12), lots of hit die (9d8 + 18, averaging to 58 hit points), middling attacks (only +5 to hit) with only middling damage (1d8+3 for a psuedopod and 1d8+3 for a bite that also inflicts 1d8 acid damage). However, they're VERY good at grappling (made MUCH easier in this edition). They're bigger hit point sinks than the similarly challenge rated ghasts, but they're less offensively inclined and have a little less battlefield control.

By this time, the party needed to finish off the ghasts (this included Cugel using his little used wizard stabby dagger! on Mr. Durst) and Amrus continuing to sneak attack Mrs. Durst. Even though poor Sarra had been nerfed by the shadows, she still managed to be effective in mop up. By the end of the night, our table had done something it had never done before: gone longer than any other encounters table in the store. It took close to 2 and a half hours from me arriving around 7:15, to when they finally cleared the encounter at around 9:45. I even spotted them the last hit point of the mimic and fudged rolls left and right to make the monsters less effective and to make the grind go quicker.

One of the more comedic moments was Ap using shocking grasp on the mimic, which only got his hand stuck to it again. In a subsequent, failed attack with the same spell, he missed. I decided that the mimic's adhesive is a resistor, so it gave his electrified hand just enough give to ground out the shocking part of the grasp its slime.

I'm going to take a soap box for a minute hear, and also combine it with some armchair game design. First, is the issue of challenge rating. The idea behind a challenge rating is that a party of a certain level should be able to handle that monster at a certain level of effectiveness. In 3rd and 3.5 it was "the party should expend a quarter of their overall resources on the monster," In 5th, it's the more vague "a fully rested party at this level should have no trouble beating the monster/NPC." The idea of challenge rating is a sticky one, considering how vague it really is, especially since different party builds will have different resources to throw at something. Sure, Tarkir (or any paladin really) at second level or higher would have made short work of the shadows. Or if Tathora hadn't expended her Turn Undead (or refreshed it before this battle with a short rest), they could have isolated the shadows better. Or if they were 5th level or higher and any caster with daylight (its on most of the lists-only bard, warlock, and wizard don't get it) or a cleric with spirit guardians, the shadows would have been dead meat in a turn or two tops. But at 1st-4th level, they're 32 hit point sinks with the potential to make the party's ability to damage them less effective with each attack. So CR 1/2 is a low ball figure, in my opinion. Granted, I think there is a base assumption that somewhere between level 1 and 4 at least one party member will become the proud owner of a shiny magic weapon, and the spell magic weapon is only level 2 (meaning casters get it at 3rd level and higher). Again, we've arrived at vagueness, and that just doesn't sit well with the gamist nature of the rule. The ghast and mimic's challenge rating felt more correct. The ghast for being better offensively and at controlling, and the mimic for its surprise value and being a big old hit point sink.

Lastly, was Jake's little foray that allowed this battle to spiral out of control. And God Bless the noobs. He hadn't played D&D long enough to know that you never split the party. But he was familiar enough with the idea of table-top role-playing games to understand another, and in some ways more important, thing: do what your character would do. He decided that a greedy wood elf rogue would leave an embattled group of strangers to find rich stuff. Tactically unwise, yes, but exactly why we play table-top RPGs and not CRPGs or adventure board games: because our options are only limited by our imagination.