I think this was the first chapter where we had a near total party wipe. It all started innocently enough as I tried to corner Leosin and smack him around a few times to try and get our reward for rescuing him from the previous people smacking him around a few times. Unfortunately, the dudes' AC is apparently more than 23. That's higher than FRIGGING adult dragons man.
Anyway, after a 'negotiation' with Leosin, our party ended up having to go and explore the camp we had previously escaped from. Somehow we took this mission cause PLOTZ. But considering we burned half their camp down the last session (and this percentage keeps going up the more we retell this story), we weren't too afraid. Plus it's like 50 kobolds, who's afraid of 50 kobolds at this point?
So we go in and do our usual schtick, which really involves sending the fighter with DR3 to piercing/bludgeoning/slashing damage in front of us all the time so he can 'detect traps'. Overall, we didn't have too much trouble as we navigated the caverns easily, since we had a lot of random stuff on us that we just kept using, like climbing kits and so on. What was weird was how we came into a cave full of bats that nearly killed 2 of our party members; the cleric and the warlock. 11 bats that had pretty damn high AC and damage (1d4 +3) Somehow they just kept hitting the warlock and nearly killing him. The ironic part is right after that encounter, we met 2 drakes and a cultist and killed them all without taking damage at all.
But the real difficulty of the encounter lay with fighting the Dragonborn that I had encountered previously. With shield of faith on, my AC was a pimping 21 but his dragonbreath doesn't target AC...That and there were four frigging berserkers around. That's about 300 frigging hp right there. And here we are, dealing 1d8+modifier damage per turn usually....OMG, that was a really rough grind. I mean, other than taking a massive amount of damage from the dragonbreath, I didn't really get hit at all by the barbarians or even the dragonborn. But when the guy rolls 4d10 on a level 3 character......-_- Let's just say it was a bit imba. The druid went down in the first round and pretty much spent the entire fight down. Whenever, we tried to revive him, he'd just get downed again before he could shapeshift, due to a really shitty init roll.
Finally, it was over, but we had nearly wiped ourselves out and pretty much depleted our spells. Which was why it was probably a good thing we managed to get through the next few fights without taking damage, through a mix of trickery and guile. Also, insanely good charisma rolls. When you can bluff a cultist leader into believing whatever you say, you're probably rolling insanely high. Otoh, these ARE cultists and their perception modifiers are probably really low. I swear, CHA is probably the highest stat in the party right now, or at least the more useful stat. With it, we've managed to walk through an entire enemy camp without being challenged, rescue the monk without taking a fight, deceive a roper, deceive some drakes, deceive a cult leader and her guards.
Somehow, and this is a miracle, somehow we also managed to get through the session without taking any damage. Except for me when some cultist pinged off my armor and dealt me 2 damage. But nonetheless, the sheer difference in difficulty between some fights and others is mind-boggling at times.
But more importantly,I was finally at level 4, which meant I could take polearm mastery. Just part of my plan to become a lvl 12 paladin/lvl4 barb/lvl4 fighter multiclass.
No comments:
Post a Comment