Joel’s Scattered Thoughts

I got a little bit frustrated with last night’s session. It wasn’t because of the players playing poorly, it was because they played too well!

I had set up an encounter that was a few notches below deadly. I had a strategy for their opponents that I thought would do a pretty good job of tying the players down. The archer and the magic user were to be tied down by mooks while the tank would be fighting a higher level tank whose abilities matched or slightly surpassed his own.

The PCs saw this group heading out towards them. Then, for the first time ever, the magic user started using her buff abilities left and right. Suddenly the tank had another 45 hitpoints and +8 to his already considerable armor class. The archer suddenly had amazing climb and tumble skills so she set up for shooting from a tree 20 feet above the ground. The magic user can fly, so she hovered well above the tank.

The opponents I had set up are deadly infantry and okay archers. They don’t use much magic. The leader missed his automatic critical on the tank, but the mooks managed to pepper the archer and the magic user with arrows. Thanks to the tank’s boosted AC and some bad rolls, the leader missed the tank a lot. The magic user kept barbecuing the mooks with area effect spells. The archer did some decent damage. The PCs each used one healing spell during the battle and that was about it.

Anyhow, I’ve learned a few things.
- Given some time to prepare the group can boost their effectiveness by quite a bit
- I need to figure out how to have sensible opponents be less vulnerable to area effect spells
- Opponents need some way of dealing with flying PCs
- Opponents without magic are at a severe disadvantage against magic users, no matter how tough they are
- Once again, CR/EL is not a solid indicator of how tough an encounter will be. It all depends on the players
- I need to remember that my players play to “Kill Things and Take Their Stuff” and to beat the crap out of annoying critters. If they’re happy, I’ve done well even if my elegant strategy falls apart.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 29th, 2005 at 7:32 am and is filed under AE Campaign 1, Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.