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Rivenroar - Goblin Personel Shortage? - Wizards Community
So, I just started running the adventure path for friends new to 4e.
They got through the Bar Fight and Ogre Bombadier fights just fine.
Next day, they interrogated Morrik successfully.
However, they failed the Tracking the Goblins skill challenge, and the Kruthiks really put them through the wringer, so by the time they got to Castle Rivenroar, the first encounter with two hobgoblin soldiers and 2 goblin sharpshooters had everyone down to their last few healing surges.
They retreated for an extended rest in the wilderness around Castle Rivenroar, and we ended the session.
I'm a little perplexed that there's no mention of how the "Red Hand" reacts to repeated daytrips into their hideout.
They don't make any attempt to re-staff emptied rooms?
I'm considering putting four Hobgoblin Grunt minions in the Room 1 to replace the soldiers and sharpshooters, just to give a sense of versilimitude.
As the PC clear out rooms and then retreat, I might start putting sparcer amounts of minions, and probably demote to using Goblin Cutters, to represent the Red Hand loosing personel.
Also, after how many days would Sinruth realistically continue to let his men be slaughtered without waiting in Room 1 with the combined rest of his forces, so they can fight the PCs at once?
To sum up the issue, really: What's stopping the PCs from blowing their dailies in one fight, retreating for an extended rest, and heading back in, lather rinse repeat?
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It gets boring? Also, eventually they will find themselves in places where this doesn't work, and they'll really need to have figured out how to pace themselves in order to have three or four fights in one day.
This is something I feel is okay to tell them, GM to Players.
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I know 4e abstracts a lot of things 3e used to simulate, but I feel like the behavior of a credible threat should be simulated rather than just abstracted on good faith that the players won't cheese it.
Do you think the minion filler is a good enough deterent?
I don't want to them to repeat whole encounters, so I don't want to make the recurring fights to hard, and making them minions will have the fights go at a brisk pace, but eventually if they have to backtrack through 6 rooms of minions, they might loose a healing surge or two.
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What Thellaren said.
Also, don't restock the dungeon.
Just move creatures to the front room to replace the dead guards.
Have the bad guys lop off the heads of prisoners and stick them on pikes just outside the entrance to the dungeon as a warning.
Start with just one after their first retreat and add another every time they fall back to camp.
(Kartenix is a good choice for the first go since he's already dead anyway.
Just don't kill Sertanian.)
Here's a sample timeline:
Day One: PCs attack Rivenroar, get driven back.
Day Two: PCs return to find the head of Kartenix on a pike and the first chamber guarded by some denizens from other parts of the dungeon who are now using piles of dead comrades as "sandbags." Change other parts of the dungeon the PCs have already been in to reflect NPCs searching the area.
The dead rage drake, for example, might have hunks of meat carved off it.
If the PCs retreat again, have them attacked in their camp at night by still more creatures from the dungeon, the ettercaps perhaps.
Day Three: The PCs return again and find the heads of Andronsius and Jalissa on pikes.
The initial foray reveals abandoned posts and cleared rooms - the denizens of Rivenroar have pulled back to a defensible position (your choice as to where this is) and wait for the PCs to attack.
Combine several other room's encounters to make something really hard here.
At the end of Day Three, have a cadre of new Red Hand recruits arrive, having heard of Sinruth's recent attack on Brindol and the utter failure of the authorities to do anything about it...
Have fun with it and give your campaign world a persistent feel by making logical changes that make things feel as if they are not static.
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Quote: : I'm a little perplexed that there's no mention of how the "Red Hand" reacts to repeated daytrips into their hideout.
I think that DM's are supposed to determine what is reasonable if this happens.
There are some possibilities and one of them is to redistribute the monsters that are left and fortify the entrance a bit more.
You could even have some monsters try to find the PC's and ambush them while they are taking an extended rest.
There could also be consequences in taking too long.
You could make it so that hostages are killed every so often.
The more extended rests the party takes, the fewer hostages are left alive and they will get less experience because they failed to rescue all of the hostages.
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Thanks Iserith. I was uncertain if I should kill any of the NPCs because of future Adventure Path episodes.
The warning about Sertanian is very much appreciated.
Your timeline is also pretty awesome.
This will help me a lot.
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Hey - note that for friends new to 4E, realism does not necessarily equal fun.
Realistically, there's no way five guys could clear out a well defended goblin base camp.
It just couldn't happen.
In order for the game to stay fun, sometimes you need to abstract.
If the goblins genuinely group together in a single defensible location, the adventure becomes unwinnable.
Just... unwinnable.
No amount of trickery or force should allow five level one characters to overcome an alert, forewarned room packed with five to ten encounters worth of opponents.
On the other hand, no amount of luck will let a group clear Rivenroar without taking an extended rest.
They'll probably need four or five.
So do we punish players for the limitations imposed on them by the game system?
No. It's not our job as DM to have the goblins respond realistically.
It's our job as DM to come up with believable reasons why the goblins don't respond realistically.
It's our job to transform mechanical limitations into compelling narrative.
Good DMing requires holding oneself to a higher standard than realism.
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Quote: : So do we punish players for the limitations imposed on them by the game system?
No. It's not our job as DM to have the goblins respond realistically.
It's our job as DM to come up with believable reasons why the goblins don't respond realistically.
It's our job to transform mechanical limitations into compelling narrative.
Good DMing requires holding oneself to a higher standard than realism.
This is what I was trying to do, really.
While the players know that 5 guys couldn't realistically defeat an entire army of hobgoblins, they should feel like they are capable of doing so because they're awesome not because the goblins are stupid.
The art of DMing is finding the right balance to challenging the players.
Not enough believable attempt to stop them, and there's no danger.
Too much, and they're slaughtered.
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Quote: : This is what I was trying to do, really.
While the players know that 5 guys couldn't realistically defeat an entire army of hobgoblins, they should feel like they are capable of doing so because they're awesome not because the goblins are stupid.
Sounds like you're on the right track!
Personally, my default with humanoids who aren't exactly braniacs (such as goblins) is to have them basically panicking.
Players overhear conversations like:
"Did you hear?
They slaughtered everyone at the guard post!
And then ran away!
We should go reinforce the guard post!"
" I'm not reinforcing the guard post!
What if they come back?"
"...
What manner of monsters could have killed five fully armed goblins?
We're all doomed!"
"Let's just stay really quiet in this room and hope no one comes looking for us until it's all over."
If, mechanically, the monsters really need to stay put, you're absolutely right that the explanation for that should be tied directly to the players being awesome.
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Quote: : Hey - note that for friends new to 4E, realism does not necessarily equal fun.
Realistically, there's no way five guys could clear out a well defended goblin base camp.
It just couldn't happen.
In order for the game to stay fun, sometimes you need to abstract.
If the goblins genuinely group together in a single defensible location, the adventure becomes unwinnable.
Just... unwinnable.
No amount of trickery or force should allow five level one characters to overcome an alert, forewarned room packed with five to ten encounters worth of opponents.
On the other hand, no amount of luck will let a group clear Rivenroar without taking an extended rest.
They'll probably need four or five.
So do we punish players for the limitations imposed on them by the game system?
No. It's not our job as DM to have the goblins respond realistically.
It's our job as DM to come up with believable reasons why the goblins don't respond realistically.
It's our job to transform mechanical limitations into compelling narrative.
Good DMing requires holding oneself to a higher standard than realism.
Nobody would suggest putting 5 to 10 encounters worth of monsters in one location, especially not in this dungeon...
First, to have gotten to that point on my hastily-described timeline, the PCs would have had to have eliminated a good many of the goblin encounters already and probably a couple of the gnome ones or whatever else.
It'd also be likely that the ettercaps were dead as well.
At best, there'd be a handful left over from various locations that could certainly be used to bolster the otherwise very weak Sinruth encounter.
My PCs had a tougher time with the ghouls than they did with the supposed "boss."
I bolstered the dungeon with traps and extra creatures to challenge my PCs.
They went in rested, pulled out to rest one time, and completed the dungeon on the second go.
I had the goblins respond to the attack in a logical way as described above more or less.
Everyone appreciated the realism and flow of it and the game wasn't unbalanced in any way.
There's certainly no need to adhere to strict realism in a fantasy world, but a little obvious logical persistance is always a nice touch.
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