First Post - Introduction
"You step into a 100 ft x 100 ft room. There's 160 orcs guarding a chest."
Not something you see every day, but there was a time when that was a perfectly viable description of what's going on.
Or, in my specific case, dancing and chanting in front of a throne, whereupon their god sits and watches them. The god sees you, stands, and disappears.
This was "Drums on Fire Mountain", an adventure for 5-8 characters of levels 5-8. And it was, once, one of my favourite adventures. These days, I know better - and this adventure falls under 'interesting idea, horrible execution'. The adventure, in a nutshell, racist as fuck. Ever since I figured that out, I've modified the adventure to not be an insult to the Polynesians.
Essentially, the PC party is hired to deal with a ship's bane - a mist that rolls out into the sea and slaughters entire crews, the ships then disappearing. The PCs get into it, and find themselves eventually on an island with bright green orcs that have afros, and whose culture is horribly built around the Polynesians. They're ruled by a Devil Swine - essentially a wereboar with magic powers - who's posing as their god - because they're too "superstitious" (read: stupid) to realize it's just a guy with magic powers.
Yeah. It's that bad.
When I last ran it, I swapped out 'glowing green orcs with afros' to 'minotaurs', the Polynesian culture to 'minotaur culture', and the human to 'the actual avatar of the god of minotaurs (and destruction)'. That was a lot better, I think.
All that aside, here's a few things from the adventure to look at - specifically, three rooms that the PCs would come across in the adventure and have to deal with:
Room 1: 30 orc warriors and 20 helpless orc young (0 attack, 0 damage).
Room 2: 160 orc warriors, 40 orc, 40 helpless orc young.
Room 3: 110 stirges.
The stirges, I'll note, show up in a chasm, with one hell of a drop. The group, if they want to get through the room, have to cross a bridge that's 10 feet wide, and about 90 feet long (give or take). I'll note, again, 110 stirges. Back then, a single adventurer took 10 feet of space. Due to three dimensions, this meant 23 stirges could attack a single adventurer (less if he had buddies on either side of him).
Remember, this is an adventure for levels 5 to 8.
Because I took down a 36th level cavalier (2e AD&D) with this room.
If this was in 3e or Pathfinder 1st edition? The orcs would be a nightmare, because the GM could (and probably would) use the kids to provide a flanking bonus to the warriors. The kids, of course, are helpless, with only 3 hp and can be wiped out casually. But then... "Do I attack the orc warrior beating the shit out of me, or do I wipe out one of the kids who's giving him a flanking bonus?", followed by, "do I actually murder an otherwise helpless kid who just wants his parents to live?"
And the thing is, this is why I like the adventure. The encounters are totally a mixed bag of "yeah, this room's easy" (a single displacer beast) to "huh, interesting" (an attractive young woman willing to wander with the group - and may actually not betray them if given proper incentive), to "oh my god that is not fair in the slightest" (110 stirges). As a game master, it puts a smile on my face. As a player? I look at it in horror, then immediately begin planning on how to survive.
And that intellectual challenge is wonderful.
There's just something about slipping into a chamber, and going 'holy crap' at the sheer number of enemies, then wondering what to do. Go in and try to kill the lot of them with superior tactics and lucky dice rolls? Sneak past them and pray you're not spotted because they're distracted celebrating before their god? Turn around and walk away, to look for a different route?
It's the Han Solo walking into a room with way too many Stormtroopers and going 'nope' and running. It's the heroes kicking open the door in Curse of the Azure Bonds and seeing cultists, beholders, and rakshasa discussing just how stupid adventurers are - and being given the chance to just quietly close the door and walk away - or take them on and pray.
This isn't something you see much in modern adventures. Most adventures are built with the idea that every fight is going to be nominally 'fair', or that if it isn't, the PCs are expected to succeed with perhaps a minor to significant drain of their resources - as if the world is aware of their existence and balances itself to this group of 4-6 people in particular, making their life difficult, but not too difficult, because existence doesn't want to make things too hard for its favoured children.
Yeah. I did like those 'ocrap' moments, where you know for a fact you're both outnumbered and outgunned. Or maybe you don't know it, and after one or two rounds have passed, you realize just how much shit you're in, because the enemies are dishing out the hurt a lot faster than you are.
Flashback Time. My First TPK
There's a nasty critter in the Companion Book for BECM D&D. The Companion Book is for characters level 15 to 25, providing information on characters along that range, becoming druids, paladins, and knights, getting strongholds, advanced weapon proficiencies and mastery, the outer planes, and a plethora of critters to face down. This specific creature is the drolem (or, 'dragon golem'). Yeah, dumb name, but this was the early 80s. I'm going to slip this critter into a semi-5e stat block to give you an idea of what the PCs were facing, being 18th level when I decided to pull this thing out of my bag of tricks. Just one.
AC: 22; HD:20d8 (90 hp), ATK: 3 (2 claw, 1 bite), DMG: 2d6/2d6/1d20+10
Special: Breath: Cloud, 20 ft x 20 ft x 20 ft. Constitution Save (DC 20) or Die.
Immune: Sleep, Charm, Paralysis, Mind-Affecting Abilities, Fire, Cold, Poison, all Spells of level 4 or less, non-magical weapons, silver weapons, any weapon of +2 or less.
The PCs see the thing, and decide to walk up and confront it for a throwdown. It killed all of them. First round. One blast of its breath weapon and everyone failed.
I looked at the group, they looked at their character sheets, we looked at each other, and I shrugged. "So, you wake up a hundred years later, with no idea of what's happened in that time."
Not bad for a 13-year-old. We took TPKs as one of the risks you face when you played D&D. Sometimes, the thing you're facing is just going to be too big for you to deal with, and you're not going to know until it's too late. But then, if you're stupid enough to walk up to every threat expecting to just throw down and win, you get what you deserve. My group decided 'tactics' was an important thing from that point on. Try to bias the environment to your advantage. Use the terrain. Set up traps and ambushes. Make the fight as unfair as possible in your favour. If you can't? Consider not having the fight in the first place. Negotiate if possible.
This is, by the way, one of the reasons I ignore CR in D&D and similar games. The world, as far as I'm concerned, isn't carefully balancing itself to the strength and abilities of the PC party. The world is what it is, it has its own biome, and the PCs are exploring that biome and testing themselves against what the world has to offer. Sometimes you run into a lone goblin, sometimes you stumble upon a goblin hunting party, and sometimes you crest a hill and find the entire damn goblin tribe.
Running away should always be on the table. And if the PCs aren't careful, it might even not be, in which case the group does its best to survive any way it can.
I had a discussion concerning this with one of my younger players. She's almost thirty years younger than me, and the difference in gaming perspective shows. To her, it isn't 'a world to explore' it's 'a story to tell'. The narration of the game, the flow of events from A to B, the story of the characters, is more important than the world being a simulation that the characters explore.
She's not wrong. That's a perfectly viable way to run and play the game.
I do root for the PC party. I do want them to succeed and tell their story. But for me, the story is their actions within a world that's populated and chugging along just fine without their interference thank you very much. I help the players, in that I'll remind them of options they have, suggest tactics they can use, and basically act to ensure they know what they're capable of and what the rules allow them to do. I don't, however, tweak the adventure, fudge the numbers, or fudge the dice in their favour.
I may, once in a while, have an enemy perform a sub-optimal action or two to give the PCs some breathing room. Because not every enemy is a mindless killing machine - some brag, some get distracted, some have a derp moment. They're living, breathing creatures after all.
And hey, I consider that fair. You do something unexpected, they react to it. You bluff, they might fall for it. One of theirs dies horribly, or scores an awesome blow, others might get distracted for a moment.
Han Solo screams and chases a bunch of Stormtroopers down the hall, making them think they're outnumbered - until they get to the dead end and realize there's just one of him.
You just can't make moments like this if everything's balanced 'to be fair'. And if the players are having a hard time, you could always bring in the Ewoks.
Pax.
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