0
The latest session report is up, a few months late.
It was a good session, and ended with a dragon fight. It was my first dragon fight, and I learned a few things. First, dragons are complex to run, and it’s easy to forget some of their abilities. Second, dragons should be mobile; I made the mistake of having the dragon stay relatively stationary, and I think the encounter suffered as a result. Third, go easy on extremely debilitating conditions. The dragon was using a lot of darkness-themed powers, causing players to be blinded a lot. There were also some minions that I had created that immobilized the PCs with one attack, and with the other slid them and dazed them. The tactic I kept using was to slide a PC into the water, after which he would be dazed and have to spend his entire turn getting out of the water. This was effective at locking down certain PCs and keeping them from attacking the dragon. I don’t think it was that fun for those PCs.
In general, I think that conditions like blinded, stunned, dazed, and immobilized should be used sparingly; maybe one or two monsters in the group should be doing those things, and not every turn. The problem is, because those effects are fairly powerful, attacks that utilize them tend not to do that much damage. Because of this, you wind up with an encounter that is long and potentially frustrating to the players, but doesn’t make them feel like they’re ever in that much danger. I think it’s probably a better idea to use those kinds of abilities as window-dressing to harry one or two powerful PCs, and to focus more on monsters that have the potential to hit really hard. I’d rather have a quick encounter that makes the players afraid for their characters’ lives than a long one that doesn’t.
Related posts:
