So, the party TPK'd.
Technically, it wasn't a TPK, but seeing as how the rogue barely escaped, and eventually contracted a lycanthropic curse off the fight, I figure that counts.
But I'm getting ahead of myself here, let's start where I last left off.
[spoiler=Round Two! Fight!]
After escaping the dire wolverine, the party met back up, healed, rested, then decided to try for the entryway into Kundarak again. However, since the cleric still had a negative to move silently from her armor, and she didn't stay far enough back, the orcs heard her as the party tried approaching to take them by surprise again. Ready for the PCs to attack again, and better prepared, the orcs waited for the party to once again breach the door (only taking slightly longer this time, since the PCs had worked out this assault plan already, and only suffered from some bad rolls for the first two attempts to blow in the door), then unloaded on the party with attacks from their longbows.[/spoiler]
[spoiler=Wherein the DM apologizes for making a mistake]
So, I mentioned to the PCs and apologized for running cover wrong. Turns out after I went back and looked it up, I had been shortchanging the orcs by quite a bit on the stats for Improved Cover. The PCs realized that perhaps they weren't built to assault this place when they started factoring the differences on AC and reflex saves. After 9 rounds of combat, the PCs move to withdraw, since even with a dedicated plan they still didn't have enough light on the other side of the room to effectively fight the orcs, and just weren't good enough shots to pick them off from around the pillars. Seems a fireball might have been handy here, but no wizard, and the rogue only had one rank in UMD, so the party didn't think it useful to get ahold of a wand or scroll to attempt to use it in combat. Oh well. The PCs tactically withdraw, covering themselves, and suffer fairly minorly on the way out, mostly expending just some divine spells and power points.[/spoiler]
[spoiler=OH GOD DROP BEARS WTF!]
So, random roll ends up with a Werebear on their last day to Blasingdell as an encounter. The party is literally at full power, loaded for bear (figuratively, as you'll come to see), and were ready for him. So when a bear "fell" from a tree along their path, they immediately decided to open up on the dude, without any other questions. I didn't even get to finish the sentence of "A bear falls out of a -" when they interrupted with "WE ATTACK" and started rolling initiative, and charged.
Bear wins init, and opens up on the Ranger. Ranger, despite taking almost approximately 2/5ths of his HP out of the two attacks that hit, managed to make the check to prevent getting grappled. His roll and mine could not have been more diametrically opposed. He took this as a sign of some sort. The ranger dealt 1 damage to the thing, because no one in the party had a silvered weapon. In fact, the ones they had found as loot they had pawned off instead. I guess they figured wererats were no big deal, a werebear wouldn't be a big deal either. This is where that "You really need to do more than 1dx+random-small-number of damage on your attacks, guys. This is kind of sad in terms of your damage output" lesson I've been trying to teach them came back and bit them in the butt. Hard.
Rogue dealt halfway decent damage via sneak attack flanking, and by halfway decent, I mean 9 hp total real damage. Cleric did no damage at all. After realizing that the DR might not allow them to survive this, they started moving back and attempting to maneuver around the thing to attempt to outrun it. I'd like to take this time to point out that left the warforged completely unguarded, and with nothing in the way to prevent the werebear from charging him down when it got lit up. The warforged realized this as he named off his damage roll, realized he dealt almost half it's HP in damage, and then was promptly charged. The party made AoO's, but dealt no damage in the process, the rogue currently laying on the ground at -2, the ranger capable of dealing 1 damage only on a maximum damage roll, and the cleric rolling nothing but mid damage numbers that didn't penetrate DR.
The bear clawed the warforged solidly, power attacking for 2 in the process thanks to the +2 from charging. He hit. It hurt. The warforged defensively manifested once more, dealing fairly minor damage, but bringing the enemy lycanthrope down to 21 HP, around the neighborhood of 1/3 left. He stepped back with a five foot step, not wanting to provoke an AoO, but not wanting to waste a round not dealing damage when he might be the only one capable of killing the creature, trusting in his companions to save him. He was already outside of Close Wounds range to begin with, I might add.
The cleric burned a cure moderate on the rogue, healing her nearly up to full thanks to her augment healing feat, the healing domain, and a near perfect roll on the dice. This left the Ranger to attempt to stop the "killing machine" from mowing down the warforged. You can imagine how that one went.[/spoiler]
[spoiler=Dead robotmen, and the near complete TPK]
The Ranger's attacks were largely uneffective, even with pouncing letting him make a full attack. The bear opened up on the warforged and took him to -13 with the first two attacks, his bite dropping the ranger with a max damage roll and the +3 from power attack to -1. The ranger really regretted only having an 18 AC, and that was while in whirling rage. The cleric and rogue, being the only two left, quickly decided a strategy. The rogue would run, and the cleric would die, since the cleric had no hope of outrunning the faster moving bear, and the rogue might make it if she had enough of a headstart.
The cleric charged the werebear, dealt 1 damage, and then promptly died to a horrific mauling. The rogue "escaped". Staggering back into town, barely alive, she collapsed into unconsciousness, unbeknownst to her, having contracted lycanthropy from the werebear's bite. The ranger finally pieced together the DR, with the "unnatural intelligence" gleaming in the bear's eyes as a werebear and broke down into hysterical laughter.[/spoiler]
[spoiler=And thus begins, the new beginning...maybe]
So, I decided to let the players of dead PCs roll up new characters, and we spent the rest of the session doing that, bringing them in at 8th instead. Yes, the half-drow werebear rogue is an ECL 12. I understand that.
I also decided to scrap running them through the RHoD, which is why I had originally told them to roll up 8th level characters. I decided they would still die horribly, and I'm now running something completely different. Mostly, P.o.o.m.a.
Seeing as how I granted them 8 ecl to work with, we now have the former-ranger's-player running a Dwarven Cleric, focusing on hammers and combat smashyness, intending atm to go into Warpriest for general mass buffery, iirc. He has a warforged sorcerer Cohort. His followers haven't been utilized in a game yet, but they're dwarven heavy armor fighters. I think he has them with the phalanx fighting feat. Neither has he rolled a failure on his % check for that armored body. He decided on a blaster cohort after I pointed out the party had no offensive magic or ranged combat ability AT ALL.
The formerly-psiforged's-player is now playing a...lemme make sure I remember it correctly: Half-Black Dragon Half-Giant Crusader. He wields a huge sword, and flies around and strafe's things to death. He's got enough White Raven manuevers he really functions as a battlefield enabler. He's a little smushier than the dwarf, HP wise, but he dishes out nearly four times the damage.
I helped the rogue with the werebear parts, and the new gear, since apparently her boyfriend is a completely incompetant teacher, by her words (and several other people's words, I learned after the fact), and she wanted to not die like his ranger. So she's more or less entirely self-sufficient at this point thanks to magical gear, spends most of her time in hybrid form in combat, and utilizes her natural attacks with her two dagger attacks. If she flanks, or is invisible, or one of a number of things to get her sneak attack dice, she dishes out 18d6 worth of dice (2d6 from rogue, 2d6 from assassin's stance, and her dagger has deadly precision), plus a ton of strength damage. She doesn't mind the lost rogue levels, since she still deals crazy burst damage each round, which is really what she wanted to do in the first place. Plus, she's a freaky ass bear. Did I mention I ruled Wilding Clasps to work for lycanthropic changes? Yup, freaky ass bear in armor. Scary on a battlefield to look at.[/spoiler]
[spoiler=And thus the battle is joined]
Going with a more open battlefield type feel to portion of the campaign, which is why the party built like they did. I'm going to probably be pulling heavily from the mini's handbook, heroes of battle, etc. to build on this campaign, and see if I can't manage to teach them how to build hopefully decently contributing characters. Mostly through showing them how a half-way decently optimized character works through battle. They'll function more as an elite strike force type group. I started humming the A-Team theme song. Seriously. I need help, I think.
I'm eventually working in Meepo back into this one, after filling out his stats from the start WotC gave him on his mini stat-card (with some level replacements. 9 fighter? Come on now) and the title of Dragon Lord. It will be kind of similar to RHoD, but not at all. Maybe they can learn after all, the rogue's player picked it up relatively quickly after I sat down and pointed out some things to her. Despite the +4 LA, the crusader's player seems to be picking it up quickly as well, but he's been scouring the CO boards learning some too. I have hope for him when the first words out of his mouth were "I realize this is horribly bad, and terribly inefficient, but I want to play X". He likes the feel of the character, which is good enough for me since he's actually a decent contributor on the battlefield.[/spoiler]
[spoiler=Wyverns and Manticores and besieged cities, oh my!]
So, just to give them a little bit of a test, and to help get the feel for the new abilities of their characters, I threw a couple fights their way. The first fight involved about 30 mook level 2 fighters. They decimated them without too many hits, especially on the dwarf and rogue. Their ACs are upper 20s, which means the lower level guys don't pose too big a threat to them, which is good. They couldn't land a hit on the crusader that actually damaged him either, thanks to crusader strike, Martial Spirit stance, and his delayed damage pool. He forgot his retribution abilities that key off his damage pool as often as he remembered them, but it was a brand new character.
The next fight involved a couple of wyverns the party had to run down and kill fairly easily without too much loss, although the warforged is super-dee-duper squishy. Almost Gelatinous Cube consistency. The dwarf is rethinking how he built him now.
The real test came when the small city they reported back to for mission completion came under siege. I figured I'd tie up the party via air-superiority, give the crusader a chance to enjoy flying. Manticores doing hit and run through city streets was a lot more fun to run that I thought it would be, especially with their poor fly maneuverability. In the end, the bear's kept-near-max jump modifiers allowed her to jump into a manticore or two, and grapple it down to the ground. Weighing a little under a ton helped. The crusader utilized his superior maneuverability to deadly efficiency, and between those two, they managed to one-round a manticore each on a pretty regular basis. The dwarf went up on the wall to help bolster the men via spell assistance, and to lend a hand where he was more useful, having given up on throwing hammers at the manticores when he saw how viciously effective the rest of the party was at dispatching them, and settled for what he could reliably kill: The enemy soldiers attempting to surge over the wall.[/spoiler]
[spoiler="I cast Create Great Swaths of Dead Guys. Err, I mean, Fireball"]
Taking it personally when the enemy tried to force open the gate, the dwarf decided to take care of the guys on the ram, then resuming his position on the wall, had his cohort blast apart the area around the gate with all four fireballs the warforged had that day. He's good at mook crown control, I'll give him that, even the ones who made their reflex saves still died. In the end, one of the manticore, seeing the dwarf and warforged as the biggest destroyer of the army and being out of tail spikes, engaged the dwarf in melee. While not capable of dishing out damage like his other party members, the dwarf didn't do half bad, and definitely recognized his place in the group as a tactical leader for the moment. The werebear climbed up onto the wall in the end, and threw dead manticore bodies into the other army. Between seeing a bear-thing in armor, a warforged laying death into great swaths of men, and a black-scaled giant clad in a funeral shroud (He wears the Ghost Shroud magic item over his mithral armor) breathing acidic breath over their forces, the party clearly won the day for that fight.[/spoiler]
[spoiler=Final Analysis for the two sessions]
While the party started off horribly, they now seem to have learned from the mistakes they made during their first module, and have shored up a lot of the painfully glaring holes in their effectiveness. They are quite pleased with being able to take down 4 on-cr fights back to back before needing to recover abilities, and between the dwarf's spell radii, and the abilities of the Crusader, they are started to really grasp the importance of party tactics. It helps that the Crusader's player has no qualms about speaking up on party tactics now, so they aren't plagued by the up-until-now-horrible tactical decisions of the dwarf's player. We'll see how they do one I throw spells into the mix against them as well. I have good feelings for this, and perhaps after this is all said and done (whether through completion or TPK), I'll be able to run the RHoD. Maybe I'll just have one of them run it instead and show them how it's done.[/spoiler]
