EPT+ Show Spoiler +
Ted - halfling ranger
Zen - half-elf bard
Walten - Elven Wizard
Damien - Half-orc Barbarian
Ren - dwarf cleric
David - half-elf cleric
Zen - half-elf bard
Walten - Elven Wizard
Damien - Half-orc Barbarian
Ren - dwarf cleric
David - half-elf cleric
The title's relevant because Black and White just came out Sunday and Walten decided it would be a good idea to memorize the entire Gen V pokedex, and bugbears as they found out, are fun. That is, when you manage to one-shot them.
Well. We're moving along in the Scourge of the Howling Horde - combat is moving faster, people are starting to understand some things better. Ted pretty much one-shots anything that he manages to hit (the 'you have to exceed the AC of your opponent with your accuracy roll' thing still doesn't make much sense to me but I go with it)
Expand for our progress in the campaign:
+ Show Spoiler +
They enter the cave with two dogs down, but since the dogs saw them and alerted the goblins, I had them stay in the cave and attempt to get higher ground. It works out decently - Damien gets hit a couple times because he runs into the cave and invokes an attack of opportunity from all six guards that were waiting inside the cave as he rushes in, but he's only down about 11 health. With two clerics that's nothing. He and Ted clean up all six nicely, Ted either one-shotting them to death or rendering them unconscious and Damien doing some decent damage; he got a crit on one of them and ended up doing about 43 damage (Goblins only have 4-6 health). I start frowning, since they're pretty much OP as shit as long as they do well on their accuracy roll.
They get past the guardroom, which is now empty because they alerted all the guards, sent them into the entrance chamber to help out the other two who were waiting in the shadows, and then killed all six in about a span of 30 in-game seconds....and make their way down the hall. I was going to redraw the map as they got to certain rooms so they didn't see the entire thing, but I gave up and just used a cover sheet instead, which was a horrible, horrible idea. They were able to see parts that they shouldn't have been able to see and whether Zen admits it or not, it at least had a subconscious affect on what direction he wanted to go.
The corridor after the guardroom looked like a +, with them coming from the western direction. even though I drew out their cone of vision, I wasn't able to move the paper in a way that would hide what they couldn't see, so Zen decided to go left instead of right - which would have been fine. However, they got into an argument on which way to go, and Damien wanted to turn right, which just messed everyone up. Their party dynamics are horrible! Damien's trying to be a low-witted barbarian, but he doesn't realize that some decisions for the character should be made with the intellect of yourself, not the character. The party's yelling at Damien for going right when everyone else is going left, and I can feel the friction between the players growing, so I intervene. I had made them do a listen check earlier, and a couple had made over 20, so I decided that the best way to solve the problem would be to make the bugbear down the right corridor growl happily. It does the trick, and the whole party turns and moves in that direction.
They kind of freak out over the fact that the door is locked and there's a sign on the door that says "Big Bronk's Room", and actually approach with caution. Damien gets out his battering ram (I probably should have mentioned to them that there was a 15 DC strength check, so he didn't really have to do that), and after some probably horrible DMing of the damage to the door, they break inside. As they're doing this, and making all that noise, Big Bronk got up from his lair of leather or cloth or whatever, and is standing in front of the door waiting. When they bash inside, Zen does a quick diplomacy check to make him turn indifferent, and then Ted shoots from beside Damien using an attack of opportunity...and does 17 damage. Big Bronk's health was only 16. Big Bronk was intended to be a sort of mini-boss for the party, and it was rather disappointing how quickly he dies.
I stop the session there, since Walten had to leave early. Everyone leaves, everyone's mostly happy, and then I log onto facebook to check on the group's wall. Damien sounds a little distressed about the incident I mentioned earlier when everyone is yelling at him for going the other way (as well as many other in-character impulses throughout the campaign that get squashed) and posts something on the wall about it. Ensue 50+ comments about it, mostly between Walten and Damien, but eventually involving pretty much everyone except Ren about the party dynamics.
However, somewhere in all those comments, it comes into light how OP Damien and Ted are. I'd been calculating damage as hit die + BAB + dex/str modifier...at least, I thought I was. They were both getting damage counts of ten or above most of the time, with the minimum (assuming they hit) being about five on Damien, and twelve on Ted. Enough to one-shot or almost one-shot a goblin with 4 or 6 HP. What do? Ted copypasta's the section in the PHB about attack bonuses and such, so I get confirmation that I'm doing the rolls pretty accurately. Is there something else I'm missing? Something to do with their armor that I should be subtracting? There's got to be something. There's no way level two characters should be doing this much damage. The CR ratings on the goblins are 2!
tl;dr: being a DM is difficult. All the blame for any sort of error in the campaign can be traced back to you. All of it.
Also, thank you all for your comments and suggestions :3 I posted this earlier in the day because I wanted to actually stay up and respond to comments this time instead of falling asleep... if you asked me something in the previous entry, I did post a response the next day in there.
EDIT: lessened the wall of text a bit. I also texted Ted and asked him what he had for his BAB, since his minimum damage is just way too much. He had it down as eleven...so that's part of the problem. There's a chart on page 22 of the PHB that lists the BAB of classes - a ranger's BAB is two
no wonder!
