Torog's Shrine is the climax of the Chamber of Eyes.If players are happy just to kick down the Shrine's main doors, they're in for a treat. The central chamber of the Shrine is dominated by a massive Dire Wolf, who'll immediately occupy players while Hobgoblin Archers snipe from a surrounding balcony. As the encounter goes on, reinforcements arrive from the bedrooms to the north, including one of those Hobgoblin Warcasters I like so much, and eventually the dungeon's chief villain, Chief Krand.
It's a tough fight, but an exciting one. The raised balcony is not just physically higher but symbolically higher, and players making their way to Krand on the upper level will be fighting a literally uphill battle. It's tremendously satisfying to storm the balcony and wrestle with the dungeon boss beneath the intimidating gaze of the huge Idol of Torog.
However, if your players are either smart or stealthy, they're much more likely to avoid the main doors and clear the bedrooms first. It's a strategy that turns an exciting set-piece battle into a staid tank-and-spank in a dull, narrow corridor. The Dire Wolf is made irrelevant (due to its size it can't fit into the living quarter corridors), the utility of the archers is greatly diminished, and surplus melee characters will have nothing to do while the party tank single-handedly takes on all seven of the humanoid opponents.
It's safer, to be sure. Competent parties who use this back route will find it fairly easy to lock down their enemies and murder the hobgoblins at a laid-back pace. But it's not much fun. There's nothing thrilling about kicking down a line of tactically-neutered enemies one at a time. It almost feels as though players are being punished for their competence.
In D&D, survival isn't the greatest reward a player can gain; in fact, it's a distant outrunner. Excitement and adventure are the reason players come to the table in the first place and there can be no higher encouragement of players than giving them an extra helping of awesome. When players perform well, the game should get less predictable, not more.
The wolf-and-balcony fight should have been presented to every group. It's potentially one of the module's best fights and Thunderspire does itself a disservice by allowing players to miss it. The module's mistake is that it lets the better players dodge it; instead, it should have let the better players own it.
Let's see rules for mounting the wolf's back and riding it back towards the hobgoblins. Let's see an option to use the wolf as a stepping stone for vaulting straight to the balcony. Let's have the damage that the big stone idol does if you knock it free from its base and roll it down the stairs. The two-level terrain is a classic swashbuckling cliche and the developers really missed an opportunity here by not taking it to its ultimate extreme. It's hard not to imagine a chandelier in the room, so strong is the urge to swing on it.
The lesson is: don't be afraid of your climactic fights. Don't think that avoiding or minimising them is something your players should aspire to. When you've got a big bad guy and an interesting map to fight him on, revel in it.
It's a mistake, unfortunately, that Thunderspire will make twice more, before finally overcompensating in its eventual conclusion.
17 comments:
Generally, I deliberately choose to make suboptimal plans as long as they're exciting. Hurling myself down on the wolf from a second-story balcony is exactly the sort of thing I would do.
It turns out there is indeed a low-level Beholder in the second Monster Manual. It's a level 5 Elite Artillery, and would be very interesting indeed with a two-level setup like this. Telekinesis ray! Sleep ray! Central eye! (All three in every round, no less.) Maybe trade out some archers for melee combatants... describe the Beholder Gauth as being linked somehow to the idol?
The MM2 is a really good book, by the way. Check my URL for my attempt at an extended monster-by-monster review of every single entry.
Whoops, forgot to close that last tag:
[/shameless plug]
I see your point, but I don't see why players who are lucky or skilled enough to take the stealthy or clever route should be forced into a frontal assault just because it's more 'fun'. That's what supposedly differentiates pen and paper RPGs from the likes of Final Fantasy, after all. Not every player wants the hack and slash approach - I know quite a few who derive immense satisfaction from tricking or negotiating with the enemy rather than killing them. Some players like to feel they've overcome an obstacle in a different way. If this is the approach a given group take, then it's likely they will have 'fun' in doing it their way.
4E already has a heavy 'gamist' feel. If you take tactics away from PCs completely, why are they making the decisions in the first place? Just run a string of combats without any preamble and save them the false choice.
I'm unlikely to get MM2, but I wonder if all players necessarily want to fight iconic monsters at low level. If a low-level beholder is just a reskinned Elf Archer, where's the challenge in that? There's something to be said for going up in level to the point where you can take on and expect to beat a classic monster like an illithid or beholder. Offering low-level versions seems to cheapen the classics to me. I never liked calling myself a 'dragonslayer' when all I'd killed was a 6 hp hatchling...
Speaking of dragonslayers, the blue dragon wyrmling happens to be a level 4 Elite Artillery now. He's a pretty tough contender, too.
And being "lucky or skilled enough to take the stealthy or clever route", in this situation, will result in a fight anyway. It will make the fight easier, but the problem is that it will also make the fight much less interesting.
Maelora: One of the cool things about 4th edition is that if you present them with a level 5 solo dragon at levels 3-5, and fully describe the size of it, when the have a hard time beating it, they'll still feel impressed. Later in the campaign, when you unleash an adult or elder version of the dragon that as a youngling almost party wiped them, they'll feel even more awesome after they tango with and defeat the beast.
On topic:
My problem with my group is their insistence to fight every battle on their terms. Lots of really cool encounter areas don't come to much when the tanks won't move the front line into the rooms and they fight from the hallway. If my party does get to the Shrine and enter the double doors (we'll find out next Friday), they'll certainly fight from the doorway, bottlenecking the Dire Wolf and gaining massive cover from the archers, who'll have to leave their vantage point to hit the PCs. Even if I set up a flank from north with duegar reinforcements, we'll have another clumped hallway fight. I can't seem to get them to enter the rooms until everything is dead. That's why I was impressed with the BBEG encounter from H1 because the PCs were forced into the center of the room from the get go.
If only their methods were less effective, but the party's defender is rocking a 23-24 AC at level 4 and the hobbies are attacking at +7. It's hard to hit, and it's hard to target anything else. I can't tell how much fun the PC's are having, but I know I'm personally getting bored with the repetitious combat encounters.
Scott - The MM2 does indeed look good but I'm holding off getting it just yet as I can't honestly think how I'm going to use it. Both groups I'm running are working in pre-printed modules (my fortnightly group are near the end of Thunderspire and my MapTool group are about a third of the way through Rescue at Rivenroar).
Maelora - Stealth and diplomacy are only fun when they're rewarded. There's no "Oh my! How did those heroes get in here? Flee!" moment to be had from taking the back way. Players still have to fight all the same monsters, just more slowly and with less real danger. It's objectively less fun. The satisfaction of knowing you made the right tactical call is pretty much all used up by round 2 of the combat and then it's just four rounds of swinging weapons.
Oscar - Well, the "chunk in the doorway" option works sometimes, but as per my previous post, don't they often run into trouble with the rearmost enemies going looking for help? (If they don't, maybe you could do that more often) In Torog's Shrine if they try and hold the door, the goblins could well use either the secret door to the refectory or the route through the living quarters to flank them.
We did manage to get through Torog's Shrine on our last session, and indeed, the party completely avoided entering the main area, instead facing the two duegar down the side passage. The combat was still challenging and interesting, as I made two archers flank from the side and forced a "squishy" rogue striker into combat with Force Lure which drew the defenders forward to help out. Force Lure also worked well with the giant fireplace. The party had to chase archers down the stairs into the shrine proper where I sprung the Dire Wolf, too big to really leave the shrine, on them, taking them by surprise. Pretty successful still.
Unfortunately, they sorta forgot completely about the kitchen area and left The Chamber of Eyes without even realizing that there was more to it to explore. And if they did know, they certainly didn't care.
>wrestle with the dungeon boss beneath the intimidating gaze of the huge Idle of Torog.
Idle of Torog? :-)
I have this image of the PCs fighting deperately beneath a statue of a demon-god who is slumped asleep on his throne...
You caught my spelling error. I'll go fix it.
Sorry Greg, didn't mean to be pedantic. I only point out typos if they're funny. I once wrote about 'thirsty travellers in the dessert' and my players have never let me live it down...
I'm constantly having to explain to people that yes, "just deserts" is the correct spelling, that no, it's not "desserts", that yes, it is a different form of "deserts" to the geographical sense and no, it's not to my knowledge used in any other part of modern English.
I proofread for a living so it's particularly annoying when errors creep into blog posts.
Maelora: "I'm unlikely to get MM2, but I wonder if all players necessarily want to fight iconic monsters at low level. [...] There's something to be said for going up in level to the point where you can take on and expect to beat a classic monster like an illithid or beholder. Offering low-level versions seems to cheapen the classics to me."I suppose I see your point, but I'm hardly your target audience: the Beholder-kin Gauth can trace its first appearance to a Monstrous Compendium appendix in 1989, two years before I was born.
Also, there's a account of someone over at ENWorld who added a Gauth to this encounter. The result: a horrible, bloody TPK.
You're right about the Monstrous Compendium, Scott. I never did bother much with those. I've always thought D&D is better with a small pool of monsters than loads of new ones.
Against my better judgement (hoping for something sensible like PC rules for Centaurs) I did buy the new MM2. Now, I've had many, many 'WTF??' moments in 4E, but this is the worst of them. Between the porcupine duergar, the bullywugs that heal you when you kill them, and the genuinely bizare 'Insane Noble', I have to concur that this book is either a huge in-joke or the work of someone criminally insane. I simply no longer recognise the game of my youth. I full expect MM3 to contain only the flumph, flail snail, and pages of Mike Mearl's scribbling in crayon 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy'...
I'm not sure that PC rules for centaurs are entirely sensible. 4th Edition seems to be trying to avoid characters who can't fit into the same space as other characters and have difficulty safely navigating cramped indoor areas.
Speaking of that. How did they get the dire wolf into the shrine?
But centaurs have been a PC option since 2nd edition. They are thematically far more like candidates for PCs than monster races like duergar and bullywugs...
Alchemists fire and acid flasks make great motivators for those PC's who like to stand their ground.
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