What are you supposed to do?

[Username17]

OK, this thread is talking about The Red Hand of Doom an adventure series that for whatever reason is very common and popular right now. I am playing through it and I have no idea how the player is supposed to win. Which isn't to say that we aren't winning, I'm just puzzled as to what you're supposed to do. We've been pulling crazy crap and I can't help but to think that without we'd be losing party members constantly.

Our core party is composed of one Sorcerer with a bunch of Dragon bullshit, and a group of Rogues. One catfolk Ranger/Rogue using Bootblades and Catfolk Pounce, one Shifter Barbarian/Scout and one Deep Halfling Rogue stocked up on alchemist fire and the like. And of course there is a steady parade of temporary characters who in turn are always stealthy in one way or another.

So really we have an entire party of closet trolls. And a Sorcerer who knows Color Spray, Stinking Cloud, and Web. And we have

a zombie chimera that we fly around on.

So we rarely take damage from anything, prefering to kill things before they get actions. And have travel times much shorter than what the game presumably intends.

But consider:

There's a bridge, it's guarded by about a dozen 3rd level Hobgoblins with bows, 2 hell hounds, and a frickin 11 hit die Green Dragon. The party is 5th and 6th level. The dragon is itself listed at a CR 5, which means that it's really a CR 9. The dragon has flyby attack and hover.

We approached it by sneaking guys into the bridge towers and assassinating the archer sentries, peppering their hell hounds with arrows from above. Meanwhile the Sorcerer webbed and then stinking clouded the dragon, preventing it from taking standard or full round actions for 10 rounds - thereby preventing it from moving in the webs and eventually being killed with arrows and alchemist frost.

But what the heck are you supposed to do? The dragon is faster than anyone in the party can be and has flyby attack, which means that once it takes to the air it's just going to swing by with its acid breath from time to time until everyone is dead.

And earlier:

So Koth has his little keep that has a bunch of rooms filled with hobgoblins, worgs, a manticore, a minotaur, and of course a 6th level Sorcerer bugbear who knows lightning bolt. We snuck in room by room and killed each and every group individually before they got a chance to scream and took no damage.

But a frontal assault would simply get everyone killed. That would be a straight TPK. A Manticore and a 6th level Sorcerer raining attacks down on a party going toe to toe with mounted goblins with character levels and a minotaur? At 5th level? Good luck with that.

But the worst offender so far I think, is the swamp city:

There's a lake that's like 3 kilometers across and in the very middle are some free standing structures that are partially sunk into the murky waters. If you said "sounds like a black dragon" - you're right. There's a Juvenile Black in there. Which is bad news for a 6th level party, but the news gets worse because in addition to there being a black dragon with a huge murky lake to play in that you're supposed to get across somehow, the buildings are 500 feet apart from each other and the unimportant one has 6 archers in it who will screw you up good.

More importantly, the main building has an ettin, a 7th level ranger, a bard mindbender, the dragon, a stupid dragon-like magical beast, and 4 ogres. The dragon is listed at CR 7, so it's about a CR 11 by itself in any sane world. Also, the lake is ringed by huts filled with lizardmen if you care, which you don't.

I don't even know how you're supposed to get to the place without have a black dragon swim underneath you and acid you to death repeatedly about a kilometer from the shore. What we did is make our zombie chimera invisible and then fly to the central building and have everyone ninja flip off through a hole in the roof killing all 4 ogres before they were able to act.

Then the ettin and dragon popped up, and the dragon got itself color sprayed back down and the ettin got killed where it stood in a giant cluster fvck of readied sneak attacks and AoOs on a squeezing target as it attempted to get up the 5' wide staircase.

At this point things are going so poorly for the villains that they start trying to escape, and the mindbender actually does (though the dragon doesn't, he gets webbed down and eventually grappled to death by a zombie chimera). The demoralization of the DM was palpable, after the Rogue/Fighter defensive specialist deliberately provoked an AoO from the goblin ranger (that missed on a natural 19) and used Elusive Target and Improved Trip to drop the guy, he took his last action to actually attack his own equipment so we'd get less loot.

But the point is, if you weren't a bunch of closet trolls backed up by a battlefield control specialist, what would you do against that force? Its got more warriors than you do and they are individually harder core. Other than sneak attacks and treachery, aren't you pretty much screwed?

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

As far as fighting a flying dragon, I'd assume you'd just all take cover and hide when it's flying away and then try to return fire with ranged attacks, making sure someone with evasion was there to try to draw the fire. If it's high up in the air the -1 penalty per 10 feet of distance for spot checks is really going to help you out so it probably won't see anyone hiding. Also if you want just have them duck behind total cover.

Though for the most part, I don't thik the designers actually expect anyone to have the dragon do flyby passes, even though that's the most tactically sound thing to do. Dragons generally aren't expected to be played to their best, I think it's part of the reason they're very under CRed. Generally they land and start clawing into people as opposed to fighting a hit and run fly by scheme. That's what the designers see happening I think anyway.

But that's an old story anyway, D&D has always undervalued aerial movement. It's built as a 2 dimensional combat game with flying as an afterthought.

[fbmf]

I'd planned on running my group through this module when they get to the right level. I already have a a lot of work to do to adapt it to my campaign world, and I really would appreciate any insights as how to make it less of a clusterfuck.

Keep us updated, Frank.

Game On,
fbmf

[MrWaeseL]

What's a closet troll? Does it have anything to do with homosexuals?

[Fwib]

I think I know what is meant in context, but I too would like to know the meaning and etymology? of the phrase.

[dbb]

It isn't anything to do with homosexuality. It has to do with the fact that a troll out in the open is a reasonable challenge for a party of appropriate (according to the game) CR, because they can move around and not get full-attacked by it. But a troll in a tightly enclosed space (like a closet) is a nightmare, because it will full-attack you, and it will rend you, and that amount of damage will just plain kill your ass at the level you are supposed to be fighting it.

So a "closet troll", metaphorically, is a melee specialist who does massiv e damage when he can catch the enemy in close quarters.

--d.

[Daiba]

The biweekly group I'm in is currently playing this module, too. We have a significantly weaker party than Frank's, and I have to say that the second encounter would've TPKed us if the DM hadn't started pulling his punches.
Anyway, the party was 5th level at the time, consisting of a Conjurer, a ninja, a single-classed archer ranger, and a barbarian strength rogue (me). We're all pretty stealthy, since the conjurer rides around silently on his phantom steed all day and can cast invis.

But this crazy encounter:

We sneak up on this place called Vraath's Keep, or something like that, which is basically a ruined keep full of hobgoblins and monsters, including two goblin worg riders, a minotaur, and a manticore. There was also a hobgoblin trickery cleric we let escape from the previous encounter, and a bugbear sorceror. The monsters were divided into separate rooms, but since the walls and roofs are collapsed and whatnot, fighting in one area will alert the other areas.

We made the mistake of attacking two rooms at the same time (the minotaur and manticore rooms, with me trying to coup de grace the sleeping manticore). After the initial flurry of attacks, the minotaur and hobgoblins were dead and the manticore was severely wounded, but there was no way we were going to win.

At that point, the DM just handed us the victory by having the sorceror "miss" a lightning bolt and then hide indoors with the cleric while we finished off the rest of his minions.

[Fwib]

Doh, yes, a troll in a closet - *kicks self in the hypothalamus*
Punching harder than your weight class.....

[Daiba]

I'm thinking more and more that the intent is to provide the DM with an encounter that will challenge even a strong party, and then expect the DM scale back the encounter for weaker parties by using suboptimal monster tactics.

This makes sense, since the average party power varies so much from group to group (are splatbooks used? are the players good at minmaxing? are there even any casters in the party at all?) that it's impossible to make an encounter that's the perfect challenge for all of them. And scaling back an encounter is definitely less effort than beefing one up.

[RandomCasualty]

1143575138[/unixtime]] And scaling back an encounter is definitely less effort than beefing one up.

Yeah, that's definitely a good point. It's easy enough to remove a creature or two from a multicreature battle and be ok.

[Josh_Kablack]

But that is not even attempting to use the CR system, which although flawed, is what published modules *should* be using for their guidelines. A 5th-6th level party should be fighting fights of average EL 5 to 6, and not 9, 9, 7, 11 - which is what it sounds like this module is doing.

Even giving the designers the benefit of the doubt and assuming that they are going on official dragon CRs instead of "fair" dragon CRs, these encounters seem crazy-go-nuts.

[fbmf]

I agree, Josh, which is why I'd like updates as people have them so I'll have the heads up when I run it for my group.

Game On,
fbmf

[Username17]

I actually missed the introductory session, which was apparently crazy-go-nuts and the players had to hide during part of it to divide the enemy forces. I'm not really up on what was there, but my impression was that the players had their work cut out for them (but hey, I wasn't there).

So here's a point-by-point encounter description, with our methods of dealing with the problems:

Drellin's Ferry:

"What kind of rooms would you like? We have common rooms, fine rooms..."

"-We would like 'Free Rooms' because your entire town is going to be destroyed by hobgoblins in days, and we're the only people who can do dick about it. Send in the mayor when he's free or you are all on fire."

I think players are supposed to take a lot more crap from the townsfolk than we did, possibly because we aren't a Good party. The hamlet of Drellin's Ferry or however that's spelled has nothing to offer a party of adventurers. This is actually a serious problem because the equipment that the players find is not size balanced between Small and Medium. Our DM modified it so that there was a 5th level Artificer living here, if there isn't then your party Gnome Plate and Shield fighter is going to be screwed. Actually, he's going to be screwed anyway because he'll be purchasing magic items with magic items he is selling at half price, but even more so. I suggest everyone running this game do the same.

The Woods:

There was a shambling mound in the damned woods. I figure this was a random encounter that involves either the DM fvcking with us or the module providing a random encounter list for the woods that is utter madness. Now, the Shambling Mound is really tough and doesn't take sneak attack damage, but my character has a Bag of Tricks, and we all got into a polish firing squad and shot arrows at it while I fed it a magic wolf every turn until it died. Good luck with that, those things are practically invisible in the woods and have Constrict. Our 5th level party felt pretty outclassed and only 133+ Juggling tactics kept us alive.

The Ranger. This guy is apparently completely useless, since he refuses to go into Verath Keep, so unless his presence served as some sort of magical talisman against getting jumped by additional Shambling Mounds, even the 5 gp we gave him was too much.

The river had a Hydra in it. A 6 headed hydra that has Fast Healing 16 and 6 attacks. Fortunately it surfaced next to the wagon, so we webbed it down and had a large pile of archery to eventually kill it. If it had surfaced next to the bridge, we all would have died. I'm not even kidding, those things get 6 attacks at the end of a charge.

Verath Keep:

I think we went through this place backwards, our last room was the old collapsing gardener's shed which we searched and bypassed without actually going in. Every fight opened up with a color spray and we had taken potions of stealth before entering. So none of the enemies got to scream, and we were able to keep anyone from hearing our presence even with the -20 move silently penalty for combat.

Koth himself was the only character who got an action, and he apparently doesn't have a Concentration skill, so the cluster molestation he was in by the time his action came around caused him to fail to cast a lightning bolt. We actually took 0 damage in the whole place.

Then we went room by room and took 20 on search checks, collecting all the weird crap from downstairs - as well as stashing all the bodies there. If we do lose anyone, it is our intention to take their body to an Artificer who knows Power Surge so that we can bring them back without using up precious charges. Precious charges.

The stuff in the boxes is so obviously side quest material that I am honestly insulted.

The Bridge:

I think you're supposed to dramatically attack the bridge at a weak point and then run like little bitches while the dragon hunts you down like quail. I have no idea how that's supposed to work, maybe you were supposed to have purchased a scroll of teleport? Regardless, our actual technique was to come in and kill everyone and then use a scroll of summon monster III found earlier to call up a Thoqua, and then make obscenely high Disable Device checks to pattern out some Thoqua bore holes lengthwise in the bridge such that any substantial weight on the bridge would bring the whole thing down. Heh.

The dragon is faster than you (movement of 150 feet and it has flyby attack), and better than you (5 attacks in a Full Attack and a BAB of +11). The book claims this encounter is EL 10, which is complete crack smoking on their part, but still much more than a 6th level party would expect to be able to take without help. I am honestly unsure of what deus ex machina is supposed to save you. Perhaps the Forest Giant?

The Ruined Stedding:

Does the book think that combat is an option here? It's a Forest Giant, making it roughly the equivalent of a Fire Giant, or your entire party. Anyway, buying his ass off isn't terribly difficult, but I'm not sure what difference it makes if the Forest Giant agrees to take on the horde. He can kill a crap tonne of hobgoblins, but since there is *plot device* worth of hob goblins, I'm not sure what use that is.

The Village Again:

A chimera shows up for no damned reason when you return. This was just as well as it came in just in time to be turned into a zombie so that we could bypass overland encounters for the rest of the adventure. The chimera itself is a chump because he shows up in the middle of a big empty space and his first combat action is to eat peasants. He can burn himself out of a web, but Chimera aren't fire resistant, so he does half the work of killing himself when he does.

The big city:

Armed with a zombie chimera you can get back to the big town of whatever it's called in just hours, at which point we handed over Koth's map and gave them the low-down on what total badasses we were and totally fvcked they were. They want the party to go fight a road block, which as far as I can tell is a total waste of time. We decided to accept the mission, but so far have made no move to actually attack the road block. Why bother?

The woods:

Our method of travel required DM handwaving to get us jumped by the razorwing. Like all magical beasts, it goes down like a [offensive statement] as soon as it gets surrounded by ninjas and gets color sprayed right in the face. It has a ring in its belly, but honestly if our party hobbit wasn't searching the intestinal pockets of all the major monsters we kill (because this is a module and monsters have stuff in their belly all the time), there's no reason for us to have found it.

The elves are, as far as I can tell, a completely pointless encounter. Our campaign is in Eberron, so the elves have been replaced by shifters, but the effect is doubtlessly just as pointless. Maybe with higher diplomacy tests you can get access to owls before taking out the big lake? We didn't need them and didn't ask, but it seems likely. If players don't have a zombie chimera at this point, I think that diplomacy check is probably a campaign breaker, as without flight you cannot win against the city of Rhest.

The City of Rhest:

Long fallen into disrepair and sunken into a swampy lake, the city of Rhest is going to kill your entire party unless you are very very careful. The lake is 2 miles across, so swimming across it is not going to happen. Boating across it is a death sentence, since the black dragon can acid spray you from under water.

In the middle of the lake there is a party of 4 CR 7 monsters who each have an Ogre cohort. Also there is reserve forces available of some hobgoblin archers in a distant tower (I honestly have no idea how they get into that tower) and another razor wing in the hatchery. Maybe that's supposed to be an "equal challenge" as I think maybe you're supposed to be 7th level by now, but that's absurd.

If you loot everything correctly, you get a Lich's phylactery. Possibly you aren't supposed to be able to break a phylactery (as it has 40 hit points and is made out of adamantine), but if you have access to flight (and you do, because you won instead of dying to acid sprays against your boat about a kilometer from shore) you can just bring the thing 500 feet into the air and drop it - if you repeat 2 times the damned thing will shatter. That's one less Lich in the world if you want to do it that way...

Also, the pond is surrounded with lizardfolk, which is completely meaningless since if you arne't flying over the huts you're dead anyway.

-Username17

[fbmf]

Thanks, Frank. More to come, I assume?

Game On,
fbmf

[Crissa]

Maybe the Lizardfolk have a way across the lake?

-Crissa

[MrWaeseL]

That module sucks ass.

[User3]

With so many encounters, I would assume that a traditional wizard character would run out of spells fast. And thereby, become a weakness to the group. Am I right here?

My group will be running the campaign shortly. And my thoughts were to play a wizard since there is never a campaign that isn't well suited to wizzies.

Any advice here?

[Oberoni]

It sounds like any character that isn't secretly 4 levels higher than what his character sheet says would become a weakness to the group, so you probably should't worry too much.

Just use some lower-level blindness and paralysis effects, maybe?

[Username17]

Having played a fair chunk of it and noting the number of other groups doing the same, I feel confident that The Red Hand of Doom is on its way to becoming the 3.5 answer to The Tomb of Horrors - the module that everyone gets killed in and talks about years down the line.

Of course, saying that you survived the Tomb of Horrors is like saying that you flipped a coin 12 times and got heads each time. It makes an interesting story but it says nothing whatever about your skillz as a player or anything. The Tomb was filled with arbitrarium traps that simply killed you no matter how good your thief was. The only way to avoid them was to happen to pick all the right doors randomly.

But the Red Hand of Doom is not like that at all. Instead, it's just a meat grinder against substantially superior opposition. In battle after battle you are fundamentally outclassed and you need to be a D&D ninja tactician or you're going to lose characters in every major confrontation. If you aren't pretty good, you'll be TPKed pretty quickly. The module doesn't break the rules, it just has monsters that there's no reason to think that you can defeat.

So if someone says "We beat the Red HAnd without losing anybody" that means much more than saying the same about the Tomb of Horrors. And if that's what the authors were going for, I guess it was a success.

-Username17

[Neeek]

Hey Frank, mind add what level you were to those encounter synopses? Or was it the same for all of them?

EDIT: Also, fbmf, you mind checking to see if they say what level they expected you to be for those encounters?

[dbb]

1143653373[/unixtime]]The only way to avoid them was to happen to pick all the right doors randomly.

I had a player once who beat it with a wagonload of "Monster Summoning N" spells. Of course, this is pretty much the same thing as picking all the right doors randomly, except you get a number of mulligans limited only by your patience.

--d.

[RandomCasualty]

1143735208[/unixtime]]
I had a player once who beat it with a wagonload of "Monster Summoning N" spells. Of course, this is pretty much the same thing as picking all the right doors randomly, except you get a number of mulligans limited only by your patience.

Yeah, that seemed pretty much the best strategy. I remember that Gygax once said that some guy beat it by sacrificing a bunch of hirelings. That seemed to be the only way of actually beating the tomb without significant casualties.

It was a pretty notorious module, but it really wasn't a fun module at all for PCs. Most of the traps weren't very fair at all and there wasn't any way of avoiding them besides just sending your hirelings in to set em off.

It's hard to write a legitimately good trap module in D&D. Because it's rather pointless if all the traps are detectable. That means it's just a bunch of dicerolling by the rogue as he takes 20 on every inch of corridor followed by lots of disable device checks. And that means that everyone else is sitting by bored while the rogue does everything. It also means that the traps get arbitrarily set off by bad luck and no PC decision, which is pretty much also boring. If the PCs find the traps and try to disarm them, they've basically done all they could, and if you punish them anyway, it sucks. Of course if they can just disarm them easily, it also sucks because it's just an easy module.

To make traps work, you've really got to have a trap disarming minigame of sorts, and that calls for more rules.

[User3]

1143743121[/unixtime]]
It's hard to write a legitimately good trap module in D&D. Because it's rather pointless if all the traps are detectable. That means it's just a bunch of dicerolling by the rogue as he takes 20 on every inch of corridor followed by lots of disable device checks. And that means that everyone else is sitting by bored while the rogue does everything. It also means that the traps get arbitrarily set off by bad luck and no PC decision, which is pretty much also boring. If the PCs find the traps and try to disarm them, they've basically done all they could, and if you punish them anyway, it sucks. Of course if they can just disarm them easily, it also sucks because it's just an easy module.

To make traps work, you've really got to have a trap disarming minigame of sorts, and that calls for more rules.

Or you've got to make them impossible to find without the circumstance bonuses that come from intelligently analyzing clues. And make sure they aren't all DTs. At give some time constraints.

Which is fully within the rules.

[User3]

One of the funny things about the Red Hand of Doom is that its a time-dependant adventure. Since I'm playing a Sorcerer and don't need to take extra days to prepare spells, and I've taken care of our transport needs, and we don't take damage so we don't need to rest, this means that we are well ahead of schedule.

[User3]

Here is a link to some other players playing this adventure. Link

Considering how often they get dropped, and how they use high-level scrolls, I guess this is how you are supposed to play the adventure.

You can almost hear the words "and here is where the DM didn't kill us."