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Any D&D/D20

Shadowrun

World of Darkness

Palladium

Other (feel free to post about it)

[MrRoboto75]

Have two ranks of undead fighters.  The first rank has AC out the wazoo (plate, tower shield, the works).  The second rank, just behind the shields, has reach weapons.  The shield wall should be at least as wide as the hallway they fight in, or at least have hindering terrain to make flanking not too simple.  If the melee wishes to charge in, he will face at least 6 attacks, and he will have to push through the shield wall to get to the spearmen.  Probably can only kill one a round anyway.

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A squad of undead at the top of a flight of stairs, most of them have ranged weapons.  Have one dump oil (or grease spell) all over the stairs, so climbing them means likely slipping and falling down.  Or have barrels to roll down the stairs, knocking anyone down.  Have the barrel shatter or break at the foot of the stairs, covering the area in oil ready to ignite with a torch.

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Have something cast the entangle spell.  Anything trapped by it gets poked by reach weapons from others.  Chances are the party might not have reach weapons, so they can get poked without much retaliation.

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Skeletons are immune to cold damage.  Have a bunch of skeletons engage in melee with the party.  Meanwhile a spell caster (its a necropolis, maybe some necromancer loser snuck in) tosses AoE ice spells into the melee ball.  The party takes damage, but the skeletons don't care.

[Sirus]

All nice/nasty ideas, but I think Jimmy's trying to deal with a single problem character, not wipe the floor with most of the party.

[Jimmy]

I've come up with a fun encounter! [/cackle]

I've been trying to decide what to do with the room I've made into the ruins of a lizardfolk brothel. There's a few fun pieces of loot in there too, but I think I've also come up with a good undead monster to lurk inside. I'm gonna go with a Rogue Missing Petrified Maiden and swap out the Cleave and Power Attack feats for Point Blank Shot and Rapid Shot.

Stealth skill of +21 and the ability to make checks in full view means it should be able to dish out some hurt pretty bad with ranged sneak attack. Plus it'll likely get attacks of opportunity for the party moving in its threatened area, inflicting its curse with a successful slam. Hopefully displacement will give it a bit of survivability too against the samurai's melee, though he does have Blind Fight so he rerolls miss chance.

Now I've got a loot budget of 10,050 gp for the NPC creature, and it already has a +1 composite +4 Str longbow worth 2,800 gp. What other gear should I add to it to make it nastier I wonder? Poisoned arrows? Armor? Magical rings or wondrous items?

[SOLDIER First]

Implying a Lizardfolk brothel isn't already fun.

[Jimmy]

Decided to keep it simple and went with bracers of armor +1, ring of protection +1 and cloak of resistance +2, as well as 40 arrows poisoned with black adder venom. We'll see if the samurai burns through all his daily resolve on the poison saving throws before he gets hit with the curse. Even odds are that the party's magus/cavalier will probably buff his AC sky high and end up making him near untouchable though. They've built a multiclass character that focuses on using Aid Another to hand out massive bonuses, like +7 stacking bonuses to hit or to AC. I must remind them, however, that unless they can see the enemy, they can't use their special Aid Another skills.

[highmax28]

Here's a tip for DM's:

Don't base your encounter on your party's best player and expect everyone else to be like them. My DM just sent a CR30 encounter after us and we almost died killing one of the two CR15 enemies and the other one let us go.

The DM instead of dealing with me by making the enemy resist my attacks, he buffed up their HP to an amount that rivals a terrasque...

And we're only level 5... He said I kept doing consistently 80-90 damage per turn because I get an extra 1d6 damage on a 1d12 attack as a barbarian. Not including the potions of fire giant strength I keep on hand...

We now have a new player coming in and the battle was so hard, that she was useless. 5th Edition and these enemies have 20AC and over 500hp. The one encounter was 3 hours long...

[Neonivek]

5th Edition and these enemies have 20AC and over 500hp

What the freeken heck? You guys are fighting CR 20s?

[My Name is Immaterial]

One thing I've noticed is that 5e encounter difficulty is whacked. In the last one-off I ran, two 3rd level PCs almost got their asses handed to them by 5-6 goblins.

[Neonivek]

One thing I've noticed is that 5e encounter difficulty is whacked. In the last one-off I ran, two 3rd level PCs almost got their asses handed to them by 5-6 goblins.

At low levels you do have to be careful. The game actually makes note that some monsters while they have a low CR, are more then capable of defeating low level characters.

However looking at the calculations... Yet that is how it should have went.

Goblins are worth 50exp each,... 5-6 of them double their exp value... 500

A hard encounter for a 3rd level character is 225 exp each for a total of 450.

It WAS a hard encounter with a party that had limited resources.

[highmax28]

One thing I've noticed is that 5e encounter difficulty is whacked. In the last one-off I ran, two 3rd level PCs almost got their asses handed to them by 5-6 goblins.

I sent 6 goblins and 3 goblin bosses after a party of 4 level 5's and if it wasn;t for the fact the party had a nightmare and two extra party members, they would have been overrun.

One thing I've noticed is that 5e encounter difficulty is whacked. In the last one-off I ran, two 3rd level PCs almost got their asses handed to them by 5-6 goblins.

At low levels you do have to be careful. The game actually makes note that some monsters while they have a low CR, are more then capable of defeating low level characters.

However looking at the calculations... Yet that is how it should have went.

Goblins are worth 50exp each,... 5-6 of them double their exp value... 500

A hard encounter for a 3rd level character is 225 exp each for a total of 450.

It WAS a hard encounter with a party that had limited resources.

Wait, when do you double XP amounts?

But yeah, my DM is gonna revamp his encounters he planned because he didn't realize my one weakness: my weapons are not actually magical. He specified that the berserker axe that I got that I was cursed to use didn't inflict magical damage (and I thought that was where he was going with this). So if he wanted to cripple me, since we have two casters (a cleric and a druid), he just had to make them resistant to slashing/piercing/bludgeoning or even immune. This would make me have to do the role I was hoping to do: tank. I have a 17AC (can be 18 because I'm a shifter) and I prevent enemies from attacking my allies and moving at them with sentinel.

Also, in lighter news, had my holiday session (I was DMing). Had them participate in festive events such as singing, ice fishing, polar dip (called it a frozen swim), ice sculpting, and riddles (which someone got all of them right without checks). The mystic caused a bunch of the swimmers to take off thier swimwear and hurl it into the crowd and then the next batch of them run up to the ice sculptors and rub them. The party wizard met with her vampire boss, seduced him to dance with her, and the two of them double crit. When the mystic tried to fuck with them, the vampire boss, being the awesome guy he is, had a field of anti-magic around him when they did this.

The party had a good time, and I managed to end them off right into the fight with the first boss. I know its bad to end the session before a big thing like this, but I was strapped for time and we got distracted a lot.

My only sad thing was we tried cooking dinner and the stove broke and the person in our group who organized cooking everything broke down so we had to take some time to get out and have a few laughs (at my expense as I fell on the ice on purpose to make her laugh... Then I fell four more times not on purpose) and then we returned to the session and things were all better.

I also learned something too: flying mounts are a big problem with splitting the party

[My Name is Immaterial]

Wait, when do you double XP amounts?

Maybe it was because I had only 2 players? IDK.

[Neonivek]

Wait, when do you double XP amounts?

Maybe it was because I had only 2 players? IDK.

It is because you had 5-6 monsters in that encounter who "Significantly contribute to that encounter"

[My Name is Immaterial]

Wait, when do you double XP amounts?

Maybe it was because I had only 2 players? IDK.

It is because you had 5-6 monsters in that encounter who "Significantly contribute to that encounter"

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Neonivek]

That is funny because it is an entire step in the DMs guide... In fact the step after "Calculate total exp"

[My Name is Immaterial]

Yeah, I didn't read that.