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Gonna run my first game of this this weekend using Tales. Any advice for a new DM? ----- Edit: Doing my research, and I've got some questions - spoilers for Tales of the Demon Lord adventures: 1.Isn't the first adventure in Tales of the Demon Lord really lethal? I'm going to have three starting characters, and the book recommends a daily difficulty of 25 for a party of starting characters, though I'm tempted to lower that to 20 since they're a pretty small party. Entering the Moore house, the party are likely to encounter two hired killers (20 difficulty), eight rats (8 difficulty, maybe more because of the extra buffs they get), and an organ filch (10 difficulty). This seems like an awful lot. I'm tempted to throw out the hired killers and replace them with three commoners. 2. Related to point one above, I don't understand the encounter difficulty rules on pages 189-190 of the main book. I get that an encounter's difficulty is calculated by summing the difficulty of the creatures in the encounter, that's fine. But then when I get to the "example encounters" section, it says "An easy encounter for novice characters can have a total Difficulty of up to 40" - the chart on the next page says that easy encounters for novice characters are difficulty 10 or less. Then the text says a challenging encounter for novice characters should have a difficulty of between 76 and 150. But the chart says 31-50. There's nothing about this in the errata. I'm a little worried about this as I've heard the game is very lethal already and I guarantee the best way to ensure my players drop it like a hot potato is to TPK them in the first encounter. Gort fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Jun 1, 2017 |
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Jun 1, 2017 10:54
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Serf posted:1. There's actually also a ghoul in there too, which is 25 Difficulty alone. When I ran it, I had the ghoul chained up as an optional fight and the Rude Boys surrendered once both of them had taken half Damage. It needs some eyeballing for sure. Hopefully this helps! Yeah, it was this. Thanks for the answers, this makes sense now. I'm going to make the adjustments you suggested. Did you notice anything like this for the other adventures? ----- Edit: Although I notice that section still has mistakes in it in my freshly-downloaded-from-bundle-of-holding copy. At least I can see it's just a single-word typo now, rather than the entire section making no sense at all. 
Gort fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Jun 2, 2017 |
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Jun 2, 2017 08:06
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My weekend game went really well, thanks to everyone who answered my newbie questions. Now I've got another: The character sheet on the website is extremely rear end, anyone got a good one to use?
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Jun 6, 2017 07:49
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Yeah, the PDFs are virtually unusable on the Linux E-PC I read all my PDFs off at the game table. I'm talking like twenty seconds wait to change pages where other PDFs take maybe 0.2 seconds.
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Jun 7, 2017 20:13
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Trip report from Tales of the Demon Lord adventure 2 (spoilered): Ho-ho-holy poo poo, an island with nine hired killers on it at level one? I had them run into a single hired killer and his first damage roll was 12, which instantly dropped the rogue (I actually secretly fudged it - rules as written taking your health in damage is instant death). So far it feels like challenges are generally pretty easy to succeed at, but fights are lethal and swingy as gently caress. I need to keep a weather eye on the encounters in this book, they're generally about a million times too difficult.
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Jun 11, 2017 20:49
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Coolness Averted posted:Yeah it's why I asked, it wasn't technically missing anything, it just felt very abrupt. Like a very short paragraph that could've been the end or there could've been more. Plus the no back cover like most of the other books. Though not all of them have that end page and advert for another product in the line. Fair criticism. Tales of the Demon Lord has so many references to Cultist and Hired Killer that I wish they'd just put that 10 centimetre squared monster description in the adventure.
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Jun 16, 2017 09:30
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Angrymog posted:Got to say, some of the art in this is really stupid - the Demon in the bestiary section for instance. I don't really get what they were going for in that picture. It's dumb. "Let's have a big demon and then... chain a naked woman to its crotch"? Gort fucked around with this message at 15:34 on Jun 17, 2017 |
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Jun 17, 2017 15:32
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Played another game of this last night. My players are up to level 2 now, and it feels like they can actually convincingly win a fight now, after levels 0 and 1 being just "survive this godawful poo poo somehow". The warrior and rogue pretty much just roll attacks each round within that fight though - there are special moves you can do for melee and ranged, but none seem worth giving up your only boon for. I've suggested that they pick up some magic in their level 3 paths so they can get some limited-use abilities. It kinda feels like the game mandates a magical healer, though. We have a three-person party - rogue, warrior and priest of the maiden of the moon. The priest path forfeits the "heal another character" power that's built into normal priests in favour of regaining some spells, but the priest doesn't have the life tradition. This means the party has only their "heal themselves for a quarter HP" powers, once per rest, to heal themselves, which in turn means that absent any time limitations they pretty much need to rest after two encounters. This isn't really ideal, I prefer to avoid such short adventuring days. Maybe I'll do a house rule where you get to heal for your healing rate after each fight or something, just to give the game a bit more momentum. It feels wrong to be butting up against the "You can only rest once per 24 hour period" rule all the time - the party are pretty much at the point of replying "Well, we'll just rest for 48 hours straight then".
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Jun 18, 2017 10:36
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Serf posted:As for your first point about special attacks, I've seen players start to realize how good they are after a while. We just had a game where players used the Unbalancing Attack to knock an enemy down and start giving other melee attackers 1 boon. I think the game kinda expects warriors and rogues to sacrifice those boons to start forcing enemies into disadvantageous positions for the rest of the party. Yeah, I could see this maybe. However, our party is only three, and of those there is only one full-time melee attacker (the priest uses his sword when he's out of spells, basically) so that doesn't particularly work for us given that the enemy can just stand up as their move on their turn.
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Jun 18, 2017 15:59
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Coolness Averted posted:Forcing an opponent to always take slow round, and waste their movement just standing up (or waste an action standing, then moving into melee) sounds like pretty good action economy to me. Especially if your ranged dudes ready a triggered "I Shoot him again when he gets up," and "I fire another staggering shot after my buddy shoots him." Or there's called shots to disarm, or prevent spellcasting. Two banes to maybe knock someone prone on a ranged attack just doesn't sound very good at all. Plus we only have one ranged dude.
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Jun 18, 2017 21:16
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Angrymog posted:Has anyone tried stringing together a bunch of the adventures into an Adventure Path of sorts? That's literally what Tales of the Demon Lord is - ten adventures in a row with a common thread running through.
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Aug 13, 2017 08:26
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Sage Genesis posted:Hey guys. I found the Tales of the Demon Lord adventures often contain ridiculously tough or numerous opponents for my 3 PC team. Like the first encounter is against two hired killers with 18 health each, who attack at +2 with a boon for 2D6 damage which means they can one-shot a PC and not be one-shot in return. You could easily wipe the party in the first encounter. I've been running through the adventures ahead of time and comparing the encounters to the encounter-building guidelines and replacing them with more appropriate stuff. Hardened assassins use the stats for bumbling farmhands, that sort of thing. I get that the game is supposed to be gritty and lethal, but "You got ganked by some punks before you reached the adventure, roll new characters who will probably suffer a similar fate" doesn't make for thrilling gameplay.
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Aug 18, 2017 11:55
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I've been kinda disappointed by Tales of the Demon Lord in general. The fights in it are overpowering, and they reveal how dumb it is that the game doesn't take into account whether your party has 3, 4, or 5 members in it for the purposes of fight difficulty. Then you've got the problem that most of the adventures in the book don't have anything to do with the main plot. They're just standalone adventures. Like, only two of the adventures in the book have much to do with the "main plot", which kinda defeats the purpose of an adventure path. The fight difficulty bugs me more, though, I hate it when adventure writers don't follow their own guidelines.
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Aug 29, 2017 15:41
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