As I mentioned in Part 6C: The Vault of the Alexandrian Remix of Dragon Heist, you can basically run the main vault at the end of the campaign unaltered: The PCs get the vault doors open, journey down to the lower level, find the golden dragon Aurinax hanging out down there disguised as a dwarf with the dragonstaff of Ahghairon, and then somehow get the gold from him.
In practice, there are a few problems with this:
- Aurinax and his relationship with Lord Neverember is not previously established in the campaign. So at the very end of your epic story, the big conclusion hinges around this dude you’ve never heard of before. It’s very confusing and probably anticlimactic.
- If the scene ends in a fight, the low level PCs will almost certainly be brutally murdered by the CR 17 dragon.
- So the scene seems pretty heavily weighted towards social negotiation, but the way it’s designed makes this incredibly unlikely to succeed. (Multiple checks, with the designers actually telling the DM to ignore the rules to make failure more likely with stuff like “if even one character loses the contest, Aurinax senses that the group is lying to him.”)
So what you have is a confusing encounter which likely ends with the PCs either being forced to leave without the gold or being brutally murdered.
NEVEREMBER’S DRAGON
Spoilers: This is not how I ended my Dragon Heist campaign.
First, let’s identify what’s actually cool about this encounter:
- A huge pile of gold. Not only are these inherently awesome, but this huge pile of gold has been literally the goal of the entire campaign.
- Dragon fight. Dragons on top of golden hoards? Awesome. Dragon slaying? Epic.
This is largely all you need: Epic dragon fight. If you win, you claim the dragon’s hoard. Perfect note to end the campaign on.
What do we need for this to happen?
First, it shouldn’t be a gold dragon. Gold dragons are Lawful Good and explaining why one is down here guarding stolen gold inevitably leads to some sort of weird, convoluted continuity that the players aren’t going to care about at this point. (It’s the end of the adventure; it’s the time to be wrapping stuff up, not adding more back story.) It’s really easy to simplify this: There’s a red dragon. Neverember put the dragon here to guard his gold. How? I dunno. Dragon owed him a favor. He enslaved him with an artifact. It was a young dragon who just really wanted to sleep on a big pile of gold, and Neverember’s offer was irresistable.
Second, emphasize the big pile of gold. In the adventure as published, this is what the vault looks like:
Sort of a weird, complicated space with the gold tucked away in the back corner. Compare that to the epic painting of the dragon perched atop the hoard above! We don’t need all this distraction. Want a nice, simple dynamic here: Big pile of gold. Dragon.
So what I did was just have a large staircase leading down to the arched entrance of the lower vault. The vault itself was one big chamber with four pillars in the shape of dwarven hammers in the middle of the room (matching the architecture above). In the square space between these pillars was heaped the huge pile of gold.
When the PCs arrived, I had the dragon behind the pile of gold. This gives you TWO big moments:
- Players see the gold and have a moment to really focus on and process that image.
- Dragon crawls up over the top of the pile! Oh shit!
Third, it will probably be rewarding to reduce the chance of horrible death by not having the dragon pursue the PCs if they flee. If Neverember enslaved the dragon and bound it to the vault, then this takes care of itself. Smart PCs who feel overwhelmed by the dragon will now be able to retreat, regroup, and potentially call on the powerful allies they’ve made throughout the campaign (which would make this big finale fit thematically with the rest of the campaign).
(Tangent: If you wanted to, you could hypothesize that this is a modified orb of dragonkind or a similar artifact which is suspended from the roof the vault and keeps the dragon from leaving. PCs who intuit what’s happening could use that to find an alternative solution to the dragon problem. But it’s probably an unnecessary complication.)
REALITY CHECK – HOW BIG IS THAT PILE?! If you do the math, it turns out that 500,000 coins don’t actually make for that big a pile. If you’re being generous in your assumptions, it’s probably about the size of a big pile of leaves. And why is it all in one big pile in the first place?! Wouldn’t Neverember have his stolen hoard conveniently stored in coffers or bags or something? Why would he bring it all down here and then just pour it out on the floor?
First: Honestly, this is probably a place where you just need to care a little less. If the players do the math later and hit a fridge logic moment where they’re like, “Hey! That pile of gold shouldn’t have been that big!” it’s fine. It’s not going to detract from this big, awesome moment you had or the dragon fight that ensued.
Second: They’re in a big pile because dragons like sleeping on big piles of treasure. Stop kink-shaming. (If you want to add a bunch of leather satchels or coin coffers that have been ripped open by dragon claws and tossed in the back corner of the vault, that could be a cool touch, though.)
Third: Okay, you still care. Maybe the players have already done the math because they’ve been trying to figure out how they’re going to get all those gold coins out of the vault, so they’re already expecting a leaf pile of gold. Fair enough. Two things you can do:
- Who said the whole hoard was made up strictly of gold coins? Add a bunch of silver and even more copper to bulk things up. The gold is a thin layer on top, because dragons like the feel of gold on their scales.
- Look at that picture again. Notice the stone plinths sticking out from the corner of the hoard pile? Yup. Middle of the vault is actually a big stone pyramid and the dragon has piled all the gold and silver and copper on top of it, greatly increasing the perceived size of the pile. (Why? Dragons like big hoard piles. Again: Stop kink-shaming!)
Oh! Better yet, it’s actually a stone replica of Mt. Waterdeep. (If the PCs have been paying attention to the Dumathoin imagery throughout the rest of the vault, they might realize the Melairkyn dwarves have placed a huge sapphire worth 25,000 gold pieces in the center of this replica to echo the Heart of the Mountain. Up to them whether they desecrate the ancient holy place to dig it out. This can be a nice reward for groups that have ethically agreed to return the money to the city, however, because the sapphire wasn’t stolen from Waterdeep and the city has no claim to it.)
(Damn. That’s really cool. Wish I’d thought of this last night when I ran that final encounter.)
DESIGNING THE DRAGON
A brief digression on encounter design in 5th Edition.
With the remix of Dragon Heist I was worried, coming to 5th Edition for basically the first time, that the heists built around the villains’ lairs would be too fragile/difficult. This concern was primarily based on the number of times the book says any of the PCs going to these lairs will almost certainly die.
Not only was I taking stuff that was supposed to be too hard, I was also writing them up with adversary rosters so that the NPCs would dynamically respond to the PCs if the PCs were detected. Using this technique with encounters that are already extremely difficult can easily lead to TPKs, as I discussed long ago in Revisiting Encounter Design. (You can also read an example of this happening in actual play in my Playtest Report on Gamma World.) In actual practice, though, there was nothing to worry about for Dragon Heist: The NPCs rarely get a chance to respond dynamically because they’re generally dead before they can raise any sort of alarm.
For example, the books says that, “Lord and Lady Cassalanter are formidable spellcasters and devoted to one another. If one is assailed (…) the other arrives as quickly as possible. A direct confrontation with the Cassalanters will likely result in defeat for the characters…” But in practice the PCs can dish out so much damage that the “formidable” spellcasters will be dead before they can cast more than one spell.
In my game, for example, the PCs snuck up on Victoro, got a surprise round, and then all beat his initiative check. Two full rounds of unleashing damage on him and he was dead before he was able to take a single action.
This was not an isolated incident.
My experience with 5th Edition is still mostly limited to this single group, so it’s possible that my players are just really good. But the fact that I’m routinely seeing “Deadly” encounters (or stuff that’s even more difficult) getting curb-stomped by the PCs does leave me scratching my head on what effective encounter design actually looks like in this game. Because the point where the curb-stompings by PCs become mechanically unlikely seems to ALSO be the point where the bad guys have such outsized offensive capability that if the PC’s DON’T successfully curb-stomp them, they’re going to one-shot kill the PCs.
So right now it seems to have a real “choose your glass cannon” problem going on.
With that being said, my experience is still limited to a very specific campaign and I can already see that there are a number of other play dynamics that I need to actually run at the table. This notably includes:
- Really huge mobs of bad guys. (These are comparatively rare in urban adventures like Dragon Heist.)
- Long dungeon crawls or similar scenarios where long-term strategic play has a potential impact. (Also not really part of the Dragon Heist experience.)
- Higher level adventuring. (With the remix, Dragon Heist tops out at 7th level.)
In any case, this influenced my design of the final encounter: I knew the dragon would be alone down there. But I wanted the encounter to be meaningful and challenging. It was, after all, the big finale of the campaign.
TARGET LEVEL: One other thing to discuss here is the expected level of the PCs for this finale. This is discussed elsewhere in my notes for my remix, but basically I have the PCs level up:
- After Chapter 1 (when they rescue Floon).
- After the Gralhund raid.
- After each of the heists.
There are four available heists, although the PCs may only need to do three of them. So the PCs will either be 6th or 7th level going into the Vault. (In the case of my campaign, the PCs did all four heists, but we were on a race to the end and I forgot to have them level up. So they were 6th level heading into the Vault.)
THE DRAGON: The first thing I did was to just pull up the list of available dragons. I’d decided a classic, fire-breathing red was the way to go, so:
- Ancient Red Dragon (CR 24)
- Adult Red Dragon (CR 17)
- Young Red Dragon (CR 10)
- Red Dragon Wyrmling (CR 4)
The Ancient and Adult Red Dragons are obviously too deadly. If you want to build an encounter strictly by the book, then I might suggest throwing a pair of Red Dragon Wyrmlings in there. A double dragon fight sounds cool. (You might even bump it up to a triad of wyrmlings for larger 7th level parties.)
But what I really wanted was that really iconic dragon-on-its-hoard encounter. So I decided to grab the Young Red Dragon at CR 10.
However, I’d already seen my PCs mop the floor with “deadly” CR 10 encounters. (Victoro Cassalanter, for example, is a CR 10 opponent and they’d rolled right over the top of him.) Having the dragon go, “ROAR!” and then do nothing while they turned it into a thin, red paste felt like an anti-climactic way to wrap things up.
(If it happens, that’s fine. Awesome even. The players will probably love telling the story of how they blew a dragon away. I’m just not going to deliberately design it that way, since that would be the opposite of awesome.)
What I concluded was that the plausible solution to this problem was to give the dragon some legendary actions. Generally only much more powerful monsters are given legendary actions, but they almost instantly solve the problem of the bad guy not getting to do very much before being wiped out.
Long story short, this is the dragon I designed. Feel free to plug it into your Dragon Heist finales:
YOUNG RED DRAGON
Large dragon, chaotic evil
Armor Class 18 (natural armor)
Hit Points 178 (17d10+85)
Speed 40 ft., climb 40 ft., fly 80 ft.STR 23 (+6), DEX 10 (+0), CON 21 (+5), INT 14 (+2), WIS 11 (+0), CHA 19 (+4)
Saving Throws Dex +4, Con +9, Wis +4, Cha +8
Skills Perception +8, Stealth +4
Damage Immunities fire
Senses blindsight 30 ft., darkvision 120 ft., passive Perception 18
Languages Common, Draconic
Challenge 10 (5,900 XP)Multiattack.The dragon makes three attacks: one with its bite and two with its claws.
Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +10 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 17 (2d10+6) piercing damage plus 3 (1d6) fire damage.
Claw. Melee Weapon Attack: +10 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 13 (2d6+6) slashing damage.
Fire Breath (Recharge 5-6). The dragon exhales fire in a 30-foot cone. Each creature in that area must make a DC 17 Dexterity saving throw, taking 56 (16d6) fire damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.
LEGENDARY ACTIONS
The dragon gets 3 legendary actions. These actions can only be taken at the end of an opponent’s turn. They refresh at the end of the dragon’s turn.
Detect. Make a Wisdom (Perception) test.
Bite Attack. Make a bite attack.
Wing Attack (2 actions). Creatures within 10 ft. make DC 18 Dexterity saving throw or take 2d6+8 bludgeoning damage and are knocked prone. The dragon can then fly up to half its flying speed.
I’m sorry to be a pedant, but the fact that you consistently misspelled “hoard” as “horde” makes my teeth hurt. A horde is a large amount of hostile people, not a pile of coins.
Nice work. I agree, a dragon on a big pile of gold is what players expect and want from a campaign called “Dragon Heist!”.
On the steamrolling of villains, yeah, it is a problem in 5e. I think it is a problem in 3.X too. But I have noticed that the high level monsters have little in the way of interesting or challenging abilities. In 3.X a demon for example often could do some spellcasting and debuff the party before going to town with it’s claws. Dragons likewise were spellcasters. Nowadays most of these kinds of monsters are just big bags of HP with some physical attacks. The solution I see a lot online is to add more monsters to the encounter, but sometimes you want that big boss showdown and I think you have to do as you have done and add legendary actions and so on to make that viable.
Yeah 5E encounter design I feel is based on your players slowly taking away their own resources in a lot of fights and so it gets harder and harder as it goes on, but of course every player will usually be rest before they get to that point and a lot of times you really can’t fit that many encounters in a session. So it leaves all fights being a little easy, especially when you got the big monsters which really don’t hit enough.
About encounter design, my experience is very similar to yours : PCs either mow down the opposition without incurring any real risks, or the risks are suddenly very high.
I’m pretty sure it’s intended by the disign, though (well, the easyness part, not the TPK one). If we look at the definition of “deadly” encounters in 5e, we realize that Wizards’ uses of the term does not really match our intuitive understanding of it (emphasis mine) : “A deadly encounter *could* be lethal for one or more player characters. Survival *often* requires good tactics and quick thinking, and the party *risks defeat*.”
Deadly means that death is possible, that there are risk, and that tactical acumen is probably necessary to survive. The encounter design is not “useless” or broken (as many internet comments say), but it is very much geared toward a game where actual danger is the exception, not the rule, and my guess is that most people playing D&D assume differently. Steamrolling enemies in combat is the norm, as the definition of medium encounter makes quite clear (although I’m not sure what they mean by “scary”) : “A medium encounter usually has one or two scary moments for the players, but the characters should emerge victorious with no casualties. One or more of them might need to use healing resources.” The normal combat involves no danger, no risk of defeat, but might involve using healing ressources.
This means that a well-rested group of PC (especially if thy are played by experienced and tactical players) can take on a much tougher challenge (my intuition is that this “gap” widens with levels, but I never GMed above 6th level). With the generous resting rule, it also means that a single night of sleep suffice to start again. The encounter design guidelines does not cover those absolutely survivable scenarios, as if they were not meant to be in the game.
In my experience, this does have some undesirable effect (but it might be due to me and/or my group of players) : it does not incentivize players to think strategically, only tactically. That’s very dangerous, TPK-wise, when the enemies are played dynamically (groups coming to the help of another, etc.)
My players fought basically all the goblin forces at once from the higher level of the Sunless Citadel, and won, they then did the same for the lower level (they even assaulted the enemies that had time to fortify their position), and won again. They were fully rested both times, and there was no casualty. I calculated the goblin encounter after the fact, using the DMG guidelines (don’t forget the multipliers for the number of opponents!) : it was more than triple the value of a standard deadly encounter.
I’m not saying the players are stupid, or that 5e makes shenanigans impossible. They actually did some cool stuff (turning a baby dragon against the goblins for instance). But the ruleset makes brute forcing encounters the easy solution. Fortified position and superior numbers does not give players pause, or tell them that another way might be better. With the very forgiving death mechanics, even a comrade falling in combat does not mean that fleeing is a better option.
That whole thing, of course, means that when things go sideways for the PCs, it goes really bad. When they were entering Khundrukar (in the Forge of Fury), they fought the whole orcish forces *in the entrance* (where they took a shot rest). They almost won (I think 2 almost dead enemies were left standing), but it was a TPK instead. Thanks to some ability use before combat, they knew the complex housed 80+ monsters; at the beginning of combat, the saw some orcs flee to alert the others; they used very noisy sonic booms attacks; at some point, they were surprised by orcs arriving from behind, thatks to an undiscovered secret door; yet they never thought about retreating, instead holding their position. They were mostly winning, too, until they weren’t.
Alien@System: Two possible explanations. One, I should not write posts late at night after finishing a marathon game session. Two, the 500,000 gold dragons of Neverember’s horde are tiny, gold, dragon-shaped golems. A horde of golems.
@Xercies: Yes. My preliminary conclusion is that 5e effectively inherits the classic D&D mechanics based around long-term strategic play (resources drained over multiple encounters), but also scoops up the rest mechanics and ubiquitous low-level magic of 4e that were designed to prevent that classic strategic play from happening.
Thinking about this a bit more, I think what I’m experiencing here is what pre-4E groups that were able to “nova” every encounter were experiencing in 1E, 2E, and 3E. They’ve just removed the need for a day-long rest between encounters and it’s manifesting at the lowest levels, not must mid-level and high-level play.
@Jordan: I haven’t seen enough of these stress-test moments to really get a feel for it, but it feels like so much in 5e is dependent on action economy that as soon as you start losing some PCs things are going to radically shift very quickly.
My recent 3E experience has also primarily featured a group that has a ring of teleport, which has a radical impact on how they approach engagement and retreat. So I’m trying to keep in mind that some of the differences I’m feeling in encounter end-states is due to that.
What do you see as the benefit of being able to make a Perception check out-of-turn? In other words, why would it be worth spending a legendary action on?
I reread your article on “Revisiting Encounter Design”, and I note that you recommended that, in a 3e adventure, most encounters should have an EL 2 to 4 levels lower than the PCs so that they can be quickly resolved and you can get through more of them per adventuring day and per game session.
Based on what you said about 5e skewing less deadly in your experience, would you revise that number upwards? In other words, is CR= the new CR-2?
Re : encounter design. (Apologies for straying a bit far from the original post.)
I realized just now that in the earlier editions of D&D (pre 3.0), the morale rule make “solo boss monsters” more threatening. The action economy is simpler, but means fundamentaly the same thing : more bodies meant more attacks, so a single boss monster is at a disadvantage (although they usually have better attack bonuses and more attacks, but that’s also true in 5e). In 5e, the legendary actions solve that problem by making the solo boss monster act basically as if it was a group.
But with morale rules, fighting a single boss monster means that they don’t roll for morale at all (at least RAW in B/X, maybe when they are down to 50% HP in other editions), making it much riskier in comparison than a fight against a group that would have to pass a morale check at the first casualty (so usually pretty soon after the hostilities started), then another after 50% of the group was dead. Sure, you can trap it, but are you willing to risk losing a couple of characters to bring it down?
Great point, Jordan. Thinking About Morale is a little dated in terms of my current thinking, but still useful for readers who aren’t already familiar with these systems.
@Wyvern: I lifted it off the Adult Red Dragon. I believe the thematic design intention there is for the dragon to be able to spot smart-aleck, invisible halflings creeping around the place. (Basically it lets them zone in on invisible targets further than 30 ft. away without having to spend an action looking for them.)
Re: CR sweet spot. Quite possibly.
DH was the first campaign I’ve run in a long time where I’d basically pre-designed the whole thing before the first session happened. So I’m realizing my usual give-and-take with a new system (where I design some encounters, the players encounter them, and I tweak the next set of encounters I design accordingly) didn’t really happen. The first time I actually designed an encounter in response to play feedback was actually this dragon.
It seems like if you can state the problem as “If the monsters have enough hit points to survive more than a couple of rounds, then they do so much damage as to one-shot the PCs,” then the direct solution is basically the World of Warcraft one: just give bosses a lot more hit points. The rule that more hit dice means better attacks is time-honored, but not actually a law of nature. It may be a simple knob to tune to match the skill level of a given group of players and their appetite for danger, also. (“Add x% to all enemy hit point totals.”)
Legendary actions seems like a good solution, too. If the name was something other than “legendary” it would seem totally fine, right? This is basically the thing I’ve learned about running combats from Dungeon World — the way to make combats more dangerous is to have the enemies act more frequently and force the PCs onto the defensive.
It’s possible my solution is totally bad though because I happen to have very little experience with 5e.
@Wyvern, normally making a perception check takes an action
@Justin: You said that Dragon Heist is the first 5e game you’ve run, right? (I was surprised to learn that you’ve just finished it; I assumed when you did the Remix series that you’d already played it. You must trust your players a great deal to post your GM notes publicly like that.) Have you had much experience with 5e from the player’s side, and if so, what has been your impression of it RE: the difficulty level of encounters?
Hey Alexander!
I’ve been wanting to ask you something, but can’t make it to the patreon monthly hangouts. Do you know of other modules similar to Dragon Heist? What I mean by that is a political, role play focused and intricate story? I’m getting close to the end of Dragon Heist and the dungeon crawl of Mad Mage is nowhere near what we like to play. It could be from another edition or system, I don’t mind adapting stat blocks.
I love the complexity of the story (from the remix) and even more loved that so much of the work was done for me, it gave me more prep time to get even more deep and complex. Thanks!
If you’re looking for a dungeon-based campaign that plays more like Dragon Heist, check out The Banewarrens by Monte Cook. It’s 3rd Edition and so will require adaptation, but it features a bunch of different factions all fighting over the dungeon with different agendas.
It would be very easy to adapt this to Waterdeep, in fact, and you could pretty easily have some (or all) of the factions from Dragon Heist get involved in the NEXT Grand Game of the Banewarrens.
(I’ve also been thinking about sharing my remix notes for the Banewarrens here on the Alexandrian.)
Another great option for a roleplaying-focused game is Splintered Peace by David Chart. Also 3rd Edition, this adventure is focused around a town threatened by an orcish horde, but focuses primarily on the internal politics of the town as its factions are placed under stress by the external threat.
Love to see a bit more love on the DH Remix. Still adapting it for Fantasy Grounds. Will let you know when its ready.
As you all have discussed some, action economy is critical in 5E. So is the adventuring day. I rarely allow the players to have a singe encounter in a day, or even a single encounter per short rest. Unless it is a ‘flavor’ type encounter that they are expected to win. I’ve surprised my players enough over the months (we played the first level of my version of Undermountian, not DoMM, before starting DH) that they know better than to alpha/nova strike unless they have to.
A few things I do is to rarely have solo monsters, and when I do I either give them lair/legendary actions or place the encounter with traps and hazards, so their is more than just the BBEG for the players to worry about. Some of them might have to be disarming a trap, or navigating a lava flow, or something to give the BBEG advantage (i.e. the bad guy is not dumb so when possible they have plans for being accosted by murder hobos!). Another is to have minions/support folks be the first NPCs the players start the fight with, so the BBEG has some time to react and engage. And of course waves/reinforcements to help balance encounters on the fly and to control TPK risks.
Final comment/suggestion, my favorite house/optional rule is re-rolling initiative every round. This has a bunch of effects and only a couple negatives. It keeps the players engaged. It keeps the chaos of combat as a player can never be sure they will be able to heal etc before the some opponent goes on the next round. Lots of benefits I’m sure you can think of, and the only two downsides are; 1) overhead, but for me FG handles this automatically so not an issue, and 2) spell durations are not set. Sometimes things might last more or less than they might otherwise. But again, chaos of combat so we are ok with that.
I have a couple of suggestion for balancing encounters:
1) The BBEG has *always* legendary action or some mobs. Action economy is really valuable here, in my opinion (not quite like 3E, where a single action of a spellcaster could change the entire encounter, but almost), even more if your party has some heavy hitter. Most of my bad guy have minions, but when the need arise for a single badass evil guy, legendary action and legendary resistance are the way to go. The first one simply means that there is a little bit of a balance in term of actions, the second one gives the player a strategical dimension that isn’t normally present (for instance, spells like banishment or similar can hit very hard if the guy is alone, but by giving legendary resistance players have to chose which spell to use when). Finally, another approach was to think of two monster but fusing them in one big boy. It has double the hp, double the actions, whatever. When it reaches half of his life, one of the two “turns” it was using disappears. (In general, two stages monsters with abilities that changes after certain stuff happens are really nice in my opinion).
The problem, in my opinion, with single monsters is that most of them in the 5E are pretty boring. They have the attack action, and maybe one or two secondary effects. By using minions and/or two monster in one you could use different kind of roles for each one (like the minions are glass cannon while the boss tanks and controls the field / debuff, or viceversa, or the first stage is a debuffer / tank guy while after half of the life is gone it start to deal real damage).
2) Use the mechanics of rests from 13th Age: basically, players get a full heal up after X encounters and a short rest after Y (personally I generally only use deadly or very deadly encounters and Y=2, X=4). Neither requires a fixed amount of time, it could only be a long breath, and resting does not mean actually taking a rest if this does make sense: PCs could go to sleep for a full 8 hours and still have all the resources used up, if they didn’t meet the encounters thresholds. This can have a major downside (hunting for smallest encounter just to obtain the rest), and I usually try to fight it in this way: honor code (“C’mon guys! Where is the fun??”) but mainly the fact that they could actively anticipate a rest (like a long rest after just 1-2 encounters) accepting a story-consequence: something develops story-wise that probably will put them in a more difficult position (ex: they choose to rest before the vault encounter, somehow the dragon get a wiff of their arrival and will be more prepared to meet them, or in another situation the evil ritual of the evil guy will be evilly more close to its evil end).
Hi Justin. I have recently discovered your website and am pouring through the DH remix as I am a relatively new DM running through the early stages of this campaign.
Your revised version is multiple time’s better then the original and I love the way you’ve pitted the various factions against each other. Makes the campaign much more dynamic and interesting, rather than having a singular static BBEG. My only hope is that I am able to do the intricacies of the campaign justice for my players.
I would love to see your remixed versions of the Banewarrens and splintered peace as I now have them in my sights for a potential sequel campaign. (Though I’ve never played 3e before so might be tough for me to adapt them)
Thanks again! Such great and insightful reading.
Regarding solo monsters. Angry GM has an idea where he splits the monster HP in half and it’s half has its own initiative order, and any de-buffs and the extra turn disappear when it drops bellow 50% of the HP total. With monsters in 5e being mostly HP bags I am not sure it would get to act on repeated double turns but I plan to combine this with legendary actions. It should fix the problem with action economy I hope
I’ve been meaning to experiment with inverting that technique: At half health, Boss Monsters get a second initiative count.
This creates a generic model the VG/anime/tokusatsu trope of boss’ revealing their “true form” half way through the fight. Dramatically it paces the fight so that it ramps up to a thrilling conclusion (instead of the solo monster becoming significantly less threatening half way through the fight).
I did something much like this in a campaign several years ago. There were four elemental guardians … guarding something. They were walking around like animated suits of plate armor, with elemental energy jetting out of the gaps in the armor. But basically they were just animated armor with a bit of extra elemental damage and resistance. But when their hp went to zero, they weren’t killed — that’s when the armor was destroyed and the raw enraged elementals came out, with a new bag of hp and different abilities. And it suddenly changed the battlefield as these opponents which had been tough but slow suddenly morphed into creatures that could fly, or become lightning bolts, or whatever. It was a fun encounter.
IIRC I also gave them two turns each once the armor was gone, to make them seem blindingly fast and enranged. I think I rolled one initiative and then gave them their second turn at half the first initiative result.
I feel like this is a good place to drop some thoughts and a question that’s been buzzing around in my head for a few days now.
The problem with “big, single boss” encounters in Tabletop RPG in general is that they run right into the trap of Lanchester’s Law, which is that in a combat situation with focused fire, the effective combat strength of a side goes up linearly with quality, but quadratically with quantity.
In an example: Assume you have a fight with an enemy that in a one-on-one completely tires out a single player character. As in, all but the last hit point gone, all potions used, all magic depleted, etc. Now, if that same enemy is attacked by a group of five, the dynamics are suddenly very differently. The enemy takes five times as much damage, thus only lives a fifth as long, thus can only deal a fifth of the damage it dealt in the duel. Thus, only a fifth of the resources of a single person are depleted. Together with the group carrying five times as much, the end result is the encounter being only a twenty-fifth (4%) of the danger to a party of five than it is to a single person!
I think not enough game designers are aware of this law. It should for example affect CR calculations for groups of monsters (although CR is not quite what Lanchester calls quality, meaning the issue is rather messy math in the end). And it means that unfortunatly, when it comes to boss encounters, it’s basically always favourable for the group to bring a lot of hirelings to Zerg Rush down the boss, because of the quadratic scaling.
Since I am thinking of having an open table in a setting which would focus heavily on boss fights, I am looking for ways to basically de-fang Lanchester’s law and make a boss be not a roll-over for a group of five when it is a barely doable challenge for a single person. I know AoE attacks (which scale with enemy density, depressing the exponent) help, and it seems so do legendary actions (as they scale with the number of opponents), but I would also like to see a more rule-intrinsic way of doing it, compared to relying on boss-specific special rules. Anyone have any thoughts?
For some reason, while reading the base adventure and your remix, I kept thinking Aurinax and Ahghairon were the same name and thought, hey, that explains why he lived so long in Waterdeep, a gold dragon ruling and then spending the rest of his time in a vault. Not sure if there’s a connection that could be created for the sake of the base campaign.
This is one area where I strongly disagree with your rewrite.
Basically, because it’s substituting an excellent chance for roleplaying with naked violence against a creature that is set up to be perfectly reasonable to respond to. The player characters should be relying on their wits against the gold dragon here. They can convince him the gold is stolen (which it is), they are here to return it (which they might not be), or that his original deal is void. All this so they can have a potentially AWESOME ally if they play their cards right.
Imagine the ending of the game with Xanathar, Manshoon, Larael, the Cassanthars (possibly with their Devil son), and Jarlaxle showing up at the end like THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY. Suddenly the player characters with their gold dragon ALSO have the ability to potentially make this showdown favor them.
@C.T. Phipps: As noted in the article, the problem with the encounter is that it’s a badly designed railroad that will statistically TPK the party unless they truthfully agree to return the money to the city. (And even then, it’s chancy.)
You describe the scene as an “excellent chance for roleplaying,” but as written it isn’t. Not only is the choice to negotiate forced (because the 5th level PCs can’t fight a CR 17 dragon), but the choice of HOW to negotiate is almost entirely forced. (Most approaches are described as impossible and the only alternative to turning the money over to the city is to lie… which is then adjudicated in such a way as to force failure.)
The encounter described above doesn’t remove the possibility of roleplaying; it’s just not interested in railroading that outcome.
As noted, it’s quite possible to keep Aurinax here: But you’re going to want to do the groundwork to establish Aurinax, his relationship with Neverember, and the dragonstaff of Ahgairon earlier in the campaign so that the entire conclusion of the adventure isn’t suddenly about a bunch of lore the players have never heard before.
You’ll also want to heavily rework the encounter itself so that it’s not trying so very, very hard to force an outcome.
While obviously as DMs we can do whatever we want in home games and adding legendary actions is a common suggestion to buff boss fights, I find it funny how after reading some of fizban’s that I got for christmas, the value of the dragon’s “hoard” here makes giving it these extra powers basically RAW?