Episode Number: (TG505)
Original Airdate: 11/2002
The party heads to the land of the Savage Beast, with Timus teleporting the party in close. After a hike, the party meets stone giants, and passes them without incident. The party also passes a warning written in giant. Finally, they are attacked by giants. The battle is horrific, and three people are killed. The party retreats, save Tierney and Emcee, who learn more about the Savage Beast. Gryff, Kaz'k, and Arly (maybe) are brought back, some via unusual means...
Patrick: Emcee appears to be stripping leaves off the trees to make a blanket that... what?
Colin: You're not allowed to start any sentences with "Emcee is stripping..." anymore.
Kazek (gesturing to a giant that had just down & dying'd Tierney, with Tierney now at 3 hit points after a healing potion): I believe your woman wants you to flank him.
Colin: If I had more than fourteen hit points I'd tell you to lay off my woman!
Dragon: If that box should leave this cave, your world would end.
Tierney: It's happened before.
So, about you killing three people...
I'd like to raise a point or two, if not in defense, then in explanation.
Nobody forced anyone to go after the Savage Beast. There were other options, including but not limited to going after the Penumbral Lord, scrying the area, or going back to the Oracles with more questions or suspicions -- since Tierney thought that they were being less than entirely honest, and he thought that the PL didn't really ever have his soul.
The giants were cloud giants modified as follows: they wore +1 chain shirts, and they used gargantuan greatswords instead of gargantuan morningstars. The 'stars and greatswords do equal damage, and no 19s were rolled, so the weapons were purely flavor. The chain shirts did add a fair amount to the AC, but this is extremely powerful magic we're talking about. You'd expect them to have, you know, something.
The giants did not have class levels. They had only the skills listed in the book. They regularly patrolled the area, and had a better understanding of the terrain -- so their starting location let them throw rocks.
The area where I feel completely at-fault is in having Emcee charge the giants. The smart thing to do when fighting giants is to use ranged attacks to whittle them down, and Emcee's charge sparked Tierney's charge, which sparked Kaz'k's covering attempt, and got the party hurt badly enough that Timus had to yank people out of there. If Emcee hadn't charged, I don't know if the fight would have gone differently.
At the same time, though, Timus did force the giants down earlier with his stinking cloud, and Kaz'k doesn't really have a ranged weapon -- so his options were pretty limited.
It's also very possible that people weren't thinking in real-world terms, or thought that I wasn't thinking in real-world terms. I mean this in two ways. First, if there's an extremely powerful magical device out there, it's gonna be guarded, and there's no reason for the PCs to think that it's guarded by something that they can get past easily. Second, if you were thinking of rocks as just ammo, flavor, instead of thinking of them as large boulders, you might not have had an awareness of how many shots the giants really had. Each giant had seven rocks. Had the party gone invisible, levitated, or done other avoidance tactics, the giants would have shot their loads, so to speak, and then wandered around with greatswords shouting at people to come down and fight.
Four Cloud Giants (and not the ones with spell-like abilities, either): four CR 11 creatures, or one EL 15 encounter. We had six people: True, Kaz'k and Emcee are only 12th level, but they're pretty tricked out for 12th level. Gryff was 15th, Tim & Company are 13th? Arly was a bit limited by not being Arly at the time, but since the giants weren't TBP, it's not like he lost out on a ton of abilities.
By the book, I don't consider this just me throwing you into an impossible fight. This was a combination of bad circumstances and bad rolls. The dragon, by the way, would have mopped up the floor with you. And there would have been enough clues given to indicate that a huge silver dragon shouldn't be tangled with.
Other stuff...
It'll be interesting to see how Arly's resurrection plays out. The black beetle was something that, honestly, I just completely made up. But it sorta makes sense, in a Cryptlordy sorta way...
Good or evil, a giant is still a giant. Size is everything to them.
It's not like we haven't been in over our heads before. I've had worse.
That Cryptlord thing still freaks me, though.
I'm still confused.
(Translation: What is done is done, and there's no sense in me being bitter about it. Let us move on.)
I don't think the encounter was that unfair.
But when half the party leaves the other half outnumbered in melee combat with greatsword wielding cloud giants, that's when it starts to get bad. Certainly I expect some ramifications from this, especially from Gryff and Kazek. Possibly the flail, too.
I wish I'd been able to explain to the dragon how important our mission is -- I mean against the TBP -- and how important Sendant is to that. Somehow we've ended up being the bad guys again.
It was reasonable. I'd estimate equivalent (4-character) party level 14 vs. EL 15, a slightly more challenging encounter than average, by stats.
The things that killed (some of) us were poor tactics and a lack of offensive magic.
Tactically, we should have gone invis and used ranged attacks, or at least had the fighters lead the charge. More than that, we should have been expecting something powerful and done more pre-planning. Not that that's been much help in the past. :)
Magically, if we'd had sendant and a different mindset there would have been blade barriers and (earlier) fireballs. The stinking cloud was a clever idea, it just turned out to be ineffective, and there wasn't time for much more but reactive survival attempts.
Overall, having only half the party really involved in melee at any time -- and fighting monsters who are all melee power (hitting AC 40, doing 65-point criticals) -- was our downfall.
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