- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
Yeah, very much agreeing on 5e being able to get very lethal very quickly.
When my gaming group tried out Storm King's Thunder, we had our first TPK maybe ten minutes in - we saw a pair of wargs in the abandoned town square, we tried to sneak past them, we failed, and then the entire party was ripped apart into gory chunks within a couple of rounds. Even the DM was flabbergasted at why the module would do this.
Thinking back, a solid majority of the encounters in Storm King's Thunder were borderline Kobayashi-Maru nightmares. We were regularly forced to resort to convoluted schemes because the threats we were set up against would have slaughtered us all without issue in a fair fight. Like, we only survived a relatively small group of Zhentarim by tricking them into sharing a meal, serving them poison prestidigitated to smell & taste like wine, and then barricading ourselves into the keep's high tower overnight and hiding out until the poison finished off the last of them.
Not only that, they're actively trying to break the current state of quasi-detante between the various gods. There is no possible universe where they wouldn't have SOMETHING try to gatecrash the ritual in stop them, because numerous gods would be pulling to try and stop this using whatever Prime Material assets they were able to scramble.
At that point, I would deliberately rig things so that if your typical five-man band of appropriately leveled PCs decide to try and solo this, then they're almost certainly going to die screaming. This is a situation where not only do you have a shitload of high-level casters, but also the collective wealth and political power of said wizards being brought to bear. You're essentially fighting Thay itself, in terms of how much metaphorical firepower they'd be investing here. The players should absolutely have to put together resources of their own to back them up and make the fight winnable.
When my gaming group tried out Storm King's Thunder, we had our first TPK maybe ten minutes in - we saw a pair of wargs in the abandoned town square, we tried to sneak past them, we failed, and then the entire party was ripped apart into gory chunks within a couple of rounds. Even the DM was flabbergasted at why the module would do this.
Thinking back, a solid majority of the encounters in Storm King's Thunder were borderline Kobayashi-Maru nightmares. We were regularly forced to resort to convoluted schemes because the threats we were set up against would have slaughtered us all without issue in a fair fight. Like, we only survived a relatively small group of Zhentarim by tricking them into sharing a meal, serving them poison prestidigitated to smell & taste like wine, and then barricading ourselves into the keep's high tower overnight and hiding out until the poison finished off the last of them.
... Okay, in that case? No, each of those five groups would have brought along their own security detail, because these are fucking wizard aristocrats from a decently competitive culture participating in a ritual which is of inestimable strategic importance to the nation as a whole and is likely to provide immense personal gain for those who performed it - and they're having to perform it in a location spacious enough for literal military formations to parade about in, rather than somewhere enclosed enough that they could feel confident in their ability to quickly rush down an attacker by overlapping the radius for their various offensive spells, and where they wouldn't have to worry about getting swarmed under through sheer numbers pouring into the room.
Not only that, they're actively trying to break the current state of quasi-detante between the various gods. There is no possible universe where they wouldn't have SOMETHING try to gatecrash the ritual in stop them, because numerous gods would be pulling to try and stop this using whatever Prime Material assets they were able to scramble.
At that point, I would deliberately rig things so that if your typical five-man band of appropriately leveled PCs decide to try and solo this, then they're almost certainly going to die screaming. This is a situation where not only do you have a shitload of high-level casters, but also the collective wealth and political power of said wizards being brought to bear. You're essentially fighting Thay itself, in terms of how much metaphorical firepower they'd be investing here. The players should absolutely have to put together resources of their own to back them up and make the fight winnable.
