Instead of three chapters perhaps there should be four? Start chapter one with four encounters and then break the rest of the story into three more chapters. So it almost pains me to say this, but D&D Encounters may need to work in more opportunities to let the PCs take extended rests. From what I read on the boards this seemed like a pretty common occurrence.Īt my home game I’m always pushing the character to the limits. I gave my players a choice to take an extended rest after completing the second or fourth encounter during chapter three. Now they’re expected to go through chapter three (five encounters) without an extended rest? Not happening. The PCs barely made it through chapter one (four encounters) and chapter two (four encounters). Where this really became a problem was in chapter three.
The problem is that the characters aren’t built to handle that kind of challenge week after week. When you’re only playing one encounter each week I understand the desire to make every one epic. I’m glad to see that although season 5 does track XP, it’s a lot more definitive and clearly says that if you’ve played every encounter you’re ready to level at the end of each chapter. I think that tracking XP individually was a good experiment, but I miss the old way of doing things. In the previous seasons of D&D Encounter the PCs didn’t track XP they just leveled at the end of certain chapters. Meanwhile the PCs at the other table were all advancing to level 3. I don’t know if the extra hit points and +1 to attacks and defenses would have made that big a difference, but it certainly wouldn’t have hurt.īy the end of chapter two I just told everyone at my table to level up their PCs whether they had enough XP for level 2 or not. The level 1 PCs at my table kept getting slaughtered. This wouldn’t have been such a bad thing if the encounter difficulty didn’t ramp up so sharply in chapter two. At the end of the fist chapter none of the players at my table had enough XP to level whereas all the players at the other table did. The result was that the other table ended up with more XP because they faced deadlier challenges. The other table was made up of more experienced players so the DM challenged them by beefing things up.
My table had a lot of first-timers so I usually stuck pretty close to the adventure as written. And then disparity happened.Īt my FLGS we ran two tables all season. This let the players who showed up more often gain the benefit of leveling up before those players who only shower up once and a while. Tracking XPĪt first I thought that tracking XP individually was a great idea. The importance of the role-playing parts were really emphasized when players learned that there was just as much XP up for grabs for role-playing as there was for the combat part of the encounter. In almost every encounter there was an opportunity to role-play and in many cases there was even a structured skill challenge. Role-playing? What’s that? But this season was a lot different and a lot better. You built a character for combat, killed all the monsters, and that was it.
#PHANTOM BRIGADE UPDATE 9 SERIES#
One of the biggest complaints I had about previous seasons was that they played out like a series of dungeon delves. In the end only a couple of players were actually using classes and races from non-essentials materials anyway so I don’t think it was such a big deal. My thought was that I’d rather have you play the character you want to play, even if he’s technically not allowed, and keep coming back every week than be forced to play a character you hate and never return. If you made a character in character builder I allowed him regardless of class or race. Although the character were all supposed to be created using D&D Essentials products, I wasn’t that restrictive. This season more than any of the previous season we had a lot more players make their own characters.
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