Siege at Bordrin's Watch

In other news my group finished Siege of Bordrin's Watch last night with a magnificent 20 round encounter. I had read about the final encounter on WOTC's community pages. Some groups claiming it went 40 rounds and hundreds of minions were killed. I'm not exactly sure why a DM would let it run that long, but 20 rounds was definitely a lot of fun.

I run with only 4 players so I had to adjust the encounter on the fly, using different waves to tailor the difficulty to keep my PCs challenged, but just barely keeping them from being overwhelmed. I think I managed to hit the difficulty just about right. With the exception of the ranger who killed minions by the dozen, everyone was at the very least bloodied and most of them had been one lucky hit away from making death saves at some point in the encounter. I probably should have thrown a bit more ranged damage at the ranger just to challenge him a little.

Since I knew it would be a long encounter and since numbers heavy encounters (i.e. ones featuring lots of weak npcs) are rough on an undersized group, I used the idea from the DMG 2 on Long Fights. I planned for one of two events to be a "turning point" in the battle. When the PCs completed the mini-skill challenge or when the PCs defeated the enemy leader they would be offered the choice of one of the following:

1) Regain 1 healing surge
2) Regain use of Second Wind
3) Gain an Action Point and be able to spend it, even if they had spent an AP this encounter
4) Regain use of an expended Encounter power

The party managed to kill the leader before doing the skill challenge, so that became the turning point. No one picked option 2, but every other choice was taken. Giving them that little extra boost of power really did turn the battle in their favor (although just barely). I'm not sure if the DMG 2 included the idea to let the player's pick or if that was something I thought up, but I feel it was key to making this idea work. There was really no single benefit from the list above that would have fit everyone.

It's not hard to see why many people rate Bordrin's Watch among the best adventures in the heroic tier. It borrows a lot from the LotR movies, is well paced, and unlike Rescue at Rivenroar has a final encounter that actually has that epic end of the movie feel to it. Definitely thumbs up for Siege of Bordrin's Watch and the DMG 2.

For those of you who are really interested, I'll do a write up with quotes, pictures, etc over on the groups Obsidian Portal adventure log .

2.0 in action

My scales of war campaign continues as a test bed for 2.0. You can see some of the messages in chat, along with an error report, and the crazy movement paths that are common for Reggie.

Ten Scales (Scales of War) screens

I've been working on a 4E project which I'm pretty excited about. It should be a nice ease of use upgrade for players and GMs alike. Unfortunately right now it's just a pile of .NET code and XML. I'll post screen shots of it once it's usable in FGII.

In the meantime here are some screen shots from last night's session. More details can be found at the Obsidian Portal site for our campaign, once I get to updating it.

Cleaning up

I found this while cleaning up my files. A screen cap from the first Scales of War session. Note my pro grid skill.

Parser 3.5.4 released and SoW

First a screenshot from one of my redesigned SoW skill challenges....oh as a bonus you get to see Xorne's character (Tak) wishlist


You can get it on FUM:
3.5.4
****************************Public Release: 6/2/2009 *****************
* MM2 - Support for Multi-icon (MR/CA) powers
* Familiar ZToken tag is now ignores case.
* Split documentation into 2 files to avoid confusion
* Added documentation for Familiars

3.5.3
* MM2 - Handling of the "A" power icon for Templates greatly improved. Line wrapping should no longer be needed.
* MM2 - Lore formatter now understands a chain of knowledge skills separated by " or " (i.e "Arcana or Religion DC 15:")

3.5.2
* MM2 - Cascade from Speed to Saving Throws enabled
* MM2 - Dot removed from keywords

3.5.1
* Cleaned up documents shortcuts.
* Added XML validation

Updates

In "Parsing of War" I mentioned I was going to be doing some DMing. I've run two sessions worth of the first Scales of War adventure (I've actually parsed the entire second adventure). You can follow my group's progress over on our Obsidian Portal site. It's mostly just background information I took from the Scales of War player's guide, and the adventure summaries. Maybe some time I'll get around to adding more content.

In other news, I "finished" the MM2 tonight. I'm sure there are still some data errors but I've got everything parsing correctly. I had to make some minor changes to handle the multiskill lore entries (Dungoneering or Nature DC 15:) and the new multi-icon powers. Well they aren't new but I think there were only 2 of them in the original MM. The MM2 has one NPC with 2 different multi-icon powers. Mutli-icons required some ruleset work and even me mauling some graphics. Hopefully we'll get something better in place for the final version:


As usual, I ended up doing more than I needed. I added all the stats, graphics, and fluff for the MM NPCs that were mentioned in MM2 encounters.

Slow

Just an FYI for anyone who might have missed it, the public version of 1.5 released this week. There's a lot of new features and some long standing wish list type requests. And once FGII takes 2.4.0 to production the long awaited token drops will work. You can find a copy over on FUM

I completed my Parsing of War and converted the first Scales of War adventure to FGII format. I then spent another 2 days building a version customized for the party I plan to send through it. I altered some of the questionable monster choices, added a bit of character, assigned wish list treasure, and rewrote the skill challenges to be more in line with the articles by Mike Mearls. I'm still a bit nervous about running them, but we'll see how it goes when my turn to DM comes around.

And finally, I worked some more on converting the parser to .NET I made some significant progress as it now renders the UI correctly. That might not seem like much but trust me the VB6 Treeview and the .NET Treeview are very different animals. I'm pretty sure the mechanical portion of the parser will function once I get the UI issues cleaned up.

Parsing of War!

So I'm going to be trying my hand at DMing something longer than a one shot. There was interest in doing Scales of War, so on Wednesday I started work on the first adventure in the path. I finished it up today. I think it's pretty much done at this point.

I had to make a few tokens, but fortunately there were a lot of marker free maps available on the internet. I turned a few sections of the story into completely separate story entries so I could link to them from tactical encounters, maps, etc.

Unfortunately since we haven't actually played any of it yet, I can't post any images from it...stay tuned.