Shattered Honor – Part Seventy-Nine
Chapter: Season Ten
A big point to keep in mind with this encounter is that Brett made a custom/kit-bashed creature for the Aspect of Acererak. He pulled from the Iron Golem, Gorgon, and a few other bits and pieces. It has legendary actions (as we have seen), but it does NOT have legendary resistances. I will be posting the Aspect’s stats once the arc is complete.
New player to the group (relatively speaking) walks straight into the trap, gets stuck off camera for a chunk of the session, and then gets to emerge in a new form and deliver what might be the kill-shot of the boss fight? Everything’s coming up Carlos!
I love that you credit your character for your creation. Not having legendary resistance was a good call I don`t think they fit the pacing of a web comic well.
Ouch. Wonder if Brett has thoguht of some kind of threshold for damage? 8d6*2 is potentially a lot of hurt, maybe enough to blow the thing apart. Shrapnel City. And if there’s anything reasonably conductive that’s too close, or the impacy and the shock superheats the air around the construct as with a regular lightning strike – so many opportunities to add a dash of hurt to the PCs!
The npcs have had nothing BUT HURT tho
High Damage, high vulnerability. Love it! Nothing’s worse than a sludgy slugfest where players are yo-yoing up and down for three hours whilst a miserable sack of hitpoints flails at them with it’s one, low-damage attack.
The big question is though…
Did Brett fudge that save roll? I mean, he’s a straight shooter who plays everything as the dice falls. He wouldn’t, would he?
I would! It’s exactly the right dramatic moment for a PC win, theyve suffered for it and earned it, no-one will say “oh, that was easy”. They’ll remember it as a tough fight that Carlos win for them at the last moment. Evening of entertainment, tick.
Brett has hit them pretty hard up to now, and has only used “cool over rule” once earlier in the piece. I think the dice have landed as they have, and the Aspect is going to hurt a lot all over.
I dunno, I’d like to think Brett knows his friends well enough by now to know they’d rather lose to a bad roll barrage than cheapen a win with added fudge.
Glad to see Carlos get some epic spotlight time too. If he hadn’t already earned a place of honour with the team with that Andromeda arc, this would have done it for sure š
Given what we had with a crit nat 20 in the past; I would hope not, one hopes this is sybchronicity a natural christmas present that just happens to line up with great plan, inspirational, move, and a heroic rescue from the everstinking pits of dicesuck.
Maybe I miscounted, but it seems like the Aspect dropped the opportunity to use a couple of its legendary actions this second round?
Agree on the game design thoughts! Faced one pre-written encounter boss with no offensive threat but that could basically only be killed through cold steel…and nothing had foreshadowed the need for it. So after we cleaned up the minions we had an hour and a half of opposed grapple checks to drown it. Ugh.
and 8×2 is 16 … š
8d6 x2, though. That’s indeed 16 if all 8 d6es are a 1…
But a crit fail on EIGHT d6es? In a row? That’s a 1 in 46656 chance.
It’s 8D6 x2, so max damage (rolling all 8’s) would be 96 and minimum damage (rolling all 1’s) would be 16. The chances of him rolling minimum damage is very small, besides, only Trevor has had the critical fail dice so far. Have a little faith in Carlos. š
Brian, I thought I’d let you know: Reading this storyline inspired me to step out of my comfort zone and behind the DM screen for the first time in a decade. My table runs the gamut from “Never ever played a tabletop RPG” to “Written commercially published material for an RPG” to “Has committed to memory every last scrap of D&D lore” to “my beautiful wife”. It’s more than a little intimidating, but it’s going really well. I aspire to be the kind of DM Brett is. He’s fair, he provides a challenge, he takes his players’ needs and weak spots into account. I nearly wept when he pulled Carlos aside after Gul’Ren jumped into the portal, he handled that moment so very well. THANK YOU for what you do, and the skill and care with which you do it.