Some thugs killed another character while we were split up and brutalized the other pc there before he fled. The town was annoying because we kept having to roll charisma checks all over the place and what we did or said always mattered less than the dice roll. The cave saw two people bringing in new characters because it was basically one long fight and the gobbos kept walking past the fighter to beat on the rest of the party. The only time I went through it was with a newbie DM (he'd been playing for a couple years) and it was pretty terrible.Ī single gobbo crit downed someone on the first round of the ambush and the cleric was out of healing by the end just keeping people alive. For miles around their lair, they employ pit traps, snares, and nets to catch the unwary, and when their hunting patrols encounter other beings, they always look for ways to capture their foes instead of killing them.īecause fluff text in a splat book is a good solution to a brutal module? Goblins seek to trap and enslave any creatures they encounter, but they flee from opposition that seems too daunting. What are your thoughts on it? Do you disagree with me? I've heard LMoP was a good dive for first time players, but I'm disappointed so far. I tried to put in a lot of clues, but I still felt the players were blindsided despite my best efforts. It wouldn't be such a big deal, if this wasn't supposed to be a player's first experience of DnD. The module feels like it doesn't reward good actions as much as punish mistakes, without telling you what mistakes you made. I had to pull punches, reducing the wolves to dealing the same damage as the goblins, and they still ended up with a dying party member in their second fight with the spell slots of a level 1 team. I found myself struggling to include options for our medicine/nature cleric, or our socialite Bard. At what point should the players receive a level up? They've had to retreat from the cave (one person was dying from the flood trap pushing him towards a wolf), so I've decided the best move was to reward them the HP gain from level 2, gaining the rest of the level up benefits once they bested the goblin hideout. Not to mention that it doesn't have a good breakpoint, with the goblin ambush being too little to end a session with, but including the cave being far too much. Alerting the goblins to set off the flood trap is pretty dang easy to do, and it's not at all telegraphed in any way to prevent it. The wolves are chained up, but those chains are set to break, on top of the howling that should probably be heard throughout the cave (or at least, through the crack behind the wolf pen where most of the goblins are).Īlso, it's a dark cave, and someone is likely using a light source. In order to see the goblins while they're lollygagging, they'd need to breach past the stream and likely lose any chance at catching the goblins unaware.Īdditionally, once we get to the cave itself, the wolves deal a whopping 7 average damage when the average character in my party had a maximum of 9. Once they do reach the hideout, the goblins have another point where they can see the players (in the thicket), but the players cannot see them. Additionally, the group has a wagon with oxen that they were tasked to guard, and they were already ambushed out in the open, causing an issue if they want to follow a path for an hour to find the goblin's hideout. The traps leading to the goblin cave aren't too terrible, but it seems odd for creatures like goblins to set sophisticated traps like a snare. Once the fight is completed, there isn't any means of a social encounter without knocking any of the goblins unconscious, which isn't a natural choice for players towards goblins (who are unlikely to be worth the effort in most scenarios, in terms of both intelligence or morality). There are few interactive environmental effects can could be applied to a open field scenario like this. It initiates the Surprise conditions on behalf of the enemies, which is a difficult ruleset for first-time players. It'd be difficult to reward the players for being cautious, as they approach from an open road. This is a problematic situation for new players, as:įew clues could be picked up on that someone is hiding nearby. Here, several goblins are hiding nearby to ambush anyone who investigates the horses. It initially starts with the party coming across the ambush site where their employer's dead horses are found. I ran it for the first time with a group of new players, and after our first session, I realized just how bad of a module it is for a new group.
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