Quote from: yosemitemike on August 15, 2024, 07:40:04 AM

Quote from: jhkim on August 14, 2024, 02:18:37 AMyosemitemike started this thread claiming the fight was "trivially easy" which is flatly false.

The CR system defines these encounters as of trivial difficulty you disingenuous weasel.

Quote from: ForgottenF on August 15, 2024, 09:18:19 AMThis isn't intended as a shot at either side of the argument, but I thought it was generally agreed that the CR system was essentially busted and unreliable?

The CR system is absolutely unreliable - and it has warnings of such. However, even it isn't that wrong. The thresholds for a party of four 3rd-level characters are: Easy (300XP), Medium (600XP), Hard (1100XP), Lethal (1600XP).

Multiple monsters get a multiplier for how many there are. The multiplier is x1.5 for two monsters, and x3 for 11 to 14 monsters. So the monsters in this encounter are:

2 gargoyles (CR2) -> 450XP x 1.5 = 675
12 ghouls (CR1) -> 200XP x 3 = 600
1 wight (CR3) -> 700XP x 1 = 700

By the book, any of these on their own are already Medium difficulty. The three together, even in waves, are clearly more difficult.

Oh, I pulled out my books to correct yosemitemike's "disingenuous weasel" numbers, but I see JHKim already started. I think that insofar as yosemitemike wants to be using the CR system here, the numbers are even bigger than JHKim reported:

From DMG page 82, we've already done steps 1 and 2 to find the party's XP thresholds. Then we:
3. Total the monsters' XP
4. Modify total XP for multimple monsters

2 gargoyles are CR 2, 450 xp each, means total 900, with the pair they're 1350xp - that's HARD.

Reading the text of the encounter the wight is not necessarily a separate wave: "Drovath emerges from his crypt to join the ghouls in battle." So 12 x 200 + 700 = 3100 xp, x 3 = far into the LETHAL zone.

Far enough into the LETHAL zone to actually seriously threaten the party of 5e characters, if we're going to mock CR appropriately. The ghouls have 22hp each, your PCs don't have a lot of AOE damage, and about 30% of hits from the ghouls are going to cause paralysis on top of depleting a third of the PC's hit points. My current players just hit third level and I expect this encounter would wipe all six PCs out unless they made really good use of terrain & tactics that aren't spelled out in the adventure. Only 1 attack in 4 would hit the paladin, but there are too many enemies and the space is too open for him to keep them off the squishies, and this is somewhere where the barbarian's rage resistance wouldn't help tank once he's paralysed.

Having spent months going through half the book, roughly half as a player and half as a DM, I think the adventures in Candlekeep Mysteries are generally lousy - but stop inventing fake shit to tar it with. Stick to truth.

I have come to the thread just to snort at the CR system.

*snort*

Quote from: Naburimannu on August 16, 2024, 05:21:42 AMHaving spent months going through half the book, roughly half as a player and half as a DM, I think the adventures in Candlekeep Mysteries are generally lousy - but stop inventing fake shit to tar it with. Stick to truth.

Naburimannu, can you give any more details about the scenarios you've tried? Were any particularly worse or better?

So far, I've only run one of the scenarios in the Candlekeep anthology. From browsing through it, it seemed mixed but interesting, which is better than the early 5E modules I tried, but that's a low bar because I hated those modules. When I've used published modules using 5E, I've mostly adapted modules from earlier editions. (I listed some of the ones I liked in reply #57.)

In general, I think mystery scenarios are particularly difficult to write - especially with magic in the mix and not knowing the players. So the anthology theme of mysteries made it rough for writers.

We played 26 2.5ish-hour online sessions over most of 2022. The plan was that I DM'd the even adventures + added a bunch of supplemental material, and a colleague would run the odd adventures, but I ended up doing a bit more than half the work. Some of these complaints may be curmudgeonly; I think what I learned is that I don't like disconnected episodic adventures unless the worldbuilding is good and the connections between them are strong. Candlekeep was a fairly pointless backdrop and did nothing to motivate or engage the party or connect things.

CM 1 - A perfectly adequate artificial bounded starter adventure.
CM 2 - I don't know how to run a city adventure with no city? It very much assumes the players will follow the rails and have no other interests, that the city is just an arbitrary backdrop.
  So I mixed in overland travel to the city (flavour from original the Baldur's Gate computer games) & a lot of material from Murder in Baldur's Gate. That filled out the city nicely but the tone of the circa-2014 Murder  adventure fell flat with some of my players who didn't want to deal with class struggle, racism, etc.
  I also found the adventure a bit overly self-contained; like many in Candlekeep Mysteries it's so episodic that it feels disconnected unless you add a lot to it.
CM 3 - discussed before
CM 4 - Crawl through the ruined village & mines. Some of the timeline needs willing suspension of disbelief but it works. Reminded me how much I dislike the current FR worldbuilding.
CM 5 - Excessively modern magic spa. Some people are OK with that but spoils my verisimilitude.
CM 6 - Hook is arbitrary but not the most illogical of the series. You either handwave the travel to the site or do a bunch of extra prep. Combat underwhelming if the DM forgets so many enemies have magic resistance. (But that doesn't help much in 5e against direct-damage spells, anyway.)
CM 7 - Handwave travel to Waterdeep, engage with one or two details there, then do a village investigation and a dungeoncrawl.
CM 8 - skipped
CM 9 - skipped
CM 10 - This felt like a reasonable conclusion. Again, it's a travel-heavy adventure where that's all handwaved, expected to be a total railroad where the players go to a certain set of locations in a certain order with no alternatives or agency.