Ever since the 4th edition rules for Dungeons and Dragons came out (on my 19th birthday so long ago, no less) I've had my poor old 3.5 manuals sitting on the shelf at home gathering dust. A part of me missed the good old days of ridiculous character builds and broken spell chains, so when I heard my friends nostalgically discussing 3.5, I jumped on the chance and offered to DM an epic level campaign for them.
It took them 4 months, but they finally decided on their character builds this afternoon, unfortunately for me, they have Jeff, who happens to be a master of min-maxing. It looks like I'm going up against a party of one psychotic meatshield berserker possessed by two ghosts, one of which is actually possessed by another ghost and several multiple personalities. Oh boy.
Now I'm all for plotting to destroy my players, and I already have a pretty good idea about how I'm going to test their ability to survive (to be used to weigh future PC-killing plots) in the first session this Saturday, but where's the fun in that without a little democracy. Not for them, of course, they'll never see it coming even if I have to drop a meteor on them, but for you guys.After every session I'll post a new poll on my blog, to see what you think has the best chance of giving me the sweet victory of a total party kill, and then I'll throw it at them in the following game. You don't have to know anything at all about D&D to have an opinion, it basically comes down to what kind of monster(s) you think will own the most face.
So, think you can kill my players?
Well, the Tarrasque is useless because anyone with flying can just fly above it and keep firing til it dies.
ReplyDeleteA Demilich and his undead minions might be a good encounter.
@Chris: Hmm, interesting idea, I was looking to do a kind of undead theme for the campaign. I never really planned on throwing the Tarrasque at them just because it's so cliche. I had a party kill it pretty easily before, but we forgot about the regeneration, so it ended badly anyway.
ReplyDeleteSome of the stuff out of the old 3.0 Deities and Demigods will probably give them a good run for their money.
ReplyDeleteWhat about Tiamat (spelling?)? I'm not entirely sure they have rules for her in 3.5 but in Advanced D&D she was a very formidable foe!
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like fun. Hit up the Book of Vile Darkness. I'm sure you can find something awesome in there to destroy them with.
ReplyDeleteYou can always be annoying and through any of the warhammer gods at them, or the narada (ship from star trek 2009).
ReplyDeleteotherwise killer bunny is the way to go!
When there's something strange in your epic level campaign - who you gonna call?
ReplyDeleteGhostbusters.
The average Joe the mid level priest : turn undead / banish for the ghost, then hold person and calm the berko ?
ReplyDeleteGhosts aside, the actual physical PCs are still alive, right?
ReplyDeleteA team of vampires with lots of class levels, backed up by a flying, invisible warlock throwing an area-effect, necrotic Eldritch Blast every turn, killing the PCs and healing the vampires.
just killing them is not much fun, is it. after all, you can simply go with the "rocks fall, everyone dies" scheme.^^
ReplyDeleteif you really want to challenge your players, work with their goals, that is, if they have a motivation besides "we be awesome". let them try to ursurp the power of a small god or demon prince, then just escalate the conflict up to some of the named baddies from fiendish codex or something like that. :D
Go to this forum.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.giantitp.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=30
Ask for the most awesomest ass kicker in the world. Watch party cry horribly.
Enjoy.
i feel like this may be a bit cliche, but... Dragons, they are my favorite hands down, and i know that there are undead/vampiric varieties of them, and they are supposed to be fairly tough i imagine. but i have never played, so i can't say.
ReplyDeleteon a side note, couldn't your players read this as well and know whats coming?
-Dave
"Underwater ninja tigers - For when the DM might as well just say fuck you"
ReplyDeleteThere's a demotivational poster of it on the interwebs somewhere...
Keep it simple. Wights with monk levels.
ReplyDeleteLet their characters find a stash of +2 weapons and then throw something at them with damage reduction 30 / +3.
ReplyDeleteAlso, more trolls than they have fire / acid is a danger.
When I took over our 4E Realms game, I almost killed the entire party with swarms of tiny lizards in the first session. It was meant to be an Easy encounter. The dragonblooded kobolds (Hard) got schooled at a rate of one a turn. Moral of the story: stats do not tell the whole story.
new guy, and whatnot..
ReplyDeleteanyway, I would like to present the WIN scenario:
http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20100210
just get these two to fight the party instead of eachother.
Run them through the 2nd Edition Night Below boxed set campaign. We ran a bunch of high level characters through it and still had an ultra-high mortality rate.
ReplyDelete@Lord: My players are all the guys I play Rogue Trader with, including my GM. I think if I threw Khorne at them I'd get attacked by some space dragon lich or something next time I played RT just as revenge.
ReplyDelete@David Moore: One of them is a regular Goliath, living and all, but he carries the body of one of the PCs with him, who's pretty dead and a ghost. The other one is technically a fiend from the ethereal plane so if he manifests outside of what the sword he possesses, I can kill him maybe.
@Grifthin: Thanks for the link, I'll put it to use if they do actually turn out to be as overpowered as I think they might be. Maybe I'll get lucky though.
@Dave: I love dragons too, I have the Draconomicon so they'll definitely show up. As for them reading this, they don't even know I have a blog, plus I think I'd figure it out if they seemed uncannily prepared every time.
@tassen: Haha, I love Ctrl+Alt+Del, that's a great idea.