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[COURT OF SWORDS - E17 Q&A] The Bloody Halls of the Rock Gnome King

Last we’ve heard yes. Sean is on vacation for two weeks but he’ll jump back into the Rock Gnome King Arc when he returns, I would assume he would continue until Rock Gnome King is killed or Snidge is killed. In the next two weeks they’ll be doing some sidequest stuff with new characters, I don’t think they’ve figured out what yet.

i really hope that @itmeJP and @DansGaming will play gnomes too now… So it could be the massive Berg with his grp of gnomes XD

A Wizard would be nice, Gnome Wizard even. @DansGaming would be able to handle a Wizard, plus they start at level 3 which would be a lot less squishy.

I just hope JP has dark-vision lol for the stream’s viewing sake.

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Adam stated multiple times during the dungeon that stopping to rest would end up in trouble, and even punished them for waiting around by having enemies hit them from the back. If the point was to wait, then Adam did a really bad way of conveying it, considering that he was sending exactly the opposite signals.

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Adam flat out said that if they rested, then the gnomes would notice that the guards were missing and would react to it. As such, it made sense for the PCs to try to push on before the whole gnome army collapses on them.

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I mean the issue from my perspective is just that they were kind of fucked when they decided to go down there. From my understanding (and I mean it lovingly and respectfully) they got really bad PC-itis and Sean ran away with the story and they flat invaded and entire kingdom that Sean already established had “armies of thousands”. Even if you try to scale it down as much as you can to give them a prayer of a chance the issue is still that they’re doing something that probably should not happen.

And the bigger issue there is you can’t just flat tell your players that they can’t try to do something because that’s really fun-killing, but if you throw them straight into a wall that’s not enjoyable for anyone either.

If they rested they were going to be surrounded probably (even if they hid the previous rooms would refill and the place would go on high alert because there are invaders) and they’re dead.
If they didn’t rest they’d run out of steam and eventually they’re dead.
If you scale it down enough that they can actually can take out a base and a gnome king (Even if you justify it narratively by saying the mara corruption slowly killed off most of the gnomes and this is all that’s left or any other plot excuse that still let’s them take on the king without it derailing the entire plot to make him a MASSIVE figure in the story) your party get’s REALLY bad PC-itis and starts doing really dumb shit and gets themselves killed or ruins their own campaign.

It’s kind of a rough issue and all you can really do is hope that the players learn from it and use that experience to make different decisions and grow (rather than assuming they had bad rolls and just try again), OR make sure to be really careful when designing places so that the scale lets them go through it comfortable but then you make it equally not super important to the story.

I don’t have any criticism of it, just from my perspective and how I interpreted what was happening it’s just not a good situation to be in. (To criticize lightly if Sean weren’t new to DnD and didn’t make the campaign while he was a guest about HIS story it wouldn’t have happened in the first place, but even there part of being a PC is to world build and add and help things grow.)

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Adam said that he liked how introducing Sean allowed them to create the side-story of the gnome king, providing for a contained but important side mission for the party to do while Sean was with them. So much in fact that he’ll try to replicate something similar with the next guest PC. As such, it wasn’t just the PCs deciding to take on the Gnome King against the wishes of the DM. Taking on the Gnome King was the intended story arc for the party while Sean was there.

Personally, I think there were two ways you could have changed the campaign to make it work. One would be not to scare the PCs off of resting by handwaving something, proceeding with the campaign as planned while allowing for the PCs to rest in-between fights. The other way, which would have not have required hand-waving in my opinion, would have been to adapt the target to better fit the party. Instead of having them enter the Gnome Kings lair at a point where they have 4+ fights in a row, with more enemies rushing in from behind them, have the secret entrance be at the hearth of the compound, with only one or two big fights ahead of them. They could have entered somewhere near the fire guardian and his hearth, with the first objective to get the hearth and free the guardian, and the second objective to kill the gnome king with the help of the fire guardian who either would be able to disable the constructs he built, or be able to turn the constructs against the king.

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Yeah, or maybe just the target being the artificer and planning (from the gm perspective) to let them glympse the evil down there (or reveal a connection between the gnomes and bug elvish person?) and then for them to escape. Or maybe yeah big fire guardian cutscene bs and players getting ported out or something.

Either way i think scope was sort of the issue, and/or some sort of establishment that the gnome king himself wasn’t the target (or it just was, i don’t know)

I didn’t know it was intended for them to semi-side story like that though. Thank you for the correction on that. (though i dont think anything is against the wishes of the dm ever really =P)

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I agree with both of you. When I heard they were doing that I was thinking do they realize what level they are? They would have to do a bunch of planning and def got the assistance of someone much stronger like you mentioned.

I guess this is more a problem of JP using his Roll20 view for the stream. On the Roll20 streams the audience usually gets Adam’s GM view and sees into how much trouble the PCs are heading. Not sure if the bigger chat on Rollplay could resist spamming spoilers though.

yeah! they’re tonally pretty different, right? like on Roll20 the audience is sort of also my co-GM and in RollPlay the audience is more in a player role.

To be fair, running into a sentry/guard, killing them and then resting for 8 hours would realistically trigger some sort of attack and sure increase of the guards - so it wouldn’t make sense to have the team do a long rest after the adventure has started.
It sounded on Adam as he thought they should have rested. For a man who prizes strict rules over flow he may have made a huge oversight in the rule design of this dungeon for a 4-man raid of their level.