Drow Ninja!

The centrepiece of yesterday's game was an epic battle between the party and a raiding party of drow and their enslaved white dragons. It took about two hours out of our three-hour game session, but I certainly felt everyone was having fun throughout. Certainly, I was having a lot of fun.

One of the things that particularly amused me about this combat was that the last time I used these particular monsters, against a party of 6 PCs, the party were quickly overwhelmed and the game ended with a TPK. Conversely, in last night's game there were four PCs (plus some presence from the Wizard, despite his player being absent), and yet only the most minimal damage was incurred.

Of course, there were a couple of factors for this. The first, and most obvious, was that my luck was truly woeful for most of last night. The only PC who was regularly hit was the Wizard, and he was protected by stoneskin. The second was that the party operated as a somewhat coherent group, splitting the drow up, moving them around, and then finishing them off. The third is that this party is a slightly higher level than their predecessors, which makes a bigger difference than I had thought. And the fourth is that the party took the time to make full use of their spells and other abilities before charging into combat. (These are not necessarily in order, by the way.)

I think part of the reason I found this encounter so satisfying was that when I constructed it I paid attention to several lessons I learned from 4e encounter design. To whit:

• The encounter took place on the decks of an elemental airship, in the midst of a blizzard. Although the environment maybe didn't come up as often as it could, it did still allow for characters slipping and sliding over the place, for people to fall over the side, for one PC to bull-rush one of the drow over the edge, and for that same PC to be grabbed and carried off by a dragon.
• Speaking of the dragon... rather than having a single group of homogenous monsters (six drow ninja), I also included a couple of white dragons. This made sense in the story, but it also meant that the combat was more interesting - as well as the fairly statuc drow, the party also had to contend with the flying (and flyby-attacking) dragons. (Naturally, the PC with the flying mount wasn't present for that session. Shame that.)
• The combat had goals beyond "kill the enemy". The major goal of the drow was to bring down the elemental airship, by using dragon breath on the hull, by turning the airship's lightning projector against the elemental ring, and so on.
• And, equally, the encounter featured terrain features that the PCs could use to their advantage. Specifically, Mondo and Urylth each made use of one of the ship's ballistae (before it was destroyed), doing significant damage to one of the dragons.

All in all, I feel that the encounter was a massive success. Unfortunately, that means that I've now set a new battle for the big set-piece battles in this campaign. Now I'll need to come up with something special for when the party catch up with the Dragon Below Cultists...