The one with the crits

This is the second playtest session for the Noble class, a martial controller. I have chosen to play a female noble, to better craft insults to reflect the powers. There’s an at-will called “Taunting Remark”, and I’ve been cracking my brain at coming up with suitably scathing insults…

Anyway, meet Lady Heather (you might recognise the name from CSI) and her minions.

I’ve chosen 2 infantry units, an archer and a taskmaster. The infantry and archer units should be fairly self-explanatory. The taskmaster on the other hand…

Since they are minions, they go down if they get hit. The taskmaster, in addition to being an infantry unit, can get fallen minions back on their feet.

This is a feature of the noble. Minions of nobles do not get killed. They just get defeated, and stay on the battlefield. So they can be revived, and sort of plugs a big collapse in logic where the noble keeps spawning minions in subsequent encounters…

So the first encounter was with the bugbears (if I remembered correctly):

This looks epic, in my opinion. So click here for a larger screenshot. And here’s a closer look at my starting position:

For your information, the dungeon tiles are from the D&D accessory book, “Dungeon Tiles: Sinister Woods“. They are clearly sinistery enough, because my noble got bloodied*…

The final monster standing, the bugbear commander, was finished off by a critical hit, a flying magical fullblade thrown by the ranger. We completed the first encounter, and decided to take an extended (full) rest. Which was good, because we had a surprise…

There was a green dragon! My DM is evil… Our brave warlord moved far ahead and engaged the dragon. The dragon, on his turn, ignored the warlord (as planned by the warlord), and flew all the way close to the party and landed. And breathed on us. And wiped out 3 of my minions. At least the taskmaster was left alive… I could still get my (wo)men-at-arms back up…

My allies basically took centre stage here, because I couldn’t help much. They took down the dragon, and we rested again. It’s a playtest session, so the DM (the creator of the Noble class), wanted us (that is, me) to tackle his enemies with all our powers.

And here’s the third and final encounter. I think we’re fighting orcs. I didn’t notice much, because I was busy with the mechanics of the noble.

I did good here, whittling the enemies’ forces by taking down their minions. I took 3 enemy minions down with one “Poisoned darts” encounter power.

At this point, our warlord friend decided to use one of his special powers, which grants any ally a critical when an 18, 19, or 20 was rolled. He was also fairly sure that no one would roll those numbers. He was convinced that increasing the range of critical hits would actually decrease the chances of a critical. In fact, he’s convinced we’d probably roll a 2 or 3.

“If any one of you roll a critical, I will chop off my ****” he bet.

For the purposes of keeping this article family-friendly, I will assume you know what I meant with the asterisks…

Here’s the state of battle at around this point:

We won, of course. And our warlord friend? Let’s just say, at last count, our warlord friend was supposed to be down to -1 ****…

* FTC disclosure: I’m not affiliated with the creators of “Sinister Woods”. A player character getting bloodied while playing on dungeon tiles from “Sinister Woods” is not a typical occurrence, and may not even happen. If you’re a DM trying to give your players a hard time, I suggest traps and stronger monsters rather than relying on “Sinister Woods” dungeon tiles.