Dungeons & Delvers 2nd Edition: Level 5 No-Cleric Combat Playtest, Take 2

The previous 5th-level combat playtest proved laughably easy, even though the party wasn't particularly optimized and lacked a spellcaster capable of healing or even meaningfully "buffing" the party. All signs point to armor being far too good at doing what it's supposed to do, so after nerfing it a bit we gave it another try.

This time we pitted the party against the following:

• 1 cinderbone skeleton (5 HD)
• 8 orcs (3 HD each)
• 1 owlbear (8 HD)

The cinderbone skeleton saw some modifications, primarily making its fire kicker effects more potent when it is severely wounded (reflecting it getting angrier). Due to its flavor it's intended to be a solitary monster, and these can be trivially easy to tackle in Dungeons & Delvers, especially when their level is on par with the party, so I didn't beef it up too much: it's really something I'd expect a 3rd-level party to deal with.

Previously it went down without much of a fuss: despite an armor-ignoring fire aura it didn't even deplete anyone's Vitality Points. This time is managed to chip away at a few Wound Points, but this was only really due to the fire aura buff. I'm fine with this, as it means if the party was a few levels lower it would prove far more dangerous.

The orcs on the other hand fared phenomenally. They only start out at +3 to hit (remember, only Dexterity applies to the attack roll), but since there are so many that Ganging Up bonus builds up pretty quickly, and they were able to hew through both fighters' Wound Points to the point where the dwarven fighter was knocked into Dead Man Walking status, and ended the combat at -4 WP. Melissa used up all ten mending potions, which still barely got them back up above half WP.

In Dungeons & Delvers: Black Book, drinking potions reduced your Constitution, representing toxicity. It would go back to normal after a Long Rest, but you had to put more thought into potion consumption. I'm considering bringing this back, but have it force a scaling Constitution save to avoid the Sickened condition. Dwarves would be naturally more resistant to it, and there could also be an Alchemy Skill Perk to provide additional resistance.

Actually, each potion could have its own save DC, and it just scales up for every potion you drink during the day. Using exceptional alchemy ingredients could lower this save, a low crafting check could increase it, etc.

Anyway, the owlbear. After doing more research on bears I realized that for all its Hit Dice and +6 Strength, the owlbear is quite weak compared to actual bears, so I improved his Hit Dice and Strength a bit. While he still only lasted two rounds he easily beat the spear fighter into negative Wound Points before getting put down. Even better, he did it despite failing to bypass the armor's DR.

Melissa still doesn't think that a cleric is necessary, and feels that the overall difficulty is about where it needs to be. She actually felt threatened, but nothing seemed unreasonable, even the owlbear smacking her guys around for 1d8+10 damage per claw. Promising, but we're going to give it one more shot, this time against a more likely set of encounter suspects. Want to make sure neither outcome was a fluke.