welcome to behind the screen with me Robert Hartley i am the
GM or games master for this lovely chaotic group
Viva La Dirt League and i'll be taking you through a few of the
epic or crucial moments in the campaign so far so come with
us on the journey and learn a little bit about what's going on behind here
so in episode 39 about 12 minutes in
Baradun comes within milliseconds of throwing a fireball through Yaris's
living room window as a distraction for his minor illusion Cantrip
Rob's probably this whole massive story prepared with this character we're just like okay
honestly he has the dice in his hand he is rolling them he is
seconds away from just putting him on the table and then he changes his mind
had he done so it would have played out very differently and i'd prepared for that
it's gonna just end one way here one way or the other like it's extreme
so for starters fireball usually does between 25 and 35 damage
yaris is a 10th level wizard and he has a plus three to his dexterity savings throw
so he might have failed he might have succeeded either way he had a maximum of about 80 hit points
so he wasn't going to die from a single fireball
however he was going to get very angry and start using his more powerful spells
we hear you're an evil wizard
he likely would have survived that initial attack
and i probably would have ruled it that his house structure would have survived but been set on fire
but we would however have gone into initiative order
some of you might be thinking if Yaris was a 10th
level wizard why was he never using fifth level spells during the fight
and that's because when i'm preparing for a fight i try to have a few different options
i don't know how it's going to start
i don't know if they're going to go in all guns blazing like Baradun almost did
in which case yaris has to meet them with that and
he would have pulled out a fifth level spell to try and rebalance that fight
have a drink
as it happened though they gave him chance to prepare
they give him a round to cast mirror
image on himself and a round to cast enemies abound on Bodger
and as such he started on the right foot it would have been
super unbalancing for me to bring out fifth level spells during the fight
if however they had started on the offensive
tactic and reduced him by like a third of his health in one shot
he would have met them on that encounter
by bringing out a fifth level spell called steelwind strike
you may know steelwind strike from the isolation games when duke fantzmo used it
essentially he can make five attacks against five different creatures
oh look at that there's five people in the party
each of his attacks would have done six d10 damage
that's an average of around 30 hit points
so he would have met them and possibly even downed a few of them
and then instead of fighting him in his living room they would have been fighting him on his lawn
oh no
so to balance a fight
when you've got one person versus many you usually want to have some sort of minions
in his living room he had the fire elemental and he had enemies abound on Bodger
so he had minions if they'd have started the fight differently and
fought him on his lawn instead he would have not had access to those things so
instead he was going to use the traps that were around his lawn
you want to slow it slow down slow down
he would have used misty step and thunderstep to sort of jump around the lawn
making the melee fighters run towards him and likely fall into traps
while probably chasing down Baradun who let's face it would have been
using expeditious retreat to run the hell away
he also had a fourth level spell called confusion which can cause a party to quote
'use all of its movement to move in a random direction
or make a melee spell attack against a randomly determined creature'
so again he would have forced them to fight each other or fall into pits
set off booby traps
and finally if he was surrounded or outmatched he had abilities to
teleport himself back into his house
spend a few turns trying to put out the fires that were raging
then the party would have had to make the decision do we try and get into
his house and finish him off or do we run away
and because yaris was meant to be a bit of a boss fight and
feel like badasses for taking him down after a long grueling fight
if just by nature of the dice rolls
he wasn't really doing any damage he wasn't really hitting them
i could always pull out his trump card a fifth level spell called bigby's hand
which essentially creates an enormous hand that can either grapple people
it can push them away
or it can just straight up punch them for a whole bunch of damage
okay this has escalated way more than i was expecting
so i had prepared different tactics for yaris in case they started with an all-out assault
whether they tried to siege him in his tower
whether they tried to sneak and stealth and deceive their way in
all of those things
victory it all worked out for the good guys hey
so now go back and watch those episodes with that in mind maybe you'll get a
little something else from them and i'll see you next time on behind the screen
if you enjoyed that don't forget to check out our other episodes over there