Wilderness Encounter Avoidance

Last Saturday's session featured a reconfigured party with improved wilderness exploration skills, including an explorer (an ACKS class that, somewhat oddly, merges abilities from the halfling and ranger classes in B/X-era D&D). The party generally responded to random encounter checks by attempting to avoid contact entirely, with a great deal of success -- almost to the point of making the session feel slow and uneventful, which is never a good thing.

To ensure high tension, I'm going to make some official rulings on how to use encounter avoidance techniques. There are three basic ways to avoid an encounter:

Hobbits: Difficult to spot!

1. Hiding. This is possible only for certain classes. Thief-types have a hide in shadows ability that improves with level. Once hidden, thieves can either remain motionless, or try to move (away, or in for an ambush) using move silently. A few other classes (explorer and elven ranger) have the difficult to spot skill.This is a hiding ability that works very well in the wilderness, and moderately well in dungeons, but does not function at all in crowded urban areas. Any other class can only be hidden through the use of magic, like the massmorph spell.
2. Evasion. Evasion is, essentially, running from a combat before it even has time to start. It is an obvious activity and will result in the party being detected temporarily and at least briefly pursued. If successful, it means that the pursuit has been abandoned. It will, however, result in lost travel time and some risk of getting lost. In particular, it typically requires leaving any marked path or road, and at least one navigation check will be required to locate the road again.
3. Parlay. Every encounter requires some sort of reaction roll, to see if the monsters encountered are hostile. If they are intelligent and someone has a language that allows communication, then it may be possible to advance that person forward to function as a spokesperson, to add modifiers to the roll from things like charisma or diplomacy. (In narrow dungeon passages this is only possible if the speaker is already standing in front. In an outdoor environment, anyone can easily step forward out of the group)

These options are mutually exclusive. If you are hiding, you aren't running away or attempting negotiations, and so forth. Hiding and evasion become impossible if the party is surprised, which happens 2 in 6 times. (Exception: Explorers have a 10% chance to allow the party to evade even when it is surprised.)

A fourth option is to simply run away after the encounter starts. This is always possible, unless the party is slower than the monsters. However, it always has the same drawbacks as evasion, and becomes very difficult to execute once in melee contact.

Green Pass Campaign II, Session 9: Summer Wrap-Up

I can't really proceed with the fall semester campaign until I get the results of the summer transcribed for posterity. So here's a short summary of the final session, and of the full campaign.

June 27, Caudex Annales, 70 AUP

The party broke into a series of smaller groups, and slowly worked their way back to Balewood Keep. Elven nightblade Terra Daystar and Dunflow the Barbarian had already arrived the previous evening with a report of the shrine battle. The less respectable duo of Meros and Wulfhere arrived together the next morning, Wulfhere sporting a new winged helmet he had looted from his extensive pillaging of the shrine's back rooms. Regrettably, the helm had born an enchantment with the effect of permanently altering his alignment to "Chaotic", and by this point he had decided that the most chaotic course of action was to isolate and murder the castellan. The jewel-snatching nightblade Meros had always been something of a bad seed, and was hardly one to stand in his way.

The two of them lured the castellan and his scribe down to the dungeons, on pretext of having some secret news to report. Wulfhere's mystic aura proved persuasive enough to set up the ambush, and upon arrival, the nefarious pair bolted the dungeon doors behind them and sprang to the attack. Terra, who had never quite trusted the other elf, followed the two of them from the shadows, and observed them through a grated window.

The initial round of combat went poorly, as Meros successfully opened with a choking grasp against the scribe, lifting him helplessly in the air before he could cast a prepared clerical spell from his scroll case. But the castellan was cast from a sterner mold, and his enchanted armor proved impervious to the initial assault. The battled turned hopeless against the conspirators when Terra slipped a magic missile past the bars of the window into Meros' back, disrupting his spell and releasing the scribe. The completion of the scribe's hold person spell ended the assassination attempt abruptly. Terra, true to form, teased both the immobilized villains with some of her typically charming flirtation techniques (nudity, full body patdown, and subsequent tongue mutiliation).

Fortunately the castellan did not immediately check the belongings of the traitors, or he would have discovered a freshly cut medusa-head with still potent petrification capabilities. (It was also a small blessing that neither of them thought to use it on the castellan during the fight.) When the rest of the party arrived in the upper bailey, they discovered a warrant had been issued for their arrest, and they were unceremoniously locked into the dungeon.

The following morning, the clearly insane Wulfhere attempted to overpower his guards and was quickly slain. The rest of the party was hauled up to the great hall for an improvised trial, with the keep's bailiff functioning as prosecutor. They stood accused of having awoken the dead against the expressed recommendation of the castellan, of having stolen cursed insanity-inflicting relics from the tombs, of harboring assassins, of fraternizing with hobgoblins and cannibalistic lizardmen, and of generally disrupting public order.

The previously arrested (and stripped, and mutiliated) visiting cleric, Father Isembart, served as a key witness for the prosecution -- despite being forced to testify by written statements due to the splitting of his tongue. His sorry condition earned him great pity from the assembled throng of civilians assembled for the trial, and the official ruling of the castellan (under some pressure of rising political unrest and insurrection) was that the party should be immediately exiled into the wilderness. Privately he communicated to them his hope that they could find some way to resolve the regional crisis, and he also lent them a fragment of a stone tablet artifact, a fragment recovered by another adventurer decades ago -- one who had emerged as the sole survivor of a doomed expedition.

Let's review: Friendly flag...

The party attempted to return back up through the mountains into Green Pass and take refuge at Centerpost, but found the gates at Footman's Notch occupied by hostile forces flying a sinister black

...not-friendly flag. Any questions?

banner in place of Durnovar's White Ship. Meros slipped away under pretense of scouting the walls, but instead opted to simply defect to the ranks of the conquerors within, and rat out his former traveling companions. When the party was assaulted by a pack of hellhounds during the night -- easily enough dispatched with the use of the medusa's post-mortem gaze -- it had become obvious that the occupation force was of an entirely diabolical nature. Earning passage across the mountains would only be possible through subterfuge, or by another route.

Cumulative Summer Casualties
Wulfhere: Cut down by the Keep's guards as he attempted to bolt for freedom, after a night in jail
Piper, the bard: Driven insane by a tablet, and vaporized by Lord Varghoulis
Finkle Bagnozzle, the gnomish trickster: Turned to stone
Bar Helm, the barbarian: Blinded in one eye
Brother Bartimaeus, the cleric henchman: Brain trauma
Reed Stormcliff, the druid: Blinded in one eye

Cumulative Summer Experience
Total experience per member: 55+356+741+509+301 = 1962