For what it's worth, I'm frustrated, too. This is the longest and most difficult of the three sidequests I set up for this city (and also the most profitable). When I wrote it up, I had no idea the party would enact it at the end of the night, when they were wounded and low on spells, or that one of them would die in the process. A
lot of things have gone wrong on this quest; some that were completely unforeseen and some that could have been prevented. So I get that it's frustrating, I really do.
But I'm not sure what I should do about it, if anything. Should I decrease all the slavers' HP and levels? Should I pull back the curtain and show you all my notes? Should I just make them surrender immediately for no apparent reason? What is the 'right' play for me, to maintain the integrity of the game but still ensure everyone is having fun?
Okay, so as promised, here's my analysis of this sidequest and why I found it so intensely frustrating. I want to be clear that I'm only speaking for myself here. I've not consulted any of the other players and they may well hold different views of it all.
As I hope you'll see, I don't think you should have done any of the things you suggest in your second paragraph, but I think there are plenty of things you could have done that would have made this more fun to play through (at least for me). That's really the most important point as far as I'm concerned. If something in the game is causing frustration on both sides of the screen, then there's no good reason not to adapt and try to find a happy medium.
The setupThe party first learned about the hospice and the potential for "high paying work" from the innkeeper when we arrived in Serenity. We made a couple of attempts to just talk our way in and each time we were rebuffed in a manner that made us suspicious of what might be going on inside.
The second time we went to the hospice was because we'd dealt with the Red Hawks and our investigation of the deaths among the refugees was at an impasse pending the results of our visit to the sage. In short, we didn't really have anything else to do.
Comment: If you really didn't expect or even felt it would be problematic for us to take the quest when we did, then throwing some other work our way could have helped head this off. Alternately, you could have speeded up the replies from the sage or maybe had another refugee drop dead in a manner that we could plausibly have believed we would get some fresh leads if we investigated that instead.
The hospiceWe case the joint, Senllip discovers the prisoners, and we decide to handle this as legitimately as possible by involving Aguru.
Aguru is the one who leads the assault and he makes it clear to the slavers inside that they're dealing with the law, not just some random adventurers. Despite being heavily outnumbered, the three of them fight with deadly force and show themselves to be unconcerned with killing the sheriff or his deputies.
We take them out fairly easily but Johannas is killed outright. Aguru orders a deputy to go the temple and fetch a priest to help with Johannas. Since he's dead, the only help that's any use is raise dead or an even higher level spell.
Once we find the captives, Aguru becomes the proactive one. He asks for our help in investigating the abandoned apartments where there may be more captives and slavers. He makes it clear that his men are stretched thin, but he promises to join us as quickly as he can with as many deputies as he can muster.
Imrich suggests that we should interrogate the prisoners before moving on to the apartments and Kalana says the same thing. I.e. we want as much intelligence on what we might be facing before continuing the mission.
Aguru refuses to allow this, insisting that he should be the one to do any interrogating and also that he's going to do things by the book even if that takes much longer. He
tells us to go to the apartments as quickly as possible.
Senllip asks about healing and borrowing potions. Aguru says he has no potions to lend and that the only place we can expect to get healing is by going to the temple. He then immediately adds that there's usually a line and impresses on us that time is of the essence.
Comment:This entire encounter really sets the tone for the rest of the sidequest. We learn that our opponents are willing to fight against overwhelming odds and that they won't surrender even when they're down to the last man. Instead, they keep fighting trying to inflict maximum damage. They also think nothing of compounding their offences by trying to kill the city's law enforcers.
Aguru sends for a priest who's presumably capable of raising Johannas from the dead. This implies there are at least 9th level priests on call at the temple, but later Aguru never manages to drum up any more help than an acolyte with a some CLW spells memorized.
This is also where we really receive our quest and the instructions of our patron - a person we have no reason to mistrust or question - as to how he expects us to go about it. He makes it clear that he won't allow us the chance to gain any extra intelligence on what we're actually dealing with, makes it plain that access to healing is going to be severely limited, and
insists that we must hurry to complete the objectives.
Since you knew exactly what we would be facing from here on and also that we were wounded and low on spells - specifically healing spells - this is where I really wonder why you didn't do more to adapt the quest to our circumstances? Just shifting your position on any of the three points above would have been a game changer without requiring you to sacrifice much of anything as far as I can tell. Instead, the sidequest ended up being set up in a way that penalized us the most.
The apartmentsWe bribe a goblin for intelligence and happily learn both about the slavers in the building and where the captives are being taken. We manage to take out the slavers easily enough, but Imrich takes a hefty 12 hp from one critical hit. That's nearly half his hit points gone in one attack.
Before we can do anything else, Aguru shows up with three deputies. He again takes custody of the prisoners so we're once again unable to question them ourselves.
Aguru "asks" us to continue to the warehouse and says he'll join us there with his deputies ASAP. He even suggests splitting the party since I make it clear that Imrich needs healing before he feels ready to continue.
It takes a whole hour before a cleric shows up to heal Imrich. Apparently she can only cast CLW, and even though she uses two of them, Imrich isn't fully healed.
Comment: Once again, we're denied even an attempt to learn more about what waits ahead and Aguru continues to press for speed over caution, even suggesting we split the party while Imrich awaits healing. And despite Imrich having lost nearly half his hit points, he only gets CLW-level healing. It was perfectly clear to me at this point that if we ended up in tougher fights, a few CLW wouldn't be sufficient to keep the party in fighting shape.
If you had wanted to, you could have delayed Aguru's arrival to give us the option to interrogate the prisoners and maybe gain an inkling of what we'd be facing at warehouse C. Likewise, you could have let us know through the acolyte that the temple knows what we're up to and would be dispatching a more experienced cleric or two to provide solid healing during our worthy quest. In my view, this is therefore another point in the quest where you could have calibrated matters to give us better chance of success without "showing us all your notes" or making all the opponents weaker. Since you would have been the only one who knew you were making adjustments, I don't any of us would have gotten pissed with you for "breaking the integrity of the game..."
The warehouse - ground floor and cellarImrich is escorted to the warehouse by a deputy. By the time we get there, it's been nearly an hour and a half since we cleared the apartments, but there's no sign of the sheriff or any other deputies. Instead, Ray says he'll go tell the sheriff where we are and to bring as many deputies as he can. He says they'll be here "soon" and makes no attempt to talk us down from investigating the warehouse in the meantime.
Inside the warehouse we face off against nine slavers. For the first time, we're seriously outnumbered. Imrich scares off five of them and manages to take out the leader, but as before the remaining slavers fight to the bitter end, seriously wounding Senllip in the process. According to your own description the crossbowmen are willing to fight because they're either trying to buy some time or because they'll go to jail either way. In the end, we're victorious but now Senllip is seriously wounded.
Pushing on, we fight four more slavers and then three crossbowmen in a stair/corridor. We defeat them, but we take yet more damage. Amazingly, the three crossbowmen set off a fire trap in the corridor with themselves still in it. They stay put and keep fighting Kalana even though this risks them being burnt alive. We're eventually victorious but have taken serious damage from the crossbows and flames. We all escape into the adjoining barracks.
Comment: At this point I'm not surprised that the slavers take insane risks to keep us from moving forwards and don't even mind being burnt to death to do it. It also reinforces the impression that there's no real point to talking. As soon as we encounter slavers, it becomes a straight combat encounter with no real option for dialogue.
Once we're in the barracks it would once again have been easy enough to have Aguru show up with his deputies to bolster our pending assault or simply have him bring much better healing than he ended up doing. You could also have left some healing potions in the barracks for us to find. Without either of these, we really couldn't do much except talk to the slaver leader.
The final confrontation
We enter the room and immediately find ourselves heavily outnumbered. The slavers are set up well, with crossbowmen furthest back so they can easily shoot us without us being able to anything about it. We try reasoning with the slaver leader but Kalana's efforts are largely ignored. Instead we end up in a drawn out conversation where the criminal leader drops random bits of exposition.
The conversation is stopped by the eventual arrival of the sheriff and we end up in another fight. The slaver leader and half his forces retreat through another door to some hidden docks.
Comment: We try to convince the leader to let the slaves go, but fail miserably. Perhaps it was never even possible to convince him? We are eventually "saved" by the cavalry but in the ensuing fight they're all so badly hurt that we find ourselves back at square one when the encounter is over. Finally, we end up in a repeat of the situation when we follow the slavers to their boat next door. Their leader literally tells us to sod off because he's sick of the sight of us.
This whole scene is one I don't get. We didn't stand a chance of beating 15 slavers by ourselves, and the leader seemed far too arrogant to consider a deal not made wholly on his own terms, so we couldn't really negotiate with him either. In effect, all we could do was drag out the conversation until you saw fit to let Aguru drop in. Even then, the odds were against us and - once again - we weren't really provided with enough healing to let us tough out the fight and put real pressure on the slavers.
So why do this at all? Why not just say that when we finally moved out of the barracks, the slavers had already left. If you wanted to give us a fight to end this quest with, a small rearguard would have sufficed and we might have beaten them by ourselves. Or you could have had them be on the move in such a way that we'd be able to divide their forces and take them out piecemeal.
In the end though, nothing in this final confrontation felt like we could successfully seize the initiative and take control of the action without an excellent chance of us all being killed or captured. Instead we ended up in a weird standoff that to me felt mostly like you were either follow a rigid script to the bitter end or that you felt an obligation to let us see who we'd been chasing even though there was no way we were going to get a satisfactory ending out of it.
I know that some people thrive on dramatic defeat as a character building moment, but I just play to relax and have fun. And even if I can enjoy a close run defeat sometimes, this just ended up feeling forced, frustrating and not terribly dramatic. The only reason we're not all dead is because you let us off the hook, but one of the main reasons that was even necessary is because it seemed that all the previous fights were unavoidable and we could never finish them without having to defeat every single slaver you set against us...
Conclusion and what next in the current scene
And that's all, I suppose. I had some additional thoughts about how I feel our attempts to still win this are being unnecessarily shut down but I won't belabour the point. All in all, I've come to the realisation that I don't feel invested enough in finishing the pursuit of the slavers that I really have an opinion on what our next move should be.
I want Imrich to live, though, so retreat is probably preferable from an OOC perspective. If everyone else wants to give this one last shot, Imrich will tag along but expect him to only do the bare minimum.
