How many level 2 players does it take to ridicule a troll?

I wrote 95% of it about 20 days ago but then work came up and I never got to finish it.

I had the pleasure of running the second session of the Sunless Citadel last Sunday.

As a reminder, I am running the 5e version found in Tales from the Yawning Portal. This book contains 7 adventures throughout the history of D&D. In character level order these are

• The Sunless Citadel
• The Forge of Fury
• The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan
• White Plume Mountain
• Dead in Thay
• Against the Giants
• Tomb of Horrors

Do I have something to “complain” about this time as well? You bet I do. But let’s pick things up from where we left off last time.

The characters returned to the kobold-controlled area to rest. There, I very smoothly (not really; I just dumped him there) introduced the fifth member of the adventuring party, a blue dragonborn cleric of order. Excellent! Now the party has 2 clerics. Will they need them? Maybe? At least that’s what I thought at the start of the session. Oh, and I let them level up to level 2 at this point. I prefer using milestones and was trying to figure out when they should get to level two, but not even the internet was sure. So I just did it at the start of the session.

The party decided to do some cleanup. In the last session, they were laser-focused on finding the missing dragon. But this time they decided to check out some rooms they had skipped. So they more or less took a look at every kobold-controlled room, except the one with the entrance to the Underdark and the one next to it. Then they moved back to area 6 and took a look at the magically locked door. The new cleric did some detect magic…magic and the party made the connection that a key the head kobold was offering must be the one to open this door. Therefore they decided to look for the dragon once more. But then they remembered they hadn’t checked out all the kobold rooms so they visited area 24.

Luckily for them, the rogue is good at finding most of the traps (foreshadowing?) so this one was a piece of cake to avoid. The goblins in area 36 were not much of an issue either. In this session, almost everything went swimmingly for the players. They didn’t even open the door to the sea of goblins and chose to go straight to room 37, where the dragon was chilling. I didn’t want to make the dragon the pet of the kobolds. Instead, I am having the kobolds worship her, maybe setting up something for further into the future. Therefore, even if Meepo was with the party and the dragon initially attacked, the party could reason with her. Once the dragon was calm and the room was clean of valuables, the party beelined back to the kobolds. They didn’t want to carry a dragon with them and they wanted the key to open the door in area 6.

With some persuasion, they managed to get a little extra as their reward and went straight to area 6. In area 7, the party saw the glowing orb and the scheming began. Even the idea of using goblins to see what the orb does came up. Was I surprised? Not really. Was I surprised by which of my players suggested it? A bit. In the end, the idea of “it’s not doing anything to us from there so we can just move to the next room” prevailed. The riddle in area 9 was not that hard, but it was a bit refreshing.

I don’t want to sound mean, but telling the rogue they didn’t find any traps only to have it hit them was nice. Not because I wanted to hurt them, but because it was a nice learning experience, especially in a dungeon crawl setting. Though I really liked their idea to just crawl on the floor to avoid the arrows from the trap, so I went with it and also awarded some inspiration.

And now we move to areas 10 and 11, where my complaint is. Well, it’s not exactly a complaint but mostly me wondering about the meaning of life and the difficulty of encounters. I won’t stay in room 10 for long and just mention the quasit was instantly killed by one attack from the barbarian. The module mentions that it fights a bit and then runs away. And it tried to do that but was sent back to the Abyss very quickly.

But let’s move to the troll. The module says to use a troll with fewer hitpoints than usual, less regeneration, and no extra attack. I found out that this would have been a really poor choice even with a 4-person party, let alone a 5-person one. At this point, everyone knows the Challenge Rating system is busted. But it’s even worse when trying to gauge the challenge with the party facing just one enemy. I realised this before the fight began so I used the actual troll stats, but even then, the fight didn’t take long. Funnily enough, the sorcerer decided to use a firebolt on the first round, negating the troll’s regeneration. They are new to D&D and don’t have the usual biases, but their decision to roll with Firebolt has shined in both sessions.

So yeah, the troll was down and the room had been looted before you could say Magic Missile. And that’s where session 2 ended. My players had fun so I am happy. I feel I will have to readjust some of the encounters for the next session because it’s a pity not to give a bit of a challenge to the players.

And until next time, have fun!

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