GnomeBoy wrote:
Is it possible the bridge was too hard because you had added in extra stuff before that point?
I can see no inherent problem in "you travel for three days and you're there!" Especially, if a gaming group has limited opportunity to play. But if the game you run dips greatly into "here's what happens each day to this party" throughout your campaign, and days in the wilderness always entail crossing fierce animals and worse, that's a stylistic choice that, yes, would require some rejiggering of the module.
I haven't yet run this module, but I do see the 'repeated' stair encounters as opportunities for strategic thinking... "how can we do this better than we did last time?" The adventure name escapes me, I can vividly recall the "aha!" moment we had in a game years ago, where we had a 'repeating' encounter and we realized we could build on what we had done before to do better each time...
I don't think so about the bridge because I didn't add in anything extra. Another user above wrote about this adventure turning into a joyless exercise in dicing. That is what happened to us both on the stairs and when crossing the acid pool (both ways, in and out again); it became a prolonged, tedious, mechanics-heavy experience for everyone.
Also, the "three days and you're there" was probably the least of my complaints. Still, since the three days is a fixed part of the module, I would have appreciated some sample encounters or at least suggestions written in to improve the depth of the adventure. It also would have given the players more to hang onto in their minds from this adventure prior to the mind-numbing descent down the stairwell.
Interestingly, a fluke in the gameplay led to one of the more interesting experiences in our sessions. When the PCs camp for the night on the stairs, Elzemon the invisible demon is supposed to taunt or disturb them. I happened to roll the option for "imitates sounds of children crying," which I role-played as children calling to the PCs that they were trapped in cages and needed to be let out. On the way out, this actually caused the party to turn around, go back down the stairs, and search for these invisible kids again. They only realized at the very end that it was just the demon messing with them. This improved the experience dramatically, and I think the module could use more of this type of thing baked into it to give it more depth.
There definitely really cool ideas in this module which I remember vividly as I imagined them. I just think it could maybe use a revision to be less clunky and more fluid in terms of the mechanics, with more "connective tissue" between encounters.