[Myrion]

So let's see if I can properly respond to everyone's thoughtful replies. Thank you all, at any rate!

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

Peshkalis are tough and nasty, but they don't have Peripheral Vision. Why weren't they surrounding it to get some free hits in?

Well, who with? The only one who could reliably damage it was the barbarian. Sure, the thief snuck up behind it, but they had serious trouble getting through DR - and then the peshkali turns around and knocks them out in one attack.

Originally Posted by Anthony

The second character is vastly better, and without some system mastery at GURPS it's not obvious that it would be true.

Yes, and for some reason the swashbuckler liked to thrust, anyway. My mastery of GURPS has waned after a bit more than half a year of not playing and I never ran DF or anything similar, so I didn't see it either...

Originally Posted by Anthony

You probably forgot his magic resistance 6 -- it's not likely that a bard has the skill of 24 needed to reliably affect him (skill 24 is reduced to 18 for MR, his HT of 12 is increased to 18 by MR).

Yuuup, that'd be it. Kinda glad I missed that, ultimately.

Originally Posted by Stripe

I'm not saying ISaR is good or bad in my opinion, but making a balanced party a requirement for a dungeon is a good indication that it has a wide variety of challenges—not just hack-and-slash—and I consider that a good thing.

At the same time, calling a party made of a Bard, Barbarian, Swashbuckler and Thief "not optimal" is putting it pretty mildly. You let the difficulty knob get set to hard mode with that selection, and if you had much experience at all with the Dungeon Fantasy line, you would have known that. You could be the best dungeon crawl GM ever, but that party is going to have one hell of a rough time in any dungeon, not just one that "requires" a Wizard and a Cleric, for example.

Yeah, I thought that my general knowledge of GURPS would be enough, but I'd never run DF before. That certainly didn't help.
While I generally agree that it's good to, hm.. "soft"-require a balanced party, where things are easier with the appropriate team, "hard"-requiring it, where you simply die if you don't, is not as fun.

Originally Posted by Stripe

The Bard is basically a master of the "Town" mini-game (Exploits, pp. 13-17). If that template isn't in the hands of a veteran GURPS player, it's probably not going to go real well. I would have advised a brand new player against taking that template for a birthday one-shot introducing people to table-top RPG's!

I don't have anything nice to say about the Thief template. [...]

See, I did advise against it, but I didn't want to force them into roles they didn't pick. I figured that the thief would be useful with the locks, and the bard would at least be able to fight. I thought that one of the genre conventions that the DFRPG would uphold was that everyone's a fighter.

Originally Posted by Stripe

As for the peshkali, according to Dungeon, page 3, "Fixed numbers assume six adventurers; scale these to group size and round up (minimum one monster)." Instead of six, you're basically working with two, neither of whom are munchkin'ed out. So, no surprise that it wasn't a fair fight. Perhaps ISaR should have an alternate there for sub-optimal parties.

Yeah, I probably should've reduced the number of arms or extra attacks.

Originally Posted by Stripe

I've never ran or played ISaR so I'm not going to comment on it, but I think it's probably asking too much for a generic adventure to prove a well-balanced challenge for that group of PC's, played by that group of players, under those circumstances. :-)

Probably - but they felt entirely non-viable, and for all that they were newbs and non-munchkins the party didn't look like they should've been so out-matched.
Oh well, I learned something for the next group I'll run through ISaR.

Originally Posted by Kromm

But skull hits are skull hits, even on Merle. To get him to -10×HP with his measly 9 HP takes 99 HP in total, which is just 25 HP in total skull damage. That would take a single hit of 32 points with skull DR, or two of c. 20 points, or three of c. 16 points, which I hope is in range of any party with a barbarian.

Yeah, but skull is at -7 to hit, and the barbarian only at skill 16, iirc - he wasn't gonna try that out without AoA and given that he was the main target of Merle, that was an uncomfortable risk. Plus, DR7 at the skull is not nothing either.