r/TheGoldenVault

Hi all, planning on running keys from the golden vault as an overarching story.

I've read through the adventures and it seems that there are lots of random magic items in most rooms.

Did anyone else cut down on the scattered magic items seeing as you get rewarded with items at the end of a successful heist?

Thanks in advance for the help!

Hi all, I've been running The Golden Vault as a campaign for a while now, and while it's going fairly well and we're having fun with it, I've been running across a common problem.

My players are a pretty well-balanced party for this sort of campaign, with a Rogue, an Artificer, a fairy Warlock who handles recon, and a dragonborn barbarian for muscle. But I've noticed that rather than using their respective skills creatively, they usually take a brute force approach to many of the heists.

For example, We're currently in the middle of "Vidorant's Vault". While talking to Goldenbeard, I had him pretty explicitly suggest multiple avenues they could take to prepare (talk to former guards, scout out the building, check out Vidorant's mansion). They elected to look for the former guards, but after getting a bit of information from that, they almost went straight into it. I reminded them it might be a good idea to case the building, to which they found a secret entrance into the vault, and then promptly forgot it existed. They instead decided to go through the guarded, locked balcony, immediately going into combat and making a ton of noise. I ended the session with Vidorant herself teleporting to the balcony with guards in tow, and I'm trying to figure out how to make it clear they can't (or at least shouldn't) fight their way out of this.

I think part of the problem is that, for one, I've been making combats way too easy. I'm a very new DM, so I'm not good at balancing and I don't think they ever feel like they're in any danger or have any reason to avoid combat.

And two, I haven't been making it clear enough what options they have available to them, or what the best course of action would be.

So if anyone has any advice as to how to deal with this, I would really appreciate it. Sorry if this is unnecessarily long.

So, after some light recon, my party made pretty quick work of the actual hurdles in the casino. They:

• Charmed the guard away from the trophy case and picked the lock, disguised as one of the guards, then dropped it into the Bag of Holding and called for Quentin to come see what happened
• Quentin demanded it back... but the Bag of Holding is locked down by Verity. The player dropped Disguise Self and told Quentin that Verity sent them to ruin his tournament.
• Quentin took the Bag and called the nearest guard, who just happened to be another player using Disguise Self to look like one of the guards. That player took the "thief" to the holding cells.
• The rest of the party snuck into the security room using the access tunnel from the circus.
• They all fought the guards in the security room, which was actually the tougher fight, and barricaded the door. (Thugs should be CR 1 and not CR 1/2... compare to the Brown Bear if you don't understand why)
• Smashed Virgil to pieces, because the dice rolled terribly (he didn't land a single hit and I didn't fudge the rolls)

The session ended in the vault after Virgil got beaten like a pinata. Since everything went so well for them, I want to give them one last hurdle to try to give them a challenge. I plan to have Quentin, waiting in the hall outside the security room, Bag of Holding at his side. He makes one last offer to the players to see if they'll turn on Verity. If they refuse, he calls the Spined Devils to ambush them. But if they accept... well that's where I need help. Presumably they go back to the Brine Widow to confront Verity, and she'll present her side of the story, giving the players a chance to double-cross Quentin. But if they choose not to, I need a stat block for Verity to fight all of them. I'm thinking of something flavored like Gambit from the X-Men, flinging playing cards. Are there any pre-set monsters like this? Or do I just need to generate one? Suggestions