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Party of course, ignores the story and goes the wrong way. Eventually we get to the cave where I put the dungeon. I had glanced over the monsters, roughly had some descriptions of the rooms, an NPC encounter, treasure worked out as well as basic stats for monsters and the like. So we get there and I look at the first room again.
You find 27 Kobolds.
...
"Roll Initish?"
It wasn't entirely bad, since there was two wizards and a barbarian and a Druid and a rogue. The Barbarian just cleaved his way through, and the Wizard managed to color spray a huge chunk of them. But I was going insane with d20 rolls and tracking hit points and trying to keep things going fast. I ended up just fudging most of the rolls towards the end and making up stuff.
I told myself that if I was going to do that again I'd have a list of like a 100 D20 dice rolls, and damage rolls. Just put the combat on auto pilot.
Honestly, I don't think it's terrible to throw large numbers of low CRs at the party, but it takes a lot of work to do. It does help challenge the players if done right, and it is good to switch it up a bit. Towards the later levels Wizards can just Fireball these encounters away, but in the 3-6 range it can be a well done challenge.
This requires a lot of effort from the DM though, so much that i did it maybe once/month on a big scale. It enlarges the party's percieved roll in the fight, since their efforts take up most of the time instead of determining the rest, and those are the ones you get most feedback from, being forced to pay attention to how the fight goes where, protect the schmoe and the cargo, RP recovering from the ambush (what got broken, can any player help fix it, was food/water stolen/damaged), and reward accordingly. Few encounters can match it, especially if you stick to ECL and stuff dies so, so fast.
I'm going to be running an adventure where the BBEG mind controls progressively more of my PCs into running around and collecting important dingus's for his dark plans. It will start with one PC and then she will go in and proxy his mind control onto more of them until it ends up being 3 on 4, with the slight edge towards the non-mind controlled guys.
However, I don't want to just make the mind controlled guys puppets, so this is how I'm going to handle it. When the mind control takes hold of them, rather than directing their actions they will be sort of an alternate reality where they suddenly perceive the world slightly differntly and have manufactured memories directing them in a certain way. He needs something out of a temple, so they will think that they need a magic item out of the temple to save one of their friends. When they arrive there they perceive guards as monsters, etc.
Basically, rather than mind control, its more of a mind illusion. This way they can still roleplay their actions within the context of the situation they think they're in.
What the players and their characters didn't know until some time later was that the queen had been possessed by the leader of the demons several weeks previous. The amulets, in addition to their anti-scrying powers, allowed the demon to influence what the PCs saw.
The upshot of all this is that the first couple sessions were spent fighting an angel and the paladins/clerics guarding her. Good times...
Neat.
It's stuff like this that makes me wish I had a regular gaming group with a badass DM like I did before I went to college.
The problem is that they have no real incentive to do anything other than sail straight to their destination. I can put obstacles in their path that they're forced to deal with, of course( e.g. their food supplies run low and they have to stop at a nearby island ), but that just stinks of railroading. I could just throw them a few random encounters and be done with it, but that would be a copout considering the length and supposed difficulty of their journey.
I'm not looking for modules or anything like that, just basic ideas/premises for stuff that could happen.
Ocean travel is vast, long, and otherwise monotonous. I think it's an 8% chance per day (cumulative) of an encounter. It's not impossible to go up to two weeks without an encounter
Some adventure ideas listed in it were A wererat pirate, island encounters, haunted temples, and a graveyard of ships.
Perhaps combat need not be the focus of the voyage. Perhaps the voyage is an opportunity to engage in character dramas, or to make magical items and research new spells.
Maybe there's mermaids or monsters or pirates chasing them. Maybe they get knocked overboard and find Atlantis, or an underwater community of sea-elves. Maybe their ship hits a planar portal and lands in the Plane of Water/Air/the Abyss.
In fact, getting a ship trapped into a large 'bubble' on the plane of water might be kind of freaky and an excellent adventure to find a way out. Maybe there's a Bermuda triangle, or the ship keeps passing some of the same spots.
Or maybe there's ghosts.
I disagree that making the adventure path more interesting or as difficult as it should be is somehow railroading. You're just doing your job there. And do you think they're going to be wild about spending 5 or 6 months on a boat? Sheesh. Start describing the boredom... in very, very lengthy detail... and see if they don't want to do something other than sail.
At sea, they'll very much be at the mercy of the weather (hell, you could roll for weather effects and have consequences in mind). For example: the wind could die down. After being stuck for a few days, the crew starts making a dent in the provisions, maybe starts causing a little trouble because of their idle hands... and maybe they think that someone has brought this bad luck onto their ship.
And if nobody has attempted the voyage for 200 years... how the heck can they sail straight to it? I'm sure Columbus thought he was headed straight for India, and he wasn't even CLOSE. They could end up finding something that they believe is the Eastern Continent, and end up being horribly wrong.
But I'll bet there has to be a good reason that nobody has attempted to get to the eastern lands for 200 years too... and there's a good chance the PC's will encounter this reason in transit. If they already think they know what it is... maybe they're wrong, and what REALLY has been sinking ships out in the water all those years is more bizarre than they could have imagined... maybe an undersea race has caused some sort of persistent undersea cataclysm... maybe a Demigod is all pissed off about something that happened two hundred years ago... maybe it's a giant storm that, if they manage to avoid it, still blows them hopelessly off-course... maybe there's a gigantic magnetic mountain range deep in the ocean that stops a compass from working... lots of stuff could happen out there.
Maybe the limits of the world also have yet to be explored. Think about how your material plane is built, and where they might end up if they are lost or blown off course. In a Norse-type world, for example, they could end up sailing through one of the roots of the world tree, and end up in, like, Muspelheim or somewhere else that's got charming fellows like Surtr roaming about. What happens if the world is flat and the ship goes over the edge?
et cetera.
I do disagree with making the trip monotonous or boring. The characters may find things tedious, but I don't want the players to feel the same way. And this isn't really a happy-go-lucky "let's have adventures!" group that can decide to take a break from the journey and explore other stuff; by the time they set sail, just about everyone they'd ever met was dead. By the time they reach their destination, this will be true for half the world population. Not much call for sight seeing.
But I really like the ideas of an underwater city, and the ship getting blown off course or going the wrong way. And the how the heck did I forget about ship graveyards? Sheesh.
Sight seeing is one thing.
Going crazy because you've been stuck on a floating piece of wood with a bunch of mangy sailors for weeks on end, nothing but a flat oceanic horizon to see, drinking the same awful grog, eating the same stale and decaying rations, doing the same chores, playing the same games and singing the same songs to pass the time...
...that's another thing entirely.
There's so much potential there for disaster just due to the fact that they have to be aboard the ship for such a long period of time. Having to spend 5 or 6 months on a boat is its own kind of danger.
Maybe a murder mystery or someone is trying to overthrow the captain.