Grey Hill Inferno First Room seems extremely hard

#1

Learning the system, looking at this first room… this seems extremely difficult if its just a single charcter.

“ESCAPE THE FIRE
As flames consume D block, you must escape your cell or be burned alive. Roll
a D4. You have that many ROUNDS to break out of your cell with your bare
hands. Do 1 HEART of BASIC EFFORT against a 10 TARGET to break free.”

So say I roll a 3 which is a good roll on d4… i have 3 rounds to roll 10 points of damage on a d4 - basic effort … if I roll 3 every time (again a GOOD roll on a d4 ) … I still die. Am I missing something?

#2

I ran this solo (https://youtu.be/Id_0qU8xSsk) the other day and this exact same thing happened to me. I got all the way to 9 effort before the fire timer hit zero. What I ended up doing is having the fire deal BASIC damage automatically.

I ended up getting free the next round with only minor burns.

#3

You could potentially find something to pick the lock. Like part of the mattress spring or maybe a shiv hidden in your cell. That bumps you up to Weapon/ TOOL effort d6. Just spitballing here to be honest.
Either way the time pressure is definitely on.

#4

Kane has it: the fire doesn’t immediately engulf and kill you. It does damage each round you remain in the cell (and maybe as you run down the hall after escaping the cell).

You could lean into the compounding challenge of a burning room, and say that each round you remain in the cell, the fire does one die higher of damage (d4, then d6, then d8…). Or you could just say it does d4 or d6 damage every round.

The point of the scenario is to teach the mechanics of the game, so you have lots of ways to play with the dice. If you don’t succeed this time, try it again with a small change and see what happens.

You could also think creatively. Is there a window? A heating duct? Roll d6: evens is “yes”, odds is “no”. This kind of thinking is exactly what players will do, so getting some comfortable with on-the-fly rolling-to-find-out is a good experience, too.

#5

Instead of rolling for the timer in this case, simply set it to a 3 or a 4.