(no subject)
In regards to D&D Challenges.
I was writing a lot of stuff here, but I decided to start over. I want to address one of the things you said in particular, because I feel it’s key to the whole thing so I’m repeating it here:
My third solution is to disassemble each of the module's monsters and reassemble it using the tools my Players have. Why is the Temple of Air's champion an eighth level fighter and not an eighth level warblade? Why doesn't the evil high priest have revenance and revivify to use on his best underlings? Why does anybody 9th level or higher have the Toughness feat instead of the Improved Toughness feat? And since the current adventure plots involve fighting worshipers of a god of madness (Tharizdun) or a demon prince of madness (Adimarchus), why would every single wizard, sorcerer, and cleric capable of casting 5th level spells NOT be under the effects of death throes? These are just a few examples from the many, many ways I can improve on Players' opponents' design. But all these changes I'm talking about in this paragraph that I can make add up to tougher encounters with no increase in CR, and therefore no XP bump. They put the bad guys back on a more even playing field.
Because it is not the job of the NPCs to survive. It’s their purpose to provide a challenge, yes, but ultimately they are there to facilitate the story and give the PCs obstacles to overcome.
The job of the PCs, on the other hand, is to survive and triumph. Sometimes if a challenge isn’t overcome, a PC doesn’t survive, but the point remains that such an event is by design the exception to the rule.
The bad guys aren’t supposed to be ‘on an even playing field’, they are supposed to lose, that is an absolute reality in the game design of D&D. The only real issue, then, is how much of a challenge should they be and where is the line where the design gets turned back on itself? When Susan’s barbarian killed that Hydra-Construct thing in one round with her super-crazy-pounce-power-attack-awesomeness, sure, it was a one round kill against what was supposed to be a ‘tough fight’, the truth is if it had gotten to go first it would (from what D told me after) have killed anybody it focused on in one round barring really crappy rolls. How is that ‘challenging’? It was going to be one round for somebody, either way.
This is a fundamental flaw in the basic design of 3.x D&D. The only time a drawn out combat is actually a challenge is in a fairly narrowly defined space where each party has large bags of HP and only a medium ability to do damage. At 1st level you might have planned the best encounter with a group of 4 Goblin Warriors that you can plan, but as a 1st level Wizard any one of those guys can knock out my 2-4hp with a single hit and I am keenly aware of it both as a character and as a player. You might find it a bit of a letdown when I manage to nail all of them with Sleep or Color Spray or whatever but to me, I just narrowly avoided a very, very good chance of dying/losing my character.
The situation gets a bit better in the 4 to 11 range of levels, though even then the number of times that situation is encountered (if we don’t finish them ASAP we are screwed) is not insignificant, but once you hit 12th level and higher it becomes endemic to the game. Enemies that get multiple attacks with crazy damage numbers, spellcasters who can cast Implosion and stand a chance of just outright killing one of your party members a round for 4 rounds unless you gank them first thing. Mind Flayers who can stun the entire party with a single action. These are not things that are conducive to a drawn out conflict, because a drawn out conflict favors the NPCs, especially at higher levels where things are at-will. It becomes more and more difficult to balance that idea that the PCs should be challenged, but survive, when the ‘challenge’ is defined as ‘did you fail a saving throw oops you are dead/unconscious/stone’ or ‘did the monster win initiative and can you survive its 9 attacks on a full attack action’.
My point with all of this is (despite the doomsaying above), it’s not an all or nothing affair. Not every encounter is a one round destruct-o-fest. Sometimes, yeah, you need to just be OK with the PCs destroying an encounter with what you perceive to be little effort. I can assure you that they quite often do not see it the same way. Other times encounters will be like the one you ran with the Beholder and the Vrocs and whatnot, which was insane and pushed the party to its limits. Often it was neither extreme. The same goes for D’s game. Sometimes we just completely wreck things (but I think if you look closely at the monsters wrecked you’d find that having not done so would not constitute a challenge so much as a total defeat), sometimes we get run over (less often at high level because anything that ran us over would just destroy us completely), but usually it’s in between. To players it seems as if every encounter is a gauntlet of terror, with a few exceptions, and to DMs it seems as if every encounter is a cakewalk, with a few exceptions. The truth is that both perspectives tend towards a bias, and neither is really accurate on the details.
I know the above two paragraphs seem contradictory, but they aren’t. The truth is, you guys are already doing a good job of keeping things mixed up. It’s okay that sometimes the players just tapdance through what you thought would be a challenge. As long as it’s not happening to every single combat (and in the games I play in, it certainly is not), why is it a problem?
Also, as a sidebar: I know that Risk vs Reward is a metric people try to keep an eye on, but it’s not really a fair one here. What you risk by having an NPC killed in one round is, I feel, far less than what any given PC risks by being killed in one round. When your NPC dies, your ongoing participation in the story doesn’t really change. When a PC dies, assuming they stay that way (and I went through what, like 3 characters in the most recent low level game?), the player is losing out on getting to participate in the story as that character. Maybe their next character is as fun, maybe more fun, but maybe less. It’s still a new character coming in with no investment in the story-so-far, whose personal story and foibles take an immediate back seat to those of the established party. I tend to view situations where a challenge is resolved in one round not as a boring combat but as a quick resolution and now let’s continue the story, especially since the alternative may well have been bringing in a new character next month.
Anyway. I started rambling in there. I hope at least some of that made sense. You’re a good DM, and while I’ve certainly enjoyed dropping the crazy bomb a few times, you’ve killed or nearly killed my PC (who is, by far, one of the two most ‘well designed’ in the party) on numerous occasions, sometimes more than once in the same combat, so from my perspective the challenges are spot on.
I was writing a lot of stuff here, but I decided to start over. I want to address one of the things you said in particular, because I feel it’s key to the whole thing so I’m repeating it here:
My third solution is to disassemble each of the module's monsters and reassemble it using the tools my Players have. Why is the Temple of Air's champion an eighth level fighter and not an eighth level warblade? Why doesn't the evil high priest have revenance and revivify to use on his best underlings? Why does anybody 9th level or higher have the Toughness feat instead of the Improved Toughness feat? And since the current adventure plots involve fighting worshipers of a god of madness (Tharizdun) or a demon prince of madness (Adimarchus), why would every single wizard, sorcerer, and cleric capable of casting 5th level spells NOT be under the effects of death throes? These are just a few examples from the many, many ways I can improve on Players' opponents' design. But all these changes I'm talking about in this paragraph that I can make add up to tougher encounters with no increase in CR, and therefore no XP bump. They put the bad guys back on a more even playing field.
Because it is not the job of the NPCs to survive. It’s their purpose to provide a challenge, yes, but ultimately they are there to facilitate the story and give the PCs obstacles to overcome.
The job of the PCs, on the other hand, is to survive and triumph. Sometimes if a challenge isn’t overcome, a PC doesn’t survive, but the point remains that such an event is by design the exception to the rule.
The bad guys aren’t supposed to be ‘on an even playing field’, they are supposed to lose, that is an absolute reality in the game design of D&D. The only real issue, then, is how much of a challenge should they be and where is the line where the design gets turned back on itself? When Susan’s barbarian killed that Hydra-Construct thing in one round with her super-crazy-pounce-power-attack-awesomeness, sure, it was a one round kill against what was supposed to be a ‘tough fight’, the truth is if it had gotten to go first it would (from what D told me after) have killed anybody it focused on in one round barring really crappy rolls. How is that ‘challenging’? It was going to be one round for somebody, either way.
This is a fundamental flaw in the basic design of 3.x D&D. The only time a drawn out combat is actually a challenge is in a fairly narrowly defined space where each party has large bags of HP and only a medium ability to do damage. At 1st level you might have planned the best encounter with a group of 4 Goblin Warriors that you can plan, but as a 1st level Wizard any one of those guys can knock out my 2-4hp with a single hit and I am keenly aware of it both as a character and as a player. You might find it a bit of a letdown when I manage to nail all of them with Sleep or Color Spray or whatever but to me, I just narrowly avoided a very, very good chance of dying/losing my character.
The situation gets a bit better in the 4 to 11 range of levels, though even then the number of times that situation is encountered (if we don’t finish them ASAP we are screwed) is not insignificant, but once you hit 12th level and higher it becomes endemic to the game. Enemies that get multiple attacks with crazy damage numbers, spellcasters who can cast Implosion and stand a chance of just outright killing one of your party members a round for 4 rounds unless you gank them first thing. Mind Flayers who can stun the entire party with a single action. These are not things that are conducive to a drawn out conflict, because a drawn out conflict favors the NPCs, especially at higher levels where things are at-will. It becomes more and more difficult to balance that idea that the PCs should be challenged, but survive, when the ‘challenge’ is defined as ‘did you fail a saving throw oops you are dead/unconscious/stone’ or ‘did the monster win initiative and can you survive its 9 attacks on a full attack action’.
My point with all of this is (despite the doomsaying above), it’s not an all or nothing affair. Not every encounter is a one round destruct-o-fest. Sometimes, yeah, you need to just be OK with the PCs destroying an encounter with what you perceive to be little effort. I can assure you that they quite often do not see it the same way. Other times encounters will be like the one you ran with the Beholder and the Vrocs and whatnot, which was insane and pushed the party to its limits. Often it was neither extreme. The same goes for D’s game. Sometimes we just completely wreck things (but I think if you look closely at the monsters wrecked you’d find that having not done so would not constitute a challenge so much as a total defeat), sometimes we get run over (less often at high level because anything that ran us over would just destroy us completely), but usually it’s in between. To players it seems as if every encounter is a gauntlet of terror, with a few exceptions, and to DMs it seems as if every encounter is a cakewalk, with a few exceptions. The truth is that both perspectives tend towards a bias, and neither is really accurate on the details.
I know the above two paragraphs seem contradictory, but they aren’t. The truth is, you guys are already doing a good job of keeping things mixed up. It’s okay that sometimes the players just tapdance through what you thought would be a challenge. As long as it’s not happening to every single combat (and in the games I play in, it certainly is not), why is it a problem?
Also, as a sidebar: I know that Risk vs Reward is a metric people try to keep an eye on, but it’s not really a fair one here. What you risk by having an NPC killed in one round is, I feel, far less than what any given PC risks by being killed in one round. When your NPC dies, your ongoing participation in the story doesn’t really change. When a PC dies, assuming they stay that way (and I went through what, like 3 characters in the most recent low level game?), the player is losing out on getting to participate in the story as that character. Maybe their next character is as fun, maybe more fun, but maybe less. It’s still a new character coming in with no investment in the story-so-far, whose personal story and foibles take an immediate back seat to those of the established party. I tend to view situations where a challenge is resolved in one round not as a boring combat but as a quick resolution and now let’s continue the story, especially since the alternative may well have been bringing in a new character next month.
Anyway. I started rambling in there. I hope at least some of that made sense. You’re a good DM, and while I’ve certainly enjoyed dropping the crazy bomb a few times, you’ve killed or nearly killed my PC (who is, by far, one of the two most ‘well designed’ in the party) on numerous occasions, sometimes more than once in the same combat, so from my perspective the challenges are spot on.