My players have been breezing through the AP. I talked to my two most experienced players and they told me what the problem was. They are VERY good at single combat. Specifically the blaster mage. A single foe usually goes down against him quite easily. However, he's not prepared to face many foes (yet). I'm working on a pair of more difficult encounters, a goblin tribe in between tamoachan and the Climax of the campaign for the session before winter break, an encounter with a Pirate Alienist and his monstrous brother.
What are some other encounters that I can beef up with cannon fodder?
Similar problem in my group. What I've done is for instance just changed tactics so that there are more ambushes and more cunning and planning on the part of opponents.
RPG Superstar 2013 Top 4, RPG Superstar 2011 Top 16
|
1 on 4 odds are never good for a BBEG no matter what a designer thinks. The most important currency in the game are Actions. The more you have the more you win! No Boss worth his salt should ever be caught alone against the party. Even if you do wear them down with the previous encounters, most of the time they've been saving their best for the Boss.
Bosses need to start out with an advantage, usually in terrain or position. No easy path for charging or clean shots with disintegates! After that they need buffers, mooks, minions, or obstacles to keep the PC's busy. Fodder alone will not do... the buffer needs to be a credible threat of some sort. Remember even at higher levels a Tanglefoot bag is a headache!!!
keep in mind the earlier installments of the STAP have no real BBEGs - that slowly changes in SWW and definitely so in HtbM, where not only the BBEGs are mean mothas, but also often enough take the initiative, leaving the players to react to them, not vice versa.
If you want some beefed up encounters - introduce some vermin swarms to Tamoachan (which are hard to fight in a straight battle), and perhaps some monstrous vermin too - say some large centipedes, fire beetles or evil grubs. Giant leeches (stromwrack), especially if advanced, can be very dangerous for their Con-Damaging blood drain. Same goes for leech swarms
A shambling mound attacking straight out of the ferns besides a jungle trail or a morassy pit (making the mound well soaked and perhaps adding some temporary FR-5 or 10 ?) might also work nicely, especially if someone is foolish enough to throw lightning at it. The first the characters know might be them walking straight into AoO range.
Bad spiders (from above) would have the same effect, in all likelihood.
Its not so much a problem with BBEG, it's more an issue with the "big scary monsters." Either they're unhitable (will o wisp) or they're way to easy to beat (that demon thing in tamoachan)
My PCs breezed through "There Is No Honor" a bit too easily, so right now I'm adding various things to "The Bullywug Gambit." So far the main thing is I'm adding a band of tasloi ninjas that will work in concert with the bullywugs to drop the PCs once they enter Lavinia's manor. This should make things much more deadly.
I had fun in Tomoachan by adding an ambush by a couple of Girallions and a Tendriculous (seperate encounter). Both encouters could have easily led to a couple of casualties and only luck on the part of the PCs saved them.
keep in mind the earlier installments of the STAP have no real BBEGs - that slowly changes in SWW and definitely so in HtbM, where not only the BBEGs are mean mothas, but also often enough take the initiative, leaving the players to react to them, not vice versa.
If you want some beefed up encounters - introduce some vermin swarms to Tamoachan (which are hard to fight in a straight battle), and perhaps some monstrous vermin too - say some large centipedes, fire beetles or evil grubs. Giant leeches (stromwrack), especially if advanced, can be very dangerous for their Con-Damaging blood drain. Same goes for leech swarms
A shambling mound attacking straight out of the ferns besides a jungle trail or a morassy pit (making the mound well soaked and perhaps adding some temporary FR-5 or 10 ?) might also work nicely, especially if someone is foolish enough to throw lightning at it. The first the characters know might be them walking straight into AoO range.
Bad spiders (from above) would have the same effect, in all likelihood.
Generally speaking if you have only one opponent versus the party the bad guy needs some kind of an edge. Some way of making the party use actions that don't hurt the BBEG. Dragons are generally pretty good at this for example. The sheer threat of their phenomenal physical attack suite forces players to move away instead of hurting the Dragon. Their breath weapon can damage many members of the party which again encourages the PCs to move away but also costs them actions to heal themselves.
In the end the BBEG needs to be able to survive a a good round of party attacks and also be capable of screwing the party up so that they can't just keep beating on it. Spell casters can sometimes do this effectively with spells like confusion which can send knock half the party out of the fray but if their good spell does not work a mage is usually pretty much dead right there as the PCs go crazy trying to kill it.
|
Also, at sea, a sahuagin mutant four armed barbarian and his warparty of 20 cronies.
I did a wereshark with a group of 10 sahuagin rangers. It was a really nasty encounter, I was very happy with it.
The OP mentioned his problem with only having a single big target making it too easy on his party. I can promise that this would NOT be that kind of fight. The wereshark is obviously the biggest, but the sahuagin can NOT be ignored, especially with their blood rage thing. Also, I had some dire sharks in the water around the ship. The wereshark would bull rush people overboard, to be dealt with by them.
|
Generally speaking if you have only one opponent versus the party the bad guy needs some kind of an edge. Some way of making the party use actions that don't hurt the BBEG. Dragons are generally pretty good at this for example. The sheer threat of their phenomenal physical attack suite forces players to move away instead of hurting the Dragon. Their breath weapon can damage many members of the party which again encourages the PCs to move away but also costs them actions to heal themselves.
In the end the BBEG needs to be able to survive a a good round of party attacks and also be capable of screwing the party up so that they can't just keep beating on it. Spell casters can sometimes do this effectively with spells like confusion which can send knock half the party out of the fray but if their good spell does not work a mage is usually pretty much dead right there as the PCs go crazy trying to kill it.
My partey recently fought a kobold monk who quaffed a potion of displacement and did cartwheels around us for 2 rounds until we bloodybapped the nose and flopped the ornery little bastich.
My partey recently fought a kobold monk who quaffed a potion of displacement and did cartwheels around us for 2 rounds until we bloodybapped the nose and flopped the ornery little bastich.
Were the PCs challenged?
I've made more then a few NPCs that the PCs can't hit myself. The problem I usually find is if you spend to little on defence the NPC goes down like a chump, if you spend too much then its actually, from a meta game perspective, worse. The players can't hurt the NPC but it can't hurt them either. A long and rather boring combat then ensues which mostly involved the players missing and occasionally some of them taking insignificant damage. Not an exciting use of game time.
To be effective from a meta game perspective the NPC has to be able to do something. The players want to be able to make meaningful choices. Thats were a lot of the fun in combat comes from. If the NPC can't hurt or incapacitate them then usually it can't force the players to make meaningful choices and thats not very interesting.
Where the unhittable monk would shine is in a chase. The PCs have to catch this guy and he's racing through a crowded city or some such. Now his weak attacks don't matter while his maneuverability, speed are very significant.
|
|
Did you use the Dire sharks to launch your Sahuagin abord ship ala Shamu???
-Vrock lobster
Cute, I didn't think of that, but no, they just climbed aboard the old fashioned way. It was pitch dark, cloudy, and foggy along a stretch of dark jungle coastline, and the party lookouts blew their spot and listen checks, so the whole group was aboard before anybody noticed anything. OOPS! :)
I actually had another method of attack as well, as one of the dire sharks essentially bit a big hole in the bottom of the boat, and a couple of sahuagin came in that way as well. That served as a good excuse to use the various boat layers, and to just be mean, because then they had to repair the boat from a more or less random encounter. :)