Wizards mind controlling the barbarian and turning him against his fellow PCs. Works everytime.
There are a few ways to make the party feel like they really earned their victory.
1. First off if the party relies heavily on their casters make sure you don't let the spell casters rest or memorize new spells too often.
2. Keep the enemies coming in waves. Wait for the barbarian to come out of his rage then simply spring part two of the trap.
3. Put them against a similar band of creatures. Have the enemy magic user dispel and target the paladin and barbarian with debuffs. Have archers interrupt the spell casters. Have melee characters step up and wail on the melee characters.
Silence. Seriously, it's time to look at having your bad guys in groups. A nice low-level support cleric who casts that spell on a stone and hands it to the fighter type... that can be really useful. Fighter type closes with the party who then can't cast those pretty buff spells.
How about a bad guy support sorcerer who readies a damage spell for if the casters cast? Go ahead. Take damage while casting. Concentration check please.
What about debuffing? Ooops, my friend here just dispelled your buff. Weird... you seemed so much scarier with haste.
Lots of creatures are either immune to or have resistance to fire. Or have protection from energy cast on them. Or resist energy. Screw it, give your bad guy a few potions*.
Things that burrow can be fun.
Dragons are always annoying to PCs. Look at me... I can fly. And breathe. And have a truckload of hitpoints. And great saves. And resistances to energy. And I'm really, really smart, so I don't do stupid things like LAND AND LET YOUR FIGHTERS HIT ME. And I can run away and heal myself to return another day to eat you.
Bad guy casters. Spells are what turns the game into a warped imagination game. Without magic, it's just a hack & slash numbers fest. The paladin and barbarian can't hit what they can't see, thanks to invisibility. blur and displacement are also useful there as is levitate and fly and/or spider climb. A party that's been subject to entangle may not be able to get free before they're killed, if you're lucky. Fighting on grease sucks... having your weapon slathered in it sucks more. Enervation cuts your enemies down a notch and if it's the subject of a rod of empower or the Sudden Empower feat (Complete Arcane), that notch cuts deep. I've never met a barbarian who enjoyed calm emotions, strangely.
*Quick aside. Potions are awesome. Cheap, short-term buffs for your bad guys. If you can justify your bad guys having seen the PCs, have them chug a couple outside of initiative. Don't do that every combat, but occasionally having a bad guy who's got standard buffs up can make for interesting things. Don't optimize for the party's abilities in particular - NPCs don't necessarily know what to ready for - but stock buffs are good.
Swarm tactics can be useful, too. They might be individually weak but flanking and shear numbers can be helpful, too.
Also, set up flanking (not the bonus) ambushes. If the paladin and barbarian rush forward to engage a group of enemies, they either have to sacrifice the softies or eat AoOs when they move again to address the second group of enemies that just decided to eat your sorc and bard alive.
Something I did in 3.5 when a friend invited me to design and run his battles when I was visiting him for a weekend: I designed an encounter with a single water naga that made liberal use of invisibility set in a shallow river with a rope bridge about 15-20 ft up. I had the party running back and forth across the bridge and burning resources because they couldn't pinpoint the naga. Making your PCs fight on the enemies' terms rather than their own (which they seem to have been doing) can be a serious balancing factor.
if they are easily trouncing cr 12 encounters as lvl 6 characters I would review their wealth by level.
that said don't give them the chance to buff. have nocs ambush them have intelligent monsters simply retreat and come back I'n an hour. how many encounters a day are you doing? if it's one or tso push it to 4 or 5 by the time they hit the last encounter all their buffs should be gone and resources used it will really push them
I just did a module that used this by the time they got to the climactic fight ALOT of resources were used and it was a hard fight for them.
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Would the Will o Wisp be using it's electric touch to increase the Shambling Mound's Con or attacking?
I would say buffing the mound's con until said mound is dead, then attacking.
Something that pretty much made my barbarian useless was a quickling in dense underbrush. Thing kept running up, stabbing me or someone else in the party, then running away and hiding again. Stupid 120' movement speeds and spring attack. Think it may have also had a few levels in rogue. Either way, it was an annoying encounter to say the least.
Ambush the group in tight quarters (no fireball).
Have your monsters buffed a bit with things like Blur, Displacement, Mirror Image, Bakskin, etc... to make them less likely to get pummeled by the melees.
Include traps or other hazards in your combats. These are especially effective if the monsters the players are fighting are unaffected by the dangers or can more easily avoid them.
Use more creatures with Evasion.
Surround the party--fireball doesn't work well when the enemies aren't clustered.
Outnumber the party enough to ensure flanking for your enemies and some sneak attacks.
Use flying creatures to force the barbarian and paladin to pull out ranged weapons.
Use archers to target the squishy back liners.
Hit the barbarian with Will save or suck/lose spells, the paladin with ranged touch spells.
Include some crowd control for your monsters.
So, I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong, but currently, all my encounters are soliciting the same exact tactics from the party.
So what is the real problem here? Is it that you do not feel you are providing sufficient challenge for your players? Is it that you feel combat is growing stale with the same tactics?
I am personally wary of any advice that simply targets the offending tactics. Sure, it works the first half a dozen times before the PCs simply adapt to a new set of tactics they will use repetitively again.
In my opinion, you first need to identify the root cause of the real problem and then address that with your players. Player buy in means they will not feel like you unfairly targeted them. It could lead to the players simply being more creative with each combat. They could also provide valuable insight from their perspective.
Identify. Discuss. Have fun.
I've seen games my games like this. You just need to build your encounters different. Like take archers in different areas shooting at the party using terrain to slow the advance. Your party can buff but fireball would be waste to catch one opponent and it would take 2 fireballs per area minimum. Also don't use average hit points. That's just the average, a monster could have more or less. If you do increase the hit points be sure to lower a few in some encounters just to be fair. Make use of hit and run tactics to eat up the inspire courage rounds and let the buff spells expire. Rush in hit and move out let 10 minutes pass and do it again. Use lots of lower CR monsters to do this. They technically don't even have to hit but if they do all the better. You just need to find way to eat up party resources.
I find in my games if I use the same tactics the players will use the same tactics and being to breeze through in encounters so I mix it up. As well I let the players breeze through some encounters just eat up resources. Only so many Bulls Strengths per day and if you don't really take any HP damage you tend not camp up for the night.
Archer support to stop the buffs, and/or flyers to bypass the melee guys to get to the casters.
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Also vary your dungeon tactics and encounters. What happens when your group is in a corrider and they get surprised at both ends? What if more than one of your martial characters is occupied? Do they carry torches? Have them walk into a gas pocket. Vary your encounters as.. throw some swarms at them.They generally always had two free rounds to buff because I was running a dungeon. They'd just buff, walk through door, obliterate, buff, walk through door, obliterate. Then they'd rest after they ran out of buffs. Even if sometimes there was no encounter on the other side of the door, they'd still be cautious.
On the off encounters I did catch them off-guard, whichever melee champ the party decided wasn't going to get buffed would act as a meatshield for the party while they buffed.
The dungeon thing also hampered most mobility/flying/ranged tactics. I guess, seeing most of the advice here involves tactics and maneuvering, I should run the next adventure not in a dungeon, or in a very large dungeon.
Dungeons have more than one monster. If they buff outside the door then charge in, they should be drawing the attention of the others in the dungeon.
Play what would actually happen. If they charge a room, the rest of the dungeon should be coming to investigate.
#1 Use terrain. Paladin or Barbarian's effectiveness will drop significantly in situations where multiple enemies are spread out behind various cover or concealment, or where broken ground or obstacles make closing for melee a difficult proposition. Line-of-sight interruptions like walls or ruins, thick foliage or weather will make your casters and ranged combatants work for their supper too.
#2 Use tactics. Combine a small swarm of mooks with a couple of bigger guys, i.e. a bunch of skeletons backed by three ghouls with couple levels of rogue, cleric and wizard will present a dramatic challenge - and a very fun fight - if deployed properly. Pre-plan traps and ambushes. Take into consideration the environment (see #1) and assume your monsters would plan to fight in it, turning it to their advantage (i.e. positioning a caster or some archers on a narrow solid sandbar in an otherwise hip-deep mud of a riverbank so any melee character charging them ends up badly stuck or slowed down)
#3 Use subterfuge and cunning over brute force. That old man needing help or maiden in distress? Totally a manipulative shapeshifter or a conniving fey luring the players not only into doing the dirty work for the baddie, but also planning on jumping them when they're worn out and exhausted from helping.
#4 Why didn't you list that among your assets? Remember to use any loot monsters may have. Nothing will piss players off more than watching Kobold chieftain chug down some potions of Enlarge Person, Bull Strength and Mage Armor before wading in with that +1 Human Bane Flaming Dogslicer... and then see the Shaman burn the last charge from the Wand of Cure Serious Wounds to keep the chieftain from dying as he and Paladin duke it out.
Remember also that fireball in small rooms is flaming inferno for everyone and everything there. Of course, you might have a metagamer who calculates how much damage the party can take and casts it anyway, but I think that is pretty lame. No sane person is going to cast that in a confined space.
This comes from a guy who used to play in my game. :)
In your Dungeon, put in a Goblin. Just one goblin. A single solitary Goblin.
Give this goblin lots of little tunnels behind the walls, all too small for a medium sized character. Give him trap doors all over the place (in walls, in ceilings, etc).
Have him annoy the heck out of the characters. Dump pink die on the wizard while he's asleep in his bedroll from a trap door in the ceiling (thus ruining his nights sleep for preperation and annoying him to no end, as he's now a pink wizard).
Have a mirror set up at the end of an L shaped corridor, at a 45 angle. Have the goblin bend over and show is butt and make comments down the corridor (he's in the other corridor). When the fighter charges him (after being buffed) he goes through the mirror and into a pit trap. :)
You get the idea.
This is your thing right there. Why do they always have two rounds free to buff? Maybe you need to vary your encounters more. Maybe instead of making a bigger thing, you need to mix it up by swarming your group, making the party deal with several smaller bads that force everyone to be occupied and see what happens to that buff time when the Bard and Sorcerer have to see to thier own skins first.
Sorcerer and Bard spend two rounds casting stacking buffs
2 rounds to buff is pretty easy in 99% of encounters when you have two bruisers like the Barbarian and Paladin.
If the PCs are exploring a dungeon setting, consider how the place's remaining inhabitants will react when they realize other creatures have been defeated. "Someone killed those ogres that kept demanding tribute from us! We'd better beef up our defenses!"
Treat the area as a realistic, living environment. Its inhabitants will probably send out stealthy scouts, set traps, and prepare for trouble. Some might seek out magical items or call for reinforcements.
Try to have diferent types of encounters each game session:
* A few "straight-up fights" (...Which the party will probably walk right over)
* Tailored fights (Situations well-suited to prey upon the party's weaknesses)
* Puzzling Challenges (Situations where combat isn't the best option or may not be an option at all)
* Ugly twists (Encounters where things aren't quite as they first appear.)
A dungeon?!? Even better!
How about someone who knows wall of stone? Nothing says "fun" like a party divided into two halves. A little bit of dimension door makes sure Mr. Bad Guy can get himself onto whichever side he wants to be on.
Doors should be trapped occasionally. Even if the Perception and Disable Device DCs are nice and low, fact is that dinking with he door will alert anyone any everyone inside that there's someone coming. Let the bad guys have readied actions. Like fireball. Go ahead Mr. Hero... open the door. Also, try linked rooms. Players are screwing around with the first door down a corridor. It's locked. Players take 20 to open the lock. Meanwhile the bad guy wizard type steps out in the corridor three doors down, and lightning bolt goes flying down the straight line. Ooops.
Creatures with Acrobatics can move through enemy squares, so don't let your bad guys get plugged in inconvenient bottlenecks all the time.
Caltrops. And/or tanglefoot bags. Have rooms that are a little long, a couple mooks to throw, and a few archers. With feint and sneak attack. Oh look, you're stuck, and getting turned into a pin-cushion. Cute.
Basically, my advice continues to be: think outside of the box. Use the terrain you've given the players, and use it as though your minions live there and know the place. Don't just have monsters sitting in rooms waiting to be slaughtered, at least not all the time.
Use more magic, and make sure your NPC casters play "outside the initiative" — that is, they make logical decisions and can't be easily pigeonholed into encounter tactics.
Don't try to correct the game for PC tactics, introduce an NPC smart enough to correct for PC tactics in the game. The former approach is being a jerk GM, the latter is being a creative GM.
Always aim for near death of the PCs, and be at ease with the result if an encounter proves too easy or too hard. If you have to ratchet up the CR to provide a regular challenge for the PCs, then so be it. CR is nothing but a yardstick, and sometimes you need to calibrate for the party instead of blindly following a miscalibrated instrument.
Illusions. You know they cast fireballs? Toss a couple illusions of masses of creature X that just beg to be fireballed, and have the real threat sneaking past the melee walls to sneak attack the casters.
Illusion of a floor over a pit, with the monsters on the other side....paladin and barbarian charge in, fall down in the 50' pit, with oiled walls, and flasks of alchemists fire on the bottom. After the barbequeue begins, the monsters charge across the small bridges hidden by the illusion and waste the casters.
Once they get used to the fact you are using illusions, then you throw in the real stuff. Your sorcerer casts dismal on the 'illusion of the 10 lizardfolk rangers'...not an illusion...they all just rained precise shots down on your barbarian.
Spectral Hand with Touch of Fatigue on your raging barbarian. Bye by rage. Sure your Paladin will be able to remove the fatigue, but it will waste a round doing so. And if you give the paladin something more important to think about, he may not have the time.
What level are your mooks? Er...PC's?
I would think if they are lvl 6 beating cr 12 encounters after 2 rounds of buffing there has to be more than buffing and good tactics involved. as I said I'n one of my previous post check their wbl.
I would think if they are lvl 6 beating cr 12 encounters after 2 rounds of buffing there has to be more than buffing and good tactics involved. as I said I'n one of my previous post check their wbl.
I also think that something might be wrong with that, check the wealth by level, also check if you or the players did something wrong with the characters and are "cheating" (by mistake), are you aware of the errata, especially the paladin's smite one?
That was my impression, with such a discrepency, something is rotten in Denmark. Go over their tactics between play time, and see if they are not following a rule, or totally avoiding one. Even if the result is confirming what they are doing is correct. This allows you to get a feel for their tactics, so you can add a twist to the next encounter.
In addition, widen up the spaces they fight in, or allow for mulitple avenues to enter or escape. Add in other distractions to annoy them and throw them off their game like terrain, darkness, wierd sounds, etc.
And every so often when they are resting, let them have it.
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They generally always had two free rounds to buff because I was running a dungeon. They'd just buff, walk through door, obliterate, buff, walk through door, obliterate. Then they'd rest after they ran out of buffs. Even if sometimes there was no encounter on the other side of the door, they'd still be cautious.
That's your problem right there. Wow, they spend twenty minutes exploring and then they rest for the next 23 hours and 40 minutes? Throw wandering monsters at them. A lot of wandering monsters.
On the off encounters I did catch them off-guard, whichever melee champ the party decided wasn't going to get buffed would act as a meatshield for the party while they buffed.
Attack the casters by ranged means, not melee.
The dungeon thing also hampered most mobility/flying/ranged tactics. I guess, seeing most of the advice here involves tactics and maneuvering, I should run the next adventure not in a dungeon, or in a very large dungeon.
A sound idea...try having large chambers...people get fed up by 20x20 foot rooms.
Throw in a few creatures that can cast darkness at will. Their darkvision can see through it fine. I bet all of the pc's don't have darkvision.
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Flying monsters are awful vs. a melee focused party at this level. A group of six melee focused 7th level characters I played in got almost TPK'd by a single Erinyes just using her bow. She never even used her spell-like abilities. It was nasty.
Archers (or other ranged attackers) in general, either flying, hidden, or protected by their own meat-shields, are just sounding like a really good tactic against these folks.
Well, don't throw flying creatures at them constantly.
But even just one - because if not a single character has a bow or a crossbow....
Besides that's where improvised weapons come in. Paladin throws greatsword. Just just the flying creatures a low AC - but fire resistance.
A little encounter that doesn't hurt much, creature just does a few points of damage a round, but one that makes them think outside of their standard MO box.
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I'm pretty leery of doing so however. The party is made of pretty new players and other than that one tactic, they really are not that tactically minded.
Aka, NONE of them bought a secondary weapon, and there are a grand total of 0 ranged abilities other than the Sorcerer's fire stuff.
Well then stick with ground-based archers with meat-shields. It'll take 'em at least a couple of rounds to go through the meat shields and get to the archers, during which the archers can mess them up quite a bit if they've got, say, Precise Shot and Rapid Shot with Masterwork Mighty Composite Longbows.
As a bonus, after looting the archers, they'll have bows and you can sick the flying stuff on 'em.
Based on what you've said, I recommend that you give your guys the satisfaction of a fight in the dark. After investing in blind-fight and with a barb who has darkvision, that would be a challenge they're well suited for.
I'd also attack them with flying foes such as minor devils, encouraging the party to pick up some missile weapons. Make it an interesting challenge by providing numerous options: Do they bolt for cover? Improvise thrown weapons? Ready attacks for when they swoop down? Flee?
I'm pretty leery of doing so however. The party is made of pretty new players and other than that one tactic, they really are not that tactically minded.
Bing! Bing! Bing!
We have a winner. Game mechanics and tactics aren't something you just intuit, generally. Really mastering the system involves experience and example.
As long as you don't challenge them with flying creatures and ranged creatures they can't reach, your players will never learn tactics to cope. You need to keep throwing different tactics at them, for them to evolve their own understanding of the game. You don't need a super high CR... in fact, a couple easy encounters with flying creatures should go over well to turn the lightbulb on. "Oh, crap... that was way harder than it should've been. We need to adapt or the next flying creature will eat us."
Incidentally, kudos for caring enough about your players' fun to come here and ask for advice. Very cool.
That's your problem right there. Wow, they spend twenty minutes exploring and then they rest for the next 23 hours and 40 minutes? Throw wandering monsters at them. A lot of wandering monsters.
Hama hit the nail on the head there. You've gotten a lot of good ideas from this thread for better tactics, but what is going on the rest of the day? Is the party leaving the dungeon? After they blow their day's resources, are they camping out in a wide open room?
Regardless of what tactic they are using, there is an appropriate response. Your monsters shouldn't be stationary. They should be behaving like living, breathing (and possibly thinking) organisms. Maybe a couple of drow are feeling a bit peckish and go looking for some better eats, which just happen to stored where the party is. Maybe have a random patrol figure out what they are doing, and refuse to let the party rest. A few kobolds could use that secret door that the party didn't find (and therefore failed to barricade) and ambush them at night. As someone already mentioned, shadows ignore walls and therefore all corporeal defenses the party sets-up. A couple of hell hounds could block the party from leaving the dungeon.
The more time the party spends in the dungeon, the more likely reinforcements can be located. Even semi-intelligent creatures can figure out that they shouldn't sit and wait for the party to destroy the whole dungeon piecemeal.
Also, even when the party is prepared for a fight, throw in a couple rogues. Rogues are kryptonite for arcane spellcasters. As the Paladin and the Barbarian rush in for the obvious threat, have a rogue step out of hiding and sneak attack the sorcerer or bard. The rogue can even time his attack to disrupt a spell. Even a low-level rogue should beat a mid-level arcane spellcaster's perception check.
This comes from a guy who used to play in my game. :)
In your Dungeon, put in a Goblin. Just one goblin. A single solitary Goblin.
Give this goblin lots of little tunnels behind the walls, all too small for a medium sized character. Give him trap doors all over the place (in walls, in ceilings, etc).
Have him annoy the heck out of the characters. Dump pink die on the wizard while he's asleep in his bedroll from a trap door in the ceiling (thus ruining his nights sleep for preperation and annoying him to no end, as he's now a pink wizard).
Have a mirror set up at the end of an L shaped corridor, at a 45 angle. Have the goblin bend over and show is butt and make comments down the corridor (he's in the other corridor). When the fighter charges him (after being buffed) he goes through the mirror and into a pit trap. :)
You get the idea.
I'm clearly much meaner than you.
I did a dungeon like this, where the goal for most of it was the harry the players, but it wasn't just with taunting.
Basically, I had a pair of kobold crossbowers firing at the PCs who enter the kobold lair. The two kobolds would hang out at the end of a narrow hallway until the players were in sight, fire off a shot each, then dart down the next hall. All of the corridors twisted a bit or had narrow points that required a medium sized creature to squeeze. Sometimes the kobolds would end up much farther away than seemed possible--the PCs didn't notice the secret doors the kobolds were using to bypass some hallways.
And there were traps. Lots of traps.
One trap involved the kobolds running across the first big room the group had come across and they proceeded to fire at the PCs from across the space. When the players tried to cross, they fell through the floor, which was actually a lightly reinforced covering for a pit trap (it could support up to about 50 lbs, or enough weight for 2 kobolds with light gear). The pit wasn't too deep, but then the kobolds set fire to the covering which was littered with straw. While the players were struggling with all this, the 2 little nasties kept firing bolts at them until one player finally managed to kill one of the kobolds. Then the other one ran off.
At the end of the pit, there was a rope leading out. The first player attempting to climb the thing discovered that there were fishhooks laced into the rope that themselves were coated in poison.
A few corridors later and they were in another room. This one was honeycombed with smaller covered pit traps, each of which had some monstrous centipedes living in them.
Another corridor lead into a 10x10x10 room, with a squeeze-through opening leading out the other side. A pressure plate in that room cast Enlarge Person on whoever stepped on it, essentially trapping on person in the room, while a kobold could fire at their feet in safety from the corridor leading out. At the end of THAT hallway, was another pressure plate that cast Reduce Person and Gust of Wind, possibly firing a player back through the first room, which would reset through this action.
Eventually they killed the last harrying kobold, but still were pressing on into the dungeon in search of some prisoners, or maybe, at this point, to just murder every last stinkin' kobold. The players were quite literally tearing at their hair in frustration. A couple of them still refer to this dungeon years later with mixed resentment and appreciation for how much it pulled them in.
In the end, they ran across MORE traps, and eventually discovered that the whole thing was a Dead End! Turns out that this was all just a fake entrance designed to soften up or eliminate would be intruders. The real entrance was through a secret door in one of the pits in the second trapped room, or through a real entrance a few hundred yards away from the one the players found.