So, after looking through the various encounters this year I have noticed a very common trend. If I run a party of the assumed level (where CR=LVL), the encounter will be a speed bump for them. Now, for some of the encounters, this is reasonable. But anyone outlining the final boss of a dungeon puts themselves at a disadvantage from doing so.
Take Mike Welham's encounter as an example. If you throw a mummy (CR5), a CR1 snake, and 2 1/3rd CR skellies at a lvl 6 party, a few level 3 spells and the encounter is done. On the other hand, if I throw this at a lvl 3-4 party, it makes for a good final fight.
In the end, unless you are running a solo enemy, your encounter CR will always end up being higher than the highest enemies CR, and thus the strongest enemy will be less of a threat to the party than you usually want for a final boss. This may be fine for mid-adventure fights, but final epic fights excite voters much more.
In the future, I would like to see a recomended level range submitted with the encounters for the fight. Depending on the type of fight, the designer make put the level closer or further to the CR. I feel as though we would see more interesting and useful encounters out of this than we do now.
That's already built into the CR system. The expectation is a group of 4 characters of average level X can handle an encounter of CR X pretty easily, only expending about 20% of the party resources. According to the table on Core Rulebook page 397, that's an "average" encounter. It's harder than an "easy" encounter (CR = APL minus 1), but not so difficult to be a "challenging" encounter (CR = APL plus 1). So when we say "design an encounter with CR X," the assumption is you're bringing 4 PCs of level X.
Now, if you're suggesting in the future that the challenge should be "design a hard encounter with a CR equal to the APL plus 2," I could get behind that...
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Now, if you're suggesting in the future that the challenge should be "design a hard encounter with a CR equal to the APL plus 2," I could get behind that...
Allowing encounters to be built this way could certainly allow the contestants to show their mettle in what should be the most exciting encounter in the adventure, the climactic boss battle.
Expecting CR X for APL X is essentially asking them to create a mook encounter or one of the random non-consequential and meaningless to the plot encounters that is just there to expend resources before the final boss battle.
I agree.
I think Dudemeister hits on a good point. The encounters are being played, for the most part, in a vacuum. In Tom's, for example, you've presumably gone through two levels of dungeon already; in Steve's, you've had whatever happened in the cave; in Russ', you've gone through the Chalet, etc. etc. That's not going to be reflected in our playtests, nor is the fact that the PCs will go on to continue fighting in most of them, so will need to have resources remaining.
I think in that regard, last year's challenge -- which generally had to use the villain and which usually made it the final encounter (I remember at least the Rotting Kremlin actually made it an early part of the adventure) -- might have been a little easier to gauge CR appropriately.
That said, I could also see "design a hard encounter" being a good challenge.
To me, I think the wise RPG Superstar competitor naturally understands that a CR+1 or CR+2 encounter (as compared to APL) is what you'd want to showcase for the purposes of creating something dynamic with a high degree of entertainment value...not just for actual play, but also just in terms of appealing to the voting community. If they get excited about the encounter, they're going to naturally be excited about you and your design skills. They'll want to see what kind of ideas you'd pitch for the actual adventure proposal. And that's because they'll rightly surmise you can deliver something really awesome if you win the whole thing.
The inclusion of the PFS tiered elements in the encounter round is something new that got introduced last year. So, the best examples for how to handle it can be researched in the archives of the 2011 Superstar forums...or an actual PFS scenario. For the purposes of playtesting these encounters, I didn't necessarily view it through the prism of APL = CR, meaning, I thought it would be fine to playtest these things with a party of 3rd level characters even though the tier is CR 4. That's a CR+1 encounter as compared to APL. And, as a result, it would carry a lot more danger than just a group of 3rd level PCs vs. a CR 3 challenge.
Regardless, this is why it's important to let us (and the designers) know what kind of group you playtested against the encounter. If you went with 5 PCs and 20-point buy, you've clearly scaled things up too much on the side of the adventuring party and whatever encounter you take them against will be underpowered. I'm of the belief that playtesting very much needs to assume 15-point buy, a party of 4 PCs covering all of the four basic roles (i.e., melee, arcane, divine, skill), and then scale their levels up and down to try them against the encounter as if the CR were equal to their APL, CR+1, and then CR+2. But that's just me. I go for overkill when I'm analyzing things. If I'm short on time, however, I'd just try to determine what level of challenge a given encounter is meant to be in the overall adventure, and then playtest an appropriate group against it. If that means the encounter should be CR, CR+1, or CR+2 as compared to the APL, so be it. You just want to make sure you do it justice.
Going forward, if playtesting is conducted again for future competitions, I'd like to see some kind of designation given in each competitors' encounter to indicate if it's meant to be a CR, CR+1, or CR+2 challenge. And again, because most competitors will want to go for a bigger threat and more compelling scene, I suspect they'll all be reaching for the CR+1 or CR+2 encounters. If I were competing, I know that's what I'd do.
But that's just my two cents,
--Neil
That's already built into the CR system. The expectation is a group of 4 characters of average level X can handle an encounter of CR X pretty easily, only expending about 20% of the party resources. According to the table on Core Rulebook page 397, that's an "average" encounter. It's harder than an "easy" encounter (CR = APL minus 1), but not so difficult to be a "challenging" encounter (CR = APL plus 1). So when we say "design an encounter with CR X," the assumption is you're bringing 4 PCs of level X.
Now, if you're suggesting in the future that the challenge should be "design a hard encounter with a CR equal to the APL plus 2," I could get behind that...
I was thinking of having the designer suggest the APL for the combat, in addition to CR, instead of just assuming that they should be equal for playtesting.
The current selection has an assortment of encounters where the CR should be varying off the APL. Some of these are good for APL=CR+2 encounters, but not as good as APL=CR encounters, and work as climactic battles. Others work fine as APL=CR combats as more the start of the adventure. Abilities, especially spellcasting, can turn some encounters into trivialities at certain points. I mean, how many times has Ryan commented about Flight?
APL=CR fights are almost never the epic fight that excites. I think if you want to showcase that aspect of the designer, going to APL+2 would create more exciting challenges that are more reasonable for what people are looking for.
It's also worth considering how much more a single CR can be worth at low levels. An APL+1 can potentially cause a TPK at level 1, but at level 9, it's merely going to be a more challenging fight.
There is something to be said about CR=APL encounters, however. This contest is about designing a module for Paizo, and most of the encounters in any given module are going to be about the range of CR=APL. A really cool boss fight is nice, but since that is only a small part of the content, if the goal of RPG Superstar is to find the best adventure designer then we need to look at a larger picture. Non-boss fights need to be well designed and fun as well. I happen to think that someone who can design a great non-boss encounter, a mid-module encounter that is fun and exciting and even challenging, is probably a designer who can design a great end fight. But the reverse may not be true.
Just me two cents.
I don't see a problem with encounters of CR = APL for RPG Superstar.
That said this year many of the entries actually were more like CR = APL-n where n = 1 to 5.
In other words, too many of the encounters were total pushovers...
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Neil the few PFS scenarios I've run through or watched being run rarely have just 4 PCs and all PFS characters are 20 point buy by default. So the Core assumption can't be used if you're planning on writing a PFS scenario.
--Vrock'n Load
That's an interesting way to view things, Scott. I always made the assumption PFS GMs would adjust the CRs for each encounter in a PFS scenario rather than asking the authors to assume more than 4 PCs and a higher point-buy for character creation. I've only ever written one PFS scenario, so maybe the guidelines are different?
Regardless, I do know we all write our adventures for 4 PCs using 15-point buy when we're doing Pathfinder modules and APs. That's always been the baseline assumption for playtesting and ELs all the way back to 3.5 rules, as well.
PFS has just upped the expected party size to six. Granted that's for the next season, but that's what the top four will be writing for.
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That's an interesting way to view things, Scott. I always made the assumption PFS GMs would adjust the CRs for each encounter in a PFS scenario rather than asking the authors to assume more than 4 PCs and a higher point-buy for character creation. I've only ever written one PFS scenario, so maybe the guidelines are different?
Regardless, I do know we all write our adventures for 4 PCs using 15-point buy when we're doing Pathfinder modules and APs. That's always been the baseline assumption for playtesting and ELs all the way back to 3.5 rules, as well.
PFS GM's are not allowed to modify the scenarios. It is part of PFS rules to run the scenarios as written.
This is part of the reason that Mark Moreland is choosing to develop the PFS Scenarios for 6 players instead of 4. There will be written in options to downgrade the CR for 4 players if need be.