|
I'll note that I have been a player - I talk about events in this campaign and how they relate to a previous campaign that I ran quite a bit but there was an intervening campaign as well. In effect there was a 3.5 campaign that I ran that was the first part of this story.That campaign dies when the group was 14th level. At the time I attributed it to the fact that 3.5 becomes broken at higher levels. I know think that this is true but not the whole story - that campaign was also at about the three year mark and the players where just becoming unfocused despite the fact that I felt the final adventure - a slightly adapted Maure Castle, was fantastic.
Then another DM took the DMs chair and ran us through the first 18 levels of Scales of War. I'm guessing we where at it almost 3 years. At that point the DM faced a Players Revolt and I took the DMs chair again. At the time we attributed the problem to the DM. Partly true mainly because there was no player at that table that wanted to play D&D less then the DM. Don't get me wrong if we were going to be playing D&D then he wanted to be the DM but he would just rather that we not be playing RPGs and would instead play boardgames and Magic. He would try and convince the group that next week we could not play D&D every week - we mostly forced him to keep running the campaign but every 3rd or 4th week he would refuse to...
This is fair, but it speaks again to motivation. It bothers me, though it is prevalent that there are people who enjoy the ritual of getting together weekly (or so) and are willing to suffer a role playing session, but do it grudgingly. I've seen this often enough to know of it, but it is very consternating. It is especially egregious if it is the DM, as that sort of nonsense makes one person's malaise transfer to everyone. It's horrid.
I remember not wanting to GM for a few choice reasons, and though I was pressured to continue a campaign, I finally insisted on stopping. It is not a good time for anyone.
As for avoiding a player revolt, that is always the preferred way to go. They don't feel pretty, and just noticing the writing on the wall and abdicating goes a long way. You wouldn't read the same book series for two years if you weren't having a good time (apologies to Wheel of Time fans...)
While I think being a player is a very good experience for any DM I would also note that it can be deceptive. On the upside I would say that my experience as a player definitely reinforced my feeling that for almost all players if they love their character your going to have an easy time DMing because your players will overlook a lot of DM sins if they love their character. That said I noted that I apparently have a particularly high attachment to my characters compared to most of the players around my table. When I was a player I played my Death Cleric through to 12th level and when he died I played my new Merci nary with a bizarre mechanical Crossbow Ranger (Ranger/Alchemist Hybrid - use all the Alchemist weapon improving powers on your crossbow) until the Campaign ended. I loved them both but I was one of only a couple of players at that table that did not decide at some point in the campaign to retire their character in order to play a new build. So here I might have taken the lesson that players that love their characters are easier to please a trad too far because I apparently become more attached to my characters more then most of my players.Furthermore I would have argued - and I believed at the time - that part of this DMs problem was absolutely zero interest in the campaign world itself. We where told we were in a fantasy world that included anything and everything in the character builder except Darksun stuff. All the Gods could be...
This is a bit harder to address, but it harkens further to knowing your players. I believe I am retreading old ground, but when you are a creative force, it is difficult to maintain your integrity against the desires of your audience. That having been said, it is not difficult to give players what they want, and to have held their attention for even two years is impressive enough.
I would take the lessons that you have learned, and imagine the next campaign to simply be condensed within two years. Who knows, perhaps you could simply build upon the first campaign as a book series builds upon its own volumes. Once players have the taste of accomplishment, and know that they have finished something momentous, it might feed into their buy-in.
I doubt it...I played and ran BECMI right through 2nd edition before I moved to 3.5.The problem is most of the players playing these games are young and the campaigns die all the time. People change schools or they discover girls (or sometimes boys) or they get new friends or discover booze and/or drugs or they have crazy schedules etc. etc. Life changes a lot when your young and the discipline needed to have a long running campaign just is not there. I ran 4 campaigns during these years and had 3 others fizzle and die after only a handful of sessions during these years and the longest one was a little more then 2 years. Most where about a year.
The most obvious example of this can be found in Dungeon Magazine (though the module offerings are indicative of this as well). Check your Dungeon Magazine collection or go find an index on the web. Note how rarely a high level adventure is written? I mean maybe there was one every six months and I suspect that it is not even that high. There was no demand for high level adventures even then. Sure there are stories of groups that run campaigns for a really long time but these are exceptional and by no means the norm.
Perhaps. I have had World of Darkness games last quite a long time, and I owe that to not having a linear progression tied to the narrative. That having been said, I am hoping to recreate that success once I begin running my games. It's about planning for that increment, but it also takes a heck of a lot of trial and error, unfortunately. I've had experiences similar to yours, and can only hope that I get more chances to right those wrongs.
And to speak to the nature of fewer high level adventures, it is... shall we say, difficult to write for those for many reasons. I think that it should be recognized that a party will not only be more powerful, but also varied into the high levels, to say nothing of established norms, backstories, and expectations. It's a sticky wicket for sure, but an area that is open for creativity and personalization that cannot be replicated by modules and so on.
This might owe to the problematic nature of the Wrath of the Righteous campaign, as it takes all of those troubles at the high end, and brings them down to the lower levels. This is also true of Exalted, but that's a topic for another day.
Perhaps. I have had World of Darkness games last quite a long time, and I owe that to not having a linear progression tied to the narrative. That having been said, I am hoping to recreate that success once I begin running my games. It's about planning for that increment, but it also takes a heck of a lot of trial and error, unfortunately. I've had experiences similar to yours, and can only hope that I get more chances to right those wrongs.
And to speak to the nature of fewer high level adventures, it is... shall we say, difficult to write for those for many reasons. I think that it should be recognized that a party will not only be more powerful, but also varied into the high levels, to say nothing of established norms, backstories, and expectations. It's a sticky wicket for sure, but an area that is open for creativity and personalization that cannot be replicated by modules and so on.
This might owe to the problematic nature of the Wrath of the Righteous campaign, as it takes all of those troubles at the high end, and brings them down to the lower levels. This is also true of Exalted, but that's a topic for another day.
I could see how this could work with World of Darkness. I have only 1 experience with that system and what essentially happened is everyone made their characters and man what deep and interesting characters they where...and then we very quickly came to the conclusion that our characters had no interest in working with each other particularly and we sure as hell had no interest in following along with whatever the DM was trying to hook us in with. I no longer remember any of the other players characters except that they where all interesting and deep. I recall that my character ran a tea shop in Hong Kong and was in some ways stuck in the past as she had been the wife of a British Officer during the Colonial Era.
In any case I could see how a skilled DM could essentially work out plots around what all the players are doing and then, kind of like a soap opera, lay down plot points so that the players personal interests keep leading them to each other while having interesting over arcing plots that build up. The key to all of this is that the players recall all the plot details because they drive the whole thing.
This can presumably be generalized to most RPG systems as the key element is not about the system it is about the players creating the plot by following the motivations of their characters and the DM simply staying in front of them. The Story Teller system is very good at this because it starts the ball rolling by giving the players characters with complex and interesting back stories but in theory this works so long as the players eventually create complex and interesting characters.
All that said not every group actually wants a character driven campaign. One of the elements of such a campaign is characters can only die very rarely or the whole edifice of having the players build the plot through the motivations of their characters falls apart. This is a very co-operative way to play the game. That is fine as far as it goes but many groups prefer something more confrontational where their characters face grave dangers and overcome brutal challenges. That only works if sometimes some of the PCs don't overcome the challenge and die. Worth noting that in my group one has to keep the challenge level high - when the other DM was running things we went for 12 levels without a single death and then there was a mini-revolt where we told the DM to up the danger or he would no longer be the DM. Until that point the players where doing all sorts of things to try and alleviate the boredom of facing challenges we always beat. Several PCs where having a feud with each other, some of the players where swapping characters every five or so sessions etc. Basically my group is not looking for self directed gaming but for phat loot gained after overcoming death defying challenges. Preferably involving their PC doing something totally awesome.
I wonder if the issue is a bit simpler than that. With my guys, the game stretched for years. And they forgot stuff. Details I'd been putting in as foreshadowing just passed them by. Important clues got forgotten. Key turning points became fuzzy. As a DM this stuff is in your mind but a lot of it the players will forget, and they get detached gradually from the game. Then it gradually becomes a series of encounters, which they don't necessarily easily comprehend. It's hard to care about it then as it just gets confusing.
In the end, we stopped just shy of the final encounter - the rebirth and (hopefully) defeat of Nerull - because they were surprised when he showed up. So the whole multiplanar conspiracy angle they'd been playing through for years simply didn't register. Since they had reached level 30 at this point, they were just burnt out and didn't fancy the final encounter, so we folded. I think it is an understatement to say I was somewhat annoyed at the time, but in retrospect it's an important lesson. I think one of the reasons the PbPs can last longer (eight years for my longest running here) is you can at least go back and read what the hell happened four years ago.
I certainly noticed elements of this with my campaign as well. Not exactly forgetting the plot so much as the way my campaign was set up the points between the adventures where pretty straight forward even if some of the adventures themselves tended to be complex.
Nonetheless there is certainly something about the passing of time that turns big accomplishments into little more then faded memories which essentially makes the campaign just seem disjointed if it goes on for long enough and seems to sap the excitement out of it.
Adventure Path Design Lessons
So following along from the last post I’m going to look at this campaign in particular and consider what I did, why I did it and how I might have done it better.
Chapter #1: Cell Block F
The campaign started with Chapter #1: Cell Block F In this adventure the PCs where tasked with recovering some prisoners from a secret political prison and returning them to the capital. Of course everything had gone to heck at the political prison. The adventure set the stage for the campaign and most importantly introduced the characters to a major NPC Blessed of Hern who has information regarding another critical NPC Heldane Crafter but this info is not introduced until later in the campaign. For the moment the PCs handed over the prisoners and the campaign continued.
Chapter #2: The House on Swann Street
In this adventure the PCs stopped a serial killer which made them hero’s in the capital and put their name on the map as investigators. I wanted both of these effects to take place in the campaign but the adventure itself did not deal with any real core plot line. I probably should have found a way to wrap this into another adventure because it was clearly to long a period of time to spend in one adventure.
Chapter #3: The Menagerie
Here the PCs rescue a business when the proprietors critters escape and cause havoc. Again this is pure sub plot – the PCs meet an NPC that owes them and can give them rituals but the main plot is not being addressed.
Chapter #4: The Sapporo Caves
Here the PCs travel to the lands of the Chin-Tuo kill some goblins and are involved in some scenes that set in motion the entire goblinoid invasion of the campaign finally starting up on the major background element of the whole campaign. I am of two minds here. I had the PCs go to the lands of the Chin-Tuo because of a lesson I learned in the campaign I ran earlier – introduce the PCs to the major peoples of the campaign. In effect my players in that campaign had been unhappy when it ended with them in the lands of the Chin-Tuo and yet had never been there previously. I learned that if my PCs where supposed to be saving various peoples they need to have some kind of a connection to those people at some point in the campaign for it to be fulfilling. I needed an adventure like this and I needed to get the main campaign theme rolling but the reality was I never addressed main plotline directly here. Still an adventure of this kind might be worth it so long as they are the exception rather then the rule and maybe I could have wrapped this in with more major plot development.
Chapter #5: The Oakbridge Murders
In this adventure the PCs put a stop to a series of murders. During the course of the adventure the PCs learn that the individuals being murdered where merchants who had been delivering supplies to a group called the Chosen who are the guys behind the Goblinoid Invasion. They also meet an NPC that can later take them into the Darkwood which will eventually be important and they get their first clue about the villain Spider who is pulling strings for the Chosen in the capital. I would say this is really the first adventure after Chapter #1: Cellblock F that is really putting the PCs onto the main plot line though they are really only just starting on the trail when the adventure itself ends.
Chapter #6: Salvage of the Ocean Empress
The adventure gives the PCs the ship they will use to fight the Minotaurs who are allies of the Chosen.
Sigh…this is kind of where I really start to feel the constraints of the campaign design. This is pure side quest giving the PCs access to something they need to further what is really just another side quest. Thing is this really brings to light the fact that my whole campaign is just too big to fit. The whole major war theme with all these factions invading the Empire is just too big a story to be told in a single campaign. I mean my PCs never need to deal with the Minotaurs but they are a major sub theme of the campaign. Never addressing their part in the plot because it just does not fit makes me sad. I want the Minotaurs addressed in this campaign…but in putting this into the campaign I pretty much had to admit…and of course I never did…that this was a story that could not be told in a single campaign. In any case this entire adventure needed to just be cut if I was to stick to the main plotline. In adding it I needed to recognize that I would never finish the campaign and should have aimed for a resolution…interestingly the resolution actually kind of needed to end right about where it will actually end in this campaign though that is, of course, unintentional.
Chapter #7: The Telhran Job
Here the PCs have learned that Blessed of Hern is a key NPC with information they need and it starts with them getting a clue as to where he is being kept prisoner and ends with them rescuing him and getting the information from him that Heldane Crafter is someone the Chosen are looking for and whatever Heldane Crafter was trying to find is the key to this whole mess. Here we have another adventure key to the main plot line.
Chapter #8: The Soldier of Kezeus
The PCs follow up on information received in the Telhran Job and go looking for Heldane Crafter. Here we are on the main plot path for the whole adventure.
Chapter #9: Re-Creation
The PCs search leads them to the southern part of the Empire where they get involved with the Humans and Lizard Folk down here and go back through an adventure that they went through in a campaign previous to this one by insuring that the Draconian base that their last adventuring party destroyed stays dead. This adventure is really big and sucks up a ton of time before its complete – it’s the point where I start to loose my PCs and its roughly the two year mark for the campaign. It is pure flavour as well. Truth is I probably could have done this whole adventure in a mere fraction of its length and would have achieved what where really flavour objectives. This is kind of the counter part to the Chin-Tuo adventure except now it introduces the rest of the country side and the Lizard Folk as major players. Ultimately this adventure was pure sub plot but it was significant for the flavour elements and maybe more importantly because it tied this campaign to the previous ones and brought the accomplishments of the last group my players ran to the fore. This focuses on the benefits that accrue from running campaigns in a consistent campaign world.
Chapter #10: Telhran Inflamed
Here the PCs have learned that the answer to their inquiry regarding Heldane Crafter is all the way back where they started in the Capital and the adventure begins with the PCs returning to Telhran. They have learned that they need to talk to the Great Hero’s who where their previous group. The PCs spend the adventure trying to get into contact with the Great Hero’s but I designed it so they never meet up with themselves (imagine trying to role play that!) but that all the information they need has been handed to a third group – The Princess Swords who are being hunted down by Spider. This is another adventure which gives out the major plot line but the PCs don’t really have it until then end of what is sort of a sub plot adventure. Still by the time it ends the PCs have all he information their previous group had and know that the person Heldane Crafter was looking for was some one named Mordev – Mordev is the ultimate BBEG of this whole story so at this stage my players finally on the main plot path of the campaign…and I don’t realize it yet but we have been gaming beyond two years at this point and my campaign is on borrowed time.
Chapter #11: Pax Tharkas
With the clock ticking on the end of my campaign my PCs set out on another adventure that is pure sub plot. They attack an old dwarven base that the Chosen have been using to arm their goblinoids – save the slaves form an army from them and win a major battle in the war. None of this is critical to the main plot – but it was good story.
Chapter #12: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spider
Again we are into sub plot that feels important. The PCs finally hunt down Spider herself eliminating the threat of the Chosen manipulating Telhran and the people in it. They fight the BBEG of much of this campaign and beat her but she is just one important member of the Chosen. That said this is the capstone for what the PCs where throughout the adventure. This is the adventure where my PCs – who have been an Investigators for the whole campaign and eventually became, defacto, Telran’s Counter Intelligence finally fulfill their core role. I made them Investigators as opposed to Adventurers because much the campaign would revolve around this investigation and counter intelligence theme.
Chapter #13: A Bubble in the Sea of Time
The PCs take their ship the Ocean Empress and sail off to confront the Minotaurs – they’ll win and stop the Minotaur threat by the time this adventure ends and that will also be where my campaign ends. This of course is sub plot but its major sub plot that has been running through this campaign and the previous one.
OK so I started writing this post with the objective of identifying what I was doing wrong in campaign design that kept resulting in my campaigns ending before I resolved the main plot…but this is not the opinion I have now that I have gone over the whole campaign. Truth is I’m not so sure any of this was really a mistake – the real problem with my campaign is less about sub plots – it’s the story I have chosen to tell. I mean I conceived of the basic story line way back when I was 15 years old or some such and it was heavily inspired by Dragon Lance. The problem I have come to believe in writing this post was not so much that I get side tracked in campaigns but more that I have chosen to tell a story that is so huge that it just does not really fit in a single campaign. Sure I could get it to fit with a laser focus on getting through it and only hitting on the main plot line – but that kind of seems to miss the point of telling such a huge story – why have this massive epic if I’m not going to take the time to cover all its bases? I doubt that I’ll ever try and run something so huge again in my life but maybe it is not such a problem that one decides to tell one epic tale in their life. That said if it is not such an issue to take three campaigns to tell a single story as I am now concluding I really want this to be done when I choose to run the next campaign so I had best design it so that it both fits within the level range of the system I choose to run it in and that it is a story that can be told in about two years of real life. I think that is doable…crazy thing is by the time I’m done with this post I’ve gone from being sad that my campaign has ended prematurely to being interested in how I can tell the tale in my next campaign. In the end it will need to be focused but maybe not really any more then the current campaign – here I managed to tell half the story and delve into a lot of interesting sub plots including interesting elements intertwining what had taken place in the first campaign with what took place here. I think I can do the same in the next campaign – tie up some more of the sub plots and make sure that I intertwine elements from the first two campaigns and still manage to tell the rest of the story…that will be my goal in any case.
|
|
Phantasy Star 3 was an interesting game in that it told a story over 3 campaigns (or something resembling that) and through 3 generations of adventurers. I don't know if this helps with inspiration, but I've always found that idea fascinating, even if the game itself was riddled with gameplay issues.
Change of Plans
So above I do quite a bit of soul searching regarding issues I have with my Bubble in the Sea of Time adventure in regards to trying to make sure that the Adventure does not overstay its welcome for my PCs. Thing is once it was decided that this adventure was in fact the last one of the campaign suddenly the issues with trying to make sure that the adventure does not drag no longer seem quite so important. I am no longer trying to make sure that the adventure is only a two level adventure. I’m perfectly happy to allow the adventure to span three levels and the desire to make sure that the plot keeps moving forward quickly in order to keep the campaign moving is no longer really so important.
Certainly my goal is to make sure the adventure does keep up some kind of a reasonable pace – after all I am motivated to make this adventure good. I want my campaign to go out on a high note and I don’t want my players to have their last experience of my DMing for a while to feel like a drag. Nonetheless a large part of what was pushing me to make sure that this adventure wrapped up at a reasonably quick pace was the idea that I was already loosing my players to the length of the campaign and I still thought I had 40% of the campaign left to run to get my players to level 30 and through the rest of this campaign.
If I’m not trying to shove 40% of a campaign that has run 3 years into as little time as possible it is no longer necessary to get in and out of this adventure at high speed. In fact now the goal is to make sure that this adventure includes as many interesting high points as possible. The result is a number of the sub themes are extended. The material that has been added to the adventure is not so much the random encounter elements. I don’t really think the Random Encounters are the best element of the adventure – though I am no longer motivated to try and keep them to a minimum. I expect my players will run through between 12 and 14 of them during the course of the adventure but at this point I’m OK with that so long as it contributes to the feel of the adventure.
The elements that get added are an expansion of the core set piece scenes of the adventure. The PCs need to retrieve a magic key to open a gate to the Abyss to pass through the Plane of Infinite Portals to get back home. Originally that was going to be 1 single encounter. I’ve expanded that out two encounters and focused on elements in this type of encounter that feel really 4E - Interesting terrain and fantastic traps. I’ll focus on adding some unique high level monsters including adding an encounter with a really powerful Dragon that sees guarding the Demon Gate as its duty and can’t be convinced otherwise. Of course I’ll also make sure to add a larger – if role playing focused – dénouement to the adventure to emphasize the PCs contribution to the overall campaign and hopefully provide a meaningful ending.
In the end I think this makes for a better adventure overall which is good in itself but, in a back handed sort of way this also emphasizes why campaigns can’t be allowed to overstay their welcome. In retrospect it seems clear that I was compromising the quality of the adventure itself because I was so keen to try and save a campaign that had reached, and passed, its best before date. If, for whatever reason, we where to try and keep the campaign alive then the choice to force the adventure to be as short as possible would have been the correct choice – improving a campaign is more important then improving any given adventure in that campaign when one is forced to choose but it does make sense to try and never be in a position where one has to choose.
Considering ‘Broken’ Character Builds
I was thinking about some of my PCs in terms of ‘broken’ character builds. I’m thinking about this not in regards to every kind of optimized build but to a specific subset of optimized build. Specifically I have a Player that has created a wizard that is focused on domination as well as the power Slumber of the Winter Court (by handing out huge penalties on the save). It is by no means the only kind of optimized character build, in fact all of my PCs are pretty heavily optimized but this build is different then say a Ranger build that can go Nova and dish out insane damage or a Defender with a phenomenal AC. Essentially the specialized Wizard PC presents a particular problem because the design of the character is either overwhelmingly good or practically useless in any given combat encounter and I decide whether or not the build works or not. This stands in stark contrast to all the rest of my PCs. My phenomenal Ranger PC is essentially challenged by me merely by increasing the potency of the opposition. If the Ranger can do 400 hps worth of damage in one round I make sure that the opposition has enough hps to still be able to provide a challenge after the Ranger carries out his Nova attack. The wizard build though is really a special challenge because the design of his character is essentially all or nothing. Either his ability to autowin the encounter works or it does not. It is practically the same story with his domination capabilities (though it is not quote as bad). Either the enemy is perpetually dominated or they are not.
After running a sizable number of encounters with this character in the party I have noted that everything tends to come down to one of these two extremes – either the character works as advertised the encounter is a push over and the PCs clean up the opposition without any trouble or, alternatively, I build in immunity to charm or sleep, or the ability to easily shake off conditions into the opposition and this PC becomes practically useless.
I am not really a fan of this kind of build as neither answer is really a good answer, it is no good if the encounters turn into gold fishing, especially in 4E, because it is still 45 minutes to an hour to resolve even if it’s a blow out. On the other hand it is never ideal if a PC really can’t do anything meaningful to impact the combat.
All that said while I’m unhappy with the fact that this build even exists I have to say that a lot of this issue is really on the head of my player who decided to go with this build. Needless to say he expresses a great deal of frustration whenever his character is rendered useless and yet seems to, at least partly, understand that the build is broken. Furthermore I kind of don’t have much sympathy for the player because this player has done this before – building this sort of all or nothing character that either works and essentially auto wins encounters or does not work and is pretty much useless. I even get the impression that the other players around the table have kind of clued in on this as the most recent encounter where the PC realized that the Golems where immune to his powers and started to complain about it another player pretty much said ‘that is what you get for having all your eggs in one basket’.
In the end there really is not to much I can do to resolve this issue. I find myself ‘balancing’ this build by pretty much including encounters that are not designed specifically to counter this players abilities, and then he wins and building encounters where the opposition can’t be put to sleep or dominated (at least not for long) at which point the Player has to deal with the fact that his character is really sub par. Unfortunately for this player these encounters are not exactly even – I’m willing to let him blow out throw away encounters but if I’m really interested in the combat – if its against major opposition and I have put a lot of work into the design of the encounter in terms of interesting terrain effects and exciting opposition then I make sure that this encounter won’t just be won by this player. Pretty much if I just draw out the Battlemap quickly with wet erase markers that is a pretty good sign this player can win the coming fight – but if I spent 6 hours building the layout of this encounter in GIMP and it is going to be tactically interesting you can bet I won’t let this player spoil all my work by turning this into an autowin encounter. In other words this PC gets to autowin the less interesting encounters but is rendered very weak against the really exciting encounters. Truth is I think the player actually looses out with this type of build because of the way I handle his build.
Ultimately there is actually a lesson here for players more then for DMs – don’t make this sort of build because you can bet that it won’t work – it can’t work and the campaign continue. Either the DM essentially tells the player to make a new character or the DM adjusts to what the player is doing – and you can bet that almost no DM is going to adjust ‘fairly’. I suspect that almost any DM would behave in a manner similar to what I describe myself doing above. The players all or nothing build might be allowed to work – but not against the opposition that the DM is really excited about running – not against the big boss types.
Of course not every DM is creating the encounters himself – many are running modules or other professionally published adventure in which case the DM has less of a vested interest in altering the opposition in order to nerf this PC during some of the encounters because said DM has not had to spend hours slaving over the creation of the encounters.
Thing is if one thinks about it the result is still always going to be bad for the player in question because in the end the DM either goes with a kind of personalized punishment of the player in question – in the case of published adventures the DM might be beefing up the interesting encounters so as to allow them to still present a challenge to the party – which would take place because this players build was being nerfed. This can easily be the case in a party with this type of character as chances are all the PCs are somewhat optimized and the DM has to up the power level of the encounters in any case so along the way he chooses to make sure that the most interesting encounters are immune to the PC with the autowin button or, alternatively, there is collective punishment for the whole group.
The collective punishment is well disguised as it is actually the DM allowing the PC to work as advertised in every encounter. Sounds great for the PCs except of course it is not – the players think they want to win every fight easily - but the reality is the players don’t. The first few times the players turn an encounter into a gold fishing event they might be elated but not the 12th time, not the 13th time. Eventually numbing boredom will set in. Mindless number crunching to an easily achieved overwhelming victory is not actually entertaining at all.
The bottom line with this kind of build is the player that has made it always actually looses out and this is true in pretty much every system. Certainly it was true in 3.5 (where I used the collective punishment option to make the point when faced with this sort of build), it clearly exists in 4E where, with this being the final adventure I don’t have time to make the point via collective punishment and so am using individual punishment and no doubt it exist in 5E as well. Nonetheless whatever the system that this type of character exists in in the end the player that creates this type of character will always find that he or she is being punished for it – because even when it works the player is punished.
|
They way I justify this sort of stuff is that, if the PCs get any amount of notoriety, their quirks and abilities will become known and the enemies will adjust their tactics to match.
If you think this is ruining the fun of the game, it is probably worth telling the player. If this isn't an option (personalities and so on) you could always run an adventure (for example, "Against the Golems") which basically makes the PC completely useless for a long time - it might also have the useful corollary of getting the PC killed as well. The other players may then suggest the players gets a character that can actually contribute on a general basis, not just under specific circumstances.
But in the end, I agree that there isn't much to be done. PCs are really just facets of the players' personalities and they will often come out similar due to preferences and play style. Grin and bear it, and try to kill the offending PC without making it too obvious.
This Has Become a Mini-Campaign
Been awhile since I have done a post on my campaign and yet it still continues despite a clear end date for the campaign when this particular adventure ends. At this stage it has become clear that what I had originally envisioned as an adventure and what was then upgraded to a larger adventure when it became clear that this adventure would be the last of the campaign has morphed beyond that into almost a mini campaign. My PCs had just levelled to 14th level when Island in the Sea of Time began and at this point they will be 19th level (for a single encounter) when the adventure ends.
I had not originally planned this adventure to be anywhere near this long, though of course when I first sat down to write this thing I was under pressure to get it so that my adventures ended with the PCs getting two levels each just to have a chance of making the campaign fit into 30 levels.
Once this became the final adventure of the campaign I was freed from that restriction which in the case of this adventure was, in some ways, for the best as it pretty much just did not fit. Even in 1st Edition Isle of the Ape was essentially a mini-campaign and since that is the backdrop for Island in the Sea of Time it is still pretty much a mini campaign.
Nonetheless, I never quite grasped just how big this thing was. Once I redesigned it and went through the trouble of counting combat encounters it became clear this was going to be big. The adventure comes with 3 encounters while the PCs travel to the Island of the Ape, a good 10 or so set piece encounters on the island (not including 5 or so non-combat encounters), up to 14 ‘random’ encounters – though my PCs will only ever run through 12 of those, and two mini dungeons with a total of 7 encounters between them. That is a total of 32 combat encounters and since I usually level my PCs after 6 or 7 combat encounters it is clear how this all adds up to 5 levels over the course of this adventure.
In this case it is going to take my Players around 14 months before the adventure ends. I note that I wrote my first post about this adventure on January 1st of 2015 and I estimate that I’ll be done with the adventure (and the campaign) in roughly March of 2016. That is a pretty long time for an adventure and I think my exhausted players will be happy to have finished this thing – though it has not been to bad as the adventure itself has provided a reasonably good mix of different types of encounters including some on water, wilderness and magical dungeon type encounters. No urban encounters but the whole rest of the campaign has had a lot of those so the mix is pretty good.
All of that said this adventure has turned out to actually be the longest of the campaign. My players would be freaking out completely but the fact that the campaign wraps up when the adventure ends and they want to wrap it up properly keeps this thing going…but I am pretty sure that if I had told them when this started that the adventure would take 15 months to finish that would have been unacceptable.
Just a Second – This is King Kong’s Island
There was something of a surreal situation at my table when my players get onto the natives wall and survey the island soon after learning about Oonga. Thing is some of my players are reasonably familiar with King Kong and all the popular culture lore that surrounds King Kong but I personally am particularly ignorant of King Kong and its lore. Never saw any of the movies, never read any of the books. I mean I knew Oonga was inspired by King Kong but I assumed that it was just really that. Gygax had decided to have a big ape as the apex creature on the island. Thing is it now seems that the entire island was inspired by King Kong’s island which Mr. Gygax had translated into D&D. I never knew that. So my players are making all sorts of King Kong references and drawing conclusions that seem reasonably accurate about my adventure and I’m just kind of staring at them confused – which has them confused. After all how the heck did I design an entire adventure based on King Kong’s Island and yet have no real knowledge of King Kong at all. That said I did tell my players that the setting was based on a 1st edition module by Gary Gygax…which allowed me to blame Mr. Gygax at a later point when my players realize that the entire geography of the island does not work. Gygax has the island be a bowl with high sides and a low middle where it rains daily. That does not work. The centre of this island should be dry and desolate because it is in the rain shadow of the mountains and highlands that ring the island.
Overview of How Island in the Sea of Time is Playing Out
Normally I would not do a post like this until after the adventure was finished but this thing has been so big that I’m going to take a look at a bunch of elements in the adventure and it seems best to get what happened (and a little of what will happen) explained first.
So My players went through the Sea encounters initially and there is no real out of combat decision making in those. The final encounter was with the Kraken that destroyed their ship and that has been covered above.
Once on the island the initial part sees them on a peninsula and it is pretty similar to a road adventure at this part because the players really can’t go anywhere but up the peninsula so they encounter the hostile natives and beat the snot out of them (again I covered this encounter above). They take over the Natives village and make their first real campaign effecting choice here in that they leave the rescued crewmen along with the Captain of the ship, Challi Assam, in the cleared out natives village. They also rescued some cat people in the village and learned a bit about the island. This is where my players clue in that they are on King Kong’s Island and that Oonga is King Kong.
After this they climb the great wall that cut the Peninsula off from the rest of the island, note that there are two paths they can take from here, one leading north to the Bird People (Aarooka) and Gnomes as well as a path leading east toward where the cat people live. The cat people are trying to convince the PCs to go to their home and having no real reason to choose one of the routes over the other the PCs agree.
They make their way to the Cat peoples lair bumping into a couple of dinosaur encounters along the way and learning a bit about how the island works (attrition of surges) and ‘random’ encounters with Dinosaurs and the fact that the cat people think the PCs are extremely loud and inept along the way. There are a couple of fights which the PCs win pretty easily.
Once at the home of the cat people they meet their Matriarch and learn a whole heck of a lot about the island including that their have been other explorers to the island before searching for something called the Rook of Rao. The cat people have a powerful magic item they found on the bodies of one of these adventurers and the PCs get the item, they also learn that the Aarooka and Gnomes have some other magic items from these other adventurers and that the Gnomes used to travel off the island by a magic gate. The PCs also learn that while the cat people have seen the Minotaur Ships out to sea they don’t know of any Minotaur Base on the island but that the cat people pretty much only really know where the evil natives are as well as where their allies the Gnomes and the Aarooka are. They have not really been to the middle or western end of the island in at least a generation and did not venture out that way much even before that. The island is simply too dangerous to undertake trips that are not necessary and what the cat people need they can get closer to their home for the most part.
Not having any particular reason to make alternate choices and being lured by the idea that the Arrooka might know more about the island (because they fly) and especially the lure of powerful magic items the PCs choose to back track and head north. But first they hang out with the Cat people for a week or some such as the disease effects have begun to hit the PCs and they won’t venture forth while suffering penalties. Eventually they all get or beat the disease and are ready to continue their expedition.
More encounters with Dinosaurs. For the most part these are on the easy side but here there are a couple of encounters that are on the tougher end. The T-Rex type Dinosaurs are potent enough that they give my players pause and they are ambushed by two Purple Worms which push my PCs to the very limit of their abilities with their generally powerful stats and swallow whole power – the Purple Worms where gobbling up PCs at a reasonably good clip and the cleric got swallowed which removed healing from the party and also just about killed the cleric who did not have skills or powers that made escape reasonable (some of the other PCs either had such great athletics that they could make a skill check to escape or had powers that let them leave the Purple Worms stomach).
The PCs make their way to the home of the Aarooka where they get their magic item, learn that only the Gnomes know about the magic gate but get a pretty good background on the layout of the island. The Aarooka know of the Minotaur base in roughly the east coast of the island as well as the location of the gate in the middle of the island.
The PCs then continue on to see the Gnomes. By the end of this journey they have made enough skill checks and fought enough Dinosaurs that they are beginning to be able to travel for days without suffering random encounters. When the PCs speak to the Gnomes they learn that they will need to retrieve a magic key to use the gate and that the Gnomes are related to the Gnomes from their homeland and that once these Gnomes used to use the Magic Gate to get to and from the land of the Gnomes in the PCs homeland. With their ship lost this looks like the best way for the PCs to return home. The PCs get a general idea where the magic key is located. They decide that getting the key is almost on the way to the base of the Minotaurs and they head for that location. More Dinosaur encounters – a couple of which a slightly tough, particularly an encounter with Rocs, but for the most part the PCs can use Slumber of the Winter Court to pretty much autowin an encounter.
The PCs get to the place where the key is located and attempt to retrieve it. Here everything takes a major turn for the worse. I’ll go into more detail on this mini-dungeon in a later post but the bottom line is that the party gets within a hairs breadth of a TPK and just barely manage to flee the dungeon with their lives. Unable to re-enter this dungeon for three weeks due to how the magic there works the PCs choose instead to press forward to the Minotaur Base. They are following paths and for one of the few times during the adventure the PCs choose to follow a path that does not seem to lead them toward the location of their target and instead up into the north east portion of the island where the path ends in the cave of one of Oonga’s female mates. In this case however she is not home and there is little for the PCs to find. They back track, bumping into encounters along the way and then start to press toward the coastline not liking where the paths lead and figuring that the Minotaurs must have a port. If they reach the coast they can press south until they find the port.
Here my PCs come to something of a decision point as PCs start to really suffer from the attrition of the island. The last full, surge restoring, rest the PCs managed was back where the magic key is located and many members of the party are down to two and three surges. There is some suggestion of turning back and trying to return to the safe zone provided by the location of the magic key. Here they could rest, restore surges and because they have been improving in their ability to navigate the island without attracting Dinosaur encounters might be able to get back to this area with significantly more surges. However the players do figure that even if their overall situation would improve it would nearly certainly mean having to run through at least two extra encounters and they elect to instead press on. They find the Minotaur Port and scout around it ultimately finding the Minotaur Base and determining that the Minotaurs are transferring forces between the port, which has a ship at dock, and the Base every day. Eventually the Players elect to attack the port which turns out to be not that tough an encounter, then fight off the Minotaur forces that return from the base, which is actually a super easy encounter as the PCs start cutting attacking Minotaurs down from a great distance away with the Ballista’s at the base and then blast the Minotaurs apart when they finally get close to the port. At this stage the PCs can sleep on the ship and restore full surges (the ship is a safe zone).
The PCs then attack the Minotaur Base, I’ll do a couple of write ups below detailing some of the encounters there but it boils down to them fighting their way through five encounters and finally killing the Minotaur Commander.
At this stage no matter what happens afterword the PCs have ‘won’ the campaign. The loss of the Minotaur Leader results in the Minotaurs abandoning their attacks on the PCs homeland and returning to their far off home. Mission Accomplished. The PCs can all die in a TPK at this stage and it will still be a victory.
Nonetheless they still need to return to their homeland and bring the lost Gnome Tribe home if possible. So the PCs elect to head back to the Magic Key location as the requisite time they need to wait to use the magic gate to get in has passed and they bump into an encounter on the way which they easily beat.
This is actually where we are while I write this post so I’ll eventually have to update the end but they should now redo the Magic Key dungeon. I have high hopes for them after all they now what they are in for and should not make the same mistakes twice. Also they have gained two levels so the encounters will presumably be at least a little easier. Once they have the key they need to travel to the Portal itself – that will involve a Random Encounter and then fight the Gates Defender which is a brutally potent Dragon. Beat that and they can enter the portal and deal with the final encounter of the Campaign, a drawn out, race against time and numbers Demon Encounter at which point the campaign will wrap up with a Dénouement on my part wrapping the whole thing up.
How my Attrition Theory Worked
So above I outlined how I would make this adventure into a kind of a mini-campaign by including an element of attrition in it where the PCs would slowly loose surges as they adventured on the island but could get their surges back if they rested in specific safe zones.
I’d say that the results are pretty much a failure with some bright points. The idea behind this attrition theory was supposed to get the PCs to feel pressured by the island and treat it somewhat strategically by having them work around the safe zones - retreating back to them if their surges got to low. Sort of a system where the PCs would venture out of the safe zones a certain distance looking for the next safe zone or at least the fastest route to the next objective. It was also designed to get it so that the ‘random’ encounters where not actually irrelevant (because they would attrition the PCs who could not get all their surges back with full rests).
Thing is that did not happen like this. My PCs simply refused to treat the adventure strategically. They essentially made it clear that they would head out and push forward to the next objective no matter the cost and if it turned into a TPK well so be it. They where never willing to turn back or treat the adventure strategically and I would say that at the heart of that was that they where not willing to go through more ‘Random’ encounters then absolutely necessary. At one point I pretty much subtly influenced them to ‘conquer’ a safe zone (this would be the ship at the Minotaur Port) because if they had not taken it they would have entered the biggest mini-dungeon in the adventure with only 2 or 3 surges apiece and would have certainly lost the adventure.
It is always interesting as a DM to find oneself in this sort of situation. I’m essentially rigging the game – if subtly, so that the campaign does not end on a sour note with a big defeat after 9 months in an adventure and 4 years of a campaign. There where a couple of moments during the course of the adventure that it looked like my Players where going to TPK and I would have been willing to live with a more standard TPK that ended the campaign – but not one where the PCs just died from not being able to get their surges back. Having the Campaign end in the final adventure because the PCs suffered a TPK in battle would not have seemed completely out of place for how the campaign wrapped up while a ‘drained of surges by the island’ type ending would, I think, have just left too much of a sour note to be acceptable.
All that said the redesign did have some bright points. OK it did not get the players to treat it like I wanted them too…but on the other hand they never caught my subtle influence to get them to capture a safe zone. They are sure it was all their idea and therefore have been happy that they managed to get such a zone when they where so low on surges. Furthermore the surge loss has convinced the PCs to treat the ‘Random’ encounters with a certain amount of respect – they are not complete throw away encounters as far as my PCs are concerned. It is just that they are still these big long encounters that my players are very motivated to avoid so far as possible – but more because they want to get this thing done and even they can see that the ‘Random’ Encounters do not push the plot forward.
At the end of the day I’d say that 4E remains the wrong system to run this type of adventure in. The other issue is simply how long big 4E encounters are. In a much faster system the PCs might be willing to treat the adventure strategically because they would be far less motivated to keep the ‘random’ encounters down to as few as possible. In 4E each encounter takes a full session. Hence 4E, at high level anyway, is the wrong system and this is the wrong time because my players are burnt out and want this to wrap up. If I did not have this combination of Players highly motivated to end this campaign and therefore highly motivated to avoid multiple extra session long combats maybe then I could have managed to push my players to play this strategically but the reality is I do have these underlying motivations driving my players so true strategic play in this island sandbox did not really pan out.
The Retreat
One of the more interesting series of encounters took place when my PCs took on a mini-dungeon of two encounters. Now the mini-dungeons in this adventure have been designed very specifically to play to the strengths of higher level 4E. This means encounters featuring interesting complex combat environments and at high level, usually magic is heavily involved in making the combat encounter interesting.
In this mini-dungeon the PCs needed to make pretty hard arcane checks in order to teleport a companion through a teleporter into the encounter which consisted of a room with a floor that randomly did nasty things to the PCs standing on it (unless a mage made arcane checks to ‘shut the floor down for a turn’. All the while a couple of powerful Iron Golems attacked the PCs and some crossbow turrets blasted at the PCs from the corners of the room. Even when the PCs got teleported into this very large room they would be ‘scattered’ to a random location in the room.
The entire thing was pretty entertaining to play out in that the PCs where kind of being dribbled into the encounter in the first place just as fast as one of the Mage PCs could teleport the PCs in. Then they where scattered and unable to effectively support each other and being attacked by these Iron Golems as well as being peppered by the Crossbows.
The entire situation was kind of unnerving my players and the seemingly unfavourable situation along with the PCs being very used to only having single daily fights led them to go crazy with using their powers so that they where pretty much tapped out on Daily’s by the time this encounter ended. When it further became clear that they would not be able to take a long rest in this room and must push on to the next encounter things went downhill.
In the second (and last) encounter of this mini-dungeon the PCs faced a room that was somewhat maze like and produced these magical spheres that tried to touch the PCs and if they succeeded again there would be nasty results. The main opposition in the room was a Tyrannosphere (though my players called it a Warforged Beholder – which would have been a much cooler name). In any case the PCs seemed to end up scattered being overwhelmed by the magical spheres while the Tyrannosphere just tore them apart with it powerful area attacks. Very quickly in the fight things just seemed to turn south and with the PCs having started by taking a rather slow elevator into the room it quickly became apparent that their was no way for them to easily retreat.
With the Tyrannosphere tearing the party apart it started the seem to everyone, both myself and my Players that we where about to experience a TPK. That fate was very narrowly averted when the mage PCs noted that he had a daily power that could create a portal between any two spaces. Somewhat funny scene ensues as the rest of the players at the table yell at the mage player for not bringing up this power much earlier. Then there is a hair raising event where the mage player gets targeted by a sphere and if I had rolled 7+ on the attack roll the player would have gone down at which point there would be no teleport and well before he could have been brought back the whole party would have started to drop. Fortunately for my players I missed the roll and they fled the dungeon.
Been some time since my PCs where forced to flee an encounter (the Legendary Kraken would have been the last such encounter though that one was rigged and my players figured that out when it was finished). At this point my players decide to continue on with the adventure and come back to retrieve the key from this dungeon later. Likely a good move as they will gain two levels before trying to tackle it again and will be taking it on with some understanding of what they are in for.
It sounds like some mojo has returned to the game.
The definite end date that is not to far in the future has done that more then any other single thing. Basically just knowing that this is going to come to an end and as soon as this adventure is completed got them somewhat out of the rut.
Do Your Job and Get in the Pit
NAME OF PC: Salasie
CLASS AND LEVEL: 17th level Male Human Ranger
Catalyst: Fell in a pit and was convinced to stay down there with a most hostile Beholder.
Long Version: The PCs are slogging through a high level dungeon crawl attempting to get to the Commander of the Minotaurs whose assassination is the reason they came to this island in the first place.
Having fought their way through an army of Minotaur Minions and defeated a hired band of Fire Giants they enter a room where they come upon the Minotaur Commanders ‘advisor’…An Eye Tyrant (or Beholder).
The PCs are pretty freaked out when I show them a picture of a Beholder. None of my players have ever fought such a creature but its power is legendary among all D&D players. As the fight ensues it soon becomes apparent that the Beholder is capable of dishing out some pretty mean effects with its eye stalk rays but maybe more notably it has the ability to shake off pretty much anything including a power that lets it remove the ongoing effects of powers placed on it which means its pretty much impossible to pin down.
As Salasie charges the Beholder it turns out the cunning creature is hovering over a large pit trap which Salasie falls into tumbling 60 feet. Nonetheless while battered such a fall does not really put too much of a dent into a 17th level Ranger. The pit however has my cunning PCs thinking and they hit the Beholder with a power that forces it down to the bottom of the pit and then set up a wall of fire in such a way that the Beholder can’t get out without going through round after round of being in the fire wall.
This would all be all right but of course Salasie is already down in the pit and when he opines that he should crawl out the rest of the players demand that he stays down in the pit and do his job of fighting the Beholder while the rest of the party supports him from the top of the pit.
Unfortunately it soon becomes apparent that 60 feet down (12 squares) is actually to far for most of the PCs to manage to do anything to support their brave Ranger Companion. Nonetheless the Eye Tyrant is bloodied by Salasie along with peppering fire from some of the longer ranged powers among the PCs. Bloodied however triggers an extremely potent power of the Beholders. When bloodied it fires every single eye ray at a random target in range. The problem is that Salasie is the only target in range and he sucks down every single eye ray. When we get to the 8th eye ray – a disintegration ray Salasie finally is knocked past negative bloodied damage while the warlord and cleric – who should be supporting him look on helplessly unable to effect the outcome and Salasie becomes so much dust at the bottom of a pit.
This is the first death my players have experienced in some time so no real problem on that end. The player I killed just joined the campaign for this last adventure but he has played in my campaigns in years past and actually thinks of me as a really brutal DM who kills PCs by the bucketload…it’s a tad odd but I’m actually glad to have managed to maintain that reputation with this player by having it come to pass that once again I’ve bagged one of his characters. My Dungeon however is now in some trouble as the player will bring in another 17th level character next session and the ever so careful draining of the PCs resources that is part and parcel of a 5 encounter dungeon crawl will be a little thrown out of wack. But ce le vie…I bagged a PCs and that is all a DM can ever really hope for.
Odd – Killer Solos
So in recent encounters I have found that the Solo’s often seem to be some of the most brutal encounters for my players. This actually really surprises me. It goes completely against what I was finding for most of the campaign and even seems to be at odds with the basic theory of D&D in general, including 4E. Essentially Solos are supposed to be easier then expected encounters because conditions or power effects (such as Pacification) laid down on a Solo mean that the Solo looses its entire turn.
Nonetheless in the recent part of the campaign my players have come within a hairs breadth of a TPK against a Tyrannosphere and the last PC I killed died when A Beholder opened up on the player with all of its eye rays.
In trying to figure out why the Solos seem to have become more dangerous then earlier in the campaign I have a couple of theories and suspect that it is a mix. One aspect that is always important is party design. My players have 3 controllers a defender, 2 leaders and a striker. Controllers are weak to Solos and my party is stacked with them while having a bit of a weakness in damage dealing so the Solo gets to hang around and use its potent powers.
Another element that might be significant is that I have had more players join the campaign. At first blush one would think that having 7 players instead of 5 would make the Solos weaker but I have a suspicion that it does not. With 5 players the PCs fight a Solo that is at their level or a couple of levels above them but if one is spending the XP budget for 7 players on a Solo then the PCs start facing a Solo that is 4 or so levels higher then them and now the Solo starts to get a bunch of benefits that stand out with the Solos in recent fights. The Solos bonus to hit starts to get really, really high. My players like to apply penalties to their targets to make them miss but if the Solo has +30 to hit even pretty high penalties don’t really mean the Solo miss – often it still hits. The Solo also has very high defences when it is a bunch of levels above the PCs. Often one or two of the Solos defences are so good the players actually need to roll a 14 plus to actually hit. This results in the PCs often simply missing with their attacks which generally makes them pretty ineffective.
At this stage I’m guessing that the combination of the fact that the Solo’s are able to hit despite my players best efforts to stop them from doing that and the fact that the players often miss the Solo despite their best efforts is allowing the Solo to get off more attacks and when it comes down to it Solos often have crazy good attack powers – its just that they tend to not be able to show off their crazy good powers when the players are layering on conditions and penalties.
The Angel Battle
This was another standout interesting fight worth taking a look at. It took place near the end of a pretty classic 5 encounter dungeon and being second to last of the fights my players where playing pretty cautious with the battle trying to save what Daily’s they had not already used for what they assumed was a final battle coming up soon.
In this case I had 4 Angels (of an evil God – in 4E Angels are sometimes the opposition) in an encounter where the other major element was that the floor was kind of like a moving sidewalk – the PCs would be shuffled forward 2d6 squares at the start of their turn.
The design on the Angel encounter was unusual in a couple of ways. Generally in 4E encounters the bad guys don’t have any ability to protect their own or heal but here one of the Angels was an Angel of Protection who could help out the other Angels and all the Angels gave each other temporary hps when they where either bloodied or destroyed.
This gave the Angels a lot of stamina in the encounter. Interestingly when I looked the whole thing over I actually thought the Angels would be pretty easy for my players to beat. The Angels damage output was nothing too impressive and tended to lean toward single target melee attacks. Lowish damage and only against a single player simply felt like something that would not unduly test my players. Though one of the angels had a really nasty power to put ongoing 20 as a minor, something that did not seem that impressive when I first glanced at the stat blocks but would turn out to be pretty impressive in reality.
This started off seeming to work out for my players with them opening up with a bunch of area attack immobilizing powers that seemed to stop the Angels from really being able to do much at all due to the fact that the Angels primarily do melee attacks.
My players even seemed to figure out the best way to work their way through the Angels by bringing the Angel of Protection to them so they could kill it first so that it could not support its Allies.
I was actually rather surprised when this encounter seemed to go south on my players. They had polished off the Angel of Protection without to much trouble but along the way seemed to start running low on good encounter powers. The groups only striker is melee orientated and had a very difficult time dealing with the flying Angels and their reach of 2. The floor eventually brought the players closer to the Angels and the players ran out of ways to immobilize the Angels and the Angels ability to fly around targeting the soft PCs really became apparent. When the cleric went down the PCs started to really freak out – they had to use a potion to bring their cleric back which, at this level, does not even give the cleric enough hps to take a single hit and uses up a very valuable surge. At this point the players decided that the game plan of saving their Daily’s was just not viable – they would loose the encounter if they saved them and for a couple of rounds they really went off with their good stuff. This finally turned the combat around and when they managed to take out more Angels the combat swung well back in their favour as every dead Angel significantly reduced the amount of damage the Angels could dish out. When the combat went down to just the last Angel this really stood out as the Angel was not really able to do more damage then the Clerics daily heal power was able to heal a round and my PCs finally prevailed.
In the end the ability of team evil being able to support itself was not really put on display because the Angel of Protection went down so fast but the constant boost from temporary hps when the Angels where bloodied or died was extremely noticeable in a party that often did area effect damage spread out over all enemy targets as the Angels would tend to negate all the incidental damage that they tended to take and the PCs had difficulty putting out enough damage in the encounter especially after they ran out of encounter powers.
This was definitely a long fight which ran three sessions mainly due to the fact that the Angels could absorb so much damage and the PCs dished out low damage but it was at least an interesting combat. The pure length of the combat meant that powers like ongoing 20 eventually really added up. If the fight had been fairly short it would not have been that brutal but with one Angel pumping this power out every round it eventually really started to drain the PCs, particularly when they ran out of ways to get extra saving throws or raise their saving throw numbers and the power started to stick for multiple rounds.
The fight never really felt like a grind primarily because of how difficult the Players where finding the fight. This jives with my experience throughout 4E at least the way I play it – grind is not really so much about how long a combat is but how long a combat with a forgone conclusion runs. The closest thing I get to grind is the big daily combats with the Dinosaurs. Not usually actually a problem as my players use their Daily’s but they certainly avoid this type of encounter when possible because they are going to win and there won’t be any real long term impact.
Magical Mini-Dungeon Redux (or what a difference a little knowledge makes)
My players returned to the two encounter mini-dungeon that they had escaped by the skin of their teeth some time back (See the Retreat above) and really the story here is how much better this went with them having some idea on how to handle the encounters.
This was true of the first encounter but was especially true of the second encounter.
In the first encounter the PCs mages had to make pretty high arcane checks to teleport either themselves or their comrades into the dungeon at which point the PCs would be scattered somewhere in a large room where the floor attacked them, there where two powerful Volcanic Iron Golems and each corner of the room had crossbows that targeted the closest PC. Interestingly the PCs new exactly what they wanted to do to handle this encounter – get to the elevator that led down because if they where standing on that they would not be attacked by the floor and it was in an indent that would mean they could not be attacked by all the crossbows. The Mage could then stick up a fire wall to make it so no crossbow could hit them and the encounter would be easy. Interestingly this knowledge helped significantly but not really significantly. The reality is that the players figured this out pretty quickly last time they ran this encounter and the real issue was always the fact that the whole sequence of events was unpredictable and hard to control. One simply could not help being scattered or the fact that the party entered over a number of turns. In a lot of ways the second play through of this encounter felt significantly like the first play through. It starts off feeling absolutely brutal and once the PCs manage to get the whole party through the portal and to the safe zone of the elevator it is a complete pushover. The difference that took place in this second play through is that my players had a plan and that plan involved only the most minimal use of daily powers which they knew would have to be saved for the next encounter. Basically speaking it went according to plan but cost more then they would have liked.
The second encounter with the magical spheres and the Tyrannosphere was a whole different story. Here the players planning felt like it made all the difference in the world. I had thought the fact that my players had gained a couple of levels would be a big deal but in retrospect it really was not. The difference in power level between 16th level characters and 18th level characters is actually really small. The new powers don’t count for much because the players don’t have any more powers really. Just a couple of their powers are, maybe, are a few shades better and damage has gone up by a small amount as well the PCs have an extra +1 or so to hit. Maybe they are 5% more powerful…maybe.
Nonetheless where the first time my players did this encounter it had turned into a chaotic fiasco with players leaping off a high elevator, caught in large area effect blasts and being swarmed by magical spheres that screwed them over here it all played out differently. My players used the mages teleport power to enter the room and their plan was to get to the source of the spheres and shut them down one by one before the encounter was just crawling with them.
The reality is that worked and it worked better then I expected. The PCs could pretty much get up on one sphere producer almost right off the bat and then they kind of naturally progressed to the point where the main mage PC and the cleric more or less ran around the room counter clockwise shutting down each sphere producer in turn while the strikers and defenders spread out around the Tyrannosphere and began to lay into it with their powers starting with the best daily’s and just working their way down.
It still felt like a tough encounter – the Tyrannosphere’s high Willpower meant it could not be debuffed by the cleric. Nonetheless once the defenders and strikers pretty much got around it they could not easily be targeted as a group by the Tyrannospheres area effect powers and the players where shutting down and dispelling the spheres fast enough that they where no more then a nuisance and, eventually the PCs worked there way through the 1000+ hps of the Tyrannosphere and won.
The difference that planning made in the second encounter as compared to the first seems to me to really come down to the fact that the PCs could control a lot more with the second encounter – they teleported in at a location of their choosing and then executed their plan while in the first encounter there simply was no way to control where they would end up. The result was that they could use foreknowledge to dramatically improve the situation in the 2nd encounter but only mildly improve their results in the 1st encounter.
Rethinking some lessons learned about 4E skill checks in encounters
Looking at the above mini-dungeon encounters they – and especially the 2nd one really played out well, highlighted 4E style encounters and where enjoyed by all. Weirdly enough the encounter with the Tyrannosphere involved an element that I had thought of as both quintessential 4E and problematic. Way back on page two or three of this thread I covered an encounter where the PCs needed to make skill checks to open a magical sewer gate while Minotaurs just kept showing up and would eventually overwhelm the PCs (this was way back when the PCs where 5th or 6th level and a Minotaur was a really nasty opponents – the minotaur encounters with 16th level PCs had the Minotaurs as Minions for the most part).
In that encounter the players who had to spend their time making skill checks to open the sewer complained that the encounter was really boring for them and I believe after that I made it so skill checks in encounters would just be move actions so the PCs could still use their powers and participate.
Technically that was true in this encounter – all the skill checks where move actions but the mage and cleric had to do a lot of running in this encounter and then used their standards to convert them to move actions to make more skill checks. Nonetheless they really did not complain about it and seemed to have a really good time in the encounter despite not using their powers.
Why the discrepancy? Part of it could just be the players involved. The player that was complaining in the original 6th level encounter complains any time his PC is rendered ineffective for any reason. He complained in a later encounter where he got restrained and could not use his melee combat abilities and complains every single time his character gets stunned and looses his turn. So maybe I learned the wrong lesson. All that said even if I was dealing with a player that was particularly unhappy at not getting a real turn my choice to make most skill checks in combat into move actions was one I think was a good one – giving the players some ability to really participate if they wanted to makes for more fun encounters – I still recommend that.
That said I think two other aspects helped in this encounter to make not using combat powers seem fun. The fact that it was mobile, that there was choices in terms of using the skills to dispel spheres or keep moving or try and shut down a sphere producer meant that the skill checks kind of felt like using powers and the PCs felt like they where progressing and making their own choices. It is all a matter of perception but at the end of the day there is a world of difference between spending your turns just standing there making a skill check against an inanimate object while your buddies play an encounter and progressing through the middle of an encounter running all over the map – while potentially under fire and dodging your way through danger to make skill checks at different parts of the map. The first one is boring while the second one is actually pretty exciting even if you are not unleashing your daily’s.
The Odd Complex Monster Problem
I was running an encounter in which my PCs faced off against a sizable pack of very potent magical spiders and bumped into an issue that had come up a few times before but which was actually a little counter intuitive. Basically the spiders all had a plethora of powers along with elements like powers with after effects and such and I noticed that the encounter was really difficult to run. It seems counter intuitive as one would sort of assume that if all the monsters where the same that would make running a bunch of them easier but my experience has been that it actually makes them harder as you have to try and track which monster has used which of the many powers and which have not and this puts quite a strain on the DMs cognitive carrying capacity.
I actually find that having a whole bunch of different monsters even if all of them are complex to be far easier to run simply because it is actually so much easier to track who has done what. Not to say that a bunch of different complex monsters is actually easy – you still find it slowing the encounter down and such but your less likely to find yourself lost. At this stage I would say that it is probably a bad idea to use more then two complex monsters of the same type in an encounter. If there needs to be more then two then it may well be worth it to either use different monsters or to simplify the monsters and rely on a few big hit type powers to keep the encounter challenging.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Did monsters change a lot in the "D&D Essentials" run? I know that classes from Essentials tended to be less power oriented, by and large, and I wondered if monsters were too.
I've done a number of posts on monsters in 4E but pretty much the bottom line is monsters changed a lot throughout the course of 4E. To the point where I attempt to use monsters created after the release of Darksun and avoid using those made before that date.
This can get to extremes with the monsters made around the time of the original Monster Manual being just aweful - a failure by WotC to really understand the role of Monsters in Dungeons and Dragons really.
Monsters improved as time went on. The original design of monsters had emphasized simplicity. The monsters had few powers and the goal was to make monsters that would fit into small stat blocks and be easy to run. It is worth noting that at this stage WotC still believed that 4E was going to have fast combat. The monsters where not only too weak - especially in regards to how much damage they did (trivial amounts) but where straight out boring - having awesome PC powers is only 1 part of the fun - beating boring monsters it turns out is not actually all that entertaining.
By Monster Manual Two the first fixes where in and this pretty much involved generally giving monsters more powers to make them not only a little more powerful but also more interesting. It helps a bit and some of the monsters have interesting powers but low damage out put still means the monsters are very weak.
Monster Manual 3 (and monsters made in books from around this period) continue the trend, damage remains far too low but monsters start to get a more focused suite of powers, which is to say not just attack powers but other kinds of helpful powers more often. Powers a better designed not to 'overlap' as much. Basically giving a monster 3 attack powers that all require a standard action is usually not ideal. It is usually only going to use one of them. However by this stage when this happens usually they at least do different things - a focused attack and a ranged attack for example. If the monster really fits I'll customize an MM3 Monster where as I will alomost always simply skip over an earlier one.
Darksun was the real watershed moment in Monster Design - they finally serously upped the amount of damage monsters can do and some of the Darksun Monsters are the most nasty creatures in the game. I don't really hesitate to use Darksun Monsters though a few of them have powers that are actually to powerful - usually something along the lines of 'first failed saving throw = death'. Also the Solo problem still exists with Darksun Monsters.
Essentials is nearly perfect - I still do some customization for my very min maxed group to make most more powerful but the tweaks are needed least for Essentials (and the books that come after). This is the best place to find Solo's in particular with most of them being designed to take into account the fact that PCs are going to try and stun or daze them. They have ways out of this sort of stuff and usually ways to take a lot of actions in a turn to challenge a larger group.
There was one final evolution right at the very end of the edition where we seemed to kind of go full circle with monsters becoming much simpler - however they where extremely hard hitting. I assume this was kind of testing for 5E. I'm not super enamored with this last design. It just does not save that much time in the long 4E combats but makes the monsters less interesting opponents but they are still basically fine and can be good for some roles.
So the answer actually is that Essentials Monsters are more power orientated not less but that is for the best...but one should avoid using more then two of the same type of monster if they are fairly complex (after effects to powers - lots of encounter or recharge when first bloodied type powers - interrupts).
Treasure Woes
With my PCs off on a lost tropical island for the remainder of the campaign I have bumped into an issue with wealth by level – well I have bumped into two issues and only one of them was really wealth by level. One of them was a ‘bonus surprise’ that basically backfired.
OK the first issue is simply the fact that out on a tropical island and the promise that the campaign ends when the PCs return to civilization has essentially made the vast piles of gold the PCs are finding worthless. In truth this bothers me not at all. My players are pretty min-maxed and high level and it did not bother me really at all that they could not convert their gold wealth by level into magic items. They don’t need the extra power provided by the magic to be potent. I was also somewhat interested in getting a bit of a taste for 5E in this regards after all no one will be buying much in the way of magic items in that edition.
Despite me pointing this out I would say that for some (though not really all) of my players the inability to take their monetary wealth and convert it into magic items was not at all a hit. They have complained bitterly about the situation and one player even retired a player character seemingly primarily because he would get to choose new magic items using the bringing in a new character rules. Though I’m not actually certain that was exactly why that player retired the character. Simply that this was his stated reason for doing so. This player does have something of a tendency to get bored with his PC every so often and bring in a new one and he was the one running the ‘focus on Slumber of the Winter Court and Dominates’ build that I noted some time back is a trap build as I won’t let his auto win powers work in any encounter I have put real time and effort in designing. So it might well be in part a desire not just for a change but also to get out of a build where every encounter with something other then the ‘random encounter’ Dinosaurs ends up being one where Slumber of the Winter Court simply won’t actually work.
In any case I certainly have no fans in terms of eliminating the ability of the players to convert their gold wealth into something useful in the adventure and if I where to do this all again I think I would have provided the NPC tribes with at least alchemy items the PCs could have bought. I think that would have made the issue less problematic. I do wonder how this is going to go over in 5E where gold eventually really does become pretty worthless.
My other issue actually stems in part from this first one. I decided to compensate to some extent by having a one level only wish list. So when the players went through the big finale dungeon off to kill the Minotaur leader after every encounter they would get to find one item from their wish lists. I gave my players a month to choose wish list items and when half of them failed to get around to it I gave them a two week extension….which resulted in exactly no new entries to the wish list. At this point I threw up my hands and used the wish list for the three players (of 7) that had provided wish lists so their characters got pretty decked out.
This was allowed to fly but led to fighting among the players when one of the players that had not submitted a wish list (same player who changed his character actually) then argued that he should get a share of the wish list items – he had a point in the sense that using the magic item picking rules for who got dibs on regular ‘random’ treasure drops he might well have a turn but was argued down by the players that had made the wish lists insisting that they got the items because they where wish list items and he had opted out when he choose not to submit a wish list. These players got their way (in large part because the other players that did not submit a wish list actually sided with the wish list players – agreeing that they don’t get anything because they never made a wish list).
End of the day though this all felt like far to much anger and hurt feelings. This was supposed to be a fun bonus but it really just felt like squabbling and hurt feelings. Even the players that had managed to submit their wish lists did not really seem all that thrilled and ultimately I would say that I would probably have just been better off if I had stuck with handing out random loot. Though I also think that a big issue here was the usual campaign fatigue. Two years ago I would not have had a situation where most of my players could just not be bothered to submit a wish list. At this stage expecting them to just show up is asking a lot – I need to stay away from actually making them do any work.
Still it was also a clear boo-boo for there to have been any issue with wealth by level or any of that sort of thing. If one is going into the grand finale for ones campaign then it is time to be DM Santa Claus and make sure that the really phat loot flows and there is no reason for ones players to be unhappy in this regard. Now is not the time to be trying to help out play balance by cutting off the loot tap…better to just up the power of the opposition.
Official Campaign End
While I'll likely still be adding posts to this thread for a little bit longer as I do a denouement for the campaign and then go on to provide my players an adventure by adventure campaign summery (which will involve a lot of looking over the posts on this thread) for the next few months the campaign officially ended on Wednesday March 9th, 2016 with the PCs completion of the Island in the Sea of Time Adventure.
The Battle With the Dragon Calastrix
As my players closed in on the end of the adventure and the campaign I threw them up against an Iconic Monster as the penultimate encounter.
Calastrix is Iconic on a number of levels. The big Dragon battle is pretty much the most iconic of encounter types in all of Dungeons and Dragons and in 4E in particular Calastrix is iconic as one of the four well thought out and designed Dragons of 4E – and the most powerful. Coming from the Monster Book Threats to Nintir Vale Calastrix is essentially the epitome of 4E monster design, especially in regards to Dragons. Threats to Nentir Vale gives us four Dragons (Sadly no Blue) each of which is unique but comes with all the bells and whistles of late 4E era Solo’s. Specifically Calastrix has three heads and gets the ability to take actions at three different initiative counts, can make saves and otherwise shake off conditions at the end of each of her heads turns. All of this is supposed to help her handle the weak points of Solos in the ability to remove conditions and overcome the limited actions issue.
That said while this was the base design of Calastrix the version I eventually went with saw some significant changes in the build on my part. I believe I expanded out her condition removal abilities but this was pretty much to just include the ability to get rid of every really brutal condition in 4E. Her original build allowed her to get rid of lots of them but not all of them and it seemed like more of a design oversight then something intentional. The Unconscious Condition is not something that is really common in player powers but it comes up and it is so powerful that players take it whenever they get the chance – so allowing her to get rid of that goes right along with allowing her to get rid of the stun or dominate effect. I swapped out one of her major powers in that I removed her ability to grow a new head when bloodied. This was primarily for fluff reasons – multi-headed Dragons are core to the lore of my campaign and a three headed Dragon fit right in…but not one that could grow a new head.
I replaced that ability with a power that let her recharge all her breath weapons – made her Rip and Tear power recharge when first bloodied, gave her an action point and maybe the biggest of them all ‘all effects of powers on Calastrix end’. That one was likely the most significant effect of all. You can bet the players have (and will have used) all sorts of potent ‘until the end of the encounter’ powers on her and this got rid of them when she was first bloodied.
All that said these where essentially cosmetic changes. A bit of swapping and such. Par for the course in how I design 4E monsters. However for this fight – the last of the huge Solo fights of the entire campaign and quite possibly the last big Solo fight in 4E we ever play I wanted to do something special and also maybe take this final opportunity to do some 4E testing.
When I first put together her stat block and ran my usual modification on it I came upon a bit of a problem. She had a great stat block but it looked a lot like what we had seen in Solo’s recently. Specifically she had fantastic defences, very good hps, yadda yadda. The problem initially was her great Will defence. Needless to say I had kind of gotten into the habit of giving my Solo’s good ability scores that helped out Will and such but now I was staring at a stat block that really reminded me of both the Beholder and the Tyrannosphere. The Tyrannosphere in particular had great defences (in my version of 4E each monster class gets some kind of a benefit and Controllers have great non - AC defences).
It makes for a challenging encounter but it does so by making it hard for the players to hit with their powers and the non-stop string of high Will Solo’s means the Cleric is nerfed by not being able to connect with his powerful nerf powers. For this fight it did not feel as authentic as it had with the Beholder and the Tyrannosphere. Calastrix is a Brute and they are low defence high hp creatures. Once I started thinking along these lines though it dawned on me that maybe it was time to really break the rules in terms of monster design. Not just fiddle with the stat block but make something that the Stat Block simply does not generate on its own but might well be fun for my players and still make a good encounter.
My, maybe not so unique, idea was to make a challenging encounter that still allowed my players powers to work. Basically I decided to lower Calastrix’s defences – though nothing super low, and give her extra hps. I pretty much set her defences in the low to mid 30’s. This meant that my players would generally hit her so long as they rolled better then a 7 (and this could well go up if the players first layered on powers that would give them bonuses – which they like to do).
I initially set her hps at 2000 but ultimately went with 1800 hps. That made her, by far, the creature with the most hps of the campaign. I believe the Tyrannosphere was second place and it had just around 1000 hps.
There was also a bit of an unusual element to the design of the encounter. Calastrix was being used as a Gate Guardian, for a planar gate on an island and my players had to get to the island which they did with a large raft. The Encounter was supposed to have the water suddenly start boiling in front of the players as she emerged from the Lake after which she would make a pass over the players using her breath weapons and then fly off for a final encounter at the Gate itself. This was meant to keep it so that the battle would be fundamentally ground based. Dragons can fly but in reality they are actually melee combatants at heart. They have a breath weapon but it is pretty short ranged and needs to recharge. The real bread and butter of most Dragons is their physical suite of attacks. This is true even in 4E and was true of Calastrix. This would also be better for my players who had a number of melee combatants and having Clastrix flying around to breath on the players whenever her heads recharged seemed to possibly to turn the encounter into something not very exciting. That said it would not work like that at all.
It is worth noting that I was somewhat concerned with this encounter going in. Fundamentally it is very reminiscent of a lot of the weak points of early 4E monsters. Calastrix, ultimately, does not actually have all that many powers. She is a pretty simple design. She has massive numbers of hps however. This really stands out as what one tended to see early on in 4E. Monsters, especially Solo’s, with tons of hps that take forever to die but which seems to bore the players as they spend an inordinate amount of time slowly working their way through all of these hps. I was especially concerned as the early Hydra’s where often cited as the quintessential example of this problem and the reality is that Calastrix seems a lot like an early 4E Hydra. I did say this was something of an experiment to see how that would work out.
So how did the battle go? Well Calastrix emerges and my players are certainly freaking out. She starts getting most of them in the blasts of her breath weapon but pretty quickly my players begin to alleviate the situation. For one thing they don’t even bother with the idea of saving their powers for later encounters – deciding right off the bat that this was a single daily encounter and it was going to be one where they would use their daily powers up as fast as possible. They very quickly find ways to either get at Calastrix or use powers to essentially pull her to them. The reality is her defences are low so their powers pretty much work and that means that their battlefield shaping powers work.
It soon becomes apparent that I am never going to get a chance to fly away with Calastrix. They drag her in and lock her down and then begin to dish out the damage and I realize that Calastrix really just does not have the ability to get away. If I try and fly away with her she will lose her attacks while my players won’t loose theirs for the most part and they can bring her back and lock her down. The reality is this is going to be a stand up knock down fight with very limited maneuvering for Calastrix as she will be under the effects of ‘stay where you are’ powers and my players simply can’t maneuver to much because they are stuck on the raft (they could and occasionally do dive into the drink but swimming is slow so they don’t do it much).
One of the stand out features of this encounter is that one of the players has a Barbarian that has really been designed to pair with an enabling Warlord. Now the Warlord player has not been showing up so I have not seen how this team works but for this session an old member of the group is visiting town and it is decided that he can cameo for the session and run the Warlord. Needless to say the Barbarian, always good, is just brutal with the help of the Warlord to provide loads of attacks and auto criticals and such.
The players ability to layer on the nerfs and such is in full effect since their powers can hit the low defences. Especially as the cleric often likes to utilize defence lowering powers.
The dice are not really gong my way in the fight. Calastrix has a phenomenal +26 to hit. That is high enough that normally it should allow her to overcome anything but the most devastating of nerfs but my players do get -6 down pretty consistently and while +20 to hit is still pretty good it is closer to a 50/50 chance to hit and I think I was rolling pretty poorly for the encounter, straight out missing a lot of the even odds attacks.
Calastrix could still dish out pretty good damage but not enough to counter the large amount of healing my players could put together. Ultimately the encounter was significantly shorter then I had expected. Calastrix lasted a mere 4 rounds, the most notable facet of that was really the sheer amount of damage the Barbarian could put out with the Warlord giving him extra attacks – the Barbarian probably did 800 hp worth of damage in 4 rounds meaning that a single character (though in truth its two characters) did about 40% of the damage in the encounter.
My players never really ran out of good powers in this combat 4 rounds is not really enough to drain them. The possible exception was the Ranger who is designed to be a really dedicated Nova build but even he was just getting in the neighborhood of running out of powers – not actually tapped out.
In the end, despite all the build up, of how powerful Calastrix was, the encounter was a bit of a push over. Don’t think any character went down, healing not really tapped out, the players where just not actually pushed toward their limit here. Ultimately large hps, at least in this case, don’t make up for low defences, though the combo of the Barbarian and the Warlord in some very real ways threw a wrench into the experiment by so significantly upping the groups damage output. Still even if the Barbarian had only been able to do 400 hps damage – which is about what he can do over 5 rounds without the Warlord I don’t think an extra round would have changed much and the rest of the party could probably have gotten the other 400 hps in. with another round, maybe round and a half.
The bottom line was this Dragon was just overmatched in a way that some of the other more difficult encounters recently where not. She had stamina and the ability to get out of most of the debilitating effects that the party could lay down but, despite appearances, simply could not put out enough damage or effects to stop the PCs from doing what they wanted to do each and every round. They are 18th level PCs and even her breath weapon was only doing about 32 points of damage, 16 on a miss and that is maybe a ¼ to an 8th of any PCs hps. Reality is at this level the opposition really needs to be pulling out huge guns to even phase the party – something along the lines of 50 points of damage, and your prone and your stunned (save ends) and tell me about it when you make your save because then I’m going to f$%! you some more – anything less and it simply won’t phase the players. Their hp totals are around 100 for each character but that is really just the tip of the iceberg. Grand total there is another 700 or so hps behind that for the group in healing and they won’t really start flipping out unless that 700 points behind is on the verge of being tapped out. If one wants to get them to sit up and take notice one really has to use an anvil and Calastrix had no anvil though her very high HP total made for a reasonable facsimile for this one encounter.
OK so this was an experiment about whether high hp monsters akin to early 4E ones would cause grind. I’d say the answer is yes though there was no grind in this specific encounter. The dichotomy comes about because grind is not an objective state but a perception – this combat was not a grind because my players never realized that actually it was. If I did encounters along this lines, say using some early Hydra’s and the like, my players would catch on after three encounters or so and would be falling asleep. In this specific instance the ever rising HP count, instead of boring them had them enthralled – you can’t really pull that rabbit out of your hat as a DM more then once however. Eventually the big number no longer keeps them interested…instead it bores them by telling them that they still have another two hours of slogging before the monster inevitably dies.
Classist versus Modernist in Adventure Design
As my PCs headed for the Abyss – specifically the first layer of the abyss, Pazunia the Plane of Infinite Portals for the final encounter of the Campaign I found I needed to write some flavour text for when they got through the gate and ended up on Pazunia. At this point it dawned on me that I don’t, exactly, know what Pazunia is like. I mean I have a kind of basic idea – I’ve read D&D supplements that describe it and places in it in every edition but I’ve never had PCs visit the place. Still not a huge issue – I pulled one of the texts off my shelf and looked it up – I’m particularly fond of the 3rd edition text on the Abyss which had Eric Mona as one of the authors.
This is turn got me thinking that different authors must approach this problem in different ways. Here I’m calling them Classists and Modernists because hubris – well and I had to call them something. What I mean is that, when it comes to something like D&D with its huge history and vast numbers of supplements adventure designers are likely to fall into one of a number of camps. The two primary camps are people like myself – Classicists who really on vast libraries of background material to support their adventure design by essentially looking up information from supplements and utilizing that to support their work. For example when I utilized a Beholder in my adventure I first went and grabbed my copy of the 2nd edition supplement I, Tyrant as well as rereading the relevant section of the 3rd edition supplement Lords of Madness before even placing the monster in my adventure.
That said I am sure that there are a great many DMs that would not have gone through such measures – most of the DMs I know don’t have vast libraries of material dating back to 1st edition. They would simply have used a Beholder and been done with it – they make up what they need for the adventure and move on. Call them Modernists – or at least that is what I’m calling them in this post. Nothing really wrong with that either – at the end of the day the material I read regarding the Beholder was all pretty much just background information. At least an hour of research went into that endeavour and I probably did little more with it then add material to the written part of the adventure that was known only to the DM (myself) in terms of why the Beholder was there – my players never really found out – they just killed it. I got a bit of flavour text in terms of having the Beholder use its disintegrate eye ray to do some custom work on its lair, I got the sneaky idea of using a pit trap and having the Beholder hover over it and finally I gave the Minotaur leader a specialized power that let him have a 50% chance of essentially ignoring the dominate condition because he was so used to being dominated by the Beholder and yet acting independently of close instruction…a power that never came up in the fight with the Minotaur Leader because my players never dominated him.
It was much like that again when my players got to Pazunia – I read them flavour text inspired by 45 minutes to an hour of my research – but they don’t really know or care that this is the case and would not have been able to tell if I just made it up. The encounter exists in the form it does because I knew that Pazunia was the Plane of Infinite Portals and that therefore it could be that PCs could get from one place to another by passing through the plane which is something however. It is a bit of an edge I have as a Classist DM, I can draw on all this knowledge I have spent decades packing into my brain and sometimes use it to make some interesting encounters that maybe would not have existed otherwise.
It also dawns on me that there are those – like Eric Mona at Pazio that are essentially Classists forced to become Modernists. Paizo needed to make its own campaign world and therefore Eric Mona became a defacto Modernist – he had to start making things up from more or less scratch. That said one can see a strong Classicist approach to the Endeavour. Pazio’s homebrew has essentially grown to become its own well detailed world meant to support a classicist style of play.
In some ways that is always the case for a DM that runs their own campaign world. While I am pretty heavily a Classicist myself the fact that I have my own unique homebrew means that I am also a modernist. In fact over time it became clear that there are some significant issues with the classicist approach in D&D. At one point I sat down to write my campaigns core creation mythology and had meant to weave this so that it includes a great many conceits of classic D&D only to recognize that core D&D mythology was never created using what TV producers would call a ‘Bible’. It is chalk full of stories that simply cannot all be true. For example the world creation story that leads to the Blood War between Demons and Devils and the Orc Mythology about the Gods of Elves and Humans and Halflings etc. divvying up the world and Grumash using his spear to gouge out places in the world for Orcs to live are mutually exclusive. They can’t both be true. It was something I really struggled with when I tried to wrap everything together to form an overall coherent mythology when I created my homebrew.
It dawns on me that I have encountered this before – many years ago I was at a gaming convention and I got a chance to ask Ed Greenwood how it was possible for the Gods of Forgotten Realms to have both the Kura-Tur mythology of a Celestial Bureaucracy while the western Gods of the Inner Sea and such seemed to have no such thing. Either there was a Celestial Bureaucracy that mirrored everything in the world or there was not – can’t have it both ways. Ed Greenwood pretty much just said that this was a mystery of the Forgotten Realm Cosmos. Never did like that answer but there it was and such things are rife in D&D. Hence even a classicist such as myself – at least one that wants a consistent answer – simply becomes a classicist of their particular homebrew…or they learn to live with the contradictions…chances are your players will never notice after all.