I'm currently playing the end (?) of my campaign in which i do the GM for a party of 6 people. They started the campaign at first level in September and my intention is to end the campaign at the end of June letting them to reach level 20. I'm not a new GM, I've made a lot of campaigns and I've been mastering for 10 years, but I never had players beyond level 10-13. Maybe it's also the dimension of the group, but I find really difficult to manage the game now that they are around level 16 and especially I find combats a real nightmare.
My campaign are usually politically-driven and combats are never the main activities for the party, but now they're in a situation in which they are going to face a lot of them and I'm quite scared.
For those who are interested I summarize the plot here:
Basically they started in the Silver Marches (we're in Forgotten Realms) around Mithral Hall in 1372 CV helping the King to rebuild the city. The paladin of Lathander also had a sacred quest in the name of his god and he had to find a chalice that's named "Chalice of Dawn" which was composed by three parts, the first one is the chalice itself, the second one is a big emerald and the third one is a little mysterious and still unknown to them. Lathander told the paladin that this artifact could help him in regaining his city that was taken by an evil lich something like 50 years ago. This city was set inside the marshes above Cormyr. We also have the sorceress which has blood of silver dragons and who wanted to understand more about her blood doing some researches that led her to Candlekeep where she found that her main ancestor is a powerful female dragon called Pharyssolnyth that is currently sleeping. She contacted her powerful ancestor and the dragon tell her that her blood is the key for a large historic event that is going to happen soon in Faerun: the rebirth of Bahamut. The story here is a little bit different from the canonical one in Forgotten Realms, but I made some modifications. The other character is a female monk of Ilmater which is 16 and was raised by the paladin in the city orphanage. The girl was found with a tear tatooed on her cheek (which is something that is reserved only to high priests of Ilmater) and the will to understand her origins led them to reach Candlekeep and the city of Proskur where she discovers that she is the natural son of Ilmater. She understand this tracking the movements of the god during the Time of Troubles and after having found a diary written by his mother in which he describes the father of her children like Ilmater (I cut something because this description is becoming too big :P ). She also discovers that her mother was kidnapped by someone that later they will identify as "Th Cult of the Dragon" for the purpose to use her body to give birth to the child of Tiamat (for which they want to use a woman who had already bared a "divine pregnancy". Then we have a witch coming from the Rashemen that was sent to investigate upon the cult of the dragon and its relationship with the Thayans since in the last months they have seen a growing presence of dragons and dracolichs during the Thayan attacks to their homelands. The last two PCs (who entered later in the game) are an Uthgar oracle which has the sacred mission to rally the barbarians tribes and march on the Lich swamps, and an elven ranger which has a powerful dragon named Malachite (and which cooperates with the cult of the dragon) as nemesis and who wants to avenge his death brother.
Now they're going towards the lich castle who is built North of Cormyr after a war that they were able to win. They'll have to sneak into a portal because the castle is built geographically inside a swamp, but it lies in a demiplane of the Plane of Shadows, which is reachable just using that portal.
Short story now: I have a human paladin, a human oracle of ancestors, an elven ranger (ranged-kind), a human sorcerer/dragon disciple, a human witch and a human monk. My big problem are the combats because I cannot find a middle way to make challenging encounters in a reasonable amount of time and which are not too deadly.
In order to make the encounter difficult I always try to have action economy by my side adding minions and preferring to have more weak creatures than a single powerful monster. The problem here is that the fightings last WAY TOO MUCH, I mean in one of the last session we made an encounter against an orc warlord and his fellows; they fought against the warlord (a battle oracle), 4 bodyguards (barbarians), 1 high level cleric (18th level) and 8 orc minions. The combat was an important one for the storyline so I wanted it to be challenging and epic, so it was (more or less), but it lasted so long that we barely made the combat in an entire session of 3-4 hours. I don't want to repeat the experience: I know that maybe they should fight more than one encounter per day so that they don't keep all their powerful abilities for one combat, but I'm afraid to have multiple combats and now that (for story reasons) I will be forced to do that (they're entering in the castle of the lich, which is well-guarded) I fear that we will pass sessions just rolling dice.
The situation is bad also if I use a big monster, instead of a lot of small ones, because for action economy they basically always kill him without too much efforts.
My question is: at these levels, where the power of my characters is really high, what can I do when I'm forced to run an high number of combats? Of course I could reduce the number of fightings, but I want to hear some advices for you before modifying my idea of the final castle.
Thank you very much if you go through all the post and I'm sorry if I was a little bit unclear in some points, but English is not my mother tongue.
EDIT:
I forgot to add that the Paladin has the Leadership feat, so in the group there's also a Shadowdancer which is part of the paladin order. It's not too powerful (and not optimized), but it's worth mentioning it.
The CR system was built for your problem.
Shoot for 3-5 monsters and follow the CR rules in the GMing guidelines. Run the encounter, see how well they do. If they spank it, add 1 to the CR of the next encounter. If they spank that, add one more. You can easily manipulate CR on the fly between encounters by adding the advanced template, or adding an extra monster.
It's harder to do this with NPCs, so try to stick to some monster-only fights for a bit. Use the monster template generator over on d20pfsrd to swap templates in and out. Once you get a firm grasp on what CR your party is actually performing at, draw up your NPC encounters to properly entertain that CR.
Not all combat needs to be challenging. When your players know that every combat is going to be serious they tend to prepare for it. This leads to a situation where all the resources of the group are geared for high level encounters. When all you have to deal with is high level encounters you stop preparing for the trivial encounters. This is particularly common at high levels
If the players have to waste high level spells to deal with low level threats this reduces their resources significantly. After this happens a couple of times the players will probably start to prepare some of their spells to deal with the lower level threats. This means that they have less resources to deal with the high level threats so you can actually scale back the encounters and still have them be challenging.
The whole idea is to not let the players have all their resources available for the big fight. At high levels the characters have a lot of resources and if you don’t drain away some of them they will overpower most things. As strange as it may seem having more trivial encounters may speed things up considerably.
|
Run games at this level a few times. A few things that might help are below. Get your player buy in before using these.
1. Use average damage instead of rolling piles of dice. Or do half dice/half average if you want more variability. Can speed play immensely for casters.
2. Let players know when they are "on deck" and are going next so they can have their action ready. Don't let them dawdle when their turn comes up. If they aren't ready, they delay and initiative moves on. Use your judgement on this. Circumstances can change and negate planned actions.
3. Hand wave the remainder of a fight once it becomes obvious the party will win. Ask casters to mark off a few low spells and assign a percentage of hp damage (like 5%).
4. Don't be afraid to change things on the fly if the party is having a rough time. The CR system is your enemy at this level. It's very easy to pick an appropriate level challenge that the party struggles against because they are missing the necessary abilities to deal with it. Lower hp, have defensive spells wear off suddenly, etc. The converse can happen too. Don't be afraid to add hp to an appropriate level challenge they are steamrolling.
Always remember to have fun and don't let the combat system overtake the game you want to run and the players want to play!
If you only have one or two encounters a day then the party can easily handle something of APL +4 or +5. Lots of encounters make them husband their resources rather than drop their most powerful attacks immediately. Those powerful attacks can end encounters very quickly.
I'm surprised that you only encountered this problem at level 16. By level 6 in our group of 6, we've had encounters take 2+ sessions, and not just for the big bads. At level 9, we had an encounter take 4+ sessions (and we start at 7:30-8:00 and go until ~12:00, maybe later).
Some tips:
-Make sure your players keep track and are familiar with their total bonuses/penalties/modifiers/whatever. I find that a lot of the time we're wasting is trying to calculate totals of rolls for attacks, damage, etc. This is especially true for Criticals (though for us it's to be expected, since we use a modified critical formula).
-Not all encounters need to be "ZOMGGOTTAGOHARD" to be a drain on resources. Forcing the party to rely on only one or two methods (which drain respective resources) to defeat an encounter are also viable (and depending on how you run it, challenging) means to run a given encounter. Some famous videogames with monsters that reanimate unless destroyed in a specific manner is a prime example of this. (Bloody Skeletons follow this same mechanic.)
-Follow the KISS guidelines. That is, Keep It Simple, Stupid. If you have mooks whose only purposes are to attack or do one single thing, you'll run through that part of the encounter so much easier. Although it doesn't solve problems on the PC's end, it still helps the overall issue.
-Enforce the 6-second rule: Give each player 6 seconds to decide what they're going to do for their turn, and if they don't decide, their turn is skipped, and they are considered Dazed until their turn comes up again (makes sense, since they aren't able to decide what to do in the given timeframe); it will force the players to plan their turns ahead of time, and cut down a lot of time being spent second-guessing and power-gaming, if it is present at your tables (something which they should be doing anyway, given their level, though I find encounters at the endgame are determined by the time Initiative is rolled half the time). Although players may not like it, if you express your concern of encounters taking way too long, and having it become abstract to the game you were running previously before the game session begins, they should be sympathetic and agree to it.
|
I have run some high level games and a campaign with 6 players (not both at same time).
For higher level games, I try to make sure that I am very familiar with the monster's abilities. Playing the monster to its strength can often be the difference between challenging and trivial. You can also stagger the flood of enemies allowing the players to pick off a few before the next set. This reduces the number of active combatants at any given time and keeps the party engaged (challenged).
For a group of 6, I found that the biggest difference was the amount of damage that the group produced. I increased the HP of every creature by 50-100% and things leveled out a bit. With an extra 2 characters hitting the enemies they were just dying too quickly.
In general, I expect combats to last 3-4 rounds. I have had a combat that lasted 30+ rounds (it was intended to last the entire session and ended a major portion of a campaign) and combats which lasted one PC's action. Typically, the goal is to catch the party off guard and/or not let them prepare. A pre-buffed party initiating combat will typically win swiftly (i.e., one round give or take a surprise round).
I have found Minotaur Games Rule Zero: Underlings PDF is especially quick & useful for building minions to assist BBEG's for high level challenges.
It is only an investment of a $2.99. The OP might want to try that.
|
RPG Superstar 2013 Top 16
|
It's also true that high-level combats, in general, just take longer. Players are less familiar with high-level abilities, which means you have to spend more time looking stuff up. Everybody has more attacks, which take more time to adjudicate. Significant defenses and the ubiquity of battlefield controls stymie quick offenses.
So unless you somehow get the drop on somebody and can rocket tag them to death, you're probably in for an epic slugfest. Which, IMO, is a feature, not a bug.
|
Another thing you can do is to modulate your encounters so that enemies come in waves. If the fight goes to quickly, introduce wave 2. If you find you've goofed and the encounter is much more difficult than you'd intended, you can simply drop the later waves. Since most high level areas, like a lich's tower, should have both lots of rooms and levels and easy ways for enemies within the area to communicate, this shouldn't be too hard to implement and justify, and if you make it too hard, a few rooms that you had previously intended to have inhabitants are instead empty.
Thank you everybody, they're good solutions and I think I'm going to try a couple of them in my game. I was thinking about introducing the five second rule, I was afraid that it would have penalized them too much, but maybe it's time for them to face that they have to help me a little bit (also by learning their characters' abilities).
Here's a terrific thread from yesteryear chock full of great tips on how to speed up high level combat.
This is a very good thread, i found a couple of useful solutions here too.