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I took a long Hiatus from these boards to sort some stuff out. I'm back for a while and wanted to get back into discussing something I love.
Mid to high level play and how to be prepared for it in various ways.
I started a thread like this just prior to leaving the boards a year or so ago, but rather than necro that one, I thought we could start something fresh.
I'd like to see if this thread can be a place where experienced DM's can offer advice for other DM's on how to handle certain situations that crop up at mid to high level games.
People often discuss E6, so let's go from level 7 up.
The idea is either throw your experience out there for others to read, or ask questions, pose scenarios and see what others have done in their games.
will post again soon with an example of something that might crop up (running out of daylight and still have some jobs to get done in the house)
Cheers
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So, my first example.
Invisibility and flying come on board at level 5 6 and 7 for many creatures and casters.
This means as a DM, you're coming into the game with the potential to truly wipe groups not prepared for that type of fight (either inexperienced players or a group mix not ready for the invisible/flying foe). This is particularly true if your players aren't the type who like to retreat from combat. If this is the case for your group, its worth giving them an encounter that's not overwhelming but lets them experienced this phenomenon. They don't get wiped, they do get scared and hopefully they get a chance to think about methods to deal with this.
As players, they also get access to these as casters or through consumable items such as potions or wands or even magic items like boots and rings (though the last two are considerably more expensive than level 5 - 7 would normally have). If they use these tactics, let them have their day in the sun for a while. They're great abilities and can allow a group to truly be creative in tackling problems.
If it becomes an issue for you as DM, there are things to remember. For starters invisibility only gives a +20DC to being spotted. If characters are doing things like casting while invisible, this counts as a loud noise. The DC to know where the caster is now drops to 15 or less (+ distance modifiers). Creatures will spot that and then can target that area.
Scent at mid levels is fairly common, so groups of guards with animals that can smell are good scares for parties over using this tactic.
Blind fight is a good feat. Not only does it negate penalties for being blinded (to some extent) it allows rerolls for attacks. This feat alone makes an invisible foe far less dangerous, so both players and NPC protagonists using this works well to mitigate the power of the tactics.
Combining and invisible and flying ability into a fight is powerful. Its meant to be. Casters love this trick. Let your players use it, and let your DM NPC's use it against them as well. As long is it doesn't become monotonous repeats, the occasional fight like this is fine.
It's truly only really effective given enough height and free space to keep out of reach of opponents. Which means many scenarios won't see it in play that often (dungeons, buildings, sewers etc rarely have that much height or space for such a tactic).
Some other things that I've seen work for invis targets (assuming you don't have the spells to counter it.)
1)splash weapons into areas you think it might be. This covers 9 squares on a battle grid. Targeted squares plus surrounding area for splash. If you see the splash hit something (should be visible, especially for alchemists fire) then you have a chance to target that area now. This requires co ordinated attacks in initiative games.
2) Glowing arrows that manage to hit an invisible target keep glowing. You now have an area that is the centre of an area of light that moves with your opponent. Target that area and invis loses much of its effectiveness.
I'm sure there's more, and many more situations. I'll post more later.
cheers
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Ok, my next topic involves golems.
Many people feel golems are too easy to overcome for their CR due to simple spells locking them down. This can be true if you want it to, especially for low CR golems. I've even seen a poor designed golem encounter ruined by a cleverly placed wall of force. It was a great use of the spell, and made the golem fight easy.
However, mid to high level encounters with golems should be awesome too.
Here's some things to consider.
1) don't have single golem encounters. Have multiple golems, different types even. Have them target different PCs, including caster types so resources are spread thin and serious decisions about resource use become important.
2) build encounters where multiple access points are viable so the golems have ways around pits, walls etc. again, this becomes a resource balancing game. Better yet, have an ares that limits use of those, such as pillars rooms that make placing the ten foot pit spells difficult. Mr golem just smashes through pillars, but the pit spell needs ten feet of flat space to place it. Build rooms where the golems reach can get the roof as well as the floors etc. this mitigates flying defence.
3) mindless does not mean stupid. Computers are mindless, but complex programming allows them to get around problems. Play higher cr golems with the idea of better programming. It states that golems aren't capable of complex tactics. That's not the same as no tactics. Have them swith opponents occasionally, have them target only specific types of opponents in preference. Have them try things to get around barriers the players put there, like a process of elimination.
4) build important parts of the adventure into the golem itself. This forces the players to actually destroy the thing rather than just bypass it.
5) have controllers with the golem, who can update its programming and give it instructions on the fly. Scry and message spells work here. Invisible imps flying around giving it commands work here. Carrion crown has a great golem scenario where there are multiple controlling entities for one powerful golem.
I'm sure there's more. Feel free to chime in with other ideas or comments about those listed so far.
Cheers.
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Firstly, remember that some encounters that tactic should work. It's only when it becomes a regular occurrence that it becomes an issue.
For this one, the opposite of golems can be true. Give folks room to move. Spread out and area spells don't effect nearly so many opponents.
Relevant protection buffs or items can help for will save issues. Simple level 1 protection from (alignment) prevents a large number of mind affecting abilities, assuming they're cast from the right aligned creature.
Having opponents attack in waves alps prevents the classsic area effect that locks down enemies. This is particularly true if they come in from multiple angles of attack. Again, provide room or areas where many avenues of approach/retreat are possible.
Used against the PCs is less of an issue at higher levels because PCs usually have a wide range of abilities available to counter the issue. This does make for more intense fights though, as now your reacting to the bad guys rather than taking the upper hand. Again, this is actually good at times as it really forces that choice to be made " do I act to protect my friends or do I a to take out bad guy x?"
Also, with pathfinder and DnD before it, variety is the spice of life. Mix up what's being targeted and pit in things immune or strongly resistant to such tactics (undead aren't faceted by fort save effects, constructs and animated objects are similar, many things can't be mind affected so will saves can often be ignored.)
If you apply these ideas throughout your games, then what your describing becomes a sometimes issue rather than an always issue. This is not a bad situation to be honest. Keeps em on their toes and makes them start thinking of workaround a to situations.
Cheers
I have a party of seven pcs with two npcs in the party one is level 6 and the other is level 5. I am planning a attack on the town. I will be hitting four locations, one with the party and the rest around town or if the party is separated at the time I get to do multiple battles. I would like to know if anyone has done this before and how it could/should be handled. oh and a thread like this is awesome!
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@Deaths AA, if you have a copy of the Runelords adventure path they have this exact situation in it, although there's really only the party to handle this.
Two ways to approach it that ive used.
1) The most fun was to just have narratives of the other battles going, while truly focusing on the players combat as the essential one. If the players are failing, its allowing reinforcements to be funneled to other areas and then the whole town might go down.
2) The other way is to run a mass combat situation similar to the army fights Pathfinder provides (Or other systems that might be out there). Let the players themselves take the role of an "army" of defenders against your army of npc's. This lets the players have even more impact on the outcome of the scenario.
Some things to consider when planning this.
- Have premade maps for areas, things like the walls, then the city streets, ruined buildings and a final rally point. If you have drawn up or planned out before hand, it makes an already crowded and busy game much faster.
- Have attackers that come in from multiple methods, so your large group of players has to separate in order to deal with a threat. Frontal wave is just a distractor but still needs to be looked at, followed up by some sort of flying attack. Two waves of similar tactics happen to keep players occupied while a third wave of tunnlers are coming through. Have the waves overlap if the players are handling things too easily. If they're getting trounced, have one wave fail somehow (poor communication delayed them, or the tunnel collapsed etc).
- Jump between players regularly to make sure they are all active in a huge fight like this. Look to see what abilities they have to make them seem awsome too. If a martial type has great cleave, throw a group of lower level mooks he can mow down. Let area effects go off that wipe out big lots of baddies, but make it so they need to do this since there are hundreds of baddies to go through.
- If the besieges manage to break in, have groups of them start rushing off to attack innocents in the city, not just focus on killing the PC's. This then forces your players to split up to deal with marauding units behind their defensive lines as well as trying to push the attackers back and seal the breach.
You have a big party, and this is a big situation to pull off. Don't feel limited by CR and experience for this. Award experience based on objectives met rather than opponetns killed and go to town with creatures of lower CR to the players and some CR similar bosses to lead them.
You can throw in siege gear that needs to be destroyed too, so players may have to make a sortee out of the town proper to deal with that as well.
Sounds like it will be a fun situation for you and your friends, but it is something that takes lots of effort from you. Try to get your players to assist in some tasks, such as keeping tabs on other battles, or tracking npc hitpoints, or looking up stats for combatants. Less pressure on you for mundane stuff like that means more time for weaving the awsomeness that is a town under siege.
Cheers
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Here's a situation that all DM's come across eventually, especially if their players read these boards (hehe).
Scry n Fry is the common name for a tactic where the arcane caster scry's the enemy somehow, gets to know the location well enough that they can teleport in with their friends and then attack the enemy without having to go through all the carefully laid out defences you had planned.
If it works, this can really destroy much planning you have done as a DM and make certain experiences just painful, to be honest. The things I discuss below are for times when this tactic is getting out of hand, or could ruin a very good game. Don't over use them, as it also takes away from the powerful effects such tactics can have for your players. It's nice to feel powerful sometimes.
Unfortunately, many players feel it's their "right" to have this work as they have it planned out in their minds. Most of the time they don't have a very good plan actually getting it to work properly.
Some things to consider
- You must have some clear idea of the location and layout of the destination. The clearer your mental image, the more likely the teleportation works. Areas of strong physical or magical energy may make teleportation more hazardous or even impossible.
The bolded sections above are the bread and butter of DM language. Those two components alone allow you to design areas where teleporting in becomes insanely dangerous or impossible. Many high level encounters occur where there are high levels of physical energy, let alone magical energy (volcanoes, lightning storms, electrical generators for alchemical labs, extreme heat in desert areas, extreme cold in arctic regions. All of those are examples of high levels of natural energy (or in arctic regions, a lack there of I guess).
This gives you as DM leeway in adjusting the success or failure percentage of the spell as written in the books. Alternatively, it allows you to damage the teleports on entry, to the point where their guaranteed success attack is now looking shaky, or maybe it throws the magic of teleport off so much that it just fails.
Also, knowing the target of the scry is important. Unless they've seen the target or know enough details about them, this can be difficult. At higher levels casters often combine divination magic with this in mind too.
Scry only lets you see ten feet around a target, which is not nearly enough to get a good feel of its location, nor is it necessarily good enough to get a good idea of the layout of the place you want to teleport to. This comes down to discussion between you and the players.
The longer the scry is in place, the greater the chance someone will notice it as well. It's only a DC 20 perception check to see it. Even commoners can make that check with a dice roll. If the enemy knows your coming, your surprise attack doesn't work.
- Teleportation is instantaneous travel through the Astral Plane. Anything that blocks astral travel also blocks teleportation
The wording of this component from the general magic rules in the core book give you something to play with as well. This can literally be interpreted that anything between your target and your current location that prevents travel through the astral plane, prevents teleport. Bingo. There could be anything between your players and your target over the distance they want to travel. You don't even need to tell them why the spell failed, they'd have to work it out.
Those are just some quick thoughts on a topic that we could fill pages on. I'll post some more later today, particularly on things you can do to make scry and teleport part of the game rather than a game destroyer.
cheers
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Feel free to veto through in-game explanations any abusive tactics. Is the bad guy smart? He took precautions to prevent scrying and or teleportation. In the end, your game should be about weaving a narrative as a group of players and the interaction they have together and with the DM. When you play D&D or PF 'by the rules' the system will break if you let the players go wild. That's fine if that is your kind of game, but I prefer for everyone at the table to have fun. That means that the players and DM should behave.
On the other hand, smart tactics should not be punished. Are they trying to get closer to the bad guy and use scrying? While his protections might fend off the attempt, they do notice a nearby cave/house/field that isn't protected and might form as a stepping stone to get to his base of operations. Or perhaps they just hear a distorted version of what he's talking about, a great way to drop some clues.
I find that the higher level you are as a player, the more you should treat the game and the scenes you're part of as if it were a movie. A combo'd greater invis, haste and inspire courage on your group's martial makes a mockery of most encounters as written. And that's just one of many examples. I simply customize my encounters and monsters and do it so that the group gets a fun challenge out of it. My intention is never to kill them, but I try to challenge them at least once or twice every session :)
In the end, an understanding of what is and isn't fun should be shared by both players and DM. That's vital to RPGs in general, but it really is the corner stone of high level play.
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Great post Arie,
That is absolutely the core of the way my mates and I play as well. I don't shut down tactics on a whim, I do it when it makes sense to.
Rewarding players for smart play is what it is all about. Doing so in order for them to still have a challenge is the trick, and is what this thread is meant to be about.
I'd love for this thread to be a "heads up" for inexperienced DMs as to how the game changes with increasing levels so they can prepare and tailor the game to their groups needs and wants. Getting caught by surprise by some of these things can be hard to deal with in mid game.
Also, some players come to these boards and read about tactics that others call game breakers. If they don't use them to break the game, then no problem at all. However, if they do use the tactic, and the game starts being untenable for the DM or players, then some advice on how to mitigate it without banning it completely is going to be invaluable.
Your line about challenging them once or twice per session is pure gold. My group only gets about 3 hours of play in per week now days. So my co DM and I aim for one solid challenge per session, but it comes down to time and what the players enjoy.
Good stuff. Please chime in with more advice and situations you think could help other DMs.
Cheers
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As a GM who has done one campaign all the way to 20, and has another currently at 10 and planning to go into epic, I think the number one most important thing is to know the game well. Think like a player. Build characters. It's really hard to be flatfooted by player tactics when you know the best a high level wizard is capable of.
Just to take the scry and fry scenario above into account, a GM who knows the game will know all about scry and fry, and also know that there are a multitude of spells that handle the tactic nicely: forbiddance, teleport trap, dimensional lock, mind blank, hallow/unhallow with dimensional anchor attached.
It can also allow you to approximate enemy stats easily enough, saving you a lot of time on stat blocks.
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Rights, back again.
I posted stuff earlier about things that limit teleporting and scry n fry tactics.
However, these abilities are things that spell casters will want to do. Removing the fun toys of players can really detract from a game. Inexperienced DMs can get into trouble with this if they let it get too much ahead, but that's what my previous post and Starks post was all about.
Keeping teleport means rethinking the way your high level plots pan out. If you want to avoid having players skip entire sections of your planned game make them so important that they can't skip them.
Eg. Your big bad guy has a dungeon complex that he/she is using to prepare the end of the world. You've planned this complex and have some cool encounters worked out. Your players however, have worked out who the baddy is and just teleport to him/her and kill them. Bypassing everything else. Boohoo, game ruined.
In this case, you make it so even if the main baddy is killed, their plans run ahead any way. Turns out there are four components to dooms day device, each of which requires the passcode that only an individual boss type critter has. Even the big bad didn't know them all, realising that The Plan was bigger than his individual part in it. Now the players have to tackle the entire complex any way, but they still got to have that great moment of dropping in on the main guy and destroying him totally.
If teleporting or other means of fast travel is readily available to the party, make it necessary. They have to teleport to get to areas fast enough ( the siege scenario above makes a good use of this. When the group hears the west gate has fallen, half of them teleport there to seal the breach).
Things like enemy castles that fly, or isolated monk settlements in hard to reach mountain peaks means players can use their ability effectively. If you do this though, make sure there are other means to reach the location as well.
The issue with high level games are there are multiple ways to solve any problem. Ensuring you've designed three or four ideas yourself limits the chance of the players blindsiding you completely and negating something.
If you can track down a copy of the Age of Worms campaign, it had teleporting/magic transport written in beatifully. Whole sections of the game required the players getting themselves across vast distances in short time. If the players didn't have someone who could do this, the campaign had NPCs willing to help, for a favour.
In my version of that very campaign, I actually used the fry and scry tactic against my players a number of times. They had to spend resources protecting themselves against this tactic and also,from being scryed etc. Doing this took something potentially powerful out of their hands and back into mine as DM. Putting them on the defensive using their own tactic took the initiative and time away from them, preventing them taking vast quantities of time to plan and overtly abolish the baddies. They could still use them, it just had serious consequences when doing so.
When you do this, it has to make sense within your campaign world, of you are just effectively bullying your players.
I'll try to post more on campaign influence on high level play later on.
Cheers.