As a GM, my true joy is fights that push parties to their utter limits without either killing them or my pulling back. It is a very difficulty balancing act.
That said, such difficult fights should not be the norm. I try to push the party to it's limits only once every 2-3 sessions.
As a player, I enjoy encounters where there is a very real chance of character death, but not encounters that completely overpower the group or totally negate party abilities.
I find the close to TPK is memorable be cause it's rare. Quite often it becomes TPK or doesn't even get close to TPK.
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Enough challenge, for me, is one legitimate threat per level the character grows through. One great trial for each advancement so to speak.
I like this standard. I'll have to keep it in mind.
Some of the best combats I've been in were ones that the party was never in danger from.
It depends on the fight. A random encounter should just be an exp/loot pinata, broken without a second thought to help get the party to a certain level.
A "mission fight" should take away some resources but not too much if the players are smart.
A standard boss should make the players think about their actions and plan carefully, but super skillful teamwork shouldn't be needed.
An arc/big boss should make the team work as one unit rather than a bunch of small units and coordinate in and out of character lest they face a grueling battle with less than half of them standing at the end of it.
As a GM, my true joy is fights that push parties to their utter limits without either killing them or my pulling back. It is a very difficulty balancing act.
That said, such difficult fights should not be the norm. I try to push the party to it's limits only once every 2-3 sessions.
As a player, I enjoy encounters where there is a very real chance of character death, but not encounters that completely overpower the group or totally negate party abilities.
I feel the same way. Being on the brink of death makes players more creative, a victory more rewarding and the battle more memorable. And to be honest, I don't want to put a lot of effort into encounters which are over after one round...
One key to avoid TPK seems to be: Don't overdo battlefield control. If they face a dangerous damage dealer or nearly indestructible foe, they can always retreat or at least regroup. But when you start grappling / stunning / paralyzing etc. them, things easily spiral out of control - for the players and yourself.
That said, I usually throw something like APL+3 encounters against four or five players.
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For a good, memorable fight, at least one character unconscious until the end of the combat, but less than all the characters unconscious. For a great fight, all but one character unconscious, and maybe a dramatic death with no regrets. For an epic fight, everybody is unconscious and the familiar saves the day.
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For a good, memorable fight, at least one character unconscious until the end of the combat, but less than all the characters unconscious. For a great fight, all but one character unconscious, and maybe a dramatic death with no regrets. For an epic fight, everybody is unconscious and the familiar saves the day.
I ran a boss fight not to long ago where it came down to the boss and the last remaining PC staring at each other with 2-3 hp each.
I ditched initiative and had them roll simultaneous attacks.
In my small amount of experience, few deaths are dramatic. It's usually "Er... I don't think my constitution is high enough to survive that failed save."
From my end most of them are summed up as "that person did something dumb and took a crit because of it." One shining example was a ninja showing his face to a minotaur while he was at half health. There was a kineticist at mostly full health throwing water at him and hurting him a lot, he should have used a potion before getting back into the fight.
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RPG Superstar 2015 Top 32, RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32
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Maybe I'm a weird outlier or something, but my experience/preference is quite different from what I'm seeing a lot of in this thread.
As a player, I don't think I could trace any kind of correlation (direct or inverse) between how memorable/fun an encounter was and how "challenging" it was. There have been some good ones that were nail-biters, and some good ones that were ROFL-stomps.
As a GM, the times my players have looked the happiest has usually been when an encounter was a little on the easy side and they got to do a little flexing, so to speak.
Meanwhile, some of my worst experiences at the table have come from GMs of the "fun means challenging" mindset. I've seen far too many GMs claim that they're just trying to ensure a fun game for everyone, but be the only one frowning when the rest of the table is cheering and laughing at the BBEG's early demise (or worse, fiat away the victory and claim to be doing so for the fun of the table, while said table goes sadface at the GM's intervention).
Being on the brink of death makes players more creative, a victory more rewarding and the battle more memorable.
See, this is kind of a weird point for me. I definitely see a connection between players doing something creative and the encounter therefore becoming more memorable. However, in my experience, the creativity hasn't spawned from difficulty. Rather, I've experienced the opposite: difficult encounters are handled with cold efficiency using the most potent tools on the character sheet, and it becomes just another encounter.
My best speculation is that this is linked to my (and, I think, others') experiences with trying to do something creative in an encounter. It's been my experience that as soon as you announce an intent whose action cost and DC you can't point to on your sheet or in the CRB, the GM says "Okay, make a [whatever] check". If you roll high enough, then they say "Okay, now make a [something else] check". Roll high enough on that, and you get "Okay, on your next turn, spend a full-round action to make a [third thing] check." A single low roll and it's all for naught. But if you DO manage to spend two whole turns to roll 13 or higher on three consecutive d20 rolls, then the GM announces a result that's usually comparable the effect of a thunderstone, a net, or a single weapon attack.
Thus, you end up trained to save the "creativity" for when you don't really give a s+!~. I suspect that I'm not the only one who's received this training, because (again, in my experience) it always seems to be the newer players who try the creative stuff.
So where are all you people playing, where creativity actually works and the hard encounters get remembered?
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As a GM, the times my players have looked the happiest has usually been when an encounter was a little on the easy side and they got to do a little flexing, so to speak.
I am a DM that believes in challenging encounters, but of late I have come closer to this realization. Something I have also noticed is that as a player when my character is being challenged I tend to get frustrated and unhappy, however, days and months later I tend to look back on the experience and smile.
When it comes to challenging the players' characters something I want to avoid is making a joke of opponents. For instance, my Red Mantis Assassins have been so ineffective they are openly laughed at by my players. They even have a nickname for them that roughly translates to "cash cows with lots of money hanging off their faces". It makes it very difficult to set up any tension when I'm putting the players' characters up against CCwLoMHOTFs.
I definitely see a connection between players doing something creative and the encounter therefore becoming more memorable. However, in my experience, the creativity hasn't spawned from difficulty. Rather, I've experienced the opposite: difficult encounters are handled with cold efficiency using the most potent tools on the character sheet, and it becomes just another encounter.
Well, my experience is: Players usually do the same stuff over and over at easy encounters. Unless they start fooling around with the foes, but that's another topic...
If the encounter is tough, then yes, they feel the need for cold efficiency. But this also means they reevaluate rather uncommon choices, like bull rushing a foe away, using aid another or dragging a mate out of combat.
Combat actions beyond the rules come up rarely, but I try to apply Rule of Cool then. Though I won't give creative players a real edge here - just actions comparable with the normal ones. Because else they'd try to use creativity in any tough encounter, I'd increase difficulty as a result - and then they'd be forced to be creative to keep up.
Making every fight a serious challenge only breeds the murderhobo mentality. If the attitude is "If every action isn't perfect the whole party will die" then you don't have any room for swinging from the chandeliers or doing interesting, but non-optimal, things.
Using terrain and interesting tactics can make a fight just as memorable as the one where the fight ended with a combined total of -3 hp for the party. One encounter that is still talked about by the players and GM was where a bunch of ghouls spent all day on the floor due to a combination of Grease and a Bard with a whip tripping them.
After years of play, I've begun to become death-weary. I've got very good system mastery, and it's not that I build underpowered characters, but sometimes there are dice-induced random days when the players can't roll over a 3 and the DM can't roll under an 18. Things happen. Well, having played non-stop since 3.0e was released, statistics begin to wear on a soul. I kind of want to tell stories about fascinating characters, and frankly the more heroes that perish, the less heroic they seem in retrospect. Meh.
On the other hand, as a DM I've begun to consider encounter design differently from standard. Instead of the "four encounters a day that use 1/4 resources", I've begun to think that on-the-fly adjustments to some encounters such that most encounters use about 50% of whatever the PCs have left is interesting. It's always a struggle, but not fatally so. Boss battles obviously are excluded. Just a thought.
