Where did I go wrong?

[sabelo2000]

A bit of an after-action debrief and a request for some advice:

As a DM, my group's party consists of five 13th-level characters: a Duelist, Druid, Ranger/Arcane Archer, and two Rogue/Shadowdancers (each with a different 3rd PrC).

The players are all relatively novice. The world is comparatively low-loot, because I like my players to focus on their characters and abilities rather than all their flashy gear. Since these are new players, they don't feel constrained by this. However, they're beginning to be eclipsed by WBL and CR, so I arranged a fight against some loot-rich opponents to end the current adventure.

The group fought a pair of 14th-level Paladin/Rangers, fluffed as a Houndmaster and a Falconer (with appropriate companions and a PrC each) along with a pack of Winter Wolves.

I expected it would be a tough fight, but I wanted the group to earn the loot I had in mind for them.

Then everybody almost died.

Now, I anticipated that the two Paladin/Rangers would be a challenge, each being 1 level higher than the party and outfitted in gear that the group would be delighted to pry away from the cold, dead bodies. And as I imagined, the two NPCs dealt some heavy hits and persisted long enough to earn some "Come ON!" moments from the players, but inevitably went down.

What complicated things were the wolves. Now, Winter Wolves are listed as CR 5, which according to the DMG and online EL calculators DOESN'T EVEN COUNT as an encounter for a 13th-level party. But four Winter Wolves themselves almost ended the entire group.

Was this a fluke? Is my party just horrible at tactics? Are the CR ratings in the Core MM so maladjusted? Or did something go terribly, terribly wrong here?



TL;DR: Should four Winter Wolves and two 14th-level Paladin/Rangers have completely destroyed a 13th-level Party of Five?

[Rabidmuskrat]

Did the party have the presence of mind to give themselves some kind of resistance to cold?
I can see 4 creatures each cone-breathing for 4d6(/2?) cold damage every 1d4 rounds can quickly ruin even a lvl 13 party.

The biggest problem, I think, was that the party only has a single caster (druid) and everyone else relies quite a bit on gear, which you say your party is short of. I'm guessing the druid used up all his big spells on the lvl 14 npc's before fighting the wolves? If so, you were left with a spell-less druid (not useless) and a couple underequipped melee monkeys of various types.

Also, arcane archers are REALLY bad.

[ArcturusV]

The thing to watch out for is, even if something doesn't "even count", it's different from not actually counting. Particularly if you're behind on the buffs/equipment that the CR system presumes you are going to have. If they were gear light I might have calced them instead at say, level 10.

[SowZ]

I'd say the low-op nature of your group was a big factor. It's fine, they probably picked classes based on the flavor of what seems cool which is legit. Could easily be tactics, though. For example, did they all focus on one wolf at a time til it went down? Or did each one focus on one wolf?

So zone defense or man-to-man defense, if you know basketball?

A man to man attack style can easily get a party wiped when it isn't appropriate, (it usually isn't.)

[Siosilvar]

Low-op group with heavy item-dependent characters with less than standard loot gets destroyed by a EL+3 encounter. Nothing new here; the DMG (which assumes a lowish optimization point) presumes that such a fight has low odds of being won.

[Hyde]

In WoW, we've got a term called "focus". It's enough of a thing that they built it into their UI for us, because focusing something and removing it as a threat is almost always better than trying to spread the love, unless the other guys enrage when one of them drops.

So, for new guys especially, the encounter does seem a little tough, especially in your party of relative squishies (I'm willing to bet CON was not a favorite stat for anyone).

[Hyde]

Also, there's a difference between "almost all died", and "all almost died". If it's the former, that's bad. If it's the latter, that's fine as a sometimes food.

[avr]

13th level melee characters should be nearly or entirely invulnerable to the physical attacks of the wolves ... unless they're short on gear as you say. The breath weapons are harder to compare as they have a variable recovery period, but the rogues at least should have been able to evade these. The ranger/arcane archer or druid might have been able to lock them down nicely just with entangle spells.

For the wolves to dominate them, either the party ignored them for too long to concentrate on the big bads, or yes they are indeed understrength.

[Ceaon]

What you have is a low-wealth and probably low-optimization group, so they are somewhat weaker. This becomes more apparent the higher level they get. My advice: you should try to tone down the challenge a bit from now on, especially with creatures that are not reliant on gear. Don't look at a monster's CR; look at if and how the characters can defend themselves against the moster's attacks and if and how they can damage or incapacitate it. This will help you determine if the party can handle an encounter with them.

[ahenobarbi]

They probably didn't have any protection from cold up. If they had breath weapons wouldn't matter. If they didn't breath weapons could destroy them easily in some rounds.

[Ellrin]

A man to man attack style can easily get a party wiped when it isn't appropriate, (it usually isn't.)

Is it ever?

[Grasharm]

Also if you are going to rely on CR going forward watch out for will based abilities. An example could be an Aboleth is only CR 7 so you could field a couple according to CR but since everyone has low will save their DC 17 enslave ability would be a death sentence for your party with only the druid having a halfway decent chance of pulling through the encounter uncontrolled.

[ArcturusV]

Man to Man is good for Mass Lockdown tactics. Where you end up having a 6 man team, with 5 guys just locking down enemies, trip spam, etc. And one guy going off and picking off his target solo. Then pick off a disabled target one at a time like that.

[SowZ]

Is it ever?

Arcturus beat me to the punch. If everyone has a stun method, trip, spells, etc. man for man is just fine. No need for me to go into more detail, you've probably read the post above mine.

Sometimes you need to do it to control waves of mooks, too. Either because you want to block off passageways, are protecting someone/something from being stolen, (escort mission,) or because individually the mooks are unable of beating anyones AC. But if you let them all group up on on guy, the flanking bonus might whittle his AC down. So you want to keep all the aggro evenly distributed. That one will probably only come up when the mooks are high defense, low offense.

So man for man isn't the normative strategy, but situations where it is smart will probably come up.

[ArcturusV]

Thanks for expanding. I think the only other real situation where man to man matters is when you fight nominally intelligent enemies.

Presuming your DM plays them properly, they probably aren't going to fight to the death. In fact if they get injured they might just say "Screw it, I want to live!" and run off. 2nd Edition used to do this with Morale checks in the system. So when you knocked people to various benchmarks... leader is dead, 75% damage, 50% damage to person, half the enemy forces dead, etc, they'd have to check morale, if they failed, they tried to disengage somehow.

Now if your DM plays your enemies as reasonable, it can be quite effective to spread the hurt around. 6 players hurt 6 different enemies fairly well, they might decide discretion is the better part of valor. You get half of them to run off, or all of them to. You achieved a quicker, easier victory.

Of course this also applies in less subjective, more RAW situations. Like Clerics dealing with Undead Turning, Banishments, etc.

[SowZ]

Thanks for expanding. I think the only other real situation where man to man matters is when you fight nominally intelligent enemies.

Presuming your DM plays them properly, they probably aren't going to fight to the death. In fact if they get injured they might just say "Screw it, I want to live!" and run off. 2nd Edition used to do this with Morale checks in the system. So when you knocked people to various benchmarks... leader is dead, 75% damage, 50% damage to person, half the enemy forces dead, etc, they'd have to check morale, if they failed, they tried to disengage somehow.

Now if your DM plays your enemies as reasonable, it can be quite effective to spread the hurt around. 6 players hurt 6 different enemies fairly well, they might decide discretion is the better part of valor. You get half of them to run off, or all of them to. You achieved a quicker, easier victory.

Of course this also applies in less subjective, more RAW situations. Like Clerics dealing with Undead Turning, Banishments, etc.

Good point, yeah.

Another time to do it is if you are largely melee and think each of your party members can dispose of the enemy in two attacks or so, but the enemies aren't all bunched up. In that case, you might be able to kill them faster by each taking your own. You risk wasting actions if everyone tries to surround the same guy, but he dies before half the fighters make their attack.

[nedz]

The Encounter Calculator (http://www.d20srd.org/extras/d20encountercalculator/) rates this as very difficult at EL 16. I would expect an experienced party to win this without too much trouble, but if they got their tactics wrong or had sub optimal characters then this can happen.

Sometimes combat can be very swingy, though at this level then less so.

As a DM you should have a good feel for your parties capability regardless of CR. Encounter setup can make a huge difference to how hard a given fight is.

[Bronk]

It does sound like you overtaxed the players a bit. Each of the two baddies with PC classes are at CR14 minimum, plus one or two extra for the gear they were loaded with, which gave them a distinct advantage. Taken together, they are at least a level 17. The 4 CR5 winter wolves count as CR9 when taken together as well. After all, you add +2 to CR each time you double the number of combatants of a single type.

So the encounter would have been at least CR17 + CR9. It sounds like they won in the end though, so as long as they had fun... but I hope they get a ton of XP!

[sabelo2000]

Thanks for the advice everyone, yes the group did get LOTS of reward for this fight, I'll keep a closer eye on the difficulty in the future.