[3.5] Over-optimizing the Enemy?

[Thurbane]

As a DM, have you ever over-optimized an enemy, that resulted in a TPK or a fight that was much harder than intended?

I have done this one or twice - I often tweak monster feat selections to make them more effective, dumping things like Alertness or Toughness for more useful feats.

Or throwing a class level; on a monster to play to it's strengths.

Just interested in what experiences DMs have had with this.

Cheers - T

[Âmesang]

Once I attempted to toss a greater invisibility, silence-using dragon against a mid-level party. They weren't too happy with that. :smalltongue:

[erok0809]

I've done it a couple times. The first one happened with a pyroclastic dragon. I built it mostly for melee, since I have to custom build it, and figured that would be fine, although I knew I was gonna use the breath weapon as well. Well, one nat 1 and a low roll later, half the party was disintegrated, and the rest of it couldn't stand up to a full attack routine.

The second time was less luck based. I built a psion, made for the sole purpose of nova-ing, figuring they'd still barely live and he'd be out of power when it was over. Long story short, they did not live. Whoops.

[Pluto!]

Thri-Kreens have gotten a permanently bad name in my group after I tried to run a campaign heavily using Thri-Kreen Totemists and Tiger Claw Warblades.

I think that was our record number of character sheets used in 3-4 sessions.

[Bobby Baratheon]

I very recently made this mistake as a DM :smallfrown: It was supposed to be an epic champion style showdown between three PCs and three powerful champions from the enemy horde menacing the town they were defending. The PCs, who had routinely curb stomped overpowered opposition sent their way, went in brimming with confidence, and got spanked. The bardadin even got literally spanked as he ran away. The PCs were level eight, and were facing three bugbears. Three spellwarped stoneboned mineral warrior half troll bug bears, that is, each of which had an additional 8 levels of fighter. Each of which had an Ac of something like 36, DR 8, Fast Healing 5, SR, the ability to get turbocharged from negating a spell with SR, a burrow speed, and pretty insane bonuses to hit and damage. With no special shenanigans on my part (the bugbears just made normal, non-power attack, attacks), the PC's got wrecked. None of them died - I just had the bugbears jeer at them as they ran away. I later went back and calculated the total ECL of the bugbears, which I had sort of neglected earlier, and they ended up being around 22 or so. Surprise, party! What kind of surprise? An unintended-epic-encounter surprise! Frankly, it's a miracle they survived and got in a couple of hits before running.

[Efrate]

Venturing on a giant iceberg, with multiple paths I made a bunch of encounters. Thankfully after looking at the stat line one monstrosity they did not face. 6 person party about level 12 to 13ish, cold dangers despite terrible temperatures negated. I was playing around and made a fiendish horrid dire warbeast polarbear, Gargantuan animal. Seeing as it had 3 int and a reasonable amount of hit dice, and was trained for war, why not see what happens when I just toss a few things around. Due to crazy experimentation by an epic level caster who has a story relevant npc.

power attack, snatch,rend, greater multigrab, improved unarmed strike, snap kick, steadfast determination, rend.

All saves but fort were around +20ish, it had 50 strength and a ridiculous attack routine of bite, 2 claws with rend, 4 unarmed strikes, a kick, over 400hp, could easily power attack for -10 and still hit nearly everyone all the time except maybe on the final unarmed strike, grapples 3 characters at no penalty with a +51 grapple and can hold them for great damage each round.

Best part? There were two of them, a mated pair, and only like cr 11 or 12 by the rules, making it a 13 or 14 encounter, well within scope. Glad they went the other way. O.o

[mauk2]

only like cr 11 or 12 by the rules, making it a 13 or 14 encounter, well within scope. Glad they went the other way. O.o


So....


What I'm seeing in this thread is that the encounter difficulty is pretty much impossible to determine. Has nobody done the math to work out what's an appropriate challenge?

So how do you build challenging and fun encounters?

Do you just throw random monsters at the party based on your gut and hope?

[AlanBruce]

I do fall into this category, sadly. But the players enjoy the fights, tough as they are.

For instance, right now they are engaged against a Bog Imp 'Queen" (Heroes of Horror). This one has the Unseelie Fey template slapped into it, giving it high DR and an aura that gives penalties to saves within 5ft. based on Charisma modifier.

Then there's her build: Monk 2/ Duskblade 3/ Ur Priest 2/ Sacred Fist 8/ Scaled Horror 2

The last two dips was for Freedom of Movement, just in case the party decided to throw fogs into the fray.

Buffed to the nines, this beast is currently large sized, flying and opened up with Blasphemy, followed by Alliance Undone.

The party of 6 ECl 13, the woodling druid NPC they met in the swamp where the imp resides and the npc consecrated harrier are blasting this thing with dispels like candy, as she flies around and punches the Raptoran ranger around who decided to stay airborne. Thankfully, the party has Shield Other, so the damage isn't too nasty...

Until she used Stop Heart on the raptoran, tired of his forcebow.

But all in all, a fun if difficult fight.

[Bobby Baratheon]

So....


What I'm seeing in this thread is that the encounter difficulty is pretty much impossible to determine. Has nobody done the math to work out what's an appropriate challenge?

So how do you build challenging and fun encounters?

Do you just throw random monsters at the party based on your gut and hope?

I don't know about doing the math, but in my experience CR tends to overrate beatsticks (behold, the mighty Tarrasque) and underrate large groups. Large groups of decently tough mooks (played at least half way intelligently) tend to perform better than a single big guy. For example, my party dang near instagibbed a purple worm but took nearly twenty rounds to take out a pair of nigh hags and some somewhat nerfed wights, and nearly died. IIRC the two encounters were about equal in terms of CR, but the more efficient night hags + wights lasted longer because they could work together and had a much higher number of actions, whereas the poor purple worm only got to swallow two PCs before they killed him, and the two inside of him managed to escape AND leave a grenade behind (we play at 17th century level tech)

[Douglas]

Does it count if it's intentional? Once in a really long running campaign, I had one particular really nasty dragon acting as an ally to the BBEG. The PCs were level 20, the BBEG was I think level 21 and commanded a giant army. This dragon? Nominally CR 25.

Backstory had this dragon (a black dragon) leading a successful effort to genocide all metallic dragons in the world, despite the efforts of both the metallics and a major powerful humanoid nation allied with them. And he did that 1000 years ago. I gave him a few age categories past Great Wyrm, 32 point buy base ability scores, and carefully chosen feats and spells to make him a permanently ultra-buffed melee juggernaut that was nearly impossible to debuff. I fully expected that if the PCs fought him, he'd slaughter them all.

Fortunately the PCs were reasonably smart, figured out that this particular challenge was not meant to be fought directly, and found, freed, and recruited the only surviving metallic dragon (an older-than-Great Wyrm silver dragon) to help. It was interesting optimizing her enough to win that matchup, while using completely different strategies. The PCs left the dragons to duke it out while they took on the epic wizard who knew they were coming.

[Azoth]

I sadly fall into this a fair bit, but it is largely due to my players. I usually custom design every encounter and place enemy numbers both offensively and defensively at the 50% mark for the party average numbers in the opposing categories. My party optimize to varying degrees and in different fields so the averages are skewed everywhere. Meaning half the time the main beatstick hits on a 5 or better, but the rogue will need a 13 or better to hit. The party Druid will pass the save on an enemy spell targeting Will on 7, but the Warlord needs a 19. Things like this.

On boss fights all values but one are usually high, and my players absolutely refuse to test the protections so they grind the long way to victory. Making the fight a lot harder than it has to be.

Then again, they also fight like 6 individuals instead of a cohesive unit so any coordination from enemy units absolutely puts them on the back foot.

All but one player enjoys the difficulty and trying to figure out how to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The one guy whines constantly about difficulty, things having too much health, things not a standing still to trade full attacks, things hitting too hard, ect...guy wants to slaughter CR 1/2 Orcs at ECL10+ and get XP for it.

[Theobod]

Have a few of these.
One: a robotic highwayman with DR approximately equal to base weapon damage, AC the party only hit 25% of the time, a DR ignoring sword and snatch arrows (party was all ranges focused) that went from shakedown to one character disabled, one out of vitality and retreating and a desperate fight ending with a knife edge victory for a the psion who was out of power points.
Max resources to nearly none in one equal cr fight. Add hocced up the XP reward a tad.
In fairness it was completely avoidable and the party knew it was coming AND started the fight.

Later on in the same day: on a cliff face, three modified effigy harpies with rudimentary intelligence, flyby attack and heavy Dr, one had a sonic breath weapon to boot. This one the party rightly noped to and given a choice of hand over one of their menfolk or a tithe they settled for a tithe.

Funnily enough that same party never had so much trouble as they did against run of the mill goblins and skeletons, the latter didn't even use tactics. Stepping from high op to low op DMing means my encounters tend to be mid op minimum, I'm learning to under cr and as hoc XP as a result.

[Kelb_Panthera]

So....


What I'm seeing in this thread is that the encounter difficulty is pretty much impossible to determine. Has nobody done the math to work out what's an appropriate challenge?

So how do you build challenging and fun encounters?

Do you just throw random monsters at the party based on your gut and hope?

There's a set of guidelines in the MM toward the back for building your own creatures completely from whole-cloth. It gives a set of target values related to the -intended- CR of a new creature. If you compare those targets with your results after applying templates and such then you land in the right ball-park. Optimization level also plays into things but that's simply a matter of system mastery that can't really be easily quantified.

[Theobod]

I think that is really the heart of it, an unavoidable fight that can't be trivialised easily should probably be a 50%er for group fights or a 75%er for single fights. IE can only resist half or 75% of an average hits damage, has an AC that can be hit on average 50-75% of the time, should have average or above average hp. Adjust from there for harder n lower fights. This ofc only works if your players are of similar strength. A imbalanced party is hard if not impossible to balance encounters around.

[Efrate]

Yeah mixed op is a huge pain to balance. My current 6 man group has a druid/wizard theurge, with a large fleshraker companion, not really optimized at all just solid. We have a rogue who should be a lot better than she she fight a two weapon pouncer with a ton of d6s and penetrating strike but who rolls worse than almost anyone ever, A seeker of the song who is decently optimized to be an insane buffer, a tibbit warshaper BSF type who just likes fighting as a cat who can grow horns or a hand to attack and be silly, and a very high op ubercharging pouncing leap attack barbarian/frenzied berserker with 15 foot reach whose minimum damage if all his attacks hit is more than enough to instagib epic encounters, at lvl 15. Plus 15 foot reach and great cleave. And a killoren ranger who is a next to no op barring pretty decent senses and a bow which does mostly nothing in combat.

Campaign is two dungeons from finishing, or the next party wipe, which hasn't happened in a long time. Characters die but haven't tpked since like lvl 7. Will be grateful when its over and I can hand over this 5 year campaign to be just a player again.

[Gnaeus]

So....


What I'm seeing in this thread is that the encounter difficulty is pretty much impossible to determine. Has nobody done the math to work out what's an appropriate challenge?

So how do you build challenging and fun encounters?

Do you just throw random monsters at the party based on your gut and hope?

You look at the party's actual #s and strengths. Can they hit the monster. Can the monster hit them, or auto hit them. If it wins initiative, is it likely to kill one PC/ round? Can the party short circuit the monster easily (like by flying above it and shooting, or with disabling spells like shivering touch or ray of stupidity.

[Fizban]

When a player left the game, the most obvious thing to have his character do was backstab the party and run off with all the loot (may not have made sense but it's more interesting than just leaving when you're an evil warlock meanieface). It put their WBL behind for a bit but also kept it from getting excessive as it was about to. Naturally he'd have to show up at the big showdown to muck things up, so I had him sell the loot and buy a laundry list of magic items and consumables, everything he'd need to take out the party (actually more than he should have been able to buy, whoops!).

So he shows up at the big fight (the Battle of Brindol in Red Hand of Doom) sowing chaos at the end. I had his minions pull off/replace some of the main foes and didn't actually enter the guy himself into the fight. The party was running on empty and finished the battle with basically nothing left. . . and then two of them decided to go after the warlock, chasing him into a building. This being a former PC who was built to survive and exploit, who I had geared up with solid counters to all the PC's abilities. . . it did not go well. He ran them around in circles with Flee the Scene, took no damage from the ranger, critted the wizard to death in a single shot and killed the ranger before I just had him take off on the grounds that he'd lost plausible deniability since the other two PCs weren't there or something.

It was a mess on multiple levels but kitting him out with everything in the book, while appropriate, may have been excessive.

[Manyasone]

My party is currently in Runeforge (RotR AP) about to enter the Necromancy wing. Since they breeze through most encounters so far I decided to add a bodyguard in the dungeon. Nothing fancy, he is an Azlanti human Two-handed fighter Dread Blood Knight wielding a masterwork scythe (mostly because i have a player who believes magic items make the character) His template make it a monster and I'm curious as to how damaging he can be. He has about most things you would expect featwise to increase his damage... But if this one crits once...for some in my party it would mean OneHitKO

[Esprit15]

There's a sour taste in one player's mouth after the big antagonist for him was a tripping factotum, he was a Beguiler, and first words out of the factotum's mouth when the Beguiler saw him were "Anti-Magic Field!"

[mauk2]

I don't know about doing the math


If you check my sig, me and a buddy of mine are writing our own game, and one of the very first things we did was, we ran the math. We generated sample builds for every allowed class for every level, generated an average damage output, average hit points, average defenses, at every level. We then set all the monster numbers to challenge that.

Yes, it was a STUPID amount of work. Nuada made some spreadsheets that were so huge they were hard to believe, but yes, we modeled the entire conflict space of the game before we started designing monsters.

My astonishment is that Pathfinder, the pre-eminent D20 game right now, apparently doesn't do that, based on the evidence of this thread. So the challenge rating of your encounters, arguably THE most core mechanic of the game...is just undefined? If you can generate a rules-legal monster that is overpowered to the point of party wipe, then it's not the fault of the GM. (Aside from that whole 'gaming is a social activity, don't be a jerk to your friends' thing.)

Now, is a lot of this third-party stuff that hasn't been run past an editor for 'common sense'? Maybe?



in my experience CR tends to overrate beatsticks (behold, the mighty Tarrasque) and underrate large groups. Large groups of decently tough mooks (played at least half way intelligently) tend to perform better than a single big guy.

Yes, in Epic Path we designed the base encounters to be one bad guy per player. But we also put in 'Roles', to generate tougher single-monster fights.

But, we also designed those roles to be a party challenge. For example, the 'Threat' role we defined has several mechanics to make it a fun fight. Threat role mobs are designed to be equal to four normal mobs, and so are immune to the first five instances of every status condition, for example, and have an auto-rez power that 'does stuff', and if the party is large, we built a class of henchmen mobs you can use to keep the challenge at the right place.

Here look at this as an example:

http://epicpath.org/index.php/Bulette_%28Threat_Role%29

We deliberately designed the monsters to be challenging and interesting, but also easy to run for a poor over-worked GM. :)



For example, my party dang near instagibbed a purple worm but took nearly twenty rounds to take out a pair of nigh hags and some somewhat nerfed wights, and nearly died. IIRC the two encounters were about equal in terms of CR, but the more efficient night hags + wights lasted longer because they could work together and had a much higher number of actions, whereas the poor purple worm only got to swallow two PCs before they killed him, and the two inside of him managed to escape AND leave a grenade behind (we play at 17th century level tech)

Twenty rounds?!

What level was this? Did you run the spellcasters completely out of spells? :)

And yes, we heartily agree, multi-monster fights are far more interesting and dynamic, which is why we went with that model as the 'normal' encounter in Epic Path.

[mauk2]

There's a set of guidelines in the MM toward the back for building your own creatures completely from whole-cloth. It gives a set of target values related to the -intended- CR of a new creature. If you compare those targets with your results after applying templates and such then you land in the right ball-park. Optimization level also plays into things but that's simply a matter of system mastery that can't really be easily quantified.

Yes, I'm aware of those guidelines.

One of the core balance issues in Pathfinder is the way that the monster rules are completely 'freeform' and at the same time too narrow. If the GM thinks a certain monster is 'super cool', and said GM allows their enthusiasm to run away with them (oh, we've all been there), then you get things like CR22 bad guys taking on CR8 parties.


To avoid this, we ran the math, to exhaustion, and then we built an entire new set of rules just for monsters. Monsters don't cast spells like PC's do, monsters don't have hit dice except as an informational metric. Monsters saves and difficulty DC's aren't based off their stats at all.

This means that at every CR we were able to define a Monster Blueprint, which has all the base numbers that are challenge-appropriate for that CR, and we know what those numbers are because we modeled every character class at every level. As long as you stick within close agreement with the Monster Blueprint numbers, you should never have any problems.

Now, that generates all sorts of arguments about 'every monster is the same'. To address that, the combat abilities of every monster is completely freeform in definition. Epic Path monsters FEEL completely different on the table because the players don't see the foundational numbers, what players see if the abilities being used against them, and those are WILDLY different.

For example:

http://epicpath.org/index.php/Skeleton_Soldier

http://epicpath.org/index.php/Violet_Fungus


Those two monsters are built off the exact same blueprint as each other. So the base numbers are right, they are challenge appropriate mobs, and we have actually play-tested this to prove its true.

Yet, those monsters are nothing alike. They play differently, they behave differently, they demand different tactics to handle. But, they are appropriately challenge specific.


See how that's supposed to work? Or is it clear as mud? :)

[mauk2]

You look at the party's actual #s and strengths.


Superb advice in all instances!



Can they hit the monster. Can the monster hit them, or auto hit them.

This is an example of what we call the dynamic range of the game. At a given CR, with appropriate wealth, in a properly designed game-space, all player characters regardless of class should be able to reach a range of defensive values within a D20 roll of each other. In practice, you want that range to be smaller than that, say around half. A tank should be able, with effort, to force the mobs to roll 19-20 to hit, at the expense of other things. A full-damage spec clothie should be hittable on a five of a six. But most PC's with an eye toward being both effective and survivable, will tend toward a fairly small range of AC and Saves.



If it wins initiative, is it likely to kill one PC/ round?

If you have built your challenge levels right, it should be possible for an average mob to SEVERELY maul an even-CR player character if they get a lucky run of the dice, but unlikely to kill them outright in one round. Because insta-gibs are not fun for anybody I'd care to sit at a table with.

Also, we added some status conditions that move players around on the initiative order. Makes for a lot of fun!



Can the party short circuit the monster easily (like by flying above it and shooting,


One of the design metrics we're using in Epic Path (see sig!) is the concept of damage channels. Every monster (mostly, there's always exceptions) has a way of dealing damage at range. Some of them do 'ehn' damage at range, some of them do 'HOLY OUCH' damage at range.

And then on top of that, there's Roles such as Sneak or Shooter, that give monsters ways of stopping a uni-tactic. No single approach will work well in all cases, and every tactic has a counter.

For example:

http://epicpath.org/index.php/Oni,_Moryo

These guys have that Yin-yang ability that I really love a lot. Fights with these things are wild and crazy affairs, let me tell you. :D



or with disabling spells like shivering touch or ray of stupidity.

Yeah.... One of our high priority tasks right now is rebuilding how ability damage works from the ground up. Wish us luck! :)

[Belzyk]

I had a dm on roll20 that taught me the best thing ever. Never stat out your monsters. Wing it. When you think the party killed it. Let it die. If the party makes a ton of mess ups kill a few. Or severely injured them. It made the game feel a lot more real because we never really knew how powerful the monster really was he didn't tell us what he did till after about 70 sessions and we never really knowticed.

[Kelb_Panthera]

I had a dm on roll20 that taught me the best thing ever. Never stat out your monsters. Wing it. When you think the party killed it. Let it die. If the party makes a ton of mess ups kill a few. Or severely injured them. It made the game feel a lot more real because we never really knew how powerful the monster really was he didn't tell us what he did till after about 70 sessions and we never really knowticed.

That's fine for narrativist gamers but I, for one, would've been -furious- at that revelation. Total walk-out. How well I do is dependent entirely on your arbitrary feelings of how well I should be doing? **** you, I'm out.

For some of us the story is an engaging way to string together the obstacles but we play for the game. If all I wanted was a story I could write one or read a book.

If that works for you and yours, that's cool. Do you. Just be aware that there are those of us that -do not- want that. No, not even then.

[mauk2]

For some of us the story is an engaging way to string together the obstacles but we play for the game. If all I wanted was a story I could write one or read a book.



Yup!

It's the old 'fluff versus crunch' argument.

Some people like fluff, some people like crunch. The objective is to strike the right balance while being flexible enough to accomodate both.

Crunchy-fluff.

Fluffy-crunch?

Flunch?

Hrrrm.

[Belzyk]

I had a dm on roll20 that taught me the best thing ever. Never stat out your monsters. Wing it. When you think the party killed it. Let it die. If the party makes a ton of mess ups kill a few. Or severely injured them. It made the game feel a lot more real because we never really knew how powerful the monster really was he didn't tell us what he did till after about 70 sessions and we never really knowticed.

Prime example. We we're all evil. We come across a gold dragons lair and decide to kill it for the riches. Dm knew this was an impposible fight for us. So after 6 rounds the dragon takes off flys up to a alter of io and begins to pray to io. Our ranged attacks can't hit him and our spells seem to have no effect. An avatar of io appears and forgies the dragon (a cleric of io) for what he must do. But warns him not to chase if we run. (Dm gives us the chance to get out of there.)

I don't Dm this way but it was very nice and didn't really realize and difference between a normal game and how he was doing it.

[Bobby Baratheon]

Twenty rounds?!

What level was this? Did you run the spellcasters completely out of spells? :)

And yes, we heartily agree, multi-monster fights are far more interesting and dynamic, which is why we went with that model as the 'normal' encounter in Epic Path.

The party had two real spellcasters (not counting the bard), and were defending a small ruined keep. The main damaging spellcaster, the sorcerer, kept popping up over the battlements and getting magic missiled by the night hags, while the wights went to town on the gates with a battering ram. The main issue was that the PC on sentry duty dropped the ball, so the night hags were already in position and waiting. The other caster was a summoning oriented favored soul, but it was his first session with the group and we hadn't realized how horribly unoptimized his character was relative to the rest of the group. The PCs also positioned themselves somewhat poorly, with two of them on the walls (the bard and the sorcerer) getting peppered with magic missiles, while the other two (the beatstick and the favored soul) stood behind the gate, waiting (in their defense, there were peasants inside the keep that they were defending). The PCs had awful luck as well - they kept failing to overcome the night hags SR, and the wights kept somehow making saves against glitterdust and grease. Once the gates came crashing down, the odds evened somewhat - the beatstick cut his way through the wights with little issue, and the favored soul kept summoning celestial bison to distract the night hags. The sorcerer spent a couple of rounds buffing himself with mirror image and dragonskin (IIRC), then flew out (he was an unseelie fey) and started nuking things with empowered scintillating spheres and elemental darts. The bard then went into inspire courage (dragonfire, of course), and the PCs ground down the night hags and the remaining wights. A lot of that twenty rounds was the wights trying to break through the gates, and the sorcerer and the bard trying to snipe over the top of the walls (and getting pounded by magic missile). The PCs were all either level six or seven; this was the encounter directly after the purple worm, which some of them had leveled up from.

[mauk2]

Description of Awesome Battle

First, wow, that sounds like a ton of fun was had by all.

Second, now I desperately want to make a class named "Beatstick." :)

[Bobby Baratheon]

Yeah it was one of the more fun battles we ever had, more so IMO because the PCs got desperate.

If you make a Beatstick class, make sure to make a counterpart Meatshield class! And perhaps a class combining elements of both called a Meatstick :smallbiggrin:

[A_S]

If you make a Beatstick class, make sure to make a counterpart Meatshield class! And perhaps a class combining elements of both called a Meatstick :smallbiggrin:
I would be unable to resist the temptation to play a Meatstick named Jim with Deformity (Gaunt).

[Bobby Baratheon]

I would be unable to resist the temptation to play a Meatstick named Jim with Deformity (Gaunt).

Only so long as he has a barbarian cohort (or a meatshield) named Randall Savage with Skill Focus: Shouting.

[Quertus]

The worst encounter I never ran was at a players behest.

He had just gotten a new "mini", and wanted to encounter such a beast, to train as a mount.

Problem was, it was a 4-headed dragon. Second problem was, said dragon's breath weapon(s) were perfectly matched to the party's weaknesses. Third problem was, based on the size of the mini, it was noticeably above the party's ECL.

Even at the party's level, even without any optimization, it would still almost certainly be a TPK. What he was asking for, with even basic optimization, would have placed anything short of a TPK into the realm of the miraculous.

Fortunately, they never did hunt the beast down.


So....


What I'm seeing in this thread is that the encounter difficulty is pretty much impossible to determine. Has nobody done the math to work out what's an appropriate challenge?

So how do you build challenging and fun encounters?

Do you just throw random monsters at the party based on your gut and hope?

Back in my day, the party encountered what was there, with no expectation of balance. Scouting and running away were important survival skills.

All that changed, of course, if the DM started harping on game balance. Then they were taking the responsibility on themselves to run a balanced game. They usually failed.

[mauk2]

Back in my day, the party encountered what was there, with no expectation of balance. Scouting and running away were important survival skills.


Oh yes, I still use 'you look down in the valley and there is a tribe of Mountain Trolls dancing around a Menhir' sort of encounters. I love that sort of thing, and it conveys to the party that yes, the world is large and wild and they should walk carefully.

That said, when there is an encounter that I DO expect them to win, in the base rules there seems to be no solid way to calculate that it actually is a reasonable expectation, because the gamespace has not been numerically proofed out.

D20 is pushing on toward forty years old, and nobody has ever done this? For any of the games? We're all just relying on our guts?



All that changed, of course, if the DM started harping on game balance. Then they were taking the responsibility on themselves to run a balanced game. They usually failed.

Aw man, now I'm all depressed and stuff.

[EyethatBinds]

I gave a Skum 4HD, improved natural attack (bite), and the elite array for stats. His bite did 4d6+6 the party was 4th level, so I figured he'd make a good solo boss monster once they lured him out of the water. If they fought him in the water, he'd be a CR 5, 6 in the water.

But then my players reminded me that most of them only had 20 to 30 hp.

Only two characters escaped.

[martixy]

Oh yes, I still use 'you look down in the valley and there is a tribe of Mountain Trolls dancing around a Menhir' sort of encounters. I love that sort of thing, and it conveys to the party that yes, the world is large and wild and they should walk carefully.

That said, when there is an encounter that I DO expect them to win, in the base rules there seems to be no solid way to calculate that it actually is a reasonable expectation, because the gamespace has not been numerically proofed out.

D20 is pushing on toward forty years old, and nobody has ever done this? For any of the games? We're all just relying on our guts?




Aw man, now I'm all depressed and stuff.

Come on, they just solved go.
Give em a couple more decades.
:biggrin:

But no, not gut. You use the same primary skill the game hones.
The ability to put yourself in your player's character's shoes.

You learn how they fight and test their limits.


That's fine for narrativist gamers but I, for one, would've been -furious- at that revelation. Total walk-out. How well I do is dependent entirely on your arbitrary feelings of how well I should be doing? **** you, I'm out.

For some of us the story is an engaging way to string together the obstacles but we play for the game. If all I wanted was a story I could write one or read a book.

If that works for you and yours, that's cool. Do you. Just be aware that there are those of us that -do not- want that. No, not even then.
That is entirely correct. I feel we could reasonably assume this will be a wide-spread sentiment among folk visiting this particular forum.

It reminds me of the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion fiasco.

This is especially true for D&D 3.5 since that system tends to retain precisely those players who stick for the game perspective, since it is the system that is most able to satisfy that need.
Many of the narrativist players and DMs naturally drift towards 5e or more rules-lite systems.

A lot of complex human endeavours feature a very simple bit of wisdom: Choose the right tools for the job.
It is a basic tenet of optimizing life.
This is true for things like programming and it is true for TTRPGs.

Wasting time with a rules-heavy system like 3.5 on a narrativist game is a highly sub-optimal method of going about the game.

[Ammutseba]

I like having different strata of encounter levels for players. CR is fine and all, but you can scoot around within a given "rating" quite a bit. When I'm designing adventures, I like to use a gamut of optimization levels based on the nature of the enemies at hand. For certain enemies, though, that can include intentionally over-optimizing the enemies involved.

There are quite a few variables to consider, though, and being able to bring it all together is the most important thing. One encounter I designed used a group of four revived fossil giant crocodiles and two fire-souled jovocs to challenge a party of 7 ECL 8 gestalt characters. Unfortunately, instead of using the prescribed conditions, the monsters were all put together in a single clump and encountered on an open road. The monsters were annihilated.

On a revision of that encounter, the player roster changed and someone died in round 1. The others scraped through but were horrified at how bloodthirsty their DM had suddenly become, when they'd been blowing through encounters with ease until this point.

Balance is difficult, and must be controlled extremely finely. Location, conditions, number of monsters, arrangement, teamwork, load out and tactics, among other things, all need to be calibrated properly to create the right kinds of tension and difficulty. Whether our heroes will weather the storm turns out to be much more than a simple yes or no question.

So, I like to design multiple levels of optimization. Some will be dumb and played straight from the books. Some will be given NPC gear. Some will be found in locations that lend themselves naturally to the monsters' strengths. Are you looking at the BBEG, though? It's over-optimized. Nearly every time. That fight is supposed to be memorable for the horrific meat grinder it runs the party through. Good luck.