Karnitis
2019-07-23, 09:36 AM
The group I was DMing for last night had been tasked with getting this McGuffin, and they were given a variety of paths to get there. They naturally chose crossing the land I bluntly said was full of barbarians and savages.
We'd been playing for a few hours and were close to the end of the session, but as they entered the savage lands, they got into their first/last combat of the evening. I made sure they were weenies, as they had just entered the land. I could tell they weren't too engaged/threatened and an idea popped into my head. They are completely inside enemy territory, in an unfamiliar land. I decided to throw in a lair action.
They are all level 10 and I sent out 4 CR1 enemies. At the end of every round, if they hadn't cleared out the enemies, another one spawned and they had to make DEX saves to dodge arrows from the bushes. It instantly made the encounter seem more dangerous, even though they were still only CR1 and the arrow damage was 2d6.
I'm thinking of keeping this up - they won't have a ton of encounters every day (as long as they learn to be safer/more stealthy), but I think this is more realistic, rather than Random Encounter Monster Zealot.
I wanted to verify with y'all - have any of you guys tried this or something similar, does it diminish the relatively rare impact of lair actions overall?
We'd been playing for a few hours and were close to the end of the session, but as they entered the savage lands, they got into their first/last combat of the evening. I made sure they were weenies, as they had just entered the land. I could tell they weren't too engaged/threatened and an idea popped into my head. They are completely inside enemy territory, in an unfamiliar land. I decided to throw in a lair action.
They are all level 10 and I sent out 4 CR1 enemies. At the end of every round, if they hadn't cleared out the enemies, another one spawned and they had to make DEX saves to dodge arrows from the bushes. It instantly made the encounter seem more dangerous, even though they were still only CR1 and the arrow damage was 2d6.
I'm thinking of keeping this up - they won't have a ton of encounters every day (as long as they learn to be safer/more stealthy), but I think this is more realistic, rather than Random Encounter Monster Zealot.
I wanted to verify with y'all - have any of you guys tried this or something similar, does it diminish the relatively rare impact of lair actions overall?