Bounded Accuracy Captain-Hobos the BBEG

[Quertus]

So, here's my train of thought:

One of my tables had several long-running parties. One if those was the one I refer to as the BDH party. They could take on nearly anything, and waded through their enemies like they were humans.

They had incredible alpha-strike potential, with high initiatives and high damage.

People have made numerous comments about this party that felt to me like there was something I just wasn't communicating successfully. Comments like, "it's fine for the the party to be powerful, but the GM has to scale the encounters in kind".

I know that this isn't true, because that party - among other things - ran through one or more published modules, and had a blast.

I've always tried to approach explaining this from the PoV of Player Agency - how it takes away from their decision to play powerful characters if the GM artificially scales the encounters to match. I've subtly or blatantly tried to liken it to Railroading, or the dreaded leveling treadmill. But I've always felt that, in addition to having questionable success at getting people to see how it could possibly work, that I have somehow failed to capture the essence of that party, of what made it work.

So, yes, very few monsters got to take a turn. Perhaps only one or two ever got two turns. If you got a 14 on initiative, you probably weren't going get a turn, because combat would probably be over.

But that was fine, because, even if you didn't get a turn this fight, it was only one of a dozen or a score encounters we'd blaze through in a night. We'd wade through most monsters like they were human.

Also, no single character was soloing these fights. Sure, maybe you wouldn't get to go this encounter, but it wasn't being solod by a single übercharger, or ending to a single SoD. So it wasn't ShadowRun level "and now it's Aquaman's turn to shine". No, everyone felt like they were shining all the time, even if they occasionally had to wait 10-15 minutes for the next encounter for their shine to be visible.

But, somehow - perhaps because of my poor explanations, perhaps because of the differences between a CaW vs CaS mindset, perhaps something else entirely - I felt like the message was never coming across. Worse, it felt like it was the wrong message - like, somehow, I should be looking at the issue differently to properly explain it.

And that's where this thread comes in. While keeping this on the back burner forever, something (and, sadly, I'm too senile to remember what right this second) made me look at this from another PoV.

See, in the BDH party, yes, most encounters were very easy. Most encounters, the party crushed their opposition, and moved on. But a few encounters, they didn't. A few encounters, the opponents were so powerful, or smart, or prepared, or lucky, or whatever, that they didn't just die to the BDHs. Those opponents, the party didn't just wade through them like they were humans. Those opponents were epic. We killed an ancient dragon while it was still gloating how inevitable our defeat was on initiative count 19, but you? You actually got a turn / you actually had an effective Contingency? You're awesome. The party being so powerful, and steamrolling so many foes, made those special opponents more memorable, more impressive by virtue of them comparing favorably to so many who had fallen before so easily to the party's might.

Now, compare that to 5e bounded accuracy. Really, Mephistopheles? You lost to these guys? You realize that they nearly TPK'd to a band of orcs yesterday? ... How do you think that makes Mephistopheles feel?

When you make the party vulnerable to weaker threats, you weaken the bigger threats. Like the old saying, "when a cow's life is as valuable as a man's, a man's life is as valueless as a cow's". While I don't know about that, I do know that, when I don't fear a Dragon significantly more than I do a band of orcs, it lessens the might and mystique of the Dragon, at least in my book.

Bounded Accuracy is the new Captain Hobo, whereas characters and parties who live the high end of their table's power curve have more appreciation for truly special foes, IME.

At least, that's my thoughts on the matter.

What do you say, playground? Does this make any sense? If it does, does it match your experience?

[Pelle]

Playing all powerful characters who are not facing any real challenges is fine if that's your thing. To me it's boring, because it turns the game into Magical Tea Party. I want to do that - sure, you do that. I want to do that - sure, you do that. If so, I don't see the point of using a system more complicated than free form.

Now, I don't really see what this has to do with bounded accuracy or not. You can play a party that face challenge or not in both 5e and 3.x if that's what you are comparing it to. And bounded accuracy doesn't really make a single orc more dangerous, but hordes of orcs will be. Whether that's good or bad is just a preference. I like that stopping a BBEG is about more than just rolling high in iniative, and don't see it as a problem that it is weak in combat as long as it has political power. My games are not about winning individual combats, they are about achieving goals, so bounded accuracy is not a particular issue in that respect. And the memorable opponents with contigencies you are talking about is more about winning the combat before it starts, which is the same situation with bounded accuracy. If the dragon is vulnerable in a straight fight, it shouldn't risk fighting and needs to be played smarter. That's why you fear it. Yes, in 5e parties can punch above their weight class when it comes to CR, possibly making enemies less special, but CR just measure straight combat potential, not BBEG potential. That you have to build up narratively.

[Pleh]

Now, compare that to 5e bounded accuracy. Really, Mephistopheles? You lost to these guys? You realize that they nearly TPK'd to a band of orcs yesterday? ... How do you think that makes Mephistopheles feel?

This is the part that stands out. I also feel that Bounded Accuracy is at best tangential to the rest of this train of thought. "Where did this come from?" I can see how it relates, but not how it's a next step in the process.

The quoted set makes me feel less like Bounded Accuracy is your problem as much as User Error.

Bounded Accuracy makes the act of engaging in any fight inherently dangerous, which is one of the things I like about it. And it's dangerous for everyone that participates in it.

But the thing that makes me think, "user error" is that you established that the losing devil was Mephistopheles. Then it seems out of character for him to lose. If he shouldn't have much chance of losing, you don't have to use combat rules or offer a fight. If you want tbe BDH to fight a devil, don't give him a name until he's become an infamous enemy.

And why aren't we just raising the infamy of the orc gang? Sure, you didn't say if the party barely won the fight or ran away, but there's no reason either way that the rest of theur gang couldn't still be out there, with increased prestige and infamy for putting the fear of orcs into a group of BDH.

It just feels like you need to do more prep work to account for all outcomes. How do I want this to go if X happens? What about Y?

You seem to like CaW and favor gameplay that rewards preparedness, which makes Bounded Accuracy feel cheap as it insists there always be an element of chance. But in reality, it just means you can never trivialize combat, so you have to always be prepared to deal with the fickleness of combat.

But this isn't just for PCs, but NPCs as well. Mephistopheles didn't rise through the pandemonic ranks by ignoring the bounded accuract of combat in his world. He got there by knowing how he could recover or profit even when a battle went south OR how to prevent combat from initiating to begin with.

[Quertus]

Playing all powerful characters who are not facing any real challenges is fine if that's your thing. To me it's boring, because it turns the game into Magical Tea Party. I want to do that - sure, you do that. I want to do that - sure, you do that. If so, I don't see the point of using a system more complicated than free form.

Now, I don't really see what this has to do with bounded accuracy or not. You can play a party that face challenge or not in both 5e and 3.x if that's what you are comparing it to. And bounded accuracy doesn't really make a single orc more dangerous, but hordes of orcs will be. Whether that's good or bad is just a preference. I like that stopping a BBEG is about more than just rolling high in iniative, and don't see it as a problem that it is weak in combat as long as it has political power. My games are not about winning individual combats, they are about achieving goals, so bounded accuracy is not a particular issue in that respect. And the memorable opponents with contigencies you are talking about is more about winning the combat before it starts, which is the same situation with bounded accuracy. If the dragon is vulnerable in a straight fight, it shouldn't risk fighting and needs to be played smarter. That's why you fear it. Yes, in 5e parties can punch above their weight class when it comes to CR, possibly making enemies less special, but CR just measure straight combat potential, not BBEG potential. That you have to build up narratively.

OK, I clearly failed to communicate here. Let me try again.

In D&D, one fairly common way of viewing encounters is that most aren't "life and death" situations - or, at least, aren't intended to be - but, rather, are simply a drain on resources. Such minion fights are more interesting as logistical challenges of "what resources can we afford to throw at this" in preperation for the fight against the "boss monster" than (to a war gamer like myself) interesting tactical challenges in and of themselves.

If one adopts this PoV, the BDH party was not failing to face any real challenges, because there were not any real challenges to be faced, outside the "boss monsters".

Unlike normal D&D, where the minion battles slowly wear the party down, and the success or failure of the boss fight is largely due to how well the players planned (against, mind you, the black box of whatever the boss monster happens to be, with the potential that zero foreshadowing of their capabilities is possible). So, you can have a party that struggles with or even TPKs against a boss fight that they "should have won easily", except that they expended critical resources in as minion fight.

With the BDH party, the coolness of the "boss" fights was entirely on the strength of the encounter itself. Mephistopheles wasn't cool because minion #127 managed to make the party expend their Potion of Defeat the Boss, Mephistopheles was cool because Mephistopheles was cool.

Lastly - and this is really hard for me to explain - but talk of the BBEG's political power is strictly outside the scope of this discussion. The biggest reason for that? Because if you're playing multidimensional chess against a BBEG opponent, and then win by punching him in the face, it's either really cool, or anticlimactic, depending on the setup and expectations.

So replace "BBEG" with "boss fight" for your purposes in this discussion, to limit the discussion to how cool the combat potential of creatures is. My assertion is, characters who more readily roflstomp minion fights are more wowed by the "cool" combat encounters than the ones who get TPK'd by rats.

This is the part that stands out. I also feel that Bounded Accuracy is at best tangential to the rest of this train of thought. "Where did this come from?" I can see how it relates, but not how it's a next step in the process.

The quoted set makes me feel less like Bounded Accuracy is your problem as much as User Error.

Bounded Accuracy makes the act of engaging in any fight inherently dangerous, which is one of the things I like about it. And it's dangerous for everyone that participates in it.

But the thing that makes me think, "user error" is that you established that the losing devil was Mephistopheles. Then it seems out of character for him to lose. If he shouldn't have much chance of losing, you don't have to use combat rules or offer a fight. If you want tbe BDH to fight a devil, don't give him a name until he's become an infamous enemy.

And why aren't we just raising the infamy of the orc gang? Sure, you didn't say if the party barely won the fight or ran away, but there's no reason either way that the rest of theur gang couldn't still be out there, with increased prestige and infamy for putting the fear of orcs into a group of BDH.

It just feels like you need to do more prep work to account for all outcomes. How do I want this to go if X happens? What about Y?

You seem to like CaW and favor gameplay that rewards preparedness, which makes Bounded Accuracy feel cheap as it insists there always be an element of chance. But in reality, it just means you can never trivialize combat, so you have to always be prepared to deal with the fickleness of combat.

But this isn't just for PCs, but NPCs as well. Mephistopheles didn't rise through the pandemonic ranks by ignoring the bounded accuract of combat in his world. He got there by knowing how he could recover or profit even when a battle went south OR how to prevent combat from initiating to begin with.

I feel much of what I wrote above applies here, as well, so I'll not repeat myself unless necessary. (Also, I'm regretting relying on my phone, as you really deserve a more point-by-point reply. Hopefully, I'm not missing too many important bits this way.)

Despite the length of the post, it isn't the entirety of my thoughts the matter, so feeling like I skipped steps is entirely valid. And, yes, I favor CaW.

Feel free to replace the orc gang with a bunch of rats. In fact, my original experience with this issue was with a party that happily slew dragons - sometimes multiple at a time - but was TPK'd by rats. Because RNG hated them (or loved the rats, perhaps?).

The fact that Bounded Accuracy makes every fight dangerous... I suppose it's easiest to see how that causes problems from a Narrative perspective, where the party that defeated Mephistopheles loses members to a random orc or rat. There's numerous discussions on the Playground where people have advocated the idea of "you cannot die unless it is narratively appropriate". While I don't hold to that - at all - I do feel that it cheapens the cool monsters when they lose, yet the most feeble of monsters actually pose a credible threat of death to the party. Also, for sufficiently large parties - which is my preference - you can make statements like, "Mephistopheles lost to this band heroes, who had just suffered three casualties to rats the day before - how tough can he be?"

It is solely the perception of the power of the encounter that I am discussing. Mephistopheles really looks lame when looked at in that light, IMO. Now, sure, I've seen/run boss fights that "won by losing" - heck, I've even ran a PC who pulled that off - but that's an exception. Not every cool monster should need to be playing 5d chess to seem cool, IMO. Perhaps, however, that is "user error" on my part, and worlds with Bounded Accuracy inherently have 5d chess as a prerequisite for coolness.

"If he shouldn't have much chance of losing, you don't have to use combat rules or offer a fight" - here I fundamentally disagree. Some of my best stories are from when the party won (or lost) against all odds. Some of my worst stories are from when the GM cut to narrative. I cannot imagine a war game where this would be acceptable. IMO, one should only "skip the rules" with the mutual consent of all parties involved.

[Cluedrew]

I've always tried to approach explaining this from the PoV of Player Agency - how it takes away from their decision to play powerful characters if the GM artificially scales the encounters to match.

I mean I do appreciate the idea of cranking things up as far as it can go and tackling the challenge head on. But generally I don't care about the challenge part of the equation and play a power-level (and power type, but here I will just focus on combat) that I feel fits the character.

Of course what that actually means can very. The best combatant I ever played managed to go 4/5 rounds with a swarm of monsters and then escaped with the help of other PCs and 1HP. In D&D that would not be considered that great, but this is a system where the strongest class of monster (which I was not fighting) might not have health. We killed one (across all campaigns) by setting off a cluster of nukes in its stomach, and that was narrated as part of the epilogue and it is still one of the most significant monster kills I any of the campaigns I have played.

So if you want to address: "Bounded Accuracy is the new Captain Hobo, whereas characters and parties who live the high end of their table's power curve have more appreciation for truly special foes, IME." I'll take it further than that. If everyone was playing the combat build I was, and we all had better weapons (the only area the character was not maxed out, possibly), then we still wouldn't be able to kill that thing. No it took narrative level impacts for us to kill that monster, unbounded accuracy wouldn't of made a difference.

So basically... I'm not sure bounded accuracy helps, but if "making enemies feel significant" is the core problem I don't think it is the primary cause. A monster that survives 2 rounds sounds like it was just a longer grind. A monster that a PC sacrificed themselves to kill in a campaign ending fight (we lost most of the party) will stay with me for a long time.

This post is not the one I set out to write, but I think it works.

[Quertus]

I mean I do appreciate the idea of cranking things up as far as it can go and tackling the challenge head on. But generally I don't care about the challenge part of the equation and play a power-level (and power type, but here I will just focus on combat) that I feel fits the character.

Of course what that actually means can very. The best combatant I ever played managed to go 4/5 rounds with a swarm of monsters and then escaped with the help of other PCs and 1HP. In D&D that would not be considered that great, but this is a system where the strongest class of monster (which I was not fighting) might not have health. We killed one (across all campaigns) by setting off a cluster of nukes in its stomach, and that was narrated as part of the epilogue and it is still one of the most significant monster kills I any of the campaigns I have played.

So if you want to address: "Bounded Accuracy is the new Captain Hobo, whereas characters and parties who live the high end of their table's power curve have more appreciation for truly special foes, IME." I'll take it further than that. If everyone was playing the combat build I was, and we all had better weapons (the only area the character was not maxed out, possibly), then we still wouldn't be able to kill that thing. No it took narrative level impacts for us to kill that monster, unbounded accuracy wouldn't of made a difference.

So basically... I'm not sure bounded accuracy helps, but if "making enemies feel significant" is the core problem I don't think it is the primary cause. A monster that survives 2 rounds sounds like it was just a longer grind. A monster that a PC sacrificed themselves to kill in a campaign ending fight (we lost most of the party) will stay with me for a long time.

This post is not the one I set out to write, but I think it works.

So, I'm not sure if I follow you - let me know if the story I tell below seems to have anything to do with what you're trying to get across.

So, one day, the BDH party encountered - as a random encounter - a Puzzle Monster. At full health and full resources, they engaged this single monster... and it survived their alpha strike. It made a not humiliating show of itself offensively... and proceeded to survive a second round of assault by the party. Historically, this should have been enough to kill three great wyrm dragons, so something was clearly up. The party was forced to think their way around this encounter - all completely RAW, no fudging or homebrew - and thus it made for one of the more memorable monsters.

Narratively, this monster was a random encounter - it wasn't meant to be significant. However, it demonstrated very clearly that there were things out there being the party's understanding or capabilities, and thus was quite significant to them, personally.

Because of the stark contrast between it and most encounters, it's significance really felt significant.

I'm not interested in / having trouble with making monsters be significant, I'm more concerned with significant monsters that don't feel significant - in this case, because rats can feel as significant (or, worse, already have felt more significant).

I feel that, when you've lost party members to rats, random orcs, and starving children with rusty knives, it lessens the coolness factor of other monsters.

Or, to more directly address you story, would your party's sacrifice have been as meaningful if, just yesterday, you'd sacrificed two party members to escape the rats that the danged lazy cat hadn't eaten?

[JAL_1138]

Consider, though, the characters in fiction who’ve defeated dragons. The majority have been physically-ordinary mortals (or physically-equivalent immortals, in the case of elves). Bard the Bowman rolled a Nat 20 on Sneak Attack (hit to the one spot where a scale was missing) with a Masterwork Arrow to defeat Smaug. Túrin Turambar defeated Glaurung with an intelligent magic sword, also pretty much due to a crit on a Sneak Attack (stabbed in the underbelly from below). St. George killed the Dragon of Silene by stabbing it with a lance and then beheading it with a sword (using some form of Divine Smite, presumably), but he himself was executed/martyred by ordinary humans.

The typical dragon in fiction is killed by the sort of person who could get wrecked by a massive Orc army. Or at least someone who’d have to consider it rather dangerous to wade out onto the battlefield, instead of being secure in knowing that it wouldn’t be possible for a huge Orc army to really harm them appreciably.

And as for Mephistopheles, he doesn’t have stats, as far as I’m aware, so you’re free to have him be as unbeatable as you like. Most of the Archdevils that do have stats are failures who’ve lost their thrones (Geryon, who can’t even defeat an ice cube; or Moloch, who’s banished from the Hells outright), or upstarts (Zariel, a fallen angel turned general mostly powerful through command of hordes of lesser demons; or Titivilus, called out in MtoF as weaker than others and hiring outsiders to deal with other “problem” devils, mainly wielding the political power of an Evil Vizier to Dispater).

But even so, powerful evil beings being taken out by mere mortals isn’t without precedent. “Really, Sauron, Dark Lord of Mordor, chief lieutenant of Morgoth, you lost to Isildur? He got one-shotted by a nameless Orc archer later.”

And then there was that one time Cthulhu got somewhat inconvenienced by a boat and went back to sleep.

[Pelle]

So replace "BBEG" with "boss fight" for your purposes in this discussion, to limit the discussion to how cool the combat potential of creatures is. My assertion is, characters who more readily roflstomp minion fights are more wowed by the "cool" combat encounters than the ones who get TPK'd by rats.

Sure, but I still don't see the relevancy, maybe I still don't understand your issue. Also with bounded accuracy you can have parties roflstomping minions, and then being wowed by cool boss fights. It's just a matter of how you use the CR scale. (Also without BA, you can have challenging minions and boring bosses)

Your issue seems to be that you want specific creatures to be roflstomped, and specific creatures to be special. Yes, it's inherent in bounded accuracy that the power level is tighter, it's not increasing exponentially. The intent is to have both orcs and dragons be potential opponents at a given level. But it's not necessarily difficult to get the same experience, you just need to shift your perception of which specific creatures are suitable as minions and which as bosses. In your example, use a better statblock for Mephistopheles if he is supposed to be that spectacular.

What bounded accuracy does is make quantity matter as much as quality. I don't think of Mephistopheles as pathetic for losing to orcs if it was a whole horde of them. A single one still has no chance. If your measure of boss coolness depends on how big armies they can take out singlehandedly, then BA will affect that.

[Faily]

Well, I totally get what you're trying to say, and I agree.

It's one of the reasons I don't like Bounded Accuracy, and don't really want to play in games with them. I don't want a fight against commoners with pitchforks to be equally tense and difficult as fighting the great Dragon and his goons.

I've been in groups too who have gone through most fights without a sweat, and those "boss-fights" have had that big important finale-feel to them. People get to have that power-fantasy of being awesome, and it's fun.

Now I'm not saying I need this in every game I play, but in D&D I vastly prefer that over the Bounded Accuracy-mode where being wasted by a swarm of rats is as likely as becoming dragon-chow.

[Anonymouswizard]

Now, compare that to 5e bounded accuracy. Really, Mephistopheles? You lost to these guys? You realize that they nearly TPK'd to a band of orcs yesterday? ... How do you think that makes Mephistopheles feel?

Specific point, this is 5e Bounded Accuracy, not 4e Bounded Accuracy (where a 'level appropriate monster' would always be hit between an X and a Y, but everybody scaled with level). Now, we have to ask, how important is Bounded Accuracy.

Now what does BA do? At it's core it means that at the end of the day numbers and tactics can make up for pure power. This is actually the way many games work, in that getting swampped by 50 starter monsters has a very good chance of killing a four man high level party, so we know that it's something that gamers like enough to keep buying these games. The way it's done in 5e means that numbers mean more than they did in previous editions, but that doesn't mean it's bad.

The thing is, compared to 3.X or 4e, this leads to a different world. In 3.X Mephistopheles wouldn't lose to a bunch of people who nearly TPK'd to several squads of orcs. He wouldn't in 5e either, because Mephistopheles doesn't fight when he doesn't know he can win. He's not a fighter, he's a schemer. Ba'al might get into that fight, but he has three times the hit points and 50% magic resistance.

Now is a game where you can just curbstomp low level threats a bad one? No, and it's why I'm sad that 5e isn't that game, it's rare among my collection. But the idea of a game and more importantly a world where you don't need 3,872 orcs to threaten a level ten party isn't inherently a problem, just different to what you like.

If you want that style, just continue with 3.X. Nobody can force you to play a game you don't want to.

[PhoenixPhyre]

All I'll say is that Bounded Accuracy is a bigger problem for this in theory than in practice. Because there are very very very very very few cases where an actual party will face a hugely overwhelming number of low-power creatures and actually fight. And it does have to be a hugely overwhelming number, at least if the high-level people have half a brain.

For me, knowing who wins by who wins initiative is fundamentally a denial of agency. Why even bother rolling the round if it's a foregone conclusion? Just roll initiative and tell it out narratively.

So in practice, you do get high level parties scything through large numbers of creatures before being seriously challenged by a big encounter (which may or may not be a single enemy--often BBEG + goons works better). It's just a few fewer than you'd have in 3e. I ran a 1-20 campaign like that where the last major piece (at level 18) was them slaughtering things that could only save on a 19 or 20, and sometimes not even then. In fact, the most challenging thing for them was deciding who of their party (including some long-term NPCs) would end up making a final, ultimate sacrifice to prevent the BNSEG (Not So Evil) from changing the world according to his vision (which the players didn't like). Took them several sessions of discussion and debate where the in-game clock didn't move at all.

In fact, the encounters they most enjoyed and that were most memorable were the ones where the monk stun-locked a beholder so it didn't get a single action (I rolled poorly) and where they threw a demon off a building and burned a rope ladder behind them to deny reinforcements. For them, a "tense" encounter is where one PC drops low on HP or gets knocked to 0.

And bounded accuracy does not mean that every fight is equally tense balanced. In fact, you can go an entire campaign using only Medium encounters. Medium (by the DMG definition) is not supposed to run any significant risk in isolation of killing a character. Yet you can have adventures that are tense, merely by making them choose between pressing on when short on resources or wait (and possibly lose their goal). Death is easy. Death is cheap. Death is boring. Real challenges are to things the players care about. And that can't be summed up by combat power, CR, or any such thing. That takes actual role-playing.

Bounded accuracy merely means that the system math does not assume that ATK bonuses and defenses increase strongly with level. That's it. It does not mean they can't, merely that the system works just fine if they don't.

Not only that, but unbounded systems are horrible for world-building. If the PCs aren't the first high-level creatures out there, then why are there still problems to be solved? A single quasi-immortal (epic level) character could have already solved all those problems before breakfast. It also means that every king, every guard, etc has to be high level or they'd evaporate under threat. And that's horribly jarring to me. I can have significant NPCs who have the power of a 2nd level character at best. I can have "high power" characters held in check by the masses. The actually available world-building solution space is tremendously higher because you don't have the distortion of level == power in an exponential, unsurmountable sense.

It also lets me use a much larger fraction of the MM, no matter what the party's level is at. I can throw "interesting" things at them without gating them behind "you have XYZ items/abilities to play or you're insta-dead or can't hit anything."

[Quertus]

@JAL_1138

... ****. Afaict, you fully understand what I'm saying, and I can't disagree with any of your facts. The best I can do is spin your response as saying that yes, what I'm saying makes sense, and, yes, I am technically correct, but it's a style preference, which, sure, Bounded Accuracy may not support - but neither does the fiction.

I may, in a bit, come back to why that still leaves me grouchy / still leaves me with battles to fight (but in an almost "searching for my missing piece" way), but, for now, I'll at least savor my (potentially Pyrrhic) victory that, yes, people could use my original post to see from another angle how the BDH party was fine in the modules as written.

Sure, but I still don't see the relevancy, maybe I still don't understand your issue. Also with bounded accuracy you can have parties roflstomping minions, and then being wowed by cool boss fights. It's just a matter of how you use the CR scale. (Also without BA, you can have challenging minions and boring bosses)

Well, I suppose I'm not being entirely clear. I'm not talking about what a fight/encounter/element is supposed to be, but what it is.

The module writer planned the Puzzle Monster as a meaningless random encounter; it was actually eye-opening. The module writer planned something as a challenging boss fight, it was actually trivial. I planned someone as a BBEG, he actually became the party's patron. And I'm fine with that.

But it's like Captain Hobo. You can build a character who looks fine in a vacuum, but, next to him, your character suddenly looks terrible. Same thing with Bounded Accuracy - you can have an event that looks fine in a vacuum, but degrades when evaluated with respect to previous performance. Sure, you shot the Dragon through the heart via a chink in its otherwise impenetrable armor - but that was clearly just luck, given that you missed a stationary target repeatedly just yesterday. You're not really that skilled. Sure, Mephistopheles put up a good fight, but those rats yesterday killed three men, so the big M was kinda a letdown by comparison.

My point was that, with the BDH party, there was never any question of whether the encounters that were (not were intended to be, actually were) cool felt cool. There were no, "well, when you look at it that way..." moments.

Your issue seems to be that you want specific creatures to be roflstomped, and specific creatures to be special.

Not really.

I'm fine with the party curb stomping Mephistopheles, or getting a TPK vs rats.

What I'm not fine with is when, because the rats were fatal, they Captain Hobo the otherwise memorable Mephistopheles encounter.

But even that isn't actually the point of the thread, but an analogy to explain the point. The point I was actually trying to make was that powerful PCs roflstomping most encounters makes the encounters that give them trouble even more memorable, makes them feel even more special.

Yes, it's inherent in bounded accuracy that the power level is tighter, it's not increasing exponentially. The intent is to have both orcs and dragons be potential opponents at a given level. But it's not necessarily difficult to get the same experience, you just need to shift your perception of which specific creatures are suitable as minions and which as bosses. In your example, use a better statblock for Mephistopheles if he is supposed to be that spectacular.

Well, no, that's cheating.

If I'm playing MtG, a Scathe Zombie is B2 for a vanilla 2/2 Zombie, and that shouldn't change based on what table I'm at, or how well my Merfolk deck is faring against the zombies.

I'm pretty sure that particular table* would agree with me that restatting the big M is a no go. Everything should be exactly as tough as it is, not as tough as the GM intends it.

The issue is that, under Bounded Accuracy, the existing stat blocks Captain Hobo poor Mephistopheles (who is just a stand-in here for "powerful opponent", be it Dragons or demons or whatever). By making rats as scary as Mephistopheles, you make Mephistopheles as much a joke as rats.

Similarly, if the BDH party waded through everything like they were humans, then it would have made all the encounters bland and samey, and I'd agree that it was a bad thing.

But since that was not the case - since they still had trouble with a few rare encounters - that made those encounters even more memorable, even more special.

* That particular table made several parties, which ranged from BDH to struggling with minions. And that flavor difference, where the GM ran the world honest, and each party felt different, is, IMO, very important.

What bounded accuracy does is make quantity matter as much as quality. I don't think of Mephistopheles as pathetic for losing to orcs if it was a whole horde of them. A single one still has no chance. If your measure of boss coolness depends on how big armies they can take out singlehandedly, then BA will affect that.

Well, no, the question is, if the Supreme Ten is down to the Supreme Seven because they went down to their cellar and encountered the rats that their lazy cat wasn't hunting, can they possibly prevail in an epic battle against Mephistopheles without him looking like a joke in retrospect? Do the rats not Captain Hobo the big M?

[Mordar]

Not really.

I'm fine with the party curb stomping Mephistopheles, or getting a TPK vs rats.

What I'm not fine with is when, because the rats were fatal, they Captain Hobo the otherwise memorable Mephistopheles encounter.

But even that isn't actually the point of the thread, but an analogy to explain the point. The point I was actually trying to make was that powerful PCs roflstomping most encounters makes the encounters that give them trouble even more memorable, makes them feel even more special.

[SNIP]

Well, no, the question is, if the Supreme Ten is down to the Supreme Seven because they went down to their cellar and encountered the rats that their lazy cat wasn't hunting, can they possibly prevail in an epic battle against Mephistopheles without him looking like a joke in retrospect? Do the rats not Captain Hobo the big M?

I think I see what, for me, the issue is with this discussion.

The encounters that "give them trouble" are the ones that are memorable or special. They cruise through virtually all of their encounters, even those featuring three elder great dragons of deathiness, to the point where if an enemy gets a turn is it exceptional. However, that exceptionalism is probably not actually the result of the opponent being especially tough or capable (based on your description), but more likely due to special planning by the GM or "good" luck (either RNG or just happening to have Puzzle Monster nature/defenses that countered the blitz of death).

Thus the Big M falling to the party after they became the Supreme Seven because of the Cellar Rats doesn't speak to Big M at all. It simply points out that the Cellar Rats just happened to be one of those exceptionally lucky encounters that went south on the Supreme Ten. No one in that environment would think "Wow, Cellar Rats are super tough while Big M, 3 EGD of Deathiness, entire continents of rampaging Storm Giants, Tarrasques and Beholders are all chumps, because the Supreme X stomped all of them but lost 30% of their members to those Cellar Rats." They would simply think "Wow, that batch of Cellar Rats must have won the galactic lottery that day."

Basically instead of a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters and a thousand years turning out the works of Old Bill, we've got a thousand farm boys with a thousand spears and a thousand attacks finally hitting Achilles in the heel.

- M

Edit to add: Bounded accuracy doesn't make the big monsters a joke. Those characters do. Bounded Accuracy just means that each monster gets a ticket in the $1.5B mega millions lottery...and one of those tickets might pay off.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Quertus, you're assuming something that doesn't exist (at least in 5e). Just because there's bounded accuracy doesn't mean that villains lose to rats. Or even guards. Not unless they stand stupidly in the middle of hundreds of them in a white room under permissive circumstances. It means that mechanically, the range of (attack and defense) power does not automatically grow with level. That is, that just because you're level 1 does not mean you can't hit that level 20 or that the level 20 will automatically hit you. Thats...all.

For an adult dragon (for example) to lose to a bunch of guards, you have to assume he flies straight and level out of clear blue sky, with tons of warning and does nothing but fly in and sit-and-spam attacks. Any other strategy is going to be fatal to the vast majority of the guards unless there are literally thousands of them.

I'd say this enhances things. No longer can the BBEG simply no-sell you until you have the plot token of power (or are high enough level)--it actually has to act like a real character. And this is done without the fatal-to-world-building arms-race that happens without bounds on the power.

[Arbane]

For an adult dragon (for example) to lose to a bunch of guards, you have to assume he flies straight and level out of clear blue sky, with tons of warning and does nothing but fly in and sit-and-spam attacks. Any other strategy is going to be fatal to the vast majority of the guards unless there are literally thousands of them.

I was briefly in a group playing "Horde of the Dragon Queen" (I think?) for 5th edition. The starter adventure for first-level characters has you shooting and throwing things at an adult blue dragon flying around overhead in hopes of getting it to leave.

....When our group's wizard got turned into a cloud of charged particles by one stray draconic lightning bolt, my rogue started looking for an escape route.

[Tvtyrant]

I personally love bounded accuracy, because it makes the world feel more real to me. A dragon where armor and attack scales (heh) heavily the dragon just flies down and crisps an army. Which immediately makes the probability of there being enough people to make armies suspect. With bounded accuracy it burns some outposts and villages, then retreats when forces large enough to threaten it approach. The party can sneak up on it where an army can't, which is why they are heroes and not soldiers.

Mephistopheles is the same thing. If I got 1,000 archers and he stood in an open field they could probably kill him. If he wanted to kill 1,000 archers he would wait until most of them were asleep, set their camp on fire then rinse and repeat until the army was dead. In 3.5 that army would lose to a Vrock, much less a Duke of Hell.

Without bounded accuracy it makes it difficult for me to buy the survival of any populations of mortals, and makes all enemies equally above them. The threats really stop scaling after level 6 compared to the world and only scale to the party, as a commoner is just as incapable of dealing with a bulette as a great wyrm dragon.

Edit: And a party could easily kill an army even in a bounded accuracy system, they just couldn't walk up to one in a field and blow it up until everyone is dead. With exactly one exception (wheel of time) I don't know a book where the protag could kill an army like that. But casting Weather Control to flood them out, having the Rogue poison or destroy their supplies until they have to split up and then kill the groups one at a time? Totally doable.

[Pauly]

This is a storytelling issue.
In a superman story any problem that can be solved by punching it in the face is instantly resolved that way. The storytelling is in finding problems that can’t be solved by punching it in the face, while keeping punching minor problems in the face within the story to keep up the “wow!” factor. (ie the PCs are paragonsj

In a batman story the problems he fights can punch back just as hard as he punches. This makes the fights more meaningful because each fight carries a risk that random thug pulks out a gun and gets a lucky shot in. The problem solving has a lot to do with how batman or the joker gets an advantage when it comes around to face punching time. (ie the PCs are everymen)

I prefer playing PCs who are below level 5 because I prefer to be John McCain over Dutch (from Predator), I prefer to be Odysseus than Achilles, Ripley is more interesting to me than Boba Fett. In your case the party is superman, so of course when batman elements turn up it feels out of place in that story.

[Quertus]

Ok, I can't keep up with individual replies any more, but let me clarify a few things:

I have never talked about having a BBEG or whatever fight rats. Captain Hobo didn't have to fight your character to make your character seem worse just by his existence, nor does the BBEG need to be beaten up by rats for them to make his combat prowess appear anemic. They need merely both exist, and both threaten the party, for this to be true. Having the rats actually defeat the BBEG would just be pouring salt on the wound.

The encounters were created by the "content writer" - the one who wrote the module - who is not necessarily the same person as the "rules adjudicator" / the GM. And, for most of the time in question, they are explicitly not the same person.

The encounters that are special are the ones that are special - not the ones that the content writer intended to be special. Unlike many encounters with other parties at that table, there was never a "yeah, you seemed cool, but, really, a pack of rats was as effective" moment with the BDH party. That which was cool was unambiguously cool.

That party struggled with anything social that couldn't be solved with innuendo. "Well, you're quite skilled with your tongue, but I'll need to see how you handle your sword." "He's got a huge sword, but his stamina leaves something to be desired." I mean, their slogan was, "we waded through them like they were human". And possibly my favorite exchange involved them asking the local clergy "can you cast Heal?" to undo the effects the party had used to "subdue" someone they wanted to question. So, upon learning that the answer was "no", they slit the prisoner's throat, and asked, "how about Speak with Dead?". It was after this exchange that the party adopted a "no prisoners" policy, simply to keep the aghast clergy off their backs. I loved that this party made simple dealings with NPCs memorable (often leaving the NPCs asking themselves, "are you sure these are the heroes?").

Despite the title, the point of this thread - for me - was to try to see if I could make another way to explain why it wasn't necessary to scale up published modules for the BDH party. Although the attempt may not have been 100% successful, I think it's shown promise. So I'll happily selfishly enjoy being the one to learn - in this case, about people's stances on the effects of Bounded Accuracy.

It's not a matter of pure rocket tag "wherever wins initiative, wins". No, it's a matter of a group of BDHs - who happen to be pushing towards the rocket tag border - playing in a "normal" module. If a PC won initiative (they usually did, having iirc +12-+18 initiative), they did not solo the fight. If an NPC got to go, let alone won initiative (which technically could happen, especially with surprise), then... they certainly never did just win the fight, and rarely seemed to threaten to do so singlehandedly.

[Cluedrew]

So, I'm not sure if I follow you - let me know if the story I tell below seems to have anything to do with what you're trying to get across.

Paragraphs 1-2 are about one topic (letting characters be powerful relative to the setting) and paragraphs 3-4 are about a different topic (the necessity of a range of power). Does that help? (I forgot section labels.) Your reply, and most of the rest of the thread, focused on the second part so I will focus on that. But before I do:

On Scaling to Characters: I am not a fan of it in general. I think it serves a role in some challenged based games but otherwise should be avoided.

Or, to more directly address you story, would your party's sacrifice have been as meaningful if, just yesterday, you'd sacrificed two party members to escape the rats that the danged lazy cat hadn't eaten?

Is this a game of MouseGuard?. Otherwise no, of course not.

But more importantly I feel that if the only thing keeping a prepared half dragon* warrior of impossible strength and speed from the rats that the deranged lazy cat didn't eat (but could of) is the hit/miss ratio of their attempts to bit the warrior... there more fundamental issues about how you are representing the universe than the numbers being used to determine accuracy.

* Seemed like the most over the top PC race for the example.

This makes the fights more meaningful because each fight carries a risk that random thug pulks out a gun and gets a lucky shot in.

... Do people actually wonder if Batman is going to make it through that fight with that random thug? Sometimes seeing how he makes it is interesting, but the fact that he will is never in doubt in my mind.

[Tvtyrant]

Paragraphs 1-2 are about one topic (letting characters be powerful relative to the setting) and paragraphs 3-4 are about a different topic (the necessity of a range of power). Does that help? (I forgot section labels.) Your reply, and most of the rest of the thread, focused on the second part so I will focus on that. But before I do:

On Scaling to Characters: I am not a fan of it in general. I think it serves a role in some challenged based games but otherwise should be avoided.

Is this a game of MouseGuard?. Otherwise no, of course not.

But more importantly I feel that if the only thing keeping a prepared half dragon* warrior of impossible strength and speed from the rats that the deranged lazy cat didn't eat (but could of) is the hit/miss ratio of their attempts to bit the warrior... there more fundamental issues about how you are representing the universe than the numbers being used to determine accuracy.

* Seemed like the most over the top PC race for the example.

... Do people actually wonder if Batman is going to make it through that fight with that random thug? Sometimes seeing how he makes it is interesting, but the fact that he will is never in doubt in my mind.

He does actually get smacked by thugs from time to time. He has to be saved from thugs by Huntress in Hush, and she actually almost loses to them anyway.

And again, Batman uses his skills to divide and conquer. If Batman just attacked sixty thugs on foot you would expect him to get pretty roughed up, if not beaten. Scaling bonuses aren't needed for Batman.

[Pauly]

... Do people actually wonder if Batman is going to make it through that fight with that random thug? Sometimes seeing how he makes it is interesting, but the fact that he will is never in doubt in my mind.

If it’s a boss fight no, but there have been plenty of times that batman gets KOed and left for dead or doesn’t foil the robbery or doesn’t know how to counter the boss villain’s new weapon yet. An encounter that would be 2 pages in a superman comic becomes a 5 issue storyline in batman.

[JAL_1138]

You seem to be making two different arguments, one being there’s no need to scale encounters to the party, and one that BA results in Captain Hobo for the BBEG. These are not the same argument, and one doesn’t necessarily entail the other. You’re also overstating the effect Bounded Accuracy has in-game by comparing three rats to Mephistopheles (or a dragon, or whatever the BBEG happens to be).

To equal the XP budget for the absolute lowest-CR Archdevil, Titivilus, at CR 16, 15000 XP, you’d need 150 Giant Rats (CR 1/8, XP 25, x150, encounter adjustment x4 XP= 15000). Most dragons are higher CR than Titivilus, and more combat-focused to boot (most of what makes Titivilus dangerous is high-DC Charm effects—he can’t really take you in a fair fight, but once he starts talking...)

The typical fantasy hero, facing 150 Rodents of Unusual Size, has about three options: 1) use clever tactics/AoEs, 2) escape, or 3) die.

That doesn’t apply to every single fantasy hero or mythological figure by any stretch, particularly high-power superheroes or descendants of gods, but it applies to quite a lot of protagonists who defeat powerful foes.

It’s worth mentioning that even within bounded accuracy, certain monsters are completely immune to damage from nonmagical weapons, so the largest army in the world can’t do anything to them without casters or magic weapons, other than maybe try to abuse the grappling rules to hold them in place for a while. (Technically, that invulnerability is also available to PCs, technically, via lycanthropy, but that’s not really recommended and too specific to be a viable solution, if a solution is needed). And this can be the case without one threat Captain Hobo-ing the other, because they’re different kinds of threats. The PCs can take on the nigh-invulnerable BBEG because they have the particular set of skills and gear that can do the job when no one else can, but still be risking death if they go up against a company of soldiers from the army without that also thereby making the BBEG a chump.

Interesting you mention MtG, though, since fielding a boatload of small creatures is a valid strategy in MtG to defeat godlike wizards who can summon eldritch abominations, mighty planeswalkers, angels, demons, dragons, vampires, nature spirits, island-devouring leviathans, and suchlike to do their bidding, who can cast spells that crumble mountains to dust, burn forests to ash, scour plains into desert, sink islands beneath the waves, trigger volcanic eruptions, and so on...but can be defeated quite handily by a sufficient quantity of 1/1 tokens if you can get them online quickly enough and attack with all of them.

Captain Hobo—I had to look that term up, although I got the gist—is largely a matter of preference, what you personally find cool. There are times when it could be mechanically blatant and hard to argue against—like if a trench knife does more damage than a tank’s main gun, the game has problems—but oftentimes, it’s just a matter of what you favor. Perhaps you prefer Supers style games, where Superman can shrug off an infinite number of bullets so long as there’s no Kryptonite around, and can deal with threats no mere mortal possibly can (no, Batman doesn’t count as a mere mortal, because the writers are on his side). That’s fine, and there are games catering to that preference, especially where you do play godlike entities (e.g., Exalted, Scion, etc.). But a lot of fiction and a lot of gameplay revolves around protagonists who have to take attack by large numbers of mundane foes seriously, and could bite the dust if they drop their Artifact of Invisibility and a random enemy archer crits the bejeezus out of them.

And, too, there’s always the counter to the Captain Hobo argument: Old Man Henderson, the crazy old stoner who killed Hastur and thereby went on to Internet glory. At pretty much any point Old Man Henderson could have been killed by cultists, explosives, police, the military, vehicle crashes, eldritch monsters, or fellow PCs—he was just a crazy old lawn-gnome-obsessed stoner, with a violent streak a mile wide, who kept somehow getting lucky—and people don’t remember Hastur seeming weak because Old Man Henderson killed him, they remember Old Man Henderson being crazy-awesome for taking on an Outer God and winning.

[Ignimortis]

And, too, there’s always the counter to the Captain Hobo argument: Old Man Henderson, the crazy old stoner who killed Hastur and thereby went on to Internet glory. At pretty much any point Old Man Henderson could have been killed by cultists, explosives, police, the military, vehicle crashes, eldritch monsters, or fellow PCs—he was just a crazy old lawn-gnome-obsessed stoner, with a violent streak a mile wide, who kept somehow getting lucky—and people don’t remember Hastur seeming weak because Old Man Henderson killed him, they remember Old Man Henderson being crazy-awesome for taking on an Outer God and winning.

Except in the context of this thread, it would be the GM going with the flow and just letting Hastur be killed by a ton of dynamite. I figure that an Elder God shouldn't even have HP, and a different GM might've said "Ok, you blew it all up, and yourself too. Hastur is unperturbed.". Sure, the first GM is more fun, but I don't think that was entirely RAW, which means that Rule of Cool was in place and it can mitigate many problems with both bounded and unbounded accuracy.

[Kaptin Keen]

I'm not an optimizer. Not by any stretch. I consider the whole exercise somewhat uninteresting - although others clearly love it to bits, which is fine.

However, it feels to me that if you build a character with (for instance) high alpha strike ability - you need to accept that any enemy can be built similarly, in which case the game becomes a rocket tag, and if you roll low initiative, you're likely dead.

And that's what seems to always be missing from these discussions: The simple fact that the rules apply to the game and all things in it - not just the players and their actions. If you can do a bajillion points of damage on round one, so could some NPC. And it just becomes a game of 'roll the highest initiative', which sounds slightly boring to me.

But then, I'm all about story and fluff and so on, things that would likely bore a dedicated optimizer to tears =D

[Pelle]

The point I was actually trying to make was that powerful PCs roflstomping most encounters makes the encounters that give them trouble even more memorable, makes them feel even more special.

Sounds plausible, fine. But that point doesn't have to do anything with bounded accuracy. What bounded accuracy does though, is stretch out the range of when that happens. With, it may be rats to this Mephistopheles I guess, and without it may be orcs to dragons. But so what?

Well, no, that's cheating.

Absolutely not. When a GM (or scenario designer) creates an npc, they have carte blanche to determine their stats. There are no rules to determine the stats of Bob the npc, and it's decidedly the responsibility of the GM to determine which to use. Now, if the stats have been established, you shouldn't change them during the game. If the intent here was that this Mephistopheles should be a spectacular combat opponent, your table just did a bad job when establishing his stats.

Well, no, the question is, if the Supreme Ten is down to the Supreme Seven because they went down to their cellar and encountered the rats that their lazy cat wasn't hunting, can they possibly prevail in an epic battle against Mephistopheles without him looking like a joke in retrospect?

Sure, maybe not. So what? Find a worthy opponent instead if that's what you are looking for.

[Pleh]

Except in the context of this thread, it would be the GM going with the flow and just letting Hastur be killed by a ton of dynamite. I figure that an Elder God shouldn't even have HP, and a different GM might've said "Ok, you blew it all up, and yourself too. Hastur is unperturbed.". Sure, the first GM is more fun, but I don't think that was entirely RAW, which means that Rule of Cool was in place and it can mitigate many problems with both bounded and unbounded accuracy.

I reread that story recently. Half the point of the strategy was that they had established the rule (whether houserule or RAW) earlier in the game that when an Elder Evil is summoned, there's a short couple of rounds that they are weak due to something like a summoning sickness.

During this time they are vulnerable. OMH, after summoning Hastur and triggering the detonator, started singing the canadian national anthem so Hastur would be confused rather than defensive, right until the moment the explosives went off, which were timed to detonate before he regained his strength.

I'm not familiar with the ruleset they were using, but the fact that OMH used the DM's clues against him to win legitimately was really the entire point.

[JAL_1138]

Except in the context of this thread, it would be the GM going with the flow and just letting Hastur be killed by a ton of dynamite. I figure that an Elder God shouldn't even have HP, and a different GM might've said "Ok, you blew it all up, and yourself too. Hastur is unperturbed.". Sure, the first GM is more fun, but I don't think that was entirely RAW, which means that Rule of Cool was in place and it can mitigate many problems with both bounded and unbounded accuracy.

I reread that story recently. Half the point of the strategy was that they had established the rule (whether houserule or RAW) earlier in the game that when an Elder Evil is summoned, there's a short couple of rounds that they are weak due to something like a summoning sickness.

During this time they are vulnerable. OMH, after summoning Hastur and triggering the detonator, started singing the canadian national anthem so Hastur would be confused rather than defensive, right until the moment the explosives went off, which were timed to detonate before he regained his strength.

I'm not familiar with the ruleset they were using, but the fact that OMH used the DM's clues against him to win legitimately was really the entire point.

Pleh beat me to the punch, but yeah. “Rule of Cool” is not in effect if the DM is angry enough about what the player just pulled off to flip the table and leave because he wouldn’t be able to say the strategy doesn’t work without contradicting something he previously established as fact.

[Quertus]

So, it feels like the consensus is, no, most people haven't seen what I've seen. Well, kinda - many people are still commenting as though I'm saying something other than what I'm saying, so maybe I shouldn't measure general consensus yet.

I'd say this enhances things. No longer can the BBEG simply no-sell you until you have the plot token of power (or are high enough level)--it actually has to act like a real character. And this is done without the fatal-to-world-building arms-race that happens without bounds on the power.

Several people have said this, so, clearly, not having clear delineation of "this foe is beyond any of you" for Demons / Dragons / Superman / whatever is important to a not-niche style of play.

Which is fine, given that I'm only trying to show that, for one style of play (apparently, not this one), the monsters in the published modules do not need to be scaled to the BDH party for fun to be had without calling BadWrongFun.

You seem to be making two different arguments, one being there’s no need to scale encounters to the party, and one that BA results in Captain Hobo for the BBEG. These are not the same argument, and one doesn’t necessarily entail the other. You’re also overstating the effect Bounded Accuracy has in-game by comparing three rats to Mephistopheles (or a dragon, or whatever the BBEG happens to be).

Well, yes and no. I suppose what I'm really doing is trying to paint a picture of one of my preferred gaming styles. But because I'm playing 5d chess, painting the picture in multiple dimensions, and not explicitly explaining that that's what I'm doing (because I'm too Old Man Henderson to really realize that that's what I'm doing), it feels like I'm saying several different things.

So, in other words, when you're in this particular mindset, both of these facts will be true: a) you don't need to scale the monsters to the BDH party (and, in fact, doing so would be actively detrimental); b) otherwise cool encounters that you defeat seem lame when you realize that a pack of rats / orcs / fodder posed more threat. (EDIT: I suppose I should add "c) there exists the notion of 'this foe is beyond any of you'" - or is that covered implicitly by "b"?)

Interesting you mention MtG, though, since fielding a boatload of small creatures is a valid strategy in MtG to defeat godlike wizards

Sure can. But some kid's My First Tome Deck - let alone a several of them - isn't likely to seriously threaten the tournament champion, making your loss to him seem that much more pathetic by comparison.

I've seen good decks win matches my deck couldn't, but I doubt I've ever seen a random pile of cards thrown together for their pictures by someone who didn't know how to play accomplish spectacular feats, like TPKing the PCs (which is what "defeating the tournament champion" is really standing in for in this example).

Captain Hobo—I had to look that term up, although I got the gist—is largely a matter of preference, what you personally find cool.

I certainly never thought of it like that, but I suppose a case could be made...

And, too, there’s always the counter to the Captain Hobo argument: Old Man Henderson, the crazy old stoner who killed Hastur and thereby went on to Internet glory. At pretty much any point Old Man Henderson could have been killed by cultists, explosives, police, the military, vehicle crashes, eldritch monsters, or fellow PCs—he was just a crazy old lawn-gnome-obsessed stoner, with a violent streak a mile wide, who kept somehow getting lucky—and people don’t remember Hastur seeming weak because Old Man Henderson killed him, they remember Old Man Henderson being crazy-awesome for taking on an Outer God and winning.

The correct parallel would be if Old Man Henderson, instead of being such a BDH, had been hospitalized repeatedly in the campaign, by a bag lady, two pidgins, and a noisy cricket, then killed Hastur by punching him in the face, and walked away whistling.

I'm not an optimizer. Not by any stretch. I consider the whole exercise somewhat uninteresting - although others clearly love it to bits, which is fine.

However, it feels to me that if you build a character with (for instance) high alpha strike ability - you need to accept that any enemy can be built similarly, in which case the game becomes a rocket tag, and if you roll low initiative, you're likely dead.

And that's what seems to always be missing from these discussions: The simple fact that the rules apply to the game and all things in it - not just the players and their actions. If you can do a bajillion points of damage on round one, so could some NPC. And it just becomes a game of 'roll the highest initiative', which sounds slightly boring to me.

But then, I'm all about story and fluff and so on, things that would likely bore a dedicated optimizer to tears =D

So could some NPC have the party's level of alpha-strike tech? Sure. But that NPC was conspicuously absent from those published modules.

Also, the BDH party in question? There were no true übercharger builds - no-one was soloing an encounter*. The party just had higher alpha strike potential than Krusk / Devis / Jozan and company.

Part of the point is, because the module was run "as written", the party got to actually feel like BDHs.

Many times before when I've mentioned this party, the response had been like yours, that that's fine, so long as the GM scales encounters to match. My response is, no, it's fine, so long as the GM doesn't scale encounters to match.

Would a party of purely optimized übercharger builds have killed the fun? For my group, absolutely. As I've said (or, at least, hinted at) earlier in the thread, the party worked in no small part because no one was going around soloing encounters, because everyone got to shine all the time. The BDH party felt like BDHs because they were so much shinier than (most of) the world.

Why would you want to remove their shine?

* Outside the one time that a group of fodder ate a fireball.

Absolutely not. When a GM (or scenario designer) creates an npc, they have carte blanche to determine their stats. There are no rules to determine the stats of Bob the npc, and it's decidedly the responsibility of the GM to determine which to use. Now, if the stats have been established, you shouldn't change them during the game. If the intent here was that this Mephistopheles should be a spectacular combat opponent, your table just did a bad job when establishing his stats.

Two things. One, we were running through published modules - the stats were already established, and the table chose to play characters who were strong. Note that this table also, in separate parties, choose to play characters who were average, characters who were weak, and characters who were a mixed bag. Changing the published stats would be a denial of their agency to make that choice.

Two, I'm not a fan of "intent". Trying to preserve "intent" sounds like orc mischief railroading to me.

Heck, I wrote an NPC to serve as the campaign BBEG, and the party instead took him as their patron. I rolled with it, rather than trying to preserve his intended narrative purpose.

I reread that story recently. Half the point of the strategy was that they had established the rule (whether houserule or RAW) earlier in the game that when an Elder Evil is summoned, there's a short couple of rounds that they are weak due to something like a summoning sickness.

During this time they are vulnerable. OMH, after summoning Hastur and triggering the detonator, started singing the canadian national anthem so Hastur would be confused rather than defensive, right until the moment the explosives went off, which were timed to detonate before he regained his strength.

I'm not familiar with the ruleset they were using, but the fact that OMH used the DM's clues against him to win legitimately was really the entire point.

No, it's "X rounds until fully manifested and vulnerable to being killed" - singing the song was a very clear timer that that amount of time had passed, and the GM couldn't pull shenanigans saying that Hastur wasn't vulnerable yet.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Quertus, steamrolling a module isn't being a BDH unless the DM is GG himself and the module is the original Tomb of Horrors and you're the first group doing it. It's taking candy from a baby. It's like coming to a "learn to play MtG" event as a tournament pro with a tournament deck. It's like playing Doom on the lowest setting with cheat codes on and crowing about not dying.

Modules are written to the lowest common denominator. They're not written with any kind of optimization in mind--they're written to be easily doable by a 4-man band of Blaster Mage, SnB fighter, standard rogue, and heal-bot cleric. A "standard optimization" party (as found on this board) will not be threatened by anything there unless they play like total idiots, even in 5e with bounded accuracy.

That's part of the discrepancy here--you seem to think that modules are benchmarks for the game. They're not. They're intentionally undertuned so you don't have to optimize. And for most modules, they don't assume access to the wide array of splats, especially those published afterward.

[Pelle]

Two things. One, we were running through published modules - the stats were already established, and the table chose to play characters who were strong. Note that this table also, in separate parties, choose to play characters who were average, characters who were weak, and characters who were a mixed bag. Changing the published stats would be a denial of their agency to make that choice.

Sure agreed, if you want to play a published module straight, don't change the stats. I was talking about designing the stats/scenario, don't call that cheating. If you want a different experience than what the modules provide, you should consider redesigning the stats/scenario though.

This is just how the modules are designed, and it is not because of bounded accuracy itself. They are designed so that every creature should be relevant to the PCs (apparantly). And because that's the goal, bounded accuracy is suited for the job.

So your real problem seems to be that you want to play the published adventures which are not designed for what you want to experience. You could just as well design adventure modules where minions are roflstomped and bosses are challenging, even with bounded accuracy.

Two, I'm not a fan of "intent". Trying to preserve "intent" sounds like orc mischief railroading to me.

Don't read too much negative into the word here. This was meant more as in matching the right stats to what it is supposed to represent in the fiction. For example, if this npc should be able to take on an army alone, the stats need to match that 1-to-1. If its size is supposed to be larger than a human, size Small is objectively wrong etc. If the designer want to include a powerful creature in the scenario for whatever reason, the intent was to have an actual powerful creature, not a weak one.