Pacing a megadungeon

[Talakeal]

In every single disagreement that Talakael described his players acting dumb, they always seemed convinced to not have acted dumb. If they were just playing dumb, they would have defended their action by saying so.

Its not about intentionally playing dumb, its more often about being distracted / lazy / or overconfident and not feeling the inclination or need to devote brainpower to tactics or being too arrogant / selfish / paranoid / awkward to put effort into communication and teamwork.

[Satinavian]

Yes, that is how you describe them.

And there is no way whatsoever for you to get rid of personality traits of your players. If they are lazy, they will remain lazy. If they are arrogant, they will continue to blaim any failures on you being unfar. If they can't do proper teamwork even after years of playing together that is nothing you as GM can really change.


You should stop trying to change your players. Accept them as they are or look for others. That is esspecially true for Bob.

[Quertus]

They have never vocalized that last though. They have told me they want more action and adventure. They haven't said they want to always succeed, because admitting that would hurt their egos, just like losing does. Far better to demand a balanced game (as they do all the time) and then whine that it was unfair when they lost.

Because that is what 90% of my games problems come down to, people who are looking for blame other people for their own weak ego.



That's a bit extreme.

Although, I am not sure what the connection is here. You are surprised that I play smart monsters as smart because I have a history of playing monsters as smart?

The only thing I can think of is you are objecting to an asymmetrical knowledge thing where the DM knows if something is a trap or not beforehand so traps are unfair when used by the DM?




Its just so refreshing that they are actually looking inward after a defeat rather than insisting that I am cheating and are actually connecting the natural consequences of their actions.

You seem to have put 2 and 2 together and realized that by provoking the kobolds and then falling back to rest that is what caused the kobolds to fortify their lair and prepare for the PC's return.

And that's progress.

When a GM creates and runs the world, all the world shares their blind spots. That’s just the nature of the beast.

Happily, your players seem to have viewed events the same way you did. Sure, those actions had logical consequences. And, hooray, your players have acquired a new skill: [Look Inwards]. I’m really happy for y’all.

Here’s the problems: yes, they didn’t think, and blundered into that scenario, and only saw after the fact how obviously their foes might prepare for their return. However, that scenario is entirely of your devising - you created the scenario, pushed them to push hard, and encouraged them to fall back. The fact that they’re in a “Tucker’s” scenario feels like your doing, not theirs.

A bunch of weak egos, who feel the need to blame others for their own mistakes? I can easily see them focusing on “this is your fault” (that we’re in this scenario) rather than “this is our fault” (that we didn’t prepare for this scenario).

And that by itself would have been enough to trigger some groups I’ve been in.

But on top of that, your group’s been telling you forever that they want “action and adventure”, which… might well translate into “CaS mindless kick in the door to find a balanced encounter on the other side”, whereas you’ve forced a “5d Wizard Chess actually needing to think CaW game” on them. And that probably feels like a giant middle finger.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all about giving the middle finger of CaW to my players, too - just not to violent sociopaths (word chosen randomly for its feel, not for its precise definition) who can’t handle it. Thankfully, my violent sociopaths always had multiple members more than capable of exceeding the “thought” prerequisites of my adventures, so my surgically enhanced middle finger was never a problem.

But if you somehow exceeded the capabilities of one of my old groups, despite their protests, for years? And then forced / manipulate them into a “Tucker’s”, to their minds tricking them into thinking it was their fault? It wouldn’t have been pretty.

Then again, I’m more familiar with the “ambush the umpire in the parking lot for making a bad call” mindset of violence, rather than your table’s “child throwing their toys in a tantrum” violence, so maybe my concerns are unfounded. Shrug. It’s not a part of the human psyche that my hobbiest interest in psychology has really focused on.

[Talakeal]

@Stinavian: Maybe so. I just wanted to make it clear that my players ae not stupid, nor is their lack of tactics an intentional attempt o RP stupid characters.


@Quertus:

That’s not quite what happened. They were going about the dungeon at a good pace, encountered a kobold lair, and then decided to go back to town and rest up before clearing it. This gave the kobolds a chance to prepare for them and fortify their defenses, turning what would have been a fairly east standup fight into a veey difficult situation.

[ahyangyi]

Gloomhaven, and many other co-operative games, put restrictions on co-operation because that is part of the challenge. It isn't just to prevent socially dominant players from making all the decisions or just to keep play from slowing down. Chinese Whisphers and its derivatives make even better examples than Gloomhaven: fundamentally, the point is just to pass a message from one end of a chain to another. Yet the rules mostly just exist to make this task difficult and good chunk of entertainment comes from the ways people fail in passing the message.

In other games the challenge is elsewhere and poor communication and co-ordination just means the players suck. It's not "wrong" in some absolute sense, nor is it against the rules. It's just bad play. It isn't actually given there is any advantage to current playstyle of Talakeal"s players in the type of game they're currently playing.

I intentionally picked Gloomhaven because its restriction is soft and isn't much of a challenge than a recommended social norm. That said, that's probably still a bad example because much of the tactical talk happens after revealing initiative and Gloomhaven does nothing against that.

Anyways, I think this topic is better represented in this other recent thread, which you also participated in. What I was trying to say is close to icefractal's opinion, and I think I didn't express it as clearly as they did. I know you were in disagreement -- but that's fine, this is just a clarification.

@Stinavian: Maybe so. I just wanted to make it clear that my players ae not stupid, nor is their lack of tactics an intentional attempt o RP stupid characters.


@Quertus:

That’s not quite what happened. They were going about the dungeon at a good pace, encountered a kobold lair, and then decided to go back to town and rest up before clearing it. This gave the kobolds a chance to prepare for them and fortify their defenses, turning what would have been a fairly east standup fight into a veey difficult situation.

I'm thinking about this. On the one hand, it definitely helped that your world is dynamic and the NPCs reacted to player actions, but on the other hand, would it be helpful if you point out potential consequences or their missed tactical options forG a few sessions?

You know, that's how we learn most things; we see how other do and follow their examples until we become proficient. So if the players are not proficient, perhaps they need examples?

[Vahnavoi]

In every single disagreement that Talakael described his players acting dumb, they always seemed convinced to not have acted dumb. If they were just playing dumb, they would have defended their action by saying so.

That same set of observations can be explained by a bunch of people rationalizing their behaviour to excuse themselves from putting in more effort. You have probably seen it yourself myriad times in most mundane of contexts: people giving token effort, then proclaiming something is too hard, before giving up or resuming what they were doing already.

Claiming to have played dumb is not a defense in such situations. It's just admitting you didn't put in the effort, and makes you liable in eyes of others to do better. Don't conflate the choice to not play to one's limit with simply acting dumb as part of playing a character.

[gbaji]

In D&D, characters need buckets of magic items to keep up. If all the opponents have buckets of magic items, then the game goes into an insane monte haul wealth spiral.

It's a problem with D&D, which is a very item heavy game in terms of PC power. But it's not that impossible to overcome. As has already been mentioned, there's a pretty sharp point of diminishing returns. In D&D, you can only wear a specific amount of each type of magic gear. Anything you run across that isn't an upgrade, is mostly useless. A +1 sword, when everyone alerady has +3 swords, isn't worth more than what you can sell it for. In most sane games, enchanted armor that isn't an upgrade for anyone is going to be too heavy/unweildy to carry with you, right? Of course, D&D gives us bags of holding, which make the whole thing "silly". But maybe consider creating a game in which things like that (and teleport) just don't exist? This ceases to be an issue.

Also try playing games that aren't chock full of "+X magic <whatever>" items. You might find that a lot of these problems aren't really that much of an issue. There should be ways to make NPCs difficult to deal with that don't always involve handing the PCs ridiculous amounts of loot when they win. Again. Didn't you design the game system you are playing? Don't make it so much like D&D, and you will avoid the problems that D&D has.

In White Wolf games, if you give the NPC's full PC resources, then every fight takes two hours and the players whine incessantly about having to ration out their resources while the enemies can burn through a month of resources in a single combat. (Heck, my players whine about the monsters being at full HP when encountered).

Its also extremely boring for the PCs to encounter NPCs over and over again and a pain in the butt for the DM to have to make an NPC party for each encounter, which is why, imo, modern games no longer even attempt PC NPC symmetry.

Again though, this is a construct of the "X encounters of Y difficulty a day" mentality. In my game, the PCs rarely have more than one encounter per day. But those encounters involve them wandering around, discovering who the bad guys are (or the bad guys discovering them), and then maybe getting into an encounter with them. Sometimes, they are easy encounters. Sometimes, they are really difficult. But the encounters, and the nature/difficulty of those encounters are based on the situation the PCs are in. It's about what they are doing, and what is there. Not at all "what can they handle in a fight", much less "I need to structure X fights of exactly Y difficulty for them each day". That's.... insane.

The PCs generally have oppotunities for using diplomacy to resolve things, or at least to figure out who they are dealing with. Again, they don't just randomly wander around and fight things. In my game setting, things exist where they are for a reason, and have a purpose for being there. Part of the "game" is the players exploring and figuring things out. And yeah, sometimes this means figuring out how to deal with a group of NPCs in a non-violent manner. Sometimes, they have to figure out how to defeat a group of NPCs that may be quite tough. But there are very very few "random encounters" in my game. Occasionally, rarish (depending on where they are), and usually somewhat trivial (cause if there's things wandering randomly that are a real threat to a decently powered adventuring party, I can't rationlize how normal people survive in this world, right?).

That is exactly how the system does work.

The problem is that in real life the "floor" is hidden information, but in the game the players can look in the book and see what said "floor" is, and will thus always feel ripped off if they pay more than it.

I've never seen a game guide that had wholesale prices rather than list prices for PCs to pay for things. And if it does? Who cares? You tell your players that they don't know what the NPC paid for that good. Here's what he's offering as a result of their haggling. Period. When players do this in my game (they use a skill called bargaining), I have them roll their skill, and I roll for the NPC. I have a price in mind for the good when they start, and I adjust from that point based on the relative die rolls. I don't show them my roll anyway, so how on earth would they know? They just know that sometimes, when they buy a mule to carry stuff it costs this much, and sometimes it costs a little more, and sometimes a little less.

I just don't make my players micromanage their finances that much either. So I guess it's more of a focus thing. I also don't tend to have magic stores selling stuff for players to buy in my game either, so it's not that big of a deal either way. They're mostly paying for food, lodging, equipment, etc. As a general rule, in the context of an adventuring group, they just don't have financial problems in my game. There's a pretty huge jump from "affording day to day stuff", and "buying some powerful magic item, or a castle, or business". They're in different financial regions, so we don't tend to worry about the small stuff that much.

In my last campaign they were trekking across a wilderness that is roughly as dangerous as Skull Island from King Kong, not an active enemy war-zone. The things they fought were primarily big monsters and environmental hazards rather than organized enemy armies. The idea was the PCs would hear about a treasure in the wilderness, get to it expending as few resources as possible, and then pull back. What the players did instead was retreat to town after every random encounter and only go for the treasure if they made a near flawless run. So, they ended up having far MORE combats, but because every combat was their first combat of the day, they had zero potentially lethal combats.

If that's how they decided to do that, then that's what they decided. Maybe next time, don't put a town conveniently located where they can do this? If they had to find a map to the island, then hire a ship to get there (and perhaps the captain insists that he'll only stick around for X days), then they have to trek inland, find the treasure and get back to the ship in that amount of time, right? Where is this "town" they are retreating to? It should not exist in this scenario, right?

You're the GM. If you decide to create a mythical "Skull Island" adventure, then make the island somewhere remote, make it take time/effort/money to get there, and give them a specific amount of time to explore and then have to leave by ship, perhaps never to return. There must be a reason why this whole area is swarming with monsters and whatnot, and hasn't been already wiped out and explored, right? Make that the same thing that makes them have to actually "explore the island".

Can I repeat my earlier point that elminating easy teleportation would seem to solve nearly every problem you have in your game? Maybe think about doing that. Or, if not, then you can't have adventures like this in your game world. If teleportation is that common, this island should not exist as it is, right? The first group of adventurers to discover it should have already cleared it, taken all the loot, or sold information to others, provided teleportation coordinates, or whatever. The point is that if your world has this easy method of travel, then all things valuable enough to go and take should already have been taken and put it somewhere "secure" from teleportation. If you're going to allow that in your game setting, you have to logically adjust the setting to assume what a world like that would actually look like several thousand years later (or whatever time frame we're looking at here).

There should be no "mythical treasure guarded by nothing but animals/monsters", right? Should just not exist in this world at all. Build your setting. Make it consistent with regard to the powers and abilities that the beings living in it have. If teleportation exists in your game, and is relatively easy for adventurers to have access to then "security via obscurity/remote-location" cannot realistically exist in your game.

The players I have played with have always been obsessed with balance, and would consider the above to be the equivalent of showing up to poker night with marked cards.

Then they/you are balancing to the wrong things. Balance to the setting, not the PCs. There should always be a lot of things in the setting that are vastly more powerful than the PCs are. And they should be aware of this at all times. They should *never* just wander around assuming that nothing they encounter will ever be too much for them, or that they must even be scaled to "X fights of Y difficulty".

This is entirely up to you, as the GM, to implement. Or not. But if you don't then you can't be surprised when your players expect a series of theses "balanced" encounters, and get upset if you don't provide them with exactly that.

The argument seems to be based on the idea that "tactics that work" means "enemies win, players lose". This is horse hockey. That's not what realism means. To wit, realism means attempt to present reality as it is, without romance, idealization or abstraction. Tactics, means doing what you can with what you have, in pursuit of objectives set by strategy. Put together, "realistic tactics" means enemies doing what they think would be best for their goals, given their actual position, knowledge and resources. Nowhere is it guaranteed that this doesn't give players a fighting chance. It's only annoying to deal with, in the same sense as dealing with an actual intelligent opponent in a real scenario would be.

Yup. The PCs are generally going to be tougher than any random thing they run into. But not always. Realism means that the NPCs act in a rational reasonable manner, based on who they are. Period. Now yeah, sometimes, those NPCs just aren't expecting a powerful group of PCs who have access to some rare abilities/magic/items/whatever, and the PCs steamroll them. Sometimes, the NPCs have access to things the players didn't consider.

If you adjust your encounter methodology to be less "attack everything we run into, assuming the GM has balanced it for us to fight", and "talk to them, see what's going on, figure out whether we can resolve this using methods X, Y, or Z, and then make a decision", then you can have a great amount of realism in your game without it always being "NPCs win". The PCs just have to also be "realistic" about what battles they decide to fight, and how they fight them.

I once ran a (long) adventure where there were two big bads. Each of them were waaaaaay outside the PCs league. Like, ancient super powerful lich on one hand, and fallen (but still extremely powerful) deity on the other. Both causing problems. However, the two were also working against eachother and plotting ways to eliminate the other. The entire adventure was basically the PCs figuring out who these two big bads were, dealing with various minions and plots going on, discovering the "main scheme" each was using against eachother, and then manipulating things so that they enabled both of them to succeed. They still had a number of adventures along the way, and a big climatic final battle, but they weren't required to directly straight up fight against them directly.

The PCs should not just assume they can directly physically handle everything in the game setting. But "balanced encounter" mechanisms actually create and reinforce this assumption. Those mechanisms should be guidelines for encounters, not rules to follow.

For contrast, if enemies do always get equal resources to players? That is called an equal encounter. There might be an exponential curve on paper, but in practice, players end up in fights that are just as hard as the ones before. It's only "unsustainable" in the sense that at some point, players beat the last enemy that matters and complete their campaign, or the enemies beat them and the game ends. You know, business as usual.

And this is strongly game system and setting dependent.

So, I played again.

Man, the advice about having the NPCs react to the PCs was golden.

It doesn't always make sense, there are large sections of the dungeon which are inhabited by animals or undead, but the first floor is kobold territory, and when the players hit them and fell back, it gave the kobolds the chance to fortify their domain and go all Tucker's on the PCs.

Long story short, the PCs actually surrendered to kobolds! My. Players. Surrendered. !!!!!!!

They worked out a deal with the kobolds, although they are still planning on betraying them when they get strong enough.

Not sure what, if any, lesson they took from it though.

Great! Sounds like that worked out well. And they maybe learned something. Progress is being made.

Here’s the problems: yes, they didn’t think, and blundered into that scenario, and only saw after the fact how obviously their foes might prepare for their return. However, that scenario is entirely of your devising - you created the scenario, pushed them to push hard, and encouraged them to fall back. The fact that they’re in a “Tucker’s” scenario feels like your doing, not theirs.

Except he didn't. He predicted that they would *not* push hard, and would instead just hit the first room and then retreat to safety. So he had the NPCs react to that and were ready for them when they came back. IMO, this is exactly correct.

No one, in their right mind, would ever think "hit one group at a time, then go home and rest in between each attack" would ever work out well. Yet, that appears to be exactly the strategy that this group is attempting to employ. So yeah, imposing a tiny bit of "real world realism" into the game is not a bad thing at all. His group learned that "Oh, yeah. If we kill just some of the kobolds, and then leave, the rest of them will be ready for us when we come back". That's a *great* lesson IMO.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all about giving the middle finger of CaW to my players, too - just not to violent sociopaths (word chosen randomly for its feel, not for its precise definition) who can’t handle it. Thankfully, my violent sociopaths always had multiple members more than capable of exceeding the “thought” prerequisites of my adventures, so my surgically enhanced middle finger was never a problem.

It's a good thing if the players learn that the world they're playing in is actually bigger than them and doesn't actually revolve around them.

But if you somehow exceeded the capabilities of one of my old groups, despite their protests, for years? And then forced / manipulate them into a “Tucker’s”, to their minds tricking them into thinking it was their fault? It wouldn’t have been pretty.

Not sure where you get "tricking them into thinking it was their own fault". It was their own fault. I mean. This is tactics 101 stuff here.

[Talakeal]

It's a problem with D&D, which is a very item heavy game in terms of PC power. But it's not that impossible to overcome. As has already been mentioned, there's a pretty sharp point of diminishing returns. In D&D, you can only wear a specific amount of each type of magic gear. Anything you run across that isn't an upgrade, is mostly useless. A +1 sword, when everyone alerady has +3 swords, isn't worth more than what you can sell it for. In most sane games, enchanted armor that isn't an upgrade for anyone is going to be too heavy/unweildy to carry with you, right? Of course, D&D gives us bags of holding, which make the whole thing "silly". But maybe consider creating a game in which things like that (and teleport) just don't exist? This ceases to be an issue.

Also try playing games that aren't chock full of "+X magic <whatever>" items. You might find that a lot of these problems aren't really that much of an issue. There should be ways to make NPCs difficult to deal with that don't always involve handing the PCs ridiculous amounts of loot when they win. Again. Didn't you design the game system you are playing? Don't make it so much like D&D, and you will avoid the problems that D&D has.

That is not a problem my system has.

It does, however, have meta resources that give the players control over the game, and it would be absolutely miserable if every NPC had those same resources.

Again though, this is a construct of the "X encounters of Y difficulty a day" mentality. In my game, the PCs rarely have more than one encounter per day. But those encounters involve them wandering around, discovering who the bad guys are (or the bad guys discovering them), and then maybe getting into an encounter with them. Sometimes, they are easy encounters. Sometimes, they are really difficult. But the encounters, and the nature/difficulty of those encounters are based on the situation the PCs are in. It's about what they are doing, and what is there. Not at all "what can they handle in a fight", much less "I need to structure X fights of exactly Y difficulty for them each day". That's.... insane.

The PCs generally have opportunities for using diplomacy to resolve things, or at least to figure out who they are dealing with. Again, they don't just randomly wander around and fight things. In my game setting, things exist where they are for a reason, and have a purpose for being there. Part of the "game" is the players exploring and figuring things out. And yeah, sometimes this means figuring out how to deal with a group of NPCs in a non-violent manner. Sometimes, they have to figure out how to defeat a group of NPCs that may be quite tough. But there are very very few "random encounters" in my game. Occasionally, rarish (depending on where they are), and usually somewhat trivial (cause if there's things wandering randomly that are a real threat to a decently powered adventuring party, I can't rationalize how normal people survive in this world, right?).

My PCs enjoy high action games.

Even if it is just one fight per session, it is still annoying for the PCs to have to deal with an NPC who can throw everything he has into surviving the fight while they have to ration it out for whatever non combat challenges will be required of them this week / month.

I've never seen a game guide that had wholesale prices rather than list prices for PCs to pay for things. And if it does? Who cares? You tell your players that they don't know what the NPC paid for that good. Here's what he's offering as a result of their haggling. Period. When players do this in my game (they use a skill called bargaining), I have them roll their skill, and I roll for the NPC. I have a price in mind for the good when they start, and I adjust from that point based on the relative die rolls. I don't show them my roll anyway, so how on earth would they know? They just know that sometimes, when they buy a mule to carry stuff it costs this much, and sometimes it costs a little more, and sometimes a little less.

I just don't make my players micromanage their finances that much either. So I guess it's more of a focus thing. I also don't tend to have magic stores selling stuff for players to buy in my game either, so it's not that big of a deal either way. They're mostly paying for food, lodging, equipment, etc. As a general rule, in the context of an adventuring group, they just don't have financial problems in my game. There's a pretty huge jump from "affording day to day stuff", and "buying some powerful magic item, or a castle, or business". They're in different financial regions, so we don't tend to worry about the small stuff that much.

My system doesn't keep track of money for minor purchases, only relatively rare custom-made gear that has no fixed price. So, you see how much it costs to craft (which is the floor for price) and then haggle up from there.

I just had a ten-page thread about why this feels bad for players vs. being given a "sticker price" as a ceiling and then haggling down from there even if they both work the exact same way, you can go there if you want more context.

If that's how they decided to do that, then that's what they decided. Maybe next time, don't put a town conveniently located where they can do this? If they had to find a map to the island, then hire a ship to get there (and perhaps the captain insists that he'll only stick around for X days), then they have to trek inland, find the treasure and get back to the ship in that amount of time, right? Where is this "town" they are retreating to? It should not exist in this scenario, right?

You're the GM. If you decide to create a mythical "Skull Island" adventure, then make the island somewhere remote, make it take time/effort/money to get there, and give them a specific amount of time to explore and then have to leave by ship, perhaps never to return. There must be a reason why this whole area is swarming with monsters and whatnot, and hasn't been already wiped out and explored, right? Make that the same thing that makes them have to actually "explore the island".

In this case, the players were essentially natives of the tiny walled village by the coast, except instead of racist aborigine caricatures they were Phoenician sailors who did all of their trade by sea and never ventured inland. There were lots of ruins out there with the treasures of their ancestors, but nobody was both brave enough to go looking for it and strong enough to survive. The idea was that the PCs would be the first.

The adventure sites were really remote and hard to get to. That didn't slow down (or rather speed up) my players at all.

The whole idea of a captain who will leave after X days (or other ticking time bomb) is really contrived and hard to pull of plausibly in this sort of scenario, especially for a whole campaign, and likely would just be met with the PCs killing the captain and sailing the boat themselves or some similar out of the box solution.

Can I repeat my earlier point that eliminating easy teleportation would seem to solve nearly every problem you have in your game? Maybe think about doing that. Or, if not, then you can't have adventures like this in your game world. If teleportation is that common, this island should not exist as it is, right? The first group of adventurers to discover it should have already cleared it, taken all the loot, or sold information to others, provided teleportation coordinates, or whatever. The point is that if your world has this easy method of travel, then all things valuable enough to go and take should already have been taken and put it somewhere "secure" from teleportation. If you're going to allow that in your game setting, you have to logically adjust the setting to assume what a world like that would actually look like several thousand years later (or whatever time frame we're looking at here).

There was no teleporting in this game. I haven't had a mage capable of casting teleport in one of my parties for close to a decade at this point. Not that it would have mattered, I don't think they would have cast teleport if they could; it takes too many spell slots.

There should be no "mythical treasure guarded by nothing but animals/monsters", right? Should just not exist in this world at all. Build your setting. Make it consistent with regard to the powers and abilities that the beings living in it have. If teleportation exists in your game, and is relatively easy for adventurers to have access to then "security via obscurity/remote-location" cannot realistically exist in your game.

Well that's just an argument against the adventure genre in general.

Then they/you are balancing to the wrong things. Balance to the setting, not the PCs. There should always be a lot of things in the setting that are vastly more powerful than the PCs are. And they should be aware of this at all times. They should *never* just wander around assuming that nothing they encounter will ever be too much for them, or that they must even be scaled to "X fights of Y difficulty".

This is entirely up to you, as the GM, to implement. Or not. But if you don't then you can't be surprised when your players expect a series of theses "balanced" encounters, and get upset if you don't provide them with exactly that.



Yup. The PCs are generally going to be tougher than any random thing they run into. But not always. Realism means that the NPCs act in a rational reasonable manner, based on who they are. Period. Now yeah, sometimes, those NPCs just aren't expecting a powerful group of PCs who have access to some rare abilities/magic/items/whatever, and the PCs steamroll them. Sometimes, the NPCs have access to things the players didn't consider.

If you adjust your encounter methodology to be less "attack everything we run into, assuming the GM has balanced it for us to fight", and "talk to them, see what's going on, figure out whether we can resolve this using methods X, Y, or Z, and then make a decision", then you can have a great amount of realism in your game without it always being "NPCs win". The PCs just have to also be "realistic" about what battles they decide to fight, and how they fight them.

I once ran a (long) adventure where there were two big bads. Each of them were waaaaaay outside the PCs league. Like, ancient super powerful lich on one hand, and fallen (but still extremely powerful) deity on the other. Both causing problems. However, the two were also working against eachother and plotting ways to eliminate the other. The entire adventure was basically the PCs figuring out who these two big bads were, dealing with various minions and plots going on, discovering the "main scheme" each was using against eachother, and then manipulating things so that they enabled both of them to succeed. They still had a number of adventures along the way, and a big climatic final battle, but they weren't required to directly straight up fight against them directly.

The PCs should not just assume they can directly physically handle everything in the game setting. But "balanced encounter" mechanisms actually create and reinforce this assumption. Those mechanisms should be guidelines for encounters, not rules to follow.

That sounds like a lot of fun.

But my players would not accept it.

They take encounter balance to be an iron-clad rule and don't take kindly to GMs who cheat by violating it.

[King of Nowhere]

Then they/you are balancing to the wrong things. Balance to the setting, not the PCs. There should always be a lot of things in the setting that are vastly more powerful than the PCs are. And they should be aware of this at all times. They should *never* just wander around assuming that nothing they encounter will ever be too much for them, or that they must even be scaled to "X fights of Y difficulty".

This is entirely up to you, as the GM, to implement. Or not. But if you don't then you can't be surprised when your players expect a series of theses "balanced" encounters, and get upset if you don't provide them with exactly that.



Yup. The PCs are generally going to be tougher than any random thing they run into. But not always. Realism means that the NPCs act in a rational reasonable manner, based on who they are. Period. Now yeah, sometimes, those NPCs just aren't expecting a powerful group of PCs who have access to some rare abilities/magic/items/whatever, and the PCs steamroll them. Sometimes, the NPCs have access to things the players didn't consider.

If you adjust your encounter methodology to be less "attack everything we run into, assuming the GM has balanced it for us to fight", and "talk to them, see what's going on, figure out whether we can resolve this using methods X, Y, or Z, and then make a decision", then you can have a great amount of realism in your game without it always being "NPCs win". The PCs just have to also be "realistic" about what battles they decide to fight, and how they fight them.

I once ran a (long) adventure where there were two big bads. Each of them were waaaaaay outside the PCs league. Like, ancient super powerful lich on one hand, and fallen (but still extremely powerful) deity on the other. Both causing problems. However, the two were also working against eachother and plotting ways to eliminate the other. The entire adventure was basically the PCs figuring out who these two big bads were, dealing with various minions and plots going on, discovering the "main scheme" each was using against eachother, and then manipulating things so that they enabled both of them to succeed. They still had a number of adventures along the way, and a big climatic final battle, but they weren't required to directly straight up fight against them directly.

The PCs should not just assume they can directly physically handle everything in the game setting. But "balanced encounter" mechanisms actually create and reinforce this assumption. Those mechanisms should be guidelines for encounters, not rules to follow.

+1

my campaign runs the gamut from "there are plenty of things more powerful than you" to "you are among the strongest, but the main npc bosses can tpk you depending on luck and strategy" to "you are the strongest party around, but the evil empire can still gather enough mid-high level parties to swarm you if you charge frontally without precautions".
at this point the party defeats the final villains - who generally teamed up in an attempt to put up enough power to deal with the party and their allies - and I call the campaign over because there's nothing left anymore to challenge the party. oh, the setting still assume a few hundred level 16+ people in the world, but those that were enemies of the party are defeated, the party by now has gathered a lot of friends, and it's unreasonable to expect any new coalition to rise against them strong enough to make it a sporting fight. So, time to pick your epilogue and move on.

[gbaji]

That is not a problem my system has.

It does, however, have meta resources that give the players control over the game, and it would be absolutely miserable if every NPC had those same resources.

Ah. Ok. So some sort of expendable/recoverable XperY type pool of points that are expended to gain some benefit in any given situation? Like a luck/karma pool or somesuch (I did peruse your game rules, but didn't go that far in)? I can see how giving those to NPCs can be a pain. Um... But that's kind of the problem here though. If those meta resources are a significant amount of their overall capabilities, they are going to tend to only do things if/when they have them available to ensure success. Maybe tweak the balance on them a bit, so that they are less necessary? Or, given your group, maybe they just assume they should use them, so they do? Dunno.

I'm not a huge fan of having pools like that. I have played games with various mechanisms of that sort, and have actually enjoyed them, but it can put players in a "we can only do X things a day/week/whatever" mindset, doubly so if the delta between using and not using them is significantly large. I would lean towards the players being able to handle 90% of encounters without having to use any of these abilities/points/whatever, and scale things so that they should be saving them for nothing but big boss type battles (or the rare "OMG! that was super unlucky" random bad thing).

My PCs enjoy high action games.

Even if it is just one fight per session, it is still annoying for the PCs to have to deal with an NPC who can throw everything he has into surviving the fight while they have to ration it out for whatever non combat challenges will be required of them this week / month.

Maybe have different pools for things related to combat and things related to social interactions? Or just not allow them to be used for social stuff? I'm finding it "odd" that your system basically penalizes the PCs if they do social stuff by making them less powerful in a fight later. Or, like I said above, just scale most of the encounters (of any kind) to just not require spending those resources at all. The PCs have stats on their sheets. They have skills. They have abilities. They have spells, items, etc. They should be using that stuff to deal with most of the situations they find themselves in.

I find the concept that players are thinking of their characters as just a set of "super powerup abilities" that they can use X of and recover at Y rate, kind of extremely video-gamey. Those should really be special abilities, used rarely and when things go horribly wrong (or when in a really desperate final battle type situation). Having them view those things as their normal "kit" of tools to use, and use them all the time, is probably leading to this "odd" behavior you are seeing. I'm not sure if that's partly game design, or just your own odd set of players, but that's not normal to me. Again, they should be thinking in terms of dealing with normal day to day encounters without ever using those abilities at all. That way, when they do encounter a "big bad mega encounter", they can pull out all the stops to pull off the heroic win.

My system doesn't keep track of money for minor purchases, only relatively rare custom-made gear that has no fixed price. So, you see how much it costs to craft (which is the floor for price) and then haggle up from there.

I just had a ten-page thread about why this feels bad for players vs. being given a "sticker price" as a ceiling and then haggling down from there even if they both work the exact same way, you can go there if you want more context.

Oh. Fair enough. I must have missed that thread (or probably got bored reading it, because I don't normally spend that much thought on costs and haggling skills). Honestly? My opinion as a GM, is that I don't care what the players are reading in a "cost to craft" source book. This NPC, right here, is deciding what he's willing to sell the item for. Period. If they want to use the listed cost to craft, they can go buy their own materials, and use their own skills, and spend their own time, and craft the item themselves. If they want to pay for someone else to spend their time, and their effort, and their skill, doing that, then they have to pay what the NPC is asking for. So yeah. You are still deciding what the NPC is going to want, and having the PCs haggle from there. If the players have a problem with that, well... there's the crafting rules. Go take your character out of the adventure, say they are spending the next X years learning how to craft stuff, and then they can charge whatever the market will bear (and I'm pretty sure if they are the ones on that side of the equation they will never insist on haggling with "cost to make" as some sort of starting point). Problem solved.

In this case, the players were essentially natives of the tiny walled village by the coast, except instead of racist aborigine caricatures they were Phoenician sailors who did all of their trade by sea and never ventured inland. There were lots of ruins out there with the treasures of their ancestors, but nobody was both brave enough to go looking for it and strong enough to survive. The idea was that the PCs would be the first.

Nature never does something just once. Why are the PCs so much more powerful than anyone else who's grown up in that village in the last 100 years, or 200, or 500, or whatever? If the monsters living on the island are so powerful and nasty that no one has ever managed to survive an expedition to the interior, then why on earth is the village still standing? It should have been overrun by giant Gorrillas (or whatever) long ago. I get that the "everyone is normal and unwilling to do anything extraodinary at all except the PCs" is a standard trope of many RPG settings, but I find that to be a really bad one. It's just not terribly realistic. The PCs should be no more powerful or capable than the local captain of the guard, or dozens of his troops. or dozens of other adventurous types who have grown up in said village. How did they learn to be this skilled/powerful, and get whatever gear they are using, and knowledge, and whatnot, if there aren't others (NPCs) who have the same? And if this really is some tiny little village, how did X number of people, all about the same age, just happen to all grow up and decide to be adventurers and be the first to go exploring inland, when no one else in the history of the village ever has? Is the backstory to your game setting that some meteor landed and granted special powers to just a small set of special people or something? Otherwise, it kinda makes no sense to have "no one goes out the walls of our city" for generations, and then suddenly one day it's like "pop! hey, we're going to explore deep into the interior and find treasure!".

But even setting that aside. Let's assume that is the case, and that's the setting you have for them. In that case, then maybe starting them off on day one with "here's a map to vast treasure deep in the interior" is the wrong approach. Just let them explore in the area around the village, and get a sense for "what is out there". Let them cut their teeth taking out small groups of wild beasts and monsters and whatnot, and maybe making money selling rare/exotic pelts or something. Build them up to "searching for the lost treasure of El Diablo" or whatever. We kinda have to assume that the critters in the area around the village aren't as powerful as the ones deeper in, right (again, otherwise the village should have been wiped off the map long ago)? So they really should just do short adventures inland a bit, to get a lay of the land or something. You can gradually entice them deeper in (perhaps some patron is interested in buying increasingly rare or more difficult to find monster parts or something). I can think of a lot of things they could set as goals in the short to mid term in that kind of setting that would "work" with the setting, but also allow them to more cautiously explore.

The adventure sites were really remote and hard to get to. That didn't slow down (or rather speed up) my players at all.

Yup. Then put less important adventure sites that are closer to home then. Let them work their way up to going farther in.

The whole idea of a captain who will leave after X days (or other ticking time bomb) is really contrived and hard to pull of plausibly in this sort of scenario, especially for a whole campaign, and likely would just be met with the PCs killing the captain and sailing the boat themselves or some similar out of the box solution.

I was merely proposing this as an alternative to "they run back to the saftey of town after every fight" problem. If, instead of an interior to the island they grew up on, this is an already established group of adventurers, who are seeking fame and fortune, and have come across a map to the "hidden island of treasure" far across the sea, then you can have someone have to take them there, which requires them having at most a base camp on the island from which they have to explore. Getting back to the ship, and sailing a month or so across the ocean to go "back to town" isn't going to work, right? It's not arbitrary at all to have restrictions like that. Ships require resources to operate. They can't just sit around forever at anchor off some unexplored coastline. That's the same whether it's someone else's ship they are chartering for the expedition, or if it's their own ship. And in either case, there is no "town" to go back to, unless they want to spend a couple months sailing back and forth between single fights.

If the intention is for them to explore all the way in, and not run back to town after ever fight, the easy solution is to not give them a town to run back to. You could still make a campaign out of this, but the party would have to find sufficient treasure on each expedition to cover the cost to mount the next one. So they have to bring all their supplies with them. Pay for the cost to sail across the sea to get there, then have the ship wait while they explore. Then, when their resources are exhausted, and they've done all they can, they return to the ship, and sail back to home port, sell their loot, recover their resources, etc. By dramatically increasing the cost, both in time and money, just to get to the island itself, they will be forced to actually explore it more on each trip. Just a thought of a different way to approach this kind of adventure.

Obviously, since it appears you've already started/done this, the point is somewhat moot. But I guess my general point here is: if you don't want players to rely on easy/cheap resources being readily available, then don't make those things readily available. Assuming there's some value to "going back to town", and you want them to keep exploring between times they "go back to town", then make "town" farther away.

There was no teleporting in this game. I haven't had a mage capable of casting teleport in one of my parties for close to a decade at this point. Not that it would have mattered, I don't think they would have cast teleport if they could; it takes too many spell slots.

Ok. Wasn't clear on why it was so easy for them to just go back to town after every fight. Given a couple of your previous posts about adventuring groups who seemed to have various teleportation spells available, I assumed that something like this was in effect. Again, my default assumption for "island full of ancient ruins and mythical monsters for the players to explore" would be that there isn't any "town" on the island at all, and that this was an island that the players actually discovered (found a chart to in some ancient dread pirates treasure trove maybe). I would never put a town in an adventure setting like that (for exactly the problems/reasons you are having). Or, if I did, it would not be the town the PCs grew up in. It would maybe be the village of the local folks, from whom perhaps rummors of the horrors that lie in the interior might come from, and perhaps some who may oppose the PCs exploring ("they'll bring the wrath of <whatever> on us all"), and some who may help them, whatever. That would be part of the adventure itself, and would not necessarily always be a "safe place" either. I'd certainly not have it be a magic mart where they can just sell their loot and buy potions and items or whatever. And I'm not sure exactly how your meta-power things work in your game system, but I'd likely put restrictions on whether they could regain them there as well (although that kinda depends on the powers, requirements, etc).

If you want them to explore, then make it necessary that they actually explore. I'll point out again (as I have a couple times in other threads): I'm somewhat baffled by the lack of apparently ability to just "explore the wilderness" in your game. I've literally had PCs trek off in unexplored areas of my game world for months at a time (sometimes the better part of a year, never once setting foot in a friendly town). They should have the ability to live off the land, maintain themselves, and otherwise adventure "unattached" to any town at all. And they should be able to handle random encounters regularly in that environment, and the occasional ancient ruin/temple/whatever, as well. All while searching for some other <thing> they are looking for (and presumably eventually finding it, which may itself involve a somewhat extended exloration adventure as well). Sure. They may run into the occasional settlement of humans, or maybe trolls, or other less friendly types, but there's usually somewhat non-existant access to "civilization" and "buying/selling" things (occasional trade with some local village is the best they can hope for). Somehow, they manage just fine.

Push your players out of the nest. Let them fly...

Well that's just an argument against the adventure genre in general.

No. It's an argument against "adventuring 5 miles outside of a well established settled town and expecting to find some secret vast treasure trove". And yeah, that argument goes double if teleportation exists in the game because "everwhere you know of" is the equivalent of "5 miles out of town" when you have those sorts of travel abilities.

The "adventure genre" generally actually involves "going on an adventure". Which usually doesn't involve exploring your own back yard. It certainly can, when you have some newbie characters or something, but they should also *not* be "the most brave and powerful people we know" at the same time. I often introduce new characters with some short local adventures. Um... But nothing they do couldn't also have been done by any random kingdom guard patrol if they happened to be the ones there at the time (and were free to go do such things on their own time or something). I suppose that's a game setting thing. In my game, there is nothing *special* about the PCs other than they are the people who happen to be played by the players. Sure, as a backstory bit, it's assumed that they are more adventurous than most people (cause you could play a farmer, who just continues farming if you want, but that probably wouldn't be terribly exciting), and we assume that PCs spend more of their free time practicing/training than most people (who, you know, go home and relax after a days work, and spend their days off hanging out at the local pub, or whatever, instead of praticing magic or cool new sword moves). But mechanically? And even power level? They have no innate special advantages. It's only what they gain via adventuring over time that sets them apart from anyone else in the world.

But that's my game. It seems as though yours is run a bit differently.

That sounds like a lot of fun.

But my players would not accept it.

They take encounter balance to be an iron-clad rule and don't take kindly to GMs who cheat by violating it.

And they don't consider it "cheating" for the GM to adjust the entire world around them into "level appropriate encounter" sized bites?

[Talakeal]

Great, so you DO understand thinking like an enemy strategist does not mean being a strawman who only sets up unwinnable scenarios. Why are you arguing with me, again?

I honestly don't know the specifics of where we are disagreeing.

What I am saying is that most games have a mechanic that pushes the scales in favor of PC survival. These mechanics often aren't accounted for in the fiction (I tend to play them as survivor bias).

I feel that this is a good thing as it helps the players feel more heroic in the fiction layer. But, as a result, some tactics that would work in the fiction / real life won't work mechanically (and vice versa) and that sometimes this is asymmetrical between PCs and NPCs.

Because if you were okay with the fights giving experience, the system was working exactly as it's made to work, and your players were just reminding you to give them their due. No horror story there, just business as usual.

As far as my horror stories go, I agree this one is pretty darn tame.

The issue was that, because the wizard used hit and run tactics rather than standing and fighting, the players felt entitled to six times the experience they would have gotten had he simply stood and fought, even though the retreating made the fight easier for the PCs in the long run.

Honestly, that is one of the big flaws of the D&D XP system; circumstances and tactics grossly change the difficulty of a fight; if you don't change XP to account you get some weird situations (low level PCs negotiating with a dragon and then getting tens of thousands of XP for making a simple diplomacy check) and if you do modify XP based on tactics players go out of their way to kill everything in the least efficient way to maximize XP gains.

But that is neither here nor there because I no longer give XP for kills and use milestone instead in both D&D and my system.

And they don't consider it "cheating" for the GM to adjust the entire world around them into "level appropriate encounter" sized bites?

They come from a more "gamist" point of view than I do where the mechanics try and trump fiction.

I tend to compromise and try and have things be as close to the PCs level as is plausible given the fiction as that helps out both narrative possibilities and mechanical challenges without breaking the simulation. But again, plausibility only goes so far, and my players still tend to provoke things way out of their league.

Ah. Ok. So some sort of expendable/recoverable XperY type pool of points that are expended to gain some benefit in any given situation? Like a luck/karma pool or somesuch (I did peruse your game rules, but didn't go that far in)? I can see how giving those to NPCs can be a pain. Um... But that's kind of the problem here though. If those meta resources are a significant amount of their overall capabilities, they are going to tend to only do things if/when they have them available to ensure success. Maybe tweak the balance on them a bit, so that they are less necessary? Or, given your group, maybe they just assume they should use them, so they do? Dunno.

I'm not a huge fan of having pools like that. I have played games with various mechanisms of that sort, and have actually enjoyed them, but it can put players in a "we can only do X things a day/week/whatever" mindset, doubly so if the delta between using and not using them is significantly large. I would lean towards the players being able to handle 90% of encounters without having to use any of these abilities/points/whatever, and scale things so that they should be saving them for nothing but big boss type battles (or the rare "OMG! that was super unlucky" random bad thing).

Maybe have different pools for things related to combat and things related to social interactions? Or just not allow them to be used for social stuff? I'm finding it "odd" that your system basically penalizes the PCs if they do social stuff by making them less powerful in a fight later. Or, like I said above, just scale most of the encounters (of any kind) to just not require spending those resources at all. The PCs have stats on their sheets. They have skills. They have abilities. They have spells, items, etc. They should be using that stuff to deal with most of the situations they find themselves in.


I find the concept that players are thinking of their characters as just a set of "super powerup abilities" that they can use X of and recover at Y rate, kind of extremely video-gamey. Those should really be special abilities, used rarely and when things go horribly wrong (or when in a really desperate final battle type situation). Having them view those things as their normal "kit" of tools to use, and use them all the time, is probably leading to this "odd" behavior you are seeing. I'm not sure if that's partly game design, or just your own odd set of players, but that's not normal to me. Again, they should be thinking in terms of dealing with normal day to day encounters without ever using those abilities at all. That way, when they do encounter a "big bad mega encounter", they can pull out all the stops to pull off the heroic win.

In short, characters in my game have a set number of rerolls each mission. These don't usually represent anything in the fiction, instead representing a combination of survivor bias and the whims of meddling gods. They aren't a necessary resource, just something to help the PCs survive and give the players a bit more control over the random nature of the dice.

That being said, if the players refuse to engage in any combat without a full pool of rerolls, they are effectively immortal. This isn't normally a problem with the system as written, but it makes running a hex-crawl / mega-dungeon a bit trickier than the episodic pace the system was designed for (but again, no worse than a D&D campaign where the casters can go nova every fight due to the 15MWD).

Its a unified system, I try and not have special combat only mechanics, especially considering that the game is perfectly happy with less action oriented groups than mine.

Oh. Fair enough. I must have missed that thread (or probably got bored reading it, because I don't normally spend that much thought on costs and haggling skills). Honestly? My opinion as a GM, is that I don't care what the players are reading in a "cost to craft" source book. This NPC, right here, is deciding what he's willing to sell the item for. Period. If they want to use the listed cost to craft, they can go buy their own materials, and use their own skills, and spend their own time, and craft the item themselves. If they want to pay for someone else to spend their time, and their effort, and their skill, doing that, then they have to pay what the NPC is asking for. So yeah. You are still deciding what the NPC is going to want, and having the PCs haggle from there. If the players have a problem with that, well... there's the crafting rules. Go take your character out of the adventure, say they are spending the next X years learning how to craft stuff, and then they can charge whatever the market will bear (and I'm pretty sure if they are the ones on that side of the equation they will never insist on haggling with "cost to make" as some sort of starting point). Problem solved.

That is certainly an option, and pretty close to how I feel.

The issue was mostly about presentation; basically haggling a merchant down from a sticker price feels like a benefit while haggling up from wholesale feels like a cost, even if the net result is the same, and since my book doesn't list sticker prices, only costs to craft, the whole system feels like a punishment to most people.

Nature never does something just once. Why are the PCs so much more powerful than anyone else who's grown up in that village in the last 100 years, or 200, or 500, or whatever? If the monsters living on the island are so powerful and nasty that no one has ever managed to survive an expedition to the interior, then why on earth is the village still standing? It should have been overrun by giant Gorrillas (or whatever) long ago. I get that the "everyone is normal and unwilling to do anything extraordinary at all except the PCs" is a standard trope of many RPG settings, but I find that to be a really bad one. It's just not terribly realistic. The PCs should be no more powerful or capable than the local captain of the guard, or dozens of his troops. or dozens of other adventurous types who have grown up in said village. How did they learn to be this skilled/powerful, and get whatever gear they are using, and knowledge, and whatnot, if there aren't others (NPCs) who have the same? And if this really is some tiny little village, how did X number of people, all about the same age, just happen to all grow up and decide to be adventurers and be the first to go exploring inland, when no one else in the history of the village ever has? Is the backstory to your game setting that some meteor landed and granted special powers to just a small set of special people or something? Otherwise, it kinda makes no sense to have "no one goes out the walls of our city" for generations, and then suddenly one day it's like "pop! hey, we're going to explore deep into the interior and find treasure!".

But even setting that aside. Let's assume that is the case, and that's the setting you have for them. In that case, then maybe starting them off on day one with "here's a map to vast treasure deep in the interior" is the wrong approach. Just let them explore in the area around the village, and get a sense for "what is out there". Let them cut their teeth taking out small groups of wild beasts and monsters and whatnot, and maybe making money selling rare/exotic pelts or something. Build them up to "searching for the lost treasure of El Diablo" or whatever. We kinda have to assume that the critters in the area around the village aren't as powerful as the ones deeper in, right (again, otherwise the village should have been wiped off the map long ago)? So they really should just do short adventures inland a bit, to get a lay of the land or something. You can gradually entice them deeper in (perhaps some patron is interested in buying increasingly rare or more difficult to find monster parts or something). I can think of a lot of things they could set as goals in the short to mid term in that kind of setting that would "work" with the setting, but also allow them to more cautiously explore.

Yup. Then put less important adventure sites that are closer to home then. Let them work their way up to going farther in.

The city was in a slow decline, and every year the wilderness was taking back more of the region (not literally an island, just an isolated outpost on the coast of a vast prehistoric wilderness).

Many people have tried before, and many people have died. That is where the rumors are coming from after all!

In this case, the PCs were actually special, they were all descendants of the Maui style demigod who first colonized the region so long ago and all had some form of supernatural powers. But, mostly, it was just a combination of luck and synergy that allowed them to be the first people who succeeded. If they hadn't come along, someone else probably would have in time, or the city would have been wiped out.

That being said, it wasn't a single adventure, it was a hex-crawl with adventure sites sprinkled across the wilderness. Some were near the city, some were very far indeed, distance had little influence on the PCs decision to turn back.

Ok. Wasn't clear on why it was so easy for them to just go back to town after every fight. Given a couple of your previous posts about adventuring groups who seemed to have various teleportation spells available, I assumed that something like this was in effect. Again, my default assumption for "island full of ancient ruins and mythical monsters for the players to explore" would be that there isn't any "town" on the island at all, and that this was an island that the players actually discovered (found a chart to in some ancient dread pirates treasure trove maybe). I would never put a town in an adventure setting like that (for exactly the problems/reasons you are having). Or, if I did, it would not be the town the PCs grew up in. It would maybe be the village of the local folks, from whom perhaps rumors of the horrors that lie in the interior might come from, and perhaps some who may oppose the PCs exploring ("they'll bring the wrath of <whatever> on us all"), and some who may help them, whatever. That would be part of the adventure itself, and would not necessarily always be a "safe place" either. I'd certainly not have it be a magic mart where they can just sell their loot and buy potions and items or whatever. And I'm not sure exactly how your meta-power things work in your game system, but I'd likely put restrictions on whether they could regain them there as well (although that kinda depends on the powers, requirements, etc).

If you want them to explore, then make it necessary that they actually explore. I'll point out again (as I have a couple times in other threads): I'm somewhat baffled by the lack of apparently ability to just "explore the wilderness" in your game. I've literally had PCs trek off in unexplored areas of my game world for months at a time (sometimes the better part of a year, never once setting foot in a friendly town). They should have the ability to live off the land, maintain themselves, and otherwise adventure "unattached" to any town at all. And they should be able to handle random encounters regularly in that environment, and the occasional ancient ruin/temple/whatever, as well. All while searching for some other <thing> they are looking for (and presumably eventually finding it, which may itself involve a somewhat extended exloration adventure as well). Sure. They may run into the occasional settlement of humans, or maybe trolls, or other less friendly types, but there's usually somewhat non-existant access to "civilization" and "buying/selling" things (occasional trade with some local village is the best they can hope for). Somehow, they manage just fine.

The whole thing is a balancing act; where can the PCs regain resources and how long does it take? Standard D&D style 8 hours sleep and you are at 100% does indeed allow for indefinite exploration. My system tends to be a little less forgiving.

For my game I said you can only rest in town, but I tinkered a lot with exactly how punishing it is to go back to town, I never found the sweet spot as everything I did made them even more cautious and eager to go back, whether it was harsher or more lenient.

The game overall was a success, I just never got the rythim of rest vs adventure down right, and I don't want a repeat of the situation for my current mega-dungeon. So far, it is working out better, although I think that is mostly just due to a different player makeup than anything I did. Also, maybe, me being more upfront with my expectations and also more vague with the mechanics of how XP is gained and how the dungeon becomes more dangerous over time.

[Quertus]

They’re one more thing that’s been bothering me about this: after a million years in the pit, the Kobalds get one look at the PCs, and suddenly their defenses are better?

Unless they built their traps out of the flesh and bones of the orcs the PCs killed and left behind, I’m really not seeing how this makes sense.

[Talakeal]

They’re one more thing that’s been bothering me about this: after a million years in the pit, the Kobalds get one look at the PCs, and suddenly their defenses are better?

Unless they built their traps out of the flesh and bones of the orcs the PCs killed and left behind, I’m really not seeing how this makes sense.

Kobolds haven't been there for a million years, just a couple decades.

They are basically living in the ruins of the older human city (similar to the Seattle underground) that lies between the surface and the true dungeons below. All of their defenses are turned toward the dungeon.

An earthquake recently revealed their complex, and the PCs are the first human invaders to come from that direction, essentially attacking from behind their lines.

When the PCs murdered one of their priests and his followers, the kobolds decided to turn some of their defenses inward as well as setting an ambush for those specific PCs along that specific route in case they returned to finish the job (which they inevitably did).

[Quertus]

Kobolds haven't been there for a million years, just a couple decades.

They are basically living in the ruins of the older human city (similar to the Seattle underground) that lies between the surface and the true dungeons below. All of their defenses are turned toward the dungeon.

An earthquake recently revealed their complex, and the PCs are the first human invaders to come from that direction, essentially attacking from behind their lines.

When the PCs murdered one of their priests and his followers, the kobolds decided to turn some of their defenses inward as well as setting an ambush for those specific PCs along that specific route in case they returned to finish the job (which they inevitably did).

That makes more sense. But wait… the earthquake happened to reveal the dungeon at the same time that Those Who Lurk Below happened to start a “the megadungeon gets harder over time” march towards the surface?

[kyoryu]

They’re one more thing that’s been bothering me about this: after a million years in the pit, the Kobalds get one look at the PCs, and suddenly their defenses are better?

Unless they built their traps out of the flesh and bones of the orcs the PCs killed and left behind, I’m really not seeing how this makes sense.

Kinda this. Assuming the dungeon is a living, breathing place, they have other issues to deal with besides the PCs. The PC raid should be, more or less, "Tuesday". It might end up with them bolstering some defenses, but shouldn't be a completely major overhaul.

Also presume that the kobolds have finite resources, and only so much ground to cover. While it's good to handwave reinforcements between delves to get "up to stock", I wouldn't presume, in most cases, that they can just triple their defenses everywhere.

[Talakeal]

Kinda this. Assuming the dungeon is a living, breathing place, they have other issues to deal with besides the PCs. The PC raid should be, more or less, "Tuesday". It might end up with them bolstering some defenses, but shouldn't be a completely major overhaul.

Also presume that the kobolds have finite resources, and only so much ground to cover. While it's good to handwave reinforcements between delves to get "up to stock", I wouldn't presume, in most cases, that they can just triple their defenses everywhere.

They didn't do anything fancy. They reassigned a dozen warriors to guard the tunnel leading to their lair, kept a watch over the dungeon entrance, dug a pit beneath an already weakened section of floor, and set up a pair of levers to topple two status. Their heavy hitters remained deeper down to guard against incursions from below.

That makes more sense. But wait… the earthquake happened to reveal the dungeon at the same time that Those Who Lurk Below happened to start a “the megadungeon gets harder over time” march towards the surface?

Basically, the dungeon was in ecological balance for millions of years. Then, about eighty years ago, something happened to throw it out of whack, and there has been slow steady pressure for the lower reaches to expand to the upper levels. Then, the earthquake kicked the process into high gear by opening up a bunch of new passages, collapsing some others, and rendering areas of the dungeon uninhabitable.

[Slipjig]

You don't really "clear" a mega-dungeon, any more than you would "clear" a jungle. It's a permanently dangerous environment, and will stay that way unless the PCs do something fundamentally remake the Dungeon. Expeditions are probably trying to reach a certain objective.

For every cleared encounter, every time the party takes a Long Rest roll % dice. On a roll of 91-00, the encounter is repopulated (or replaced with something of a comparable power level). This isn't some sort of magical "resetting", it's new monsters being attracted to whatever brought the original monsters in.

Be cheap with the monetary rewards, and make the inn expensive enough that at low levels it takes a decent amount of their coin to get their long rest. Or set a threshold of, "you must have X coin by day Y, or Bad Thing Z happens". Or make like The Yawning Portal and charge them every time enter or exit the dungeon.

Have a competing party going in via another entrance. Have the other party brag about how many rooms they cleared (and it should generally be just a LITTLE more than the PCs). Or, say that the other party went in the same entrance, followed the same path the PCs did, and have them showing off the SWEET treasure they found in the very first uncleared room they came to (which would have been the next one the PCs hit if they had kept going).

[Lacco]

My PCs enjoy high action games.

Even if it is just one fight per session, it is still annoying for the PCs to have to deal with an NPC who can throw everything he has into surviving the fight while they have to ration it out for whatever non combat challenges will be required of them this week / month.

*SNIP*

That sounds like a lot of fun.

But my players would not accept it.

They take encounter balance to be an iron-clad rule and don't take kindly to GMs who cheat by violating it.

This reminds me of one thing I once wrote regarding my RL gaming group.

My players love the idea of dungeons. My players enjoy games that happen inside dungeons.

My players are bad at dungeoneering. They just plainly do not enjoy old-school dungeon delving. They do not enjoy exploring and mapping the dungeon. They do not enjoy the logistic aspects. They do not enjoy the navigation minigame. They do not look for secrets, they treat every obstacle as 0/1 situation (go through it or fail). At first glance, what they want is a Betsheda/Skyrim style linear storytelling dungeon. No real decisions, only clear pathway, some branches, lots of story. Each encounter is an obstacle to be passed and solution is either sword, magic, diplomacy or item to be found (ideally already found).

What they want, once inside a dungeon, is to get to the end and get out.

Ideally at one sitting.

Boom. There goes my megadungeon.

What do you think about the following theory: Your players love the idea of a high action, high lethality, high stakes game. But they do not enjoy it.

Also: regarding the idea of a captain that leaves after X days: normally, hiring a ship to just wait somewhere is nor really profitable. So hiring a ship that drops you off and then returns after X days, picking you up... and if you are not there, waiting for a day or two... would that be better? More realistic?

And if they are the kind of players who would rather kill the crew & take the ship... welcome to the new "we are pirates!" campaign. After all, piracy is like dungeon delving, but the dungeons are smaller, kinda smell funny and are full of drunk sailors.

[gbaji]

Honestly, that is one of the big flaws of the D&D XP system; circumstances and tactics grossly change the difficulty of a fight; if you don't change XP to account you get some weird situations (low level PCs negotiating with a dragon and then getting tens of thousands of XP for making a simple diplomacy check) and if you do modify XP based on tactics players go out of their way to kill everything in the least efficient way to maximize XP gains.

I suppose this is depedent on specific editions of D&D, but I'm pretty sure all of them have some instructions on what actually counts as "defeating the monster". And "monster intentionally engaged in hit and run tactics" certainly does not count as the monster being defeated. And "making a deal with a dragon" may get you some diplomacy/adventure-goal experience, but not the experience for "defeating the dragon". Do you get experience for "defeating the innkeeper" every time you negotiate the price for a room, or a bowl of soup? No. This entire line of thinking falls heavily into the "this is too silly for anyone to take seriously".

But that is neither here nor there because I no longer give XP for kills and use milestone instead in both D&D and my system.

And that's an excellent way to do this. Also encourages/incentivizes the players to actually engage in the scenario at hand instead of just running around "defeating things".

They come from a more "gamist" point of view than I do where the mechanics try and trump fiction.

Then you remind your players that the "game mechanics" do not say anything at all about what level NPCs must be. The actual mechanics just state how various relative skill/level/spells/whatever interact. The mechanics handle "level 20 arch mage attacking level 1 adventuring party" just fine.

The challenge ratings and other related "rules" are just guidelines for GMs so they can anticipate how much "stuff" they can throw at a typical level X adventuring party between rest periods while challenging them but not overwhelming them. They are not to be interpreted as hard restrictions to anything and everything the PCs may ever encounter in the game world. That's an... insane interpretation of those systems.

I tend to compromise and try and have things be as close to the PCs level as is plausible given the fiction as that helps out both narrative possibilities and mechanical challenges without breaking the simulation. But again, plausibility only goes so far, and my players still tend to provoke things way out of their league.

Honestly though, and I know this may be difficult at this point, and especially with this table, but that assumption/expectation is *not* what the players should have, and by complying with their frankly ridiculous assumptions, you're actually just enabling more of this poor gaming methodology. Yes, if you are putting in content which the PCs must engage with and "defeat" (actually defeat, see above), then those guidelines are important, and you must follow them to some degree. If the players feel you are forcing them into encounters they cannot win, they will be upset with you (and rightly so).

But if you just have "content", that they are not required to engage with, much less "defeat", you can certainly make that content well outside of those encounter guidelines. And, honestly, if you want a realistic world, you really should do this. In a realisic world, the vast majority of things in the area near the PCs are not just coincidentally going to be exactly the right level to fit the guidelines for "daily encounters". There should be a whole bunch of "easy stuff", and some "hard stuff", and some "impossible stuff" (arguably changing ratio as PC levels increase). As a GM, just make sure that the "impossible stuff" is always stuff they are not required to actually fight and defeat as part of your adventure/scenario. Everything else should be gravy from that point on.

What this teaches the players is that their characters cannot just assume anything they run into can (much less should) be defeated by them. They should engage in some investigation first, and maybe some dialogue as well. And unless their "quest" (or whatever) actually requires that they "kill the goblins and take their macguffin", then they should not assume they must attack and kill the goblins. Again, if you force the combat encounter (or a series of encounters), then you should follow the guidelines. But if the players are choosing to engage in stuff around them, you are under zero obligation to do so. So yeah, if you're planning out a section of your megadungeon that the players must complete in a single period (or suffer some sort of retribution/consequences) *that* is what you use the encounter level guidelines for. But just "things that exist in the world that they may interact with as they wish"? Nope.

In short, characters in my game have a set number of rerolls each mission. These don't usually represent anything in the fiction, instead representing a combination of survivor bias and the whims of meddling gods. They aren't a necessary resource, just something to help the PCs survive and give the players a bit more control over the random nature of the dice.

That being said, if the players refuse to engage in any combat without a full pool of rerolls, they are effectively immortal. This isn't normally a problem with the system as written, but it makes running a hex-crawl / mega-dungeon a bit trickier than the episodic pace the system was designed for (but again, no worse than a D&D campaign where the casters can go nova every fight due to the 15MWD).

Ok. So basically some form of luck/karma pool thing. Got it. That makes sense. Uh. Most game systems I've played that use those either hand out a very small number (with minor benefits like adding to dice pools) that are "per encounter" or are somewhat larger in number (but perhaps also with more significant effects, like your reroll system), but those are "per adventure".

I suspect part of your problem is giving the players more or less an "I win" button, and then allowing them to get them back as a "per rest" mechanic. Those should be "per adventure/scenario/whatever". And you should be determing when that period ends. I'd maybe tie it to the "adventure goal" thing you are using for experience, or if those are too granular, then some sort of significant milestone in a larger adventure. But they should really just have this one pool that covers the entire "we set out to find X, and defeat Y", and they don't recover until/unless they have completed that quest. I would maybe even abstract this as "the gods favor shines on you when you are engaged in mighty and brave tasks". So they don't get to use these rerolls at all while doing "mundane day to day things". They only get a pool when they set off on an actual "quest", and then only get them while actually fullfilling that quest. Returning to town to continue exploring doesn't count. Until they find one of the treasure locations they are looking for, overcome/defeat whatever obstacles/guardians are there, and return with whatever they find there, the "quest" isn't completed, and they don't get the points refilled.

The issue was mostly about presentation; basically haggling a merchant down from a sticker price feels like a benefit while haggling up from wholesale feels like a cost, even if the net result is the same, and since my book doesn't list sticker prices, only costs to craft, the whole system feels like a punishment to most people.

Yeah. I can see that. But the book is about the mechanics and material costs for crafting. It's not going to know about the economics of your specific game setting. I would perhaps go write up a "setting guide", that lists actual suggested/typical retail prices for these crafted items and hand that to your players. Or, at the very least, do some basic math and multiply the "cost to craft" by some value representing the time/difficulty of learning how to perform that bit of crafting, then multiplying by some rarity/scarcity of materials based on where you are (which in large cities connected to trade routes may be "1", but in some podunk out of the way location could be "5" or even "10"), and then multiplying that number by "profit margin", which should be somewhere around 25-40%. So a typical formula might look like C*D*S*P, where C="base cost of ingredients", and D="difficulty of the craft attempt", and S="scarcity of materials", and P="profit margin".

So maybe something simple like a basic potion which requires a low/easy to learn crafting skill, in a large city, might be say 10gp*1.2*1*1.3=15.6gp. So that's the "base price". Note, that the only part that you can actually haggle here is the "P" value. That's the actual profit margin involved. Sure, we might also haggle the "D" value as well, but assuming there is a cost to take time studying your craft, which must be recouped by making and selling crafted items, this is always going to be baked into the equation. So yeah, the haggling roll should only maybe result in price range of 13gp (minimum floor cost at which the seller is just breaking even) to say 18.2 (an equal "swing" in the opposite direction). The base point should be 15.6gp essentially with a +/- range of 2.6 (the actual profit margin for this otherwise "cheap" potion).

And if you think a 30% markup is "high", you have never actually operated a small retail operation before. Although, to be fair, if we're talking about much more expensive items, then the markup can be smaller (much smaller even). A typical convenience store runs a 40% gross profit margin (that's at the upper range). Most retail stores run somewhere in the 25-30% range. Very high end items (like say jewelry shops) can operate closer to 10-15%. That's "markup on each item relative to cost" btw, not "total gross profit margin". That's even lower, because "wholesale cost" is only part of the cost to run a business. The building cost money. Maintenance costs money. Paying your employees cost money. Securing your shop and goods costs money (and losses via theft, breakage, etc... costs money as well). In modern economies, you will also have numerous fees, licenses, insurance, etc that must be purchased (and renewed) as well, plus electricity costs, payroll taxes, business taxes, and probably a zillion other things I'm forgetting (we really really make small businesses jump through hoops).

So yeah. If the players are balking at this, then simplify it by just handing them the retail cost forumulas as well (or just a completed sheet for the area they are in, and the things available for purchase). Haggling is always going to exist entirely within the range of "profit margin" for the seller. You simply can't start at a "cost of materials" point. You must start at a "what is the minimum the seller can afford to sell this for?" point. Then add a profit for the seller and *then* start your haggling from there. That is your "base retail price".

In this case, the PCs were actually special, they were all descendants of the Maui style demigod who first colonized the region so long ago and all had some form of supernatural powers. But, mostly, it was just a combination of luck and synergy that allowed them to be the first people who succeeded. If they hadn't come along, someone else probably would have in time, or the city would have been wiped out.

That being said, it wasn't a single adventure, it was a hex-crawl with adventure sites sprinkled across the wilderness. Some were near the city, some were very far indeed, distance had little influence on the PCs decision to turn back.

Again though, I'd maybe try to make those special abilities that they have something they can only use when actually doing something "special". Do they have any sort of maps to guide them, or idea where some of these adventure points may be? Or are you actually just expecting them to wander aimlessly through the jungle? I mean, that is a hex crawl (which btw, is not my preferred method of running adventures, but that's just me), so I suppose that's just the way things are. You need to put in some means to encourage them to do more than just kill some critters in the wilderness though. Doesn't need to be precise, but even just some information (rummors, legends, whatever) about various treasures associated with some terrain features, or specific monster types, or something to tell them "hey, we're getting close to something we heard about that might be worth checking out".

The whole thing is a balancing act; where can the PCs regain resources and how long does it take? Standard D&D style 8 hours sleep and you are at 100% does indeed allow for indefinite exploration. My system tends to be a little less forgiving.

For my game I said you can only rest in town, but I tinkered a lot with exactly how punishing it is to go back to town, I never found the sweet spot as everything I did made them even more cautious and eager to go back, whether it was harsher or more lenient.

Yeah. I think that's part of the problem though. You've tied regaining the (very powerful) abilities to "resting in town". Which is precisely why they seem to want to retreat to town as often as possible. If you tied it to "every time you eat a ham sandwich" you can bet they'd be manipulating things to make sure they have a steady supply of bread and ham. If you want them to "complete a specifc set of adventure bits", then you should tie regaining those abilities to that instead. Just a suggestion.

Arbitrarily making it more or less difficult to get back to town is only kinda spackling over the problem IMO (and will smell strongly of you manipulating things). Some resources should regain by any kind of rest, anywhere. Why does being in a town matter? It's silly and arbitrary. Other resources, especially rare and powerful ones, should require that they do some specific action to get them back. Something they can't just do easily and quickly and/or just stop the current adventure for.

And yeah, before you go there, requiring them to complete <some specific milestone in the adventure> is *also* arbitrary and can be seen as manipulative as well. But if these are actual "special powers" they get that NPCs do not, then they should be tied to them doing some "special things" (ie: going on some kind of actual declared "quest" with actual declared objectives). Which means they are commiting themselves to this task, and their favor only applies to things done in the pursuit of that thing. Make it like a holy knight making an oath to "find and return the kidnapped princess", and gaining some kind of divine aid while in the performance of that task, but which only lasts while doing so, and he can't take on another until he's done.

That sort of methodology should keep them focused on what they are doing, and really committed to actually pushing through the content. If these rerolls do not return until they are "done", then going back to town doesn't help them at all. They must push on *and* they must carefully dole out their use of these rerolls to last through whatever content you require before you give them more. Dunno. I just think that would work a lot better and avoid this whole issue. I'm sure your players will disagree though.

The game overall was a success, I just never got the rythim of rest vs adventure down right, and I don't want a repeat of the situation for my current mega-dungeon. So far, it is working out better, although I think that is mostly just due to a different player makeup than anything I did. Also, maybe, me being more upfront with my expectations and also more vague with the mechanics of how XP is gained and how the dungeon becomes more dangerous over time.

That's good to hear.

Also: regarding the idea of a captain that leaves after X days: normally, hiring a ship to just wait somewhere is nor really profitable. So hiring a ship that drops you off and then returns after X days, picking you up... and if you are not there, waiting for a day or two... would that be better? More realistic?

That should work as well. Bit trickier to play out, but if they are going on a long extended trip to the interior, then that's probably a more realistic way to handle it. My main point with the "have them travel to the entire region via ship" was to eliminate the "town" from the equation entirely. Force them to carry their own supplies with them, and then live off the land as much as possible, with some combination of those determining how long they can last before they need to hoof it back and return to civilization. And yeah, having the ship captain say "I'm off to port, be back in 30-35 days", really puts an interesting bit of timetable on things.

And if they are the kind of players who would rather kill the crew & take the ship... welcome to the new "we are pirates!" campaign. After all, piracy is like dungeon delving, but the dungeons are smaller, kinda smell funny and are full of drunk sailors.

Yeah. I think that while players often think this sort of thing is a simple/easy solution (and these players seem like that times 100), it's actually somewhat difficult to manage a ship if you aren't actually highly trained in it. And crew members aren't going to be terribly happy to help you out if you just killed their captain. I'm a bit of a hard nose when it comes to PCs arbitrariliy murdeing NPCs because "we want their stuff" (which is basically what this would be). So best case, you convince the crew to help you sail the ship, but at some point you're going to land in a port, and that's when the crew will out you as pirates and arrange for whatever legal system handles such things take care of you (you are now arrested or outlaws, and your ship aint leaving cause no crew and the port's naval forces are keeping you at dock, so... good luck!). Worst case lands in the area of "they just slit your throats while you are sleeping and take their ship back".

Remember that the crew didn't sign on to be pirates, and presumably the party isn't actually large enough to handle a seafaring ship by themselves. So...

[Talakeal]

Well, we had another game. And it did not go well.


In short, the players continued their tactic of raiding and falling back, so that two monsters in neighboring regions of the dungeon who had been harassed by the PCs hit and run tactics came up with a pact, if one of them came under attack from the PCs, the other would come in from behind, flanking the PCs and cutting off their retreat.

This worked, and the players again had to surrender and negotiate a ransom.


Now, they were obviously feeling down, but Brian was sulking pretty hard for the rest of the evening. Eventually, he said he just wasn't feeling the game anymore and wanted to stop. I asked what was the matter, and he said that he realized that the pact they made with the monsters was one sided.

I said yes, the monsters had you dead to rights, they had no reason to offer you a good deal.

He said that he felt like the game was in a "slow death spiral" and that after losing two weeks in a row, they will never recover.

He said he doesn't feel like playing anymore, and Bob piped in and said that he wanted to quit the game after last session.


So basically, I got this from my group:

Losing fights is not fun. They should not have to play a game that is not fun.

They would rather TPK and end the game than ever suffer a setback.

Money and pride are more valuable to them than their lives, both in character and IRL.

Surrendering rather than dying is doing a huge favor to the DM, as the DM inevitably cares more about the campaign than the players and puts more work in, therefore the DM should feel obliged to make the terms of surrender purely beneficial to the players.

Setbacks are only acceptable if I let them grind back to the same place. As there is a finite amount of XP and treasure in the dungeon, that means anything short of perfection is a screw job that makes the game not fun.



None of this really surprises me. I have known for years that players hate surrender and that most of the players in my group suffer from some combination of clinical depression and / or narcissism, but it is shocking to hear it put so bluntly. And yeah, I mean it is never directly stated, but one of the key components of all of my famous horror stories is that I care more about the game than anyone else in the group and that they know this and use it as leverage to get away with things that would get them kicked out of any non bizarro-world group.


So, in short, I always here about how alternate failure conditions besides death are great for RPGs; but my players can't handle the thought of anything short of perfection, and when things go bad they actively want to die and the game to end so they don't have to acknowledge their failures. (On a related note, I have noticed for years they have a sort of psychological death spiral, if their first plan doesn't work for whatever reason they withdraw and declare the situation hopeless rather than coming up with a new plan).




Aside from the pessimism and bitching, they did have one very good point that I would like some help with if anyone has advice to offer:

So, IMO the ideal game-play loop is the players play as smart as they can to conserve resources and push as deep into the dungeon as they can, and then fall back when their resources are depleted. HOWEVER, the players don't have great scouting ability (and in a dungeon scouting can be pretty tough at the best of times) so that if they decide to push on, go into a new room, and bite off more than they can chew, and fall back, they will put the monsters on alert and make further progress very difficult.
My reading of most of the advice in this thread is that this is a good thing, but in practice, does that not mean the optimal strategy is to pull back out of the dungeon the moment you could, conceivably, lose the next fight if a big monster is beyond the next door? Doesn't smart / reactive monsters incentive the very 15 MWD attitude that this thread was created to avoid?

[Vahnavoi]

Congratulations, you're right back to the beginning. As I told you several times already, what your players do isn't optimal. It is basic. And, as your players correctly observe, their adherence to flawed basic strategy means they end up in a slow downward spiral untill they, eventually, lose.

Better players would devise a better strategy or at least better tactics to beat that downward spiral. Your players don't, because of their fragile egos. Taking their reactions at face value, they can not play the kind of game you made competently, nevermind optimally.

At this point, you either accept this and find other players, or change your game yet again. But please, for the love of God, stop projecting dysfunctionality of your players on all others, or rating game design principles based on their particular issues.

[Talakeal]

Congratulations, you're right back to the beginning. As I told you several times already, what your players do isn't optimal. It is basic. And, as your players correctly observe, their adherence to flawed basic strategy means they end up in a slow downward spiral untill they, eventually, lose.

Better players would devise a better strategy or at least better tactics to beat that downward spiral. Your players don't, because of their fragile egos. Taking their reactions at face value, they can not play the kind of game you made competently, nevermind optimally.

At this point, you either accept this and find other players, or change your game yet again. But please, for the love of God, stop projecting dysfunctionality of your players on all others, or rating game design principles based on their particular issues.

Agreed.

But they aren't always wrong. Mathematically, the 15 MWD is the optimal way to play barring other factors, and IMO you have a poorly designed game if the optimal strategy is contrary to the intended game-play loop.

I feel like the last paragraph of my post about reactive monsters is a legitimate criticism of the idea that you can counter hit-and-run tactics by having intelligent reactive monsters.

[Vahnavoi]

You keep using the word "optimal" wrong. When and where using hit-and-run tactics against reactive opponents leads to a downward spiral, it cannot possibly be optimal, and anyone trying to optimize for success realizes facts point away from those types of tactics.

When this is NOT the case, hit-and-run tactics are normal and expected part of gameplay. Literally my first post in this thread opened with that, followed by discussion on implementation and limits of such tactics in context of an infinite resource megadungeon, a la Angband.

Whenever you use weasel words like "barring other factors", you are implicitly ignoring elements that would actually allow for calculating an optimal path, and thus guilty of spherical-cows-in-a-vacuum argument. So are your players whenever they do this. The degenerate gameplay loop is something you trick each other into, not just a byproduct of game rules or game design principles. Which is why you got to separate in your mind two different groupings of incentives: "what people who are kinda bad at playing this game think is optimal" versus "what people who are good at this game think is optimal". The difference between these groups usually is whether they take into account those other factors.

[Talakeal]

You keep using the word "optimal" wrong. When and where using hit-and-run tactics against reactive opponents leads to a downward spiral, it cannot possibly be optimal, and anyone trying to optimize for success realizes facts point away from those types of tactics.

When this is NOT the case, hit-and-run tactics are normal and expected part of gameplay. Literally my first post in this thread opened with that, followed by discussion on implementation and limits of such tactics in context of an infinite resource megadungeon, a la Angband.

Whenever you use weasel words like "barring other factors", you are implicitly ignoring elements that would actually allow for calculating an optimal path, and thus guilty of spherical-cows-in-a-vacuum argument. So are your players whenever they do this. The degenerate gameplay loop is something you trick each other into, not just a byproduct of game rules or game design principles. Which is why you got to separate in your mind two different groupings of incentives: "what people who are kinda bad at playing this game think is optimal" versus "what people who are good at this game think is optimal". The difference between these groups usually is whether they take into account those other factors.

I don't disagree with anything you say.

But the "other factors" is not a weasel word, it is the crux of the issue. The whole purpose of the thread is to come up with "other factors" that bring optimal play toward the ideal game play loop rather than making the problem worse or creating some other form of degenerate play.

[Quertus]

Congratulations, you're right back to the beginning. As I told you several times already, what your players do isn't optimal. It is basic. And, as your players correctly observe, their adherence to flawed basic strategy means they end up in a slow downward spiral untill they, eventually, lose.

Better players would devise a better strategy or at least better tactics to beat that downward spiral. Your players don't, because of their fragile egos. Taking their reactions at face value, they can not play the kind of game you made competently, nevermind optimally.

At this point, you either accept this and find other players, or change your game yet again. But please, for the love of God, stop projecting dysfunctionality of your players on all others, or rating game design principles based on their particular issues.

Make a game for the players you have. The downward spiral game you made was an epic failure at achieving that goal.

My reading of most of the advice in this thread is that this is a good thing, but in practice, does that not mean the optimal strategy is to pull back out of the dungeon the moment you could, conceivably, lose the next fight if a big monster is beyond the next door? Doesn't smart / reactive monsters incentive the very 15 MWD attitude that this thread was created to avoid?

Which is why you don’t use smart / reactive monsters in a megadungeon. Or, you know, at all with your group. You give them mindless, uncooperative monsters, or foes trapped in a time loop, that they get an infinite number of tries against to build their strategies, so that they can be the underdogs who win, so that they can come off as intelligent, learning, BDHs. Instead of being the losers who lose to kobolds, who get out-thought by the monsters, and who enter a downward spiral of failure breeding failure.

Agreed.

But they aren't always wrong. Mathematically, the 15 MWD is the optimal way to play barring other factors, and IMO you have a poorly designed game if the optimal strategy is contrary to the intended game-play loop.

I feel like the last paragraph of my post about reactive monsters is a legitimate criticism of the idea that you can counter hit-and-run tactics by having intelligent reactive monsters.

And the time Temple megadungeon I suggested would be nigh immune to the 15 MWD. Whereas the reactive dungeon you built discouraged your players from playing it at all. Consider why that is.

[GloatingSwine]

I don't disagree with anything you say.

But the "other factors" is not a weasel word, it is the crux of the issue. The whole purpose of the thread is to come up with "other factors" that bring optimal play toward the ideal game play loop rather than making the problem worse or creating some other form of degenerate play.

The other factor in what you've discussed here is information.

Your players attempted hit and run tactics on opponents which had the time and resources to fully recover and prepare for the next attack and no other concerns which would have distracted them from doing so.

So honestly ask yourself "what information was presented to the players which caused them to think hit and run was viable?"

Because what I see is happening is they use a strategy that they think is going to be effective (wearing the enemy down with hit and run tactics) but it isn't (because they don't meaningfully weaken the enemy for next time) and the reason it isn't because of facts not in their possession (enemy has the resources to fully recover).

So what did they base the decision to use that strategy on?

If the answer was "nothing, they just blundered in and this happened as a result of them bailing the first time" then that's also a problem. And it might be like 85% a them problem but also as the GM and system and scenario designer it's something where you could be guiding them towards the sort of information gathering that would tell them, for instance "these kobolds have a lot of supplies and spare warriors they can recall given time, but not a lot of force on hand, harrassment will be ineffective but decisive battle will be effective".

Because the other possibility is that they're blundering around expecting the loop of the game to be a kick the doors in and take the treasure dungeon crawl where they don't have to think about that kind of stuff, and you're playing a world simulation back to them they aren't expecting or accounting for.

[Talakeal]

Make a game for the players you have. The downward spiral game you made was an epic failure at achieving that goal.



Which is why you don’t use smart / reactive monsters in a megadungeon. Or, you know, at all with your group. You give them mindless, uncooperative monsters, or foes trapped in a time loop, that they get an infinite number of tries against to build their strategies, so that they can be the underdogs who win, so that they can come off as intelligent, learning, BDHs. Instead of being the losers who lose to kobolds, who get out-thought by the monsters, and who enter a downward spiral of failure breeding failure.



And the time Temple megadungeon I suggested would be nigh immune to the 15 MWD. Whereas the reactive dungeon you built discouraged your players from playing it at all. Consider why that is.

As a wise turtle once said, before the battle of the fists comes the battle of the mind.

The "downward spiral" is completely psychological, not mechanical.

Honestly, I can't think of any way to break that aside from working full time as the PCs "PR team" throwing impossibly easy fights at them but somehow conveying AFTER THE FACT* that this was an incredible victory that only someone as smart and powerful as they were could have possibly won, but they managed to score 110%** victory!

*: Because if they believe their enemy is dangerous before they fight, the will enter the downward spiral preemptively.
**: This percentage will, of course, have to continually increase. As we established before, they consider any mission where they don't get further ahead of the WBL curve as a percentage to be a failure.

[Sapphire Guard]

Problem with using effective tactics is that sometimes they work. You got unlucky that they worked two sessions in a row, but this is a very fine line. If every session is going to end in surrender, it's quickly going to go sour.

The point of the effective monsters is that they make it difficult to have a predictable pattern. So the ideal impact would be 'okay if they know we will be heading back this way we will be ambushed, let's not go back to town tonight, let's instead camp somewhere safe like with the kobolds or in the mortuary, so the counterattack won't know where we are'

[GloatingSwine]

Problem with using effective tactics is that sometimes they work. You got unlucky that they worked two sessions in a row, but this is a very fine line. If every session is going to end in surrender, it's quickly going to go sour.

This, again, is an information thing.

The GM has perfect information about anything not inside the players' heads, the players only have the information they have managed to gather. If the monsters are using strategies like alliances then the players need to be able (at least in principle) to find out information in advance like the relations between different groups before they become relevant and to understand that co-operation between groups is a thing that is going to happen in this game.

And if they don't have the habit of doing that, but it's going to be fundamental to the way the campaign works, then that needs to be a conversation that gets had about the game so that everyone has the same expectations about what the game is.

[King of Nowhere]

a question that needs to be asked is, what was the correct strategy for players?
because there is the risk of creating a morton's fork. if the players take frequent rests, the monsters will organize and defeat them. but if the players never rest, they will be exhausted and die. what could the players have done to ensure their success?

a second, strictly related question, is: did the players have a way to figure out the winning strategy?

because, without a positive answer to both of those questions, the players may get the feeling that they have no way to win. if they push they will eventually be overwhelmed, but if they retreat the dungeon will become unwinnable later.

the players must get the impression that they have to play smart to win. they must not get the impression that they are playing dm-may-i?, or that they are playing with an oppositive dm out to punish them, or that their success or failure depends on hidden random factors that they have no way to discover.
many dm also want to feel that their players are overcoming obstacles by being smart, not by having a pushover adventure designed to reward total morons, so in this case the players and dm goals of wanting to build a campaign rewarding good thinking are aligned. bonus points if the informations are story-related and require/favor immersion in the campaign world to appreciate.

We can't say if it's your fault for not giving information or your player's fault for not taking the clues without more details.