Challenge in Sandboxes

[Segev]

The secret is that DMs don’t want the campaign to end anymore than the players do.

The trick is to have narrative consequences that aren't campaign-ending. The portal closes, and the villain achieves a victory, making the heroes' lives harder in some fashion as they now have to find another opportunity to make right what has gone wrong AND thwart the next thing the villain is up to.

[Saintheart]

But I thought the goal was to get people to have a bunch of encounters all in a row. If you have to periodically go back to town to restock, people are going to respond to that by... going back to town to restock. Which is going to mean interrupting their encounters to go have downtime.

So I haven't been here for most of this discussion, and being infected with the same Attention Deficit bug as most everyone on the Internet I can't be bothered to go back and read whether someone already answered this, but as a thought: if we're going to admit that the game fundamentally changes as the magic gets bigger and stronger, why should we think that the method of providing challenge has to remain as attrition? Or if you're going to continue to keep using attrition as a major mode of challenge, maybe it's time to think of some other consumable but essential resource that the players have to ration?

My games usually start off with characters hauling rations around and choosing between that or foraging for what they can find. The players have a choice. They get to decide whether they want to live off the land or use up the consumable resource they've brought with them. It doesn't take long before someone starts memorising Create Food and Water and/or Heroes' Feast and starting to deal with that problem, but I don't actually see that as a monumental affront to my authority as a DM or an attempt by the players to frustrate My Imperious Will. That's a choice they make. At low levels, using up a spell slot as an emergency food source is not a small decision to make. But if the players want to make that choice, then they can do so. That, in turn, is because I don't think the DM's job is primarily to wear down the characters' consumables as such. The DM's job is to offer meaningful choices for the players to make. The consequences of "spell vs. ration" might not be large, particularly given the starvation/dehydration rules are very generous to players (at least in 3rd ed), but it is still a choice, one of many the players can make. And over time, consistently choosing one or the other might well have implications; I have no way of predicting it, but that Create Food and Water slot might preclude memorising Summon Monster III and so the party has to fight harder at the end of the day when they otherwise could've called on their flexible friend to eat the enemy. That's entirely okay. The players chose, and it achieves that wonderful state of affairs where all the little choices a character makes eventually add up to a wider consequence.

As time goes on and the character levels get larger, getting basic food and water and travel may well become minor if not entirely trivial concerns. To me, that's actually entirely okay. That's expected in the game. As your characters get more powerful, why should that sort of stuff remain a significant challenge to them? (On the other hand, just because it's a trivial issue for them doesn't mean it can't remain a consideration. As said - small choices can add up into larger consequences. You want to buy an Everfull Mug to take care of your water concerns for the rest of your adventuring life? Okay, but that money then isn't available for something else and you'll have to find it elsewhere, not to mention that you can't exactly gift your Everfull Mug to a starving pilgrim in the middle of nowhere, thus securing an important information source for yourself. Or you might even gift it to him and then have to cadge off other party members for water. Or you might have to let said pilgrim tag along sharing your mug until you reach a civilised place where he can be dropped off. Or you could just leave the pilgrim to die of thirst. And so on.)

What I'm getting back to is that I believe you should aim to give players choices about what they do rather than only consequences for a decision. "You're running out of rations, and you can make it back to town and restock, but the ruins may well refill as the hobgoblins reinforce and entrench their position, not to mention that they've now got a bead on how to fight you if you show your faces here again. That is, coming back might not mean significantly more enemies, but it might be a harder fight. Or you could press on and hope your rations hold out, and maybe take out the whole place, and then hope that the hobgoblins have their own food (and hope that it's consumable by humans), or risk starvation or dehydration on the way back to town. What's it going to be, pilgrim?" Or my old favourite when asking the party how it's getting somewhere: get there fast but take risks, or get there slow but take less risk. The party is not cheating you out of your fun as a DM if they choose the slow route. They're making choices, and those choices are what the game is ultimately about. Those choices tell you who the characters are.

I think the meaningless choices are the ones where there is no clearly-discernible consequence for one route over another. The 'fast but risky' versus 'slow but safe' decision is like a muscle - and a muscle requires two components to work, which is to say both a meaningful difference in risk and a consequence for time taken. (And notice that risk versus time is the easiest but not the only way to frame a choice. Immediate bonus versus long term benefit is one.
Resource versus payoff is another. Save the NPC cleric for extra healing potions during the battle, or save the NPC king for extra victory points? Take a +4 STR potion to win the five qualifying duels in the tournament now, or get by on your own mettle and save the potion for the final battle?)

Getting back to what I was saying to start with - maybe the solution is to frame the choices of consumables in some other way. "The underground cavern complex has plenty of food and even potable water, but what it doesn't have is light sources. As with the ancient stone altar in Conan the Barbarian, fire won't burn there, no fire at all. Not to mention that what the cavern complex does have is predators in abundance which not only have darkvision but who are adapted to smell photons from half a mile away. Oh, and it has walls made of a substance that blocks teleportation except at certain sites where the dwarves tunnelled through the rock and left teleport gates, where you can get back to the surface and restock, although these sites are few and far between."

Does the party go off and procure headbands of darkvision, thus dealing with the light problem before they descend into the depths? That's okay. That's their choice, that's their way of navigating that part of the challenge posed by the surroundings, and they will quite literally pay a price in gold to do that. Do they use up spell slots for lots of castings of Ebon Eyes? Same deal. Their choice, and less spells for them to use while down there. Do they buy phosphorescent, glowing moss which lasts a few hours per plant, and which supply they have to manage? That's okay too. Do they want to use some combination of all three? Absolutely okay. (And all of these solutions still leave a challenge open because, since fire won't burn down there, the characters don't have a very powerful way of dealing with the ice creatures down there that would otherwise be vulnerable to fire.)

What about the aasimar character who radiates light equivalent to a small torch at all times in a given radius? Do you ban that choice? I would be inclined to say no. That was something specific he did for himself and for his teammates to meet this challenge, that was his way of meeting the challenge you set for him. At worst you tell him that that light radiation ability shuts off if he's ever unconscious or asleep. Or maybe don't even try to hobble him; you've told the party that the monsters in those caves are attracted by light, if he takes the greater risk that statement implies, it is a choice he has made.

Don't wait for your players to obviate the encounters you have planned, get on the front foot and give them options to obviate!


LATER EDIT: In fact, this allows me some self-reflection too. Because I realise now that the reason I used to get angry or heavily frustrated when players bypassed or obviated aspects of resource management, or even clowned entire encounters, on the way to the planned objectives, was this: I was mistaking all those sorts of things - resource management, random encounters, all those things related to attrition - as requirements for the party reaching its objective/s. I was, in a real way, seeing all those things as a price the party had to pay to continue the adventure. Therefore, when the party knocked out encounters or the need for food with one magic item (for which they paid good money) I'd get snotty that they were "cheating" or being "lazy" about the whole thing. In short, I was thinking that they weren't earning their achievement or their presence at the scripted encounters or whatnot.

That is, the problem was entirely mine, and entirely in how I saw RPGs. I didn't see those aspects of the game as opportunities for player choice. I saw them only as opportunities for obstacles. I suspect the latter mindset is a holdover from when I wanted to be a writer (and at which I eventually learned I sucked, and saved myself a lot of heartache and isolation when I gave up). Because writers think in terms of obstacles the characters have to overcome, which allows them to develop. Ergo, if I, as the DM, am a storyteller, then I must put these obstacles in the path of the players in order for them to earn their Big Bad fight at the end. Corollary: if the players bypass said obstacles, I feel they are not earning their fight at the end, they are not being part of the story.

But the moment I reframed these sorts of things as choices for the players to make, and thought of the RPG as them telling the story of whether they ate trail rations or fresh-picked crabgrass for dinner on the 1,876th day of the adventure, all need to push encounters or particular outcomes on them faded away. I let them demonstrate their ingenuity and their left-field ideas and their capacity to end encounters with an inventive use of Tenser's Floating Disk. I could still let the monsters try to kill them all, and do so without hesitation and without mercy, because I could trust my players to make their choices. And if I did want to engage my sadistic side, I could simply look at giving the players choices where there were no comfortable answers. Again, not Hobson's Choice, not a choice which is meaningless, but a choice that would tell them about themselves based on how they resolved the problem: return the princess to Guilder, and forestall a war, but ensure the Rise of Queen Amidala The Tyrant, slayer of thousands of her own people ... or "remove" the princess, thus causing a war in which thousands of Florinese people including Sicilians, giants, and duelling masters would die? And I wouldn't need to worry about whether the story went in the direction I wanted or not: because the real pleasure is in seeing people choose what to do when given the option. It's in watching that moment where quantum theory says the universe splits down two paths but we only get to follow one ... and very infrequently the one we expect.

[RandomPeasant]

No, the point is that the challenge curve in D&D (and similar games) is based on attrition.

But it's not? If you look at the 3e encounter guidelines, it supports a multi-encounter, attrition-based workday, but it also supports single-encounter workdays where the encounter is simply more dangerous.

Infinite resources, whether it is provided innately or by constant trips back to town, means no challenge and, ultimately, renders all dice rolls and decisions meaningless.

That's definitely not true. No amount of resources make a Hill Giant a trivial challenge for 1st level characters. "Infinite resources" still means a finite amount of resources at any given point in time, meaning that you can still have issues like "the village is being wracked by disease and we only have enough healing to save a fraction of the people". Some decisions are inherent tradeoffs, like "should we sell the MacGuffin we found to the Arcane Order or the Knights of the Realm". Lots of games provide meaningful challenges, let alone meaningful decisions, without being attrition-based.

[thirdkingdom]

The trick is to have narrative consequences that aren't campaign-ending. The portal closes, and the villain achieves a victory, making the heroes' lives harder in some fashion as they now have to find another opportunity to make right what has gone wrong AND thwart the next thing the villain is up to.

This, one thousand percent. In a sandbox game there's a lot of stuff going on, and players won't be able to tackle everything. Some stuff will get shuffled off to low priorities, and with other things they may very well fail. Consequences will happen, and the players will have to deal with their choices.

[kyoryu]

No, the point is that the challenge curve in D&D (and similar games) is based on attrition.

Infinite resources, whether it is provided innately or by constant trips back to town, means no challenge and, ultimately, renders all dice rolls and decisions meaningless.

Well, ultimately, you kinda do have infinite resources.

The trick is to make sure that resetting resources has some kind of cost to progress. So long as the world is essentially static (doesn't repopulate, doesn't react, etc.) then you'll have this issue. If "time" is the only cost to resetting resources, and time doesn't have any real cost, then resources are infinite.

I like the resetting progress thing (repopulate dungeons, can get encounters on the crawl, etc.) because it helps create a structure for a hexcrawl that's then "see how far you can push". Another option would be to use not-time as a cost for regenerating resources. If reacquiring resources cost money, and especially if the first few "hexes" or bits didn't generate enough money to reset them, then there's another incentive to go further, but that has an obvious failure mode (what happens if the players run out of money and are low on resources?) That's not an unsolvable issue, but it's one that needs solving.

[Talakeal]

snip

I agree with everything you say here.

That's not really the issue though.

Create food and water is just an example of why using food as a limiting resource doesn't work when spells are an unlimited resource. Also, I would need to crunch the math, but I don't believe you actually need to have fewer spells while adventuring to obliviate the need for rations, just having a spell slot left over to cast in the evening before sleeping every few days should probably be enough.

Players being able to make decisions is fine, and even being able to bypass encounters entirely is fine (although as I said above, I do "idiot proof" encounters so there isn't some ultra obvious solution to a supposedly serious obstacle).

The problem is that the solution to virtually every problem is "cast a spell" or "walk right past it / up to it swinging my sword" and then take a nap. There is no interesting decision to be made there.

But it's not? If you look at the 3e encounter guidelines, it supports a multi-encounter, attrition-based workday, but it also supports single-encounter workdays where the encounter is simply more dangerous.

That's definitely not true. No amount of resources make a Hill Giant a trivial challenge for 1st level characters. "Infinite resources" still means a finite amount of resources at any given point in time, meaning that you can still have issues like "the village is being wracked by disease and we only have enough healing to save a fraction of the people".

That's true, but single challenging encounters tend to be a lot more likely to result in player death. They also kind of strain credibility, and make site based adventures like dungeons really hard to pull off.

A hill giant is more or less impossible for a standard first level party, and I imagine there is a very narrow band between "challenging to the entire party" and "impossible fight". And, this also means there is no degrees of victory, its either win or lose. Currently my players never lose fights, and if I started just using single big encounters that would change, and I don't think anyone at the table would be happy about it.

Also, non combat encounters become totally meaningless. Traps, obstacles, hazards, and social encounters can often be solved with a single spell or just walked through with no consequence if attrition is of the table, which makes many skills kind of meaningless.

Some decisions are inherent tradeoffs, like "should we sell the MacGuffin we found to the Arcane Order or the Knights of the Realm". Lots of games provide meaningful challenges, let alone meaningful decisions, without being attrition-based.

Yeah, storyline decisions still exist, but I was more talking about strategic / tactical decisions. If you are guaranteed to replenish spells / HP after every fight, you don't really need players there most of the time, the wizard can solo most things and the fighters can be replaced with a dice rolling app.

Well, ultimately, you kinda do have infinite resources.

The trick is to make sure that resetting resources has some kind of cost to progress. So long as the world is essentially static (doesn't repopulate, doesn't react, etc.) then you'll have this issue. If "time" is the only cost to resetting resources, and time doesn't have any real cost, then resources are infinite.

I like the resetting progress thing (repopulate dungeons, can get encounters on the crawl, etc.) because it helps create a structure for a hexcrawl that's then "see how far you can push". Another option would be to use not-time as a cost for regenerating resources. If reacquiring resources cost money, and especially if the first few "hexes" or bits didn't generate enough money to reset them, then there's another incentive to go further, but that has an obvious failure mode (what happens if the players run out of money and are low on resources?) That's not an unsolvable issue, but it's one that needs solving.

Its harder to do in my system because it has a more robust downtime system than a lot of games, so that time itself is also a resource.

But, this same problem still exists in many games.

Out of curiosity, what would you (not just Kyoru but anyone) do if the players just wanted to spend ages in town making money rather than adventuring? Like "We are all playing elves with high craft and profession skills, so we are going to spend the next ten years in town living like paupers and working our butts off so we have an extra 10,000 gold to spend on magic items before we hit second level!"

Like, that is seriously something my players have tried to do before, and afaict is fully rules legal.

In the past I have done things like telling them "You can do that, but the world isn't static, and three years from now the BBEG is going to flood the town with a horde of undead and kill you all if not stopped first," is one of my player's classic gripes about why I am a bad DM.

The trick is to have narrative consequences that aren't campaign-ending. The portal closes, and the villain achieves a victory, making the heroes' lives harder in some fashion as they now have to find another opportunity to make right what has gone wrong AND thwart the next thing the villain is up to.

True. And that is probably what would happen in a real game, the video is after all a parody.

But, on the other hand, the DM doesn't want the adventure to end prematurely either. I know if I prepped a cool climactic battle with lore and statted out NPCs on the other side of the portal, I would do everything in my power to make sure the player's interacted with it in some way.


Edit: Yeah, at least in 3E you only need to eat once every three days, so just take every third day off from traveling and you will never be down a spell slot of suffering penalties from hunger.

[NichG]

Out of curiosity, what would you (not just Kyoru but anyone) do if the players just wanted to spend ages in town making money rather than adventuring? Like "We are all playing elves with high craft and profession skills, so we are going to spend the next ten years in town living like paupers and working our butts off so we have an extra 10,000 gold to spend on magic items before we hit second level!"

Like, that is seriously something my players have tried to do before, and afaict is fully rules legal.

I've played in games where the PCs had effectively infinite gold. It can still work - you just have to accept that that's what those characters are, rather than what the WBL curve says or what the system was designed to expect.

[RandomPeasant]

That's true, but single challenging encounters tend to be a lot more likely to result in player death. They also kind of strain credibility, and make site based adventures like dungeons really hard to pull off.

They mean a greater risk of failure per encounter. But if failure means PC deaths, it means that in an attrition-based game too, and it's not obvious to me that overall risk should be lower in such a situation. Creating meaningful challenges in a TTRPG is a very hard problem no matter what you do, because there must be an enormous disconnect between perceived risk and actual risk. If encounters are 95% safe for the PCs (a level of safety that is going to feel pretty boring), only slightly more than half of groups will last through a single level before getting wiped out. I think it is, if anything, easier to manage challenge appropriately if PCs are assumed to always be at full resources, as that does not require you to ensure that encounters are appropriately risky a 50% or 66% or 10% resources as well as full.

I'm not sure why you think "all fights are EL = APL + 4" strains credibility more than "all fights are EL = APL". Either you're letting PCs fight whatever you put in the world, with no concern for danger, or you're tweaking encounters to be balanced, realism be damned. Similarly, I don't quite know what you think the issue is with dungeons here.

Currently my players never lose fights, and if I started just using single big encounters that would change, and I don't think anyone at the table would be happy about it.

If your players never lose fights, then how is there a challenge curve in the first place?

Also, non combat encounters become totally meaningless. Traps, obstacles, hazards, and social encounters can often be solved with a single spell or just walked through with no consequence if attrition is of the table, which makes many skills kind of meaningless.

I would argue if your encounter can be solved by using a single ability, it is probably not an interesting encounter for parties who have that ability. Traps, for example, are generally compelling only as part of a larger encounter (e.g. the classic "Iron Golems and fireball trap), or if the party is under sufficient time constraints that they can't carefully check for them every step of the way. Otherwise, traps are just an exercise in dice rolling, with a side of "guess what things the DM thinks can be trapped and what declarations he wants you to make to not trigger them".

Out of curiosity, what would you (not just Kyoru but anyone) do if the players just wanted to spend ages in town making money rather than adventuring? Like "We are all playing elves with high craft and profession skills, so we are going to spend the next ten years in town living like paupers and working our butts off so we have an extra 10,000 gold to spend on magic items before we hit second level!"

I would play under a set of rules where having large amounts of gold was not game-breaking. The issue there is the magic item christmas tree, not the idea that PCs could have jobs.

I've played in games where the PCs had effectively infinite gold. It can still work - you just have to accept that that's what those characters are, rather than what the WBL curve says or what the system was designed to expect.

Frankly, the real problem isn't infinite gold, but magic items, especially charged ones. And those are problems with amounts of gold way smaller than "infinity". You can buy a scroll of a 5th or 6th level spell with less than the treasure you get from a EL 3 encounter, and that scroll will win such an encounter every time.

[Talakeal]

They mean a greater risk of failure per encounter. But if failure means PC deaths, it means that in an attrition-based game too, and it's not obvious to me that overall risk should be lower in such a situation.

In general:

If you are fighting a series of encounters, and one of them goes bad, you are unlikely to die, you can simply pull back and regroup, maybe use some consumables.

If you are fighting a single battle and it goes bad, your choices are either to fight to the end (and probably lose some PCs) or fall back and make no progress at all.

I'm not sure why you think "all fights are EL = APL + 4" strains credibility more than "all fights are EL = APL". Either you're letting PCs fight whatever you put in the world, with no concern for danger, or you're tweaking encounters to be balanced, realism be damned.

Agreed.

But you can take a middle ground; look at the average or total EL of a dungeon, find what level it is appropriate for, and then tell the PCs roughly how dangerous that region is known to be.

If your players never lose fights, then how is there a challenge curve in the first place?

Typically it is an issue of how much they accomplish; how much treasure they loot, how many rooms they explore, how many prisoners they rescue, how many enemies they kill, etc.

I would argue if your encounter can be solved by using a single ability, it is probably not an interesting encounter for parties who have that ability. Traps, for example, are generally compelling only as part of a larger encounter (e.g. the classic "Iron Golems and fireball trap), or if the party is under sufficient time constraints that they can't carefully check for them every step of the way. Otherwise, traps are just an exercise in dice rolling, with a side of "guess what things the DM thinks can be trapped and what declarations he wants you to make to not trigger them".

I agree. But not every encounter needs to be super interesting on its own. Stuff can enhance immersion or give the players a chance to show off their skills / cleverness without being some big, dramatic, time taking event.

I would play under a set of rules where having large amounts of gold was not game-breaking. The issue there is the magic item christmas tree, not the idea that PCs could have jobs.

Frankly, the real problem isn't infinite gold, but magic items, especially charged ones. And those are problems with amounts of gold way smaller than "infinity". You can buy a scroll of a 5th or 6th level spell with less than the treasure you get from a EL 3 encounter, and that scroll will win such an encounter every time.

Agreed... but a lot of these games are very popular.

And it really hurts immersion to have a game where treasure can't be leveraged into power in some way or another, and if you do find some ultra-contrived setting where you can't buy advantages, why are the PCs risking their necks for treasure in the first place?

[kyoryu]

Out of curiosity, what would you (not just Kyoru but anyone) do if the players just wanted to spend ages in town making money rather than adventuring? Like "We are all playing elves with high craft and profession skills, so we are going to spend the next ten years in town living like paupers and working our butts off so we have an extra 10,000 gold to spend on magic items before we hit second level!"

Honestly, I'd probably say "no, that's not the game we're playing. We're adventurers, not tradesmen. If you want to play the tradesmen game, I'll figure that out, but the system isn't designed robustly in that area. And since for most people income and expenditures tend to balance, at best I'll come up with some system that lets fluctuation happen on a monthly basis based on some factors and randomization. But you wanted a hexcrawl game, so let's play that."

[OldTrees1]

Out of curiosity, what would you (not just Kyoru but anyone) do if the players just wanted to spend ages in town making money rather than adventuring? Like "We are all playing elves with high craft and profession skills, so we are going to spend the next ten years in town living like paupers and working our butts off so we have an extra 10,000 gold to spend on magic items before we hit second level!"

Like, that is seriously something my players have tried to do before, and afaict is fully rules legal.

In the past I have done things like telling them "You can do that, but the world isn't static, and three years from now the BBEG is going to flood the town with a horde of undead and kill you all if not stopped first," is one of my player's classic gripes about why I am a bad DM.

1) How would I run it?

Remember I am much more of a sandbox GM than you are so my campaigns are a bit more flexible in terms of direction. My way is not the only right way.

So the PCs are all skilled craftsmen / professionals and they decide to spend time in town making money? Okay. Here are the checks you would make. If you do it long enough then I will roll for random economic fluctuations. Any economic consequences of your economic disruption will occur. Any local NPC agendas that change to involve you will involve you (that might be a couple short in town adventures or even an antagonist depending on the plots). Oh and the plots of NPCs outside the town will also progress.

All of this means they will still be gaining xp, although they might gain more gold than xp. They will still be facing challenges. And unaddressed plots will continue to progress. If there was a BBEG that was already planning to attack the city with a horde of undead, that BBEG will reach the city unopposed. But then they have to face the PCs and their contacts rather than face the PCs and their loot.

Given your timeline estimates of 10 years to earn 10K gp, frugal lifestyle, and the BBEG invading in 3 years. I might say, "The world is not static, I expect a disruption to your plans around 3 years in. Additionally I expect you will probably reach level 2 within those 3 years. Do you want to stick to this plan?". When they say "yes" we will play it out and they might have 3K gp and be 3rd level when the BBEG comes knocking. Their characters probably had some warning from listening to news from the local town crier.

Maybe they decide to flee the BBEG and travel to another town to continue their trade. This might be a campaign about a bunch of merchants now. Not every D&D campaign needs to be about adventurers.

2) How would I listen?

It sounds like the players want their PCs to be wealthier than normal.
-> That is useful feedback about their desires. I wonder if they just want to be wealthier or if it was a symptom of something else. I should ask them about that.

It sounds like they wanted more magic items before reaching level 2.
-> Does that mean they feel the difficulty is too hard? I know their preferences can differ from mine. There is no objective "correct" difficulty. If they prefer it was easier, then they prefer it was easier. I should ask them about that. Maybe even find a compromise.

[Satinavian]

Out of curiosity, what would you (not just Kyoru but anyone) do if the players just wanted to spend ages in town making money rather than adventuring? Like "We are all playing elves with high craft and profession skills, so we are going to spend the next ten years in town living like paupers and working our butts off so we have an extra 10,000 gold to spend on magic items before we hit second level!"

I would probably give them the crafting/basebuilding/town politics/NPC drama camapign they want. I actually like running those. But i would not allow just skipping over ten years instantly just for higher start money. If they want more start money, they should just ask and maybe we can adjust the campaign boundaries for that, no reason to use exploits.

[Talakeal]

I would probably give them the crafting/basebuilding/town politics/NPC drama camapign they want. I actually like running those. But i would not allow just skipping over ten years instantly just for higher start money. If they want more start money, they should just ask and maybe we can adjust the campaign boundaries for that, no reason to use exploits.

The players absolutely DO NOT want to RP out the time gap or play out town drama. They merely want to gloss over the "boring part" and get straight to the power fantasy.

[Satinavian]

Well, if i had players that were only interested in playing a powerfantasy, i probably would give them a powerfantasy, not an RP-heavy town drama or an old school hexcrawl. I don't provide stuff they fundamentally don't want. Waste of my time and theirs.

That is why i wrote that if they just want more start money, they should simply ask and forget the silly timeskip.

[Talakeal]

Well, if i had players that were only interested in playing a powerfantasy, i probably would give them a powerfantasy, not an RP-heavy town drama or an old school hexcrawl. I don't provide stuff they fundamentally don't want. Waste of my time and theirs.

That is why i wrote that if they just want more start money, they should simply ask and forget the silly timeskip.

Its weird, because they don’t want-handout from the DM either. I think its more about the feeling of getting away with something.

[OldTrees1]

The players absolutely DO NOT want to RP out the time gap or play out town drama. They merely want to gloss over the "boring part" and get straight to the power fantasy.

1) This sounds like the players want to be playing an easier difficulty but are not mature enough to say it directly. That is okay. There is not objectively correct difficulty. Maybe there is room for compromise. Maybe one of them wants to DM. Maybe you should split into different groups.

2) If they wanted to gloss over that part but want the system as it is, then I would gloss over that part. I would abstract that part as "3 years have passed. You are all level 3 and you made 3000gp. Unfortunately the local news has reported a Necromancer with a large army of undead is approaching the town. They will be here within 2 months. How does your plan adapt to this news?"

[Squire Doodad]

At a further glance, I'd say one of the big issues is that you're starting at level 1.
If your players want to feel strong, you can't do that too easily with a freshly-baked adventurer. Try telling them to make level 3 or level 5 adventurers; early enough that they aren't already fighting demigods and omnidragons but still enough for them to have customized a fair bit and be ALREADY locally famous adventurers. Plus they can have a cool set of abilities at that point for their preferred playstyle.
People don't gasp when they walk into a shop, but the bartender knows them and is willing to tell them some good leads for decently tough dungeons.

Also, one other thing that I find key to "feel-good dungeon crawl" is having common "extra-minor magic items". Let's say each combat encounter has two pieces of gear a party member can equip that has an incredibly minor but cool enchantment. It can be something firmly numerical but uncommon and niche, like a shield that boasts "+1 AC against Orcs", a Longsword of Glinting "1d2 bonus Fire damage", or an axe with "2d4 bonus Acid damage when rolling a natural 20"; or maybe it has a neat but mostly pointless effect that an outside-of-the-box player can put to good use. Like a Brooch of Pyromancy that allows you to tell the relative location of flames within 50 feet.
Make it so each of these have modest impact on actual player strength, and are only worth something like +20 GP when present (and thus do not count as enchanted, maybe it's "Tinkered Gear" or something), but they're still cool to find and your players can play around with them.

Though this is on top of actual enchanted equipment popping up, as opposed to instead.

[RandomPeasant]

But you can take a middle ground; look at the average or total EL of a dungeon, find what level it is appropriate for, and then tell the PCs roughly how dangerous that region is known to be.

Sure, but you can do that however the encounters in the dungeon are divided up.

Typically it is an issue of how much they accomplish; how much treasure they loot, how many rooms they explore, how many prisoners they rescue, how many enemies they kill, etc.

Those metrics are only meaningful in the context of time pressure, and time pressure can be applied regardless of whether resources are per-day or per-encounter. Without time pressure, resources are functionality unlimited unless you do very contrived things like "you must clear the dungeon to regain spells". With time pressure, players inherently have a limited resource (time) regardless of whether their character resources are limited or not.

I agree. But not every encounter needs to be super interesting on its own. Stuff can enhance immersion or give the players a chance to show off their skills / cleverness without being some big, dramatic, time taking event.

Again, sure. But if you're putting in filler encounters, those encounters should be resolved quickly and easily, or you risk spending more time on filler than things of consequence.

Agreed... but a lot of these games are very popular.

Games are complicated things, and popularity often has very little to do with mechanics. D&D 3e, for example, was (probably still is) enormously popular, but that doesn't mean all its design decisions were positive, even by the narrow metric of "helped popularity". Things are the sum of their parts, and large positives with small negatives sum to a positive whole.

And it really hurts immersion to have a game where treasure can't be leveraged into power in some way or another, and if you do find some ultra-contrived setting where you can't buy advantages, why are the PCs risking their necks for treasure in the first place?

You don't have to stop treasure from leveraging into power at all, you just have to stop it from leveraging into power that breaks the tactical game. It is okay if a party that finds a dragon's hoard is slightly ahead of the curve in fights. The game can handle that just fine. Similarly, even very large piles of money are small when considered on the scale of kingdoms and armies (and it matters much less if those things are precisely balanced to PC level).

Why PCs would risk their necks for treasure in such a situation seems fairly obvious: that's how you get treasure. If you want a +3 sword (perhaps because you need it to defeat the dragon that has captured your home, or simply because it's shinier than your +2 sword), and you can't get it by farming beets until you have 18,000 GP, your only option is to go into a dungeon, beat up the inhabitants, and hope one of them was sitting on a +3 sword. Alternatively, there are all kinds of external motivations you could have for adventuring like "I want to claim this land for my kingdom" or "if I slay a bunch of giant monsters, women will want to sleep with me" or "I can only do my thesis research in a planar convergence site and the only one of those is at the bottom of a dungeon filled with extra-planar monsters". PCs should have some motivation for adventuring beyond just "use my gear to get loot to buy better gear to get more loot", or you're basically just playing Progress Quest.

[Talakeal]

1) This sounds like the players want to be playing an easier difficulty but are not mature enough to say it directly. That is okay. There is not objectively correct difficulty. Maybe there is room for compromise. Maybe one of them wants to DM. Maybe you should split into different groups.

2) If they wanted to gloss over that part but want the system as it is, then I would gloss over that part. I would abstract that part as "3 years have passed. You are all level 3 and you made 3000gp. Unfortunately the local news has reported a Necromancer with a large army of undead is approaching the town. They will be here within 2 months. How does your plan adapt to this news?"

At a further glance, I'd say one of the big issues is that you're starting at level 1.
If your players want to feel strong, you can't do that too easily with a freshly-baked adventurer. Try telling them to make level 3 or level 5 adventurers; early enough that they aren't already fighting demigods and omnidragons but still enough for them to have customized a fair bit and be ALREADY locally famous adventurers. Plus they can have a cool set of abilities at that point for their preferred playstyle.
People don't gasp when they walk into a shop, but the bartender knows them and is willing to tell them some good leads for decently tough dungeons.

Also, one other thing that I find key to "feel-good dungeon crawl" is having common "extra-minor magic items". Let's say each combat encounter has two pieces of gear a party member can equip that has an incredibly minor but cool enchantment. It can be something firmly numerical but uncommon and niche, like a shield that boasts "+1 AC against Orcs", a Longsword of Glinting "1d2 bonus Fire damage", or an axe with "2d4 bonus Acid damage when rolling a natural 20"; or maybe it has a neat but mostly pointless effect that an outside-of-the-box player can put to good use. Like a Brooch of Pyromancy that allows you to tell the relative location of flames within 50 feet.
Make it so each of these have modest impact on actual player strength, and are only worth something like +20 GP when present (and thus do not count as enchanted, maybe it's "Tinkered Gear" or something), but they're still cool to find and your players can play around with them.

Though this is on top of actual enchanted equipment popping up, as opposed to instead.

You know, I really don't think desire to be higher level is really it. I have had players pull this kind of stuff at high level, and I have offered to let players just start at higher level when whining about slow progression and been turned down.

I really think there is some element of wanting to feel like the big fish in a small pond or like they are getting away with something behind it.

Sure, but you can do that however the encounters in the dungeon are divided up.

Yeah. But if the party is stopping to recover all resources at every fight and so you are making every fight deadly, that means that every fight in the dungeon is the exact same ECL, which strains credibility when compared to the ~9 ECL range of a normal dungeon.

Those metrics are only meaningful in the context of time pressure, and time pressure can be applied regardless of whether resources are per-day or per-encounter. Without time pressure, resources are functionality unlimited unless you do very contrived things like "you must clear the dungeon to regain spells". With time pressure, players inherently have a limited resource (time) regardless of whether their character resources are limited or not.

Exactly. Hence this thread.

Again, sure. But if you're putting in filler encounters, those encounters should be resolved quickly and easily, or you risk spending more time on filler than things of consequence.

There is a difference between quickly and easily and pointless.

Walking through a trap that deals half your HP and then sleeping it off vs. walking through a trap that deals half your HP and then keeping on going both take about the same amount of time, but in the latter case you will be lamenting not being more careful / bringing a rogue, whereas in the first you just shrug and say "whatever".

Games are complicated things, and popularity often has very little to do with mechanics. D&D 3e, for example, was (probably still is) enormously popular, but that doesn't mean all its design decisions were positive, even by the narrow metric of "helped popularity". Things are the sum of their parts, and large positives with small negatives sum to a positive whole.

My point was not that they are popular because of the mechanics, merely that these are popular games and thus my odds of finding a group for them are high, thus I can't always afford to refuse to play them if I want to game at all.

You don't have to stop treasure from leveraging into power at all, you just have to stop it from leveraging into power that breaks the tactical game. It is okay if a party that finds a dragon's hoard is slightly ahead of the curve in fights. The game can handle that just fine. Similarly, even very large piles of money are small when considered on the scale of kingdoms and armies (and it matters much less if those things are precisely balanced to PC level).

A dragon's hoard is actually pretty big; your stereotypical dragon sleeping on a bed of gold is worth more than the GDP of many modern countries.

Even so, people will always wonder WHY they can't just spend enough cash to buy magic items or higher mercenaries ten levels higher than they are, and there isn't really a good in setting reason besides game balance.

PCs should have some motivation for adventuring beyond just "use my gear to get loot to buy better gear to get more loot", or you're basically just playing Progress Quest.

Sure would be nice.

[NichG]

Frankly, the real problem isn't infinite gold, but magic items, especially charged ones. And those are problems with amounts of gold way smaller than "infinity". You can buy a scroll of a 5th or 6th level spell with less than the treasure you get from a EL 3 encounter, and that scroll will win such an encounter every time.

The particular campaign I'm thinking of used Slayers d20 rules, which are an adaptation of 'Advanced d20 Magic', which has a lot of craziness when seen from a standard D&D viewpoint. In that system, spells are not limited by level but have a DC of a Fortitude save you have to hit to cast them, which can be modified by the use of consumable components, time, etc. Standard D&D spells are retrofitted by taking the bonuses given by all their listed components, adding those to the DC, and then the spell can be cast without those things if you can manage to hit the (often very high) resulting DC. This means you can cast Wish with no components if you can hit a DC of 101 - as a 1st level Fighter if you could somehow pull that off without all the class bonuses/etc you get from the casting classes and could also make the check to learn the spell and could survive the drain (casting inflicts drain in the form of non-lethal damage that heals only through rest - the higher the DC, the more the drain).

Now, a particular thing about that campaign setting is that all of the protagonists and major antagonists are epic-level characters, and the players had at least enough familiarity with the setting to be able to do the math of 'if I want to have a goal of, say, being able to perform astral travel with impunity, I can actually look up in the book what the CR is of the thing that is going to show up to try to kill me' or 'if I want to overthrow the mazoku generals and take their place, this is what kind of power level I'm aiming for'. Those things all had published stat blocks (a point about the importance of telegraphing and communication incidentally, even if its unrealistic for the characters to know some things).

So as ~Lv12 characters, we used an infinite Wish engine (at a rate of 1 or 2 a day) to basically get inherent bonuses to all stats, as much magical gear as we could craft for ourselves with the arbitrary number of 25kgp diamonds we could produce, used that to be able to do things like cast Polymorph Any Object or Limited Wish at will, and basically shoved our way into the business of CR30-ish antagonists. And we were still fighting a losing battle the one time we went up against a mazoku general proper (though that was a holding action to pull off a ritual, so managing to not die long enough was enough there).

It would not have worked if someone looked at us and said 'you're Lv12, you should face CR 12-17 threats, have this much loot, etc'. It worked fine because we were proactive in our goals, looked at ourselves, and said 'okay, this is the biggest thing we can do with the power we were able to squeeze out of the system' rather than seeing ourselves as 'Lv12 characters doing Lv12 stuff'. And in retrospect, the magic items were a part of that, but on their own without the other ridiculousness that is the Slayers d20 magic system, I'd say infinite gear comes out to only about a +5 to effective level. I confirmed that for myself later on running a campaign for players with access to a similar Wish engine, and playing in a third campaign where standard items up to about 100kgp were more or less trivial to obtain (via three or four different ways, so I won't go into it).

[Time Troll]

The problem is that the solution to virtually every problem is "cast a spell" or "walk right past it / up to it swinging my sword" and then take a nap. There is no interesting decision to be made there.

How though?

Sure A new DM might be fooled a couple times, but once you get some real life experience you can block the players "easy button".


Make encounters have no easy pass.

Or are you saying you don't know how to do that?

[Squire Doodad]

You know, I really don't think desire to be higher level is really it. I have had players pull this kind of stuff at high level, and I have offered to let players just start at higher level when whining about slow progression and been turned down.

I really think there is some element of wanting to feel like the big fish in a small pond or like they are getting away with something behind it.

I think in that case the "extra-minor enchanted items" bit might work to make them think they have all this uber gear without actually giving them game breaking equipment, but that doesn't change the core issue.

At the end of the day, they don't just want to have a feel-good dungeon crawl that's just hard enough to be fun, but rather to go through smashing everything effortlessly.
At that point, go link them to Kingdom Hearts on easy on something, and then find a different group. Regardless of any issues with your DMing, the actual players clearly don't want to play the sorts of games you run in the first place. Maybe do a board game with them instead.

Alternatively, if you've offered but never actually done starting at somewhat higher level, go force them to do it. Start a new campaign and make them start with a few levels under their belt, and refuse to let them do level 1 instead if they ask. Just make it happen and see how it goes

[Saintheart]

You know, I really don't think desire to be higher level is really it. I have had players pull this kind of stuff at high level, and I have offered to let players just start at higher level when whining about slow progression and been turned down.

I really think there is some element of wanting to feel like the big fish in a small pond or like they are getting away with something behind it.

Okay. So my next question is, and let's bear in mind, I'm not in any way talking about you, I'm talking about the players: is there a problem with the players wanting that, and can we better define that problem?

Maybe -- and I'm not saying this is the case or that it's necessarily valid to want one way or the other -- some playing groups don't want to earn their victories. Some players really don't know what they really want, in the same immature way that small children refuse to eat carrots and then suddenly can't get enough of it once they've tried it. Some players might conclude that by getting away with something they are having more success than they do in the real world. If so, would you consider that an invalid desire or motivation to playing a role-playing game?

I might have this wrong, and the solution might ultimately be "Stop playing with adolescents in adult bodies and find a better gaming group", but, on the assumption that you don't want to dump the game and you want to find a solution to make this situation tenable and/or desirable for you, but: can you precisely define what you see the problem is with the players wanting to speedrun through an adventure?

[Satinavian]

Its weird, because they don’t want-handout from the DM either. I think its more about the feeling of getting away with something.

Well, in that case i would invest a lot of time until i finally understand what they actually want and wouldn't run anything until i have achieved this.

And if i had found it, i would reasonably expect no complaining about it and no attempts to avoid it in game.



But that is not really something we can help you with.



But if they really don't care about the game but instead are in it for the "feeling of getting away with something", as in they want to feel smart and smug for having been more clever than you and earned their victory, i would not play an RPG with them. A tactical board game with clear rules and a competitive setup would be way better. How about trying Descent ?

[Quertus]

Infinite resources, whether it is provided innately or by constant trips back to town, means no challenge and, ultimately, renders all dice rolls and decisions meaningless.

No. Rubber banding challenges renders dice and decisions meaningless.

Its weird, because they don’t want-handout from the DM either. I think its more about the feeling of getting away with something.

You know, I really don't think desire to be higher level is really it. I have had players pull this kind of stuff at high level, and I have offered to let players just start at higher level when whining about slow progression and been turned down.

I really think there is some element of wanting to feel like the big fish in a small pond or like they are getting away with something behind it.

"Get away with something" is, indeed, a real human motivation. However, this behavior can just as easily be explained by "want to earn".

There's also this Godzilla-sized "your players keep telling you in every way they know how that they want you to make the game easier". Maybe you should listen.

I return to my, "give them 5x staying power", and see just how easy they really want the game to be. Want versimilitude? Call it, "demigods of adventure", and have the final quest rewards be that they reset the rules for humanity.

(EDIT: How quickly PCs level is also something that should be available to be changed in the reboot, although it may just be a byproduct of wanting things to be easier, not an independent desire of its own.)

Yeah. But if the party is stopping to recover all resources at every fight and so you are making every fight deadly, that means that every fight in the dungeon is the exact same ECL, which strains credibility when compared to the ~9 ECL range of a normal dungeon.

Don't make every fight deadly - make every fight encounter interesting.

EDIT:

So as ~Lv12 characters, we used an infinite Wish engine (at a rate of 1 or 2 a day) to basically get inherent bonuses to all stats,

Does Slayers d20 ignore the "must be cast in consecutive rounds" clause?

[Quertus]

Rather than one cohesive but huge post, that will be out of date even if it ever gets finished, I'll go ahead and start posting random excerpts.

Communication

I really think there is some element of wanting to feel like the big fish in a small pond

The players absolutely DO NOT want to RP out the time gap or play out town drama. They merely want to gloss over the "boring part" and get straight to the power fantasy.

Sounds like your players are communicating their desires to you. Try giving them what they asked for.

Stop changing the rules

<something about players wanting you to change the rules less often>

So don't change the rules. Hand authority of "when do the rules get changed" over to the players. Or have rules changes occur at set intervals - like between campaigns.

Healing

I wouldn't use wands as an argument. They are a unique, and probably unintended, quirk of 3E that isn't present in most editions of D&D or other games, and they make the whole concept of HP attrition, battlefield healing, and indeed the role of a healer pretty much meaningless.

Although I don't completely disagree, if you look at 2e, where only the box of bandaids Cleric got bonus spells, and look at my new "favorite" module, Halls of the High King, you'll see…

• each PC starts with 4 healing potions, provided by the quest-giver;
• the quest-giver, Panthras, is willing to give x100 coins of what he offered; unspecified how many more healing potions the party could negotiate for;
• the first encounter nets the party an additional 28 (16+12) potions of extra-healing;
• the party's first babysitter has copious healing potions, that they will hand out to injured individuals;
• the party's seconds babysitter / quest-giver (roughly 3 encounters in) will offer healing;
• accepting the second quest will earn each PC a potion of extra-healing;
• there is an encounter literally labeled "bandaid". Can you guess what it offers?;
• curiously, the rescued priests (roughly 5 set encounters in) only have 3 Cure Wounds spells between them;
• about 7 set encounters in, there's 2 more potions of extra-healing;
• about 8 set encounters in, the party gets healed up yet again *and* receives an additional 12 healing potions and 2 scrolls of Heal;
• about 10 set encounters in, I *think* that the PCs get healed again (or so I remember, but don't see reference to it in skimming);
• and then there's several more encounters and an extended dungeon crawl, with only 2 potions of extra-healing and two scrolls of Heal for loot (but you're fighting Clerics…)

For a 6 person party, that's… what… 36 potions of healing, 38 potions of extra-healing, and 4 scrolls of Heal? The equivalent (based on HP of characters at those levels) of healing about 212 wounds in your system, plus several stages of free healing (and resurrection), for fewer than 30 set encounters total. Which amounts to treasure to heal 7+ wounds per encounter.

And I've played in several oldschool adventures - both modules and homebrew - that were similarly rife with healing. So "lots of healing" isn't unique to 3e, even in D&D.

Progress

In general:

If you are fighting a series of encounters, and one of them goes bad, you are unlikely to die, you can simply pull back and regroup, maybe use some consumables.

If you are fighting a single battle and it goes bad, your choices are either to fight to the end (and probably lose some PCs) or fall back and make no progress at all.

I am reminded of the reverse:

Victory? Victory you say? Master Obi-Wan, not victory. The shroud of the dark side has fallen. Begun, the Clone Wars has.

One need not win a fight to make progress; one may not make forward progress even winning the (wrong) fight.

Consider structuring your game such that either a) progress isn't tied to victory in a 1 to 1 relationship, or b) where "retreat, learn, prepare, and retry the fight" is reasonable, and part of the gaming culture.

Towards that last one, consider making *every* encounter in a *very small* hex crawl be a(n Avatar of Hate style) puzzle monster and/or clues. Maybe 20 sites, 7 puzzle monsters, 40 clues (yes, that's multiple clues per site)… and "zero to many" trash encounters, easily crushed mobs to make your players feel good. These mobs drop treasure, that the party can use to buy consumables, allowing them to prepare for "boss"/puzzle fights, as well as allowing them to grind as much or as little as they want to.

But, if they hit a puzzle monster that they cannot beat, and cannot figure out how to beat, they can keep wandering the map, searching for clues. At 40 clues for 7 monsters, that's about 6 clues per monster out there for them to find.

Progress can be made against the puzzle monsters even on a failure by eliminating possibilities, eliminating said puzzle monster's allies, or even just evaluating the nature of the puzzle the first place.

Two Parties

Here's a novel idea: run a truly oldschool Gygaxian dungeon crawl. Have 100 encounters spanning 5 levels.

And have 2 parties taking turns going in.

For giggles, you could have the players running both parties. Although having a second group, that meets on a different night, would be optimal.

But definitely write the whole thing down as a module before any PCs are created - *including* expected tactics of the monsters, which you must play honest, and not rubber band the difficulty of.

Maybe they'll be able to evaluate cost/benefit - and be able to articulate their analysis to you - under such a scenario.

[False God]

The secret is that DMs don’t want the campaign to end anymore than the players do.

Sure we do. I don't want to drag things out past a reasonable conclusion. I don't want to entertain mindless stupidity. I don't want to lessen our achievements by taking on unnecessary elements beyond them. I don't want to force people to carry on with something they're not enjoying.

As both a player and a DM: Stories end. Sessions end. Campaigns end. Endings are necessary. Endings are good.

[Talakeal]

Sure we do. I don't want to drag things out past a reasonable conclusion. I don't want to entertain mindless stupidity. I don't want to lessen our achievements by taking on unnecessary elements beyond them. I don't want to force people to carry on with something they're not enjoying.

As both a player and a DM: Stories end. Sessions end. Campaigns end. Endings are necessary. Endings are good.

*End prematurely

[NichG]

Does Slayers d20 ignore the "must be cast in consecutive rounds" clause?

Nope, I remember this being pretty tricky for us since only one of us (not my character in that one) was able to pull off the full Wish. I don't remember the numbers exactly but I think the drain was more of an issue than the DC - it was something like 10d10 slow healing damage per cast, halved if you beat the DC by 10+, and 'take drain as lethal' was worth a +10.

[False God]

*End prematurely

If the game is not running well, it may be time to end it. If the players or the DM are not enjoying themselves, it may be time to end it.

It may not be where you want to end it. But that doesn't mean it doesn't need to be ended.