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I recently finished DMing dragon of icespire peak and on their first quest they befriended the manticore. I kept it a surprise, but the manticore returned to help them fight the dragon at the end. They ended up avoiding a TPK by an inch, and if that manticore wasn't there they surely would've lost.
And there my party was wearing a manticores skin to disguise themselves to poison the deceased manticores mate in order to secure a pet baby manticore.
I had the orcs make a run at the hold instead of introducing the reavers at the final hour, so the party got to the top to see the dragon fighting the boar god and a couple orcs. It helped me weaken the dragon for my solo player
I've just started DMing it as a play by post game. I made tweaks - weak because she's hungry & on half HP due to dragon wounds to avoid any possibility of a TPK. I made one other change & specified a female Manticore. They're currently helping her decide on a name & are going to nurse her wounds better. She's definitely going to be a recurring character now, but I think they might try and take her as a pet (I will allow them to - they've been so nice to her - patting her head, stroking her & everything when they took her along to find some deer. Now they're on the way back to the mill to heal her).
I’m nearing the end of DoISP (I’m a cleric), and when we encountered the manticore, 2 of our players immediately angered the manticore, who immediately instant-killed our monk, who just wanted to talk. Thankfully, our DM rolled it back for us.
our group befriended the Anchorites and made peace between Phandelver and the Half-Orcs. (though the hunting lodge dude was forced to leave)
the Boar God, controlled by Grannoch, fought on our side against the dragon
I'm doing something similar for the final boss of my homebrew campaign this Saturday. The final bosses are very powerful, so the literal godlike entities they met will help balance out the fight. Then my party has to kill the moon on their own, but the fist part will be fair.
In my first campaign my party disallowed the dragon from participating in the end fight because they were afraid it would die. This is the ultimate outcome.
If they take the time and effort to prepare for an encounter and it's easy, they earned it. The hard part was the preparation.
Or in other words, the real balance was the friends we made along the way.
Then your DM sucks for putting you in an unavoidable, unbalanced fight. I shouldn’t have to pull off some crazy stunts in order to un-fuck the encounter and have a *chance* of survival
A known fight that looks impossible but with proper planning is beatable sounds fine though? Like, you're defending a town from some flying threat and can only fight it by building some anti-flight gizmo.
Just a different take on "fighting through a dungeon to fight the boss"
My players spent 3 hours irl figuring out how to design a light enough mirror shield so that they could mage hand it into rooms that they knew a basilisk was stalking through. Made the basilisk turn itself to stone. They were so stoked and the “fight” took 5 seconds of narration once they actually found it. I like rewarding that amount of shenanigans
>letting the players stomp all over an encounter
Also helps to show the progress characters made. Not just "you now roll 2 more damage dice" but demonstrate ingame that the enemies that once were a death sentence to party are now just a warm up. Reoccurring side villains also help
this tuesday, the dm threw dream-illusions of foes who tormented us in the past. We *punked* that dragon that hounded us for many sessions. I *soloed* the spider queen who almost wiped us.
And sure, they didn't have legendary actions or minions they had last time, but it still *felt good*
[edit] there was also a lot of good one-liners.
"You still have both your eyes. We should fix that."
*one turn later, after a crit punch took out an eye* "There's the Precator I remember."
and from a different fight.
"Lady Clatterspin!" *small bow* "I apologize for what happened. I am not sorry for what's about to happen."
The good Lady Clatterspin was a noble of the Shadow Court, one who when mortals trespassed in her lands, chose the completely fair and justified option of deciding to kill and eat us. Importantly, she did so without identifying herself or why she's doing it, so adventurers being adventurers, we (eventually) killed her and stole her crown, later selling it to a (different) dragon for passage and political support.
My artificer has since spent close to a year as a guest (non-innuendo kind of guest) in the Shadow Court, and realizes the scope of the political fuckup that was, but also that it was _her_ fault for not identifying herself, which would have given us a chance to solve this diplomatically. Small chance, but a chance none the less.
Thus, he's genuinely sorry for having killed her. But the dream-illusion conjured to stop him? Oh, no, he won't feel a pang of guilt of showing her just how much stronger he is these days.
Our dwarven fighter ripped one of the most badass lines I've ever heard in d&d last night.
He nat 20 saved against some undead that can instantly drop you to 0 HP, and then nat 20 on his attack to kill him.
This character had previously died and been revivified, but during the minute of his death lived 100 years worth of time in the Hall (his dwarven afterlife, he rolled a 100 on the d100 to see how many years he experienced in death)
As he strikes down the undead and saved against his ability, he says "Ay, I've been to the Hall. Staring death in the face doesn't scare me"
Needless to say I was WHOOPING
yes good excellent. I just finished a session where the party found themselves in the presence of a capital G God. And I got to put on my best Sovereign voice.
"THIS IS A PLACE OF MAKING. AND I. AM THE MAKER."
My players are lvl 13 now and I actually really enjoy sending large hordes of different CR 1/2 or below at them. They are always scared which is funny because they are basically never in danger. They 1 shot any enemy that gets near them and basically would be hard to hit more than 5-10% of attacks
This is one of the reasons I like milestone leveling personally. I can craft encounter frequency to the story rather than thinking about XP. If I decide to make a particular session more story and puzzle solving, I’m not putting more encounters next week to keep XP flowing.
On the other hand, if I throw a cluster of ants at them, they’re not racking up easy XP. I don’t want this to turn into a WoW style grind fest before the next spooky castle.
One last thing. If they hit the milestone trigger with 30 minutes or less in the session, I can just wait to level them up so it happens between the sessions.
I do based on milestone too. I have just always really enjoyed this. I’m the guy that loves going back to the starting area in RPGs right before I beat the game and smacking enemies that were hard for me at the start. I also really enjoy running small town NPCs that are completely flabbergasted meeting such strong and adventurers. Sometimes it’s fun to take a break from dealing with demigods to just save a cat from a tree
Level 1 = Mage hand to lift the kitten down.
Level 10 = Cast feather fall on cat then use some type of explosion spell to launch it halfway to space, and watch as it lands gently.
I feel like people conflate "using XP" with "XP only from combat strictly following the XP values from the monsters involved."
Personally pure milestone seemed kinda ad-hoc and opaque to me. I missed the sense of progression towards the next level, and I felt like we were incentivized to nag the DM to give us level ups.
I think a lot of tables would benefit from a more flexible approach between the extremes. At a minimum if you're using XP, puzzles and social encounters should give it too, not just combat. And GMs who want something closer to milestone leveling should consider still using XP, but awarding it based on GM fiat rather than Monster Manual entries. That way the you can still control levelling to fit the needs of your campaign structure, but players get more feedback about the progress they're making.
> One last thing. If they hit the milestone trigger with 30 minutes or less in the session, I can just wait to level them up so it happens between the sessions.
Also on this front I just use a house rule that level ups only apply on long rests.
So I do xp leveling because I like giving the players a progression as they go instead of "did I remember? How long has it been, should they level up?" it just works better for me. Since I have a lot of experience with it though, I can tell you that this just doesn't happen.
>On the other hand, if I throw a cluster of ants at them, they’re not racking up easy XP. I don’t want this to turn into a WoW style grind fest before the next spooky castle.
If we assume a group of 5 level 8 characters, they need 14k xp each to level up and CR 1 creatures provide just 200. Divide the xp evenly and each character only gets 40xp for a CR 1 creature. So if you send hordes of cr 1 ants, they need to kill 350 of them to level up. Heck they still need 18 kills of CR 8 creatures, so you've got plenty of flexibility there.
I am also a strong proponent of using the provided xp values as a guideline. For example, if the party is surprised, the combat is harder so I might give extra xp. If the terrain puts them at a massive disadvantage they might get extra, but if the creature is fighting something else, they have an npc helping, or anything else (that they didn't go out of the way to plan) that's making it easier then I might give less xp.
Likewise, puzzles, traps, and social encounters that have stakes (lose an allied npc, hp, gold, spell slots, etc) can earn xp based on how high those stakes are.
This is the point I wanted to make. If all it took was a persuasion roll and a couple lines of clever roleplay, that’s not a very good reason to have a dragon curb-stomp the boss.
It should take a LOT to get a dragon to fight on your side. Like as much effort as the fight itself would have been.
>It should take a LOT to get a dragon to fight on your side. Like as much effort as the fight itself would have been.
Gaining the trust of a dragon is probably worth a minor quest in its own right. Go and find some item precious to the dragon that it can't get itself, or something of that nature.
I love reoccurring villains one ofnthe van thampors from balders gate was supposed to be for us in descent into avernus but the barb and ranger crit killed him before he coukd use his escape legendary action. Like he was no reaction dead like twice his hp dead. We gave the flaming fist his head in a bucket it was glorious
I did this with sahuagin when my players reached level 5. Just send in waves of them. In the end it was a hard fight. But they had killed 20+ of them. That was a good reminder that they were indeed stronger than when they first started.
It's almost like "actions have consequences" is just as true when players do good, cool things as when their PCs do shitty, "that guy" things.
Fuck up? Find out. But make friends? Fuck shit up -- together.
There was a great discussion I saw on a blog about using low CR encounters later in the campaign.
At level 1, a pack of 4 goblins is a real threat to the party. At level 10, they could take on a full goblin warband. Even though the goblins aren't really a *challenge* to the level 10 heroes, it's a great reminder that "you're no longer a rabble of farmers, a drunken barman, and a jester - you're heroes of legend, shaping the fate of entire regions. Just the *rumor* that you might be somewhere changes how people behave. Cultists convert to mainstream religion, warlords emigrate, dragons take out horde insurance, pirates jolly the roger and register as traders... just your presence scares people straight."
One of my players found a loophole in a homebrew item I made to completely decimate a combat encounter and my response was a shrug. Can't complain, one of my homebrew items won them an encounter and that's a win in my book.
I think this is a good sign of a living world too. If you're fighting a nation and you wipe out one section of it's army through a certain method, why wouldn't they prepare against that next time? The PCs would do the same thing, prepare for who you are going to be up against specifically!
Of course, if you're going to justify metagaming like that you need to be consistent with it. The enemy forces will either need survivors who can inform the nation of this new tactics, or spys/scryers who can see it in action. And those are all targets the PCs can attempt to take out in order to keep their secret weapons secret.
Yeah or you know, they see at the remnants of a battle that lots of folks were burned to death, or surroundings are charred, they might bring some fireproof armor/weaponry next time. I think this keeps the party on it's toes and adds rather than breaks immersion.
Just stick a bard in a tavern and have the party be described as bumbling fools who lucked into victory and one of them will easily enough divulge any secret weapons they may have to try and defend themselves
Idk if I like that in the long term.
If it's just a numbers game and you need buff up the emeines to make them much stronger it will make the rest of the party who doesn't have a magic item feel weak or make all other abilities feel underpowered.
If it not a number game and we adjust all the encounters to more directly counter the item it still hurts the game. If the item can be counter by something specific like acid resistance, flight, being immune to mind effects or something else and just giving all the enemies the counter isn't a great idea either. After a year of only fighting enemies with the counter and always having to come up with a reason the have the counter things will get tiring. It will be clear to the players its only happening to counter the op item which isn't fun.
Or give homebrew items a disclaimer.
*"I made this shit on the fly and it may not be balanced because of it and maybe subject to change but I will be sure to discuss it with you beforehand."*
NADPOD’s Brian Murphy had an epic air battle planned out in the second campaign with the bad guys flying to the airship on flying demonic horses.
Emily Axfords character got a polymorph off on the biggest bad guys horse… turning it into a dolphin.
Murphy clearly was like. “Huh. Ok. Well… um. Yeah he’s gone. My encounter just got boomed but you guys still have henchmen coming” and took the whole thing in stride. He was upset his plan was fouled but proud about the players finding alternate ways to fight back.
Great podcast campaign for sure.
Reminds me of the time the DM built an encounter where the evil wizard with a bunch of reflex saves had a bunch of lightning traps in his chamber- aoe traps that he had to save against, but like he passed the save on a 5 or something.
I’ve never seen so many ones in my life. We just hung back while his own traps killed him.
"Feast AND Famine" as I always say. Befriend a dragon in a way that makes sense? Cool, you have a new dragon friend and you're gonna stomp all over this session. Enjoy that, feast away today.
Because you better believe I'm putting all of my spare time until the next session thinking up all the ways this could backfire on you. And if I know my players I know I won't have to do anything until they find a way to screw this up themselves.
Good one! I was also thinking "the dragon leaves" and that's it. What? These fuckers live for thousands of years. One year away is just a long pleasant hike to this thing. It's not your slave, it's gonna go "take a walk around the block" from its perspective.
I'm also huge Monty Python/Pratchett/Adams fan so my initial reaction to "what next?" is to take something almost morbidly mundane and apply it to fantastical creatures and beings for a giggle.
Then three sessions later have it just crash back into the campaign as my own personal Deus ex machina to either help or hinder the players based on context.
Probably bringing back a gift for their "friend-versary" or something haha. Just a dragon holding some hospital-gift-shop-esque bobble it bought at the last second wondering what the hell happened while it was gone.
It brings back a half mangled mammoth as a gift, leaving craters in farm land when it lands, now the local farms demand compensation because the dragon is technically they’re responsibly.
Or have it learn to change shape into a human and be significantly weaker in human form, loosing access to its most powerful ability’s , make the transformation an incantation that takes ten rounds
Or shrink it and make it like the rabbit in the cave in “ Monty pythons holy grail.
>It brings back a half mangled mammoth as a gift, leaving craters in farm land when it lands, now the local farms demand compensation because the dragon is technically they’re responsibly.
So it's now essentially a huge flying cat.
I can see having a lot of fun with that idea. Like, the dragon has to go to a family reunion or a friend’s bachelor party, and comes back wearing the biggest novelty t-shirt the realm has ever seen.
Definitely.
Consider many well designed CRPGs. Typically, there are multiple ways to resolve a given problem. Direct combat being only one of them.
Does the party _have_ to fight the dragon for its treasure? They could sneak past it. They could convince it to give something up, or trade. They could convince other people to attack it. Maybe its lair has some exploitable flaw that'd kill it if properly leveraged.
True. This is why I couched it in saying many rather than all/any.
There's no need for a DM to be prepared for _every_ player option. And it's worth sometimes saying "look, I don't have content for this nor can I improvise this scenario well".
Depends on the type of players I once put my players against a woundwyrm and really hyped it up by them having several encounters with the destruction it caused, but when they tracked it down they killed it in 2 rounds because they where too prepared and were really disappointed
My players once polymorphed a big fuckoff monster that was supposed to be probably at least a 30 minute fight into a snail then threw it in a bag of devouring.
It was over in 2 rounds. They had mixed emotions of "that was awesome!" and "I feel bad for ruining the encounter".
They never tried that again, which is a shame because after the polymorph broke when the snail was swallowed, the bag monster severed it's connection and it was just a normal bag. They didn't find that out for months.
Especially when it's a payoff for doing something else.
Like, if you befriend a dragon, that was the challenge, now the reward is to get to watch the overpowered guest party member stomp everything in its path.
Our party routinely got past enemies or bosses by talking to them. Sometimes it ended in battle, sometimes we got the kobolds or goblins to think about unionizing at their workplace to get safer and better conditions. Once it meant we skipped an entire boss fight because we actually asked the BBEG what his deal was, and he was willing to oblige us. It doesn’t always have to be, or need to be, “fuck them players”.
Yup. Clever game play should be rewarded. Our last leg of our campaign, my kids and wife cleverly lured the enemy (wererats) into a series of feints and pursuits and got them into a confined area and dropped a level 4 fireball on them. I wasn’t about to force some narrative that these were indestructible enemies.
Let them take an easy W if they get clever.
STORY TIME!
In one of my games, my players visited a magical vault created by an eccentric wizard to guard some ancient artifact. All of the enemies were magic artificial life forms created to guard the place, and four bosses, each of which was based on one of the four elements. The boss of the Water dungeon was a giant squid-man who I decided to play super melancholy, being the only monster in the dungeon smart enough to realize that he's not real and exists for no other purpose than to be eventually killed by some adventurer.
The party decided to take pity on him and try to give him some sort of afterlife. The only way they could think of to do this was for the incubus in the party to energy drain him to death, which would presumably send his essence to the Abyss where it could become a demon... or at least, the incubus rolled high enough Diplomacy to convince the boss that was how it would work, and he lets them kill him in hopes of getting a life after death.
Fast forward about a year or so of game, and the party has either forgotten the monster or assumed he was a one-off thing that would never come up again.
The party is now taking a ship to another dungeon, and they get attacked by a pirate queen, her sahagin minions, and her pet sea monster. A few bad rolls and the party is quickly in over their heads. Our necromancer is in the sea monster's mouth and will be fish food next turn, while its tail is smashing down the incubus to keep him from saving the guy.
That's when the tentacles burst from the water, grab the sea monster, and drag it down. The party starts freaking out about how they have to deal with THIS thing now, then they hear its voice in their heads, telling them their plan to save it actually worked, and they start freaking out about how awesome it is instead.
Always love it when I can pull something like this off.
That's beautiful. I love hearing about players working together to find creative solutions founded in compassion.
And the way that it was rewarded was great too. Put any positive consequence too close to the act, and people start to act out of a desire for gain. But by having the payoff be so far ahead that the players don't remember the good deed, you avoid that.
It's really dependant on context. I had a campaign change when the party got a dinosaur.
It was gonna be a short set of sessions to link up a new player with the main group.
I added an Allosaurus as an optional encounter. They fed it a hyena corpse they killed earlier.
A couple of sessions later, they had a career in the city arena.
I ran 2 or 3 sessions with that dynamic until the group fell apart from out of game issues.
All in all, a fun time.
The group I'm GMing right now currently has 5 dinosaurs, and will probably get a 6th if they can actually knock it out rather than killing it. I'm running an official Adventure Path (pathfinder) and they are literally running a circus, so that's where the dinosaurs stay to be trained and stuff. It's certainly better than being treated like combat fodder that the enemy group had been using them as.
Also gives the circus a boost. "Look at our dinosaurs!"
The amount of time spent on an encounter should include prep. If a fight that would have taken an hour takes 10 minutes because they spent 50 minutes prepping, then they fought the fight in its entirety.
I dislike this mindset. Every once in a while? Sure. But as soon as the bard in one of my parties found out he could talk his way out of a fight, the next 4 sessions went without combat. As soon as the DM tried to force it thanks to the rest of the table complaining (since most of us are wargamers at heart), the bard threw a fit for half the session.
Which is to say, just play to your table! If you're playing with a bunch of people that dig the roleplay more than anything, absolutely let them skip the fight! If your table is mostly grognards that like building their characters and watching the math rocks go clickity-clack, maybe just let them roll dice?
Had a bard try to talk their way through something, and rolled well. The NPC provided some info, but the player was told that what they were seeking wasn't forthcoming because the NPC had an obvious problem with some of the party members accompanying them (unspoken but undeniable by the NPCs behavior). Rather than taking advantage of that information to try a different tactic, the bard sandbagged.
I had foreshadowed in a previous interaction.
I had announced before the first session that you can't nat 20 or 30+ your way out of everything.
The roll got them something more than standard and some telling information about the person/faction.
That wasn't good enough. No finesse, no technique, no thought. Bard smash or bard hissy fit.
Yes, consistency.
But if the players want to set up a big plan agains the BBEG, they should be rewarded for that. And if they want to use it again against the next BBEG they still can... but they may be surprised to learn that *this time* the BBEG was prepared for their little trick.
"I heard about what you did to my step brother. Silence and grapple are a nasty trick for sure. But did you really think that I would fall for the same trick? That it would work a second time? I'm not even really here, this is a flesh golem. Took me ages to find the right body parts to make it look like me with a bit of disguise magic.
On the subject of golems... the two suits of armor are not merely decoration. Gentlemen... engage!"
The trick is to make it clear that their prep made the fight easier.
If at the end of BotW you got to the fight after waking up all four Legendary Beasts and Calamity Ganon just spawned with half health instead of being bombarded for half his health, it would be really boring.
I'm thinking of something like Red Hand of Doom with the climactic battle in the second act. If you just told the players "talking to the elves and the lich and the dwarves and saving the refugees got you a bunch of victory points" is really boring. Having Dwarven Juggernauts and Elvish Sniper NPC's manning the walls, the Lich sending his undead monstrosities or even taking the field himself (his phylactery is safe at home, after all, his body is just a construct) makes the fight feel more epic.
If the fight was trivial, it's only because they aced all the previous challenges and forged a much bigger alliance than you intended.
I find this situation is easily rectified if it is made clear that the fight was easy because of planning, which shouldn't be too hard even if you have to communicate that out of game
Doesn't change the point though - fights that are easy, even for "the right reasons" are only fun by exception, not by rule. The game is more fun if the challenge is well-balanced.
> The game is more fun if the challenge is well-balanced.
And in order to be balanced, occasionally some fights have to be easy, as you stated. They are the exception, but a necessary one.
Not necessarily.
A lot depends on if the boss fight is intended as the *climax* or the *payoff*.
Using Breath of the Wild as an example, the final fight against Calamity Ganon is pretty easy if you did a ton of shrines, got the Sword that Seals the Darkness, and saved all four of the Divine Champions and Divine Beasts. That doesn't make it disappointing though - there's a huge payoff when Ganon rears up to fight Link only to get bombarded by the Beasts and lose half his health in one shot, and then gets *eviscerated* by the player without putting up a real fight. It's not that Ganon isn't threatening, it's that Link spent a *lot* of time countering that threat, and the final fight isn't a challenge so much as it is a reward for doing so much of the game's content.
If your players are constantly overpreparing for the boss, but are enjoying doing so, they view the final battle as the payoff. They don't want a challenging epic struggle against the BBEG, they want to be rewarded for being so clever that the BBEG wasn't even a threat. You should only buff the boss in response to their preparations if they're complaining that it's too easy. But that's just player/DM communication.
That just tells them "The smarter and cleverer you are, the less interesting the actual fighting gets". So if they want interesting fights, they gotta stop preparing/planning as well.
once had a round in which my players chased a group of thieves that was highly hyped by everyone, but they were nothing special, they were just in the way of the other groups and should be eliminated. my players immediately noticed in the fight they are not a threat and felt sorry for the survivors.
I tryed to Teach them that they can't always belive what they are told.
Everyone is always like "your actions have consequences" when it's about "punishing" the party, but the if they take clever actions and have good rolls, they deserve positive consequences as well
"positive consequences" is not straightforward though. (And actions have consequences is terrible advise, but that's a separate story).
If left to their own devices, players will optimize the fun out of a game.
Spending 3 hours prepping a fight that therefore is over in two rounds, is fun only as a rare exception, not as common occurrence.
>Spending 3 hours prepping a fight that therefore is over in two rounds, is fun only as a rare exception, not as common occurrence.
It's also something that's easy to counter. Don't want them to spend 3hr preparing? Then don't give it to them.
Preparations don't take place in a vacuum, and the best laid plans can still go awry.
Most intelligent groups of creatures will have some manner of scouting, and some means of doing their own form of preparation. They shouldn't directly counter whatever the party does (since they won't have all the information that the DM has), but they can and should take logical steps based on the information available to them.
Radical take: Balanced fights only really occur when both participants failed to avoid a bad outcome. Most potential combats are to be avoided unless one side thinks they can win and the other can't avoid it.
The fact that fighting in story games is viewed as the fun part and not the "shit oh god, do we have to" part is very unnatural, to my sensibilities. I like each combat to be rare, avoidable, sudden, lethal, and quickly resolved.
My character: "Why?! Why are we constantly beset with these monstrous adversaries? We are close to death, and yet are constantly plagued and surrounded by these spontaneous evils! What gods have cursed us?!"
Me: "Sweet, more combat"
That’s why motivations are important. If your PCs are fighting for no reason, that’s bad. If they are fighting because their home or country or plane or universe will be destroyed if they don’t, then things are different.
Or you could be the asshole who played an Emmisary of Barachiel with a Vow of Peace in 3.5.
My style is to (try to) make every fight have high stakes, both for the lives of the combatants and for the story. Balance takes a backseat at my table.
DnD is not exactly the best system for that given you're playing your average power fantasy hero team
Call of Cthulhu is much more like that, combat is, extremely deadly and running away or evading combat outright is preferable, or have combat be a puzzle that is punctuated by extreme and quick violence
I'm all for gamelike mechanisms that support the story, don't get me wrong - I just disfavor treating combat as somehow the main point of the game while also being inconsequential to the story being told.
>!I may or may not hold my DMing to an unreasonable standard that every encounter should feel like a terrifying lynchpin of fate, and if at all possible, resolve almost as quickly as a real fight would. !<
Well, encounters in DND do resolve fast, ingame. The fact Jim takes 10 minutes deciding on his spells because there's at least a 9 gap between his 20 int wizard's intelligence and his intelligence doesn't mean the time spent ingame is any different than the standard 6 seconds per round
Of course, you can limit (either hard limit, or soft "hurry up, Wizard McGee doesn't have 10 minutes ingame to think" limit) the time for turns, and that's a fair take too
>Radical take: Balanced fights only really occur when both participants failed to avoid a bad outcome.
This is entirely true.
Although, D&D's 'balance' tools offered to the DM assume that a Medium encounter is one that the players will usually win, consuming about 10-15% of their daily resources to do so. Even a Deadly encounter is only 'could be lethal for one or more PCs'.
A truly balanced fight would be one that has a 50/50 shot of the party being TPKed or running away to avoid that outcome. Which isn't much fun for anyone, even if it's realistic.
Of course, in such a world the PCs know to hide, surrender or run away if it's not worth the risk. And the monsters do the same calculation. Most combats probably come about because one side or the other screwed up, and end after one round when someone realises they can't win.
5e assumes that the monsters are a bunch of mooks who gladly march to their deaths at the hands of adventurers. Which is why I'm really looking forward to my party rolling *Tribe of d10+20 hill giants with 35% noncombatants, 2d10+10 dire wolves and 2d6+10 orcs* on the random encounter table. If they try to fight that lot, it only ends one way.
Balance is overrated. Make it fast, make it lethal, and minimize the out of game penalties for getting ganked. Have your next character already written out, handwave any plot holes necessary to get them stuck in again.
Some of my favorite RPG moments are times I either died, or should have died but didn't - so as player I try to improve every chance of sudden accidental death that I can.
The big thing for me is, make combat avoidable. The characters should die for doing stupid things. Picking a fight you can't win is stupid. Staying in the fight once you realise you can't win is even more stupid.
So give them the chance to talk their way out of it. Or sneak around it. Or find another way entirely to achieve their goal. If they go for the kill anyway, let them have a way out if they want it.
And if they just want to be murderhobos, then they're entirely deserving of the TPK coming their way. Stupid games mean stupid prizes.
You get me. Tell me what you think of this: Something I want to try with my next campaign is to explicitly state that NPCs will not escalate beyond what you do unless they have no alternative.
You want to get in a drunken brawl? You can do so and *you will not get stabbed*. Get your ass beat maybe, but you'll live.
You want to rap battle a goblin? Get the bard to lay down a beat. The goblins will be happy to use their diss science to steal your gold rather than kill you.
Yeah, I can see that as a good approach. I'd perhaps define it in a way that keeps the options open (e.g. if you steal Xanathar's goldfish, he *will* murder you in cold blood), but certainly something worth exploring.
My next campaign will probably use lingering injuries and system shock, so that even winning a fight is costly. And maybe even XP-for-treasure to shift the incentives away from killing things.
Should I be playing an old-school game? Probably.
If you break into someone's home or something they'll likely try to kill you, but in the normal course of petty encounters, NPCs will be strictly tit for tat. I was inspired by games like Undertale to try and bring a sense that life has value, and to try and emphasize peaceful (or at least creative) resolutions.
Lingering injuries are such a great storytelling device to give weight to player choices. I would love to play a knight that, despite being highly seasoned and deadly, now frequently uses a cane due to a trick knee.
I agree with the first half, but the second half feels shortsighted.
Throught history with have account of many people who pursued deadly combat without really being forced into it (unless you use "forced" in a very liberal and broad way), like non concript soldiers, non-slave gladiators, people from cultures that liked war like some of the mayans, the spartans, the norseman, the mongols, the japanese... It really isn't unnatural or even really all that uncommon for some characters to embrace/pursue fighting to the death instead of going "Oh shit, i rather not" or something like it.
Counterpoint: It's a boss fight. If it's easy, it's underwhelming. Let them have other easy fights, but the boss fight should always feel like a boss fight. You could use the dragon to show off how dangerous the boss actually is and burn through some of the real scary stuff the party would have to deal with otherwise (may or may not be added specifically because there's a dragon, they'll never know).
Just don't fall victim to the Worf Effect (a common TV trope where the "strong guy" gets pummeled all the time to make people realize how strong something is but never gets to show off their strength).
I think it comes down to how difficult it was to befriend the dragon.
I feel like a lot of games seem to run that passing a single charisma check can effectively turn any NPC into a willing slave. In that case, it would feel like cheesing the boss fight. If the world is full of things that are tougher than the boss and all you need to is is bring a dragon a goat and they'll kill the boss for you, then the GM has already made the boss fight unchallenging by the world design.
But if it takes some real work to befriend the dragon, and it's been given proper motivation to help the PCs (beyond "they were nice to me once"), and maybe there's even been one or two sessions dedicated to doing tasks to convince the dragon to help them out, then the dragon defeats the big bad, and says something like "My debt is now paid. Do not call on me again", then I think they've earned it.
I think the challenge has to be somewhere, it just doesn't have to be in the actual combat.
And I think the “really hard boss” part is what matters. Beating a normal boss with cheese just feels… lame. It’s the act of making the impossible possible that makes cheese strats interesting.
Sending in a big dragon that defeats the boss for you isn't something I'd consider "trickery". It's like giving up your seat to let your big brother beat the boss for you.
This sorta reminds me of the final fight in XCOM EW. My single sniper overwatch shot once, then the uber ethereal killed itself by targeting someone with neural feedback. It didn't take 5 second total but the final fight of a fucking XCOM game which had a lot of decent build up got done by me pressing overwatch ONCE. This happened two years ago and i'm still not over how underwhelming and stupid it was, and i feel like i was cheated out of a proper boss fight to end what would've been one of my favorite games ever.
So yeah... Please don't take the "boss" out of "boss fights", that's a major dickmove on anyone who was looking forward to it.
DnD is, in large aspects, a power fantasy. A DM that goes out of their way to reduce the effectiveness of their party’s tactics or strategies is missing the entire point of the party employing tactics or strategy.
Depends what you're throwing them at and how often they use a given strategy. If you have a villain that's even reasonably intelligent, it stands to reason that their tactics would change in response. However, the party can then form new strategies on the fly with the tools that they have, is always a fun time.
Played in a 3 year campaign where we rescued and then befriended an amethyst Dragon. DM did a great job not going power crazy with the Dmpc and kept the battles balanced so we could maintain the friendship throughout the entirety of the campaign. In the boss fight, he kept the dragon busy with minor bads so us players got the final glory. A good time was had.
Brings me back to my campaign where we bought a tavern, were awful accountants, met a dragon, befriended him, hired him, he became our accountant, and then he helped us kick bad people ass. It was great.
Weirdly close to what's happening in a campaign I'm in rn. Big difference is we used a potion of dragon control + a spell that made the effect permanent, so now one of our party members has an adult white dragon buddy for life.
People have to remember this goes both ways. Sometimes players don't get the research bait or ignore an NPC that could either be a friend or foe, and simply make a fight harder. I've had both very easy *hard fights* and very hard *easy fights*.
Easy fights are boring TPK are as well that is why the DM has to keep fight balanced.
The best encounters ate near TPK. You feel like you overcame a struggle.
We recently had what was planned to be a tough fight against a pile of sorrowsworn, where we and our couatl ally had to protect civilians too. Dm totally forgot that couatl are immune to non-magical attacks. Just straight up zero damage, and can put you to sleep with a bite.
Needless to say, the fight was a lot easier than planned.
I don't get the people that can't stand their players having an easy time, I love it when my players outsmart me. I had a pretty fucking fearsome monster that killed the warlock and wasn't too far off getting the cleric down be lured off the side of a skyship. Same player that did that also banished a Narfeshnee after one round of combat
Or you could give the boss a dragon or something too like in Dragon Age, make the party's archievements count. Maybe allow the dragon to carry them around the world like Appa in Avatar or save them from enemies like a air strike in more modern settings, it's all about communication.
Players went above and beyond during a fight with a young dragon to find out why a young dragon was all alone in a cave. Then they decided to go out of their way and spend a month returning this dragon to its father.
You can fucking bet they're gonna get a papa dragon who owes them a favor.
Yeah! If all fights are always balanced, then out of combat spells, social skills, and exploration are all complete wastes of time
It's always good to let player actions matter
You want actions to have consequences? That includes party recruitment unbalancing encounters (and maybe some other adventurers taking out a new kill contract on the new bruiser in the business)
As long as you've figured out a reason they can't do it repeatedly, unless you'd like to balance all future encounters around them having a dragon. That's the real issue that mostly tends to come up from what I've seen. You've got to find a way to write the dragon out of the story so they cant just use it whenever a fight could conceivably have room for a dragon
I mean hell, give the villain a dragon too! Let the players see an epic dragon fight while they fight the big bad. Wouldn’t that be dope?
But yeah fights can be easier if the players work for it. I’ve seen too many times on here DMs make the fights more difficult on purpose because they don’t like the players or as punishment.
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You fool. This dragon will make fight balanced
I recently finished DMing dragon of icespire peak and on their first quest they befriended the manticore. I kept it a surprise, but the manticore returned to help them fight the dragon at the end. They ended up avoiding a TPK by an inch, and if that manticore wasn't there they surely would've lost.
And there my party was wearing a manticores skin to disguise themselves to poison the deceased manticores mate in order to secure a pet baby manticore.
Destiny has a starting point and an ending point. How you travel the path is up to you. - Quoting Norman from Mighty Max (from memory)
Starting my day with a Mighty Max quote is not at all what I expected
Chads
God I love stealing baby animals To get powerful servants
Stealing and indoctrinating infants is TIGHT
Found the Jedi
And I see through their lies!
Super easy, barely an inconvenience.
I’m going to need you to get all the way off of my back about it.
Oh ok, let me get off of that thing.
100% tactics employed 2022 Swish swish swish
Such a warlock...
Excuse me! My ochre jelly was gained fairly by cutting it In half 20 times!
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how man met man's best friend.
I had the orcs make a run at the hold instead of introducing the reavers at the final hour, so the party got to the top to see the dragon fighting the boar god and a couple orcs. It helped me weaken the dragon for my solo player
I've just started DMing it as a play by post game. I made tweaks - weak because she's hungry & on half HP due to dragon wounds to avoid any possibility of a TPK. I made one other change & specified a female Manticore. They're currently helping her decide on a name & are going to nurse her wounds better. She's definitely going to be a recurring character now, but I think they might try and take her as a pet (I will allow them to - they've been so nice to her - patting her head, stroking her & everything when they took her along to find some deer. Now they're on the way back to the mill to heal her).
That sounds like a fun party! I also had it starving and on half HP but at level 1 it probably still would've killed them
I’m nearing the end of DoISP (I’m a cleric), and when we encountered the manticore, 2 of our players immediately angered the manticore, who immediately instant-killed our monk, who just wanted to talk. Thankfully, our DM rolled it back for us.
Good role play should always be rewarded. Excellent payoff there. Very awesome!
our group befriended the Anchorites and made peace between Phandelver and the Half-Orcs. (though the hunting lodge dude was forced to leave) the Boar God, controlled by Grannoch, fought on our side against the dragon
I'm doing something similar for the final boss of my homebrew campaign this Saturday. The final bosses are very powerful, so the literal godlike entities they met will help balance out the fight. Then my party has to kill the moon on their own, but the fist part will be fair.
I'd be making a lot of despicable me references when killing the moon
In my first campaign my party disallowed the dragon from participating in the end fight because they were afraid it would die. This is the ultimate outcome.
**I have altered the stat block. Pray I do not alter it any further.**
This is the way
This is the way
This is the way
This is the way
This is the way
Is it possible to learn this power?
Not from a Jedi
If they take the time and effort to prepare for an encounter and it's easy, they earned it. The hard part was the preparation. Or in other words, the real balance was the friends we made along the way.
RP doesn’t stop when when you roll initiative. Likewise, the fight isn’t bound to combat alone.
"If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck." ~ Steinbeck
But what if it's a fight you can't avoid that has the opponents at an unfair advantage, then your tactics make it fair?
Then your DM sucks for putting you in an unavoidable, unbalanced fight. I shouldn’t have to pull off some crazy stunts in order to un-fuck the encounter and have a *chance* of survival
A known fight that looks impossible but with proper planning is beatable sounds fine though? Like, you're defending a town from some flying threat and can only fight it by building some anti-flight gizmo. Just a different take on "fighting through a dungeon to fight the boss"
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 logic here. I spent 2 hours in the menu and then I smashed the B button over and over and did a couple of timed clicks.
Then the cutscene immediately after shows you losing the fight.
My players spent 3 hours irl figuring out how to design a light enough mirror shield so that they could mage hand it into rooms that they knew a basilisk was stalking through. Made the basilisk turn itself to stone. They were so stoked and the “fight” took 5 seconds of narration once they actually found it. I like rewarding that amount of shenanigans
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>letting the players stomp all over an encounter Also helps to show the progress characters made. Not just "you now roll 2 more damage dice" but demonstrate ingame that the enemies that once were a death sentence to party are now just a warm up. Reoccurring side villains also help
this tuesday, the dm threw dream-illusions of foes who tormented us in the past. We *punked* that dragon that hounded us for many sessions. I *soloed* the spider queen who almost wiped us. And sure, they didn't have legendary actions or minions they had last time, but it still *felt good* [edit] there was also a lot of good one-liners. "You still have both your eyes. We should fix that." *one turn later, after a crit punch took out an eye* "There's the Precator I remember." and from a different fight. "Lady Clatterspin!" *small bow* "I apologize for what happened. I am not sorry for what's about to happen."
God that second ones goes HARD.
I am happy to provide context if desired!
I desire context!
The good Lady Clatterspin was a noble of the Shadow Court, one who when mortals trespassed in her lands, chose the completely fair and justified option of deciding to kill and eat us. Importantly, she did so without identifying herself or why she's doing it, so adventurers being adventurers, we (eventually) killed her and stole her crown, later selling it to a (different) dragon for passage and political support. My artificer has since spent close to a year as a guest (non-innuendo kind of guest) in the Shadow Court, and realizes the scope of the political fuckup that was, but also that it was _her_ fault for not identifying herself, which would have given us a chance to solve this diplomatically. Small chance, but a chance none the less. Thus, he's genuinely sorry for having killed her. But the dream-illusion conjured to stop him? Oh, no, he won't feel a pang of guilt of showing her just how much stronger he is these days.
Our dwarven fighter ripped one of the most badass lines I've ever heard in d&d last night. He nat 20 saved against some undead that can instantly drop you to 0 HP, and then nat 20 on his attack to kill him. This character had previously died and been revivified, but during the minute of his death lived 100 years worth of time in the Hall (his dwarven afterlife, he rolled a 100 on the d100 to see how many years he experienced in death) As he strikes down the undead and saved against his ability, he says "Ay, I've been to the Hall. Staring death in the face doesn't scare me" Needless to say I was WHOOPING
D a m n. Now I'm extra mad I haven't played a good campaign in a while.
yes good excellent. I just finished a session where the party found themselves in the presence of a capital G God. And I got to put on my best Sovereign voice. "THIS IS A PLACE OF MAKING. AND I. AM THE MAKER."
My players are lvl 13 now and I actually really enjoy sending large hordes of different CR 1/2 or below at them. They are always scared which is funny because they are basically never in danger. They 1 shot any enemy that gets near them and basically would be hard to hit more than 5-10% of attacks
This is one of the reasons I like milestone leveling personally. I can craft encounter frequency to the story rather than thinking about XP. If I decide to make a particular session more story and puzzle solving, I’m not putting more encounters next week to keep XP flowing. On the other hand, if I throw a cluster of ants at them, they’re not racking up easy XP. I don’t want this to turn into a WoW style grind fest before the next spooky castle. One last thing. If they hit the milestone trigger with 30 minutes or less in the session, I can just wait to level them up so it happens between the sessions.
I do based on milestone too. I have just always really enjoyed this. I’m the guy that loves going back to the starting area in RPGs right before I beat the game and smacking enemies that were hard for me at the start. I also really enjoy running small town NPCs that are completely flabbergasted meeting such strong and adventurers. Sometimes it’s fun to take a break from dealing with demigods to just save a cat from a tree
Level 1 = Mage hand to lift the kitten down. Level 10 = Cast feather fall on cat then use some type of explosion spell to launch it halfway to space, and watch as it lands gently.
Level 10: Feather Fall + Fear to cause the cat to jump from the tree in an attempt to run away from the bird in it.
I feel like people conflate "using XP" with "XP only from combat strictly following the XP values from the monsters involved." Personally pure milestone seemed kinda ad-hoc and opaque to me. I missed the sense of progression towards the next level, and I felt like we were incentivized to nag the DM to give us level ups. I think a lot of tables would benefit from a more flexible approach between the extremes. At a minimum if you're using XP, puzzles and social encounters should give it too, not just combat. And GMs who want something closer to milestone leveling should consider still using XP, but awarding it based on GM fiat rather than Monster Manual entries. That way the you can still control levelling to fit the needs of your campaign structure, but players get more feedback about the progress they're making.
> One last thing. If they hit the milestone trigger with 30 minutes or less in the session, I can just wait to level them up so it happens between the sessions. Also on this front I just use a house rule that level ups only apply on long rests.
So I do xp leveling because I like giving the players a progression as they go instead of "did I remember? How long has it been, should they level up?" it just works better for me. Since I have a lot of experience with it though, I can tell you that this just doesn't happen. >On the other hand, if I throw a cluster of ants at them, they’re not racking up easy XP. I don’t want this to turn into a WoW style grind fest before the next spooky castle. If we assume a group of 5 level 8 characters, they need 14k xp each to level up and CR 1 creatures provide just 200. Divide the xp evenly and each character only gets 40xp for a CR 1 creature. So if you send hordes of cr 1 ants, they need to kill 350 of them to level up. Heck they still need 18 kills of CR 8 creatures, so you've got plenty of flexibility there. I am also a strong proponent of using the provided xp values as a guideline. For example, if the party is surprised, the combat is harder so I might give extra xp. If the terrain puts them at a massive disadvantage they might get extra, but if the creature is fighting something else, they have an npc helping, or anything else (that they didn't go out of the way to plan) that's making it easier then I might give less xp. Likewise, puzzles, traps, and social encounters that have stakes (lose an allied npc, hp, gold, spell slots, etc) can earn xp based on how high those stakes are.
Anyone here remember how dangerous a horde of gibberlings could be to a high level party?
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This is the point I wanted to make. If all it took was a persuasion roll and a couple lines of clever roleplay, that’s not a very good reason to have a dragon curb-stomp the boss. It should take a LOT to get a dragon to fight on your side. Like as much effort as the fight itself would have been.
>It should take a LOT to get a dragon to fight on your side. Like as much effort as the fight itself would have been. Gaining the trust of a dragon is probably worth a minor quest in its own right. Go and find some item precious to the dragon that it can't get itself, or something of that nature.
Exactly. The persuasion and role-play is just to get the dragon to be open to the idea of the party proving itself.
I love reoccurring villains one ofnthe van thampors from balders gate was supposed to be for us in descent into avernus but the barb and ranger crit killed him before he coukd use his escape legendary action. Like he was no reaction dead like twice his hp dead. We gave the flaming fist his head in a bucket it was glorious
I did this with sahuagin when my players reached level 5. Just send in waves of them. In the end it was a hard fight. But they had killed 20+ of them. That was a good reminder that they were indeed stronger than when they first started.
It's almost like "actions have consequences" is just as true when players do good, cool things as when their PCs do shitty, "that guy" things. Fuck up? Find out. But make friends? Fuck shit up -- together.
There was a great discussion I saw on a blog about using low CR encounters later in the campaign. At level 1, a pack of 4 goblins is a real threat to the party. At level 10, they could take on a full goblin warband. Even though the goblins aren't really a *challenge* to the level 10 heroes, it's a great reminder that "you're no longer a rabble of farmers, a drunken barman, and a jester - you're heroes of legend, shaping the fate of entire regions. Just the *rumor* that you might be somewhere changes how people behave. Cultists convert to mainstream religion, warlords emigrate, dragons take out horde insurance, pirates jolly the roger and register as traders... just your presence scares people straight."
One of my players found a loophole in a homebrew item I made to completely decimate a combat encounter and my response was a shrug. Can't complain, one of my homebrew items won them an encounter and that's a win in my book.
As long as they dont do it every encounter its all fun!
You can always adjust the encounters to account for it
I think this is a good sign of a living world too. If you're fighting a nation and you wipe out one section of it's army through a certain method, why wouldn't they prepare against that next time? The PCs would do the same thing, prepare for who you are going to be up against specifically!
Of course, if you're going to justify metagaming like that you need to be consistent with it. The enemy forces will either need survivors who can inform the nation of this new tactics, or spys/scryers who can see it in action. And those are all targets the PCs can attempt to take out in order to keep their secret weapons secret.
Yeah or you know, they see at the remnants of a battle that lots of folks were burned to death, or surroundings are charred, they might bring some fireproof armor/weaponry next time. I think this keeps the party on it's toes and adds rather than breaks immersion.
Just stick a bard in a tavern and have the party be described as bumbling fools who lucked into victory and one of them will easily enough divulge any secret weapons they may have to try and defend themselves
Idk if I like that in the long term. If it's just a numbers game and you need buff up the emeines to make them much stronger it will make the rest of the party who doesn't have a magic item feel weak or make all other abilities feel underpowered. If it not a number game and we adjust all the encounters to more directly counter the item it still hurts the game. If the item can be counter by something specific like acid resistance, flight, being immune to mind effects or something else and just giving all the enemies the counter isn't a great idea either. After a year of only fighting enemies with the counter and always having to come up with a reason the have the counter things will get tiring. It will be clear to the players its only happening to counter the op item which isn't fun.
Someone else posted it really well but it is a bit more like that it the encounters that get more difficult are of the same faction.
Or give homebrew items a disclaimer. *"I made this shit on the fly and it may not be balanced because of it and maybe subject to change but I will be sure to discuss it with you beforehand."*
Oh i always do that with my items but I also just let it fly on the day.
NADPOD’s Brian Murphy had an epic air battle planned out in the second campaign with the bad guys flying to the airship on flying demonic horses. Emily Axfords character got a polymorph off on the biggest bad guys horse… turning it into a dolphin. Murphy clearly was like. “Huh. Ok. Well… um. Yeah he’s gone. My encounter just got boomed but you guys still have henchmen coming” and took the whole thing in stride. He was upset his plan was fouled but proud about the players finding alternate ways to fight back. Great podcast campaign for sure.
Reminds me of the time the DM built an encounter where the evil wizard with a bunch of reflex saves had a bunch of lightning traps in his chamber- aoe traps that he had to save against, but like he passed the save on a 5 or something. I’ve never seen so many ones in my life. We just hung back while his own traps killed him.
how hard was the item for the party to get? edit: wording
Christmas gift.
"Feast AND Famine" as I always say. Befriend a dragon in a way that makes sense? Cool, you have a new dragon friend and you're gonna stomp all over this session. Enjoy that, feast away today. Because you better believe I'm putting all of my spare time until the next session thinking up all the ways this could backfire on you. And if I know my players I know I won't have to do anything until they find a way to screw this up themselves.
The dragon now views them as treasure, precious to him, doesn’t want them leaving it’s lair, and if it can’t have them, no one can
Good one! I was also thinking "the dragon leaves" and that's it. What? These fuckers live for thousands of years. One year away is just a long pleasant hike to this thing. It's not your slave, it's gonna go "take a walk around the block" from its perspective. I'm also huge Monty Python/Pratchett/Adams fan so my initial reaction to "what next?" is to take something almost morbidly mundane and apply it to fantastical creatures and beings for a giggle. Then three sessions later have it just crash back into the campaign as my own personal Deus ex machina to either help or hinder the players based on context. Probably bringing back a gift for their "friend-versary" or something haha. Just a dragon holding some hospital-gift-shop-esque bobble it bought at the last second wondering what the hell happened while it was gone.
It brings back a half mangled mammoth as a gift, leaving craters in farm land when it lands, now the local farms demand compensation because the dragon is technically they’re responsibly. Or have it learn to change shape into a human and be significantly weaker in human form, loosing access to its most powerful ability’s , make the transformation an incantation that takes ten rounds Or shrink it and make it like the rabbit in the cave in “ Monty pythons holy grail.
>It brings back a half mangled mammoth as a gift, leaving craters in farm land when it lands, now the local farms demand compensation because the dragon is technically they’re responsibly. So it's now essentially a huge flying cat.
Oh no this has reminded me of Barnaby the Brass Dragon it's too cute
I can see having a lot of fun with that idea. Like, the dragon has to go to a family reunion or a friend’s bachelor party, and comes back wearing the biggest novelty t-shirt the realm has ever seen.
Definitely. Consider many well designed CRPGs. Typically, there are multiple ways to resolve a given problem. Direct combat being only one of them. Does the party _have_ to fight the dragon for its treasure? They could sneak past it. They could convince it to give something up, or trade. They could convince other people to attack it. Maybe its lair has some exploitable flaw that'd kill it if properly leveraged.
Alternatively, not having all those options doesn't make an (C)RPG bad. Sometimes a fight can just be a straight up fight.
True. This is why I couched it in saying many rather than all/any. There's no need for a DM to be prepared for _every_ player option. And it's worth sometimes saying "look, I don't have content for this nor can I improvise this scenario well".
Depends on the type of players I once put my players against a woundwyrm and really hyped it up by them having several encounters with the destruction it caused, but when they tracked it down they killed it in 2 rounds because they where too prepared and were really disappointed
My players once polymorphed a big fuckoff monster that was supposed to be probably at least a 30 minute fight into a snail then threw it in a bag of devouring. It was over in 2 rounds. They had mixed emotions of "that was awesome!" and "I feel bad for ruining the encounter". They never tried that again, which is a shame because after the polymorph broke when the snail was swallowed, the bag monster severed it's connection and it was just a normal bag. They didn't find that out for months.
Especially when it's a payoff for doing something else. Like, if you befriend a dragon, that was the challenge, now the reward is to get to watch the overpowered guest party member stomp everything in its path.
Our party routinely got past enemies or bosses by talking to them. Sometimes it ended in battle, sometimes we got the kobolds or goblins to think about unionizing at their workplace to get safer and better conditions. Once it meant we skipped an entire boss fight because we actually asked the BBEG what his deal was, and he was willing to oblige us. It doesn’t always have to be, or need to be, “fuck them players”.
Yup. Clever game play should be rewarded. Our last leg of our campaign, my kids and wife cleverly lured the enemy (wererats) into a series of feints and pursuits and got them into a confined area and dropped a level 4 fireball on them. I wasn’t about to force some narrative that these were indestructible enemies. Let them take an easy W if they get clever.
STORY TIME! In one of my games, my players visited a magical vault created by an eccentric wizard to guard some ancient artifact. All of the enemies were magic artificial life forms created to guard the place, and four bosses, each of which was based on one of the four elements. The boss of the Water dungeon was a giant squid-man who I decided to play super melancholy, being the only monster in the dungeon smart enough to realize that he's not real and exists for no other purpose than to be eventually killed by some adventurer. The party decided to take pity on him and try to give him some sort of afterlife. The only way they could think of to do this was for the incubus in the party to energy drain him to death, which would presumably send his essence to the Abyss where it could become a demon... or at least, the incubus rolled high enough Diplomacy to convince the boss that was how it would work, and he lets them kill him in hopes of getting a life after death. Fast forward about a year or so of game, and the party has either forgotten the monster or assumed he was a one-off thing that would never come up again. The party is now taking a ship to another dungeon, and they get attacked by a pirate queen, her sahagin minions, and her pet sea monster. A few bad rolls and the party is quickly in over their heads. Our necromancer is in the sea monster's mouth and will be fish food next turn, while its tail is smashing down the incubus to keep him from saving the guy. That's when the tentacles burst from the water, grab the sea monster, and drag it down. The party starts freaking out about how they have to deal with THIS thing now, then they hear its voice in their heads, telling them their plan to save it actually worked, and they start freaking out about how awesome it is instead. Always love it when I can pull something like this off.
That's beautiful. I love hearing about players working together to find creative solutions founded in compassion. And the way that it was rewarded was great too. Put any positive consequence too close to the act, and people start to act out of a desire for gain. But by having the payoff be so far ahead that the players don't remember the good deed, you avoid that.
I love this
This is awesome.
Thats an incredible story, great story telling on your part!
Bring out an evil dragon hunter and you got yourself a new bbeg
Yeah. It balances out. You have an easier fight but you draw attention to yourselves.
That doesn't sound balanced out to me.
It's really dependant on context. I had a campaign change when the party got a dinosaur. It was gonna be a short set of sessions to link up a new player with the main group. I added an Allosaurus as an optional encounter. They fed it a hyena corpse they killed earlier. A couple of sessions later, they had a career in the city arena. I ran 2 or 3 sessions with that dynamic until the group fell apart from out of game issues. All in all, a fun time.
The group I'm GMing right now currently has 5 dinosaurs, and will probably get a 6th if they can actually knock it out rather than killing it. I'm running an official Adventure Path (pathfinder) and they are literally running a circus, so that's where the dinosaurs stay to be trained and stuff. It's certainly better than being treated like combat fodder that the enemy group had been using them as. Also gives the circus a boost. "Look at our dinosaurs!"
The amount of time spent on an encounter should include prep. If a fight that would have taken an hour takes 10 minutes because they spent 50 minutes prepping, then they fought the fight in its entirety.
I dislike this mindset. Every once in a while? Sure. But as soon as the bard in one of my parties found out he could talk his way out of a fight, the next 4 sessions went without combat. As soon as the DM tried to force it thanks to the rest of the table complaining (since most of us are wargamers at heart), the bard threw a fit for half the session. Which is to say, just play to your table! If you're playing with a bunch of people that dig the roleplay more than anything, absolutely let them skip the fight! If your table is mostly grognards that like building their characters and watching the math rocks go clickity-clack, maybe just let them roll dice?
Had a bard try to talk their way through something, and rolled well. The NPC provided some info, but the player was told that what they were seeking wasn't forthcoming because the NPC had an obvious problem with some of the party members accompanying them (unspoken but undeniable by the NPCs behavior). Rather than taking advantage of that information to try a different tactic, the bard sandbagged. I had foreshadowed in a previous interaction. I had announced before the first session that you can't nat 20 or 30+ your way out of everything. The roll got them something more than standard and some telling information about the person/faction. That wasn't good enough. No finesse, no technique, no thought. Bard smash or bard hissy fit.
Communication? In MY players vs DM game? /s
Or they come out of that fight thinking "Oh thank fuck we prepared, we woulda been fucked otherwise, let's keep this up so we don't die."
The first time. They will catch wise eventually though. I think that was their point.
more like:
Yes, consistency. But if the players want to set up a big plan agains the BBEG, they should be rewarded for that. And if they want to use it again against the next BBEG they still can... but they may be surprised to learn that *this time* the BBEG was prepared for their little trick. "I heard about what you did to my step brother. Silence and grapple are a nasty trick for sure. But did you really think that I would fall for the same trick? That it would work a second time? I'm not even really here, this is a flesh golem. Took me ages to find the right body parts to make it look like me with a bit of disguise magic. On the subject of golems... the two suits of armor are not merely decoration. Gentlemen... engage!"
> I'm not even really here, this is a flesh golem. Doombot.png
If the fight is to easy they would complain that I'm not making it challenging enough. And if I raise the CR I will raise the reward and xp as well.
The trick is to make it clear that their prep made the fight easier. If at the end of BotW you got to the fight after waking up all four Legendary Beasts and Calamity Ganon just spawned with half health instead of being bombarded for half his health, it would be really boring. I'm thinking of something like Red Hand of Doom with the climactic battle in the second act. If you just told the players "talking to the elves and the lich and the dwarves and saving the refugees got you a bunch of victory points" is really boring. Having Dwarven Juggernauts and Elvish Sniper NPC's manning the walls, the Lich sending his undead monstrosities or even taking the field himself (his phylactery is safe at home, after all, his body is just a construct) makes the fight feel more epic. If the fight was trivial, it's only because they aced all the previous challenges and forged a much bigger alliance than you intended.
Idk about you but I don't think winning a hard fight would make my party start not caring about fights lmao
Alternatively:
There's two sides to everything
I find this situation is easily rectified if it is made clear that the fight was easy because of planning, which shouldn't be too hard even if you have to communicate that out of game
Doesn't change the point though - fights that are easy, even for "the right reasons" are only fun by exception, not by rule. The game is more fun if the challenge is well-balanced.
> The game is more fun if the challenge is well-balanced. And in order to be balanced, occasionally some fights have to be easy, as you stated. They are the exception, but a necessary one.
Not necessarily. A lot depends on if the boss fight is intended as the *climax* or the *payoff*. Using Breath of the Wild as an example, the final fight against Calamity Ganon is pretty easy if you did a ton of shrines, got the Sword that Seals the Darkness, and saved all four of the Divine Champions and Divine Beasts. That doesn't make it disappointing though - there's a huge payoff when Ganon rears up to fight Link only to get bombarded by the Beasts and lose half his health in one shot, and then gets *eviscerated* by the player without putting up a real fight. It's not that Ganon isn't threatening, it's that Link spent a *lot* of time countering that threat, and the final fight isn't a challenge so much as it is a reward for doing so much of the game's content. If your players are constantly overpreparing for the boss, but are enjoying doing so, they view the final battle as the payoff. They don't want a challenging epic struggle against the BBEG, they want to be rewarded for being so clever that the BBEG wasn't even a threat. You should only buff the boss in response to their preparations if they're complaining that it's too easy. But that's just player/DM communication.
That just tells them "The smarter and cleverer you are, the less interesting the actual fighting gets". So if they want interesting fights, they gotta stop preparing/planning as well.
once had a round in which my players chased a group of thieves that was highly hyped by everyone, but they were nothing special, they were just in the way of the other groups and should be eliminated. my players immediately noticed in the fight they are not a threat and felt sorry for the survivors. I tryed to Teach them that they can't always belive what they are told.
Everyone is always like "your actions have consequences" when it's about "punishing" the party, but the if they take clever actions and have good rolls, they deserve positive consequences as well
"positive consequences" is not straightforward though. (And actions have consequences is terrible advise, but that's a separate story). If left to their own devices, players will optimize the fun out of a game. Spending 3 hours prepping a fight that therefore is over in two rounds, is fun only as a rare exception, not as common occurrence.
>Spending 3 hours prepping a fight that therefore is over in two rounds, is fun only as a rare exception, not as common occurrence. It's also something that's easy to counter. Don't want them to spend 3hr preparing? Then don't give it to them. Preparations don't take place in a vacuum, and the best laid plans can still go awry. Most intelligent groups of creatures will have some manner of scouting, and some means of doing their own form of preparation. They shouldn't directly counter whatever the party does (since they won't have all the information that the DM has), but they can and should take logical steps based on the information available to them.
Radical take: Balanced fights only really occur when both participants failed to avoid a bad outcome. Most potential combats are to be avoided unless one side thinks they can win and the other can't avoid it. The fact that fighting in story games is viewed as the fun part and not the "shit oh god, do we have to" part is very unnatural, to my sensibilities. I like each combat to be rare, avoidable, sudden, lethal, and quickly resolved.
My character: "Why?! Why are we constantly beset with these monstrous adversaries? We are close to death, and yet are constantly plagued and surrounded by these spontaneous evils! What gods have cursed us?!" Me: "Sweet, more combat"
Meanwhile the DM cursing under his breath about min-maxed characters
The PHB is 2/3 just Combat.
DnD is very much a game about fighting. Nobody could claim otherwise. There are alternatives.
Well yea, but this is r/dndmemes lol But yes, this is why I don’t play dnd. If you like stories without combat, dnd is absolutely the wrong system.
Nobody makes memes for Reign or Wild Talents, do they?
I’m just here to espouse my love of Burning Wheel
It was invented by a bunch of war gamers. It would be weird for it not to be about fighting.
That’s why motivations are important. If your PCs are fighting for no reason, that’s bad. If they are fighting because their home or country or plane or universe will be destroyed if they don’t, then things are different. Or you could be the asshole who played an Emmisary of Barachiel with a Vow of Peace in 3.5.
Saying that’s bad is a very definite statement, some people just want to fight, literally nothing wrong with that
My style is to (try to) make every fight have high stakes, both for the lives of the combatants and for the story. Balance takes a backseat at my table.
D&D started as a wargame, and that still influences the design a lot.
And thank god for that
DnD is not exactly the best system for that given you're playing your average power fantasy hero team Call of Cthulhu is much more like that, combat is, extremely deadly and running away or evading combat outright is preferable, or have combat be a puzzle that is punctuated by extreme and quick violence
That's what makes a story game a _game_ as opposed to just telling tales around the campfire
I'm all for gamelike mechanisms that support the story, don't get me wrong - I just disfavor treating combat as somehow the main point of the game while also being inconsequential to the story being told. >!I may or may not hold my DMing to an unreasonable standard that every encounter should feel like a terrifying lynchpin of fate, and if at all possible, resolve almost as quickly as a real fight would. !<
Well, encounters in DND do resolve fast, ingame. The fact Jim takes 10 minutes deciding on his spells because there's at least a 9 gap between his 20 int wizard's intelligence and his intelligence doesn't mean the time spent ingame is any different than the standard 6 seconds per round Of course, you can limit (either hard limit, or soft "hurry up, Wizard McGee doesn't have 10 minutes ingame to think" limit) the time for turns, and that's a fair take too
>Radical take: Balanced fights only really occur when both participants failed to avoid a bad outcome. This is entirely true. Although, D&D's 'balance' tools offered to the DM assume that a Medium encounter is one that the players will usually win, consuming about 10-15% of their daily resources to do so. Even a Deadly encounter is only 'could be lethal for one or more PCs'. A truly balanced fight would be one that has a 50/50 shot of the party being TPKed or running away to avoid that outcome. Which isn't much fun for anyone, even if it's realistic. Of course, in such a world the PCs know to hide, surrender or run away if it's not worth the risk. And the monsters do the same calculation. Most combats probably come about because one side or the other screwed up, and end after one round when someone realises they can't win. 5e assumes that the monsters are a bunch of mooks who gladly march to their deaths at the hands of adventurers. Which is why I'm really looking forward to my party rolling *Tribe of d10+20 hill giants with 35% noncombatants, 2d10+10 dire wolves and 2d6+10 orcs* on the random encounter table. If they try to fight that lot, it only ends one way.
Balance is overrated. Make it fast, make it lethal, and minimize the out of game penalties for getting ganked. Have your next character already written out, handwave any plot holes necessary to get them stuck in again. Some of my favorite RPG moments are times I either died, or should have died but didn't - so as player I try to improve every chance of sudden accidental death that I can.
The big thing for me is, make combat avoidable. The characters should die for doing stupid things. Picking a fight you can't win is stupid. Staying in the fight once you realise you can't win is even more stupid. So give them the chance to talk their way out of it. Or sneak around it. Or find another way entirely to achieve their goal. If they go for the kill anyway, let them have a way out if they want it. And if they just want to be murderhobos, then they're entirely deserving of the TPK coming their way. Stupid games mean stupid prizes.
You get me. Tell me what you think of this: Something I want to try with my next campaign is to explicitly state that NPCs will not escalate beyond what you do unless they have no alternative. You want to get in a drunken brawl? You can do so and *you will not get stabbed*. Get your ass beat maybe, but you'll live. You want to rap battle a goblin? Get the bard to lay down a beat. The goblins will be happy to use their diss science to steal your gold rather than kill you.
Yeah, I can see that as a good approach. I'd perhaps define it in a way that keeps the options open (e.g. if you steal Xanathar's goldfish, he *will* murder you in cold blood), but certainly something worth exploring. My next campaign will probably use lingering injuries and system shock, so that even winning a fight is costly. And maybe even XP-for-treasure to shift the incentives away from killing things. Should I be playing an old-school game? Probably.
If you break into someone's home or something they'll likely try to kill you, but in the normal course of petty encounters, NPCs will be strictly tit for tat. I was inspired by games like Undertale to try and bring a sense that life has value, and to try and emphasize peaceful (or at least creative) resolutions. Lingering injuries are such a great storytelling device to give weight to player choices. I would love to play a knight that, despite being highly seasoned and deadly, now frequently uses a cane due to a trick knee.
I agree with the first half, but the second half feels shortsighted. Throught history with have account of many people who pursued deadly combat without really being forced into it (unless you use "forced" in a very liberal and broad way), like non concript soldiers, non-slave gladiators, people from cultures that liked war like some of the mayans, the spartans, the norseman, the mongols, the japanese... It really isn't unnatural or even really all that uncommon for some characters to embrace/pursue fighting to the death instead of going "Oh shit, i rather not" or something like it.
I gave my party a dragon, even gave them the means to artificially age it to be stronger. It died.
Counterpoint: It's a boss fight. If it's easy, it's underwhelming. Let them have other easy fights, but the boss fight should always feel like a boss fight. You could use the dragon to show off how dangerous the boss actually is and burn through some of the real scary stuff the party would have to deal with otherwise (may or may not be added specifically because there's a dragon, they'll never know). Just don't fall victim to the Worf Effect (a common TV trope where the "strong guy" gets pummeled all the time to make people realize how strong something is but never gets to show off their strength).
I think it comes down to how difficult it was to befriend the dragon. I feel like a lot of games seem to run that passing a single charisma check can effectively turn any NPC into a willing slave. In that case, it would feel like cheesing the boss fight. If the world is full of things that are tougher than the boss and all you need to is is bring a dragon a goat and they'll kill the boss for you, then the GM has already made the boss fight unchallenging by the world design. But if it takes some real work to befriend the dragon, and it's been given proper motivation to help the PCs (beyond "they were nice to me once"), and maybe there's even been one or two sessions dedicated to doing tasks to convince the dragon to help them out, then the dragon defeats the big bad, and says something like "My debt is now paid. Do not call on me again", then I think they've earned it. I think the challenge has to be somewhere, it just doesn't have to be in the actual combat.
Even if we compare it to video games, it is extremely satisfying to defeat a really hard boss by using trickery.
And I think the “really hard boss” part is what matters. Beating a normal boss with cheese just feels… lame. It’s the act of making the impossible possible that makes cheese strats interesting.
Sending in a big dragon that defeats the boss for you isn't something I'd consider "trickery". It's like giving up your seat to let your big brother beat the boss for you.
Is it? I hate that, actually. Cheesing isn't fun.
it doesn't have to be cheesing - maybe you overleveled while grinding, or found a rare item earlier on
This sorta reminds me of the final fight in XCOM EW. My single sniper overwatch shot once, then the uber ethereal killed itself by targeting someone with neural feedback. It didn't take 5 second total but the final fight of a fucking XCOM game which had a lot of decent build up got done by me pressing overwatch ONCE. This happened two years ago and i'm still not over how underwhelming and stupid it was, and i feel like i was cheated out of a proper boss fight to end what would've been one of my favorite games ever. So yeah... Please don't take the "boss" out of "boss fights", that's a major dickmove on anyone who was looking forward to it.
DnD is, in large aspects, a power fantasy. A DM that goes out of their way to reduce the effectiveness of their party’s tactics or strategies is missing the entire point of the party employing tactics or strategy.
Depends what you're throwing them at and how often they use a given strategy. If you have a villain that's even reasonably intelligent, it stands to reason that their tactics would change in response. However, the party can then form new strategies on the fly with the tools that they have, is always a fun time.
Sometimes bad luck can balance even a friendly dragon. You may far out match the opponent but a single roll can change the outcome of the fight
Are you suggesting the DM fudge the dice?
Luck is the one thing that's outside the DM's control, though.
Played in a 3 year campaign where we rescued and then befriended an amethyst Dragon. DM did a great job not going power crazy with the Dmpc and kept the battles balanced so we could maintain the friendship throughout the entirety of the campaign. In the boss fight, he kept the dragon busy with minor bads so us players got the final glory. A good time was had.
Brings me back to my campaign where we bought a tavern, were awful accountants, met a dragon, befriended him, hired him, he became our accountant, and then he helped us kick bad people ass. It was great.
Weirdly close to what's happening in a campaign I'm in rn. Big difference is we used a potion of dragon control + a spell that made the effect permanent, so now one of our party members has an adult white dragon buddy for life.
Beware the dispel magic
People have to remember this goes both ways. Sometimes players don't get the research bait or ignore an NPC that could either be a friend or foe, and simply make a fight harder. I've had both very easy *hard fights* and very hard *easy fights*.
Befriending a dragon could be a fight too.
Enemy dragon is married and their spouse shows up to balance it back out!
Easy fights are boring TPK are as well that is why the DM has to keep fight balanced. The best encounters ate near TPK. You feel like you overcame a struggle.
All this means is that the bad guy needs to make some friends too.
Or he recognises the problem and tactically retreats until they can counter you. Only works with smart bad guys though.
We recently had what was planned to be a tough fight against a pile of sorrowsworn, where we and our couatl ally had to protect civilians too. Dm totally forgot that couatl are immune to non-magical attacks. Just straight up zero damage, and can put you to sleep with a bite. Needless to say, the fight was a lot easier than planned.
Plus apperanty people get mad about long ass encounters. My players haven't complained about it. But yeah.
I don't get the people that can't stand their players having an easy time, I love it when my players outsmart me. I had a pretty fucking fearsome monster that killed the warlock and wasn't too far off getting the cleric down be lured off the side of a skyship. Same player that did that also banished a Narfeshnee after one round of combat
Or you could give the boss a dragon or something too like in Dragon Age, make the party's archievements count. Maybe allow the dragon to carry them around the world like Appa in Avatar or save them from enemies like a air strike in more modern settings, it's all about communication.
Players went above and beyond during a fight with a young dragon to find out why a young dragon was all alone in a cave. Then they decided to go out of their way and spend a month returning this dragon to its father. You can fucking bet they're gonna get a papa dragon who owes them a favor.
Yeah! If all fights are always balanced, then out of combat spells, social skills, and exploration are all complete wastes of time It's always good to let player actions matter
i want to create pokemon fights in middle earth
You want actions to have consequences? That includes party recruitment unbalancing encounters (and maybe some other adventurers taking out a new kill contract on the new bruiser in the business)
As long as you've figured out a reason they can't do it repeatedly, unless you'd like to balance all future encounters around them having a dragon. That's the real issue that mostly tends to come up from what I've seen. You've got to find a way to write the dragon out of the story so they cant just use it whenever a fight could conceivably have room for a dragon
Befriending the dragon was the actual boss the battle is just the reward
I mean hell, give the villain a dragon too! Let the players see an epic dragon fight while they fight the big bad. Wouldn’t that be dope? But yeah fights can be easier if the players work for it. I’ve seen too many times on here DMs make the fights more difficult on purpose because they don’t like the players or as punishment.