Hot answers tagged encounter-design
53
Congratulate your player on solving a problem without fighting. Really. It does not often happen in FRPGs and yet even ancient cultures managed to avoid fighting most of the time.
Talk to the group about whether they would like you to craft encounters where not-murdering-everyone was a viable solution.
Incidentally this seems very much the way a bard ...
38
Sometimes a skill-focussed player can bypass entire obstacles with that skill. This is a shining moment for them (which you don't want to step on), but boring for the rest of the group.
The general principle I'd follow here is "Yes, but...", useful throughout GMing: Don't say no, but do say what obstacles arise as a result.
First, take a look at the ...
24
I see a lot of insightful comments in the answers here; but, I think that there is a key element that hasn't been explicitly.
PCs get angry when something that they like is threatened.
Players get annoyed when something that they like is taken away.
The best way to engage your players is to threaten something dear to their characters, and give them a ...
18
Really getting people in emotional place IC involves a bit of currency with the players and a little bit of trust. I have a few rules of thumb I always go for first when creating situations:
Plot and punishment are not the same thing.
I could just be sensitive about this but sometimes when a GM gives me plot by destroying something my character has ...
18
You Can't
Strictly speaking, you can't balance them at all in advance, since the players could not only fight them in any order, but could conceivably fight any number of other things in any order, meaning they could be any level at all when they reach any given angel.
You should build a template for each angel with each of its powers in advance, and ...
17
Keep on the Shadowfell is balanced for parties of 5 players
The default party size for 4e is 5 players, and all the official modules are designed to be an appropriate challenge for a party of 5. This is not to say that the game won't work well with 3 players (my experience has been that it starts having trouble when you have 2 or less players or 8+ ...
15
Be Prepared
If the party makes a bunch of noise on the way in, the summoning should be completed just as they arive. To get this effect, simply have an encounter outside the necromancer's room - plenty of warning.
Cover / Line of Sight
The necromancer should have easy access to cover, and the other monsters should provide barriers to line-of-sight.
...
14
MANDATORY STUFF
Crowd Control Immunity: By early paragon, a few classes can have stunning encounter attacks, and many have stunning dailies. Solos need to be either outright immune to stun & daze (and possibly blind), or have some easy way to get rid of them (like an at-will interrupt to negate a just-applied effect, or an extra save at the beginning ...
12
Betrayal
Depending on whether or not you've already begun to run the campaign, betrayal can be engineered with a bit of setup.
Give the PCs an NPC companion of some kind. Perhaps it's a creature of some kind that the players rescue. Perhaps it's the ghostly remains of the last adventurer the wizard was infatuated with. Perhaps its a fragment of the ...
11
No
It does not work well to spend the XP budget on a lot of much lower level opponents or a small number of much higher level opponents.
The ability to hit the creatures also matters and also greatly depends upon the level of the characters. You should attempt to keep the levels withing 3 levels of the party, otherwise you will quickly make things too ...
10
I have a completely different idea. Rather than making it so "tight" that there has to be an XYZ progression of encounters, why not set up your session with several goals, make those clear at the beginning and let the players decide what they want to do?
When I wrote my Quick Start dungeon, I designed it so that the players could do a number of things - ...
10
There is a fantastic encounter building design philosophy that is fairly agnostic for most D&D systems called 5 Room Dungeons. This philosophy is easily implemented into 4th edition encounter design and doesn't really have much of a learning curve. The only real learning curve with it will be actual encounter design for each room, but thankfully due to ...
10
This is one area where playing online does have an advantage, as you can send messages to individuals via the same medium you're sending messages to everyone.
But in any case, in a situation like this I think your best bet is to get the ones with the perception in the minority to feel like they are "in" on it. Pass them notes about what they see and ...
10
Autumn non-magical hazards:
Weather: With the change in seasons, occasionally you will have a warm day that then gets very cold when a front comes through. Hypothermia is a danger.
Mechanical injury: If the characters are walking down a hill after the leaves start falling, a rain shower can cause those leaves to get slick causing characters to fall and ...
10
Make it a climax instead of an anticlimax
This was the bard's crowning moment of awesome, I would treat it that way. Now, instead of having the barbarian king's head, you have his surrender. This would be better in most situations, and I would play that up heavily. Now depending on the reason for the fight the players have options including making him ...
9
If you want them to experience combat as a individuals first I would say that running through the character creation scenario that is published in the new Red Box would be a good idea. If you would rather introduce them as a group there are several solid L1 adventures already published by Wizards. Either the Red Box (goes through L1) or the Keep on the ...
8
This is a small thing, but I don't think it has been specifically stated yet:
There are some things that you can take from the players, and some that you can't.
In our group, I know that we have lost money, items, and NPCs and been (as players) completely fine with it. But we had a guest DM for a few sessions, and they created enemies that caused the PCs ...
8
You're absolutely right, MUDs/MUSHs tend to low-ball players on cash in an effort to slow growth. In my experience running and playing in Shadowrun I've used two different scales:
For high-power games with lots of cyberware, big guns and tons of excitement a normal run nets out around 10,000-20,000 'yen per player, usually leaving the group with enough ...
8
I would do this with roleplaying and whatever social combat rules your system uses. The level of detail is determined by how important you want the trial to be in your game. If you are not using a system with social combat, you can also model it with "chase" or "extended contest" rules, anything where success accrues over time can probably be kit-bashed into ...
8
Have the god combat actively introduce fallout that complicates what the characters are doing. Armor and weapons shattering and falling to the ground, blocked and misdirected effects causing havoc for those below, ichor raining down and blacking out the sun, and, as you mentioned, tainted blood causing hordes to erupt from the ground.
The fight should ...
8
This is pretty much the same as an answer I gave last year.
You should add 2 standard level appropriate monsters, or you can replace either or both standard monsters with 4+ minions each.
I would recommend adding monsters from the following groups:
minions - With 7 characters, unless the party is very low level, they probably have access to many powers ...
8
Forests aren't particularly dangerous for the prepared. If you want to know what could possibly be dangerous at all given a lack of preparation or available technology/magic, then your best source is to look at wilderness survival handbooks for what the experts prepare against.
Googling for "wilderness survival handbook" gets some hits, though your local ...
8
Soulrift has a great answer, but you have some other options.
One option is: don't balance at all.
In some sense this gives the most sense of realism. If they go after an angel they aren't ready for yet, they will likely be defeated, but if they are smart they will run before they take too many death's or permenant losses (a bit of Deus Ex Machina can help ...
7
In a campaign I recently ran, a rogue/assassin run by one of my players betrayed the party. He only partially disguised the fact that he was an assassin, so the party was always a little wary of him. However, he had always participated in combats and done little (that they ever spotted or knew about) to betray their trust. Secretly, he stole a couple of ...
7
Quickly, I thought that my DM wrote this question, because we were in that exact same scenario. What helped us was:
The experienced players knew the material, and each took a pupil to help guide the new players. We're still having trouble actually "roleplaying" as a group. Most still treat it as a series of battles and not as an interactive story. We're ...
7
Teamwork, resources, environment, and planning.
Defenders have a tremendous advantage. They don't have to carry stuff in. They don't have to scout. And they have reserves.
Defenders with an established structure have all sorts of capital:
Human Capital
Infrastructure
Temporal capital
Human Capital
Human capital is the first trick. An adventuring party ...
7
There's no situation (unfortunately, mind you :)) in which something bad couldn't happen.
Simply consider the scene you're stuck in/with (NPCs, creatures and items that are or may be present, environment, weather, location and nearby locations) and ask yourself the question: What may go wrong here? Jot down your idea (or ideas, and pick the most ...
6
Using a random method, change which characters on the battlefield count as "allies" and "enemies" for the use of powers and abilities. Keep this information secret and let it be discovered through play. Since many 4e effects work explicitly on one or the other, the player characters will find themselves uncertain as to their status as friend or enemy — a ...
6
Twelve. Why? Because the Ruins of the Ramat which has 16 rooms fits in a 4 hour convention slot quite nicely. You should average three to four rooms per hour.
But a note of caution. Unlike newer edition it is hard to pin down how long an older D&D adventure will last without playtesting it. It was never designed with the encounter system in mind, the ...
6
Loneliness would be best suited for a maze instead of any kind of encounter. Just some kind of maze with nothing in it but say they can hear sounds a long distance away. When ever they try to get closer to the sounds instead of getting closer the sound recedes from them as if they had went the wrong way. Make the sound what they need to find in the maze to ...
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