# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged difficulty

38

If I may indulge in a frame challenge. A group of wandering murderers who, without provocation, attack an intelligent sentient being deserve what they get. This is especially so since, earlier in the module: There are any number of ways that the party could interact with the dragon to their mutual benefit, albeit not without risk. From the Monster Manual p....

26

Give them a better idea of the threat level If you are playing a sandbox style game, it is up to the players to determine what level of known risks they wish to face. Thus, you probably do not want to telegraph too strongly that you think they are ready; that decision is up to them. Dice have vagaries and players play with differing levels of tactical skill ...

19

There's no specific rule or best way. Roll for Shoes is malleable, and you'll work out what works for you. I have a couple of preferred approaches I've used, which work very well for setting up the number of dice to use for the difficulty of the task. The first approach is complex, the second is less so, and they can be used together. There is not anything ...

17

As many as you think is reasonable. The rules for Roll for Shoes don't specify how many dice the GM should roll, so it's left up to their discretion. Obviously, you can come up with any kind of more or less elaborate schemes for determining an appropriate number, but at least in the games I've run, the following simple scheme has worked quite well: For ...

14

Reverse Engineering From Creating Combat Encounters (DMG pp.81-84). Encounter 1: 6 monsters totalling 600XP. This means an Encounter Multiplier of 2 so each monster is $600/2/6=50$XP, so CR1/4. Encounter 2: 2 CR 2 monsters (450XP). Encounter multiplier 1.5 so $450\times 2\times 1.5 = 1350$ - looks correct. Encounter 3: 7 monsters of CR3, CR1 & CR?...

14

The specific example given by the designers is that the Ogre works out to CR1 by the numbers, but was adjusted up to CR2 because the damage it can do in one attack is more than adequate to insta-kill a level 1 character. Your Werewolf can do 13 (average) to 20 (max) damage without even critting, enough to be lethal. Certainly this accounts for some upward ...

14

Slightly-high CR can be deadly, even on full-resources. When putting together an encounter or adventure, especially at lower levels, exercise caution when using monsters whose challenge rating is higher than the party's average level. Such a creature might deal enough damage with a single action to take out adventurers of a lower level.... In addition, some ...

14

Resource management and you What this ultimately comes down is what type of game you and your table want to play. A big part of D&D is resource management and the encounter system is a major contributor to the expenditure of those resources. How you want to manage and challenge your party is very much going to be up to you. But that doesn't mean that ...

12

Reading through the comment thread under the basic info, I ran into an approach suggested by a user and then tried by the guy who made the system. If you start reading from here, you'll see a lot of good stuff from them. The basic idea is that the world grows along with the player. The GM starts by writing down a Do Anything 1 for each of his important NPCs ...

11

Don't worry about balancing this with numbers. Balance it with story. Remember that aspects created through the Create Advantage action usually only last one scene, so my character can't prep at the beginning of the session to stack free invokes for the whole session: instead I'm using precious scene time, and that's the balancing factor. Placing aspects ...

10

This is from page 84 of the corebook: The GM doesn’t have to tell the player what the target number is, but he can give her a hint, especially if her character would reasonably know if the action was easy, average, difficult, or impossible. This is from the Numenera GM Screen: It’s okay to tell players—particularly starting players—the difficulty ...

9

I believe concealed difficulties are a crucial part of the concept. Choosing different difficulties for different approaches would be pointless if the characters automatically knew which approach gives them the best chance of success. It would be of great value in pointing them to the right solution. I believe the motivation behind the hiding of the ...

9

Spoilers of published materials ahead. Justification. That said, there are ways out of this dilemma. Humble brag about winning

8

First, the numbers A group of 8 3rd-level adventurers have a budgeted XP threshold of 600, 1200, 1800, and 3200 for an Easy, Medium, Hard, and Deadly encounter. A Young Green Dragon has an EXP value of 3900, which is Deadly. But! remember, you have to account for having more than the recommended player count of 4-6. The DMG goes off to say: Party Size ...

8

As per the "Setting Difficulties" section of the SRD, if you can't think of an appropriate difficulty for a task, default to Average or Fair. Unopposed efforts to create advantages in a conflict should never be harder than Average (+1) or Fair (+2), and neither should attempts to put an aspect on an object or location.

7

It prevents metagaming. Barring magical means, there is no way to have perfect knowledge of a situation such that its difficulty can be abstracted into a number in the context of reality; those abstractions are merely a system that we (the players) use to decide what happens in the game. Some groups choose to keep DCs hidden in order to force the players to ...

7

The trick to modelling these kinds of dice pool mechanics efficiently in AnyDice is to make use of the fact that each die in the pool is rolled and counted (and possibly rerolled) independently of the others. Correction: That isn't actually the case here, since apparently the reroll limit is supposed to be applied to the entire pool, not to each individual ...

5

Let them demonstrate their new skills This is a really fun way to show, not tell their development growth. Sure that +3 in strength sounds nice, but one of those bad boys crawled too far our from the camp, time to see how strong this axe really is. Let the crimson rain be the judge! This also has the added benefit of scaling the 'boss' as well. If your ...

5

Give Them No Choice Corner the party with the enemy in question. Most groups I've been with, especially in D&D, would rather try to take it on than just sit there and get eaten. Other examples include needing a specific MacGuffin and the Big Bad won't give it up, and the Big Bad is already attacking. The Power of Meta Through Narrative Narrative is a ...

5

In general, I would say a team of 8 should not have a major risk of TPK against the unaltered thundertree dragon, provided their team has good balance and thinks tactically. Example: I ran a group of 6 players through the encounter with the dragon (they were 3rd level if I recall correctly), and increased his HP since there were more of them. They still ...

5

The basic math is this: A difficulty of [the rating of the skill being rolled] will succeed almost 40% of the time (and succeed or tie about 60% of the time). Increasing the difficulty rapidly increases the chances of failure: a difficulty 2 higher than the skill being rolled means the chances of tie-or-better is less than 20%, forcing the player to spend at ...

5

Roll for Shoes doesn't have a concept of "DC" or "passive opposition" unless you invent one. The rules only supply the active variety of opposition: rolling dice! When a player wants to attempt something and the GM wants to oppose, the GM also rolls. If the player beats the GM's roll, what they want to happen happens. How many dice does the GM roll when ...

5

Deadly encounter The DMG describes a deadly encounter as: Deadly. A deadly encounter could be lethal for one or more player characters. Survival often requires good tactics and quick thinking, and the party risks defeat. Paraphrasing, if everything goes right the party still risks defeat and one or more of them could die. So, in short, a party can ...

5

Per rules-as-written, this is correct. Discovery discusses the three ways of easing a task on page 103: Skills: Skills can never ease a task by more than two steps — any more than two steps from being trained and specialized don’t count. Assets: Assets can never ease a task by more than two steps — any more than two steps from assets don’t count....

5

Reddit user sakiasakura give in this post a more exhaustive response on this matter. TL;DR: Players can ease a task using assets, effort, and skills after the GM has determined the final task difficulty. (page 102) The GM's job assess changes to difficulty based on environmental effects. Therefore, environmental modifiers cannot be assets. (page 113) Some ...

4

TL;DR: It might be possible with a skilled group who employ excellent tactics and is prepared for such an encounter but you're more likely to kill them than not. Normally a party should be able to handle a deadly encounter or two during a given adventuring day. The DMG states: most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard ...

4

Rolemaster is a deadly system as has been observed, a kobold with a pointed stick can take out a level 20 warrior with a lucky shot which is part of the systems charm. So what you're looking for is ways to mitigate insta-kill critical effects and large penalties (broken arms et al) from the critical tables, there are a couple of ways you can do this, some ...

4

Being blinded imposes a +2 difficulty penalty on all actions The rules break up the relevant information in kind of an odd way, and the description of escaping a Hold or Clinch maneuver is not categorized very clearly. But the key pieces of the issue are that: A character attempts the Blind Fighting general maneuver when they are trying to attack while ...

3

Balancing Rolemaster has levels which are a clear indication of balance. This is more or less all you need. Anything within ten levels is doable, anything outside that range is either trivial or too hard. Within that range, encounters are fair: everyone is playing with the similar powers, no one dominates so massively that the encounter is trivial, and ...

3

One possibility is to run the encounter but set up some environmental factors to go in the player's favour. For example maybe the werewolf is already injured, or the players have silver dust that makes their weapons temporarily silver, or they have friends firing arrows at it from above, or they come in and catch it by surprise and it's prone and being ...

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