D&D Smackdown

[ralphmelton]

We had another D&D smackdown event last night, to serve several purposes:
- to let me experiment with challenges to throw at the PCs
- to let the players experiment with tactics and character improvement choices
- and to have some D&D that required less commitment--less prep from me during the holiday season, less need for Lori to be there if finals were hitting her hard, and so forth.

I would call it a reasonably successful session, while acknowledging that the requirements were much lower.

My holy grail has been to find an encounter that makes the PCs decide to run away, and yet allows them to run away successfully. I did not find that holy grail with this night.

Fight 1: the party vs. five trolls. The fight ended with one troll dead, two trolls unconscious but regenerating, and two trolls captivated by Prolix's rainbow pattern. Of the PCs, Kyle got ripped apart, and everyone else was hurting but functional.

Fight 2: the party vs. one huge water elemental. This was a fight that I had considered for a recent session, but toned down because I thought it was too powerful. It was pretty darn powerful--by the time we ended it, it still had 76 hp (half of its original), but it was captivated. Unfortunately, the only resources the party had for attacking it were the greatclub and Larissa's magic missiles. I don't think Kyle died in this one.

Fight 3: The party vs. an evil twin of Larissa, with four ogres as bodyguards. On the good side, it was an exciting, thrilling combat, with lots of interesting tactics, and it seemed pretty close to the line of what the party could just handle. On the bad side, the whole party died.

The ogres are medium-nasty, with a +8 to hit and 2d6+7 damage. The problem is that if they hit at all, they do 9-19 points of damage, so it's very hard for them to whittle the party down progrssively. Twice during that combat, PCs went from positive hit points to 'dead' in a single blow.

My general feeling is that it's getting harder for me to hit the sweet spot of 'challenging, but not too deadly'. Which is a problem.

I'm pretty much an easy GM--my only reasons for threatening PCs is that the excitement can make the game more fun for everyone. But PC death makes the game a lot less fun, so I want to steer very clear of that. And these bang-your-dead monsters make that increasingly hard to do.

I'm toying with ideas of making the 'unconscious' zone wider--to -30 or so. Having people go unconscious and get healed again seems just fine to me, and doesn't wreck the disbelief of having PCs get killed.

Comments

[cellio]

Finding the Holy Grail is hard, it appears.

Technically, we ran away from the water elemental with no PC deaths. (It was captivated, but attacking it would break that and we had no hope of doing sufficient damage quickly enough.)

Fight #3 was exciting. Both Larissa and Evil Larissa had better tactics available than what we used; I don't know how it would have played out if I'd been playing more intelligently. (EL should have started by filling the corridor with webs, not fire.) The ogres were tougher than we thought; the minimum damage turned out to be, um, a killer. The fight ended with Evil Larissa in single-digit hit points, 2 ogres dead, and 2 ogres alive (health level forgotten). Hrolf (Larissa's familiar) almost made it out alive, but that's it. Clearly, we need to do better when attacking evil sorcerors. :-) (Sorcerors can improvise better than wizards can, a fact we need to remember.)

One thing we should have done (oh well; we'll remember for next time) is to record state at the end of each fight so you could evaluate drain -- not just damage, but also spell usage. Larissa now has enough spells that a typical combat will end before she can fire anything like her full wad. I think the fight with Evil Larissa and the thugs ran about 8 rounds? I don't know how Prolix and Liandra were faring. Part of your Holy Grail might involve multiple smaller encounters in a day, rather than isolated big encounters. (In the final fight, Evil Larissa used more spells than Larissa, because of how we were set up. But she still had fireballs left at the end.)

Widening the "unconscious" zone, at least until we all get better at calibration, sounds like a good idea. In the fight with the trolls Kyle went from fully healthy to dead in one attack (a critical). I think two ogre swats killed him in the last fight.

[indigodove.livejournal.com]

I'm all for widening the "not dead yet" zone to -30. It would still provide a hassle and recovery time -- Liandra is pretty good, but she's not going to be able to bring the person back to full hit points that day. Also, you could make an additional rule that if you drop below -10, you are weak and unable to do much for the next day, two days, whatever.

Sorry I was too fried for most of the smackdown. I appreciated being able to say "Okay, I'm tired and going to bed now." :-)

[cellio]

Yes, limitations of various sorts to compensate for the widened zone make sense. Longer rates of recovery, temporary con damage, maximum amounts of healing per day, or something like that would all be plausible.