Supplements
Unless I’ve been reading the wrong kind of fiction my whole life, it’s my job to battle against the odds. As one of the big damn heroes of the multiverse, I’m supposed to man the walls of the Hornburg, drive straight through those bastards from The Citadel, and hold the hot gates no matter what. Sometimes though, when the goblins have rusty knives and I’ve got the weapons of the gods, it begins to feel a bit unfair.
This came up recently in my dragon riders game. The gold dragon PC–ostensibly a creature of purity and justice–had managed to get herself into a duel with a treacherous nobleman. There was a great deal of concern about whether or not the nobleman would try to cheat, applying fire resistance and similar buffs. As I sat there watching my honorable musketeer-type PCs spying, preparing to dispel enemy magic, and generally plotting ways that they could cheat without cheating, I began to feel a little sympathy for the devil. I mean, when you’re a dragon wearing a cloak of resistance, an amulet of mighty fists, and a custom breathe-fire-more-times-per-day necklace, things begin to feel a bit stacked in your favor.
Maybe it’s just my ludonarrative dissonance acting up, but I’m beginning to get the feeling that, when the odds are actually stacked in my favor, I’m something less than a hero. I may just be a self-righteous bully. What’s the alternative though? If you design a 50/50 chance for the PCs to lose any given fight, I don’t think your game is going to survive for long. Still, I’m pretty sure that this brand of are-we-the-baddies? unease is not the sort of thing game designers are trying to make me feel.
Do you guys ever worry about this? When you’re loaded down with buffs and weapons and special abilities that make you mechanically superior to the opposition, do you ever struggle to maintain that sense of heroism? Or am I just navel-gazing here? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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I rather like the idea of embarrassing the corrupt nobleman. For me, fighting a corrupt nobleman is a chance to say “Your money and connections hold no power over me!” You could even take off all of your gear and show “Even at my worst I am still better than you”…. and so I’m thinking the issue here is… why is the party doing its best to stack things in their favor? Not every encounter has to be one where one uses all of their power.
Rather it can be a “roleplay-fight” so to speak, fight naked against the nobleman to prove a point, or strike the goblins with the flat of your blade. Heroic character can be shown in any match-up if your roleplay it well enough. Of course, I understand that different players desire different kinds of games, but the option is there.
Brings me a thought, has anyone ever roleplayed an overpowered PC who was trying to hide their powers? I think I read of one somewhere where the PC obtained godhood and he was trying hard not to steal the thunder of the other party members.
One of my 5e characters is a Level 20 War Cleric who is also a Solar. She’s head and shoulders above the power level of practically any other PC. This has led to a sort of “world of cardboard” effect where she can never unleash her full power. As a result, when I use her in a roleplaying server I frequent, she takes on the unassuming form of a petite Aasimar woman and holds back quite a bit so people don’t feel discouraged from interacting or training with her.
Heh: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B-jn3JqCEAAUHkk.jpg:large
We’ve approached this in a Superhero game before, but my players seem to be immune to the bias in the standard Fantasy RPG. I believe it’s a context effect. Our fantasy tends to be a little grittier, a little more serious. Thus, the players feel they “have to use” every advantage in every situation. The concept of this person isn’t a CR X encounter balanced for four PCs means that they get a light encounter to them.
To talk to about BlasBlas concept of an overpowered PC trying to hide their powers, I wasn’t actually more powerful than the other PCs; but I was a Telepath in a setting of mostly low will saves. And trying to hide how powerful of a telepath I was. Namely I was pretending to be using light telepathic scanning to augment my martial arts and that was the extent of my powers. In reality, I was capable of mind controlling multiple people, reading deep seated memories and incapacitating everything with a mind in twenty feet of me with telepathic static. It was fun and I pulled it off for a good ten sessions. Finally, the gm covered us in a swarm of mind controlled bugs to make me freak out and use my incapacitatiing mindscream attack. At which point, everyone paused to stare at the cute schoolgirl who might have been the most powerful mutant they had met…and wasn’t even technically on the super-team.
Hmm, I guess, it’s a little bit up to the DM to set the tone if ever. If those gritty PCs of yours never encountered a situation where choosing the “suboptimal” way of fighting gave them better rewards, they wouldn’t know to choose it. How did you come to the decision that you had to hide the extent of your PC’s powers?
In a game I played a while back with my highschool buds, our monk got into a tavern brawl with a drunk guard, not wanting to get into trouble with the law, he decided to continuously trip the guard while making diplomacy checks. He wasn’t able to succeed even after a about 20 rounds, but the guard got so mad that he summoned a demon using a magic item. Apparently, the local lord and his personal guards were league with demons. We were going to find out later anyway, but this event was helpful in turning the locals against them. He later told us that killing the guard would have landed us in jail, which is where we would have found out about the demon thing.
It was an off-the-cuff decision by our DM, which he made in part because the monk was taking too damn long, but it went off beautifully in my opinion, and ever since we’ve tried non-lethal methods when things seem.. off.
Weirdly, I have the opposite problem in my superhero game. Because so many of our antagonists are also superpowered, it begins to feel a bit like our abilities are barely helping us to squeak by. For that reason, I’ve begun to think it’s important to stagger difficulty in supers games, throwing out the occasional “fight a bunch of weak mooks” encounters so that PCs can feel properly super.
It’s the mook fights that causes the effect in our Superhero games, actually. That and the “pancake incident.” There was a gadgeteer getting away and one of my Pcs decided that wasn’t allowable. I had already described the guy as being very injured, and the PC pulls out all the stops with a fully Damage DC power attack ( Mutants and Masterminds). The gadgeteer is hit, fails his damage save due to them having nullified his forcefield earlier, and goes immediately to dying. This makes him unconscious, which shuts off his sustained duration flight. One fall later and the PC has a body on his hands. That event combined with the “I fireball the mooks” incident has made them very power conscious.
As for hiding my PC’s power, it was part of her original concept. She was afraid that she would be carted off to some research facility and dissected or worse, since telepathy was a rare power in the setting. So she covered up most of her support with Investigation and bluff skill checks to make it look like she had simply researched or deduced the correct answers.
And it’s possible that the Tone issue may be to blame. I’m not their only Gm, and I do often prepare additional rewards for intelligent creatures being subdued rather than killed, usually in the form of additional information about future encounters. And that’s certainly a good thought, but I think it also has something to do with how unusually hard it is to be non-lethal in Pathfinder. Between penalties if you don’t want to do Lethal damage and some creatures being flat immune to non-lethal damage, it makes being good at taking them alive a niche. Adventurers don’t do Niche builds, as they need to be fairly versatile. And it’s certainly possible it’s a little of column A, a little of column B.
In my current Mutants & Masterminds game I’m playing the strong guy. Gadgeteer always looked like a hoot and a half though. Next time I get a chance to roll up a dude, I want to see if I can make “Dynamic Powers: Utility Belt” work.
Gadgeteer can be incredibly fun if you binge on Girl Genius for two days before you build your character. Though, in retrospect, that might be why the rest of my party fears that character.
Could I ask what system you were using?
It was down in Kat’s reply to me: Mutants & Masterminds.
This puts “Buffing” into a whole new light. Remember kids, use clean vials and drink a non-detection/misdirection before entering into contests.
Now I’m imagining anti-buffing judges at the fantasy olympics. That’s actually not a bad quest hook: “OK puny wizard team. Go weed out all the cheaters from this field of beefy, roided-out barbarians. Here’s your official judge’s hard hat.”
I like the idea of having officially licensed arenas whose entrances are permanently enchanted with Walls of Suppression (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/w/wall-of-suppression), or purposely built in areas with Dead Magic Zones.
That’s good stuff when you can plan for it! Sadly, the dragon duel was very much an impromptu affair. :/
Neverwinter Nights 1 had a small arena thinger, and they cast dispel magic on you before every fight. The champion was known to be oddly strong without having any particular specialty like the other fighters; he had actually fixed it so that he would not be dispelled before the fights.
I always go back to that one episode from Rune Soldier for this trope. That said, I for serious need to play Baldur’s Gate or Planescape Torment or something. I’ve never played any of the D&D games, and they seem like foundational texts to every other gamer I meet!
I prefer the Krynn Trilogy and Temple of Elemental Evil to Baldur’s Gate and Planescape Torment. The combat systems in both are messed up, which is bad because BG has a lot of combat and because conversely combat in Torment seems almost entirely superfluous and probably should have been dropped altogether as the game runs really more along the lines of a point and click adventure game
This (sort of) came up in a recent forum-discussion, and someone remarked that D&D battles are supposed to be “fights of attrition, not duels between equals”. They were talking mostly about the standard 4-encounters-per-day, not boss battles which I think should play by a different set of rules, but that’s sort of where the game is set. You CAN design super-high lethality adventures, but if people are constantly dropping out of combat to roll up a new character it kind of kills both the pacing and any chance for character development.
If you’re feeling like your characters are having a tough time finding challenges though, you might need to adjust the game world. You can either turn down the power of the party- maybe by running a campaign using 6e rules. I’ve never done that myself because I LIKE powerful parties, but you could also crank up the average level of the NPCs around them. Which (and I never really thought about it until this moment) kind of has the same effect of making the players less of big fish in a little pond.
If you’re looking for something specific to throw at your campaign, have you checked out the Book of Elder Evils? That’s all about high-level challenges in freakishly hostile environments, where the fate of the world is at stake every single time.
Part of the reason I’ve stuck with my megadungeon as long as I have is because I’m eager to see what a high-level dungeon looks like according to Monte Cook. I’ve always heard that dungeons don’t work past 14th level or so in d20 system, so I’m interested to see what this one look like.
For my money though, boss battles are at their best when the party is already a little drained. I guess that’s where the classic four-battles-per-day thing I linked to in the Alexandrian article comes in. I think that style plays into the martial/caster disparity debates though, so I tend to prefer sticking with the multiple encounters model.
Out of curiosity though, how do you like to structure your boss fights? Are they the one thing the PCs fight that day, or do you set them up a bit with attrition?
I hadn’t heard that a dungeon-crawl CAN’T work past level 14, but the concept does certainly break down a little. When your group starts looting the adamantine doors the GM installed to keep you from tunneling around his traps, you know something has gone sideways up the creek.
Personally I’ve always thought that D&D 3.5 works best at the mid-levels, which I define as level 6-14, so that sounds right on target. At the low end that’s where most of your interesting abilities have come online and you have enough resources to get through a standard day without struggle. And at the high end you haven’t gotten so powerful that you stop being able to relate to and interact believably with your fellow man (humanoid, whatever) and need to go dimension-hopping to find decent challenges.
As for boss battles, I think they can definitely work at any point in the day. I might be the wrong person to ask about this though- as a roleplayer at heart, an encounter that is memorable for it’s impact on the story is more important to me than one that is mechanically challenging.
In my experience, what has a bigger impact on “boss battles” is if they are against a single, massive foe, or something more like an enemy party (i.e. the BBEG and his lieutenants/apprentice/whatever). One of my favorite moments of clarity was when someone pointed out that even if an enemy is significantly higher level than your party, then don’t get more actions per round. Having a situation where one enemy goes, then one player goes, then another enemy, then another player, etc, can make an encounter feel VERY different than one where your whole party goes, then the enemy goes, then your whole party goes again, etc.
The former strikes me as more of a late-day encounter, where you have to dig deep into your kit and outsmart the enemy, whereas the latter is more of an early-day encounter where you can unload everything without worry about needing it later and have plenty of tricks to pull if someone takes an unexpected crit to the face.
With the edition change, I may be a little bit past of the point of developing new Pathifnder 1e adventures. Still, I don’t know of anyone who has specifically set out to make an E6 adventure path, and I always thought that would be a neat route to take.
The threat should always be bigger than the heroes, but that doesn’t mean every part of it does. Sometimes you are fighting for your life against the powerful big bad, but sometimes you get to thrash a group of mooks. I like those moments in moderation.
^ Wisdom
The world is overwhelmingly against you, not the individual encounter. Good philosophy!
I tend to think that encounters stacked 50/50 on paper against the PCs are fine. The reason for this is that I, the DM, am only one person. The PCs are generally at least 3 people, who can work together to brainstorm strategies. I am not, and never will be, as smart as 3 PCs working together on a tactical plan, so making things seem to be even at the start of the fight doesn’t actually result in even odds of the players losing.
What’s more, if the players start to look like they’re going to lose, there’s plenty of ways you can give them more of a chance without ever having to resort to fudging numbers. Maybe one of the monsters makes a tactical error, or two of them begin to fight over a downed PC’s loot.
Can you give me some examples of 50/50 encounters? What have you thrown at your players as compared to their level?
Well, a lot of what players can handle is determined by their skill at optimization and party makeup, not just the level, but in 5e if you want a rough estimate of a “50/50” challenge for a party with full resources, take your party’s level and multiply that by about 1.5-1.75 and use that challenge rating as your XP budget.
Most of the time I just eyeball my encounters, so I can’t give you a precise answer about what’s 50/50, but one of the encounters that my players have been subjected to was an adult white dragon at level 8. The players managed to avoid its breath weapon by taking cover under their enslaved mammoths and popping out to shoot, while the barbarian with his ring of jumping leaped from the back of one of the mammoths to grab onto the dragon as it was taking to the air.
Do we feel overpowered? Not really. My party tends to feel outclassed a lot of the time, even though we objectively have a LOT of firepower we can bring to bear. Maybe it’s because for the past 6 months, we’ve been dealing with a fort of ogres. Yes, technically, it takes 12 ogres to be an “average” encounter for our squad of 6 Level 9s, but when the fort has 41 ogres (and two of them are EACH CR 10 bosses, who hate to leave each other’s sides) and they love to all show up at once, we tend to feel outgunned. (Finally got them, though! Only took a 15 round fight.)
In other forms of fiction, I do agree that the proper heroic thing to do is for the overpowered hero to hold back against outclassed foes. Not necessarily to give them a fair chance of winning (letting them do that could get innocent people hurt), but there’s a reason why Superman uses nonlethal force, and that’s because he rarely NEEDS to use lethal force. A cop shooting a bank robber is fine because he has no other way to stop him, but a bulletproof man with superspeed doesn’t have that excuse. This is probably why certain types of power fantasy make me uncomfortable – if this ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeMOHE41UA4 ) is what a villain does, is this ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2DI-7uTceI ) any different?
As for the comic itself, my party actually has a Barbarian with a Mutagen (two levels of Mutagenic Mauler Brawler). With Mutagen and Rage active, his Strength is 30, and his Intelligence is 4. He’s basically the Hulk, but in full plate and with a shield. Do drugs, kids. (If you’re wondering how a guy with normally 6 INT made such a drug, his partner/handler/boss is a high-INT Mindchemist+Vivisectionist Alchemist/Empiricist Investigator with a Cognatogen, so he developed it for him. They are the definition of brains and brawn.)
For me it’s less about holding back, and more about the fact that, against any single foe, your party is technically more than a match. The classic ## encounters per day style of play begins to feel a bit less like overcoming serious threats than pushing around the skinny kid on the playground. In that sense, I guess it’s about looking at the forces of evil as a collective challenge rather than a serious of individual challenges.
Good example with Helsing, btw. I couldn’t get into that one either. Just that little bit too self-serious for my taste.
Slighty pedantic correction, but Hellsing isn’t supposed to be about heroes. Yes, what Alucard does there is villianous, as is fitting for a self confirmed monster like him. Hellsing doesn’t have “heroes”, it has points of view and motivation, and doesn’t have lightvsdark, but various shades of gray.
As for going all out all the time, sometimes you do want to feel powerfull and whoop the clear baddies. And sometimes it’s more fun to humiliate the villians or capture and redeem the missguided. It’s about what you want as a player at that moment. As is the case with many things in RPGs.
Had this exact thing come up for me recently.
Just got Holy put on my +1 Veering, quick-load musket.
After the first skirmish with some Orcs, I had immediate buyers remorse.
“Are you sure this is ok?” I asked our DM. “We just rolled over them without so much as a ‘hey how do ya do’ there…”. It’s bad when your DM says “THIS orc actually doesn’t go down in his first round of actual combat, because his Orc Ferocity actually keeps him alive past the first volley…”
My DM reassured me that they weren’t the biggest baddest enemies we would face this dungeon. These were just canon fodder.
Sure enough when we get inside the spooky castle, there are traps that keep us on our toes, and bigger badder beasties with save or pass out abilities getting all up in our faces.
What I took away from this is, the world doesn’t level with you. You are climbing a ladder, and those enemies who gave you trouble at level one are still there. They just don’t have the bite they used to. Now that first big boss you fought would be rolling Stealth to sneak past you instead of the other way around. No, not every encounter has to be heavy hitters.
The Red Kobold ambush party hiding around the next bend with their pantented fire slick trap aren’t going to know that Ye ole cloked man riding up is actually Marcus, Ember Speaker, Bringer of the Midnight Sun, Master of the Burning Wastes, and lover of only the hottest Fire Elementals. They shall learn that not only can a level fifteen Fire Sorcerer walk through their flames, but that he couldn’t care less about a paltry +5 fire resistance.
The Red Dragon who is still sore about that One-night-stand and has been sending out her minions to ambush travelers, in hopes of finding the one who besmirched her honor however… She is a fight worthy of his level (and perhaps more?).
This sorcerer wouldn’t happen to have levels in bard, would he?
Always nice to hear that I’m not alone in these concerns. It’s so tough to toe the line between “appropriate encounter,” “cakewalk,” and TPK. As you say, the correct solution is likely to include enemies with widely-variable power levels.
He could be multi-classed Bard / Sorcerer, just enough to get that winsome smile down.
Any time I think of overly amorous Bards, I think of Fredrick K. T. Andersson.
http://www.naorhy.com/art/freddy/elfwood/cross_couples/dragonlayer.jpg
He did several such encounters (some of his stuff would be NSFW so I didn’t link to a gallery, but a quick search should work)
Also, it never hurts to test the waters after some in-game downtime and a level up. Send in something similar to a challenging encounter they had recently with a few tweaks to keep it different. See how they do, and then go from there.
“”Faih fight”? Impossible, I’m a Dwahf and they’uh not. The odds ‘ll always be stacked in my favah. Let them apply theyuh poison, I laugh at that shit. Let them have outside help, moah foes for me to crush.” -Ulfgar Truehammer, Paladin of Moradin.
Also, Alchemist’s hulking out, and selling said hulk juice to Barbarian reminds me of one of the more necessary tropes that no matter how much clothing damage a woman suffers, it will never be enough to bump past a PG13.
Technically, Alchemist isn’t hulking out there. There’s still a fat little homunculus of a man underneath all that muscle. Abercrombie the tumor familiar, however, is swole as fuck.
Barbarian’s clothes are made of animal hides stitched together, so they’re very stretchy. Barbarian culture is built around compensating for the risk of spontaneous enmusclement.
I have the personal Feeling that a Game makes most Fun
between Level 5-14. You have developed your Skills and most of your Powers. And you can beat most Enemies without a long list of Extras.
To that:
In a Common Advanture should be 50% of the Encouters 2-3 levels below the Groups Challenge Rating, about 1/3 should be one below the Groups Challenge Rating and the rest at the Groups and one maybe above.
Back to the Level 14 Group: You can throw at 4 PC, several times 16 Orks with Shaman etc.. then you have a wizard with elemental and fiends, then some Medusa’s and in the End a dragon.
It will work and makes a great Adventure, when you buff it up to Level 18 you will have Problems finding Challenges and from my Experience then something is sometimes happening: The PC didn’t have the right Gear, or worse they forgot some abilities of the Gear. In one instance i got a full Group whipe out(Against a Dragon), and then one Player said: I forgot that my Blade was causing bleedings, with konstition loss. The Char hit the Dragon about 8 times… so 4×18 Lifepoints not counted in…
Thats a Problem in High End Games the Enemies goes with your CR or should go. And when you make a mistake or forget a ability, it can end in a Group whipeout. (We ended the Group after this Adventure and restartet another with Level 5)
So Level 5-14 makes lot more Fun as it is more Simple but you don’t have to worry the Goblin with the rusted knife.
To be clear: which game are you referring to? Pathfinder? 5e? Dungeon World?
3.5 and Pathfinder
But in all other RPG it is the same, there is a Sweetspot in the Midtiers.
Highend tends to be at some point lame or very on the edge.
I saw this in SW D6, Gurps, AD&D, D&D 3.5, Pathfinder and Shadowrun 2/3/4/5.
Saw a thread on /r/Pathfinder_RPG this morning about how 2e is trying to flatten some of that math. I guess it all comes down to the conflict between a sense of progression as new abilities are earned and that sweet spot of enough-but-not-too-much complexity.
Generally, as a DM, I have a sentry give the villain accurate information about half the party, but not the other half. If there are two casters, a frontliner, and a skirmisher, the villain is prepared for the tricks of a caster and one of the other three options. Usually it’s the caster and the frontliner: every good villain should have a powerful bodyguard and a caster that aids them. Their buffs are ready and puts the real fight on more even footing.
On the other hand, if the buffs happen before storming the castle, I think it could lead to some very interesting and fun to play scenarios. For things like that, perhaps look at the scene in ATLA:38 (The Earth King), wherein the Gaang has clearly hit a point where the minions are chump change and most of the party has hit a level of mastery or proficiency that allows them to storm the castle handily. Plus, it feels more heroic to make a fantastic entrance, since the climactic battle feels more impressive by comparison.
This really just builds upon what MSMask said further up the thread though.
It’s interesting to think of individual encounters as “stage setting” followed by the “real fight” that is the boss battle. Conceptualizing antagonists as serving different purposes rather than actually challenging the PCs is a neat conceit. I sometimes wonder if conveying that difference to players is the real challenge, e.g. “This is a serious fight. Be on your toes.” vs. “This is a goofy fight where you can show off a bit.”
I’m not certain there is a non-meta way to tell people “this is a goofy fight where you can show off a bit”. I guess just encourage them to always describe their actions in depth, and hope for them to take the dramatic cue. If they get a good greater cleave, let them know they have the descriptive steering wheel.
I’ve never really had much of a problem with that, because PCs are always set up to be mechanically superior to anything else in the setting. They’re set up as the main characters, the heroes. They have an end-goal of ‘being heroes’ and the entire system is established around the concept of enabling their heroic behavior. Death isn’t a constant threat past level 1 or 2 anymore, death becomes that thing you only risk by biting off more than you can chew. And so most PCs ensure that the rest of the world is reduced to bite-size pieces, to reduce their chance of doing that.
There’s also, typically, an understanding that the DM exists to facilitate heroic behavior… While at the same time, as a dual-identity god, existing to punish those who exhibit crass stupidity in attempting said heroic behavior. ‘Charge the elder dragon!’ is a warcry you usually only hear right before, ‘Are you sure?’ makes the entire table reconsider all their life choices leading up to that moment, and someone answers, ‘No.’
Point being, I think ‘The PCs are way too overprepared to be bothered with this situation,’ is a necessary evil of any tabletop system that’s designed to take characters and make them heroes. As you say, it’s hard to build a hero when the system has a 50/50 chance of the other side coming out ahead in any given fight. As a boss fight, you expect some risk of character death, but generally your heroes aren’t looking at a cave with a dozen goblins in and it thinking, ‘Hey we’re only level 14, if we mess with them we’re in trouble!’ They’re looking at it and trying to figure out which square to target with the fireball to get them all in the blast radius.
I wonder if this issue of mine is what gives rise to things like Fourthcore: high difficulty adventures designed to challenge players as much as characters. I’m not sure that’s exactly what I want, so if that’s the alternative then I think the cost/benefit analysis puts me on the side of “will continue pummeling goblins.”
Does anyone play with the optional Potion Miscibility rules?
Never heard of ‘em. Got a link?
It’s a throwback to 1st edition. It’s a variant rule in the 5E DMG.
DMG pg. 140.
VARIANT: MIXING POTIONS
A character might drink one potion while still under the
effects of another, or pour several potions into a single
container. The strange ingredients used in creating potions
can result in unpredictable interactions.
When a character mixes two potions together, you can
roll on the Potion Miscibility table. If more than two are
combined, roll again for each subsequent potion, combining
the results. Unless the effects are immediately obvious,
reveal them only when they become evident.
POTION MISCIBILITY
d100 Result:
01: The mixture creates a magical explosion,
dealing 6d10 force damage to the mixer and
1d10 force damage to each creature within 5
feet of the mixer.
02-08: The mixture becomes an ingested poison of
the DM ‘s choice.
09-15: Both potions lose their effects.
16-25: One potion loses its effect.
26-35: Both potions work, but with their numerical
effects and durations halved. A potion has no
effect if it can’t be halved in this way.
36-90: Both potions work normally.
91-99: The numerical effects and duration of one
potion are doubled. If neither potion has
anything to double in this way, they work
normally.
00: Only one potion works, but its effect is
permanent. Choose the simplest effect to
make permanent, or the one that seems
the most fun. For example , a potion of
healing might increase the drinker’s hit point
maximum by 4, or oil of etherealness might
permanently trap the user in the Ethereal
Plane. At your discretion, an appropriate
spell, such as dispel magic or remove curse,
might end this lasting effect.
I feel that it comes down to how you run it. Which in all honesty can be pretty much be applied to everything in D&D, haha.
If there’s a group or person the group has burned with rage over then it feels so nice to just mow them down, in that case the feeling of being OP is what the players want. In my campaign I also have the idea (or at least partly, I don’t want them to feel like they should be afraid to do anything) that quests and places are necessarily level locked. If a village is having a bandit problem and the lv.15 characters deal with it it might not have any deeper meaning than a bunch of CR 1/8-1/2 bad dudes wanting to rob people. So they can just steamroll them and go back to the town for a practically a pittance reward compared to taking on a adult Black dragon who has been causing trouble a few cities over. I’m not doing it to punish them or bore them, what I want to tell them is that your characters are on their way to being legendary and these are “normal” problems. The world isn’t gated in sections saying “You must be this level to proceed.”, it’s up to you on whether you think you can fight the things you encounter or not.
The potions in the comic above are a interesting thing to use. If you kill a goblin and you find a Potion of Healing on him, well why didn’t he use that? Did you kill him too quickly for him to use it? Was he planning on running away and using it then to recover? You can make encounters more interesting by letting enemies use rules that the players do.
Potions of Giant Strength are something quite funny and interesting to give. If you don’t know the enemy has it then you are in for a surprise. “Why is that kobold drinking a potion? Why does he look a good deal more muscular? Aren’t mauls heavy and small creatures get disadvantage with them? Holy shit he just chucked it 40ft. and beaned the wizard in the head! Now he’s wrestling the fighter and winning what the Hells!?”
Monsters can’t use treasure. Why would you even suggest such a thing! (Seriously, they might be listening.)
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/monsters-treasure
In my defense Liches already do according to 5e: Liches collect spells and magic items. In addition to its spell repertoire, a lich has ready access to potions, scrolls, libraries of spellbooks, one or more wands, and perhaps a staff or two. It has no qualms about putting these treasures to use whenever its lair comes under attack.
Though in their defense they were once people and have 20 Int. Meta-gaming sons a bitches.
Speaking of meta-gaming, I toyed recently with the idea of introducing an extradimensional Handbook character who can travel between the normal comics and our Handbook of Erotic Fantasy stuff.
“Wait, who did I sleep with? What are you talking about?”
“It’s a different continuity. You’ve probably never heard of it.”
Happily, my friends pointed out to me that only 60 or so people could possibly get the reference. Putting that idea on the back burner.
…
But yeah, liches. Dudes are total dick bags.
I pretty much never play Heroic Characters. They are always more grey. Is it heroic to slaughter Entire Tribes of Goblins, who have no chance against you? Nope. Most of my Characters realize this, but none are bother by it.
I don’t play Heroes, i play flawed Humans/AIs/Elfs/Orcs/whatevers. Not that both of them are exclusive. But i like my Games a bit more Gritty, or silly both is fine.
Love me some Fritz Leiber, you know? Nothing quite like escaping the collapsing dungeon with an eyebrow burned off and half a goblin still chewing on your backside!
Wait, you are the dragon? What game is that, or is a homebrew? I ask because roasted noble smell delicious.
Also if you have played exalted, nobilis or any other game, you mast know one must choose carefully his fights. Nobody attacks a Terreasque whit a level one pc who use a rat-fail. Thou as puny mortal shall not raise your fist against the power that are flesh… or spirtit or anything. The noble choose wrong his fight, so is time for roasted noble with vegetables and lemon.
The noble was also a dragon:
http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/211280/In-The-Company-of-Dragons-Expanded-PFRPG
Currently working on a novel set in the homebrew campaign world we used in that game. 🙂
thanks for the info. My point stands. He must suffer for his fooly.
Now to the important. When i am going to get my roasted noble leg with vegetables? 🙂
Oh hey, did Barbarian get a new haircut?
Honestly I find the intensity of debuffs to be a much heavier hitter than the overabundance of buffs. Not that Pathfinder isn’t prone to the shenanigans of strong characters or anything, but I’ve seen enemies glitterdusted, blindness/deafened, deafened/blindnessed, feebleminded, and baleful polymorphed.
I GM’d a fight where the party did all of that to -one boss.-
I’ve seen some magical blasters and fightmans get some pretty sick numbers, but the disparity of power between buffed allies and thoroughly debuffed enemies is a much greater gap. Then again, I’ve taken to enjoying these awesome displays of power more than feeling disappointment at the fact.
You, my friend, have got witches. Probably in the walls. All it takes is one and BAM! Infestation city. Probably a full-blown coven in your insulation or up under the eaves.
Two witches and a wizard with so many divination spells that he’s basically holding an in-game copy of the adventure to be exact, but yes you’re pretty much on point.
I was playing a Dragonborn Barbarian named Ghesh. He had a Battleaxe that I could charge up at the cost of my frost breath. I could only use 2 charges per turn, or i would suffer damage, but i could deal some massive damage. Along with a custom necklace that gave me boosted hp and STR, I was too OP, aside from my 8 INT. In short, I was the DPS Tank. I recently talked with my DM, and had him leave in the story to try and change the future and find his past self(tl;dr TIME BULLSHITTERY). So I’m now playing a Tabaxi Fey Warlock/Assassin Rouge with a HUUUUUUUUUUGE backstab fetish who serves Hyrsam, Prince of Fools. My initial stats sucked, but because i was able to start at our party’s level (6 btw), I was able to get him to a good point. Also, unlike my previous Warlock, Bobo, my new character (Frequently Vanishes, or just Vanish for short) constantly talks with is deity due to their contract (Vanish basically has to ‘entertain’ Hyrsam with fun battle tactics) and makes finding out info on enemies much easier. In short, Enjoyment has skyrocketed!
Big numbers are cool the first couple of times. After it happens once or twice though, I feel like it’s a natural progression to graduate to entertaining play. The premise of “entertain deity with amusing battle tactics” is rock freaking solid in my book.
Yeah, so far the banter has been fun.
felt sorry for the Ettin guard yesterday: We tried to talk to him, he spoke common. First Gun Slinger fucks up her diplomacy then Barbarian tries to intimidate. Grippli trying to intimidate the Ettin into giving up is just not fair at lvl9, there is no chance to re-consider after the first hit.
It depends on the people:
I had one case where we were seven PCs and the adventure was geared towards three. In the whole campaign, i got attacked (but not hit), once.
The DM knew it was an issue but did not want to make the sessions even longer and the advices i gave him were not enough to convince him, and the others did not care at all. My guess is because they did not know how easy things really were and that they were fine as most of the time was spent as comedy out of combat and grabbing one PC to avoid having a Leroy Jenkins moment on every encounter.
I had another where nothing survived round 2, and they were also so fine and conscious of it that they lent me a PC from someone that could not come that day (even though i was almost a newbie with the system).