If they wanted to, they could make it EASY for players to decide to play a 'face'. Once or twice in an adventure, have the party gets a basic quest reward(potions of healing), but a high charisma check lets the party pick from a list of magic items instead...say a +1 weapon, boots of elven kind, or goggles of night. I guarantee you someone will want to play a face at that point....they will know their choice will have 'tangible' rewards for the whole party, and the party will know it too.
Have we failed to discourage min-maxing?
NeverLucky
First Post
I would love to see more noncombat ways to resolve problems in AL adventures, but I would hate to see adventures where you'd simply fail or get overwhelmed without certain noncombat abilities. AL is focused around public play with players who frequently don't know each other, so it's very easy to have parties that lack particular spells or skills. If a group of players sit down at a convention and they all happen to play paladins, fighters, and barbarians, it's not really their fault that they don't have a trap finder or ritual caster or whatnot. Combat should always be an option to get through an adventure, even if it's not the best option, because D&D is a combat focused game where every class and every character is expected and able to contribute in combat.
Having combat as a failsafe also helps to mitigate for bad or inexperienced DMing, which is important in an environment where you can play with a lot of DMs you don't know. It can be really frustrating trying to find the "right" solution to an investigation or problem when the DM fails to provide necessary clues or is too inflexible to allow for plausible options that aren't written in the adventure. With combat as always a potential option, at least we can hack our way through the adventure if it would otherwise grind to a halt. Hack and slash combat adventures aren't that fun with a bad DM, but investigation/puzzle adventures can be downright nightmarish with a bad DM.
Having combat as a failsafe also helps to mitigate for bad or inexperienced DMing, which is important in an environment where you can play with a lot of DMs you don't know. It can be really frustrating trying to find the "right" solution to an investigation or problem when the DM fails to provide necessary clues or is too inflexible to allow for plausible options that aren't written in the adventure. With combat as always a potential option, at least we can hack our way through the adventure if it would otherwise grind to a halt. Hack and slash combat adventures aren't that fun with a bad DM, but investigation/puzzle adventures can be downright nightmarish with a bad DM.
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Enevhar Aldarion
Hero
As long as things like Adventurer's League and Pathfinder Society, and most other Organized Play groups, are geared towards the time limit imposed by a store or convention setting, combat will almost always trump non-combat. After all, why RP for 15-20 minutes to get past part of a module when you get can clear it with 3-5 minutes of combat? And if the emphasis were to ever be truly shifted, say to where you can only get the info you need if certain NPCs or enemies survive, you would end up with a season where people hated the modules the first time playing them, or a lot of meta-gaming as players shared the details on how to not fail the missions.
What I am curious to see is how the recently announced Call of Cthulhu Organized Play program handles this balance between combat and non-combat and time limits.
What I am curious to see is how the recently announced Call of Cthulhu Organized Play program handles this balance between combat and non-combat and time limits.
Tyranthraxus
Explorer
THere is a great investigative scenario in SEason 2. Ive run in twice and both times it ran really well. I cant remember the name off the top of my head but there is a lot of Non Combat exp awards in it.
Id like to see more like that.
Id like to see more like that.
Hate on 4E's skill challenges all you want, I think having some kind of in-game structure to model non-combat challenges really incentivized their creation. In their absence, authors don't really have anything other than combat to throw their RP budget at, and this is the result.
Personally, I think this is something that improves with expertise over the system. Combat is a comparatively easy thing to get right: just throw some monsters of the appropriate CR, and things should sort themselves out. In comparison, there are all kinds of traps that make investigation/exploration challenges difficult to design, not the least of which is that failing them isn't particularly fun.
It's not a simple task, but like I said, I think the authors will get better at it over time.
Personally, I think this is something that improves with expertise over the system. Combat is a comparatively easy thing to get right: just throw some monsters of the appropriate CR, and things should sort themselves out. In comparison, there are all kinds of traps that make investigation/exploration challenges difficult to design, not the least of which is that failing them isn't particularly fun.
It's not a simple task, but like I said, I think the authors will get better at it over time.
Cascade
First Post
If the party tells their judge that they are more role play focused, the judge can run the adventure with limited combat and certainly allow other options.
The minimum experience for play is quite high and most parties that get the full amount usually haven't killed enough for the xp listed, especially 6 or seven player tables.
Don't focus on the xp per creature, keep the minimum for the adventure as the target and let them have fun.
This isn't an MMO.
The minimum experience for play is quite high and most parties that get the full amount usually haven't killed enough for the xp listed, especially 6 or seven player tables.
Don't focus on the xp per creature, keep the minimum for the adventure as the target and let them have fun.
This isn't an MMO.
Anthraxus
Explorer
I really liked the concept of Skill Challenges in the early part of 4E & LFR. Later though, I grew to dislike how every mod seemed to have a skill challenge, and that some of them did not work very well and seemed shoehorned into the mod.
I have seen a few mods where you can talk your way through unnecessary combats, so that is a good thing. Less combats overall, is what I would prefer.
delericho
Legend
That's the crux of it, I'm afraid. If the game (as a whole, or your table locally) rewards behaviour X, then you will see behaviour X become more prevalent with time. The AL adventures are structured such that the optimal approach is to use a combat-monster, with all non-combat stuff either being strictly optional or being handled without recourse to the mechanics, and so those are the characters you'll see at the table.
For AL to 'fix' this, they'd need to introduce adventures with much more emphasis on non-combat skills such that it's much harder to succeed without those skills. However, if they did that now, they'd get a massive push-back from the player base, who would complain that they've had the goalposts moved on them. Deliberately doing something that's going to make a lot of your customers unhappy is seldom a good idea, so I don't see it happening.
I think this is the key insight, but if it's accurate, I think it also outlines a flaw in the thinking of how AL is organized.
The insight is that the designers always include combat as an option because every character has some combat ability, and if the PCs 'fail' the adventure because they get killed by the monsters, then it's easy to put that failure on the shoulders of the players -- if you were better in combat, you wouldn't have failed the adventure. But that simply highlights how we're actually encouraging min-maxing by trying to avoid a failure state, and leaving the default failure state as 'players didn't optimize enough'.
The problem as I see it is that we can't just decide to hand-wave failure (the whole 'fail forward' thing, which is probably worth a separate thread), because that makes the stakes pointless. Why bother setting up a scenario where you have to race across a city collecting clues when you already know that the big-bad isn't going to start his city-destroying ritual until you get there?
So on the one hand, you have the option to build adventures with a real chance of failure if the party doesn't come properly prepared with a full slate of abilities, which has the potential of leaving some newer players disillusioned that they failed without knowing what they were supposed to do to succeed. On the other hand, you can bake in combat as a failsafe, but that simply encourages players to optimize for combat, which is already known to be a factor that turns off new players from joining the campaign (see LFR, Pathfinder Society, etc.). And assuming there even is a middle ground here, finding it requires you to build very specific types of adventures when your target is to produce literally hundreds of pages of adventure content for each season, without making those adventures feel same-y or repetitive. I don't envy the admins their task here.
Enevhar Aldarion said:
I'm not sure how you're running your combats, but I'd love to be able to finish a typical non-speed-bump combat in 3-5 minutes. In Fourth Edition, the choice was between 15-20 minutes of RP or an hour of combat, and though 5E has streamlined the combat process somewhat, you'll still almost certainly spend over half your typical 4-hour adventure block adjudicating combat. In most cases, providing an RP solution would actually speed up most adventures, especially those that resort to weird, gimmicky combat mechanics as a novelty. (I'm looking at you, Bane of the Tradeways.)
delericho said:
Well, as I point out above, they're on the horns of a dilemma here -- if they don't do anything about the unintentional min-max focus, that's going to ruin the campaign right there, given enough time. (I happen to think the recent DM Quest program is going to accelerate that process, but again, that's a different issue that deserves a separate conversation.) So it might just be a question of 'how do you want the campaign to fail?'
I hate to be cynical enough to suggest that the answer is 'let's leave the incentive to min-max in the adventure design, but publicly tell people they don't need to optimize as a way of trying to convince new players that they won't have to wade through min-maxers to play a fun game, that way we maximize the amount of time before the whole thing collapses under its own weight'. I want to think that the admins are sincere when they say they want new players to not feel the pressure to optimize in order to enjoy their adventuring in AL mods and storylines.
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Pauper
