Is Power Creep Real? If so, how do you fight it?

[Odhanan]

Nah, old school would be killing the guy and finding the stuff you could use to hurt him in his loot, after he's already dead.

LOL Indeed, that is Old School to me!

 

[Doug McCrae]

And this is relevant because...?

I dunno, I just like calling everything old school these days.

The specific items you need being scattered round the dungeon reminded me of Temple Of Elemental Evil.

 

[Thurbane]

Rakshasa anyone? DR 15/good and piercing - a carry over from the good ole blessed crossbow bolt.

Seriously, DR 15 with a type the party is relatively unlikely to have weapons to counter, coupled with fairly high SR, can lead to a monster than can easily kick the butts of an appropriate level party.

Maybe I'm just being narrow sighted and missing something obvious, though...

 

[Doug McCrae]

The rakshasa is the king of defence but it can't actually do very much. Just grapple or ignore it.

 

[RFisher]

Seriously, DR 15 with a type the party is relatively unlikely to have weapons to counter, coupled with fairly high SR, can lead to a monster than can easily kick the butts of an appropriate level party.

I think the original question was more of an overall thing, not just a single tough encounter.

& isn't there a place in the game for encounters that outclass the PCs? Should the PCs never have to retreat? Should the PCs never have to regroup & seek different equipment or devise other ways to shift things in their favor in a rematch? Should there never be an encounter that the PCs should just plain avoid & find a way around?

Unless the PCs have gone someplace where they should be outclassed by (or outclass) everything they encounter, I'll fudge things a bit to adjust the challenge to the party. I'm less likely to fudge an individual encounter to make it more or less challenging, though. You want the PCs to sometimes just be awesome & sometimes be reminded that there's always something with more HD than themselves.

 

[Snotlord]

Pazio and more recent wotc books are IMO more accurate in terms of CR. NPC and MM encounter are usually easy (as in mostly boring) with evenly matched characters.
The characters in my games tend to be underequipped and we mostly stick to Core or FR sources, with a few things from the first four Complete books.

... but if there was a power creep, I would try to the most simple solution possible. I would try to be simply be careful with sources I don't trust (new monster books or adventures, if that is the case), or simply hand out more treasure and use the new sources as written.
I would certainly not try to rewrite the system to make it fit my ideas of what the power level should be. DMing is time consuming as it is.

 

[Toras]

Fire or an Axe.

But seriously, it really depends on if your characters (power gamed, creation method, equipment) and your players. We find that we can occassionally blow through things out of our CR by using tactics (not the lead scry-fry or anything like that) But explosive ruins hidden in a illusory terrain is a great thing to lure impossible to hit guys into. (explode on contact, can be replaced by Force Beard or Mechanical traps)

 

[Edena_of_Neith]

(snip)

Has anyone else noticed a trend of WotC's making modules more and more difficult?

Probably.

How can a group of players contend with the machine of WotC publishing?

Decide on a rulesset that you and your players are comfortable with. Then stick with it.
Remember that you and your gaming group are *friends.* You are there to have *fun.* Take these into account as your primary two considerations when deciding on the rulesset, and thereafter.
If you must change the rulesset, do it for the advantage of your players. Make your players happy. That is what you are there for.

It seems that opening up class and race books slows down game play and waters down the group, reducing its overall power level.

Ok, think of Knightmare Chess. It's like chess, except you have cards, and you don't know what the cards are, but each and every card changes the rules in some way.
Adapt that to D&D. You don't know all the rules. You never will know all the rules (unless you buy all the books, memorize every page, and keep up with all the errata ... a feat that would make a Star Fleet Battles or I.C.E. veteran green with envy.) Your players will never know all the rules.
And heck, the rules are subject to interpretation. Always were, always will be.

So ... play Newbie. Don't stop play to research rules. Just decide on the fly. (Don't know what that feat does? Take your player's word on what it does! Even if that means the moon is made of green cheese. I'm serious!!)
Treat all these books like cards in the Knightmare Chess game. You don't know what they'll say or throw at you (they may just throw a Frenzied Berserker or Feat Master at you! ) but you'll find out, right? Hehe, yes you will. And have fun doing it ... after all, it's your sacred duty as DM to create all those monsters and settings so the players can trash, kill, crush, tear, devour, destroy, annihilate, exterminate, obliterate, and otherwise mess everything up. Only artifacts and relics are immune ... until a Mordenkainen's Disjunction comes along and eliminates them too.
And remember that what comes around, goes around. If your players trash your monsters with some hideous, fiendish new tactic, use it back! Don't like that Irresistible Spell Feat (+4 spell levels, removes all saves) ... throw it on the PCs. Don't let YOUR monsters be push-overs. Revenge is sweet! Make em cringe, make em cower, make em know your monsters are out for some PC butt! (It's an illusion, of course - you have no intention of killing the party ... but don't let THEM know that!)

Never let the rules slow the game down. If someone is making a mistake ('my sword is +2, and +3 against djinn ... I get a +5 then, right? Uh ... wait, that's a natural 19-20 for crits, which means it's +19 or +20? So my sword is +39? Ok, I'll go with that ...') then let it pass until there is a moment to correct it ('that's a +2 sword, meaning it's +2 BAB. It's +3 BAB against djinn.')
Never let the rules slow you down. If you don't know, wing it. If they get upset, wait until they have to DM and find out what kind of difficult job it is!

Do you think that a group that is made up of characters using only the Core Rules should be X levels higher than a group made with all the new crunchy rules from the past 4 years?

If you limit the group to core rules, against NPCs and monsters with access to extra rules, then they should be stronger in *some* way to compensate (that might mean higher level.)
Why not just let the core group have access to all the neat rules the NPCs and monsters have access to?
Or, limit the NPCs and monsters to the core rules?

Do you think the new stuff is well balanced against the Core Rules?

Unknown. I doubt anyone knows the answer to that question (since it would require years of playtesting to find out, and many of these rules are quite new.)
Must it be balanced, though?
If you use it all, it balances out by default (a balance of inbalances, my favorite kind of balance.)
If you would prefer, use only a *certain set* of rules, across the board. That would be balanced.
Or, balance out stronger PCs against monsters with new and wild rulessets (or vice versa.)
Or, anything that is fun. Whatever is fun, should be the first choice.

In short, why are the new official modules consistently kicking the arses of my players, who usually stick with the Core Rules?

Retreater

I don't know.
It is possible your players aren't trying their best.
It is possible your players aren't able to adapt to the new rules as well as you.
It is possible your players are expecting one kind of module (say, thinking module) where you are throwing another kind at them (say, hack and slay.)
It is possible your players aren't cooperating, or perhaps they don't even understand how to cooperate properly ... because they are unfamiliar with the full abilities of their characters.

Or it is possible your players are underpowered, underleveled, or lack the rules your monsters use, and thus they need strengthening or you need to weaken your monsters.

Just musing.

Edena_of_Neith

 

[Shin Ji]

Sure, the example at the top of the post: Power Attack + Diamond Nightmare Blade + Deep Impact.

DNB is balanced by the fact that it's replacing a full attack -- you get exactly one full attack's damage out of a single blow. It's strong because you get the damage of four attacks at full BAB, but as a drawback, you can only crit once.

Deep Impact is balanced by the fact that it can't be used with a full attack -- the assumption was that a single attack with Deep Impact would be worth giving up your iterative attacks.

But together, you can Power Attack for everything and still expect to connect with your DI+DNB. That's as strong as wraithstrike! Never should the optimal combination of an 8th level maneuver and a top-tier Psionic feat approach the value of a 2nd level Arcane spell. Never!

Cheers, -- N

Actually, Deep Impact works quite well with a full attack. It's a nonaction to activate it. True, it only affects one attack (hint- use it for the last one), but that's often enough.

 

[Li Shenron]

Power creep is inherent with the publishing of more and more books. It's about having just a few options per book which are better or cheaper than average. A character using a couple of those options is ok, but things may get nasty in the hands of a player who picks the "slightly better" stuff from each book and combines them. If everyone does that, the game is still ok, but if only some player does it then the game may become unfair, like running the same race with very different cars.

And of course power creep is not blatanly visible, otherwise it would be "power flood". You certainly see it better in higher level campaigns, with PCs that have lots of spells, feats, classes or items.

How to limit the problem is straightforward:

- don't allow using too many books for PC creation in the same campaign (or to the same PC)
- don't be to quick in pushing the campaign to high level
- explicitly agree with the players not to exploit the material too much