Power is Relative

[Maxperson]

It is definitely a joke. In my way, I'm agreeing with you.

I think that a DM who scales foes to my power level is essentially gaming me, making all my optimization a pointless exercise. The joke I was trying to make was about how perhaps the only option available to me was to game him in return.

It's sort of the result you predicted early in the thread.

This is why I do a mix. Players in my experience want to be challenged, but they also don't want their optimization to be pointless.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Unless the DM is changing the foe mid-combat. Then I'm walking from the game




to the beer fridge.

I take it the pretzels are already on the table.

It really is just a matter of style as far as adapting to the party goes.

 

[devincutler]

While your analysis is correct for homebrews, many campaigns use printed modules (such as the official adventure paths) and many DMs are reluctant to alter those encounters. Therefore, players can beat the curve in those instances.

 

[devincutler]

I never look at the PCs before determining which monsters live in an area, or how those monsters are organized. At most, I'll keep in mind the concept of level advancement when I design a world, such that characters might progress through successively stronger areas as they move further away from civilization.

If I were to change the monsters to keep them in line with the PCs, then it would result in degenerate gameplay, such as a fighter who doesn't use armor or weapons because they know that there's no point. I would rather that the players make decisions as their characters would, which means they should optimize themselves to the best of their abilities, because they know that the world isn't going to go easy on them just because they're incompetent.

I find this to be true and not true for me.

What I mean is, for example, I have wandering encounter charts for my world. I also have every monster charted for its geographical location/habitat in my homebrew world (example, basilisks are native to a single mountain range in my world). So in that sense, no, I do not change these encounters based on PC level or power.

HOWEVER, a random roll of, say, an adult red dragon when the PCs are at 1st level is going to be an entirely different encounter than one when the PCs are 12th level. The former will be a far off sighting where the PCs have the chance to take cover, or the dragon might even want something from the PCs and make peaceful contact. The latter could be a straight up fight.

That said, my PCs know if they have fair warning, then it's on.

As an aside, in a 2e campaign I once put 1st level PCs up against a demilich (in a fashion). They were tasked with recovering an item from an ancient wizard's tower. They recovered the item on the second to last upper level of the tower after fighting level appropriate foes. Being curious adventurers, they went to the top floor and found an ornate sarcophagus, carved with arcane runes of power. A PC touched the sarcophagus and a floating skull with gems for eyes and teeth phased through it and told them that it was the demilich spirit of the wizard and if they touched or disturbed the sarcophagus in any way, it would consume their souls. All but one of the PCs fled. The last PLAYER said "There is no way this is a demilich. That's the most powerful creature in 2e and Devin would never throw that at 1st level characters". So her PC touched it, the skull floated up, and consumed the PCs' soul. End of PC.

My point is that you can keep verisimilitude in a setting and not scale all encounters to the PCs while still accommodating their level or lack thereof.

 

[devincutler]

No, we pretty much try to optimize all the time. We just don’t always succeed.

Going to school as a child? Someone was trying to optimize your education.
Getting a job? You better believe your office is trying to optimize your output.
Pretty much any trade skill, you are trying to optimize your skills and learn new tricks to do a better job or save time.

Few people optimize EVERYTHING, but it’s absolutely reasonable that adventurers would make an above average effort to optimize adventuring. Because death.

I think people are not understanding the word "optimize".

Definition: make the best or most effective use of (a situation, opportunity, or resource).

Best and most are the key words here. We are not talking about simply increasing effectiveness. Optimize means squeezing every last drop of efficiency.

Sending a child to school is not even close to optimizing. Sending a child to the best private school in the nation is. Very few people can do that.

EDIT: Just realized I did 3 consecutive posts instead of one combined post. Please accept my apologies.

 

[TwoSix]

As a DM, I find extreme character optimization efforts to be funny. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a player trying to make an effective character and I do it also when I’m the player, but not at the sacrifice of what I consider to be an interesting character to role-play. As a DM, it always makes me chuckle.

Players will often claw and scratch their way to being as powerful as they possibly can in some desperate hope to tilt the game to their advantage. I don’t know how most of you other DMs do it, but I write encounters specifically to challenge the PCs. Meaning, the more powerful the PCs are, the more powerful of an encounter I present.

<shrug>

Not really concerned how powerful the encounter is. What I care about is if I have the players and DM awaiting my turn, because they expect me to pull off something awesome to turn the fight because that's what I always do. That's powergaming just enough to win D&D, for me.

 

[guachi]

I am disappoint.

Here I thought a post entitled "Power is Relative" would be about the Ancestral Guardian Barbarian sub-class and how all power comes from your (dead) relatives.