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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5717476" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>Whereas my way of achieving the "succeed more often" vibe is by playing on the colour, and on the fictional stakes, as I posted earlier.</p><p></p><p>Not off the top of my head, but handy to be reminded of, as my game might be drifting in an underdark direction soon!</p><p></p><p>Whereas I am flexible in both those respects - minion/standard/elite, and level.</p><p></p><p>To try and say more about my approach: there are no gnoll minions in any of the monster books I've got, and late heroic was a bit of a gnoll-fest in my game (The Well of Demons, plus some other encounters adapted from The Night Below). So that means in all their fights against gnolls, the PCs had to really work hard to take them down. Whereas in a more recent encounter with wererats I statted up some wererat minions (because I wanted to keep the numbers the same as in the original Night Below setup). So the wererats were dropping like flies. But I don't particularly narrate this as the gnolls being tough and the wererats being weak. I just narrate the outcomes - "the gnoll parries your blow but you can see the strain on his face" vs "your blow cuts through the wererat's defences and it drops, dead". The balance of skill vs luck, whether we should think of the wererat battle as perhaps involving more time passing while the gnoll battle has been resolved in more gritty detail, is all left unstated and up for grabs. (I know that technically all rounds are 6 seconds, but that rule almost never comes into play in my experience. And because the actual playing out of a round takes much more than 6 seconds, I don't have any trouble imagining killing a minion as being something like compressing the battle in time, while fighting a standard foe involves more detailed attention.)</p><p></p><p></p><p>I use this maths for encounter building, but leave it open how much it correlates to ingame toughness. As with the wererat minions, I leave it unstated whether someone was unskilled, or unlucky, or untough, or some combination of all three.</p><p></p><p>I have had a couple of fights recently with elite wizards, and they put a bit more pressure on the narration. They have many hit points, which means they take a long time to drop. But unlike (for example) a behemoth or owlbear, they don't have a lot of meat that has to be hacked through. And they are unarmoured, and using staves, so I can't use the same narration as I did recently for an elite hobgoblin leader, pitching them as tough and skilled melee combatants in their own right. The melee PCs obviously are highly competent combatants, so I can't just talk about those PCs missing a lot or otherwise being ineffective in their attacks. The solution I have adopted is to describe the wizards as being preternaturally skillful in their parrying with their staves, and their erection of magical shields of defence etc. As their hit points drop, I describe this magical enhanced deftness and protection being worn down.</p><p></p><p>My general goal is to keep the narrative plausible (within the genre parameters) and engaging. But I don't feel any need to adopt some consistent correlation of numbers to fictional elements or capacities. Numbers are just a mechanical device for achieving a fictional outcome.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 5717476, member: 42582"] Whereas my way of achieving the "succeed more often" vibe is by playing on the colour, and on the fictional stakes, as I posted earlier. Not off the top of my head, but handy to be reminded of, as my game might be drifting in an underdark direction soon! Whereas I am flexible in both those respects - minion/standard/elite, and level. To try and say more about my approach: there are no gnoll minions in any of the monster books I've got, and late heroic was a bit of a gnoll-fest in my game (The Well of Demons, plus some other encounters adapted from The Night Below). So that means in all their fights against gnolls, the PCs had to really work hard to take them down. Whereas in a more recent encounter with wererats I statted up some wererat minions (because I wanted to keep the numbers the same as in the original Night Below setup). So the wererats were dropping like flies. But I don't particularly narrate this as the gnolls being tough and the wererats being weak. I just narrate the outcomes - "the gnoll parries your blow but you can see the strain on his face" vs "your blow cuts through the wererat's defences and it drops, dead". The balance of skill vs luck, whether we should think of the wererat battle as perhaps involving more time passing while the gnoll battle has been resolved in more gritty detail, is all left unstated and up for grabs. (I know that technically all rounds are 6 seconds, but that rule almost never comes into play in my experience. And because the actual playing out of a round takes much more than 6 seconds, I don't have any trouble imagining killing a minion as being something like compressing the battle in time, while fighting a standard foe involves more detailed attention.) I use this maths for encounter building, but leave it open how much it correlates to ingame toughness. As with the wererat minions, I leave it unstated whether someone was unskilled, or unlucky, or untough, or some combination of all three. I have had a couple of fights recently with elite wizards, and they put a bit more pressure on the narration. They have many hit points, which means they take a long time to drop. But unlike (for example) a behemoth or owlbear, they don't have a lot of meat that has to be hacked through. And they are unarmoured, and using staves, so I can't use the same narration as I did recently for an elite hobgoblin leader, pitching them as tough and skilled melee combatants in their own right. The melee PCs obviously are highly competent combatants, so I can't just talk about those PCs missing a lot or otherwise being ineffective in their attacks. The solution I have adopted is to describe the wizards as being preternaturally skillful in their parrying with their staves, and their erection of magical shields of defence etc. As their hit points drop, I describe this magical enhanced deftness and protection being worn down. My general goal is to keep the narrative plausible (within the genre parameters) and engaging. But I don't feel any need to adopt some consistent correlation of numbers to fictional elements or capacities. Numbers are just a mechanical device for achieving a fictional outcome. [/QUOTE]
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