Encounter difficulty with 3 players

Konquest · Feb 4, 2010

So dig this, I decided to do a one-shot delve for my 3 friends, a level 1 adventure from the starter set, with the xp budget per encounter diminished for their party size. they formed up a team of a striker, a controller, and a defender. Knowing they didn't have a leader, I switched out some of the gold in the treasure parcels with health potions to compensate. The heroes enter into the final battle against a hobgoblin soldier, warcaster, and 4 grunts (450 xp).

This results in a total party kill.

At this point I'm wondering what went wrong, since they used their powers (though the dailies were used in previous combats) and progressed well earlier. Ironically, last year I had them go up against 4 grunts and a soldier the previous year (300 xp), and that also resulted in a TPK.

So what monster roles should I not put up against the players if they're lacking either a striker, a leader, defender, or controller? Should I not put them up against brutes and soldiers of levels higher than them?

P.S: In hard encounters, should the maximum level of a monster placed be 5 or 7 above the party? The DMG says both on pages 56-57.
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Garris · Feb 4, 2010

The Hobgoblin Warcaster is a DEFINITE no-no. Look at its attacks relative to a level 1 party's health. Your party lacks leaders, higher level monsters are, altogether, something you should consider limiting. Consider Level + 3 the correct guideline until you're sure it's not a problem. If you need bigger monsters consider using a lower leveled elite (MM2+). As to last year's death to 4 grunts and a soldier? I can only assume every last one of them had ONLY attacks targeting AC.

Why don't you say what happened? Surely the fight this year is fresh in memory.

eriktheguy · Feb 4, 2010

I'm looking at the numbers and I can't see how they got TPked.
I am guessing that your players had a tough time hitting the soldier (AC 22 at level 1 is kind of brutal). But those minions would have dropped fast in front of 3 of my players. Their controller should have been able to take them all out in 2 or 3 rounds.
Many DMs find it best to use monsters of the party's level or lower. Defenses get high quick in 4e. How many of the players missed with an encounter power that fight?
A rule of thumb that I ripped off from Stalker0 is that brutes can be up to 2 levels higher (they tend to have low def), artillery can be 2 levels lower (they have great attack values) and soldiers are just bad juju (they add little interest to the fight). Everything else should be party level or lower.

Try the fight again, just as an experiment. Tell the players to target minions first, and the soldier last. See if they can win. Focus fire and coordination are important.
In general, tell them about which targets are the most valuable. Minions deal serious damage but die fast. High priority.
Artillery, lurkers and controllers are high priority. They do lots of damage but are easy to kill if you can get to them.
Brutes and skirmishers have average overall offensive and staying power, so make them medium priority.
Soldiers deal little damage and have high defense, so don't waste attacks on them unless there is nothing else to do.

Blackbrrd · Feb 4, 2010

The problem is that a smaller party has a lot less synergy than a bigger party. In other words, you can't just linearly scale the encounter xp budget. In addition, the smaller the party is the more luck-based combat is going to be. Normally this can be offset slightly by a leader, but your party doesn't have one. I would probably go with level N encounters for your party, at least until they have some better escape buttons.

Some other notes:
That warcaster is really really bad. He dazes, AOE-damages and does a lot of damage.
The hobgoblin soldier has extremely solid defences and with the warcaster shutting down 1/3 of the party he just won't go down in any timely fashion.
The synergy of these two mobs is really bad news to the party.

eamon · Feb 4, 2010

The fact that their dailies were gone does definitely matter, as does the lack of a leader - did they have and use potions of healing?

The warcaster looks like it'll rarely miss the PC's. He does quite a bit of damage too, for a controller. Looks like he's got PC-esque defenses and better than PC attack-bonuses (+7 vs. NAD's? ouch; +8 vs AC? also better than your typical PC), and every other turn he'll be using a 15 damage and dazing attack. So, that warcaster looks pretty much like a solid PC - except it has twice the hitpoints and high attacks. That thing alone is presumably half an encounter; 3 of them is basically a party of better-than-PC's: 'course they'll win. And, it so happens your 450XP encounter is theoretically equivalent to 3 of these guys.

The soldier doesn't look much weaker; probably just the soldier and the warcaster would have been tricky by themselves.

First level parties are particularly fragile; such parties tend to trail 2nd level parties by +2 attacks and defenses simply by virtue of not having magic armor+weaponry and by the fact that 1/2 level bonuses are rounded down (and that's not even considering the extra feat, utility power and hit points 2nd level brings).

So, factors that contributed were probably
- swinginess (small parties are more swingy, but you remember the negative outliers better...)
- 1st level is abnormally weak
- lack of leader
- lack of daily powers

If you'd repeat that with, say, a cha-paladin and a cleric (instead of the other defende and controller), they might even manage (paladins, by virtue of their high defenses, healing, and marking work particularly well in such small parties). But in any case, 1st level small parties are going to be a minefield; them's the breaks...

Mengu · Feb 4, 2010

It might seem like a party of 3 will be about 60% as efficient as a party of 5, but this is never the case. There is less synergy and less redundancy. And when 1 member goes down, they become a 2-man party instead of a party of 5 which only goes down to 4. So luck can make it swing very quickly in the smaller party's disfavor. (A bit off topic, but similar logic applies when running for a party of 6. An increase of 20% in monster XP budget does not seem quite sufficient.)

For smaller parties, you definitely don't want to go too high with the challenges. Level+2 is probably as high as I would go for encounter. And for monsters they face, I'd say no higher than level+4. Others have already given good advice on what monster roles to use and not to use, so I won't go into that.

If your group likes the higher challenge fights, one option might be to give an action point every encounter instead of milestone. Another option may be to give characters a once per day ability to refresh a daily power (akin to a salve of power).

I personally prefer resource management challenges through easier but numerous encounters, over few big encounters.

Last, but not least, I'm not sure if it's relevant here or not but a DMing tip... I've come close to TPK's before. If you want to avoid it, give the PC's a way out. Flight and surrender are two easy options, though depending on the group, these options get ignore a bit too much by players. But the heroic sacrifice of one character to allow the others to get away can sometimes work out. Rescue by a third party, or the appearance of yet a new nemesis for both sides of the fight, or some other event like the sudden flooding of a cave, or an explosion elsewhere, starting to bring down a building, that shakes up the encounter can be interesting, and can swing things around. When you're exploring how much the PC's can handle, you can sometimes overdo it, and having a contingency plan is always beneficial.

Amaroq · Feb 5, 2010

First level parties are easy to TPK; I've found it useful to "test run" most of my challenging low-level encounters against my party before I play them out. Its a lot easier to balance "challenge" vs "TPK chance", in my experience. Sometimes the TPK is easier with certain combinations of monsters and/or starting squares due to synergies, etc.

Sometimes the "fix" is simple. For example, I had an encounter set up against a pack of wolves (literally, the L2 Skirmisher "Gray Wolf"), and found that they TPK'ed the L1 party easily despite being level-appropriate in encounter XP. The reason? The "pull prone" and "double damage vs prone" synergised really well, and I had the wolves all rolling a single initiative. You'd wind up with one wolf pulling somebody down, then all the other wolves "savaging" the prone one before the party could react.

Putting the wolves each on their own initiative broke that combat into a fun win for the party: they were able to move around to prevent the worst combat-advantage, and they did a lot of good work to screen the person who was down until they could get back to their feet.

surfarcher · Feb 5, 2010

How about "bench testing" your encounters?

It sounds like a good option for those of us who don't get to D&D weekly.

Nifft · Feb 5, 2010

Make all of them play Leaders. They'll see how awesomely rewarding teamwork is, and they can plan their next party accordingly.

Melee Cleric
Warlord
Melee Bard

Cheers, -- N

eriktheguy · Feb 5, 2010

Another solution. If you are a handy multitasker, throw an NPC in the party. IF your players are good gamers, allow one or two of them to control 2 PCs. Beef up the party a bit and they should be able to take on those tough encounters no problem.