Building a multi-goal encounter

The scenario: The Evil Wizard has just completed a ritual to open a planar rift, and Important Generic NPC has been sucked therein. Now, Things of Evil emerge from the rift, so the PCs need to close it before, quite literally, All Hell Breaks Loose. The Evil Wizard, meanwhile, seeks to escape the PCs' clutches via a teleportation circle, while his lackeys attempt to finish off the PCs.

How would you go about building such an encounter, one that contains combat elements and, potentially, two skill challenges: closing the portal, and preventing Evil Wizard's escape? How would you handle action economy for the various challenges that pull the PCs' attention in various directions at once?

darkbard said:

The scenario: The Evil Wizard has just completed a ritual to open a planar rift, and Important Generic NPC has been sucked therein. Now, Things of Evil emerge from the rift, so the PCs need to close it before, quite literally, All Hell Breaks Loose. The Evil Wizard, meanwhile, seeks to escape the PCs' clutches via a teleportation circle, while his lackeys attempt to finish off the PCs.

How would you go about building such an encounter, one that contains combat elements and, potentially, two skill challenges: closing the portal, and preventing Evil Wizard's escape? How would you handle action economy for the various challenges that pull the PCs' attention in various directions at once?

Click to expand...

Are you asking about how as in "set CR" or mechanics?

I will try both.

At the outset i established an expansion of the three way dance death save for most any non-immediate task.

So if closing portal could be done in,combat, i would use that with each fail also bringing a bad thru.

For CR estimation, i would judge it as if any character that was going to be tied up for much of the fight was absent and assess CR based on that number of PCs.

In truth, they might get some impact but just the same other pc efforts may be diverted to keep them up.

But this would only work if they could not just ko the bad guys then do portal.

Sent from my VS995 using EN World mobile app

A few ideas,...

Combat: Every x round(s) a new baddy pops through the portal. That should be incentive enough to get it closed. The Wizard’ s lackeys could move to protect the fleeing wizard or guard the portal. Maybe even try to push PCs into the portal.

Closing the Portal: The simple way would be to require a series of standard action arcana/thievery/religion (whatever) checks to disrupt the magic or defuse the portal. Kind of abstract, but easy to do.

Another idea is to have components/artifacts/items dispersed across the chamber and the PCs need to gather/destroy/deactivate them to end the ritual/disrupt the magic keeping the portal open. Maybe they need to gather (Move action) all the components and toss (Minor/Standard Action?) them into the portal to close it.

Escaping Wizard: Easiest solution (and the one my players would think of first) would be to kill him. Or at least stun or immobilize him. Alternatively, Standard Action Arcana (or whatever) checks to disrupt or deactivate the teleportation circle. Requires # number of successes. Or, again, could have some item located in the chamber that when brought into the teleportation circle renders it inert?

I ran a similar encounter a while back. A Duergar Priest had open 3 portals and a new Devil was popping through each round. I determined randomly which portal it came through and had a premade list of the Devils that would be coming through (rolled for them randomly too). It could be a standard monster (e.g., Bearded, Spined, Chain Devil) or a group of minion Legionnaires. To close an individual portal required a standard action Arcana check. To close the first portal was a difficult DC. Once that was closed, closing the second portal became a moderate DC, and closing the final an easy DC. Once the party realized that they needed to close the portals, it took the Wizard 4 or 5 rounds to move around, dodging Devils and Duergars, and close all three.

At the same time, there were three Wights chained to three stone pillars. The chains were pulled tight to the pillar at the start of the encounter, restraining the Wights. The Duergar Priest released a wheel lock, which allowed the Wights to move up to 5 spaces from their respective pillars (still chained, but the chains were now loose). Using Athletics, a PC could turn the wheel to rewind the Wights’ chains and restrain them again (or the PCs could just kill them).

Hopefully some helpful ideas here.

5ekyu said:

Are you asking about how as in "set CR" or mechanics?

Click to expand...

I thought I was asking merely about the latter, but now that I've had some time to ruminate on this situation and get my thoughts in order I realize it's also the former. To wit: how does one fairly balance an encounter in which one of the primary combatants (indeed, by power level and story needs, the primary combatant) may be able to enact an escape. Or not, and the PCs are left to face him in addition to the cronies, etc. If the Evil Wizard escapes quickly, the encounter risks being a cakewalk. If he sticks around and does not manage to effect an escape at all, the encounter becomes much more challenging, potentially running into TPK territory if he sways the power of Team Monster too much.

Just to pile on the pressure, there's rescuing Important Generic NPC from beyond the rift before they close it...

One approach would be to calculate your XP budget for the encounter assuming the Wizard will stay for the entire battle. If he stays, then you are fine. If he manages to escape via the teleportation circle, you could have something(s) else of the same (or more!) XP value teleport into the battle (i.e., he escapes and send some of his nastier minions back to finish off the pesky PCs) or come out of the portal. Kind of a meta-gamey solution, but it will keep the encounter balance the same. With the Wizard gone, closing the portal becomes the primary objective. As Rabulias suggested, you could pile on the pressure from that to keep the encounter at the challenge level desired.

Alternatively, if the Wizard escapes, just let it be a cake walk. Turns out this is not the final confrontation with their enemy. That will come another time.

I'm also interested in how others would run keeping Evil Wizard from escaping. Skill challenge? Require him to finish two consecutive turns within the space of the teleportation circle (thus emphasizing PC enemy movement powers)?

Again, a sticking point for me is action economy and positioning if closing the portal is a skill challenge going on simultaneously to the combat. Using standard actions to close the portal gives the PCs virtually no chance of stopping Evil Wizard or engaging Team Monster as they try to enact a smackdown on the PCs. Plus, many PC combos require use of move or minor actions.

Ideally, I would love for this scenario to put the PCs into the position of making difficult choices--engage the enemy, close the portal, prevent the escape--where achieving all 3 is plausible but unlikely, requiring extraordinary skill and luck. All this while avoiding a TPK.

My take on this:

Use skill challenges.

Make the required actions minor actions.

Allow using a standard action for a substantial bonus - something like: +10 to check, 2 success (or something)

Force player movement:
- the portal's weak glyph changes spot every time someone attempts a check
- the room's defenses spring a [death obelisk] adjacent to a PC within 2 squares of the teleportation circle. The [death obelisk] has an aura 1 that deals damage/effect at the end of the player's turn.
- the foes the PCs face have plenty of forced movement (I encourage push and pull - they require less reflection, and offer very clever players some agency as to end result)
- the room has a few very desirable defensive positions that also don't offer the opportunity to participate in the challenges...
- the room has a few very desirable offensive positions. But let's just say that defense suffers... at lot. hehehe

Figure out the numbers based on your group size.
- If you have 5 players, it's "easy" to plan and design around 1-2 on portal, 1-2 on wizard, 2-3 on foes.
- (keeping with 5) Plan for 1 PC on each "event" and 3 on foe management.
- Restrict possible gains per round on each event.
- Try and make the restrictions organic: there are only 1 or 2 squares where they can interact with it. There is an obvious sequence to the "event" and it takes a bit of a time (a round) until one action "resolves" to enable the next part (a pillar is damaged and will fall at the player's next start).

... my take for now.

Addendum to the [sequence] idea:
- if you make it so there are very different skill sets required for the sequence of an event, you can force players to change "spots" within the encounter

Ex: Closing the portal
- first thing : there's a "shell" around it that stops manipulation of the sigils/glyphs (Str)
- Second : the glyphs (Int)
- Third : the power source is inside a stone idol / cube / whatever (back to Str)
- Forth : [choice time] it's volatile! (Int - safe) (Str - explodes)

Stopping Teleport
It's a 3-step process for bad-guy:
1 - Activate Staff and Orb (this is in a square 5 squares away from circle)
2 - Get to circle (requires the entire round because of LoS and stairs and such)
3 - Activate circle by throwing dust into brazier

Possible fault points (things PCs can exploit):
- deactivate the orb (easy 3 success skill challenge)
- stop from getting to circle / pull from circle
- extinguish brazier / knock it down

For most of these, re-activating/re-lighting stuff requires one action on the wizards part (can't do it AND teleport away).

OK, here's my spin on it. Use combat mechanics as the baseline, but translate some of it into the skill check dimension. So, for instance, the portal is closed by disabling/destroying various objects located at strategic points on the battlefield. These items can be dealt with via an appropriate skill check. Perhaps one requires an Athletics check to knock over the obelisk, and another an Endurance check to reach into the fire and pull out the red hot medallion (bonus points, you get a mark burned into your hand!). Etc. This would be arranged so that it takes say 4 'hits' to 'kill' the gate, which itself spews out some sort of damaging effect every round and is counted as basically a monster in the XP budget.

As for the wizard, 'killing' him achieves success there, but again you could allow some skill checks to help you along. So maybe damaging the wizard's teleport circle does some damage to him (say a surge worth), and that can be achieved via Arcana, Acrobatics, etc. Overall its pretty much a combat and the PCs can decide what order to do things in as they see fit, and you don't need to exercise a huge amount of thought on just exactly how to make each course of action feasible yet not too easy nor harder than simply hacking on the problem.

The more thought I give this, the more I wonder, building on the ideas above, if this might not be handled with some variation of the p42 stunting subsystem. That is, each PC's turn consists of a minor, move, and standard action, but the standard action has built into it 2 actions: a skill check in the SC and some other, most likely attack, action.

What are folks' thoughts on this? Would you have the non-skill portion of the attack mimic the actual stunting mechanics, or would you just stick to the PCs' normal attacks and tack on a skill check?

Also, what possible "change the scenario" obstacles might one envision for such a relatively static SC as interacting with a fixed object? That is, PC A successfully uses Arcana for a success, dampening the necrotic energies being emitted from the portal. Yay, success! Then what does one present to PC B? And then PC C?