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D&D 5E Do You Tinker with Adventures to Make Them "Winnable"?

Sacrosanct

Legend
I don't think all encounters need to be winnable. That said, I do tinker as well, because if they are key gatekeepers to the next chapter, making them de facto unwinnable (requiring the PCs to have a specific class/spell set up) is not good. It shuts down the entire adventure.

TSR D&D gets a lot of flack for having unwinnable scenarios in it, but in nearly every case, there's always a way to overcome the challenge within the adventure design itself. It may not be easy to find, but there are almost always ways to get past or overcome challenges that PCs can find.
 

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iserith

Magic Wordsmith
What might be interesting to discuss is alternate solutions to the three examples in the original post. I suggested starving out the evil caster in the secret room. What other solutions might there be given the context we're given? I can think of a few.
 

jgsugden

Legend
These sound like bad design, and do not make a lot of sense. Generally speaking, I do not have these problems because I build my own adventures, but those include situations where I expect the PCs to use nonstandard tactics to address a problem.
...
Here are a few recent situations:
1) Party needs to get into room to defeat evil caster who is terrorizing the local village. Caster is safely locked behind a door that (per the adventure) "cannot be damaged, forced open, or opened in any other way besides a knock spell (or a second spell that is fairly obscure)." All the party can do is leave the quest incomplete.
Can the PCs wait for the caster to exit the room? Can the PCs force them out by smoking them out? Are there other creative options for the PCs to get the enemy out?
2) Party enters the first room of the dungeon. There's a monster that is resistant to magic and immune to non-magical weapon attacks (and has a boat load of HP). Party doesn't have magic weapons, because none are placed in the adventure. All the party can do is leave the quest incomplete.
Resistant is not immune. Cantrips can be used to damage while the melee PCs keep it tied up. One PC grapples it, drags it into a corner, and then two others help pin it in and dodge the attacks while spells finish it off.
3) Party fights their way through a dungeon to get to the BBEG. He cannot be reduced below 1 HP unless the party casts one of two spells in another room that they are too level to be able to cast. (The adventure specifically says that no other actions work.) All the party can do is leave the quest incomplete.
Are they meant to know they need to cast the spells? Are they on scrolls anywhere? This one seems like bad design, but you'd usually expect them tp provide a solution to a problem. If not, can they acquire scrolls and return?
 


Lanefan

Victoria Rules
So I'm running an official 5e campaign adventure, which shall remain unnamed so we don't get into spoiler territory. I'm primarily looking for general advice and the points of view of other GMs and players more than specific fixes to the adventure.

Here are a few recent situations:
1) Party needs to get into room to defeat evil caster who is terrorizing the local village. Caster is safely locked behind a door that (per the adventure) "cannot be damaged, forced open, or opened in any other way besides a knock spell (or a second spell that is fairly obscure)." All the party can do is leave the quest incomplete.
2) Party enters the first room of the dungeon. There's a monster that is resistant to magic and immune to non-magical weapon attacks (and has a boat load of HP). Party doesn't have magic weapons, because none are placed in the adventure. All the party can do is leave the quest incomplete.
3) Party fights their way through a dungeon to get to the BBEG. He cannot be reduced below 1 HP unless the party casts one of two spells in another room that they are too level to be able to cast. (The adventure specifically says that no other actions work.) All the party can do is leave the quest incomplete.

There are more examples in this adventure, and it's certainly not the way I'd design my own games.

Would you tinker with the adventure to give them a fighting chance?
Nope.

Sometimes the PCs just have to accept that what they're attempting is (currently) beyond them. That said, I'll allow creative solutions to work if the dice agree, e.g. if they can't get through that knock-only door can they outright remove the door from its hinges/frame, or remove the whole frame from the wall? Or - and I've seen this done - turn a Dwarf loose on the wall for a few hours and chop a new opening through it. Or is there another means of access?

As for magic weapons, is this their first adventure and if not, haven't they picked any up in previous adventures?
Also, when following the milestone XP suggestions, they get nothing for incomplete missions. So they can't level up to be able to complete the other missions, stuck forever at 4th level.
Simple answer there: don't do milestone xp. Instead, give 'em the by-encounter xp they earn for what they do, and eventually they'll level up.
 

ccs

41st lv DM
So I'm running an official 5e campaign adventure, which shall remain unnamed so we don't get into spoiler territory. I'm primarily looking for general advice and the points of view of other GMs and players more than specific fixes to the adventure.

Here are a few recent situations:
1) Party needs to get into room to defeat evil caster who is terrorizing the local village. Caster is safely locked behind a door that (per the adventure) "cannot be damaged, forced open, or opened in any other way besides a knock spell (or a second spell that is fairly obscure)." All the party can do is leave the quest incomplete.
My players would've asked me "What are the walls made out of?"
Failing to mine through the walls....
If there was any space under the door? They'd light a fire & set up a bellows system to smoke her out.

2) Party enters the first room of the dungeon. There's a monster that is resistant to magic and immune to non-magical weapon attacks (and has a boat load of HP). Party doesn't have magic weapons, because none are placed in the adventure. All the party can do is leave the quest incomplete.
Ok, so the thing can't be hurt.
Is it immune to grapple? Being tied up? And then being drug outside & drowned in the nearest stream?

3) Party fights their way through a dungeon to get to the BBEG. He cannot be reduced below 1 HP unless the party casts one of two spells in another room that they are too level to be able to cast. (The adventure specifically says that no other actions work.) All the party can do is leave the quest incomplete.
See the above question concerning grapple & rope. Being unable to be reduced to 0HP doesn't mean you can't still be defeated....
 

aco175

Legend
Pretty standard for the fantasy genre, too. In the Hobbit, there’s writing that can only be read under the light of the moon (and sometimes only during a specific phase of the moon), doors whose key holes are only accessible at certain dates, and a dragon who has exactly ONE vulnerable spot. Figure it out and do the thing.
I agree that it is standard for fantasy and there is a place for some of this in D&D. The problem with The Hobbit is that the DM would have to railroad the party to be at places and meet people like powerful NPCs that had information. This works in a story, but may not work at the game table.

I try to give clues and options on treasure to assist. The party may have an opportunity to buy a scroll with a knock spell or get a secret note from another bad guy they defeated with a clue. Kind of like the rule of 3 mentioned above. I also have no problem giving out a few more items and cool weapons that the adventure may provide. By 5th level most of the PCs in my games will have something, even if they all do not have a magic weapon.

I once made a dungeon that had a imprint of a sword on the wall in the one of the final rooms. This was a clue to a further quest where the actual sword is placed in the imprint and a door/portal opens allowing the party to enter. This 'door' was not really part of the initial mission so it was not meant to enter at that time, so maybe this is the same as the OP but the players were ok with having to come back later. They did get some information from the old writings on the wall from the original use of the dungeon and not the current bad guys living there.
 

Dessert Nomad

Adventurer
The reason that I like TTRPGs enough to put in the effort to coordinate to play them with other people instead of playing things like CRPGs or MMORPGs is that you have an actual person abjudicating your interaction with the game instead of a PC. This means that you aren't limited to CRPG or Adventure Game style puzzles where you have to pixel hunt, find the one thing that works, or save and load until you succeed on a particular check. So not only will I modify published adventures, I think it's bad DMing to run encounters like you described as-written, because they play like CRPG encounters rather than TTRPG encounters.

The 'completely invulnerable door that only opens to two spells that the PCs might not even have, and might not have anyone who can cast' is an example of something completely artificial that doesn't IMO belong in a TTRPG. It's also really cheesy in my book that it's essentially asking 'do you have an arcane caster who took this specific spell? It's either trivial or impossible depending on your answer.' You can look at things like Is the door really invulnerable, or just warded - and what about the hinges, walls, floor, ceiling, and other pieces that could be taken apart or destroyed? If the players don't have a particular spell to get through a door and there's not a time limit, something like stonemason's tools or carpentry tools could do the job. Or the party can just wait outside until the mage has to come outside for food/water/rest-of-their-life.

The mostly immune creature should have some option to be grappled or restrained, lured away, hit with some kind of trap, or something along those lines. If it's so tough that the party really can't use other options without dying then it might need to be adjusted to be weaker, and if it's set up so that it can't be dealt with by anything other than a straight fight I'd definitely change that. Similarly, the end boss who's just immune to dying shouldn't be a 'do you happen to have exactly the right spell available and prepared' check, but instead that should be something the PCs can figure out, and if the party doesn't happen to have the exact spell there should be some alternative way to disable his death immunity - possibly things like restraining him or trapping him.

Another example from a published adventure that I change: there's an AL module Tales Trees Tell where PCs have to go into an angry hag's woods and attempt to talk her into something between don't kill us, don't kill the town, and keep helping the town in the big crisis that's coming. It's a great atmospheric adventure with a lot of Grimm's Fairy Tale type of horror most of the way though. But as written, at the end the party has to make at least half of a party-wide set of persuasion checks that will probably average about 50-50 if the party plays well and only has one 'face', and if they fail the Hag fights them in a fight that's pretty easy to win and then leaves. It's dumb both because it's pretty much just a coin flip for success/failure, and because the hag should be someone the party is terrified to confront, not someone they easily best in a fight. I completely redo the ending when I run that module and instead of a bland persuasion check roleplay out the bargaining with some persuasion helping determine what happens, and if they do completely fail to reach a deal, they just get the 'now I'm your enemy' bit instead of an easily cleared fight they can win.
 

Dessert Nomad

Adventurer
Pretty standard for the fantasy genre, too. In the Hobbit, there’s writing that can only be read under the light of the moon (and sometimes only during a specific phase of the moon), doors whose key holes are only accessible at certain dates, and a dragon who has exactly ONE vulnerable spot. Figure it out and do the thing.

Those are not like the situations the OP published - the door in the Hobbit can be read by anyone if they're there at the right time, same with the keyholes. I think it would be more similar if the writing could only be read if you had an Easterling who studied a particular piece of lore, which the party in the Hobbit simply didn't have available. Similarly, if Smaug was only vulnerable to a blow from an Easterling with one of two specific weapons, it would be like what the OP encountered.

And if the whole adventure had to come to a hard stop because the party is composed of various fighter-type Dwarves with one hobbit and one wizard, and the only people they can call on for help are not Easterlings, the Hobbit would be a much less popular book.
 


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