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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Composer99" data-source="post: 9394679" data-attributes="member: 7030042">On Challenging PCs...I'm not terribly impressed by the assertion that "struggle makes the victory sweeter" when it comes to leisure time activities. Waiting for an hour in the line at the roller coaster doesn't make it more fun and enjoyable when you finally get on it. Suffice to say such a thing can be true for some and not true for others.If anything I'm more inclined to agree with DMs posting here saying that more robust and harder-to-kill PCs are easier to challenge in combat, precisely because you can run things more no-holds-barred. That certainly tracks with my experience: in the game for adult players <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/poignant-d-d-moments.701471/" target="_blank">I wrapped up late last year</a>, I ran large encounters with juiced-up numbers of enemies (and a few monsters from EN Publishing's Level Up!) in order to put the PCs through their paces, holding nothing back. It was great!By contrast, the kids I'm running a game for at the moment are still figuring their way. The party druid's primary combat shtick is to cast shillelagh and get into melee. I can't recall the last time he's cast a levelled spell other than cure wounds in months, and he's hardly made any use of wild shape to scout or... do anything, really. Except for the party barbarian, who has a low bar to clear for effectiveness in combat - and yet who has still chosen an anti-synergistic primal path relative to his preferred fighting style! - the party is hard-pressed to overcome even simple combat challenges. Out-of-combat, they're not very good at taking the initiative. A few are only just finding their feet now with creative applications of their abilities outside of the Attack action. Any "real" challenge would tear the party up like a paper bag.I could "teach some lessons" by killing characters off, but I'm not really interested. We aren't playing a Darkest-Dungeon-style dungeon crawler, after all.As a bit of a follow-up/aside: most cinema-goers would, I think, agree that, say, Spider-Man: No Way Home was an excellent film, despite the fact that there was no genuine risk that Tom Holland's Spider-Man would die. (And indeed, the same is true for most celebrated action-adventure films.) That's because the questions the film is interested in asking don't require that kind of risk to challenge the protagonists.In a similar vein, we hardly need to threaten the player characters with death to challenge them, provided the challenges are coming out of the players' conception for them and how they interact with the game world. The kinds of questions I refer to in the thread about resource management...are, in fact, challenges in their own way, much in the same way the choices Tom Holland's Spider-Man faces in Spider-Man: No Way Home are challenges not to his life, but to his character. These are the kinds of questions I'm interested in presenting to the player characters in the kids' game.On Harder Game State TrackingI'm much more inclined to be sympathetic to this concern! I recall it was hard work running some of the big set pieces in the game I wrapped up. I play a 4e game weekly, and while I'm enjoying it, it's quite apparent there's a lot to keep track of, especially now we're playing in paragon levels. If the 2024 release adds a lot of game state complexity, it can be quite a burden on DMs.I like 4e-style monster design, and would say it would be to the good for 2024 MM monsters to adopt more of that approach as has been done with MotMM, with fewer boring sacks of hit points and more foisting of moment-to-moment tactical decisions on players. More interesting monsters to run are... well, more interesting and more fun! But that also increases the cognitive load on DMs.If the 2024 revisions can offer any relief here, it would be better guidance on how to curate non-combat or exploration or social aspects of the game to reduce the importance of combat in the game. The less you need to turn to combat (which is the rules-heaviest part of play after all), the less cognitive overhead moment-to-moment.</blockquote>

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