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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7480278" data-attributes="member: 4937">My original post could be said to have a simple thesis: AD&D combat with a few or single large monster evolves to a point that most combats are over in a single round, and as such surprise and initiative have a disproportionately high influence on the combat.   I propose that there are two false remedies to that problem.   One solution is increasing the number of monsters, but this leads to grinding combats like for example the first set piece battle in "Isle of the Ape" where in round 1 the monsters make 300 attacks in that round alone.   Also, this solution tends to involve high levels of cheese and DM antagonism, as scene 'Tucker's Kobolds', 'Skip's Goblins', and the island barbarians in the aforementioned module.   The second false remedy to the problem is to try to make that one round matter more so that the monster is immediately threatening.  This can be seen in monsters as diverse as RAW dragons, bodaks, and death knights.  These monsters produce some sort of save or die ability.  The problem with that approach is that it simply makes surprise and initiative that much more important, increasing the importance of a few single rolls and decreasing the importance of teamwork, tactics, and so forth except where it involves achieving surprise.  It tends to lead to 'gotcha' combats where monsters unavoidably ambush the party, and players become motivated to try to subvert the gameplay.  Ultimately, it leads to gameplay that is simply luck based, were individual die rolls will deprive a player of a character regardless of what he did but simply because of a bad die roll.My 'third way' is to look for monsters that have a suite of defensive capabilities that allow them to survive to actually interact with a party.   That's why I focus on things that have magic resistance, immunities, and high AC and why I suggest focusing on such creatures and not on 'save or die' creatures.  A good example of this is the approach I take with fixing dragons, which actually lowers their potential per round damage, but greatly increases AC, hit points, magic resistance, damage resistance, and the breadth if not depth of their abilities.  No, and that is the crux of what I disagree with about your assertion.  What I'm talking about is not and not even remotely suited to challenging some party that has decided 100th level PC's and +20 swords is how they should play.  What I'm talking about is a party of 6-8 PCs (plus henchmen) constructed with 4d6 drop the lowest ability scores, using the Unearthed Arana chargen rules, that is 10th to 12th level, and which has a DM which has stuck largely generating treasure by treasure type using the random magic item generation in the DMG and an occasional published module (or some homebrew of similar scope), will pretty much be able to trash all the games published monsters with no real challenge.  A very conservative DM that really tries to keep his campaign low magic and under control and not Monty Haul might extend that a couple of levels, but not long after 12th level in any event almost everything in the rules books will cease to be a challenge.   The rules themselves suggest this.  A close reading of the 1e AD&D DMG gives us suggested PC levels at which a monster of a certain level (I, II, III, IV..., IX, X) should be encountered.   By 8th level, PC's should begin to face the occasional level X monster - the highest level which any published monster is rated.  By 12th to 13th level, they are expected to be able to handle repeated encounters with such potent monsters.  Further, Gygax's own published modules for high level play suggest Gygax is very aware of these limitations of the rules.  The 'G Series' modules for PC's of around 10th level feature repeated encounters with giants and dragons, some of the most potent monsters in the game.  Giants occur in such numbers in those modules that there are potentially small armies of them, yet PC's are expected to be able with only moderate application of tactics to overwhelm these foes.  For higher level play than that, the game frequently resorts to special rules that nerf PC abilities, and foes that are significantly more potent than those published in the rules.  Gygax's own 'Tomb of Horrors' doesn't really even attempt to challenge PC's at combat and instead presents them with a large number of 'puzzles' with lethal consequences, especially to the rash.  Gygax's 'Isle of the Ape' intended for true 'high level' play (18th level characters) involves extensions to the rules to increase the effectiveness of high HD monsters, fights with literally hundreds of high hit point foes, and monsters with hit points and attack abilities previously only confined to entries in the Deities and Demigods.   So no, you don't have to run a Monty Haul style campaign to find that you need much tougher than a level X monster to truly challenge high level PC's and that your options for challenging high level PC's in interesting ways are pretty limited. Do you have 100th level PC's and +20 swords in your game or in any game you plan on running?  If not, then I'm not sure why it is worth addressing.   If some poster said, "I have 100th level PC's with +20 swords, and I'm struggling to challenge them with anything in the game.  What would you suggest?", that would provoke a very different conversation than the one I'm trying to have.Personally I feel that 'gods' and 'god-like beings' are a special topic and not really interesting in this discussion because how you want gods to interact with PCs, if at all, is such a personal decision that it is pointless to talk about the way they 'ought' to be presented.  Some DMs are going to prefer gods remain remote and unknowable beings whose reality is vague and unprovable.  Others are going to prefer gods to interact with the PCs as untouchable mentors, guides or masterminds to which the PC's and NPC's are only pawns, and others as even as foils, enemies and rivals that can be defeated by mortal means.  All of that is a matter of setting preference and clouds the issues being addressed in this thread in innumerable ways.I haven't taken offense.  The English language is great at expressing qualities of things, but not so great at expressing quantity of a thing.  There are emotions below the level of offense or anger, on some scale of frustration, that I can't name well because I'm not sure trying to apply a name to them would communicate what I'm feeling.  Mostly I just want to be understood, and we are talking past each other.  As for the Immortal rules from old BECMI, I'm somewhat familiar with them, and would be happy to discuss what is right and what is wrong about them.  What is very right about them is that they focus on defense and damage mitigation, meaning that if a typical mortal party was to overcome an immortal in combat, it couldn't be something that they could do by going first and overwhelming the immortal with a few potent spells or attacks.  Immortals are buffed primarily defensively, which means that they are an example of my 'third way' thinking - you don't need a lot of immortals to challenge high level PC's and you also haven't made the combat only really about surprise, initiative and the first die roll of the round.  So that's good.That being said 'Reduce Saving Throw' potentially undoes any of that good by creating a situation where a player is just screwed no matter what they choose.Ultimately, I'm not sure that Immortals really belong in this discussion because I don't think it's actually the intention of the person who wrote the immortal rules to encourage them to be played as simply monsters in an dungeon to be overcome.  Rather than looking at the Immortal rules and seeing someone trying to solve the problem of how to challenge high level PCs, what I'm seeing is an explanation for which mortals shouldn't interact with immortals as if the immortal was just a monster to overcome, but rather should when faced with an immortal treat it as a role-playing encounter and not likely a combat encounter regardless of the level of said mortal.  I'm seeing rules that try to mechanically reinforce a certain approach to what it means to have 'gods' and active 'gods' in a campaign world.   For example, 'immune to all mortal magic' simply screams that a rulesmith is hard steering the interaction to a certain specific outcome.  There isn't here a sliding scale.By comparison, look what I did with Dragons in the dragon thread.  As written, even Tiamat gets few 'absolute' immunities or abilities.  A red dragon for example isn't 'immune to fire'.  Rather they are relatively immune to fire.   The way I prefer to write 'immunity to fire' is never as an absolute 'on/off' ability, but rather as something like 'ignores the first 100 damage from fire'.  Likewise, I prefer not to write something like 'immune to mortal magic'.   The same effect can be achieved with something like '140% magic resistance'.   The difference may seem trivial for most cases, but what it means is that there is a scale where power exists not in strictly silo'ed tiers, but as a continuous range of ability between tiers.   Just as Gygax's rule extensions in 'Isle of the Ape' define a difference in attack success between a 16HD monster and a 21HD monster so that everything just doesn't exist at a single 16+ HD level, so to if you examine my AD&D dragon rules you'll see that I've extended the definition of challenge so that monsters don't exist at a single 'Suitable for encounter by 10th level of higher characters' tier, but we can try to distinguish between a monster that is suitable challenge for parties of 10th, 14th, 18th, or even higher level and one that is suitable as a boss fight for a party of 8th level characters.   Again, what I'm interested in ultimately is extending out a 'sweet spot' so that at high level play you see a nice mix of tactics, cinematic and potentially tense combats, and a diversity of available foes that you see in the games sweet spot.   I am not interested in achieving this by creating tiers of play, which is the approach BECMI took, or by having some sharp division between tiers so that play at one tier sharply differs from the rest of the game - which is the approach the Immortal rules use.</blockquote>

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