Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="kaomera" data-source="post: 5497953" data-attributes="member: 38357">Quickleaf: That's an interesting encounter, and I may have to try something like that at some point... The issues I have would be: Using MM2 monsters, as I'd rather stick to MM3 or MV stuf at this point. I think I understand how the Derghodemon is supposed to work, but I'd be worried about a level 12 (or even level 13) monster being able to consistently hit the PCs. Especially since it looks like it needs two hits in one turn to start a grab. This is an even bigger problem with the Xorn. And in general I wouldn't expect much from the minions, to the point that they seem a bit like useless complexity. I'm sorry, I kind of just panned everything in that encounter, I guess... I just feel like I've been trying to add more monsters, synergistic stuff, interesting terrain, etc. and it seems to just make the encounters longer, not more fun.Where are those hazards from? I've been looking at including some hazards, but all of the ones I can find seem very odd & impractical...erleni: I think maybe defensive options are pretty attractive regardless, and if they're effective then that's as it should be, really.I had kind of gotten the impression / hoped that the concentration on "the math" in 4e was going to help make it more so that players could make effective choices for their characters without them being "cheesy" or "broken". I don't think players should have to make sub-optimal choices to keep the game fun. But at the same time I was expecting / hoping that the DM would have less work in balancing stuff. And in particular that I would not have to go out of my way to negate the cool things that the players had chosen for their PCs just to make the game challenging. If the PCs pick up stuff to give them resist and I respond by upping monster damage, well IMO that kinda sucks...When I was playing (before I took over as DM for the group) I was running a Bard, and I really liked the character. But I was the only player who was trying hard to make an offensive instead of defensive character (even the Ranger was more or less optimized for running away...). And even though we had kind of a "defender and a half" the other PCs just didn't stop the monsters from getting to me, and I kept ending up getting pounded on... It was frustrating because I wanted to play the game as a real party, and designed my character around that idea, and everyone else was really just concerned with their own characters and tried to make them as self-sufficient as possible at the expense of being able to support me (or anyone else).I'm kind of seeing something I think is related with the group now: as an example, they've been talking a lot of ways to make combat advantage useful, because they don't feel like +2 attack is actually worth moving into a flank instead of positioning themselves defensively... Or, really, I think they kind of don't think the +2 attack bonus is worth much of anything at all. And I think it's at least in part because they're doing a lot of their "play" away from the table in character builder. If it's not something they can write on their character sheet, then it's not really important...The result has been, unfortunately, that I'm spending a lot of time on encounters, etc. (and I can chalk a lot of that recently up as "learning experiences", at least), and it's not really making much of a difference. It doesn't matter much what the monsters' powers are, if the players really don't care. It certainly doesn't help that those choices (that I've made) don't seem to have been very effective ones... I'd like to avoid really deliberately screwing over the PCs, and I don't really want to cause a TPK, so maybe part of the problem is I can't really define / decide what I'm trying to accomplish with these encounters. Should I just be "going for the throat", maybe? Is it at all reasonable to be fishing for monsters, etc. that will specifically screw over conjurations or the swordmage's aegis, or whatever? Or what?</blockquote>

Verification