Jhaelen said:
That's interesting. I don't quite see how it's possible, but I'll take your word for it.
It was the Artful Dodger rogue ability. Combined with a player that was careful to always consider AC in her build, while not going overboard.
In other words, a PHB1 character, no crazy frills. Against a Dark Sun creature compendium monster, so suppposedly one of the "modern" characters.
Blew my mind, too.
ahayford said:
Preface: This comments/questions are asked out of a honest desire to know if these things could have helped you and are not intended as a "you are doing it wrong" type comment. I have not run 4e to high levels and am curious.
I'll do my best to answer, then!
I think, more so then any other edition, the changes to 4e were made out of a desire to make it easy to build tactically interesting encounters that are challenging for your party. Knowing what powers/abilities your characters have going into a fight make it easy to know what guns your team will have to bring to bear in an encounter. The GM control here, I believe, is in laying out the encounter itself. If you wanted a big bad that stayed at range, I think you are better picking a creature (or modifying one that exists) whose powers reflect that. Perhaps swap out that melee swipe with breath weapon/gaze/etc.
lol. You lasted one paragraph before you started with advice.
I do know what my characters are capable of. I did plan encounters. It turned out that, really, it's just not worth it. Because they constantly get new powers that even the PLAYERS are having a hard time keeping track of. I have no hope. This sort of "GM control" is not my idea of fun to begin with, and yeah, it's an illusion. Wait and see.
Also, tailor-fitting monstes to nerf player abilities is a huge pet peeve of mine. I shall never do it. Even if the game is otherwise ticking me off.
This, to me, seems broken. What power tier did you see this at? Was your party overloaded with magic gear or was this just do to the base character abilities?
As mentioned above, the dodger was just a basic class feature that couldn't be hit by an epic lvl 33 solo. As for the only missing on a 1, it was a combo of a few powers that stacked. Both PCs were made by the same player (he made the rogue for his wife, who is like me - she hates "character building"). He's a bit of a power-gamer (sorry, Blarg!) but makes sure not to go overboard for this campaign. While his two PCs are two of the most powerful in the game, they do not overshadow the rest of the group, who has similar powers.
In other words, this isn't something particularly special or noteworthy. Just dailies that overlap. And I personally believe that in a fight against a BBEG, PCs should have at least a few solos.
I would say, in terms of week encounters, instead of cheating, you are better off just buffing the monsters, adding more creatures (paper tigers, low hp high damage), and interesting terrain effects to make it more difficult. As for other "real world" issues, can you give some more examples? I am curious.
I added terrain effects. And I can't add minions too often, because the controller basically makes them pointless (he has an "auto kill minion" ability that means I don't use them that often. They literally last one round, most of the time, before dying).
And the problem isn't number of creatures, etc. It's that unless you throw a bunch of seperate smaller encounters at the party, the game collapses. This was deliberately done by the designers as a response to player complaints of 3.5E. Unfortunately, it means that if you try to do a few, larger encounters (most of my encounters these days are almost two encounters thrown at the group as one), it blows up, because the players can blow dailies like they were encounters.
And what "real world" issues are you talking about? I'm a bit confused.
This is the area I think 4e should shine (on paper anyway). Its balance should allow you to create encounters that should completely drain the abilities of a party and leave the characters with that "we barely won that" feeling. Would 1 larger, very dangerous encounter have worked better here? Why did you feel like you had to grind to challenge your players?
That works at heroic. Not so much at paragon and epic. Both of those encounters in my final sessions really did challenge the pcs. Absolutely. But you HAVE to grind, it seems, or the players will blow all dailies in the fights and wind up unstoppable (our fighter, for example, has a daily that does something like 400 damage).
the only way I was able to fix that was with a terrain effect that ended ongoing powers in the encounter randomly. However, using it more than once or twice is kind of a lame thing to do... especially in a final fight.
Could this have been part of the cause of your hyper untouchable/unmissing characters?
I'm gonna go with yes and no. Allow me to explain.
"Yes", because it let my players cherry-pick the items that shored up their weaknesses and exploited their strengths. They had properties that were useful, and daily powers (usually as interrupts) that let them avoid the worst conditions.
"No", because they only took powers from "core" wotc sources. And no because the way the game is written, the players are expected to have "wish lists" that the GM more or less accomodates. And PCs are allowed to buy gear basically unsupervised (RAW). Basically, all I did was cut out the middle man in this transaction (the GM), and have at it. The end result of our game was the same as if a group of PCs had a GM that gave them the items on their wish list.
I've been here, it really sucks when you are GMing when you realize you aren't having fun anymore.
Yyup. While I had a LOT of fun with this campaign, the moments I really enjoyed were often system-neutral. And when we switched to BECMI to give me a chance to catch my breath, my enjoymenet of the game really increased.
High Level D&D has NEVER been my thing, mind you, so maybe a lot of the problems I've experienced aren't a big deal for others. But I'm glad I stuck through it, and can now attach "finished a multi-year campaign" to my gamer vest.
