NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wik" data-source="post: 5664454" data-attributes="member: 40177">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.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" />I'll do my best to answer, then!lol.  You lasted one paragraph before you started with advice.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" />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.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 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.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />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.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.  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.</blockquote>

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