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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guilt Puppy" data-source="post: 545519" data-attributes="member: 6521">My players are pretty good with tactics. Any game with a strong combat presence, IMO, needs that sort of creativity to stay interesting... It's not that you have powers that make you powerful, it's that you know how to use them.That said, it can be frustrating to have difficult encounters thwarted by something clever that I didn't think of. I will adapt an encounter based on PC planning if I feel it's warranted (either because I want it to be a difficult encounter -- easy encounters are no fun as a player -- or because it makes sense). In fact, adapting to player ideas is pretty common practice: The question I have to ask myself is "in the time I spent designing this encounter, I didn't anticipate these tactics... but in the time these NPCs spent fortifying their base / working out strategies / et cetera, would they?"IMO, that's not cheating the players of anything -- it's just versimilitude. I design my fortresses from the start to be impenetrable, my raiding parties to be savvy and quick to escape, with the implicit inclusion of any strategy my players come up with that seems like it would be appropriately common in the game world. (ie, giving certain guardians True Seeing... Just because I missed the whole Invisibility aspect when I designed them, doesn't mean the epic Cleric who made them in game wouldn't have thought of it.)Of course, really creative ideas I still let run their course. Basically, it all comes back to that question: "Realistically, should this work?" (Of course, that uses the world's standards of realism, where Stone Shape and Flight and so forth are common.) If it would -- well then, my players end up winning.And my players do always end up winning, and it's always satisfying, because they always have to work for it.</blockquote>

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