Balancing 13th level combats

[River]

I'm playing in a game right now with about 7 players of 13th level give or take 1. Our DM has been having a dickens of a problem balancing combats.

I should start ou by saying..

1. On average our PC's have resources about the sames as the DM's guide says an NPC of our level should have.

2. We are almost always fighting characters with levels, we almost never see a "monster."

Either A: Our party, mostly through the use of our spell casters wipes up the entire combat round 1 or round 2, OR 1/2 the PC's are killed as the enemy does the same to us...

A few monks with "Freezing the life's blood" wiped our party out. In another combat we wiped out a party in two rounds with Mass haste, followed up by empowered fireballs and flame strikes. Then the next combat we face some oriental adventures spell caster firing off instant kill spells with DC24 fort saves.... We all get blown apart.....

Our mage has greater spell focus and 23 Inteligence.. Nothing saves against him.

Is that just the nature of 13th level combats?

Also the fighters in the party have become complete 5th wheels. We screen the druid while he eliminates every foe on the board with Firestorm, or the mage while he does his thing.

My 1d8+8 attack is not so impressive next to the cleric who walks up and uses HARM......

Is it just our general lack of stuff? Am I missing something?

River

 

[mkletch]

3E works best with monsters as opponents for this very reason. The most dangerous threat to an adventuring party is other characters. Even with NPC-value equipment, a party of adventurers can still duplicate most of the party's abilites, though without their long-term survivability. So yes, this is the nature of 13th level combats with NPCs as the foes.

If the spellcasters seem to 'take all the glory', let them 'screen themselves', and fighters march forth!

-Fletch!

 

[Dagger75]

I am in the same boat. Level 19 here, though only 3 characters. I have seen dragons, clerics and frost giants barbarians fall to this group, but almost get wiped out by 1, one, uno 15th level wizard. You are correct with warriors being the 5th wheen in the group. We discovered that. It was actually a little suprise. Now at near 20th level with stuff having like 30 SR and massive DR the fighter is showing there uses once agian. The rogues with a meesly 9d6 sneak attack are nothing when 15d6 Flamestrikes, Fire seeds and fire storms are being unleashed. Hell last night we had a creeping doom go through all 1000 points of damage it could do and it only took out 3 of the 5 monsters.

The secret I have found for higher level is quantity. The more bad guys the better. Also teaming up certain creatures work pretty good. My frost giant fighters on Grizzly Mastadons from MMII worked pretty well.

Hope that helps

 

[mkletch]

I am in the same boat. Level 19 here, though only 3 characters. I have seen dragons, clerics and frost giants barbarians fall to this group, but almost get wiped out by 1, one, uno 15th level wizard. You are correct with warriors being the 5th wheen in the group. We discovered that.

We had three characters, 1st-18th level, and they were originally made 'in a vacuum'; we did not know what everybody else was making. So, no arcane spellcaster, but we did have a cleric. It was a very fun game, and we did not have many of the issues I read about on these boards.

Is that indicative of something?

-Fletch!

 

[s/LaSH]

I suspect you're having problems because everyone's focused on high-level offensive capability. There are two fixes I can think of.

First, you might want to use more divinations and defensive spells to ascertain exactly where, when and why you'll come into conflict, and then prepare for that circumstance by casting globes of invulnerability, readied counterspells, elemental resistances etc just before the battle. If everyone starts playing defensively, then battles will probably get a little longer.

Second, the limitation of spellcasters is their limited resource of spells per day. Sure, a mage against an army is not a fair fight for the army. But put the same mage and the same army into a vast catacomb of 10'-wide tunnels, and suddenly it's not so easy. Fireball is actively dangerous to yourself, lightning bolt won't take out many enemies at once, and harm on a level 5 soldier is a waste. Basically, large numbers of low-level opponents are where the fighters really shine. Oh, and I'd be careful about attacking the tarrasque with only spellcasters.

 

[JacktheRabbit]

I suspect your party rests way too often since they base all of their power on spellcasters.

Also I bet your fighters just walk up and start wacking instead of fighting intelligently.

 

[Rackhir]

Something does sound seriously wrong if your fighters aren't pulling their weight at 13th. I can see them falling behind as the spell casters are hitting the 8th and 9th level spells, but a well put together fighter should be cranking out plently of damage. My 13th lv archer was cranking out 50+ points of damage around, significantly more with crits.

One thing for your DM to try is waves of attackers. Mages and clerics are hot stuff until they run out of spells. Get them to use up a bunch of their stuff and then hit them with masses of lower level stuff once they're mostly out of firepower. That should give the fighters a chance to shine.

 

[Graf]

General agreement with what's been posted here.

I DM a similar group (10th level or so). I've encountered situtations where what you say is definitely ture but over all I think its fairly easy to balance out combats. The mage has max int (23ish?), evoker with evocation specialization, for tough fights he uses fox's cunning (bull's strength for int) So monsters save infrequently against him. He frequently fills up his 2nd level spell slots with MM (and Nox's Lashing Whip from one of MC/SKR's old games).

Whie he's the most dangerious damage causer I don't really feel like his presence is unbalancing.... as the sort of foes you face and the situations you face them in increase magic's effectiveness fluxuates wildly.

I agree w mkletch. Monsters of different types help balance out a game. If you face the same type of challenge over and again you'll find that one class or specific character build is excessively useful.

Thinking back over it the following things in the game have happened in my game to limit mage power:
1. (number one for a reason). The speed of opponets... with someone in the party who goes 100 and lots of monsters (blood reaper from CCII for example, wizards with expidetous retreat, etc) with speeds above 50 its pretty tricky for the whole party to keep up. If they fight -tight- this won't work but people have an unbeleiveable tendency to run after things. And leave the poky wizard (and the platemail wearing guys) behind.
2. Visibilty, recently facing someone with serious weather control they encountered a fog which got thicker and thicker. A wizard with a visbile range of 20 ft isn't going to be tossing fireballs around. Give some bowmen a 1st level spell that doubles your vision in fog and some poisoned bows and he's pretty unhappy (true strike helps)
3. Invisibilty, a sorcerer can summon monsters and remain invisible. A hasted caster can throw a lightning bolt and then turn invisible (to be cheezy do this with a ring, its a standard action). Detect magic won't let you find the location of an aura until round 3....
4. SR becomes common 7th or so level. Its rare for a monster to not have some sort of spell resistence, spell or element immunity. This goes a long way toward fixing things.
5. Monster intelligence (my other #1). Spell casting monsters & foes know how magic works and to best disrupt it. They focus on spellcasters, have socerers with Dispel magic hanging around with prepared actions, throw grenades with touch based inhalation poisons (paralysis or something like that), etc. Even a bunch of archers ready to fire at the wizard and disrupt spells help.

Though if you're the player its hard to implement this stuff you might want to mention it to the DM.

 

[Nightfall]

I love blood reapers. And Blade Demons. And Leonine Demons, Blood Horror Demons! Hell I love CC 2 period! Course the Feral are nice too.

 

[River]

You're partly right. We tend NOT to dungeon crawl. The way our campaign is structured there are often weeks between combats, but each individual combat iv VERY VERY hard. We usually have one, maybe two a session....

I suspect your party rests way too often since they base all of their power on spellcasters.

Also I bet your fighters just walk up and start wacking instead of fighting intelligently.