Challenging Combat?

[NMcCoy]

In the most recent campaign session I was in, our level 9 party of 4 pcs (accompanied by 10 npcs of varying competence) was in a fight that included, among other things:

* An enemy with a ranged attack that could rip your soul out of your body on a hit, and a melee attack that inflicted "at the start of each turn, you lose 1 healing surge (no save)".
* Draconic avatars of the god of the sun and the goddess of the moon who were oathbound to defend the kingdom (currently ruled by the previously mentioned enemy). The moon dragon was persuaded by a PC to leave without harming us, and conferred a blessing on the PCs in the room before departing - temporary HP equal to her surge value (173 temp HP).

In our game, we have a houserule to add Aspects and Fate Points (from the Fate system); this provides a great deal of buffer to what we can survive in the short term, but during the 6-hour-long fight there were about 4 fate points left between all the PCs (of the ~36 we started with), and we only prevailed because (through tactics, creativity, and well-timed natural 20s) the BBEG got sliced in half with a portal, the sun god got teleported elsewhere, and the moon goddess left rather than fighting.

And we certainly didn't emerge unscathed - one of the PCs (with a prayer to the god of death, who he became a devotee of after being given a second chance at life) removed the surge drain effect from another, taking it upon himself instead. He died as a result, but remains animated through the grace of the death god. Which is problematic for him, as he now has a vulnerability to sunlight and we're making a trek through the desert next.
Other characters have suffered consequences of similar scope throughout the campaign; while death is a very real possibility, there are many other more interesting dire outcomes of the PCs' actions that can and do occur.

What makes a given combat a challenge, if you're expected to win it as a team? Is it the chance that your own character might be KO'd? And if it is, how do I keep players engaged if their characters are winding up unconscious early and often?

In short: in or out of combat, provide lasting consequences to the events that the PCs take part in. This can mean a PC dies in combat, gets reanimated by his god, and is now a lich; it can mean that a PC gets a wrenched arm and can no longer wield his sword properly; it can mean that a PC's beloved familiar takes a hit from a god-slaying sword and is irrevocably destroyed. It can also mean that a PC gets crowned ruler of a city in the Shadowfell, or throws a concert so awesome that the collective outpouring of goodwill brings his loved one back to life. (All these things have happened in the campaign I'm in.)

 

[fanboy2000]

What if we removed the assumption that PCs losing = TPK?

It seems to me that part of the reason that the PCs win almost all of time is that if the PCs lose, the campaign grinds to a halt. Imagine a campaign where, if the monsters or NPCs win, the PCs are simply unconscious and lose their stuff instead of die. Suddenly, we can ratchet the success rate way down, and the campaign doesn't grind to a halt.

 

[LostSoul]

What is the game about?

How do the characters change? How does the setting change? What's the relationship between those changes?

 

[I'm A Banana]

I'm leaving the house shortly, but I'll just address this quickly. Surviving to the end of the campaign is like getting 300 boys. Even if the party is 99+% likely to surivive each fight, they have to keep on surviving fights or it will be a TPK and the campaign is over.

Aha! This is what the challenge does -- it risks ending the campaign!

Which makes me think about how I'm doing FFZ a bit. It's more narrative, so PC's don't really have "permanent death" (instead, the PC's can fail, and have to deal with the consequences of their failure, like a lot of other posters are talking about). So one way or the other, they're getting to the End. It's just a matter of how likely that End is to have a positive outcome for them....hmm...

t seems to me that part of the reason that the PCs win almost all of time is that if the PCs lose, the campaign grinds to a halt. Imagine a campaign where, if the monsters or NPCs win, the PCs are simply unconscious and lose their stuff instead of die. Suddenly, we can ratchet the success rate way down, and the campaign doesn't grind to a halt.

This is kind of the problem in a nutshell.

There's already a method in FFZ for dealing with goals, and failure, and PC's not dying. A lot of more modern games have this, too: they say "the game will go on, regardless of the success or failure of the party, failure will suck for other reasons."

But with that in place, I still want success and failure in combat to actually matter.

And for that, I have to figure out: how likely should failure be? What should be the (in-game, mechanical, not just narrative) consequences?

Maybe I can link it to the failure/success of the overall campaign. Each combat feeds into each adventure (you need to win a certain % to successfully get your adventure goals), and then each adventure feeds into the campaign (you need to get a certain % of the goals to get a "good ending").

Still leaves me a little hanging on how tough individual combats should be, but maybe we're a little closer...