Crashing the game: When the DM doesn't expect resistance

[pukunui]

I've been there. For our first-ever SWSE game, the GM had set us up on some backwater planet controlled by some Hutt family. My character was a Jason Bourne-style amnesiac assassin with Force Sensitivity. The others included a wookiee and a Mon Calamari Jedi (can't remember any of the others though). Anyway, the other players were all having their characters act rather stupidly, attacking a group of Trandoshan slavers in the street in broad daylight and resisting arrest when some battle droids came calling and the like, so my character, understandably, decided to have nothing to do with them and went off on her own.

The GM went along with it for a while, allowing my character to find work in a mechanic's shop and such. It helped that this came at the end of a session so everyone else went home and we ended up having a one-on-one side session.

However, my GM got a bit stumped as to how to get my character back with the rest of the group, who ended up leaving the planet as hired hands on a starship. First he tried having a bounty hunter capture my character, but she of course resisted and managed to take the bounty hunter down on her own (she was only 1st or 2nd level at this point). So then he sent a squad of battle droids after her. She single-handedly took them out as well. And another squad. By this time, he was getting pretty frustrated, so he sent an overwhelming force of battle droids after her. I had her hide under a bed in a back room, but even though she rolled fairly well on a Stealth check to hide, I think he was just tired of it and had the battle droids find her anyway.

As "punishment", the GM made me wait through an entire session during which he focused solely on the other PCs, only to come back to my character at the end and rush her through a clearly railroaded (and very anticlimactic) scenario in which she was arrested, incarcerated, "rescued" by an agent from her former employers, taken aboard a starship, tortured, and then truly rescued by the other PCs, who had also ended up on the agent's starship somehow. There wasn't anything my character could really do about any of it (although he allowed me to make some rolls anyway), and I remember being rather annoyed that he hadn't gotten it out of the way at the beginning of the session instead of building up my anticipation by making me wait until the end.

Following that, we did a better job of staying together but hardly a session went by without us choosing to do one of the few things the GM hadn't anticipated. I have to say that for the most part, he was pretty good at rolling with it, but every once in a while he'd make it pretty obvious he was railroading us (like the time we finally got the chance to take my character's newly tricked out starship for a test drive only to get hit by a magnetic meteorite that just conveniently happened to not only take out both the main hyperdrive and the backup hyperdrive but also rattled the ship enough to smash the spare hyperdrive sitting in the cargo hold ... all so that we would be stranded on a particular planet so we wouldn't take the game off the rails again).

 

[TheClone]

It's a simple application of PC knowledge and experience. Any reasonably competent group should be able to get a bead on the relative competence of the opposition with a little study and expertise. Sizing up the opposition is standard practice in advance of any real-world battle.

But it's simply boring to me. Just have them make a roll and they know almost the EL or CR of their enemies down to the exact level, because with 4 players one will always roll his dungeoneering (or whatever) check high enough. I like to have challenges also for the players and if I refer to checks in such a situation only when the enemy strength is overwhelming, it doesn't work. Because the players automatically know that they should flee once they get to roll at all.

I don't say you can't do it. Everyone who wants to should do it. But I personally don't like to do it. I prefer an roll-less solution with describing or setting up the opposition in a way that makes clear that they are way to strong. Although it is much more difficult.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

4E made this one of its central tenets; the players ARE the center of the world, and all encounters ARE balanced. Of course, nothing forces you to play like this, but its how 4E was presented.

Define a "balanced" encounter when you get a default variance of -1 to +4 levels or so just following the guidelines?
Wouldn't this imply that the encounters would all be equally difficult or easy?

I can assure you, they are not. So they can't really be balanced.
What they are is winnable.

But even that doesn'T make it impossible to put in higher difficulties. But the guidelines don't give you any particular suggestions for it. Most DMs have no problems throwing stuff that's too tough at their PCs. (Just look at the highest level solo you can find. Probably too tough). What they need guidelines for on is what range is winnable or fair without being utterly unchallenging. Stuff that they can put in so that the PCs can really fight it.