Creating encounters for characters?

[Drawmack]

Interesting question but I voted other. It depends greatly on the type of game I am running.

My last game involved a great deal of overland travel and at least 3/4 of the game was spent on random mini-adventure tables. These were generally balanced to the party maybe + or - 1 CR or something but really close to balanced for the party. Though once in a while I'd throw in a rediculously easy or rediculously difficult one (just cause you're a city boy don't mean you aint gonna see a bear in the woods).

My current game is city based with very little travel and therefor very few random mini-adventure charts. So in this campaign after each adventure we have 1d4 weeks ''off-screen'' time. I hand the players a print out of clippings from The Freeport Gazete, and possibly some private offers. As they are a mercenary investigating group (2 rouges, 1 investigator, 1 ranger, 1 druid, 1 monk) they then decide which of the leads in the paper to follow up on. I have told them that every lead in the paper has a preplanned plot with it. They must decide from the (often sketchy) sotries which adventure they take. I balance every adventure to the PCs but not every encounter. I add up all the ECLs, divide by # of encoutners and make sure that equals the party's CR. Some encounters are hard, some impossible and some easy.

We play in freeport which is a surrounded by a tropical jungle. You bet your rear quarter that if my PCs decided to go out into the wilds they would run into stirges, apes, dire apes, boars, dire boars, snakes, vipers, constrictors all kinds of stuff that is above their ECL. I call this realism.

My world does not revolve around the PCs, on the other hand part of my job is to keep them alive and keep the story believable at the same time - that is not an easy job at times.

 

[Destil]

A mixture of both is definatly a good thing. A party with a ranger who never fights his favored enemy, a hunter of the undead who sees mabye one skeleton a month or so, paladins with no evil to smite et cetera strikes me as bad DMing. Players should be able to use their abilities, IMHO. So you do need to work a bit to make things more enjoyable. At the same time babying them and throwing push over opponents they can always blow out of the water due to the strengths of the party vs. the weakness of their oppisition is dull, so I always try to make sure each adventure has at least some situations where things arn't a simple Cleric turns the Undead, Wizard fireballs and acid arrows the trolls, fighter cleaves through the orcs and the rogue disarms the traps and assinates the mage style affairs.


Having a definate logical background for adventures is also something key to a good game, IMHO. An evil cleric should have a number of undead in their layer, even if everyone in your group has rogue levels. But at the same time you should look at the adventure and think "Ok, since they don't get sneak attack damage here, where could I put something to let them use some rogue abilities.." Mabye some area of effect traps/spells with reflex saves should be added, for instance (and if it's a burst of negitive energy, even better!).

Likewise throwing fire resistant bad guys constantly at a sorcerer who just learned fireball is bad form, but if the PCs invade a fortress built into the crater of an active volcano having lots of oppisition with resistance is simply logical. So mabye there's many creatures with no natural resistance, but whom rely on protection from elements ... throw in an early opponent who the player can loot a wand of dispel magic from, and suddenly he's usefull again.

In general, I prefer to challange a party, but also to them shine every so often. For my current game I've thrown some extra undead into the upper levels of The Forge of Fury (and switched over a few NPC adepts to clerics), since I have a paladin who really really hates undead. The opening combat was still very dramatic and interesting, and there were some undead to smite, too. I'll most likely throw one or two rogue levels onto some of the creatures in the next level, since one of my PCs just got uncanny dodge (there a little higher than the module recomends, and have 6 PC as opposed to 4, so I'm scaling it up). I'm also adding a few psionic opponents to tempt the party psion to use some of the last 7 charges of his dojore of negate psionics.

It's really all about providing a fun game. Never using specialized abilities isn't much fun for PCs. Rolling over every opponent they face becauce the're weak against the party's specialitys is also dull. Keeping things balanced between the two and providing a varied and interesting combat aspect of the game is really always my goal, and I'm rarely prouder of my adventure creating skills than when I come up with a really clever encounter. Or of my plavers than when they use good tacticts or good ideas (or a combination) to get through the game.