DM Encounter Advice

[Piratecat]

Isn't that what commoners are for, though....?

Only if they're evil and have big sacks of gold!

 

[GreatLemur]

I think I might've just gotten myself (or, more to the point, my PCs) into a similar situation. Last session, I presented them with a ruined estate full of inbred cultists, and made it reasonaly clear to them that they were outnumbered (when an even number of these guys nearly killed a couple party members in the previous session). They've got three spellcasters and a pile of interesting utility scrolls, and they aren't really kick-in-the-door style players, so I figured they could find a way to locate and destroy the big McGuffin Device inside without having to siege the place.

Unfortunately, somebody failed their Hide check and had to shoot the cultists' lookout, which resulted in some commotion on the inside of the estate when the lookout's cry was investigated and his corpse discovered. Even more unfortunately, they chose to wait and see what this lead to, instead of just hightailing it out of there. Now there's a couple cultists with a big mutant dog thing coming out after them, and they've all been spotted.

This will be a tough fight even if I downgrade the dog-handlers a bit, especially if they stay within crossbow range of the estate's walls. And there are still a lot more of these guys inside. Fortunately, I made sure the party had a nice array of escape options available (mostly those aforementioned scrolls); I hope they actually use them if it comes down to that.

(Of course, these players keep surprising me. There's a reasonable chance the Sorcerer will nail both dog and handlers with a color spray on the first round.)

 

[Rackhir]

I try to remember and have those once in a while, just to underline that how amazing the PCs are. And since I'm running an Eberron game with now 13th level PCs, they really are gods among men as far as the vast majority of the populace is concerned.

So why can't we go buy a newspaper safely in sharn again?

 

[cildarith]

And when they first reached the cave entrance, things looked promising. The druid spoke with a rabbit and convinced him to go into the cave and scout things out....

The rabbit runs in and several minutes later runs out - with some dolgrim behind him. The party sees the dolgrim and without waiting to talk to the rabbit about what he saw inside decided to charge them - so they did.

The whole time I felt really bad and just kept thinking, "It wasn't supposed to turn out this way. If they had talked to the rabbit, they would have figured that out."

Did the PCs actually have time to question the rabbit?

Perhaps I've misunderstood the situation, but it does not appear that they did from what you've said in your narrative. If Mr. Bunny's information was crucial to their success, I would probably have allowed the players to receive the information before the dolgrim came running out of the cave in pursuit. This also rewards the players for being clever; in the situation that played out here, you allowed their good idea (sending in Rabbit to scout) to blow up in their faces, thus further discouraging them from using stealth and subterfuge as a means of resolving problems.

It also seems that Mr. Bunny stirred up quite a hornets nest by venturing into the cave. I don't know much about dolgrim, but do they always get up in arms like that over small animals wandering into their lair? I can visualize one or two of them perhaps trying to catch Mr. Bunny as a tasty morsel, but sounding the alarm and raising the lair over one small rabbit seems a bit much.

You wanted a "sneaky, stealthy session", but it seems to me that the reasons it turned out otherwise were primarily the result of your own decisions as DM.

The players did the right thing sending in their little scout. I would have sent the rabbit scampering out of the cave entrance, running for its life, but I would also have allowed the characters to communicate, however briefly, with the rabbit before one or two dolgrim show up at the cave entrance in pursuit of the rabbit.

Even if the players' still charge the monsters, they will at least have received the rabbit's warning and can react appropriately as the fight unfolds and the rest of the lair becomes aware of their presence.

Hope that helps.

 

[billd91]

Isn't that what commoners are for, though....?

Heck, I have my players run into commoners, warriors, and experts all the time... and quite a few of them have levels, too (some of them old potato farmers can be tough, just look at the formidable Farmer Maggot). But even so, they don't lay the smackdown on PCs too well. They do absorb damage OK, which gives the PCs time to unlimber some fun brawling action before it's over too soon.

 

[Rel]

So why can't we go buy a newspaper safely in sharn again?

Oooh BURN!

On the other hand, Rackhir, a smart party pays the extra to have the paper delivered to their doorstep.

Can't be too careful you know.

 

[Rackhir]

Oooh BURN!

On the other hand, Rackhir, a smart party pays the extra to have the paper delivered to their doorstep.

Can't be too careful you know.

We tried that. Losses were... unacceptable.

 

[shilsen]

So why can't we go buy a newspaper safely in sharn again?

Hey, you've got a weekly column in the paper documenting your exploits and people in nations you haven't been to know who you are! I can't help it if said exploits means everyone wants to kill you and take your stuff. Well, I can, but what would be the fun in that?

 

[NCSUCodeMonkey]

Hah, this thread is awesome. My $.02: As others have said, there is absolutely nothing wrong with having over-CR and under-CR encounters in a game. It makes things way more interesting and can add that threat-of-deathyness that makes getting out of a combat by the skin of your teeth the best feeling in the world. My only comment is on:

I had never intended for it to be that kind of encounter.

There's nothing wrong with having an intention for an encounter. I think that most encounters are designed with some end result in mind. The only problem is, IME, there's a fairly good chance that the encounter won't turn out as planned. If you're planning on the BBEG escaping at the last second, give a thought to what would happen if he were to get killed by a lucky critical. If you're planning on the beguiler talking his/her way past superior numbers, give a thought to what happens if they kick down the front door. In this case, could the cultists have captured the party and then the beguiler could have beguiled them out of the situation?

You can't plan for every contingency, but I usually ask myself: What happens if the enemy escapes? What happens if he dies? What happens if there is a TPK? Sometimes the answers are simple, like "The whole party dies." Sometimes, it might be more complex like, "They become prisoners." or "They become ghosts and have to fight their way back to the land of the living." As another example, I always assume that my players will kill all of their opponents. The bad guys always try to run away, but actually making it out of a combat alive is a bonus for an NPC, not a given.

From the sound of things, I think you're a great DM and probably figured all of that out a long time ago, but the part of your post that I quoted leapt of the page and beat me in the face until I agreed to reply .

 

[Anguish]

My opinion is that the idea of overpowered encounters is a good one. That being said, I think that such an encounter needs to have a pretty serious margin of error. For instance, if you have a party of 1st-level PCs go into a cave to discover a huge, deadly dragon, it should be lazy and sluggish at first, giving the players a round or two to get the heck out. If they insist on sticking around they're meat.

Key summary: players should have the opportunity to realize the nature of their mistakes, and back off.

In the rabbit scenario, the problem is that the players made a single mistake of engaging without sufficient intel, and *poof* that's it. Mind you, only one PC was lost. That's fairly reasonable. Still, any situation that's designed with a TPK as a very real possibility needs to have a LARGE number of other possibilities. Not one. And honestly, "many ways of finding out there's a lot of bad stuff in the cave" is just one in my book. Players want to play. They want to push, they want to excel, they want to exceed last week's successes. They want to try, even insane odds.

Final thought: They should have a chance to try. What's more fun; finding out there's a "really insanely powerful thing in the next room" because you rolled a 19 on your Gather Information, and walking away... or opening the door, seeing the powerful thing, taking a swing, rolling 19 on a d20 and hearing "miss", realizing it's got some hugely un-hittable AC, THEN running away in terror? Players want to play. Let them.