Do your PCs ever completely outclass the enemy?

[Bastoche]

Very often but we never actually play out these encounters. The DM just states "Oh yeah and on the way you were ambushed by orcs and made short work of them." Unless something particularly relevant should happen during the fight due to tactics (ex: one "fodder" has an important intent and try to escape while the rest of the fodder charges)

 

[DonTadow]

Very often but we never actually play out these encounters. The DM just states "Oh yeah and on the way you were ambushed by orcs and made short work of them." Unless something particularly relevant should happen during the fight due to tactics (ex: one "fodder" has an important intent and try to escape while the rest of the fodder charges)

Sometimes its good to throw in some irrelevancy to throw your pcs off, else you'll get pcs whom play the game thinking everything they do is designed.

 

[Bastoche]

Sometimes its good to throw in some irrelevancy to throw your pcs off, else you'll get pcs whom play the game thinking everything they do is designed.

We hate that because it equal to a loss of precious game time. We don't have too much extra hours to waste in pointless fights. Typical fights takes about 1 hour real time to resolve. Maybe 30 min for a fight vs mooks. Waste of time. But that's just us you know... We KNOW it's designed. No need for false pretense.

 

[DonTadow]

We hate that because it equal to a loss of precious game time. We don't have too much extra hours to waste in pointless fights. Typical fights takes about 1 hour real time to resolve. Maybe 30 min for a fight vs mooks. Waste of time. But that's just us you know... We KNOW it's designed. No need for false pretense.

Trust me, I know what you're mean. The trick is to make he fight seem important, maybe even move an pc's personal background along or provide the pcs something interesting in the range of a new npc. YOu also have to orechstrate the fights a bit. Make sure they don't last more than 3 rounds. (for instance after 3 rounds they run away, surrender, kill themselves ect). Because time is precious, every fight I set a mental time limit of how long i want it to end. After a certain time, i put a win/lose condition in my head that should be achieved within minutes.

Previous reasons I've used these encounters and the outcome

::The party visits a rough and tough pirate island bar for some r and r. Later that night, several of the pirates whom noticed hte pcs spreading loot around decided to pay attention to the inn and steal their women folk. They go there and the women pcs are rolling much better than the men pcs. So I use the opporunity to play up on how fearless the women pcs party members are compared to the mail counterparts (whom were basically support characters). After thep irates fall, the pcs find some bar tabs with the name Mr. Smith on it. Mr. Smith would go on to be one of the party's foes. When i formally introduced him, there wasa cool "oh crap moment".

:: When the pcs enter a new realm, such as the far plane, I like to throw a collage of the different beasts at them to set the tone of the environement. During one such event, the pcs wiped out the beings and found some wierd prestigious armor inside one of the beasts.
Later on in the campaign the pcs discovered that this armor was very ancient, allowing the pcs to remember the battle and set an age of how old those monsters were they fought. That was importnat because the pcs needed to know when the monsters began to show up.

:: Bandits attacked the party on the way to a new village. After the party wiped them out, they got their their names to see if there was a reward. 2 months later in another village the pcs come across a young man looking for his brother and a hefty reward if he's found. The brother was one ofteh bandits from ways away.

:: Low level mephits should be easy and aw alk in the park, but not when one of the party members has a dire fear of fire. the party needed some light hearted antics so i through some mephits at the party and watched as they quickly slaughtered them, but the one pc ran around the battlefield frantic. It was a good lead in to make the party member feel more like apart of the party as he told them why he fears fire and how it wiped out hiswhole village. Helped mesh the group a bit more.

::The farplane was driving the pcs crazy and bunch of rabid squirrells attacked them. cr 1s to a tenth level party. However, the pcs all saw different things and made for a comical fight as they played out their crazyness thinkthey were being attacked by golems, dragons, and mountains. This battle, though irrelenant to the plot , established how badly the party nneeded to figure out a way out of the area and to play on their worst fears, which again brought the party closer.

 

[The Shaman]

More and more often as the PC level increases. To do otherwise would be a suspension of disbelief for me. After all, high-level characters are more rare than their low-level counterparts.

Well-said, Sammael - I concur.

Rather than throw in an "occasional" low-level encounter, the adventurers are more likely to face mooks "all the way up the ladder," as in the case of Sammael's hobgoblins - my high-level encounters tend to involve either a singular challenge, such as a "leader" with levels appropriate to challenge the adventurers, or more often a group of lower level figures that together provide a +2 or +3 EL encounter, but in either case, there will be the "usual" low-level minions to be dealt with throughout the adventure, such as guards or servants.

I find that this allows the characters to consistently show off their abilities - sneaking past a guard was a challenge at 2nd and 3rd level, interesting at 4th or 5th level, and by 8th level it becomes all about the style points! It also adds an element of surprise when the adventurers expect to encounter a mook and instead meet up with something else...

 

[Mercule]

My campaign started with the players facing against the forerunners of an orcish invasion (though they didn't know that's what it was at the time). Now, things are in full swing. The next adventure will see the 10th level party thrown smack in the middle of things. Should be fun, since there were a couple of potential TPKs at 1st level.

In general, I believe in letting the players see that they've gotten "cooler" every now and again. Otherwise, you may as well just keep the PCs at 2nd level.

 

[Havlo]

I get this nearly every encounter and so far haven't been able to fix the problem. I know it's wrong, but I am almost getting to the mindset of DM against the players just so I can "win" once in awhile.

 

[Zappo]

Often. Especially as levels grow. 12th level town guards and entire armies of classed ogres hurt my suspension of disbelief badly. PCs in my campaigns can and do become able to defeat common monsters without breaking a sweat. Sometimes we don't even run the combat - certainly not when the CR difference is such that the PCs wouldn't even get XP.

That's actually the reason for which I like teleport (and for which, oddly enough, lots of DMs hate it) - it cuts down the pointless encounters with roaming goblins and ambushing bandits.

Every single fight. Otherwise roughly half the time it would be a TPK. The nature of the EL system forbids a fair fight.

Think of it this way -- a 4-member group of level 4 Characters is an EL 8 encounter. Yet the highest recommended ecounter for them is EL 7, and that's for the ultra-bad boss monster. So by definition the PC's are always fighting "down".

True. But this isn't an artefact of the EL system. The same situation applies in any game which involves lots of combat - of course most fights will not be seriously dangerous, otherwise the whole thing would become unplayable as characters keep getting killed every second combat. The EL system merely quantifies this.

 

[lukelightning]

I certainly believe that rank-and-file adversaries shouldn't mysteriously scale along with the players. The town guards who were 1st level warriors when the players started shouldn't magically become 5th level fighters when the players get higher level.

That's one of the things I hated about the Epic Level Handbook. A city with 21st level fighter watchmen?!?!?!? Ridiculous.

 

[Chimera]

I gotta second the bit about the Therapeutic benefits of waxing a gaggle of mooks. It's something I highly recommend to every GM I play with.

Last sesson, our 'some of us just made 5th level' party creamed six Gnoll bandits in two rounds, taking only that long because the first round was spent dismounting and closing. Of course, it helped that I dropped my very first Fireball on top of four of them hiding in cover, rolled 23hp damage (on 5d6) and they all failed their saves.

Sometimes the dice just go with you, as in last night's Eberron game, where my Hasted, Bull Strengthed (Broken) Monk/Rogue flurried the snot out of a purple worm to the tune of 117 hp of damage in a singe round (no crits), dropping it after others had wounded it. Heck, that's something I'll be talking about 20 years from now!

These events make me happy.