GMs & DMs: What do you do with (severely) unbalanced adventuring parties?

[Ragmon]

Here are my 2 cents about your problem Jon_Dahl.

In short: D&D is an RPG, its a sandbox game, where the players are only limited by there imaginations and DMs.
Problems a can be solved many ways and players should be never forced to play in the manner YOU the DM imagined.
And never forget a player can do anything, but his/her actions should have reactions/consequences, good or bad.


Longer version with some examples:
1. A party can only be unbalanced if your DM-ing a combat oriented story.

2. D&D is an RPG ("Role Playing Game", for those min-max, power playing, tier system oriented "sons-of-2-male-elfs", who forgot what it actually means to role-play).

3. There always is/should be more solutions to a problem.

4. A class should never be limited to there stereotypical role.
4.a. If a group of rogues choose to to infiltrate a castle to save the princess, let them. Instead forcing them to group up with the mercenary group hired by the king to storm the front gate.
4.b. Let the group of fighters interact and role-play the search for the aforementioned rogues at the banquet held by the Warlord who is forcing the princess to marry him. Instead of making them roll constantly to see if they can spot the rogues in disguise.
4.c. Allow the wizard group to out smart the traps in the dungeon instead of constantly roll search and disable device.

5. An adventure should NEVER be one sided, it should never be a "corridor" that the adventures have to walk through, but more like a real world scenario (with no invisible walls to hold you back, or enemies that automatically attack you, sterile empty rooms, or rooms where no items are usable to solve any problem, or situations where conversations cannot be applied....you get the basic idea i hope).
5.a. A taking of a castle doesent just involve soldiers who assault the castle.
5.b Facign a cult leader doesent always need to be an epic battle between him and the group.
5.c. You can always flood (divert a river) a dungeon to clear out enemies that need to breath.
5.d. You can always try and kill the magic item merchant for his wares.

 

[Celebrim]

Once my group battled against spectres and had a near-TPK. They created new characters with the intent of returning back and getting back the bodies of the slain PCs (and their magical items). This was really fine with me.

The thing was that the new PCs were astoundingly poorly equipped to handle undead and incorporeal opponents. I'd argue that it would take less than minute for an average Enworlder to figure out that it was 100% hopeless mission.

So once I saw the characters, I was certain that I had given up the mission.

They didn't and they all died without any hope against the spectres. To this day I haven't figured out what the plan was.

There are times for all-rogue parties. If you create one from the beginning of the campaign that's ok. But during the campaign it can make things impossible.

A man has got to know his limitations. If you create the all rogue party, then yeah, you may need to give up on:

1) Headlong frontal assualts on anything.
2) Getting into slugfests with anything.
3) Spending most of your time battleing angry spirits.

If you can't kill it by round two, you need to be buggering out. If it sees you before you see it, you did something wrong and you need to be turnning tail. If it is uncanny and you can't kill it by sticking a dagger in its back or cutting its throat while its sleeping, it probably isn't the mission for you.

It sounds like the party set unrealistic goals for itself, and then having created a creative party, set about trying to use uncreative solutions. If you had previously established the world, then I don't see this as being your fault, and if the characters were all brand new, I don't see the loss of characters that the players hadn't really invested in as being all that terrible. Sometimes players need learning experiences.

And honestly, spectres? Spectres are one of the classic test monsters. If you are even fighting spectres, you are doing something wrong. There is never any upside to fighting spectres. You find one, you always avoid it regardless of class or party composition.

 

[Desdichado]

As an aside, and this probably belongs in another subforum, but heck, I'll put my money where my mouth is and propose an all-rogue play-by-post game right now. Some parameters:

• Because of the archetypes, which allow for a great deal of variety on the mechanics of the concept, let's use the Pathfinder rules. The "PRD"--SRD specific for Pathfinder, available at the Paizo website, has all the information you'll need. The Classes link in Core Rulebook has the basic class rules, and the archetypes are listed under the link Core Classes in the Advanced Player's Guide with additional ones listed under Class Archetypes in Ultimate Combat.
• No alignment. I'm not even going to ever address alignment. As far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing, except in the case of outsiders and maybe undead or something. No "mortals" are strongly enough aligned to count, so don't even consider the concept of alignment when making your characters.
• On that front, I have no problem with rather rascally, scoundrel characters; those who would be able to successfully navigate and feel at home in a fantasty wretched hive of scum and villainy. This does not mean "can't work together with the other PCs when necessary" kind of nonsense, but otherwise, I'm not looking for white hats here.
• I'll run a game that's mostly urban intrigue and skullduggery--but with some pronounced wilderness activity too, especially if I get any characters who are equipped to handle the wilderness. I don't anticipate anything that looks like your classic dungeon, though.
• I'm not going to be fussy about race selection, although I'm adopting my otherwise somewhat non-D&Dish setting. The environment you'll be in is mostly populated by humans and tieflings, with some ifrits (fire genasi), aasimars, and shifters here and there. My setting doesn't actually have any elfs, dwarfs, gnomes or halflings, although I'm adapting this for a one-off, so if you want to play one, that'd be fine. You probably won't ever run into another one, but I won't make a big deal out of it; your race can kinda fade into the background. And Pathfinder doesn't have rules for shifters, but I'll handwave them in with slight modifications to half-orcs or something.
• In my experience, play-by-post works best with a few caveats. First, folks need to stay on top of the game. When folks aren't posting for days at a time, that's when the game grinds to a halt and gets abandoned. I certainly don't expect everyone to be waiting with baited breath for an update, but checking in a few times a day seems to be almost necessary to generate sufficient momentum to get a Pbp working. Secondly, Pathfinder is a fiddly system, and if I don't handwave a fair amount of the rules during play, the game will seriously bog down and lose too much momentum to work. What might work fine in a face-to-face environment doesn't always work in Pbp and vice versa. If you have a problem with fairly fast and loose GM rulings because it's not your style, then Pbp (at least one run by me) is probably not your thing. Similarly, combat will not be very tactical, because I'm not going to create grids or anything. You'll just have to do your best to imagine stuff, based on my descriptions. Combat will be firmly narrative, because I just don't know another method of doing it via Pbp that isn't more trouble than it's worth.

Anyway, if there's any interest, I'll start up a thread in the Play-by-post subforum or something. I'm confident that the game can work (theoretically) because I've run such a game before in the past (via Play-by-post, even) and it was wildly successful. But it can, of course, fail is the players aren't sufficiently engaged to keep up a level of momentum that's sufficient to get Pbp rolling.

EDIT: About races; please no really bizarre races like tengu or catfolk, though. I don't want to be the bad guy and veto stuff, but they really just won't fit with the concept of the campaign I'm pitching.

EDIT EDIT: Here's a thread in Talking the Talk for the game. Maybe it's better to respond there if you're interested rather than cluttering up this thread. http://www.enworld.org/forum/talking-talk/329133-all-rogues-game-wretched-hive-scum-villainy.html

 

[Corathon]

Huh. Not to sidetrack, but in the all arcane casters game I played in we went through the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. The first couple of levels were like this, but once we hit the tipping point, every challenge after that was a complete joke.

Nytmare, maybe this is more feasible in 3e than in earlier editions? IMO, a group of straight arcane casters with no henchmen, hirelings, or the like to protect the magicians or heal their wounds will never get past the first couple of levels in AD&D. Hell, they'll probably never reach 2nd level.

 

[Derren]

Longer version with some examples:
1. A party can only be unbalanced if your DM-ing a combat oriented story.

2. D&D is an RPG ("Role Playing Game", for those min-max, power playing, tier system oriented "sons-of-2-male-elfs", who forgot what it actually means to role-play).

3. There always is/should be more solutions to a problem.

4. A class should never be limited to there stereotypical role.
4.a. If a group of rogues choose to to infiltrate a castle to save the princess, let them. Instead forcing them to group up with the mercenary group hired by the king to storm the front gate.
4.b. Let the group of fighters interact and role-play the search for the aforementioned rogues at the banquet held by the Warlord who is forcing the princess to marry him. Instead of making them roll constantly to see if they can spot the rogues in disguise.
4.c. Allow the wizard group to out smart the traps in the dungeon instead of constantly roll search and disable device.

5. An adventure should NEVER be one sided, it should never be a "corridor" that the adventures have to walk through, but more like a real world scenario (with no invisible walls to hold you back, or enemies that automatically attack you, sterile empty rooms, or rooms where no items are usable to solve any problem, or situations where conversations cannot be applied....you get the basic idea i hope).
5.a. A taking of a castle doesent just involve soldiers who assault the castle.
5.b Facign a cult leader doesent always need to be an epic battle between him and the group.
5.c. You can always flood (divert a river) a dungeon to clear out enemies that need to breath.
5.d. You can always try and kill the magic item merchant for his wares.

Pretty much this.
When all players play rogues they are hopefully smart enough to approach problems in a rogue like way, if not it is their problem to deal with it.
But if the DM does not let them play rogue like because his pre written adventure doesn't allow for it it is "all his fault".
Either way, that the party consist only of rogues is not the problem.

 

[Alan Shutko]

I do see your point [MENTION=2205]Hobo[/MENTION] but running games for one-dimensional party can be very limited. Ok, the players create a gang of rogues... How many adventures do we want to play that are all about stealing things and sneaking around?

If the players made a gang of rogues, they're telling you they want to play a lot of adventures that are around stealing things and sneaking around. That can cover a lot of ground:

• Mission Impossible: Use your sneaky powers to resolve problems without letting the populace panic
• Ocean's Eleven: Set up a heist so you can really get revenge
• Indiana Jones: sneaking into old tombs and getting loot ("It belongs in a museum") is canonical for rogues
• Circus of Death: Performers wander around but are secretly a band of thieves either ripping towns off or heroically solving their problems from the shadows.

They can still clear the graveyard or wipe out the dragon, but they'll just go about it a completely different way.

 

[S'mon]

However, as you've been mentioning, it could also be a message to the DM:
If everyone wants to play a rogue (or a wizard), then the players may simply be interested in playing a non-standard campaign.

I might be fine with that, too (at least for a while) and adjust the adventures so they work with that kind of party. However, imho, it's harder to come up with a fun and interesting campaign for such a special setup. As the DM I'm more likely to run out of ideas.

I think it's up to the players to come up with ideas - this kind of game works best as a sandboxy setting where the GM presents the world, some NPCs, and runs with whatever plots and plans the PCs come up with. It probably won't work with a published AP.

Actually there's not nearly enough of that sort of game these days. I'm lucky if I get one really proactive player per game-group, except in my grognardy Dragonsfoot game, which has two (and the others aren't bad either). One reason it's such fun.

 

[Nytmare]

Nice nitpick on the word. But if "rogue" is character class, i going with the players are all playing the class. gee gamist of me.

The characters were a rogue (as in the character class) who focused on breaking legs, a rogue (as in the character class) who focused on UMD, a rogue (as in the character class) who focused on picking locks, and a rogue (as in the character class) who focused on stabbing backs.

 

[Rogue Agent]

The solution is simple: Stop thinking that it's the GM's job to railroad PCs into pre-designed encounters.

When you allow the PCs to choose where they're going to do and what they're going to do, the "problem" fixes itself.

 

[Evenglare]

The solution is simple: Stop thinking that it's the GM's job to railroad PCs into pre-designed encounters.

When you allow the PCs to choose where they're going to do and what they're going to do, the "problem" fixes itself.

What about those of use who run adventure paths made by paizo, or enworld, or (in my case) MWP's Dragonlance? Those are pre-designed.