Have we failed to discourage min-maxing?

[Pauper]

So I'm getting ready to start my local group of gamers through Season 4; we're starting Suits of the Mists tonight. Over the weekend, there was plenty of chatter in our online group on what kinds of characters people were planning to bring to the game. As I reviewed that chatter, though, I was dismayed; one player was bringing a dual-wielding fighter, another a rogue. It seemed nearly everybody was gunning to gring a big-damage munchkin character to the adventure.

The admins have done a great deal to present Adventurers League as an environment where you don't need to min-max to have an enjoyable time in an adventure, so I wondered why so many of my players, most of whom are AL veterans by now, felt the need to optimize damage, especially when Suits seemed, on first reading anyway, to be an investigation adventure, not a combat adventure. So I asked, "Hope someone is planning to bring a character with some skills to the table!"

The response I received was telling: "Why should we, when the modules take care of that for us?" It seemed like a weird response, until I took another look at the adventure. While it's certainly true that the central question of Suits of the Mists is "why did the Gur do the things they did?", it's also true that each chapter presents itself in such a way that the overarching question isn't really all that significant to what is likely to happen at the table.

Episode 1

[sblock]The party is pursuing Hricu, who stole Aya Glenmiir's wand of fire. The party must defeat two sets of monsters to reach Hricu, who then simply agrees to return to the inn. There is no story XP award for doing this, as there is no skill check or other requirement -- the party cannot fail.[/sblock]

Episode 2

[sblock]The party is pursuing Rilynin, who stole a box of gems to trade to an unscrupulous merchant in exchange for some holy water. The party must defeat the merchant's guards, then survive a swarm of blights. If they do so, Rilynin simply agrees to return to the inn. Again there is no XP award for this, since the party cannot fail.[/sblock]

Episode 3

[sblock]The party is pursuing Kehkim, who stole weapons to bring to a local orc outpost. He was captured by the orcs and put into a cage, which the party must open to free him. Despite this, there is no XP award for freeing Kehkim, who, as with the others, agrees to return to the inn once free, as the only way the party can fail is if they simply choose not to employ all the means at their disposal to open the cage. Meanwhile, it's suggested that the party might face an orog, if it is strong enough.[/sblock]

Episode 4

[sblock]The party is pursuing Ozzcar in order to determine how he cursed the cook's assistant. They find him in the company of Jeny Greenteeth, whom the party is not expected to fight; instead, Jeny sends them on an errand to fight some elk. If freed from Jeny's company, Ozzcar also simply agrees to return to the inn, no questions asked, no XP awarded.[/sblock]

Episode 5

[sblock]The party finally meets the mysterious Sybil, but instead of having to persuade her to reveal what is behind the strange behavior of her family, she instead insists that the PCs rescue a heretofore unknown boy, who is wandering about in the mist outside the inn. The party engages in two combats, then Sybil makes a mysterious pronouncement and the party ends up in Barovia. Only here is there an XP award for rescuing the object of the adventure, but even this is tied to combat, as the party must defeat the mist zombies who are dragging the boy off to some unknown fate.[/sblock]

So, out of 5 episodes in this ostensible investigation adventure, exactly zero of them require the party to do any actual investigating; all five of them are basically short combats that then reward the PCs with a plot-button that resolves any non-combat questions without fuss or muss. If the party succeeds at the combats, they can't fail the adventure. In that sense, why wouldn't a party decide to focus on doing lots of damage in combat, since that's the most effective way of getting through the adventure?

Disappointed that the adventure focuses so much on combat at the expense of investigationand role-playing, I re-read the episodes to identify what I might do as a DM to de-emphasize combat and make investigation a significant component of the adventure.

Episode 1

[sblock]The adventure notes that the energy from the wand of fire protects Hricu from the stirges. However, I am considering adding a mechanic where, if a fire stirge is killed by non-fire damage, the essense of the fire stirge is drawn into Hricu, in much the same way that the original energy from the wand of fire was drawn into him. Unfortunately Hricu is not in a state to control that much energy, and the energy of the first stirge notably injures the boy. If the party insists on fighting the stirges rather than using the energy within Hricu to defeat the stirges, the boy dies when he absorbs a second fire stirge's essence.

If Hricu returns in a later season 4 module, I expect to roll one of the curses from the ALDMG to represent the Dark Powers agreeing to return Hricu to life. This will prevent a continuity error if the party kills Hricu, but his role is still needed elsewhere.[/sblock]

Episode 2

[sblock]Instead of immediately attacking the PCs, the blights use whatever surprise they gain in their attack to surround Rilynin, seemingly defending him from the PCs. This convinces Rilynin that what he was attempting to do was the right thing, or at least that there is something deeper in the mists that wishes to communicate with him. Rilynin will need to be persuaded to return to the inn, with the party suffering disadvantage on this check if they killed any of Churly's guards or if they attack the blights, which suggests to Rilynin that the PCs are more bloodthirsty than the blights. If the party convinces Rilynin that they mean to help, Rilynin finds that he is able to send the blights after Churly's guards, avoiding the combat. The party gains the XP they would have gotten in the blight combat as non-combat XP for convincing Rilynin to return to the inn.[/sblock]

Episode 3

[sblock]This one is easiest -- increase the size of the encounter at the orc camp by adjusting the number of orcs upward both from that encounter's suggestion and the suggestion from the previous goblin encounter, adding as many as necessary to convince the party that simply attacking the orc encampment would be a Bad Idea. Instead, their goal is to free Kehkim without rousing the guard. If they succeed, they gain XP for doing so equal to the combat XP they would have gotten for fighting the combat as written in the module. If they alert the guards, but have befriended Esselios, the raven dive-bombs the camp, drawing off most of the 'bonus orcs and goblins' in a wild raven chase, leaving the party to fight the battle nearly as-written in the module. If the party ignores both Esselios and the Gur's plight, they fight an overwhelming battle.[/sblock]

Episode 4

[sblock]The first and most obvious change is to have a character who is trained in Medicine recognize that the cook's assistant is drugged, not cursed. A DC 10 check would be sufficient to recognize this, with a DC 20 check allowing the character to identify a possible remedy. However, if the party can get the information on precisely what drug Ozzcar used on the assistant, there will be no danger of side-effects due to a mis-diagnosis, so the party may still need to pursue Ozzcar.

Instead of simply ordering the party to slaughter some elk, Jeny has a specific request -- she needs the still-beating heart from a living elk. She asks if the party has the ability to 'charm the savage beast'; if they don't she provides a scroll. In either case, she also provides a ritual that must be performed while the elk is still alive and conscious; party members who cannot participate in the ritual can help to restrain the elk via grappling or other non-lethal methods while the ritual is completed. It is clear to anyone trained in Religion that the ritual is evil.

If the party simply cannot abide performing the ritual, Jeny will still consider releasing Ozzcar if the party placates or otherwise bribes her. She even offers to accept lesser tasks in exchange (rolled randomly from the list of activities in the ALDMG that can be done in place of downtime to convince her to cast spells on the party's behalf). If the party succeeds in rescuing Ozzcar from Jeny (he has no difficulty agreeing to return to the inn once safely out of the hag's clutches), they gain XP equivalent to what they would have received fighting the elk.[/sblock]

It's hard to know how to adjust Episode 5, since the actual reason for the Gur to have behaved the way they do isn't revealed in the adventure, unless it's simply the arrival of the mists, which the party can't prevent or otherwise affect anyway. Still, I think the above changes make the adventure much more suitable for a party that isn't combat-optimized, and that gives them good reason to believe they made the right choice by not optimizing for combat.

Unless more adventures take the time to develop alternative 'win conditions' that don't require victory in combat, I think all the advice and exhortation to avoid building min-maxed characters will simply fall on deaf ears, as it'll be obvious that, while the campaign says it doesn't want to be overrun with munchkin characters, the design of the adventures are such that the more munchkin you are, the easier a time you'll have, so why not optimize?

--
Pauper

 

[Steve_MND]

I haven't had a chance to look over the mod yet in any detail, but I would not be terribly surprised. As I mentioned in another thread recently when the issue of min-maxing came up, there's really few reasons for players in AL to play 'normal' well-rounded characters anymore, and not purely combat gods. There are comparatively few opportunities in the various mods that brute force can't accomplish the needed goals for. Assuming, as you seemingly describe here, when those goals aren't in fact just 'kill these guys to get to that guy.'

Anecdotally, I seem to recall more opportunities for negotiating out of things or the like in Season One mods, but that may well just be memory bias.

 

[Inconnunom]

Personally, I feel putting so much emphasis on creature death as xp helps push people towards min/maxxing. My players had a tremendous time playing Death House because they didn't feel they had to kill everything in the module in order to get milestone xp. So we ended up having a bigger variety of playstyles instead of the usual 5 min/maxxers and 1 non-min/maxxer that I usually have every week.

 

[Cascade]

I've played this 3 times now and have run it once. yeah spoilers...







The judges that ran it for me (including WF) emphasized that something is simply wrong. Each time, there was a concern that things weren't as forth right as they were presented. We role played a lot to try and understand how the "curse" was working, why "that" wand, why "those" jewels...was there some overall theme connected by item composition? Only in 2 of the 3 playing was the real reason presented. I agree the mod could give more direction on role play options. I've seen some tables finish in 2 hours as they simply ran the combat encounters and didn't ask questions....I see your point.

Aya becomes the relevant character - asking the PCs to talk with and return the Gur for judgement. I feel and felt that she is the mission giver for the event even though it isn't spelled out.


And of course, dual wielders and archers seem prevalent. Clerics and paladins paramount.

 

[Anthraxus]

I would like to see more non-combat options. Maybe, ways to make a combat easier if non-combat skills are used in/before combat. I really don't like it when there is tons of combat in an adventure.

 

[Pauper]

I would like to see more non-combat options. Maybe, ways to make a combat easier if non-combat skills are used in/before combat. I really don't like it when there is tons of combat in an adventure.

Agreed. I can see the logic in the counter-argument 'don't make combat irrelevant with a single die roll', but at this point, AL adventures seem to be geared toward making non-combat skill use irrelevant if you have enough damage dice. It'd be nice to see the pendulum at least start to swing the other way.

--
Pauper

 

[TwinPeaksGuy]

I played Call of Cthulhu for about 4 years, and the DM encouraged RP over combat with:

* liberal use of Inspiration rewards for good roleplay
* you didn't need to roll at all for things like persuasion and intimidation if your roleplay was good.

If your stated goal is to tone down min/max, you wouldn't know it from the AL adventures. Combat is heavily rewarded and investigation/RP not so much, so you get what you reward.

 

[Cascade]

Agreed. I can see the logic in the counter-argument 'don't make combat irrelevant with a single die roll', but at this point, AL adventures seem to be geared toward making non-combat skill use irrelevant if you have enough damage dice. It'd be nice to see the pendulum at least start to swing the other way.

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Pauper

It really shouldn't be that difficult.

You simply assign xp for completion of the goal instead of combat.

You get to the end...Y amount of xp.
There can be multiple paths ; with varied combats or role play to avoid some.
I don't like staged xp. It seems in AL, the minimum is always bigger than failed events anyway.

 

[Pauper]

It really shouldn't be that difficult.

You simply assign xp for completion of the goal instead of combat.

You get to the end...Y amount of xp.

Agreed - that's pretty much the way I went with my proposed modifications, keeping in mind that AL has specific guidelines on how DMs are supposed to be able to modify adventures. I feel pretty good that my proposed modifications all fall within the bounds of the published DM Empowerment guidelines.

With that said, since the module as-written doesn't offer any options for what happens if some of the Gur don't come back in Episodes 1-4, and my modifications allow for that to happen, it would be up to the DM to figure out how, if at all, the events in Episode 5 are modified if some or all of the Gur from the first four episodes don't actually come back.

--
Pauper

 

[Byakugan]

This kinda reminds me of the way I tend to 'decide' to hand the players free information when I think they need it. Particularly disparate plot lines like the Mirabar delegation in season 2 are troublesome. The adventure is taking place over several months of real life time, and the details are scattered all over the place, almost as an afterthought. There is a ton of information about the events and the members of the delegation, and lots of great information about the factions goals and agenda on the matter. Problem is the players only encounter a tiny bit of that information. There is no way for them to enjoy the fine details unless I just explain it to them. Many a player would be left in the dark on entire plotlines were it not for the BBEG monologue at the end.

The other thing is that 5e is not designed in a way that let characters be both good at combat AND good at diplomacy. There is no real system in place for role-playing XP. There are no interactions where the PCs get to negotiate for higher pay for a job. There is no XP for finding and disabling traps. Todays gamers have grown up playing linear, binary RPGs. You gain xp from farming. You are level 1, you start in the newbie zone. Level 3, you can go to the next level of the dungeon. Level 5, you finally get to a point where you have more than 1 option of hunting ground...choose carefully. I am guilty of the same linear thinking. The reality is that the hard-cover books can't predict what DMs will do to adapt the experience to their tables, they can only predict that they will TRY to do so.

In my games I try to discourage the players from thinking this way. I give them full XP for talking themselves past fights, or skipping them altogether if they come up with creative ways to avoid them. I also give bonus XP out for completing quests when the adventure does not do so. That usually ends up just taking the form of generous rounding at the end of each session. I've never DMed or played in a game where anyone was actually at the 'proper' level the books said they should be at once the party got to about 5th level. Too many tables seat 7(or more) and that murders the XP curve.

 

[Byakugan]

If they wanted to, they could make it EASY for players to decide to play a 'face'. Once or twice in an adventure, have the party gets a basic quest reward(potions of healing), but a high charisma check lets the party pick from a list of magic items instead...say a +1 weapon, boots of elven kind, or goggles of night. I guarantee you someone will want to play a face at that point....they will know their choice will have 'tangible' rewards for the whole party, and the party will know it too.

 

[NeverLucky]

I would love to see more noncombat ways to resolve problems in AL adventures, but I would hate to see adventures where you'd simply fail or get overwhelmed without certain noncombat abilities. AL is focused around public play with players who frequently don't know each other, so it's very easy to have parties that lack particular spells or skills. If a group of players sit down at a convention and they all happen to play paladins, fighters, and barbarians, it's not really their fault that they don't have a trap finder or ritual caster or whatnot. Combat should always be an option to get through an adventure, even if it's not the best option, because D&D is a combat focused game where every class and every character is expected and able to contribute in combat.

Having combat as a failsafe also helps to mitigate for bad or inexperienced DMing, which is important in an environment where you can play with a lot of DMs you don't know. It can be really frustrating trying to find the "right" solution to an investigation or problem when the DM fails to provide necessary clues or is too inflexible to allow for plausible options that aren't written in the adventure. With combat as always a potential option, at least we can hack our way through the adventure if it would otherwise grind to a halt. Hack and slash combat adventures aren't that fun with a bad DM, but investigation/puzzle adventures can be downright nightmarish with a bad DM.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

As long as things like Adventurer's League and Pathfinder Society, and most other Organized Play groups, are geared towards the time limit imposed by a store or convention setting, combat will almost always trump non-combat. After all, why RP for 15-20 minutes to get past part of a module when you get can clear it with 3-5 minutes of combat? And if the emphasis were to ever be truly shifted, say to where you can only get the info you need if certain NPCs or enemies survive, you would end up with a season where people hated the modules the first time playing them, or a lot of meta-gaming as players shared the details on how to not fail the missions.

What I am curious to see is how the recently announced Call of Cthulhu Organized Play program handles this balance between combat and non-combat and time limits.

 

[Tyranthraxus]

THere is a great investigative scenario in SEason 2. Ive run in twice and both times it ran really well. I cant remember the name off the top of my head but there is a lot of Non Combat exp awards in it.

Id like to see more like that.

 

[RCanine]

Hate on 4E's skill challenges all you want, I think having some kind of in-game structure to model non-combat challenges really incentivized their creation. In their absence, authors don't really have anything other than combat to throw their RP budget at, and this is the result.

Personally, I think this is something that improves with expertise over the system. Combat is a comparatively easy thing to get right: just throw some monsters of the appropriate CR, and things should sort themselves out. In comparison, there are all kinds of traps that make investigation/exploration challenges difficult to design, not the least of which is that failing them isn't particularly fun.

It's not a simple task, but like I said, I think the authors will get better at it over time.

 

[Cascade]

If the party tells their judge that they are more role play focused, the judge can run the adventure with limited combat and certainly allow other options.

The minimum experience for play is quite high and most parties that get the full amount usually haven't killed enough for the xp listed, especially 6 or seven player tables.

Don't focus on the xp per creature, keep the minimum for the adventure as the target and let them have fun.

This isn't an MMO.

 

[Anthraxus]

Hate on 4E's skill challenges all you want, I think having some kind of in-game structure to model non-combat challenges really incentivized their creation. In their absence, authors don't really have anything other than combat to throw their RP budget at, and this is the result.

I really liked the concept of Skill Challenges in the early part of 4E & LFR. Later though, I grew to dislike how every mod seemed to have a skill challenge, and that some of them did not work very well and seemed shoehorned into the mod.

I have seen a few mods where you can talk your way through unnecessary combats, so that is a good thing. Less combats overall, is what I would prefer.

 

[delericho]

The response I received was telling: "Why should we, when the modules take care of that for us?"

That's the crux of it, I'm afraid. If the game (as a whole, or your table locally) rewards behaviour X, then you will see behaviour X become more prevalent with time. The AL adventures are structured such that the optimal approach is to use a combat-monster, with all non-combat stuff either being strictly optional or being handled without recourse to the mechanics, and so those are the characters you'll see at the table.

For AL to 'fix' this, they'd need to introduce adventures with much more emphasis on non-combat skills such that it's much harder to succeed without those skills. However, if they did that now, they'd get a massive push-back from the player base, who would complain that they've had the goalposts moved on them. Deliberately doing something that's going to make a lot of your customers unhappy is seldom a good idea, so I don't see it happening.

 

[devlin1]

FWIW, I've noticed that a number of season 4 adventures have put more of an emphasis on skill use.

 

[Pauper]

I would love to see more noncombat ways to resolve problems in AL adventures, but I would hate to see adventures where you'd simply fail or get overwhelmed without certain noncombat abilities. AL is focused around public play with players who frequently don't know each other, so it's very easy to have parties that lack particular spells or skills. If a group of players sit down at a convention and they all happen to play paladins, fighters, and barbarians, it's not really their fault that they don't have a trap finder or ritual caster or whatnot. Combat should always be an option to get through an adventure, even if it's not the best option, because D&D is a combat focused game where every class and every character is expected and able to contribute in combat.

I think this is the key insight, but if it's accurate, I think it also outlines a flaw in the thinking of how AL is organized.

The insight is that the designers always include combat as an option because every character has some combat ability, and if the PCs 'fail' the adventure because they get killed by the monsters, then it's easy to put that failure on the shoulders of the players -- if you were better in combat, you wouldn't have failed the adventure. But that simply highlights how we're actually encouraging min-maxing by trying to avoid a failure state, and leaving the default failure state as 'players didn't optimize enough'.

The problem as I see it is that we can't just decide to hand-wave failure (the whole 'fail forward' thing, which is probably worth a separate thread), because that makes the stakes pointless. Why bother setting up a scenario where you have to race across a city collecting clues when you already know that the big-bad isn't going to start his city-destroying ritual until you get there?

So on the one hand, you have the option to build adventures with a real chance of failure if the party doesn't come properly prepared with a full slate of abilities, which has the potential of leaving some newer players disillusioned that they failed without knowing what they were supposed to do to succeed. On the other hand, you can bake in combat as a failsafe, but that simply encourages players to optimize for combat, which is already known to be a factor that turns off new players from joining the campaign (see LFR, Pathfinder Society, etc.). And assuming there even is a middle ground here, finding it requires you to build very specific types of adventures when your target is to produce literally hundreds of pages of adventure content for each season, without making those adventures feel same-y or repetitive. I don't envy the admins their task here.

After all, why RP for 15-20 minutes to get past part of a module when you get can clear it with 3-5 minutes of combat?

I'm not sure how you're running your combats, but I'd love to be able to finish a typical non-speed-bump combat in 3-5 minutes. In Fourth Edition, the choice was between 15-20 minutes of RP or an hour of combat, and though 5E has streamlined the combat process somewhat, you'll still almost certainly spend over half your typical 4-hour adventure block adjudicating combat. In most cases, providing an RP solution would actually speed up most adventures, especially those that resort to weird, gimmicky combat mechanics as a novelty. (I'm looking at you, Bane of the Tradeways.)

For AL to 'fix' this, they'd need to introduce adventures with much more emphasis on non-combat skills such that it's much harder to succeed without those skills. However, if they did that now, they'd get a massive push-back from the player base, who would complain that they've had the goalposts moved on them. Deliberately doing something that's going to make a lot of your customers unhappy is seldom a good idea, so I don't see it happening.

Well, as I point out above, they're on the horns of a dilemma here -- if they don't do anything about the unintentional min-max focus, that's going to ruin the campaign right there, given enough time. (I happen to think the recent DM Quest program is going to accelerate that process, but again, that's a different issue that deserves a separate conversation.) So it might just be a question of 'how do you want the campaign to fail?'

I hate to be cynical enough to suggest that the answer is 'let's leave the incentive to min-max in the adventure design, but publicly tell people they don't need to optimize as a way of trying to convince new players that they won't have to wade through min-maxers to play a fun game, that way we maximize the amount of time before the whole thing collapses under its own weight'. I want to think that the admins are sincere when they say they want new players to not feel the pressure to optimize in order to enjoy their adventuring in AL mods and storylines.

--
Pauper