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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Argyle King" data-source="post: 6134496" data-attributes="member: 58416">I quoted #1 because it relates to some of the problems I had.  Mainly, the PCs didn't take consequences seriously.  They were confident that they could handle themselves in a fight well enough that future consequences weren't often a serious concern.  They had the attitude that they were above and beyond the world around them.  In a game where I was a player, the GM of the group I was a player in once made the comment that he had mostly given up on social encounters because some of the players too easily turned to violence as an answer.As I said, I did eventually find ways to fix this for myself in the games I ran, but it took a lot of work.  Most of the work revolved around changing how I built solos and elites; I likewise rewrote encounter XP guidelines to better suit the changes I made.  I had to do a lot less of that sort of work with later 4E books, but I still had to do some of it.  The problem I had was -if I can tie back into the first paragraph- that the PCs actually were above and beyond the world around them.  While I realize that's intentional, the power disparity between PCs an the world around them made it difficult to create a world in which the PCs felt threatened and cared about consequences.A while back, there was a 4E thread in which I gave an example of why I say such things.  I created an encounter which took place on a gondola suspended above a pit.  The PCs were riding one gondola, a group of enemies was on a second.  I fully expected that attacking the gondola's support mechanism would be a valid tactic; what I didn't expect was that the PCs would be able to destroy it so easily; the encounter didn't even last a full round.  The numbers that the PCs were able to generate were so far beyond the numbers that the game world was built on (according to the info in the DMG) that it was hard to contain them.  In contrast, the numbers that NPCs and monsters would generate struggled to keep up.How that translates into problems with social encounters is that it became obvious very early on that this was the case.  The players were highly aware of their power relative to the world around them.  They felt confident enough that they could handle things around them that they mostly did what they wanted to do without regard for the feelings and emotions of the NPCs or the world around them.  To be quite honest, a big part of the problem in this regard was attitudes of the players, but I couldn't fully blame them either.  If I woke up tomorrow with the power level of Superman, I'd see fit to impose my will on a lot of situations which I'd like to change.  It took a lot of work for me to adjust the numbers involved with the game to put things on more even footing so that the PCs would take a king's guards seriously as a deterrent for why they shouldn't just beat what they wanted out of him.  The other thing I learned was to largely ignore some of the official encounter building advice; it didn't work for the group I gamed with.</blockquote>

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