My game has become "me vs. them"

[der_kluge]

Maybe it's because I'm getting over stomach flu/food poisoning, or something, but the game I ran last night seemed like a contest of me (DM) vs. my players.

They are 13th level, and very tough. To avoid a discussion of tactics, and rules, I'll avoid posting what they are, or what they are comprised of, but suffice it to say, I've got a party of characters that I have a really difficult time making a dent in.

Last night, they found 5 blue slaad, 4 reds, and two greens. And, I've bumped up the stats on all these creatures. My green slaad are CR 18 creatures, with wizard levels. While I managed to scare a few PCs into the "red zone" with some fireballs and chaos hammers, the battle was won without too much difficulty on their part.

I just feel like they've been walking through most of these encounters without too much difficulty, or if they do have problems, I just get the ol' "let's throw up a rope trick and sleep it off" solution, which usually happens.

I could always wake them up unexpectedly surrounded by vicious slaad, but I'm sure my players would accuse me of meta-gaming if I did that. I can hear it now, "Oh, so the slaad just happened to be walking by this corridor with see invisibility up, yea.. that makes sense..."

I guess I'm struggling with high level play to a degree, and I want to try to avoid making insane encounters to scare them to death, but the fact remains that I haven't had one really, really good encounter that left the party without resources, without resources, battling tooth and nail to the bitter last, with any kind of suspense about it. I've been struggling to find that kind of supreme balance to where the players all stand on their feets watching every dice roll to make sure no one fails a save, or that the monster misses because of a blink spell, or something so that they just barely eek out a survival. These kinds of things used to happen at 3rd level, but they seem nigh impossible at 13th.

Anyone have any tips on how I can pull off that kind of battle without absorbing the entire evening into senseless combat? I mean, I know I could do this with 20 slaad, but I shudder to think of how long that battle would last.

 

[KenM]

Dead magic zones are always fun, hehe.

 

[Brother Shatterstone]

I could always wake them up unexpectedly surrounded by vicious slaad, but I'm sure my players would accuse me of meta-gaming if I did that. I can hear it now, "Oh, so the slaad just happened to be walking by this corridor with see invisibility up, yea.. that makes sense..."

This doesn't sound like meta-gaming to me... Slaad aren't as stupid as they look and if they know that intruders, the PCs, are in there lair, and they have a number of missing and dead, than yeah why wouldn't the creatures look for who ever did it with what ever means they have…? :\

 

[wocky]

It'd seem that the problem is they're better than you at combat. It's only natural, since they're more numerous and can be more focused while in combat. I can think of two different solutions:

1 - Try to get better at combats. Try to refine your monsters' tactics by reading appropriate threads in the forums, make combat simulations by yourself before the game, take a careful look at the monsters' stats and figure out the best possible tactics. Be fair, but don't be forgiving. Don't regard the monsters as a group of mooks, but rather try to get in the shoes of any one of them and get really concerned about your survival... just as if it was your character.

2 - Challenge them in different ways. Pose them dillemas. Try to divide their opinions as to what to do next. Place challenges where some of them might choose to fight and others might choose not to. This is the area where the DM has most of his power. If D&D is taken as a skirmish game, 4 or more players will probably always win over the DM, unless they're heavily outmatched.

 

[StalkingBlue]

Hm, it's kinda difficult to comment without specific information on the party makeup and tactics.

If the party has a habit of walking a single encounter with boosted foes, have you tried attrition tactics, i.e. sending wave after wave after wave of 'minor' encounters (i.e. roughly at or slightly above their party level) against them? It's not a tactic to use all the time obviously, or else everybody at the table (including you) will get bored to hell and back, but it might make for a change of pace?

EDIT: IME 13th level isn't exactly the land of walkover victories for PCs - in fact 10th-14th are infamous for being deadly for PCs. In the DnD game I play in, PCs currently average 12th-14 level. We've had tons of PC deaths and mission failures since about 11th level or so, and are hanging on by our teeth hoping for some of us to finally make 15th and get into safer realms once again. So yup, what you are describing sounds as if something is going wrong in your game, either in the party makeup or equipment or in your combat tactics.

 

[The Cardinal]

- exhaustion: give them responsibility - tons of it. Force dozens, nay, hundreds or thousands of refugees or freed prisoners upon them - the party as their only hope for survival. Then have them evacuate under enemy fire: hostile terrain, ambushes, the works - for weeks at a row!

- fear: level-draining monsters

- paranoia: lure them into a "trap" where the PCs are all separated for a time. Play a short scene with each player where the others have to leave the room. Then make it clear to them that one of them probably has been "turned", complete with a divine-level "telepathic camouflage" job which makes all mind-reading or alignment detection attempts useless...

 

[Darklone]

Ok, you didn't want rules hints, right?

For the other problem: There's no real help. Your players have probably taken some nice prestige classes and minmaxxed their special abilities, saving throws and attack routines to a level high above the corerule level.

You have several options:
- Start a new game with low level characters. I don't think though they'd like it.
- Adapt. Go minmaxxing yourself and throw munchkinized smackdown builds at them. Bet they will not like it either.
- Don't care. Play your game and wait till they rant about not being challenged. Then smack them down.

Sepulchrave in his storyhour had a point where he leant back and asked the players what they would expect from the story. Then everyone talked about it and they went on playing. Think about it. There's a certain power level in campaigns where D&D starts to change rapidly from the gamestyle you're used to from lower levels.

 

[The Lemon Merchant]

The last campaign I gm'd I initially had this same feeling. The table I play at is extremely effective and they work very well together as a team. It doesn't take long, regardless of the party makeup, for us to work out tactics that work well. At first I got frustrated about it, but then I realized that it was taking the fun out of the game for me. I've been out of the "seat" for awhile now, but will be returning to it shortly. This time I'm actually approaching it as an opportunity to play a multitude of characters that I haven't had a chance to. It's still going to be a rough challenging the party, but I think I can manage. First and foremost, I'm going to make sure I'm having fun as well.

 

[Thanee]

- fear: level-draining monsters

As soon as the party has Restoration, level-draining becomes hardly frightening.

You should make it difficult for them to use their buffs to full advantage (can only guess, that this is a problem), by giving them time limits. If they only have that much time to find something, they cannot afford to rest all the time, or use all their spells up at once.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Mr. Kaze]

Okay, so what I'm hearing here isn't that the game is "me vs. them" but "them doing the same 'ol stuff and I'm getting bored (and am afraid that they are too)." And that's how we get to the "how do I keep my players on their toes?" question.

1) Force lots of saves. If your mooks have any chance of hitting at all (don't forget ambushes from which you might get somebody flat-footed), give them poisonous weapons. I nearly killed a PC troll with a yuan-ti poison ambush just by the averages for the poison saves.

2) Don't give them saves. Look for the spells that don't give saves -- as I recall, Enervation and Ray of Enfeelbement should be able to do a number on a party, and a few unexpected Enervations in a single round might out-and-out kill somebody.

3) Cast from cover. A wizard with Invisibility on itself can summon in untold hoards of monsters without breaking the invisibility... party walks by and a silenced Summon Monster IV later, the party wizard is suddenly flanked by raging fiendish wolverines that make well enough noise of their own to mask the next casting...

4) Associated class levels aren't often worth the cost. Use unassociated class levels to boost saves and give better tactical options. Why give wizard levels to a Slaad when you can give them twice as many rogue levels instead? Fill in the weaknesses instead of piling on the strengths.

<sarcasm>
5) Oh, and put a freakin' portable hole under that Rope Trick when nobody's paying attention.
</sarcasm>

::Kaze (did away with "any 2-bit wizard can make extradimensional spaces, sure, no problem!" first thing in his campaign)