Cartigan Mrryl said:
... so you see, manipulation WORKS. Anyways, back to your point about how you have to worry about using "weaker monsters" (I mean this in the nicest way possible, please keep that in mind if I sound too harsh) you should use the whoel CR thing, if you DO, then you might want to cheat in the XP category... do you reward the characters for completing mini-quests? Or for finding new, inventive ways to get out of a situation?
In conclusion, I'd like to say that having the characters able to crush ANYTHING is quite boring....
ADIOS
I see that I wasn't clear about my own position. I can send in an EL 5 encounter and play it out reasonably accurately, and it will usually wipe out a large portion of a group that should numerically be able to handle EL 7, and force the rest to flee. The problem is, essentially, that the monster routines are written sub-optimally. CR ratings sometimes assume DMs who don't know what the heck they're doing, and overly intelligent or overly stupid behavior for monsters. I know what I'm doing more often than not, so for me, the CR system is a little broken. I adhere to it, but it doesn't help that much.
I do award story arc XP, which you would call quest XP. I do not award XP for player creativity, but I do award XP for good RP. The creativity of characters should be solely a function of how intelligent and creative the characters themselves are, and should not be a function of how bright the players are. A 5 int barbarian cannot and should not come up with a clever solution to any problem, except something like how to put his pants on. If the player doesn't like it, too bad - they should have put more points into Int. I do not reward metagaming. If the player's character is more intelligent than the player himself, that can also be a problem, but I have no way of making real life players suddenly more intelligent.
What is it that enables the characters you have to crush anything? See, from my standpoint, it appears that it isn't that you aren't willing to kill them, it's that you have strange ideas about how to kill them. Why use the tarrasque, for example? That's an encounter of last resort. Why not send in succubi who look like commoners in need of help, mixed in with commoners who really do need help? A few kisses later and the cleric will have lost serious amounts of wisdom. THEN you send in some monsters to fight. When he goes to cast some spells - oops, no can do.
Why allow your character to flee the tarrasque? Does he know what it is? Why allow him to listen to his older brother? Isn't that metagaming? He should make decisions only on what the character thinks and knows, not what he himself thinks and knows, and certainly not based on the OOC input of others. If his cleric thinks he's invincible, why would he flee just because he can't recognize a new type of monster?
Let me close by addressing your comments on style and manipulation. I recognize that this is a matter of personal preference amongst DMs. My style is not dead-set on making a group do exact things. I run my game with multiple parallel side-threads, and let the characters decide where they go depending on what they think is important. Events in the world progress accordingly, and there is always more to do than can be done. So, if they don't go after the people who are hatching a plot to open a gate to the abyss, lo and behold, after enough time passes, demons will indeed start overrunning the world. On the other hand, if they don't go after the necromancer amassing bodies, they could face an undead army. It's up to them to decide what's important and what gets done. If they screw up, they screw up. My game is non-cinematic, and I do not have a habit of making things easy, giving extra equipment, or fudging rolls to keep people alive.
That's my DMming style. Your mileage may vary.
PS: I see what you mean about not having to worry about the plot, though, because you apparently are not running multiple independent events in the background. It's a downside of taking the "simulated world" approach that a DM has more stuff to keep track of.