Overestimating Party Strength

[Al]

The worst overestimation of party strength I've ever seen was from a novice DM with whom I once played. He had long been a player but wanted a go at DMing.
Now, we had 2e Skills and Powers and Combat and Tactics, so needlessly to say we could've wiped the floor with the average 1st level party. I can't remember exactly what we were, but I think that there was a Fighter, a Fire Elementalist (from Tome and Blood- played by myself) and a couple of others.
First Encounter: An ogre. Well, normally this would scare a 1st level party and perhaps a casualty. We slaughtered it. So the DM decided to up the stake.
Second Encounter: Two ogres and an ogre mage. We virtually turned white. His first question: 'How much damage does a Cone of Cold do?'
The campaign ended soon afterwards.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

One important thing to remember is that running away can be next to impossible. A dwarf, small race, or plate armored tank means that the group can only run from a handful of monsters. A plate armored dward, gnome, or halfling essentially means that conventional escape is impossible.

Yup.

If you don't have horses even medium armor can be a death sentence when the fight goes badly.

This is less of a problem for dungeon crawls where Obscuring Mist or Stinking Cloud can break contact and discourage pursuit. You increase the scale of the space and it takes big mojo to slow the opposition down.

Anyone in medium or heavy armor absolutely must keep a potion of Invisibility and/or Fly for emergency use only. It is cheaper than getting Raised.

 

[novyet]

I ran an encounter with frost giants that I ran not too long ago, that ended pretty weird. There were 3 of them and the first went down really fast, the next did some damage to a couple of people. Number 3, well....See the third one got chewed up pretty badly by the party's fighter, and knowing it's demise was near put everything it had into one last swing. I did a full on power attack and critted the fighter, who went down. It was funny because the tide of battle completely reversed at this point, with the giant wailing on people who kept dropping, he lasted for 4 more rounds after that before someone dropped him.

The crazy part was he had like 3 hp left!

Oh and girallons are nasty at CR 5.

 

[kengar]

Man! Did I ever overestimate party strength 2 weeks ago:

I was running a module and it had a dragon at the end (won't say which so as not to spoil). Well, the party -5 adventurers, so already a little more powerful than the classic 4 person group- had been wiping the floor with everything up until then. Folks were getting bored and except for a player death from poison (whom they managed to get resurrected), they were bored to the point they wanted to just head for the hills and have random encounters instead of finishing the dungeon.

I asked the group to vote on whether they wanted me to turn it up a notch -warning them that it would mean not everything would be at or below their "target CR"- "BRING IT ON!" was the near unanimous reply.

I bumped the dragon at the end from CR4 (Young) to CR6 (Juv.). Then, the five of them -all 6th level (nearly 7th)- made short work of a CR10 creature. So I bumped the dragon again to CR8 (Young Adult) and read up on tactics at BADD's site.

You see where this is going, don't you?

Needless to say, the dragon CREAMED them. Only one got away and that was because I lost track of how far he'd gotten before the dragon turned its attention on him. The group decided to just make new characters than continue the current campaign. I felt terrible, but I *had* warned them repeatedly that it was going to get riskier.

Bottom line: it happens. Sometimes it's bad rolls, sometimes the DM just guesses wrong about monster/party strength and sometimes -as I feel is true of 3e dragons- the CR ratings are off (That dragon should've been a CR10 at least!).

PS- The fact they had no cleric in the party (with 5 of them, no less!) and they hadn't rested before going down the next level hurt their chances, but it was still too much for them. Once dragons get spells and DR they are INSANELY tough!

 

[jollyninja]

6 lev 1 characters vs 12 cats out of the mm. TPK. it was horrible, they couldn't hit the cats at all. it's just nasty watching a party get whittled down 1 point at a time.

 

[Kalendraf]

Dragon CR's

According to an article by Sean Reynolds, the Dragon CR's are intentionally messed up. They are listed as well below their actual CR value. The reason given was that dragons are only supposed to be encountered by groups actively hunting them (hogwash, I say), and the group is supposed to be expecting them. Why they neglected to inform anyone of this is beyond me. Here's the article link:

http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/misc/handlinglargeparties.html

Overall, that article has a lot of good suggestions for dealing with party's and not overwhelming them. One group I DM for has 5 characters (currently 7th level) and most of them are multiclassed. I'm finding that CR and EL numbers are very reliable for this group, especially humanoid, vermin and animals. The more unique a creature is, the more difficult it is to judge, since in some cases the unique abilities may be hard to deal with, while other abilities may be very easy to deal with, and it really depends on the party's composition. But humanoids, animals and vermin which are all very straight-forward in function, seem to line up very well on the EL/CR tables for the challenge they pose for this group.

Another thing that many DM's aren't aware of it how important the equipment is in the CR rating. The DMG lists expected equipment/character wealth at each level, and the CR numbers take that into account. If the DM decides to wimpify the treasure he dishes out, it suddenly makes the CR ratings go up. And many newbie DM's (at least new to 3E) make this mistake at some point and figure that an Xth level party should be able to handle an encounter of EL X, without stopping to consider their mistake. Some are obvious - magic weapons required vs. non-corporeal creatures, but others aren't as obvious (improved Armor rating w/ magic armor vs. the monster's insanely high BAB, etc). And the innevitable result is a PC death or more before the DM realizes his mistake.

Personally, I'm finding that tossing more though weaker encounters at the group is far better than trying to toss stuff that is more than 1 EL above them, since it is just so easy for those encounters to backfire and decimate the group. And where's the fun in having a bunch of dead PC's?

 

[kengar]

Re: Dragon CR's

According to an article by Sean Reynolds, the Dragon CR's are intentionally messed up. They are listed as well below their actual CR value. The reason given was that dragons are only supposed to be encountered by groups actively hunting them (hogwash, I say), and the group is supposed to be expecting them. Why they neglected to inform anyone of this is beyond me.

Interesting read, thanks for the link. I would add that in the case of the party I was DM-ing, they were also keen on maxing out potential loot, which -since the dragon was placed deliberately in the module- lent itself to boosting the CR & therefore the hoard.

The party was on target for their level in wealth (another point in SKR's article) but probably would have need to be a level or two above that to have items capable of winning that encounter.

The fact they all but one missed their Will Save v. Frightful Presence and were shaken didn't help either

 

[Leopold]

Fi 2
Cl 2
Ranger 2

vs.

5 Orcs

EL 4 vs EL 2.5

end result:

Round 1-2(Suprise Round)
5 Criticals in a row drops the cleric and fumblefizucking dual wielding ranger, and fighter is down megapoints so quaffs a potion Orcs 2 PC 3.

Round 3
Fighter has 5 hp's left and downs the orcs with cleave.


They thought "ONLY ORCS! NO BIGGIE!". The power of the dice was strong that night as I made them use up ALL of their healing potions! MUHAHAHAHAHAHA!!