PEACH: the Great Equalizer

[Aoirorentsu]

Hello Enworlders,

A random thought for a houserule, wanted to see what folks thought. Presented in a form here.

The basic goal is to be able to fashion an "okay" encounter out of an overly easy or difficult one on the fly. The key is to recognize it early, and kick the Equalizer into effect at that time.

To do so, there's a Equalizer Scale modifier. It starts at 0, and can go either negative or positive. The Equalizer Scale represents a modifier to all monster attack rolls and defenses that lasts until it changes or until the end of the encounter, at which point it resets to 0.
- natural d20 rolls between 8 and 12 (inclusive) impact the modifier as follows:
1) a hit on a PC decreases the Equalizer by 1.
2) a hit on a monster increases the Equalizer modifier by 1.
- any change to the modifier does not come into effect until after the action that resulted in the change has been resolved. For example, if multiple PCs are caught in an area attack, apply the same Equalizer to all of them and then change the Equalizer after each attack roll is resolved, according to the net number of hits/misses. If three PCs are attacked, all of the die rolls are between 8 and 12, and two of them hit, a net -1 to the modifier would come into effect after the attack is completely resolved.
- an attack on one creature from an ally (resulting from domination or the psion's Betrayal power, for example) does not impact the Equalizer no matter the die roll.

Variant: if the an elite creature hits a PC with a natural d20 roll between 8 and 12, change the modifier by 2 as appropriate to account for the increased value of elite creatures; for solos, change it by 5. This is a variant because most elite and solo creatures have ways of making multiple separate attacks per round, and thus changing the modifier multiple times per round.

Variant: to make the Equalizer more powerful, increase the range of die rolls that modify it, as long as the increase in range applies to both ends. Thus, you can make the Equalizer be modified on a natural roll of 8 to 12, 7 to 13, 6 to 14, 5 to 15, etc.

Variant: the "Equalizing Range" might increase by 1 in both directions each round that it is in effect, such that it is 8 to 12 on round 1, 7 to 13 on round 2, etc.

The Good:
- it more or less accomplishes the goal. Given a non-swingy d20 roll (8 to 12), the battle would tend toward a situation in which the monsters and PCs are hitting each other in roughly equal measure. I assume this is a good thing and is generally intended for at-level fights - maybe I'm wrong, though.

The Bad:
- it may not be philosophically sound to punish PC success (by increasing the Equalizer when they hit).
- There's no real XP modification built in. It'd have to be a DM judgment call, but I would say that an encounter where the Equalizer was used should be worth at-level encounter xp against one at-level monster per PC. Perhaps that's wonky.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!
Aoi

 

[Aoirorentsu]

Well, it looks like no one's responding, which is fine *sniffle**sniffle*

If anyone uses this or something like it in their game, please let me know how it worked for you, k?

Thanks

 

[the Jester]

Understand that everything in this post is a playstyle choice and there is nothing wrong with your system for certain playstyles, but I would never use something like this in my game.

First of all, not all fights should be the same.

If an encounter is easy- great! The pcs have an easy encounter!

If an encounter is hard- great! The pcs had a hard encounter!

If an encounter is so hard that it turns into a tpk- bummer! But sometimes that's how it goes.* (I'm assuming that the encounter had some kind of out for the pcs here, or else their actions brought it directly upon them, as opposed to

If an encounter is so hard that it is an inevitable tpk that the party had no chance to avoid, work around, approach another way etc.- I'll just plain fudge.

On the (VERY) rare occasions when I fudge as a dm, I do not need or want a system for it. If I am going to bother to decide things instead of simply adjudicating them, I will decide them. Using a system like yours seems unnecessarily full of extra bookkeeping. Also, if a pc misses the same enemy on a 10 this round but then hits on a 9 next round, they will know something wonky is going on.

Edit: Which isn't terrible if they know the system is in play, but imho things designed to equalize tough/easy combats work best when they are invisible to the players; otherwise they come to rely on them.

*In fact, the whole epic destiny/exit the campaign at level 30 thing that 4e has introduced is something I'm still not sure how I feel about, but my campaign hasn't yet reached epic levels, so we'll see eventually!

 

[Verdande]

I agree with what the Jester said- I'm not really looking for more complexity, especially when it's just to try and prevent everybody from dying. If your players' characters die, whoopsie- at least they learned something about their capabilities as players and will adjust fire when they continue on what they're doing.

After all, if there's no possibility for failure, fighting loses its point. If you always win, victory is hollow, you know?

 

[vic20]

An an FYI aside, you can drop the "PEACH" at ENWorld. The shielding-against-rudeness that is implied by the acronym on other boards is unnecessary, as that sort of rudeness is actively discouraged by the mods here. Some board elders start smoking out their ears whenever they see it, and that's no fun either.

 

[knightofround]

Well, at a first glance, I don't think its necessarily a bad idea. I wonder if its really worth the additional complexity though.

My three concerns with this houserule is follows:

1. The equalizer will be skewed heavily by the difference between minions and solos. If all your creatures are "standard" its okay...but solos *need* to have a high accuracy in order to be effective. The opposite is true of minions; they don't need to have as high accuracy, as they can be worthwhile via aid-another, meatshield, flank-bot, etc. Using your system, if you have 5 minions attack and miss, then the three standard monsters in the encounter are going to have a much-larger equalizer "bonus" to their attacks than they really should.

2. AOE attacks. One AOE can hit/miss the entire party. This means that either you're looking at making 4+ equalizer adjustments off of a single attack, or you need to fudge it as a single equalizer shift per "action". Which can be counter-intuitive because AoE attacks are typically weaker than single target, and often have the potential of hitting your own team-mates.

3. This system only looks at attack rolls, not damage rolls. If you're using this system to adjust encounters on-the-fly to prevent TPK...well, in my experience, the real threat is when you roll REALLY high damage numbers against the PCs. If you have any MMO experience, its damage spike that is the real threat, not overall damage output. To put it another way...you could have a combat where a ton of minions miss or nibble away the party just fine, and the solo gets unlucky with his attack rolls, missing the first two rounds of combat. But then on the third round, he finally hits, and unluckily for the PCs, you roll near-max damage on all the solos attacks, inadvertely killing on of the PCs.

I guess I'm saying that %-to-hit is only part of what you need to consider when adjusting encounters-on-the-fly....you also need to consider how much damage has been dealt in the encounter, how many resources the players have left, etc...

Because of all these variables, I'm not a huge fan of making a houserule system to cover on-the-fly adjustments....there's just too many things to take into account, it has a tendancy to add too much complexity. It's much easier to fudge NPC behavior or rolls instead.

 

[the Jester]

An an FYI aside, you can drop the "PEACH" at ENWorld.

This. Please, please, please- for God's sake- never use PEACH again here, I implore you.

 

[King Nate]

Peach

I'm just posting to complain about people who complain about PEACH. Wait, I have a great idea. I'm going to start adding PEACH to every post I do regardless if it deserves it or not just so I can have people bumping my post to complain about it.

 

[vic20]

I'm just posting to complain about people who complain about PEACH. Wait, I have a great idea. I'm going to start adding PEACH to every post I do regardless if it deserves it or not just so I can have people bumping my post to complain about it.

That sounds like a bad idea. You'll be stacking unnecessary meta context on top of unnecessary meta context. It's really a cultural thing that isn't appropriate here. I can appreciate that it is necessary elsewhere, but we're not there.