SKR's problem with certain high level encounters

[ashockney]

High Level CR's and EL's

This is the fourth or fifth really good thread on EN World and Wizards boards about the challenges of high-level play in 3rd Edition. This is one of the first threads that has had so many heavy-weights weigh in on the subject.

It has been farily well established in the previous threads that the CR system begins to lose it's consistency at higher levels. Even a "baseline" CR becomes significantly less relevent at higher levels as the "comparable changes" required to bring your villian up to the power of your party becomes exponentially more difficult to calculate.

I echo the sentiment that a CR "factor" which laid out the designer's reasoning in assigning a creatures' CR would be extremely helpful. Further, I would really love to see a standard "d20" methodology for advancing creatures to fight against a "min/max'd" party. For example, I am required to spend hours of preparation time advancing, adding hit dice, increasing saving throws, calculating stats with "buff" spells, adding magic items, and developing encounters that leverage my villian's strengths. This is a ton of additional work. The bottom line is that below 10th level, I rarely, if ever, must put forth this kind of effort, no matter how much my characters' min/max.

On another note from the thread, I use the XP system from the DMG, and I think it works great.

As it regards Sean's rant, I agree that it can be very disheartening to fight against villians who ignore your character's strengths. Any DM that thinks otherwise needs to spend some more time as a player! In defense of the concept of this creature, however, having played high-level 3rd Ed quite a bit, I recognize and appreciate how difficult it is to really challenge a party of high level characters. If you take away the abilities of Undead, Incorporeal, and Possession, this monster is reduced to surprise round fodder! It most likely, won't even take an action. This is a tough situation, and I'd challenge Sean (or others) to offer how they would have presented a similar monster, that challenges a high level party? In my present high level campaign, it is a rare villian that doesn't have SR, immunities, concealment, damage reduction, defensive spells, buff spells, and more than one type of attack that will be threaten the party (ie, very high raw damage, poison, attribute reduction, immediate incapacitation, etc.).

Good luck to all who take on the endeavor of building a CR system that makes it easier for DM's to do their jobs!

 

[Aloïsius]

Has someone ever tried to fight a dragon in an antimagic field ? Some creature, with a lot of HD and extraordiny abilities become really scaring if you must fight in a dead magic zone, because they keep most of their physical firepower, while the PCs (even the non-spellcaster)are nerfed by the lost of their magic item.

 

[Plane Sailing]

While I don't like save or die effects, I don't advocate removing them completely from the game. They have their place, more for flavor than dramatic necessity. But even a medusa's gaze could be rewritten as Dex damage (stiffening up), where you turn to stone when your Dex is 0.

Hmmm, I quite like this idea. Similarly death effects could be CON damage.

It would be too big a change for me to bother trying out in my current campaign, but it would be an interesting escape from the "all or nothing" saves.

 

[Tsyr]

I'm just gonna chime in here with a quick comment...

My only real gripe with the CR system is that some DMs belive it is... infallible. I play under a DM that sends us up against something with a challenge rating near what we should be able to deal with (always a bit high 'cause he either thinks we enjoy the challenge or he hates us), but doesn't care that it has damage reduction and we have one magic weapon amongst the entire party, and it's the wizards staff at that. (He gives screwy rewards).

Then he gets mad when we complain about not standing a chance, as he gestures ephaticly at the CR entry in the MM, yelling "YOU GUYS COULD HAVE BEAT IT!".

 

[Ravellion]

I'm just gonna chime in here with a quick comment...

My only real gripe with the CR system is that some DMs belive it is... infallible. I play under a DM that sends us up against something with a challenge rating near what we should be able to deal with (always a bit high 'cause he either thinks we enjoy the challenge or he hates us), but doesn't care that it has damage reduction and we have one magic weapon amongst the entire party, and it's the wizards staff at that. (He gives screwy rewards).

Then he gets mad when we complain about not standing a chance, as he gestures ephaticly at the CR entry in the MM, yelling "YOU GUYS COULD HAVE BEAT IT!".

Or the other way around: DM's that give "Phat L3wt tm ", then say "How the heck did you beat that!? You should have ran away!"

Interesting thread. Funny that Monte and Sean actually reply to each other's post here, 2+ years after release.

Rav

 

[PeterDonis]

Errr... you missed the point entirely. I don't run hack and slash campaigns (except demonstration nights at the gaming store but thats a different story). Hack and slashers in my campaigns die horribly. I've written extensively on this board about avoiding hack and slash campaigning and defusing the 'kill on sight attitude', so you are preaching to the choir and the deacons.

Sorry, I wasn't aware of your previous posts (too many threads, too little time). I didn't mean to imply that you were promoting hack and slash gaming, I was really just trying to make a general comment.

I was going to go through another long explanation, but if you don't get it now you won't no matter how I explain. I've been doing this for 20 years now, and I find the thought of you trying to tell me that high level combat in D&D doesn't go too quickly and that simply changing my DMing style will correct that frankly kinda silly. Referee games for another 10 years and then we'll have this conversation.

I've been refereeing games for more than 20 years, a good many of them high level. Of course, my experiences are just one person's experiences, so read a YMMV after my posts if that helps. But my experience has been that combat--straight hack and slash combat--doesn't change all that much as the levels get higher. Some combats go quickly, others don't--but that's just as true at low levels. An orc can take out a 1st level character with one good blow--is that any different than a power word kill taking out a high-level character in one round? If I had to pick out one trend in my experience, it would be that combats actually on average last a little longer at high levels, simply because characters have more hit points, more resistances, and more defenses to put up. But the trend, if it's there, is very minor. That's precisely the reason I like to have my game revolve around other things than combat--because in a sense, if you've seen one combat, you've seen 'em all.

Peter Donis

 

[Sonofapreacherman]

The problem isn't the monster, it's the CR system

"Did you (and all the other designers) really think that player's "wouldn't" optimize their characters?"

Of course we did.

I see no evidence of it, unless you and other designers intentionally set out to create a Challenge Ratings system that was counter-productive to the rest of what is otherwise a diversified edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

You see, if you "knew" that players would optimize their characters, then why not create a Challenge Ratings system that scales with the party, rather than basing monster Challenge Ratings on the baseline statistics of one set of non-tweaked iconic characters? Rest assured, I understand full well what you meant by "baseline" Monte. Hopefully you see what I mean now.

Something else bears mentioning. You and the other designers created a "wonderful" diversified role-playing system. It's just that the Challenge Rating system did not rise to that same level of diversification. So if you are taking these criticisms personally, please don't. The current Challenge Ratings system is (by your own admission) singular in its scope, only taking into account the iconic characters. It fundamentally lacks the ability to diversify across as many character types as possible.

I'll be realistic now. You and the other designers accomplished A LOT with 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons. Definite progress was made (the skill system for instance). So I'm not calling your efforts a failure by any stretch of the imagination. Challenge Ratings, however, need to be reworked. They require too much adjustment and tweaking at higher levels. They currently force dungeon masters to dissect monsters into their component parts (read: special abilities) in order to properly assign more appropriate Challenge Ratings and thus Experience Point rewards. It's too cumbersome a task that fails to offer "accuracy" as the final product.

So let me ask you another question Monte...

Rather than resisting what I suspect even you realize is a flawed Challenge Ratings system, why not instead weigh in amongst the devoted gamers of this thread and join the mammoth task of fixing it?

I'm sure your help would be more than welcome.

So far I would say that Ryan Dancey has the right idea with Challenge Ratings Factors, but it obviously needs to be built on.

Heck, are you still reading along Ryan? I'd be interested in knowing if you have already done some preliminary work on those numbers? Can you offer this thread anything? I don't think anybody is expecting perfection at this stage. Just some *splattered* ideas to give people a starting point.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Hmmm, I quite like this idea. Similarly death effects could be CON damage.

It would be too big a change for me to bother trying out in my current campaign, but it would be an interesting escape from the "all or nothing" saves.

Essentially 3e takes this exact style of death damage when they rewrote the poison rules as ability damage. We could tweak the most all of the insta-doom effects as ability damage.

Frex, Finger of Death could be rewritten as: "Make a Fort save immediately and once in each of the following two rounds. For each save you miss, take 1d12 Con damage."

A death effect can still be a near certain death sentence without killing you instantly. It could be much more dramatic to have to option of desperately attempting to save your life with potions or healing spells as the clock ticks.

It wouldn't be difficult if you were starting at low level and tweaked as you slowly introduced powerful magic. Probably too ugly to try out on an existing high level campaign, though.

 

[LostSoul]

Essentially 3e takes this exact style of death damage when they rewrote the poison rules as ability damage. We could tweak the most all of the insta-doom effects as ability damage.

I guess you could also use Hit Points for all types of damage (considering how nebulous Hit Points are). A medusa's gaze does 2d6 damage; stones the commoners but the hero avoids it. When the hero hits -10, he's turned to stone.

(I don't know why 3e has ability damage; it seems like a way of getting around Hit Points, even though the designers say that Hit Points are great. I like ability damage, but I wonder why all damage isn't ability damage.)

Of course, to do this you'd have to refit all spells and spell effects. I think giving PCs some kind of fate point to help them out when they need it would be easier.

 

[neroden]

My considered opinion

On SKR's actual topic: I agree that the "immune to X, Y, Z, resistant to everything else" trend is no fun.

On the topic of CR:

Tactics and adjustment notes for each monster would be invaluable for any DM running a monster for the first time. I'd like to see, for instance, "This monster is twice as hard if you can't turn undead"; "This monster is three times as hard if you have no magic weapons"; "This monster's greatest weakness is X, so is very easy if your party is especially good at dealing with X"; "This monster is designed for parties which can deal out lots of melee damage, and is nearly impossible for other parties"; etc.

Certain monsters in the MM have CRs which are wildly off because the monsters are *very* specialized. For example, the shrieker. If there are no other monsters in the area, the lone shrieker can deal NO damage, and is no challenge. If there are twenty strong monsters nearby, the shrieker forces the party to face them all at once rather than one at a time, which may be a tremendous challenge. And yet it is listed as having "CR 3". That's a joke. The shrieker should have a section explaining how to determine its challenge based on its surroundings, since a fixed CR is worthless.

There are other creatures where the situation is less extreme, but where the difference by situtation or type of party is still very significant, warranting more than the generic comments in the DMG on adjusting CR, EL, and XP. But these detailed comments do not exist, leaving DMs to guess or ask others.