Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheAngryDM" data-source="post: 5285351" data-attributes="member: 93931">@Kamimaze Midget: Forgive me if this sounds a little 'angry', but ultimately, driving the game or the PCs forward is not my problem. The encounter building guidelines in the DMG do not provide an incentive for the players to fight the monsters. Instead, they are there to let you build an encounter when you need to put one in your game. The DM running the game is still responsible for creating quests, motives, stories, personalities for factions, and so on. This is just a mechanical tool for managing the setting and the antagonists. Of course, exploration can be a motive, but its not something that every party enjoys as a motive. Slaughterhouse isn't good at all for anything in the short term. As I mention briefly in the article, I wouldn't dream of using this system for any site that wasn't meant to involve at least three experience levels, and even then, it might just get in the way.  This is just one more tool for the DM to put in his tool box and pull out when he needs it, like a power drill. When you need to put a hole in something, a power drill is the best tool, but if you need to pound in a nail, you probably want something more hammer-like and less drill-like. Specifically, this is a big, expensive tool, like a gas-powered power washer. Its big, its heavy, it drinks a lot of gasoline, and its a pain to lug out of the basement and connect up. You wouldn't use it everytime you want to wash your car, but when you need to clean a two-story house, its a hell of a lot easier than a ladder and a sponge.  Slaughterhouse won't swoop in and solve your problems, either. Yes, if your party uses the nova-rest cycle, they will be frustrated by their inability to make progress in the adventure (because they can't whittle things down one encounter at a time) and that might solve the problem. When repopulating the dungeon, if you keep ramping up the difficulty of the encounter at the door that the party keeps grinding to the point where the difficulty is too much for even a full nova. ("Hey, look at that, all of the orcs in the dungeon were waiting for you this time, good luck.") that could also solve the resting problem. It might not, though, and I never intended it to fix the nova-rest problem. But I suspect, with modification and paired with other tools (time pressure, strong motivations, ramping up difficulty, monsters hunting the party down instead of letting them retreat and attacking them when they sleep), it is one more way to tackle the problem.</blockquote>

Verification