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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="WalterKovacs" data-source="post: 4705958" data-attributes="member: 63763">So, as long as the group has a dagger based rogue, and a wizard, and someone to flank wth the rogue it should be fine. Not only does each member of the party have to be optimized ... the actual choice of characters has to be optimized as well. Whether or not the troll is going to be a huge threat or a manageable one is based not just on how optimized the party is, but exactly what classes are there. So ... you should know what your party can handle before you throw just ANY "balanced" encounter against them.  Again ... so long as the group has a rogue, it will be fine. "Having a rogue in the party" should not be a requirement for having a balanced party.    A DM needs to know their party. They need to know that when you go to the top levels of encounter design it's assuming that the entire party is AT LEAST at the baseline of being optimal, and that this means that many in the party are only going to be hitting maybe 30% of the time unless they can get bonuses, or attack the right defense, etc. If they know that there are PCs that are not "at their best", they need to recognise that and adjust accordingly.  The players and the DM are all playing the same game. If their expectations are not synced up it doesn't matter which one is playing the game wrong. What is important is that they resolve their issue. The beauty of D&D is that there is more than one way to play it. You CAN have extremely difficult encounter to challenge people who want to have difficult and potentially deadly encounters and test their abilities to build characters able to withstand them. It's also possible for players to try less than optimal ideas (such as race/class combinations that don't yield optimal builds) and for the DM to cut out the most dangerous encounters because the players have increased the difficulty by reducing PC optimization. The problem comes when PC goals and DM goals, or goals between different PCs, are not synced up. As has been said in the thread, the problem with the feat is if only some of the players take it. The feat is extremely good, and in most groups, everyone will eventually take it, some early in heroic tier, and some later in heroic. Any group that actually has an optimized character taking the feat, and an extremely unoptimized character not taking the feat (The example of the dwarf paladin with 16 charisma and the human fighter with 20 strength was made) is a group that has problems beyond the feat.  Because the designers made the game such that there is a very large range of possible encounters, it's their job to play the game correctly and have their PCs fit a narrow mold. If they don't optimize they are playing the game incorrectly and wasting the time of the designers ... OR, the DM can take advantage of the wide design area and slowly test the boundaries of the party to see what is acceptable for them, not just what is acceptable for the expected power level. Some parties may not be able to take on level + 7 monsters. Also, some parties may be able to take one SOME, but not ALL level + 7 monsters. Guidelines help in encounter design. The statement has more to do with "don't even bother trying level + 8" so much as "you really should try level + 7". If something is at the very top of the power level a party is expected to go up against, you don't just throw it out there without considering what your party can do. A good DM does more than just builds encounters for a party that is hypothetically at the expected power level, and throws it up against their party. Especially if the party has players that: (a) don't know they are expected to be at a certain power level(b) don't know what the expected power level is(c) don't want to be confined by expected power level (race/class combination is particularly important, and multiclassing, especially paragon multiclassing, would be discouraged) Problems arise from lack of communication about expectation. It's not about players doing it wrong because they haven't built characters capable of being as good as the hypothetical party (like not having a Rogue with the particular at-will power that targets reflex in order to have an easy time against the Troll, for example).</blockquote>

Verification