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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6674270" data-attributes="member: 4937">While this is an important thing to keep in mind, there is a significant risk of over tailoring to the PC's as well.  Taken to an extreme, this approach results in railroads where the DM is deciding the outcome of encounters, and even in the less extreme case is probably just as likely to result in loss of dramatic tension as it is to increase it.  At the very least, it tends to result in treating PC's with kid gloves and discourages the players from developing technical skills as players.   As someone else rightly pointed out, just because direct attacks have been rendered difficult or impossible doesn't mean that the players ought to feel like they are out of options.  A player of consummate skill is continually aware of what would challenge his party and is working to mitigate against that.  If a party as a whole decides to go all in on a single strategy, the DM needs to keep that in mind, but he also should avoid rewarding that approach by removing from the list of possible encounters things that hard counter that strategy.  After all, for every such encounter, there is another encounter where the PC's strategy overwhelms the monster.  If a particular monster is virtually immune to magic, there is another monster that is particularly vulnerable to it.  If a particular monster is strong versus melee attacks, there is another that is weak when the PC's can get to melee range against it.   If the DM is deciding that it would be unfair to present a party with a challenge that works against their character's strengths, should he also not present the party with challenges that do work to their strengths?And that gets to the crux of the problem.  When a player invests resources to being good at a particular thing, then he has a reasonable expectation that in actual play he will be in fact good at that thing.  What I've actually observed in 100% of the cases where a DM takes a tailored encounter approach, is that the difficulty of the encounter scales to the level of resources that the party has invested.   The trivial example is a rogue who has invested in being able to pick locks consistently, finds that in practice he picks locks no more regularly than a rogue that isn't is tremendous lockpicker because the DM sets the DC of opening a lock according to the PC's bonus to do so.  The player that invests in great perception, finds that the more perceptive he becomes the more hidden and subtle all the clues become.   This goes on and on, so that the player is a great archer finds that all his foes are either virtually invulnerable to arrows or just as great of archer as he is, and the wizard that excels finds that all his foes now have a great deal of magical resistance and immunity.The way that a DM avoids all these subtle traps and maintains a proper neutrality is not over tailoring the world to the PC's, but instead sets a reasonable baseline for what is out there and then leaves it up to the PC's how to deal with those challenges irrespective to what he knows about the PCs.  If the DM is always tailoring encounters based on what he knows about the PC's, he's metagaming and as a result the player's agency is being eroded to a lesser or greater degree.There are far more subtle ways to tailor encounters to maintain a reasonable range of challenge (and yes, challenge in encounters should always have a range and not be tightly zeroed in on the PCs abilities) than to metagame off of the PC's abilities.   A better and approach in my opinion is to tailor to the player's skill level by increasing complications in the encounter - increasingly complicated terrain, increasingly disfavorable situations, increasing cunning and preparation by the foes, hostages to rescue, fog of war, and so forth.  Good encounters are challenging in the same way good puzzles are, and not merely because they chip off a certain number of resources.</blockquote>

Verification