In message <eurrn1$fta$1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
mkkuhner@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Mary K. Kuhner) wrote:
<snip>
> I have severe worries about the survival of my Worms game at this
> point. There's an implicit contract between player(s) and GM when
> playing D&D, it seems to me, that the GM will do something appropriate
> for non-minimaxed PCs and the player will not minimax to a game-
> busting degree. Episode #4 of _Worms_ broke the GM side of that
> contract *badly*. It is hard to tell the player "don't minimax"
> after throwing a CR16 at level 8 PCs. But once you've started down
> that road, is there really a stopping point short of "every fight is
> determined before it starts" outcomes?
>
> Episode #5 really never posed any serious danger to the PCs; the
> gladiatorial fights in particular were a joke. (The crowd didn't
> like the PCs as much as the module thought they should, because
> yes, the PCs won, but it was *boring.* Madtooth the great monster
> never got to act at all; it just turned into a frog on the first
> action of the first PC. Admittedly that was a bad die roll, but
> still.)
>
> But it's hard to tell the player "Back down a bit on the minimax"
> when there might be another Episode #4 coming at any moment.
> (And in fact, I think he *has* backed down some. The line between
> enough minimax to survive and too much to be fun is very thin and
> hard to spot. I'm not sure that for me there *is* such a line
> past about level 12.)
This probably counts as a band-aid over a broken limb, but as a possible
future suggestion, how do you think this would work:
1. 'No minimaxing - design the characters as characters, not combat
machines.'
2. Use a 'drama multiplier' - for lack of a better term - that multiplies
the characters' capabilities by some scalar in the range 1.0 to 2.0
(hopefully x1.5 would be the most you'd ever need, unless it's a real
munchkin module) and reduces damage taken by a similar amount.
This is a very quick-and-dirty way to 'rebalance' unbalanced encounters.
You
might allow characters to 'pull out all the stops' and operate at a higher
level of efficiency when something is really im****tant to them, or it's a
dramatic encounter - a bit like Star Wars Force Points - but the primary
objective would be to provide an easy way of correcting for other people's
bad scenario design rather than to provide an in-character turbo boost. I
know you would have in-character problems with 'hey, we beat that last
Tarrasque easily, why is this one so much harder?', but AFAICS you get
that
/anyway/ with badly-designed encounters, and at least this way characters
die less often. If you keep track of the 'drama multiplier' of a
particular
campaign, you will see spikes and dips, I assume, but hopefully this would
give you some indicator of the average difficulty level that is
independent
of the Challenge Rating. Particularly as it seems the Challenge Rating
can't
be relied on to be all that accurate (or well-chosen) anyway.
If you can track the drama mulitiplier through a campaign and find it's
1.0,
1.0, 1.2, 1.5, 1.2, 1.2, 1.5, 2.0 you at least have a marginally better
chance of the characters coping. And you have some chance of gauging at
least in rough terms where the next scenario is going to be pitched.
What's
more, if you under- or over-estimate a particular encounter, you can bump
up
the multiplier relatively quickly, and even apply it retrospectively if
necessary, and adjust it slightly from round to round.
Given the agonisingly slow train wreck I've been reading about (I hope
you're painting it at least a bit blacker than it really is :-), I'd
really
want to keep a simple trick like this in my GMing armoury to cope with the
scenarios.
--
Simon Smith
When emailing me, please use my preferred email address, which is on my
web
site at http://www.simon-smith.org
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