In article <s4k313di883rfnv4st9djc17u2p6f2nnbc@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Erol K. Bayburt <ErolB1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>On Tue, 03 Apr 2007 00:26:40 +0100, Simon Smith
><simon_smith_news@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>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.'
This doesn't help at all, because it makes (as far as I can tell) most
published adventures and modules completely unusable unless you bump up
character level a *lot*--and many of them are still unusable. A 15th
level party which is strongly de-optimized may lose to a 12th level
scenario; on a bad day, to a 10th level scenario. (And everything in the
module but the one killer fight will probably be too easy to be
interesting.)
The encounter which caused the double TPK in _Age of Worms_ #4 (a module
for levels 8-9) not only mopped up Jon's 8th level party, I think it would
have mopped up my less-optimized 11th level party. (Now, at 13th, they
could do it. But if you ran that module for 13th level characters I think
it would break; they have too many capabilities the module author didn't
allow for. And all of the other encounters would be trivial. The PCs
would
probably need to make a new plan like "Win without causing any fatalities"
or "Take over the evil organization and turn it to their own ends" in
order
for the game to be at all interesting.)
>>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.
>If the problem could be so easily patched, it could be so easily
>patched. The problem isn't that the characters are too weak (or too
>strong) it's (IMO) that the game has a very low tolerance for
>variability in character power at high level.
Yes. I could get something of the same effect by running modules meant
for
much lower-level characters, and we have had partial success with this,
but the higher the actual level gets, the more brittle it becomes. The
warm-up encounters are so easy that they aren't a warm-up--they don't
give the player any useful practice in handling the characters--and the
boss encounters may still be lethal, depending on exact details of party
composition.
There was a CR12 leonal guardinal (a kind of angel) in one of the SCAP
adventures; an 11th level PC challenged it to a duel and lost hopelessly.
The PCs went up a level, went back and (at the urging of the
now-ex-paladin)
jumped it en masse, all eight of them, average level 12th; and lost. (We
had thought that might happen so were very prepared to retcon it.) There
are a bunch of twiddly little numbers in D&D and if a couple of them are
out of the normal range, you get results like this. (SR, DR, AC, and Fast
Healing are the usual suspects.) And there start to be spells which are
unanswerable except by a few very specific countermeasures. (Wall of
Force was the culprit here.)
On the other hand, Jon's 10th level party, now fairly well optimized,
would
win that fight pretty handily.
It's not that the PCs are too weak or too strong. It's that they're
frequently too weak *and* too strong, depending on the precise details
of the adversaries. You can fine-tune the degree of optimization but
at some point, you're just changing the relative pro****tions of too
strong and too weak: the sweet spot in between seems to have vanished.
(In my previous game I felt we were irrecovably past that point at
level 14.)
Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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