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Any D&D/D20

Shadowrun

World of Darkness

Palladium

Other (feel free to post about it)

[SOLDIER First]

This thread doesn't include non-DnD, total freeform play-by-post, does it?

[NullForceOmega]

Not really?  That's pretty far into the gray area I think, so it might not be well suited to this thread.  I'm willing to let you try, but if it gets too off-topic I'll have to ask you to take it elsewhere.

[SOLDIER First]

Yeah, on second thought it doesn't really fit. Thanks anyway.

[NullForceOmega]

Okay, good luck and have fun with your game.

[SOLDIER First]

Thanks! c:

[Cattani]

Hey guys. I'm a very new DM and i'm scheduled to take over our group soon. Our game is Pathfinder.
I have DM'ed a few encounters before and my opponents always feel very underpowered. I mean VERY. I need advice on making actual deadly encounters. And I dont just want to shove harder enemies at them because the problem is not game balance, it's because I feel I'm not really using my orcs/goblinoids/drow/what-have-you up to their best.
Anyone have advice or a link or something that can be shared?

[SOLDIER First]

I've always heard the key to making challenging encounters is to have multiple enemies, because of turn economy and... things. So try that. Just add more enemies. Always works.

[wierd]

You need to tailor your monsters to the abilities and perks of your players.

Players will always try to overbuff themselves, etc.  This means that monsters that should own the floor with their spleens can get creamed effortlessly, if the players are savvy.

You have to be more clever than your players.  The game typically tries to provide handicaps in addition to boons when somebody takes a feat, or uses an object or spell to buff a character. Exploitation of those handicaps is how you cut through the tank's defenses, and wreck the floor with him.

Outfitting the drow with useful things, like magic tattoos (which cannot be looted, because well-- they are part of the drow's skin!) gives the drow in question the equivalent of having wondrous items equipped, without actually having wondrous items to loot.  This makes it possible to buff the creatures in ways that make it hard to combat them, especially if the drow in question are formed into a cohesive and useful party themselves. Say for instance, one of their number is able to draw all magical attacks, and has a perk to strongly resist, or completely negate those magic attacks. This makes the glass cannon wizard/sorc less effective at taking out the fighters in the drow party, and causing the player party's tank to get overwhelmed.  Can couple with other fun things like adding some kind of anti-magic to prevent healing effects, or some local hazard that reduces saving throw efficacy. Drow are sentient humanoids, and it makes perfect sense that they could make use of such things. Given their culture, it makes sense that they *WOULD* use such things.

Properly combining the features of the dungeon room itself, with the creature's abilities, can make even an encounter with pitiful monsters into one that causes nightmares for players.

Look at how your group's characters do things.  Create situations where those tactics fail.  Force the players to try something else besides their familiar formulae.

[Jimmy]

Hey guys. I'm a very new DM and i'm scheduled to take over our group soon. Our game is Pathfinder.
I have DM'ed a few encounters before and my opponents always feel very underpowered. I mean VERY. I need advice on making actual deadly encounters. And I dont just want to shove harder enemies at them because the problem is not game balance, it's because I feel I'm not really using my orcs/goblinoids/drow/what-have-you up to their best.
Anyone have advice or a link or something that can be shared?

What are your players' classes and levels?

What is the campaign theme currently?

How do combats usually get resolved?

[Harry Baldman]

Hey guys. I'm a very new DM and i'm scheduled to take over our group soon. Our game is Pathfinder.
I have DM'ed a few encounters before and my opponents always feel very underpowered. I mean VERY. I need advice on making actual deadly encounters. And I dont just want to shove harder enemies at them because the problem is not game balance, it's because I feel I'm not really using my orcs/goblinoids/drow/what-have-you up to their best.
Anyone have advice or a link or something that can be shared?

Slight advantages tend to make or break a combat encounter. If the party are taken by surprise, they can't easily do the cavalcade of buffs. If there's difficult terrain and obstacles, movement becomes more complex. Combine these with good positioning, traps, reasonable anti-wizard measures (such as a net) and of course spellcasters (using a spell like pyrotechnics, for instance) and you have encounters that make you work to beat them. Take advantage of the fact that adventurers usually fight enemies on their home ground and prepare accordingly (could be something as simple as the drow outpost being completely unlit and them using their superior darkvision to outrange the adventurers as well as put traps in the darkest and least visible locations). Take advantage of verticality as well and don't hesitate to put enemies well above the players on a perch or a roof and let loose hellish retribution.

[Jimmy]

Indeed. You'd be surprised how effective a handful of mooks with tanglefoot bags makes an encounter.

[Criptfeind]

As a side note, I think I wanta put in that easy encounters aren't universally a bad thing either. It is if your players are feeling unsatisfied with the battles, but so long as they are easy because your players are playing relatively not stupidly (controllers are controlling, dps are dpsing, buffers are buffing, tactics and stratagy aren't stupid. Etc.) I don't think encounters need to be super life and death situations every time. Mostly because, well, D&D is a game based on randomness of dice rolls. And a close and hard encounter (if it's truly close and hard and not just a smoke screen) implies a percentage chance of failure and death. That's cool for some climatic battles, but if every fight has a 25% chance of dying either your game is going to last around 4 fights before it's over, or you'll have to pull out bullshit to keep them alive. Neither option is really very satisfying in my opinion (well, the 4 fights one CAN be satisfying, but it's not how you want to run every game.) Ultimately it sorta depends on what story you and your group want to tell. But if it's a heroic one, an easy ride (except sometimes in climaxes) isn't necessarily a bad thing.

[Arx]

Take advantage of verticality as well and don't hesitate to put enemies well above the players on a perch or a roof and let loose hellish retribution.

This is super true. My party once had a player kill from two low-level skeleton archers on rooftops. Piercing resistance meant the archer couldn't trivially kill them, poor climb check meant the paladin couldn't hop up and flatten them. We got them eventually, but it was a challenge.

[Cattani]

Thanks for the help guys!
Everyone in the group is new to the game. We wanted to play but we knew no DM or anything so I just took it upon me to do it.
It's a low level campaign, fighting goblins and stuff, doing some side quests to understand their power level before actually putting up a big story arc.
I think i can see where I'm going wrong... My fights are always on bright areas, the terrain is never dangerous and my guys never have cool stuff on them like tanglefoots or potions or anything.
It really makes sense. The players are still enjoying their stuff but these kind of fights are not taking us far. Better ramp up the difficulty before it gets boring.

[Draignean]

Thanks for the help guys!
Everyone in the group is new to the game. We wanted to play but we knew no DM or anything so I just took it upon me to do it.
It's a low level campaign, fighting goblins and stuff, doing some side quests to understand their power level before actually putting up a big story arc.
I think i can see where I'm going wrong... My fights are always on bright areas, the terrain is never dangerous and my guys never have cool stuff on them like tanglefoots or potions or anything.
It really makes sense. The players are still enjoying their stuff but these kind of fights are not taking us far. Better ramp up the difficulty before it gets boring.

Throwing in a radically different kind of enemy is always a good way to spice things up. A single quell, for instance, while capable of doing only very limited damage, is capable of throwing a fairly massive wrench into the works of a party that relies on its healers.

Changeling bandits led by a low-level sorcerer capable of casting animate rope can make a wicked ambush by adopting the faces and aspects of prisoners, wearing animated ropes, and then jumping whichever individual is foolish enough to try and free them.

A promising looking ruin, inhabited by even a single gargoyle, can also very easily challenge the unprepared.


For my own part, I'm having trouble with my setting. On the one hand, I like the general concept of a world where the Heroes of Prophecy fucked up their jobs royally more than two centuries ago, and thus left most of the continent in the hands of an Alienist* Dracolich and his pet Necrocracy.

On the other hand, it runs into one of the larger problems I have in campaigns: giving people impossible problems. See, I like giving people horrible snarls of brambles that no human could ever escape from, because I want to see what people DO in those sorts of situations. Still, it's a problem, and I've been told that I have a bad habit of making the early encounters so impossibly horrifying that most people try to abandon their respective quests and go farm goats on a secluded mountain.

Things are usually okay once they get rolling, but... Well, I'm leery of creating a setting that is, at it's core too dark and dreary.

Bah. Still working on it. Intros are hard, and for some reason this one is bothering me more than most. Hell, maybe I'll just go back to my Smalls campaign idea...


*Every time I go back and read the Lords of Madness extension, I am struck by how terrible this prestige class is.