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[Loud Whispers]

For sure. They can get Sul Skewertongue, falxugon master defense attorney, to help them with their case. I'm going to try to re-enact this scene in an infernal courtroom. I've a mind to have him suggest the 'cheat at the trial (so we get corruption points on you)' thing - he'll immediately proceed to reveal the cheating before the court, but only to argue that such accomplished and daring cheaters should be embraced as the future pride of Hell and thus cleared of all charges for the time being. Because you absolutely should not trust your devil lawyer, even if they win you the case.

That's all in the game yo, right? I got the hex mark, you got the pact tome

[Digital Hellhound]

I would have gone with a Lionel Hutz inspired Imp for their attorney myself. An incompetent lawyer, other than being a source of levity, puts more of the onus on the players to find their own argument for why the case should be thrown out or ruled in their favour.

Yeah, that's definitely the first guy they get as a court-assigned free public defender. Even with a better lawyer, it'll be up to them to come up with a winning strategy - I'm not just going to DMPC them to victory, the smarmy devil attorney will have his own agenda.

[Kagus]

A friend of mine is running Strahd for a few people, and has wanted to make it the dark, stressful, deadly experience she knows it can be, but... She's very much more of a role-player than a roll-player, and has never fully grasped combat mechanics and such.

Nearing her wits' end, she asked if I could help out with prepping an encounter, because so far she's mostly been using DnDBeyond's rating system and it's so-called "Deadly" encounters have been... Well... Stomped without breaking a sweat. To the point that the players have gotten cocky. Very cocky.


Now, I don't have any experience on that side of the DM screen, but I do know a little bit about game mechanics. ...enough to inform her that some of her players have been building/using their characters incorrectly, and by that I mean shit like the warlock using his genie's vessel basically at-will and using Flock of Familiars to get multiple imps, not to mention letting her in on the fact that Silvery Barbs (and the apparently egregious use it's seen this campaign) isn't strictly speaking a "core" spell.

So now they're, hopefully, going to get a little bit of a rude awakening. They're in prime position storywise for a big fight/ambush, and in a situation where it's perfectly reasonable that even if they do effectively wipe, it's possible for the story to move forward through mercy/hubris.


I'm not innately familiar with a lot of the mooks in the books, but there's also an excellent candidate in this fight for some player-class fuckery, and I have spent a reasonable amount of time piecing characters together... So now the party is gonna be facing up against the regular assortment of fodder, along with a level 10 Enchanter who's going to hopefully have some fun with the party's universally low INT saves. And total lack of Counterspell.


Of course, this isn't a balls-out optimized character; I didn't want to go full minmax for something that'll be fighting a group that's used to combat encounters they hardly need to think about. Also no hard disables like Hold Person or Hypnotic Pattern, because that's not particularly fun to be hit with. I do have Raulothim's Psychic Lance in there though, because the synergy with Enchanter 10 is too good to pass up and it's pretty much exactly the thing to put the fear of god Strahd into the party's powerhouses.

So, hopefully with that and the notes I jotted down to help understand the reasoning and style of play, they're gonna have a proper taste of Barovian hospitality coming up soon. Preferably without it seeming completely unfair. And without also just getting ineffectually squished within the first round or two.


For reference, the party in this case is 4-5 players at level 6, with mostly max HP rolls, with a Barbearian and a Sorlock who have been making mincemeat of her encounters. While 10 does seem like a bit of a high level for an enemy, the "Mage" template the peep was supposed to be using has spell slots akin to a level 9 Wizard, so it's not thaaaaat much of stretch (lies)

[Loud Whispers]

DnD lethality is always a bit wonky. You've got to keep in mind that even "deadly" encounters are assuming your players are facing them after having burned through 4-5 other fights, and even then you can get stuff where your players are basically never imperilled but then get one-shot by a disintegration or an intellect devourer who end up being much more lethal than the balancing suggests. I prefer using the low fantasy gaming rules for running horrors, since it strikes that nice balance between powerful players and the monsters being dangerous. If my players encounter a 5e vampire it's going to be a situation where they're all cracking jokes and dunking on it in style (in one particular headache inducing instance for me, the party paladin turned on us and initiated PvP after getting charmed. Not mind controlled - just charmed). Still killed the vampire without anyone even being close to death. But LFG vampires are fucking menaces

If your DM wants to stick to 5e and run horror, it is possible. Just got to remember terror is walking through the woods and hearing the wolves howl; horror is knowing you sent your kids into the woods to see grandma when you hear the wolves howl. So you can definitely run a horror with stronk 5e characters where the horror comes from the choices they have to make. S.T.A.L.K.E.R., F.E.A.R. and Metro2033 all come to mind of horrors where the protagonists are stronk as fuck but the horror comes from the oppressive atmosphere and choices they have to make.

There is also a very elegant solution which drastically ratchets up the pressure on 5e characters without having to sick hard-counter enemies on players or nerf them. Up short/long rest duration to something more narratively fitting for the timescale your players play at. If your players tend to go through one fight a day at most, then have a short rest be a day's rest and a long rest a week's rest. This was what I advised one of my friends who was pulling his hair out because his players just kept nuking every foe they met from orbit, and that was just because they were always going into every fight with full spell slots. But 5e is balanced around resource expenditure, e.g. spell slots or "xyz per day" abilities, on the assumption that players have 5-8 encounters between long rests. Calibrating the time period to match 5-8 encounters between long rests preserves players' power whilst keeping that feeling of players slowly being worn-down, exhausted and spent from constant survival. They're going to be able to nuke any one foe with that high power spell slot, but they've only got the one.

[As an amusing side-effect, when the game is played as intended, this really allows the rogue to shine. In narrative-style 5e games where people can take their time and enter every fight with full spell slots, the bard is just superior to the rouge. But when resource expenditure is taken into account, the rogue shines as being the only class that has no resource-dependent abilities, meaning the rogue is always at full-potential at the start, middle and end of an adventure].

[Kagus]

What she wants is a Strahd campaign where the players don't feel like they can just rush headlong into any challenge or encounter and expect to come out with nary a scratch. The party warlock had his imp hurl a severed penis into Strahd's carriage as it was passing by, because they feel like that's absolutely something they can get away with since they apparently feel they've been given no real reasons to fear him yet. And, given what the combat and challenge encounters to date have been, that's accurate. Because she simply doesn't know enough about combat to know what would make it challenging or not.

Given how they're already many sessions into the campaign and she's barely comfortable with 5e, let alone any other TTRPG, I'm not sure major changes to the system or application thereof are really the preferred solution in this case...


Going over to "gritty realism" resting could be entertaining, particularly for the potential coffeelock in the party, but would again be a very significant change to a campaign that's already established and well underway. And, again, when it comes to raw mechanics she needs as much structure and help as she can get, so making the on-the-fly adjustments needed to patch over some of the more unsavory parts of that conversion would be even more stress than she's already subjecting herself to.


Really, this is mainly about helping a burgeoning DM learn about the combat system and mechanics so that she can put actual challenges in the path of the players, and have a better understanding of what would and would not be a challenge. It's not something she's used to thinking about. ...but yes, I do absolutely agree that DnD lethality is a, uh, peculiar beast... At best.

[Loud Whispers]

What she wants is a Strahd campaign where the players don't feel like they can just rush headlong into any challenge or encounter and expect to come out with nary a scratch. The party warlock had his imp hurl a severed penis into Strahd's carriage as it was passing by, because they feel like that's absolutely something they can get away with since they apparently feel they've been given no real reasons to fear him yet. And, given what the combat and challenge encounters to date have been, that's accurate. Because she simply doesn't know enough about combat to know what would make it challenging or not.

Given how they're already many sessions into the campaign and she's barely comfortable with 5e, let alone any other TTRPG, I'm not sure major changes to the system or application thereof are really the preferred solution in this case...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Going over to "gritty realism" resting could be entertaining, particularly for the potential coffeelock in the party, but would again be a very significant change to a campaign that's already established and well underway. And, again, when it comes to raw mechanics she needs as much structure and help as she can get, so making the on-the-fly adjustments needed to patch over some of the more unsavory parts of that conversion would be even more stress than she's already subjecting herself to.

I wouldn't even describe it as gritty realism resting. It's not like GURPs resting or warhammer resting. It's just that DnD 5e is designed for exploring dungeons, assuming characters won't spend more than one or two days in the dungeon. So everything is balanced on the assumption that player chars will go through 5-8 encounters between long rests, gradually losing hit die, HP, ability charges, spell slots e.t.c. before reaching the dungeon boss

So if you run campaigns where players do 1 fight between long rests, they just absolutely rinse through foes. Your options are then to either sick really deadly encounters upon them relative to their CR (which due to 5e wonkiness can result in fights that are long but not deadly or else end up being a party wipe). Adjusting it so the rest period matches the actual in-game pace isn't a radical departure from 5e, it's how 5e balance is designed to be played. It's a common problem I think every table has struggled with at some point (hence the comic, made by someone else a year ago), where people stubbornly cling to 5e and try to use it to do things it can't do until the very end - investing more effort into forcing the square peg through the round hole than if they had just put in the mild effort to read 12 pages of another rulebook :d

Really, this is mainly about helping a burgeoning DM learn about the combat system and mechanics so that she can put actual challenges in the path of the players, and have a better understanding of what would and would not be a challenge. It's not something she's used to thinking about. ...but yes, I do absolutely agree that DnD lethality is a, uh, peculiar beast... At best.

5e is an impenetrable mess for new DMs to learn how to appropriately place challenges for players, especially when they're doing sweaty rule-bending metagaming. For the sake of their sanity I strongly advise against trying to pit a DM on training wheels against people who make coffielocks, not characters

Like it's a hell of a lot of work for new DMs to know how all the class interactions & spell descriptions & DPS action economy nonsense works vs using a simpler, better system. I don't get how so many people laud the simplicity of 5e but then when it's player turns it's 3 minutes of checking spell descriptions. Even harder work for a DM trying to keep track of what spell combos and shenanigens they're going to sik on NPCs with unlimited rest spellworks, bad faith spell accounting & rules lawyering

[Kagus]

"Gritty Realism" is specifically the term used in the DMG to describe the "short rest is a day, long rest is a week" rest variant So yes, it's 5e's concept of what gritty realism is... Which, yes, is rather telling.


As for swapping systems, she doesn't exist in a vacuum... While it might be entirely possible to convince her that swapping systems is the best bet, her players are also predominantly 5e players who would need to be convinced of the move. And, more likely than not, rebuilding all their characters again. I've little doubt that she'd be happier in a different system more suited to her inherent DMing style, but I'm not really sure this current group (of personal friends and acquaintances, not expendably faceless randos) would allow her to switch with them remaining onboard.

[Grim Portent]

I don't think I've ever even seen a group that manages to fit in the expected rate of encounters into a D&D 'adventuring day,' most D&D combat is tedious as hell, traps are trivially bypassed with no resources 90% or more of the time, and it takes long enough just to cover the actually relevant exploration and social scenarios. It always winds up with one or two small fights that are basically jokes, or one big fight that's actually hard but still leaves us with so much magic that we can splash it about on trivial nonsense. D&D 5e is very dumbed down and simplified towards the goal of white room bonk the enemies to death and move on to the next room in the dungeon type of play, not that the other editions were ever great at other things either.

[NJW2000]

I don’t know much about DND, but if narrative is her thing and the players are munchkins, would it be a faux pas to introduce tricky supernatural horror machinations they have to solve rather than fight through?

[Kagus]

Not at all; I believe she's even made some attempts towards that end a couple times previously in the campaign. I think they've just been rolling quite well for the occasions where that sort of thing shows up (and, there too, the mechanics question of "what is an appropriate DC for this"), and as referenced this isn't exactly the best system for things that aren't "roll d20 to see if you solve it"... But she still quite likes things like that, she just also would like to have combat challenges that actually push back a little bit.


Also I was wrong before, she does have experience from/with Pathfinder 1e. Although I believe that was predominantly as a player

[Dorsidwarf]

Huh, I recall us being scared stiff during strahd, mostly cuz we kept getting too big for ouR boots and dying whenever we weren’t. Then being trapped in the cycle of barovian mystic reincarnation and coming back to life with some curse.

[Kagus]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the feeling she wants to go for... Just hasn't figured out how to kill them yet

[Loud Whispers]

"Gritty Realism" is specifically the term used in the DMG to describe the "short rest is a day, long rest is a week" rest variant So yes, it's 5e's concept of what gritty realism is... Which, yes, is rather telling.

Oh god I forgot about that cursedness

As for swapping systems, she doesn't exist in a vacuum... While it might be entirely possible to convince her that swapping systems is the best bet, her players are also predominantly 5e players who would need to be convinced of the move. And, more likely than not, rebuilding all their characters again. I've little doubt that she'd be happier in a different system more suited to her inherent DMing style, but I'm not really sure this current group (of personal friends and acquaintances, not expendably faceless randos) would allow her to switch with them remaining onboard.

Yeah I faced the exact same problems with my group, 3/4 of whom were 5e onlies. At some point you just have to bite the bullet - either accepting 5e power stronk overwhelming chars and monster HP bloat or switch systems

I don't think I've ever even seen a group that manages to fit in the expected rate of encounters into a D&D 'adventuring day,' most D&D combat is tedious as hell, traps are trivially bypassed with no resources 90% or more of the time, and it takes long enough just to cover the actually relevant exploration and social scenarios. It always winds up with one or two small fights that are basically jokes, or one big fight that's actually hard but still leaves us with so much magic that we can splash it about on trivial nonsense. D&D 5e is very dumbed down and simplified towards the goal of white room bonk the enemies to death and move on to the next room in the dungeon type of play, not that the other editions were ever great at other things either.

I once had one cursed game where our DM went utterly overboard with the encounters to the point where there were goblins behind us, goblins to the right, goblins to the left, crossing the road were goblins, going through the warehouse was goblins and goblins are paradropping from the sky. Then we got attacked by a level 28 god of pestilence even though we were level 5 lol

Game did not last very long at all

[Persus13]

When I played Curse of Strahd I generally wasn't worried about the party being in danger as much as the NPCs our party befriended being in danger of being retaliated against by Strahd. Although for me dying is exciting since it means I can make a new character.

Of course that tactic requires players who are capable of building relationships with NPCs.

[sodafoutain]

The mention of Coffeelock still upsets me. 5e's rules being such as they are, I don't understand why people haven't jumped ship to Pathfinder, or any other system. However, CoS is explicitly written  for 5e, which as it's been said, is designed to have many encounters between long rests. I'd advocate that they shouldn't treat combat as the only kind of encounter, and create something like intrigue 'encounters' that give players opportunity to use utility spells to drain their resources as well. Fighting seven groups of enemies is infeasible, but fighting two to three groups and interrogating others using spells like zone of truth and whatnot is likely more feasible.