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I know, I know: we’re supposed to say “yes” in D&D. At least, the DMs are. But what about the players? The rules give the players a lot of ways to say “no” to the DM (or, at least, his or her monsters) through various powers and class features. The swordmage’s aegis of shielding, the fighter’s combat challenge and combat superiority, the halfling’s second chance, and a whole slew of powers that deny monsters the ability to do things that you want them to do. Mike Shea tweeted about this recently, and it got me thinking.
The conclusion that I came to was simply this: sometimes, you have to let your players say no to you. Sometimes, you even have to actively encourage it. There’s an instinct, I think, that tells you to do what is tactically sound with your monsters. If the fighter has marked you, you should attack him because otherwise he’s going to open up a world of hurt on you, right? And to an extent, this is true. In the case of an ability like a defender’s mark, its purpose is to draw the monsters’ attention away from the defender’s allies. However, if the only thing that marking monsters accomplishes is getting those monsters to attack the defender, then you’re cheating that defender out of something very cool: the ability to say “no” to that monster. Sometimes, you have to defy the mark so that the fighter gets his free attack, or the paladin gets to lay down some damage, or the swordmage gets to teleport in and whack the beastie. Doing those kinds of things is a lot of fun for players, and it’s kind of a bummer when it doesn’t happen in an encounter.
This doesn’t apply just to marks. Opportunity attacks are a great way for players to get a chance to say “no”, and sometimes (especially with solos, elites, and brutes, all of whom have plenty of hit points to go around), you just want to provoke those opportunity attacks so that the players can have some fun.
You can carry this mentality into encounter design, too. Brutes a great for this: they’re easy to hit, but have lots of hit points, so you can feel free to use them to soak up a lot of damage, but there’s a low chance that your players will miss all the time. Brutes are awesome for provoking opportunity attacks and defying marks, particularly because many brutes are, thematically, not that bright.
Minions, too, work well. In my games, I tend to use minions for two purposes. The first is to create minions that are dangerous to kill–exploding minions, if you will–in order to challenge the players tactically. More frequently, though, they’re there simply to make the players feel like badasses. Sometimes minions should just be there to be wiped out in the first round of combat. I know, for example, that the dragonborn fighter in my game likes getting good mileage out of his dragon breath; heck, he’s spent two or three feats on making it better, and he’s only level 8! For this reason, I’ll sometimes group two or three minions together near him, so he can lay waste to them with some dragon fire. Similarly, sometimes you want to group a bunch of monsters so that the wizard can lay down a well-placed fireball.
Now, this is not to say that your fights should be pushovers, or that you should always arrange things so that the players are always using all of their powers to their best effect. Challenge is fun, and you should challenge your players. However, every once in a while, you’re going to want to throw them a bone and let them feel like they’ve got things well in hand. They are the heroes, after all; let them feel like it from time to time.
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I love your thoughts on this topic. When I read your post, it makes me think about ways to improve/change/challenge my players.
I really like the way 4E lays out encounter creation and management. Using the XP Budget method of filling out encounters tends to be simple and work pretty well. However, I often feel like it has a tendency to lead me to create overly similar encounters. (i.e. 5 bad guys against 5 good guys, plus or minus a few minions or brutes/elites)
Now though, I’m thinking about tactics in encounters differently. What if I didn’t build an encounter based on SOUND monster tactics? What if I built it on POOR monster tactics, or perhaps monster tactics that are devised to fight a different enemy? What if I build an encounter that would normally be overwhelming, (based on level and quantity) of monsters, but have this particular group be really bad at battle tactics for some reason.
I think it might be a fun experiment to make an encounter appear to be an overmatch but once you take into account the weak strategic capability of the lead monter, things start to balance out. It would likely make your party feel pretty badass (and get to unload all their cool abilities) while they take out enemies that would normally be above their pay grade.
Obviously this wouldn’t be something you could do with any frequency (and XP rewards would have to be scaled accordingly), and might be better suited to a lighthearted campaign or group of players, but I’ll definitely give it a try sometime.
Hey, glad you liked the post. Yeah, you definitely don’t want to use tricks like these all the times, but occasionally it’s fun to let your players really shine. Also, I like the idea of a very difficult encounter that becomes a lot easier when you figure out how to approach it. I’ve used this in the past. My players recently fought a beholder (a very, very difficult monster for these 8th-level PCs, even in the scaled down form I used). They figured out pretty quickly, though, that there were Far Realm crystals in the room that were acting in opposition to a massive statue in the center of the room; the two were using opposing energies. From this they extrapolated that maybe these crystals were making the beholder stronger, so they smashed them all in short order. As a result, the beholder had ongoing 20 damage that it couldn’t do anything about for the rest of the encounter. After a few rounds, even though it probably could have killed them, it took off because it didn’t want to die. The players felt somewhat humbled because of how hard the fight was anyway, but I think they also felt pretty hard core for having survived and outwitted a beholder.
Awesome, you bring up another good point. Sometimes a great battle doesn’t necessarily end in the death of the enemy. It’s natural to think that a beast might not fight to the death every single time. One of the things I used to use a lot of back in the day was morale checks. As far as I can tell, they’re no longer around in 4E, but I could be wrong. Relating this to letting your players shine, when one of the PCs would make a crit, or some other spectacularly successful attack, I would do morale checks for the weaker, or self-serving enemies and often send one or two away screaming at the sight (plus this sets up some natural revenge/ambush opportunities later in the adventure). The PC would always get the biggest thrill because they didn’t even have to fight the bad guy because the literally scared the crap out of them.