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Aug 27, 2010 -- 5:29PM, -Aribeth- wrote:

Currently, as I perceive this campaign to be, a novice player can achieve the same accolades / story awards as the veteran / more skilled player.

I do not see a point in upping the challenge to a particular party if all parties are rewarded the same thing.  In a sense why work harder for the same reward.  We as people do not usually do that in real life, why have that kind of environment in the game.

I get comments all the time about how my characters or I do at the table. I'm extremely team-oriented in play, willing to play a face(and roleplay diplomacy or lie through my teeth without funny voices), know what I'm doing tactically, and I play off-the-wall characters who are not in general cheesed out either with powers or items(but not suboptimal after I get through with them)

As an example, at GenCon, I was playing my Bard 14 at a random SPEC P2 table with all other characters being 16th. I turned two sure misses into hits with an interrupt, caused all kinds of misses with Mantle of Unity, left myself in the kill zone while getting another player's character out of it(not that the power would have worked on me anyway, but how many times do you see a random player willing to take the hit for someone they just met?) - by the end of the mod, they were singing the praises of how they loved bards. Also at GenCon, I ran into a DM of mine at another convention, mentioned how he had DM'd my bard at the convention, and he replied that my character had inspired him to think seriously about making a bard character.

Did at any time did I dominate a table with an alpha strike? No. Did one of my powers change the table in a completely obvious, table-dominating manner? No. But the other players and DM clearly wanted to let me know that they appreciated that I was at their table. That's something the novice player isn't going to get except in a 'you weren't as bad as we thought you might have been...'

That gives me more than enough sense of accomplishment. 

LFR is focused on creating fun for the players; yes, every player regardless of skill level potentially can have the same amount of fun and that is the way it should be.  This is a game, not a competition.

WotC D&D Organized Play does offer some team competition (the D&D Championship games) where the teams can show who is better (at tactical play).  The RPGA used to offer (decades ago) a system of D&D adventures where the point was to show which player was better at role playing (which we sometimes call "classics").  Neither of those two approaches are anywhere as popular as a Living campaign format.  The market spoke; competition was not the winner.

D&D as a game system was always designed for a team of PCs working together against the baddies to achieve some goal; that uniqueness for "board games" drew me to D&D.  There are plenty of games where individual players are pitted against other individual players.

To some extent, even in LFR, there is some difference in outcomes if a given team does not perform well; obviously they may not acquire all the xp, gp and treasure if they fail to complete the adventure.  Although that outcome is infrequent, it does happen.  Perhaps you think that only the supreme players/teams should be successful in completing the adventure, but experience has taught me that most D&D players do not relish that degree of challenge and will not consider it fun to repeatedly "lose" by failing to complete the adventure. 

Keith

Aug 30, 2010 -- 4:19AM, imaginaryfriend wrote:

There is simply no such thing as "the better players".

The best player is the one who does not ask for recognition that he or she is the best player.

On difficulty: I think the key here is having good information on scaling the encounter that DMs can use. For example, when I prep with my other judges for D&D Encounters, we come up with 2-3 changes they can use to scale the encounter difficulty. This is actually fairly similar to what is found in the Glory Tier sections of the Specials, but with the changes being far less drastic. For example, we might suggest in a mod that to increase difficulty you add a fog that adds a penalty to ranged attacks, plus replenish fallen minions as needed. To reduce difficulty we might remove some difficult terrain on an access point, and reduce the damage dice by one type on some of the creatures (d8 to d6).

The reason this is important is because DME rules don't actually allow these types of changes. Either we need to change DME rules to be a bit more permissive or we need to make more suggestions. The benefit of changing DME rules is that you give control to the DMs (but you might end up with some sad tables under unfair DMs). The benefit of writing it into mods is that you can hopefully leverage the author's perspective to come up with reasonable suggestions (but they often will not be playtested). It is ideal to use factors that can easily dissipate if the tables turn. For example, stopping the refresh of minions once the battle becomes challenging.

On Dungeon Tiles: We have covered this many times. You don't have to use dungeon tiles as DMs. Most pro DMs will use a battlemap. The dungeon tiles are an option and help standardize terrain and also promote WotC product. That is good.

On recognition: If there is good story, that should provide all the recognition you need, because the PCs will feel like heroes. If you need personal recognition of how amazing your PC is, then this is likely the wrong campaign. You should be in either a more player-driven campaign or a smaller campaign where you can "prove" yourself against a smaller pool of players. Or, play things like delves where you can easily see your capabilities rewarded. In most living campaigns it does not mater if you destroyed an encounter with incredible cheese, barely made it to the end, or never reached that encounter because you were having too much fun RPing and the slot ended. What maters is that you had fun.

On number of combats: I've played in living campaigns like Shadowrun, Spycraft, and Legend of the Five Rings where there can be no combats. L5R particularly had roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of all adventures without any combat at all. This was great because often the setting really worked well with RP challenges and time spent on things like cultural niceties (pouring tea, discussing clan topics, searching for clues, maneuvering politically). However, it does not really work well for LFR. While it can be ok periodically, even the few I saw in LG would leave players dissatisfied. D&D just really is a game where combat is expected. Two per mod seems right.

The only exception I can really make is the Fey series that Eric Menge wrote. Those mods to me are really good examples (in LG) of how you can have the possibility of combat but the rest is so imaginative and engaging that players skipping combat don't miss it. It is a very rare author that can pull that off!

Aug 30, 2010 -- 1:17PM, lorika wrote:

Aug 26, 2010 -- 3:40AM, Madfox11 wrote:

Ask your DM to boost the challenge. Sorry, but for each player complaining things are too easy, there are two saying it is perfect and one that says it is too hard. In my experience increasing the challenge is a lot easier, and less obvious, then downgrading things, especially since you usually see how things are going on late in the fight.

I guess I'm surprised that people think it's easier for the DM to make a combat more challenging than it is to make it easier.  I would think it'd be the opposite.  I don't have tons of DMing experience, but it seems that it'd be much easier for the DM to tweak a combat to make it less challenging.  The easiest thing is for the monsters to use less optimized tactics - not moving into flanks, provoking when they shouldn't, honoring marks even though the defender is impossible to hit, not using certain powers as soon as they recharge, "forgetting" to use that annoying immediate interrupt, not attacking PCs when they're down, not including the entire party in area attacks, saving an action point for the next round even though the PCs are perfectly positioned now, not having all 3 of the Flameskulls act on the same initiative (especially if all the PCs are still in the "PCs start here penalty box"), etc. 

I can think of a ton of ways to make an encounter easier.  But to make an encounter harder, to me, sounds like a much more difficult task for the DM.  What do you do?  Just increase the damage dice the monsters use?  Make up some extra powers for the monsters?  Throw in extra monsters?  An experienced DM could probably properly ramp up the difficulty of an encounter without making it too hard.  But it seems like it would take much more DM skill. 

The other nice thing about adjusting things to make an encounter easier is that it's simple to ramp up the difficulty again.  For example, in my very first LFR DMing experience, I almost had a TPK in the first fight I ran (EAST 1-1).  Something like 4 out of 5 of the PCs were down and dying.  Nervous that the fight was too hard for the party, I pulled a punch or two.  To my surprise, the one round I eased up on them was enough time for them to heal some party members up and then they proceeded to easily slaughter all the monsters (turns out that none of them had used any action points or daily powers earlier, which is why the fight was so difficult).  At that point I stopped pulling my punches again, but by then it was too late for the monsters. 

It just seems much easier and more natural to figure out how to reduce the difficulty of an encounter than increase it.  (Also, I think DMs are generally more inclined to adjust encounter difficulty to avoid a TPK than to avoid TMS - total monster slaughter.)  Or are we just worried that it will take the DM too long to figure out that the encounter is too hard (i.e. near-TPK) before toning it down?

There's a lot here that I have to agree with and I think have GM'd a good deal.

Madfox, really? I bet you don't get surprised at tables as much as you think you do. I can usually tell in the first couple of -actions- how easy or hard a fight or even a mod is going to be for players. Those that are very optimized ... well, trust me, you can tell that they are going to own a fight or fights. Those that aren't ... clearly aren't to going to. Even those that are in the middle of that charop/newbie road telegraph quite nicely their capabilities and tactical sense.

Yes, occassionally I still end up with a fight where the PCs surprisingly either fail to kill everything when it looked like they would, or end up winning when it looked like their gooses were cooked (it ain't called random damage for nothing), but for the most part there aren't that many surprises. And I'm not trying to toot some imaginary horn here.

Using a few of the examples from above: Bumping up the challenge level in the middle of a fight by putting in fog, or increasing the number of monsters, or adding a monster partway through the battle, etc. are not things that many people can easily just pull out of their^H^H^H^H^H thin air. Even putting in such tactics into the mod will get forgotten in the heat of the moment.

However, every GM can lower defenses a few points or reduce hit points without having to think about things. It's easy. It says AC 30? Let's make that a 28. Likewise, if the encounter already has fog, environmental affects that advantage the enemy, etc ... it is very easy to make those disappear at the drop of a hat. A wind comes along, a rock falls on some of the bad guys, etc.

I think that the -real- trick, in both cases, is making it believable and not feel like you're either punishing the players or giving them too easy a time of it. Even if you can make the monsters easier to hit, making it believable is sometimes a stretch.