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Mar 2, 2011 -- 2:20PM, tilobin wrote:

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Why would the demons bother chaining up clerics just to kill them later? That's a little bit Blofeldian, no?

Seriously, I don't know/remember if I was told why. Seems like bad planning on their part.

 

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Note: I'm not sure if that's the way the encounter was intended to run, but that was my own interpretation.

On the subject of skill checks in combat, I am a big fan of not taking  away from the PC. Players hate to "waste" a standard action on a skill  check. Because it isn't fun, it generally should not happen. BUT, at the  same time, story reasons can validate a standard action. "Saving the  world" is one of those. Closing the portal that will bring the evil god  into the Realms is a great reason to use a standard action. Yeah, you  might want to attack on your round mechanically, but story-wise it  works. It should be figured into the balance of the encounter. If a PC  is expected to spend 4 standard actions on closing the portal, the  challenge level must reflect that and the sacrifice should feel compelling to the player.

Mar 1, 2011 -- 10:43AM, Uthrac wrote:

I'd imagine if you had a different BI (heroic) and BI (paragon) playing together, results from one would impact the other. 

There have been some great LG examples of splitting up the BI into sort of parallel adventures. One I recall dearly was in Veluna, where some tables had to find a place where giants had pens of howlers. It was set up for failure, basically, where there were two giants and one would likely go smash the gate and the howlers would pour out. The heroic part was how long you could forestall that from happening. At my table, there were some pretty crazy heroics to keep that from happening.

When the howlers got out at one of these tables, the table DM would yell "The howlers are coming, the howlers are coming!" Instantly, every DM at the con grabbed a howler mini and placed it on the battlefield.

The fun at our table was that the DM doubted our heroics. He shouted it out and we said "no way, the door is not yet open and we can stop this!" All the DMs had to take away their howler and it was a good 15 minutes before the howlers finally made it... an important difference at a BI.

Another example is a take-the-castle interactive, where different teams had different objectives. I was DMing the winch room, where the PCs were supposed to open the drawbridge. Except I was slaughtering them. I think it was APL 10. A DM comes up to me, says he is slaughtering his APL 6 table, and one of the PCs wants to come down the stairs under the logic of "we will fail here, maybe not below". I shrug and the tables combine. Well, the level 6s end up having healers and half my table was bleeding out, so the first thing the low-levels do is keep everyone from dying. Then they proceed to drop more heroics, taking hits so the level 10s can deal the killing blows. It was amazing. The low-levels literally turned everything around and made it a success. The PC that came up with the idea was recognized for their tactical insight and was named a Hero of the Realm (Geoff) for their efforts.

I could go on and on. The bottom line being that providing different experiences is fantastic. It is the stuff of stories. It gives real depth and better interaction than everyone doing the same thing. Also, it translates well to objectives. You can have a drawing of the castle and see what is happening on that drawing if the organizers update it.

Construction-wise, the LG answer was to have the various aspects split by APL. APLs 2-6 might take on the supply room. 8-12 had the winch room. 14-etc. You can build straight-forward but interesting encounters such that DMs can run them without too much prep. It is harder, and you need a team of writers, but you also can limit their work. In LG a common model was to have various authors each working on one encounter. The encounter was repeated a couple of times (2 winch rooms, 4 howler tables, etc.). The overall author makes sure it all fits and ensures common elements (like a core stat block that is then just slightly modified for each different encounter).

Another way to divide things up is along strong role presence. Leader, striker, defender, controller can link to mission types fairly well. Stealth and negotiation are examples of other paths, especially if you advertise them before the convention. Geoff would often leak the broad category of missions up front so you could have a target in mind as a player.

Offering help: I agree with Pieter. Asking for help generally does little. The mechanics of the game are such that when you will have a TPK is not clear until very late in the action. There is often a big chance you can eek out a victory. What you need is clear mission objectives and that those have clear points where you would be overwhelmed. "You have x rounds to make it to here." With that kind of objective it is far easier for tables to know if they can make it.

The other thing is to introduce chaos. The encounter is level+2, but x numbers of tables also get a named monster that vastly raises the challenge. Or, all of a sudden a new mission opens up. Unexpectedly, xyz shows up... who will hold these new foes? For that scenario, a fun mechanic (mirroring what Uthrac proposed) is to pull a max of 1 PC from a table, so you force various tables to take on a greater challenge for story reasons. They are offering help, but everyone feels like a winner.

Interaction: Yeah, timing is tough. A BI where you have segments is harder on interaction than one with a long chain of progress along a single theme/segment. LG often did things like have two segments. There might be an exploration/scouting/info_gather segment and then the rest was "the battle". Two segments, with each being long and involved. The points of interaction are easier to manage.

Another thing is to just have effects. The howlers... it doesn't matter what table Y is doing, they get a howler when table X can't stop the howlers.

Out of resources early: In BIs, this was traditionally a god-send for the organizers. It was the stuff of stories, because then it was a reason why an objective was likely to fail and other tables could aid. I recall one part of a castle about to go down, PCs hurt badly, and my table decides to go help. I let them know that this area will fall to the evil if they do that. So, one bad-arse dwarf cleric decides to stay behind and hold them. And he did. I ran a bunch of stuff at a single player and he held it all off (barely) and became a Hero of Geoff for it. In 4E it can be even more dynamic and less about cheese (because there are more tactical options), which is nice.