Early on, when we first started playing D&D, I tended to like to use the biggest, highest CR monster I could in a fight. The problem was that these fights tended to go way, way too quickly. If our Paladin got a crit and then did a divine smite (which they get to wait to choose to use until after the hit and it still benefits from the crit, as I understand it) I'd see some monster splattered all over the floor before I got to use any of their abilities.
As players get to higher levels, however, you have more options in how you want to lay out a fight. I started throwing more enemies but each with less power at them, and the fights started to get more interesting. Sure, you could easily smash a skeleton in one or two hits, but you had the other nine to deal with.
Most recently, I had the group fight five Martial Arts Experts, each challenge rating 3. The party is mostly level 8 (I think the Druid might still be level 7) and there is a total of six of them - a Wizard, Fighter, Rogue, Paladin, Monk, and Druid. But this fight went on LONG. Partially it was stressed by the fact that a player who was relying on me for a ride had to make an early night of it, but it also just seemed like the players were getting bored.
And there was a whole other fight planned after that (though to be fair, it was one that I was planning on cliffhanger-ing the session right before the fight started.)
Striking the balance is tough. I also think that there's probably something to be said for deciding which are going to be the long fights and which are going to be the quick ones.
The party didn't really have a clear signal that this was going to be a protracted battle. They had just defeated the two Bronze Golems (from Kobold Press' Creature Codex) guarding the monastery (it's in a steampunk-y gnome town up in the mountains - in fact, if you picture Narshe from the beginning of Final Fantasy VI you've got a pretty good idea of the feel of it.) That fight was embarrassing - the Wizard used Evard's Black Tentacles and the Druid further locked them down with Entangle, meaning that even if they pulled free of the tentacles, they'd have already used their actions and thus been unable to escape entangle, thus making them vulnerable to the tentacles again on their next turn.
Now, I love it when players kick the monsters' asses, but their strategy against the monks was not quite as clever - indeed, when the Paladin was put to sleep by an effect that's actually foreshadowing the "boss" of this adventure, no one woke him up, putting them at a disadvantage.
My sense, then, is that perhaps I want to try some fights with fewer combatants and higher CRs - I think health goes up faster than damage output for both monsters and players, and so a big bad monster might be tougher (or at least less susceptible to a single crit) at higher levels.
It's making me re-think the structure of how this adventure ends. Indeed, the big bad I think is now going to leave open a social option for dealing with him, potentially making him a recurring character. The party just discovered that their patron is a vampire (a genuinely good one, for the record,) and so they might think that this monster might also not be so evil (but he totally is.)
We'll see!
No comments:
Post a Comment