I've been running games of D&D for about four years... five years? Who knows what time is anymore.
Anyway, I've been running D&D games long enough that I've gotten a decent sense of what makes for good sessions, good fights, and an experience that players will enjoy. Mind you, I don't always hit that note - you can't always do it right.
But I think tonight hit what I like to think of as the sweet spot for combat difficulty.
The game I've been running is set in Ravnica, and while there surely is plenty of interesting stuff to do with just that setting, given that I've been a Magic fan since I was 8 (though I haven't actually played since college - dude, what's with these "planeswalker" cards?) I thought it would be fun to make this campaign an interplanar one. Also, given that I wanted my players to be able to go with whatever guild they wanted (we have one of every guild but the Gruul Clans, though our one Azorius member hasn't played yet) I wanted to get a good villain that members of any guild would oppose.
And because I'm a sucker for the classics, I chose the Phyrexians.
The challenge of this villain is that there aren't a ton of stat blocks that scream out Phyrexian. Sure, you can scoop your various Aberrations, Undead, and Constructs into a pile and sort through them, but I decided to do a bit of homebrewing.
Tonight was the first time the party actually fought some honest-to-Urza Phyrexians.
I brewed up a statblock for the Phyrexian Negator, and then modified it to give it legendary actions as well as maxing its health. Admittedly, I did do a sort of alternate interpretation of the monster - it's a beefy 5/5 with trample and I chose instead to make it more of a creeping assassin-type with sneak attack - but it worked out well.
Here's why I think it went really well:
I know different DMs are different, but in the games I'm running, I want the players to succeed. I'm right there with them, hoping for them to beat the monsters and demonstrate their growing power, just as if I were playing a character amongst the party. The fantasy of RPGs is that notion of progression and conquering greater and greater threats.
But the thing is, victory also requires challenge. If the party were just cutting their way through pathetic, easy-to-kill creatures, it wouldn't be that exciting.
So, in my mind, the sweet spot of any combat encounter is when you scare the crap out of the players, nearly kill them, but then all the player characters walk away from it alive.
My Negator had a 6d6 sneak attack and arm-blades that did 2d6+4 damage as well as inflicting a terrible bleed effect for 3d6, with two attacks (but only one sneak attack per turn.) It also had a +12 to Stealth (getting expertise like a rogue.) So the party walked into a weird, occult room that seemed to be a meeting place for people working with the Phyrexians in each of Ravnica's guilds, and the Barbarian was ambushed by this thing, taking a fireball-plus-four out of the blue, followed by another slash that took him down (if there's one thing I regret about the fight, it's that the Barbarian only really got one solid round to dish damage out, as he spent most of it lying on the floor unconscious).
While the Negator did knock out the Bard and hit one of the Fighters for a bit of damage, the party did a good job protecting the Sorcerer and Artificer, and indeed, the actual damage output of the monsters wasn't so huge...
But the effect was terrifying, and given that this guy was meant to be a boss monster, that's exactly what you're looking for.
The Negator is actually a non-legendary creature that I altered for this fight, but I'm glad that I was able to make it this scary for their first meeting, as even if future Negators aren't as powerful, it'll strike a nerve.
Of course, much of this tier (using the Tiers of Play level ranges) and the next is going to be focused more on tracking down the Phyrexian collaborators within the guilds, which will mean fighting more mundane (relatively speaking) monsters. But I do have a few more homebrew creations based on existing Magic cards that the party will eventually face.
Still, the fight turned out fine - my favorite bit was when the Artificer used their Mizzium Apparatus to try to cure the Barbarian's wounds, but instead created a fog cloud that only helped the Negator (who was not remotely inconvenienced by the fog). The party walked away from it, and while the Sorcerer did scare me a little when she touched some of the glistening oil in the lab they'd just passed through, ultimately the party can chalk this up as a total win.
And a memorable one at that. This DM is happy about that.
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