Perhaps because I've been running a campaign in tier 3 for maybe a year at this point, but man is it hard to create low-level adventures!
Spelljammer is out, and there are tons of aliens and weird things, but it really feels hard to use any of these in tier 1. When I was a new DM, I'd often use the highest-CR monsters when building an encounter, but the result was usually that the one monster I could use wound up getting killed instantly and the fights were over too fast to be exciting.
As such, I think even at low levels you want to really use a large number of monsters, but this means that you need to scrape the bottom of the CR scale, populating encounters with lots of CR 1/8 and CR 1/4 monsters.
Boo's Astral Menagerie only has one CR 1/8 creature (a Hadozee Shipmate, so not really an "alien" so much as a playable race NPC) and five CR 1/4 creatures.
But most of the really exciting monsters are CR 2 or higher. Space Clowns and the base Vampirates are CR 2. Using Xanathar's encounter building tools, a CR 2 monster is only really viable as part of a larger encounter at level 4 and above.
I think it's telling that the Light of Xaryxis starts at level 5.
Still, I'm cobbling this adventure I'm writing together, and it's turning out decent, I think, though much longer than I'd initially intended.
As usual, I think tier 2 is D&D's real sweet spot in terms of flexibility for players and DMs. In a lot of ways, that 5-10 level range seems like the "quintessential" version of D&D, and I think a lot of monster supplements reinforce that.
No comments:
Post a Comment