Player Agency, Combat Pacing, and Monster Design

 I ran a fight over the past two sessions in my long-running Ravnica campaign (though they had actually planeswalked to Arcavios). They were undergoing five challenges, one from each of the Strixhaven colleges, to earn the right to the shard of the Golgothian Sylex that Urza had left with the elder dragons who created the university (they need the Sylex to destroy a Phyrexian artifact that would allow them to travel across the planes and invade everywhere at once - I came up with this plot before the whole March of the Machines plot in Magic's canon lore emerged).

Anyway, the Silverquill Challenge, the last of the five, required them to race various Silverquill students to a persuade a group of Malleable Minds (Black Puddings slightly altered) that they should be given the shard, while the students (Noble Prodigies) and a trio of Archpriests and two Arcanoloths moved to intercept and stop them.

The party is level 18, and as this was the only fight they were going to have on the day (actually, that's not technically true, but there's a surprise coming their way) I balanced it as a high-difficulty encounter. At level 18, that generally means either some insanely powerful monsters or a lot of quite-powerful monsters.

So, that was why I picked the Archpriests and Arcanoloths, which are not legendary, but probably designed to be the big headliner of their respective encounters.

Here was the problem:

Arcanoloths have a really cool and flavorful ability to trap players in their Soul Tome. If they hit with their Banishing Claw attack, a target has to make a Charisma saving throw (DC 17) or they get sucked into the tome, incapacitated. They can repeat the save on each of their turns, but if they fail three times before doing so, they are stuck in the book until the book or the Arcanoloth are killed.

In addition to that, Archpriests have a recharge ability (4-6, so 50% chance to be able to use it each turn) that deals a bunch of radiant damage in an emanation around them and stuns creatures who fail their Wisdom save.

These creatures combined to mean that in the quite-long encounter (I think it might have actually gotten to ten rounds, or possibly eight or nine) the party's Artificer missed about half of their turns.

Now, sure, the encounter did conspire to make this a little tougher: the party was spread out, so other characters who might have been able to blast the book apart (there are special mechanics to do just that, but you need to do a full 35 damage in a single turn, something one of the Sorcerers eventually did with a Disintegrate).

But it got me thinking:

D&D combat is slow, especially when you get to higher levels. Monsters are more complex, as are player abilities and the breadth of their options.

In a game where each round of combat takes five minutes, losing a turn is frustrating but not that bad. In a game where a round could take forty minutes, it becomes a real problem.

Now, I think that perhaps just the fact that a round takes so long is probably a problem in and of itself. The tactical challenge and complexity, of course, is part of what makes the game fun, but it does make things go pretty slowly (I also have a six-player party, five of whom are spellcasters, which also means I generally need more monsters as well to meet them as a challenge).

There are a lot of arguments about how D&D breaks down at higher levels, and I actually think that it works out ok, it's just that things take a very long time. Even low-difficulty encounters that you'd want to pepper in over the course of a day feel pretty epic just because if they don't, they won't actually challenge the players and drain their resources.

While I love the cool powers I get at higher levels as a player, and you can bet that I'm champing at the bit to get 6th level spells on my Wizard (we're level 9 right now) I also think that there's truth to the idea that 5E works most smoothly at tier 2, and a big part of that is that your options are a bit more limited.

I mean, on a purely physical level, you need to count the values on all the dice you roll. When you are fighting monsters with 200 HP instead of 100 HP, you need to physically count twice as much damage before they fall. Even if your characters are doing twice as much damage in a turn, that act means it will be slower.

And again, slower combat means those loss-of-control moments feel that much more painful.

I'm slowly, gradually getting together a group of players to try out Draw Steel, and I get the sense that both of these issues were in mind when they designed that game. Initially, it's totally bizarre to me that abilities in that deal flat amounts of damage (there are some exceptions,) and that from level 1 to level 10, you really just do the same power roll (you're just more likely to get a better result as you level up).

I also know that MCDM, starting in Flee, Mortals! but also carrying over to their Draw Steel Monsters book, has pretty much removed any and all mechanics that would take away a player's agency: even going to zero hit points (er, stamina) doesn't prevent you from acting! Sure, you really risk getting yourself killed if you don't act very carefully while dying, and being dead is the condition where your turns are skipped, but I'm really curious to see how the game feels at higher levels.

Still, for the time being, I'm going to be looking more carefully at the monsters I use, and possibly replace various stunning or otherwise incapacitating abilities with something that works a little differently and gives players recourse.