Level Squish Impressions

 With 9.0 live today, I decided to take my Mechagnome out for a spin and see how quickly he'd level up. Before the patch came out, he was level 93 or so, I believe, and so when I logged in he was level 38. Dropping out of Draenor immediately, I went back to Stormwind and got the Chromie-time quests to head to the Broken Isles.

I played through the Broken Shore intro quests and then headed to Dalaran. I then proceeded to do all the main story quests in Val'sharah - no side quests and no bonus objectives. I ran Darkheart Thicket and have only gotten one artifact weapon.

Doing so, I've gotten from 38 to 44, which is half the leveling he had left before being ready for Shadowlands content.

Now, while there are only four leveling zones in Legion, there are also a number of class-hall quests that you can do while leveling, as well as the rather extensive Exodar scenario. So I wouldn't say that the content I've done would constitute a full quarter of what I'd expect to be doing.

A brand-new character would be arriving in the Broken Isles (or at least starting the intro quests) at level 10, meaning that you'd expect to get 40 levels out of the Broken Isles, ending up 50 by the end of it. If a zone's quests and dungeon got you a proportionate amount through it, a 4-zone leveling experience should give you ten levels per zone.

Again, I think you could argue that there's still a lot of other things one is expected to do while leveling. But I do wonder if you truly can just do a single expansion's main story quests and really hit level 50.

Obviously, it wouldn't be the end of the world to have to do a few quests in a different expansion as well - it's still going to be a lot faster to level now than it was.

I'm curious how older expansions will feel - there are definitely more zones and I'd wager more quests to do in an expansion like Wrath of the Lich King, and I wonder how it feels, proportionately.

Anyway, all that for a day's play isn't too bad.

What Happens Tomorrow in World of Warcraft?

 Tomorrow brings with it the 9.0 pre-expansion patch for Shadowlands. While the expansion itself was originally slated to release two weeks later, on the 27th, its launch has been pushed back due to the need for additional testing and polish (something that, as a beta player, I can attest to as a wise decision - the expansion has the potential to be amazing, but it's not ready to launch just yet, and another month or so could really make things way, way better.)

Given that the expansion launch is no longer imminent, the 9.0 patch won't immediately bring the pre-expansion events, which I believe are designed to keep us entertained and hyped for about two weeks before the launch of the expansion.

So: what actually comes with 9.0?

Exile's Reach:

    Exile's Reach is the new 1-10 starting zone for all characters (except those who start at higher levels, such as allied races and hero classes.) Notably, you are only forced to run this experience once per account. Afterward, you can choose to go through the old starting zones like Elwynn Forest or Durotar. I also believe that veteran players will be able to skip it as well, though having run it on the PTR, I'd actually recommend even players who are full up on alts to check it out, as it's a pretty quick and streamlined little experience, which ends with a pretty cool simulated dungeon with NPC party members (I don't believe you can choose any role other than DPS, but it's still a decent introduction to the idea of how dungeons work.)

The Level Squish:

    Your level 120 characters will find themselves now level 50, and other characters will be proportionately squished to lower levels as well. Likewise, the scaling of the world will also adjust appropriately.

    New players will need to do Exile's Reach and then level from 10-50 within the Battle for Azeroth zones - and experience gains should mean that doing these quests will be enough to get you up all those 40 levels. So, over the course of a zone like Drustvar, you should be getting roughly 13 levels.

    Veterans can choose "Chromie Time," which will allow you to choose an expansion's content to level through. Say you loved the Broken Isles or Pandaria, you can choose your 10-50 experience to take place in those continents.

    Upon hitting level 50, you'll be sent to start Shadowlands content, and the old content will become, well, "old content," which allows you to do things like soloing raids and such.

Character Customization Options:

    Vastly more options will open up in the barbershop for you to recustomize your character with new hair-styles, separated components of facial hair, picking your eye color, in many cases tattoos and/or war paint, and perhaps most notably, giving humans new facial shape options to more accurately reflect the diversity of, you know, actual humans.

    Also, both Void Elves and Blood Elves will get new eye-color and skin-tone options to effectively let us have High Elves on both the Alliance and Horde.

Class Changes:

    As with any X.0 patch, we're seeing some changes to the mechanics of various classes. Certainly some are getting more dramatic changes than others, but the overall trend here is to allow greater access to "out of spec" abilities that were pared down in Warlords of Draenor and Legion.

    Ultimately, this will largely mean a lot of new buttons to potentially put on your action bars. I have yet to read any 9.0+ class guides, so I don't know, for example, if Death and Decay will be good for Frost Death Knights, but your options are going to get a lot broader.

    Some of the odd consequences of this are going to be that some abilities actually come later - as in, you'll need to be a few levels into Shadowlands (Paladins getting to use Hammer of Wrath during Avenging Wrath regardless of the target's health, for example.) Some specs are going to experience only some small changes, while others (DPS Shamans, I'm looking at you) are going to experience serious re-works.

And that more or less covers it - I suspect we'll be in 9.0 for a good while, perhaps a month to around a month and a half, before the expansion proper launches.

I'll eagerly go on my various toons and do some barbershopping (I'm sure that my Undead Rogue is far too vain not to go with the concealed bone options) and then I think I'll finish leveling up the rest of my Allied Race characters and get them their heritage armor.

Oh, there's another note: you no longer need exalted reputations to unlock allied races, which should make things like Mechagnomes a lot easier to get.

D&D and a World Not Designed for Players

 Ok, this title might be a bit more inflammatory than I mean it to be, but I had the following thought:

I spend a lot of time as a dungeon master tuning whatever monsters or hostile NPCs my players come across to be balanced for them to fight. And while I enjoy building encounters, it's also a lot of prep work that generally has to account for how many players show up and what level they're at.

So this thought suggested to me a new idea (and maybe it's not a "new" idea, but one that hadn't really occurred to me before): namely, to build a world that is not balanced around my particular party.

Consider, for example, that the party finds themselves in some valley ruled over by a dangerous monster - a lich, for example. The party is only level 4 or so, meaning they'll need to get a lot stronger before they have a chance at facing down this big villain.

Normally, the way I'd run such an adventure would be to have a lot of side-quests and things for the party to discover that are balanced for wherever they're at in the current moment. Maybe they save a village from a rampaging flesh golem with a few skeletons or zombies backing it up at level 4, and then they fight their way into the fort commanded by the lich's vampire lieutenant, facing him as a kind of miniboss once they're around level 9 or 10.

In my DM tendencies, I'd tend to give them branching pathways, but still more or less guide them to this overall arc. I'd strongly discourage players from trying to get into the lich's lair early on, making it clear that they're not ready for it.

But I'm sort of tempted to try a different way - to not worry about scaling the encounters at all and just letting the players feel they've got to do some scouting and exploration before they commit to a full-on attack. And there's risk, as the level 5 rogue with a +10 to Stealth is certainly pretty sneaky, but not the kind of reliably invisible assassin she'll be at level 11, never rolling below a 23 thanks to Reliable Talent and her +13 bonus.

This cuts both ways, though, as well. Some brutal knight - a low-level enforcer who lords over a village under the lich's thumb would be a significant challenge if the party finds him at level 1 or 2, but if they encounter him after they've already wiped out the vampire mid-point boss, he'll be a total joke.

This doesn't mean the world needs to be static. The actions of the party could provoke a response on the part of the lich. Maybe the lich moves troops around to better protect key interests - doubling the guards at a keep or a town would mean twice as many enemies to fight for the party if they want to attack.

It could also allow the players to be very strategic, perhaps feinting as if they were going to attack one place and draw the attention of guards from some other place.

The key to DMing such an adventure would be restraint - letting the dice determine how things go. It can be very tempting to have the villains anticipate every move on the part of the players, to ensure that there are challenges around every corner, but at the same time, it can be very rewarding for your players if they truly can outthink and out-maneuver the bad guy.

This post started as a vague idea about DMing, but I'm now getting excited about it as the model for a future campaign.

So, here are a couple ideas of how I think you could run it:

First off, have a map with clear key locations - these don't need to all be towns or forts, but they should be points of interest where stuff can happen.

Avoid plot coupons - if you've played a Zelda game, you'll recognize that most of them have you go from dungeon to dungeon, collecting some group of magical objects that let you progress through the game - usually with a set of three or so early on and then a larger set that gets you to the final boss. However, we're not going to have magical barriers that require you to do things in a certain order here - the final dungeon is there to explore from the start, it's just a question of whether you stand any chance of actually getting to it and through it alive.

Next, I'd recommend taking your villain (and possibly your villain's main lieutenants) and working out their resources - how much gold do they have, how many spell components, and most importantly, how many minions. As the players hit their assets, resources get depleted. Now, the villains might be able to summon in more minions (perhaps conjuring them from other planes) but this will cost them in other resources.

Just because the players are higher level doesn't mean that the villain can suddenly just bring in better-equipped and more experience troops. Your lich bad guy (it doesn't have to be a lich, but it could be) will have to weigh whether they want to spend the gold on hiring a ton of mercenary Veterans or hire ten times as many fresh or undisciplined Guards and Thugs. Likewise, even a lich is going to be able to cast Animate Dead, getting Skeletons and Zombies, a lot more frequently than Create Undead for tougher Ghouls and Ghasts.

So if I were to run this sort of campaign, I'd track the villain's resources over the course of the campaign - the party could choose whether to wear the big bad down over time and thus grow more powerful via experience, but also risk the bad guy taking measures like hiring assassins to kill them - though again, it's something that would be a risk for the villain, as if the assassin failed, it would mean a lot of lost resources, as CR 9 creatures don't come cheap.

I realize this more or less just means running something like a hardcover adventure, and this means a lot of up-front planning. But I think the key would be to play fair as best as you can, forcing the villain to play with what they've got, but also making it clear to the players that there are no guardrails, and if they make reckless decisions, they might pay a steep price.

MTG Races and Pre-Established Monsters as Playable Races

 While certainly overlapping in many ways, the worlds of Magic the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons do have some pretty big differences.

We've now had two major crossover Campaign Setting books set in MTG worlds - Ravnica and Theros. While the vagaries of planar travel, alignment, and other rather fiddly concepts do come up, at a much simpler level, there are some inconsistencies with playable races.

In Magic worlds, Minotaurs are a common go-to race to affiliate with Red Mana. While they sometimes co-exist with Goblins (as they do on Ravnica,) in other worlds, Minotaurs take on the "proud warrior race" role that is sometimes filled by Orcs (actually, Minotaurs are more common in Magic than Orcs.) No color of mana in Magic is explicitly evil, and the only one that strongly skews that way is Black (though again, there's potential for good guys affiliated with Black mana.) The main thing is that Minotaurs are associated with rage and passion, on top of being brave and tough warriors. But fundamentally, they're just another type of humanoid.

This is a pretty big contrast with the way that Minotaurs are used in D&D. The Dungeons & Dragons Minotaur is a large monstrosity and is chaotic evil. While not demonic themselves, Minotaurs in D&D are affiliated with the demon lord Baphomet, as well as Goristros, one of the tougher types of demons in the Monster Manual. Baphomet is effectively the ultimate minotaur, and his layer of the Abyss is a giant labyrinthine slaughterhouse where he hunts down anything that stumbles in there for fun.

One of the core abilities for all minotaurs - both the standard monstrosity ones as well as the demonic varieties, is their labyrinthine recall.

Of course, in myth, the Minotaur was an individual monster that... well, worked a lot like the way I just described Baphomet, killing anyone inside his labyrinth. In the Theros setting, Minotaurs are, naturally, a playable race option, and the major Minotaur city, Skophos, is built as a giant maze. Yet the playable minotaur race (identical to its Ravnica version) does not have the labyrinthine recall ability that monster stat blocks have. Playable Minotaurs are also smaller, at medium size (keeping playable races to only medium and small) and count as humanoids, even though their Monster Manual brethren are considered monstrosities.

The Ravnica book added a bunch of creatures never seen before in D&D as playable race options - between Simic Hybrids, Loxodons, and Vedalken. But the Centaur was, likewise, already seen in the Monster Manual.

Here, things get even weirder.

Like the Minotaur, the Centaur is a classic creature from Greek myth. Also like the Minotaur, the monster manual entry for it is a large monstrosity. Unlike the humanoid playable Minotaur, the Centaur gets a different creature type, but it is inexplicably fey, rather than monstrosity.

In terms of game mechanics, there aren't as many odd omissions. The Monster Manual version is a pretty basic creature, with just a little charge ability similar to that found on most creatures, but with humanoid-style weapons. While not directly translated, the spirit, more or less, of how the Centaur monster works is inherited by the playable race. I just cannot understand why they decided Centaurs ought to be fey.

While Satyrs are also found in Theros, they do not appear in Ravnica. Here, things make a bit more sense. Satyrs remain medium, and they are also both fey creatures as Monster Manual entries and as a playable race. (Side note, I went to Greece two years ago and saw a ton of illustrated pottery, and I was always kind of shocked to see how Satyrs are actually pretty frequently depicted as having human legs - they're just horny - both literally and figuratively - bald dudes.) Furthermore, the playable Satyr inherits the Monster Manual version's magic resistance, which is arguably insanely overpowered for a playable race. Of the three MTG races that represent classic monsters found in the Monster Manual, the Satyr is the most direct translation.

Of course, we've seen this before, when Volo's Guide to Monsters, in addition to pretty extensive write-ups of new races like Firbolgs and Tabaxi, gave us stats for classic monsters (particularly those that the book focused on - well, except hags and mind flayers, because that's probably not something anyone should be playing.)

The main shared trait for Orcs in the Monster Manual is the Aggressive feature, which lets them move faster toward an enemy as a bonus action. The playable race recreates this nearly verbatim (with just a little more clarification.) While this is a pretty excellent translation of the monster stats to the playable race, the oddity is the way that Half-Orcs are so different from their Orcish parents. Where do the Half-Orc's Savage Attacker and Relentless Endurance come from? I suspect it's that the design of the Half-Orc was not intended to mirror what was then just a monster stat, so we don't see the kind of hybridity of racial features as found in the Half Elf.

Goblins are another fairly direct translation, gaining the monster-defining Nimble Escape trait, with the added playable race bonus of Fury of the Small to give goblins a bit of extra oomph.

Moving onto the next goblinoid race, the Bugbear inherits the Surprise Attack trait from its monstrous antecedent. Oddly, though, rather than the Brute feature (which, to be fair, could be overpowered,) they instead get Long-Limbed, which extends the reach of their melee attacks - which is not something the monster ever got.

Hobgoblins don't have anything really resembling Martial Advantage, which is found in its Monster Manual entries (and a variant called Arcane Advantage for Hobgoblin Devastators found in Volo's, though nothing comparable for Hobgoblin Iron Shadows, also in Volo's.) To be fair, that would probably work in practice as a less flexible version of a Rogue's sneak attack, but if all Half-Orcs can get a minor version of Brutal Critical, I don't see why Hobgoblins didn't get Martial Advantage.

Kobolds inherit the main defining monster traits with Pack Tactics and Sunlight Sensitivity, so this seems like a pretty decent direct translation.

The final monster-translation in Volo's is the Yuan-Ti Pureblood. There's literally a stat block for Yuan-Ti Purebloods, and the playable race retains the ability to cast Animal Friendship on snakes, the Magic Resistance (I guess Satyrs have precedent) and immunity to poison damage (I think this makes them the only playable race with a damage immunity - you'd think Warforged would also have poison immunity, but their feature is more akin to a dwarf's.)

Now, I had actually forgotten, but there are also some playable races in Volo's that have Monster Manual precedence (oh boy, we'll also have to touch of the Gith.)

Kenku just have a single entry in the Monster Manual, but were made a playable race in Volo's. They retain the Mimickry trait and the inability to speak conventionally (a real challenge for RP) but the Ambusher trait is replaced with more broadly applicable rogue-y and deceptive bonuses.

Lizardfolk, as seems typical with these monster-race translations, retain a lot of the defining abilities, such as a swim speed and the Hold Breath trait, as well as Natural Armor. There are a few additional things tossed in, mostly playing into the idea of Lizardfolk as rugged survivors, again, as typical with these.

Finally, we come to the Gith. The main thing that the race inherits from the stat blocks is its Innate Spellcasting (Psionics,) which has historically been treated in 5th Edition as spellcasting that doesn't require any components (as a DM, I rule that this means that you can't tell when they're casting a spell and thus can't do things like Counterspell in response to it - best case scenario the spell take effect before you can respond, but if it's one with a subtle effect, you might not even realize it's taken place.)

It seems that all NPC Githzerai are monks, gaining armor from Psychic Defense, which works exactly as a Monk's Unarmored Defense, but the subrace does not automatically gain this benefit.

Githyanki really just retain the psionic innate spellcasting spells associated with their subrace, which makes sense as I'd argue one of the real defining githyanki monster traits is their silver greatswords - a piece of equipment, rather than something they possess innately.

Many Eberron races evoke classic monsters/creatures, but they make a point to give them different names - Changelings rather than Doppelgangers, Warforged rather than Golems - and so I think they've really taken a license to not be tied down to the precedent set by entries in the Monster Manual.

Contemplating a Wildemount-Style Campaign

 While my roommate has been reading through my copy of Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, he and I have been discussing the structure of Critical Role's second campaign, and how remarkably player-driven the campaign is.

While it's one of now four (5 if you count SCAG) campaign setting books for 5th Edition, Wildemount distinguishes itself less in high concept - in fact, of all the setting's it's probably the most conventionally D&D-ish - but in the overall attitude and style of the campaign that it's designed to help you run.

In my general experience, I've run things with a plan. I know more or less the arc of the campaign, and generally figure out how things are going to go before I even know who all my players are going to be.

To tell the story that you, as a DM, wish to tell, this is, I think, the standard approach. And it fits with a lot of the published adventures, which naturally can't be designed for specific characters given that they're meant to be, well, modular (in old school terms, published adventures are called modules.)

The thing is, one of the things that makes D&D (well, and TTRPGs in general) so cool compared to something like a video game is that they can be custom-tailored to the players.

If you haven't watched Critical Role's second campaign (which I highly recommend, though I also know that it's a huge time commitment - I suggest listening to it in podcast form while exercising or if you have a job that doesn't require a lot of linguistic processing; I got through all of the first campaign while working on product photography) the structure has been remarkable, in that it all seems to flow from what the characters want to do.

While Matt Mercer, the DM and creator of the world of Exandria in which Wildemount is one of a few continents, certainly leaves hints and breadcrumbs to direct players toward certain plots, there is very little railroading. For example, at one point, the party discovers that the hometown of one of its members was recently attacked by one of the other major powers in Wildemount, and chose to follow the retreating attacks through their subterranean tunnels - something Mercer had clearly not anticipated, and which wound up changing the course of the campaign. But their choice led to some very interesting developments, and the the world was detailed and vibrant enough that things could continue with relative ease (or at least it looked that way.)

The Wildemount book is dense with regional details. Every village and town has at least one story hook that you could use for a local quest, and that means that when your party arrives there, you have something for them to do.

So why not just set them loose?

Player-specific plots are hard to work into a pre-planned arc. But the Wildemount book has a lot of methods and tools for ensuring that the player characters are fully enmeshed in the setting, and thus bought into the overall major plots there. There are also some guidelines on building arcs for your players, considering what goals and steps along the way need to happen for that character to have a satisfying story - should they survive (and spoilers for recent episodes: even if a character dies, it doesn't mean that their plot has to.)

Anyway, the other thing that got me thinking about this is that a friend introduced me to Inkarnate, which is a web-based map-making system. As someone who has plenty of imagination but limited skills as a visual artist, it's really great to have a system that lets you make pretty gorgeous maps. While I'm a little overwhelmed by the options to make battle maps (and I think I'll stick to the basic editor in Roll20) the ability to make maps for continents and other large areas has got me totally hooks.

In my homebrew world of Sarkon, there's a region called Nephimala, which is inspired by the period of western expansion in the United States during the 19th Century. Redwood forests, snowy mountains, wide prairies and vast deserts are the stage set for a young republic that seeks to expand into a sparsely populated land while the indigenous people struggle to maintain their autonomy and culture in the face of this massive conquest. And on top of this is a rush for ancient technology, a menacing army of bandits secretly controlled by an archdevil, fey crossings in the forests, and a bit of cosmic horror out on the coasts make it a place ripe for adventure.

Making a map will always inspire me to fill in more details - while I came up with five cities for Nephimala when I first came up with the Sarkon setting, building the mountain ranges, rivers, forests, and deserts inspired me to place new locations on the map, giving me a whole lot of additional locations, which in turn has made the place feel a bit more real and also given me a better sense of its history and the kinds of adventures that could occur there.

While still probably not as dense with detail as Wildemount, I could really see myself working on a few favorite regions of my setting and detailing everything from major cities to minor villages and remote shrines.

Now that my Ravnica campaign has hit tier 3 (though I don't know if it's truly halfway through - there are still nine guilds with Phyrexian cultists or their pawns subverting the plane's safety, and then a big interplanar treasure hunt to go on before taking the fight to New Phyrexia, not to mention player-specific plots) I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do next, and I definitely want to set it in Sarkon. While I have a few ideas for things to set there, one new idea cropping up is to really be pretty hands-off on the initial design and just start with in-depth character building, and take stuff from their stories to link to the overall campaign.

Having a place like Nephimala very thoroughly mapped out would probably do a lot to make that work.

Shadowlands Delayed to "Later This Year"

 So, Shadowlands is, I think, going to be a really cool expansion. But playing on the Beta, I've felt a bit worried. There are bugs and issues that really should have been ironed out a while ago, and with only about 4 weeks until their announced release date, without even the 9.0 patch live yet, I've been nervous that the expansion was going to drop with a lot of problems as yet unsolved.

And it seems Blizzard agrees with me. Shadowlands is going to be delayed until later in the year.

This is an exceptional year, and while Blizzard has claimed that their progress hasn't been slowed much by the pandemic and quarantine, I suspect that it has made work on the expansion at least a little slower.

So, what does this mean?

Well, really it just means that Shadowlands is dropping later. I still expect we'll get it by the end of the year, but perhaps a month or even two later.

This is disappointing, of course, but frankly, I'm not going anywhere, and I think those of us who have been testing the expansion likely have a similar attitude: this expansion has the potential to be off-the-walls bananas awesome, but it also needs a lot of polish - polish it probably wouldn't have gotten in the 4 weeks left until its original release date.

Still, it does mean that BFA will soldier on for a while longer. I'm hoping we can at least get the pre-patch in relatively soon so we can take advantage of the faster leveling and such.

EDIT:

While the expansion release has been delayed we have gotten a confirmation that the pre-patch will be arriving on October 13th!

So, big things coming on the 13th:

The level squish will reduce 120 characters to level 50, and other characters will be reduced to a proportionate level.

Class changes go into effect - 2H Frost returns, Prot and Holy Paladins use Holy Power once again (and from my experience on the beta, Prot is actually pretty decent for soloing,) DPS Shamans lose Maelstrom and work differently.

Maybe the most exciting change is that all the new character customization options will be available, allowing for more realistic-looking human characters of non-white ethnicities, tons of war paints and tattoos, new hairstyles and facial features that can be customized independently. Seriously, you're going to have fun playing around in the barber shop.

Corruption on gear will no longer have any effect - so you lose the positives, but you can also now equip all your most corrupted gear with no ill effect either! Azerite Armor and Essences will continue to work until we go to the Shadowlands.

And, of course, the current PvP season will be ending and you'll no longer be able to purchase the auction house mount (aka the Longboy.)

Heirlooms will no longer boost XP gained (though the overall leveling speed will be a lot faster) but will instead gain new set bonuses good for questing and leveling.

I, personally, will probably take the opportunity to finish leveling all my allied race alts, which should be a lot faster now.

We'll, of course, also get the pre-launch expansion event, including zombie plague 2.0 and quests that send us to Icecrown to battle the now-leaderless Scourge.

Into the Tier 3 Frontier

My Ravnica campaign has made it to tier 3, and that means players are level 11. Several players decided to try out alts, so I made a less plot-intensive adventure before they pick their new headquarters (and prepare to clear out monsters from their choice) in which they traveled to a remote district to deal with what turned out to be an adult white dragon who had frozen the whole place.

It's the first time I've run a legendary dragon, and I'll be honest, kind of shocked at how quickly they took it down. Four characters, three of whom literally had no magic items (except some healing potions they bought.) But there was an Open Fist Monk, a Chronurgist Wizard, an Undead Warlock, and the veteran character, an Ancestral Guardian Barbarian.

Even between only four characters (though the Warlock did use the Conjure Undead Spirit spell, which is freaking powerful) the party took the dragon down before he got a second turn - the dragon only got two legendary tail swipes, two legendary wing buffets, and a single frost breath before he was taken down.

A group of four level 11 characters is supposed to be balanced for a CR 13 legendary monster, but this felt like a cakewalk (though the Wizard was down to about 5 health after the breath attack.)

So as I see it, I think I either need to build in environmental disadvantages or I really need to make sure that any big encounter (even if it's not a plot-focused "boss") has the legendary creature's health maximized.

I do think that a lot of the difficulty scaling for encounters is based on an assumption of a lot more combat per day - more of a dungeon crawl experience. If you're having six fights before a long rest, with maybe time for one short rest in the middle, even fights that go quickly will deplete resources and health.

Something to think about.

But yeah, an adult white dragon only has 200 health on average. And when you have players at level 11, it's not terribly unusual for them to do over 25 damage in a round, so between 4 players, it'll only take them two rounds to kill it.