Encounters « A Walk in the Dark. I've been recently re- tooling my campaign . Although drow are interesting to some degree and challenging to a young party, after giving it a lot of thought they didn't really have much reason to be there. The BBEG was a high elf, so the thought of them working together was rather unlikely to begin with. And there wasn't any acceptable reason for drow to be wandering about the surface besides . One could argue that drow are part of the OGL - after all, they're in Pathfinder - but the general consensus of it is that they are part of the D& D realm. Also, in order to fully comply with the OGL, I'd have to leave their lore out of it.. It defines who they are, and without it they're not much more than a mean elf. Encounters in the Dark 'Ichi-nii? Dinner is-' 'Get out of the way, Yuzu.' 'But dad, I-' 'Ichigo! Ichigo, my only son, I order you to get out of that room. So after removing them, replacing them with other creatures, I found myself with a few monsters I no longer intend to use. So, good samaritan that I am, here they are! First off is the wood golem that I posted on Twitter. It's loosely based on the Pathfinder version, made into a CR 4 creature. Secondly is the leader of the drow group, a mage named Draya. Originally she as a summoner because of where she was physically located in the adventure, but just looking at her stat block alone doesn't indicate anything summoner- like so I just left her as a plain ol' ! Enjoy! With the release of the Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition Starter Kit and Player's Handbook, I have decided to convert my long languishing adventure . But, unlike other publishers who will remain nameless, I am not going to rush it out there, and no one's going to see a thing about it until (1) the licensing options are given, and (2) the Dungeon Master's Guide is released. That being said, I have started to try and figure out how 5th Edition works in terms of creating adventures. In 4. E, creating balanced encounters was rather simple because everything was equally balanced - given an equal level, five monsters were an even match to five PCs - but that's not exactly the case any more. Now it's more like 3. Some 5th Edition Monsters. I've been recently re-tooling my campaign 'The Coming Dark' with the hopes that I would launch a Kickstarter for it in the very near future. E and earlier versions, where a monster's difficulty is reflected in an obscure . I mean, after you stat up a monster how do you know what CR Challenge Level to give it? I wanted to clear up something. A Walk in the Dark A look in to the mind of an RPG. I'm predicting a short adventure/delve of between three and five encounters for characters of low to. Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition)» Forums » Rules Subject: Encounters in Road to Legend? Is it only one encounter the entire quest/side quest? Encounters: Photo by George Balazs. China sea turtle On the County Museum wall The curved shell spread to oblong Fiery light wondrous. Follow/Fav Encounters in the Dark. Starling City has suffered a mysterious attack by an unknown assailant and is threatened with a repeat performance. That led me to wonder about balance in general, specifically how balance is determined. Edition had an unprecedented amount of playtesters, so they had access to a variety of groups that could test and retest things in the hopes that they could determine what is balanced and what is unbalanced. But there's an inherent problem with that: not every group is the same, and not every player is the same. If an exploit exists, it will take a small handful of . Can the game be unbalanced by something you're not even aware of? So I thought about how some things could be experimented with.. When you do that, you don't run it a few times and see what happens. You run it a LOT of times and get the average results. So I decided to create a simulator. Objective. In the first scene of . But how many is enough? At what point does the encounter go from being a cake walk to a crushing defeat? So I wrote a program to simulate 5. Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition Starter Kit versus an indeterminate amount of skeletons. How many skeletons does it take before the players are likely to be on the losing end of the battle? The small little program I wrote takes a few considerations: All the attacks are basic attacks. Every class uses its preferred melee attack except the rogue (which uses his shortbow) and the wizard (which uses the cantrip ray of frost). The noble fighter and cleric are the . These are the front line defenders, and likely the ones that stand between the skeleton and the wizards. Only when they both fall is the rest of the party at risk. No high end magic of any kind. Needless to say this would quickly sway the encounter in the player's favor. No healing. No action surge, no cleric healing, no potions, etc.. This also means that the players will not use any limited resources during the combat. No one gets advantage or disadvantage on any roll. For that reason, the rogue never deals additional sneak attack damage. A natural 2. 0 deals double the normal damage. I know this isn't precise, but it's easier to code. All the damage is rolled; no averages are used. The skeletons have an AC of 1. They have a shortsword as a weapon, which gives them a +3 to the attack roll and deals 1d. The PCs are the five defined in the starter kit: Noble Fighter (greatsword), Folk Hero Fighter (bow), Cleric (morningstar), Rogue (shortbow), and Wizard (ray of frost). Since he deals bludgeoning damage and the skeletons are vulnerable to it, the cleric deals an additional die of damage on a hit. The simulations yielded the following.# of Skeletons. PC Wins. PC Losses. So, in a nutshell, the 1. Players could more or less handle ten of them, but when that 1. So what did we learn from this exercise? It's very possible for PCs to trash a modest amount of low end minions without having to fire their big guns. The above doesn't use healing at all, which means that even if the PCs get dinged about a bit they are still able to recover. PCs can win an encounter with 8 skeletons over 8. Dailies, spells, healing potions and other consumables - things that the monsters generally don't have - tip the scales considerably in favor of the PCs. If you walk into a room with 6 skeletons in it, you can probably dispatch them fairly easily. As glorious as it might be, you don't have to nuke the whole room. Until more concrete guidelines for monster creation and encounter balancing come about, I'll keep using this simulator and try to get a feel for how things should be. Over time, I might improve the simulator more and more so that it's more representative of each PCs actions in an encounter. Maybe this will end up being a full on AI framework? I can't help but wonder if Wot. C does this sort of analysis. Like I said above, sure they have tens of thousands of playtesters but it's such a diverse group with so many different situations that it may be hard to quantify. Not to mention that, if you present a specific combat situation to two separate groups, 9. Can't wait to try this out on goblins and kobolds..*EDIT*If you're curious, you can view the C# source code for the simulator HERE. A couple of months ago some of us had an idea for a special project, but due to our lives getting a little more complicated than we had planned that project has yet to develop. Maybe some day it will, but not now. I had created a short, two encounter side trek/delve for this project, which I am now releasing under the name The Absent- Minded Alchemist. The delve developed from an hook presented by The Angry DM through Twitter, and I simply couldn't get the idea out of my head for a few days so I went ahead and wrote it up. Here is the intro text: The great alchemist Zaelin has made quite a reputation for himself in these parts. Although he makes quality alchemical mixtures, potions and other items he is noticeably absent- minded and, in some cases, careless about how he goes about creating these mixtures. He’s had his share of accidents, ranging from injuring half a dozen apprentices to destroying a large portion of his home. Over time these highly volatile mixtures have eaten through the city’s sewer system and accumulated in the ground beneath his feet. There, the other smaller residents of the city – the countless rats that live underground – have been exposed to these alchemical mixtures and have been the victims of some rather nasty side effects. They have been infused with alchemical energies by his own hand, and they are too many of them for the hapless wizard to deal with himself. You don't have to read a handful of dice, add the modifier and figure out the total; it's one nice round number. No more fistfuls of dice! The problem with using that premise in 4. E is that the number is pretty much always the same. First off, when converting a monster's damage roll to a fixed number you kind of have to use the average of the damage; using anything other than the average wouldn't make sense (this is not taking . But an inherent aspect of 4. E is that, for any given level, all the monsters average the same amount of damage. That's by design in 4th Edition. Damage, By the Numbers. As a point of reference, here are the average die values as presented in my 4. E Dice Roller and in Sly Flourish's Die Roller: Minion: 7 damage. Low: 1. 0 damage. Medium: 1. 4 damage. High: 1. 7 damage. Limited High: 2. 1 damage. Hardcore: 2. 8 damage. Based on that, the first problem I have with using fixed damage would be that every monster would cause 1. Everything becomes 1. Again, that's by design in 4th Edition; doing anything contrary to that risks unbalancing things. Sure there might be some exceptions to the rule - some things might do 1. While creating my monsters for A Night in Seyvoth Manor, I actually got sick of writing . Gone are the days of the . So what do you do with critical hits and fixed damage? Add a die? I thought about doubling the damage, but is that really ? With fixed damage, that's not much different than hitting twice. I tried to mitigate it by adding critical hit effects to monster powers, but sometimes it feels like a lot of excess work. Characters, By the Numbers. To figure out the effectiveness of fixed damage I decided to compare the above values to two different characters that would be playing such an adventure. Considering that it's a 6th level adventure, I created the weakest character I could think of (level 6 human wizard w/ 1. Constitution = 4. HP) and the toughest I could muster (level 6 dwarf battlemind w/ 2. Constitution and Toughness feat = 7. HP). Using 1. 5 as the base damage, it would take three shots to knock the wizard unconscious and five hits to drop the dwarf. That's arguably acceptable, but the problem becomes apparent when you realize that the wizard doesn't need a 1. Constitution.. He could have a ONE as his Constitution (3.
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