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Scyther posted:Anyone have thoughts on using titans or champions against only three PCs, while maintaining a reasonably fair challenge and not making combat drag? They'll probably be fine. Like I said above, I've made battles substantially more difficult than recommended and my players have been coming out just fine.
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Apr 1, 2016 21:28
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fool_of_sound posted:They'll probably be fine. Like I said above, I've made battles substantially more difficult than recommended and my players have been coming out just fine. Yeah, Titans are good for boss fights and you usually want bosses to be tough. If you think they can't hack it, just reduce the titan's HP by like a quarter or a third. But they can probably deal with it without modification.
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Apr 1, 2016 21:45
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Jimbozig posted:Ratpick, nice analysis there. Very cool. What assumption did you make for ongoing damage? How much did you assume ongoing 1 was worth? I'm not exactly sure about how high I would value ongoing damage: when I saw the numbers after I ran them through AnyDice I was actually surprised how high the damage output seemed on the attack with ongoing damage, but I pretty much immediately realized that I'd be remiss in making the instant assumption that ongoing damage is always the way to go. There's also a bit of a trap in looking at the numbers as is: all the other calculations are based on the average damage output for a character over a single attack made during a single turn, whereas the ongoing damage calculation takes into account damage potentially spilling onto multiple turns. I mean, simply based on the fact that it's damage later and not damage now (and you really want to kill the enemy now before they get to make a final attack before dying) I'd probably be inclined to agree with your idea of ongoing damage being discounted by a third each round. Anyway, as I said up top there's a big flaw in my calculations in that all the other examples only consider a single attack during a single round of combat while ongoing damage is something that can potentially deal damage over multiple rounds, so for any kind of deeper analysis I'd have to run the numbers over multiple turns, which is a bit more involved than I am comfortable with as a liberal arts major with only a passing interest in mathematics. EDIT: Oh, and in case what you meant was "how much DPR is a single point of ongoing damage worth," I let the function handle that for me: I made a simple function where, in addition to the damage, on a roll of 4 to 6 it adds the ongoing damage (1) and then rolls a d2 to check if the damage reoccurs (to simulate the saving throw), only stopping to add ongoing damage once the saving throw succeeds. Based purely on the numbers 1 ongoing seems to be worth about +1 damage, which I think is fair: it will undoubtedly deal the opponent 1 extra damage with the chance of occurring again, but with the caveat that the opponent might be able to take an action before being taken out by it. homullus posted:Don't forget that the Poisoner Rogue's ongoing damage does stack with itself. Anecdotally I would be surprised if it topped the Backstabber, but it's a thing. Actually, I think I might have to run the numbers on the Poisoner Rogue next, just to see how it compares with the others. Ratpick fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Apr 1, 2016 |
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Apr 1, 2016 22:14
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fool_of_sound posted:They'll probably be fine. Like I said above, I've made battles substantially more difficult than recommended and my players have been coming out just fine. My players are insanely good and I've taken to running at almost double budget for the fight if I seriously want to challenge them in a major way.
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Apr 1, 2016 23:56
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gourdcaptain posted:My players are insanely good and I've taken to running at almost double budget for the fight if I seriously want to challenge them in a major way. Just have a monster that immobilizes all of them at once at will while summoning multiple portals per round that each spawn new monsters and that spawn progressively worse monsters if you ignore them. You know it works! 
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Apr 2, 2016 00:36
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Jimbozig posted:Just have a monster that immobilizes all of them at once at will while summoning multiple portals per round that each spawn new monsters and that spawn progressively worse monsters if you ignore them. Heh. I'm unfortunately limited in the monster fluff I can use in a lot of cases due to running Shadowrun in Strike so the more exotic powers take some justification to use. Not that I don't milk mages, spirits, and representing hacking as a weird cyberspace fight as much as possible to let me pull interesting stuff. It doesn't help my players have made an art out of avoiding or bypassing climactic fights. There's been a Matrix hacking boss fight they've skipped three times when I tried to recycle it a level or two later, so I worked it into the plot that the villainous conspiracy's middle management is getting increasingly desperate to justify their huge expense on the software in question to they're superiors so they hatched an entire stupidly elaborate plan involving evil clones entirely to work in the software.
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Apr 2, 2016 07:04
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Gort posted:Having played Strike to the higher levels (party's level 9 now) I'm not really loving how monster damage increases as level goes up. Player-character hitpoints stay the same, but they gain a couple of new powers that negate attacks, which presumably is supposed to make up for the monster damage escalation. I'm responding to this again, because at the moment I'm too tired and sick to do any more damage math. Related to my previous response to you (i.e. the idea of removing the extra damage traits from monsters and replacing them with traits of a similar cost), here are some ideas on how to make higher level monsters more interesting while keeping their damage output about the same as on lower levels, simply by way of adding traits and not messing around with their powers: Based on the rules for sample monsters, generalists should gain the Extra Damage and Recharge traits at level 6 and above, while specialists should gain those traits at level 10 and above. Recharge is a good trait which allows you to pull off a big and scary attack more than once per combat, so that can probably stay, but if you're like me you might want to replace it with some other trait for Stooges and Goons to ensure that they've got enough tricks for their level. Extra Damage is in and of itself worth 3 points, which gives a lot of options for replacements: For Defenders the Duelist [3] trait is a good one, and makes for an exact trade in terms of points cost. It gives basically the same benefit as Extra Damage (+1 damage) but limited to one target, and comes with resist 1 against effects from that target. It's basically a more specialized version of Extra Damage, because the Duelist monster can't change their target until the original target is taken out. Other good traits for Defender monster include Guard (all allies are guarded while adjacent to the Defender), Sticky (enemies lose all remaining squares of movement when they move next to you), Power Magnet (if you're using damage types or it makes sense in the fiction of your game), and Damaging Aura [3]. Damaging Aura is a really good fit for Defenders, because it punishes players for getting close to the Defender (which is exactly what the Defender wants!) and forces them to try and keep it at range. For Strikers and other melee-oriented enemies I'm particularly fond of the combo of Damage on a Miss (when you miss you still deal 1 damage) and Stronger on a Miss [2] (basically, whenever you miss with an attack you increase the damage of your attacks by 1). Damage on a Miss is a personal favorite of mine, because I tend to have the worst luck with the dice and Striker monsters in particular I have a hard time doing anything useful with because they don't end up doing much damage before my players take them out. Stronger on a Miss I feel does Extra Damage in a better, more dramatic way, because if you telegraph it well to your players through the fiction (or they decide to Assess the situation to find that trait out) they will be able to see it coming and work around it. Other good traits for Strikers are Take Advantage (+1 damage when you attack with Advantage), Flyer [2], Speedy, Super Speedy [2] and Incorporeal [3]. Leaders have the Inspirational Leader trait at the lowest cost [2] variety. Trading out that and Extra Damage would allow you to buy Aggressive Leader [4] which adds 1 to the damage line of all of your allies. Again, that's adding more damage into the encounter, but it's damage that your players have a clear way of getting rid of by focusing on the Leader. The sample Blaster and Crowd Control monsters already get Friendly Blaster, Precision Blaster [2] and Deadly Blaster at certain levels, but if you're willing to do a bit of math you can add and replace those to replace Extra Damage with. You probably shouldn't give the same monster both Damage on a Miss and Effect on a Miss, because your players might feel that it's a bit cheap. That's just a few ideas, but I hope this helps. Ratpick fucked around with this message at 12:29 on Apr 2, 2016 |
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Apr 2, 2016 10:23
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Your posts are all incredibly informative Ratpick, please keep making them. Also, if you could compile a link to what you consider your Greatest Hits I'd love to link them in the OP.
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Apr 2, 2016 22:52
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Countblanc posted:Your posts are all incredibly informative Ratpick, please keep making them. Also, if you could compile a link to what you consider your Greatest Hits I'd love to link them in the OP. Thanks! I still really want to try to crunch my damage math for higher-level characters, and I've also got that Defender post I promised in the works. Also, since my last post barely scraped the surface of designing interesting monsters with a lower damage output I'd also like to revisit that as well. In the meantime, I ran some damage calculations for the Poisoner Rogue and the Buddies: Firstly the Poisoner Rogue using Worsening Wound appears to come ahead of all the other characters purely in terms of numbers. A few things to remember here: the Poisoner Rogue deals ongoing equal to their base damage (2) on every attack roll of 5 to 6 when they choose to use Worsening Wound. Their average damage without Advantage or Disadvantage is 4.00. With Advantage it goes up to 5.89 and with Disadvantage it goes all the way down to 2.11. The Buddies, using Team Attack and with both focusing on the same opponent, can get 1 extra damage on the enemy as part of the effect. This comes up to 3.17 average damage (0.5 higher than a baseline Striker), with 4.42 with Advantage and 1.92 with Disadvantage. Analysis: Okay, so the Poisoner Rogue comes on top of the damage calculation. I was personally surprised that the Poisoner's average damage output is so much higher than the Backstabber's, but there's a few reasons for this: the Backstabber's extra damage only occurs on a 6 whereas a Poisoner gets their ongoing damage on every roll of 5 and 6, so they have a better chance of getting their extra damage in than the Backstabber. Secondly, once the Backstabber gets their ongoing damage in, the enemy will already take 2 damage at the beginning of their turn and there's a 50% chance of the enemy failing their saving throw and taking 2 more ongoing, bringing their damage output to an equal level as a Backstabber with a roll of 6. The most important drawback of ongoing damage still applies to Poisoner Rogues, that being that if an enemy were to survive your attack if not for the ongoing damage, they still get to take a single action before being taken out. However, the rest of the drawbacks of ongoing damage do not apply to Poisoner Rogues: their ongoing damage stacks with itself even though it's all coming from the same feature. This means that we can assume a reliable 4.00 damage per round from them. The Buddies doesn't reveal much of interest: 1 extra damage as part of an effect translates to a 0.5 boost in average damage, because there's exactly a 50/50 chance of getting that effect in. Anyway, I said I wanted to somehow be able to quantify a Martial Artist with Scorpion Stance's damage in terms of multiple turns on account of the fact that their ongoing damage does not stack with itself, but just trying to run the numbers with help from pen and paper makes it clear that it's a bit too complex for me. Firstly, there's a 50% chance, on any attack, that the Martial Artist will get the ongoing damage in. If they get the ongoing damage in there's another 50% chance of the damage reoccurring. This is what accounts for the +1 increase in average damage on an attack, but it does not account for the fact that the damage does not stack with itself. The problem here is that there are simply too many variables for me to keep track off to make any kind of in-depth analysis on that short of having someone who actually knows mathematics to help me. Suffice to say this much: the Poisoner Rogue comes up on top in terms of pure damage output in comparison to the other Strikers. However, its damage being ongoing damage means that it might leave the enemy alive to still make attacks before they succumb to the damage, and because ultimately the point of damage is to take out the enemy to stop them from making attacks the Poisoner Rogue's particular approach is a bit lacking in this regard. If you want to take out an enemy quickly with pure damage without giving them a chance to return the favor the Backstabber Rogue excels provided they have some way of gaining advantage. I'm a bit disappointed in how boring the Buddies turned out to be in terms of the damage calculation, but that shouldn't have really come as a surprise. Suffice to say that unlike these other characters who are focused purely on damage the Buddies has a number of effects they can put on their attacks. However, my personal take on this is that the Buddies class might be better suited to roles other than pure damage. However, as I stated when I made my first post, I have not taken into account any damage that might arise from, say, the Duelist using Find an Opening to spend focus for damage or an enemy triggering one of the damaging effects that the Archer has on their at-wills. Even though these two classes might not shine as much as the other three in terms of pure damage output, they have more tricks up their sleeve. Revisiting the Duelist I said in my original post that accounting for the Duelist's Find an Opening in terms of damage is hard, but I was actually wrong. The real problem is that there's not a simple way to predict how much Focus a given Duelist will have in a given round of a combat. Assuming for a minute though that you have the Focus, how much damage is a single point of Focus spent on Find an Opening worth? Well, the use of Focus has to be declared before the attack and the attack actually has to hit, but as a Duelist attacking the target of your Duel you treat 2's as 5's, meaning that your chance of getting a hit are 5/6. That's a 5/6 chance of getting 1 point of extra damage per point of focus spent, which translates to 5/6 extra damage, or 0.83, per point of Focus spent. A single point of focus spent in this way already brings the Duelist ahead of the Archer, Backstabber Rogue and Martial Artist, and with two points spent they'll already exceed the Poisoner Rogue in sheer damage output on a single attack. However, once we look at what this translates to with Advantage the Duelist will still only be dealing "just" 4.81 points of damage on average with Advantage, assuming they're spending 1 point of Focus. However, mirroring our original findings on the Duelist, they're still dealing a respectable 2.86 on average with Disadvantage, which is actually more than the baseline Striker with a normal attack! Here's all that in AnyDice: http://anydice.com/program/80c8 The real problem is getting that Focus: while you will reliably start a turn with 1 point of Focus, Focus does not carry over in between targets. There are ways of getting more Focus through the use of Demand Attention and the like. In general, though, an average enemy won't be alive for more than a couple of turns in a given combat, meaning that hoarding in excess of 2 Focus might never become relevant. Elites and Champions are a completely different kettle of fish, but the real question is whether it's better to have your Focus somewhere else. The Duelist is actually not all that bad as a Striker: sure, the Rogue might be able to deal a big mess of damage on a high roll, but the Duelist can deal that damage reliably and are not all that bothered by Disadvantage. This is all subject to change when these characters hit level 5, because that's when things get really interesting:
Ratpick fucked around with this message at 10:03 on Apr 4, 2016 |
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Apr 4, 2016 09:57
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Speaking of Rogue, I was a bit puzzled by the lack of support for Brawler. There are feats and kits for Poisoner and Backstabber, but it's as though Brawler was forgotten about halfway through.
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Apr 5, 2016 21:59
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I had a couple questions come up from my group's last session: For the Necromancer: Can Spectres be affected by Raise Ally? In general: Are monsters (Champions to Stooges) always Taken Out when they hit 0 HP?
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Apr 5, 2016 22:13
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Ghostpilot posted:Speaking of Rogue, I was a bit puzzled by the lack of support for Brawler. There are feats and kits for Poisoner and Backstabber, but it's as though Brawler was forgotten about halfway through. Well again remember that the combat stuff is all just in name and not flavor, but the kits are much closer tied to flavor (though still capable of being reskinned within reason). The Poisoner and Sneak mini-kits aren't really designed to be matched up with those specific Rogue options and in fact could just as easily be paired with other Classes - It's easy to think of a Buddies who was flavored as an alchemist/mad scientist who takes the Poisoner kit and whose buddy is basically a pile of steaming poison goo, and I'm sure there's lots of other stuff. But regarding the Brawler itself, there's already several kits that cover that niche nicely if you're taking the Brawler's name literally (as opposed to like, a magical pixie who uses illusions to make people fall all over themselves or something). The Brute is the most obvious one to represent "big guy," but The Protagonist offers a more heroic take on someone who is more brawl than brain. The Gunslinger and even the Spellbreaker also have some options that make sense for that sort of character.
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Apr 5, 2016 22:19
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Man Dancer posted:In general: Are monsters (Champions to Stooges) always Taken Out when they hit 0 HP? In general, yes. What the Taken Out status means will vary with the GM and narrative, but it is a Not In The Fight Anymore status.
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Apr 5, 2016 23:48
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Gort posted:Having played Strike to the higher levels (party's level 9 now) I'm not really loving how monster damage increases as level goes up. Player-character hitpoints stay the same, but they gain a couple of new powers that negate attacks, which presumably is supposed to make up for the monster damage escalation. I play in gorts game and we trialed a game with more bads with their damage toned down and I gotta say I preferred going back to early game flow. I like strike a lot but I definitely enjoyed the early game more. While it's averaging out similarly and ends up ok there's a lot more swing in encounters at the high end which can sometimes feel random and frustrating rather than heroic.
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Apr 6, 2016 03:24
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Hey Jimbozig, have you considered any sort of license so that other people can make/sell Strike content?
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Apr 6, 2016 19:00
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People already can make/sell stuff, albeit unofficially. I guess I'm a bit of a weird example since I've been involved in Strike's development for years, but I published an unofficial, independent Class a few months back.
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Apr 6, 2016 23:03
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Countblanc posted:People already can make/sell stuff, albeit unofficially. I guess I'm a bit of a weird example since I've been involved in Strike's development for years, but I published an unofficial, independent Class a few months back. I must've missed that; what was the class?
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Apr 6, 2016 23:22
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From the OP:Countblanc posted:The Psion class (preview) - A class made by yours truly, based off the 13th Age Occultist class. Deals in interrupts and reactions.
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Apr 6, 2016 23:29
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Zurui posted:Hey Jimbozig, have you considered any sort of license so that other people can make/sell Strike content? I'm going the Vincent Baker route. If you want to make a new class or expansion content, and you don't need to reprint anything of mine, then you don't need a license. Just do it. If there is any of my writing that you do need to use in any expansion material, just go ahead and send me an email and I'll give you an official go-ahead. I very much encourage people making stuff for Strike! and I won't try to stop you unless you're making some "Tournament of Rapists" type of thing. Emailing me also has the advantage that I can post or tweet about it to try bring some attention your way. If you want the icons, they are not mine and are freely available under a CC license, and I'm happy to send anyone who asks a list of links to them.
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Apr 8, 2016 02:04
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Speaking of making stuff, Jimbozig gave me the go-ahead to post these up: Blaster Cards Martial Artist Cards I made them using a little program I wrote a while back to make spell cards for D&D 5e so they're not perfect. Notably, they don't have any icons, because I never thought I'd need to add pictures to D&D spells. And I'm thinking they might work better landscape. But I figure it's not bad for a first pass and one evening's work. e: I suppose a preview would probably be nice:  I've also got a Defender Warlord and a Striker Duelist in my group, so I'll probably post up those sets sometime this weekend. ImpactVector fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Apr 8, 2016 |
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Apr 8, 2016 03:57
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Those all look great! When I made my MA ones I truncated the language a bit so I could fit the various level up effects on a single card, but otherwise that's basically exactly what I would do.
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Apr 9, 2016 01:06
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Countblanc posted:Those all look great! When I made my MA ones I truncated the language a bit so I could fit the various level up effects on a single card, but otherwise that's basically exactly what I would do.
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Apr 9, 2016 01:21
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Countblanc posted:Those all look great! When I made my MA ones I truncated the language a bit so I could fit the various level up effects on a single card, but otherwise that's basically exactly what I would do. I'd rather have more cards and then only have cards for my actual current level. Strike! has a fair amount of "at level 3, A becomes B; at level 4, it's B+1; at level 6, it's 2A-1," most notably in the provided monsters. I am sure it is because I have a small brain and it is all full.
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Apr 9, 2016 01:26
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homullus posted:I'd rather have more cards and then only have cards for my actual current level. Strike! has a fair amount of "at level 3, A becomes B; at level 4, it's B+1; at level 6, it's 2A-1," most notably in the provided monsters. I am sure it is because I have a small brain and it is all full.
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Apr 9, 2016 01:51
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ImpactVector posted:For most things I agree with you, but the way the Martial Artist works you actually end up temporarily upgrading your stances with Focused Attack. So you end up needing at least two ranks' worth of cards at all times even from level 1. And for levels 3 and 4 you potentially end up needing all 3 ranks of each stance if you end up taking a second FA instead of the other two 3rd level Encounters. That's true -- totally forgot about that. Not enough time spent with the Martial Artist. 
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Apr 9, 2016 01:54
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Done with the next set. I ended up rolling through the rest of the roles just because they were pretty quick to bang out. Roles: Controller Defender Leader Striker Duelist Warlord Condensed Martial Artist I really like how the new MA styles turned out. Thanks for the idea, Count. 
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Apr 9, 2016 06:11
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I am reading through the rulebook in preparation for a possible future campaign and I'm really liking how classes and roles are split up. Any interesting or fun combinations you guys have played/had in your games?
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Apr 10, 2016 17:52
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Rannos22 posted:I am reading through the rulebook in preparation for a possible future campaign and I'm really liking how classes and roles are split up. Any interesting or fun combinations you guys have played/had in your games? Also, Superhuman (tremor sense option) and the second option of the Blaster's Terrain power (3x3 obscuring zone) is pretty gross. ImpactVector fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Apr 10, 2016 |
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Apr 10, 2016 18:20
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Warlord/Defender was one of my favorites. Defender is one of the roles which can justify giving up its Role Boost from attacking, letting you toss out attacks to your teammates from the Warlord at your leisure. I think that character had both Toughness and Huge, so I was rocking 16 hitpoints in addition to the Defender's native bulk and just kept enemies focusing on me while using my party's powers as a big toolbox. Psion/Striker with the Confidence class feature was also a lot of fun. You basically play like a really strong Bravura Warlord where you really have to put yourself out there in order to deal damage, but the result is that you have really strong burst potential while risking your safety.
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Apr 10, 2016 18:47
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Hey Jim, could you help me and my friends out with something? My friend is currently thinking of making a Shapechanger for his next character and we keep tripping up on the wording of one-form shifter. My reading is that once you use Rally to regain the Transformation power, the next time you use that Transformation power you gain one of the extra bonuses on top of your form's other bonuses, but we keep tripping up on the phrase "instead of transforming again," which could be read as the extra bonus coming instead of the Transformation power happening. Like, I'm pretty sure our first reading of it is right, but we'd just like an official word on it. Thanks in advance.
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Apr 12, 2016 20:20
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It means that when you use the regained transformation power again, you get the bonus along with whatever other effects the power gives. It's "instead of transforming" because you may be already in that form and thus don't need to transform.
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Apr 12, 2016 20:41
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ImpactVector posted:I made them using a little program I wrote a while back to make spell cards for D&D 5e so they're not perfect. Totally unrelated to Strike or 5e, but I've been looking for something like this to make Exalted 3e charm cards, so thanks!
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Apr 12, 2016 22:51
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Jimbozig posted:It means that when you use the regained transformation power again, you get the bonus along with whatever other effects the power gives. Gotcha, thanks!
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Apr 13, 2016 04:44
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Two more sets are done. Necromancer Archer bbcisdabomb posted:Totally unrelated to Strike or 5e, but I've been looking for something like this to make Exalted 3e charm cards, so thanks! I'm slowly moving my projects over to GitHub, so you can find the current version here. No real need to update unless you want to be able to format the card text as HTML or share data files though.
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Apr 14, 2016 04:11
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A few more: Basic Actions Trouble in Hogtown Cards I'm going to try running Hogtown for my Monday group, so I figured I'd share.
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Apr 15, 2016 04:54
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So tonight I ran a big boss battle for my players that was centered around a unique status that I came up with. My players are a group of mercenaries/rebels in Star Wars, and they were liberating a factory under Imperial control from a mad scientist and her army of rakghoul troopers and thralls. The party Necromancer uses nanobots as the fictional justification for her powers, and the scientist was using a version of her research to control the rakghouls. The rakghoul Goons were able to inflict the status Infected with their melee attacks, and the boss got to exploit it. The status did nothing on its own, but the boss got Advantage against anyone with the Infected status, and when attacking someone with it, she got a special second Effect line that she could apply instead of the normal one. The special Effect line would generally be a worse version of the original, like instead of getting Panicked or Frenzied the target would be Dominated. The Infected status was a Save Ends status, so you could get rid of it, but the Goons were actually pretty good at re-applying it and keeping constant pressure up on the team. The Goons had a special resurrection ability that allowed them to return after each death as a Stooge, but with a longer delay each time. On their first death they came back on their next turn. After that they had to wait a round. Then two rounds and so on. And each time they hit, they transferred the health to the boss and kept her healed. There were also a couple of normal enemies thrown in to keep them busy and not just whaling on the boss. The fight was pretty tough but they still came through only owing a Major Concession. It was a lot of fun designing the fight, and I want to do more mucking around with status effects in the future to have more interactions like this one. And my players have earned the Infested condition as part of getting their Strikes, so that will be fun to play with later on when it comes up. Also: the resurrecting enemies idea was Not Good. The players didn't like it because killing the enemies didn't feel like progress, and I didn't like it because keeping track of how many rounds each enemy had to resurrect was too much of a headache. I don't recommend it now that I've played with it for a couple of fights.
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Apr 15, 2016 05:18
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Serf posted:Reviving enemies What I get more tired of is "the fight's boss is the off switch for <frustrating fight condition>," and even then it's still great as a Sometimes Food. It's tougher in a cover-oriented game (even without Take Cover) to get at a boss in general, and in a scenario where the infinitely-reviving monsters are numerous and also HEAL the boss when they do damage, it's even tougher and more frustrating. Like, no individual element of that fight was Not Good. The resurrecting enemies would still be cool in an encounter with non-combat objectives, for example, and especially without the boss-healing.
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Apr 15, 2016 16:31
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Encounter design question: according to the book, it's one standard monster per character for a fairly easy challenge up to four players, but at five players, I should increase their encounter powers by one and I get one action point. My question is: should I still be adding in a monster for player 5, or no? I'm not sure if that was saying "with that many players, synergy means that the enemies need a bonus to counter that" or "keep enemy numbers lower, with that many PCs it's better to make quality than quantity of enemies". So: 4 standard + bonuses, or 5 standard + bonuses?
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Apr 15, 2016 17:57
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ZeeToo posted:Encounter design question: according to the book, it's one standard monster per character for a fairly easy challenge up to four players, but at five players, I should increase their encounter powers by one and I get one action point. My question is: should I still be adding in a monster for player 5, or no? I'm not sure if that was saying "with that many players, synergy means that the enemies need a bonus to counter that" or "keep enemy numbers lower, with that many PCs it's better to make quality than quantity of enemies". Without ever actually having to run combat for more than 4, I've always assumed 4+bonuses, but looking at the wording it seems ambiguous so now I'm not so sure.
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Apr 15, 2016 18:00
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| # ? May 13, 2024 11:25 |
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4+ bonuses. To keep things fast, since adding more players slows things down. 5 on 5 should also be balanced about as well as 4 on 4, but the rules are the way they are to keep things from slowing down too much.
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Apr 15, 2016 18:25
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