That’s when I use the same technique of “hot fixing” to double or even triple that boss’s HP mid fight.
Nah... in that situation... they had all been doing like 5 damage a hit most of the time, level 2 and all... and the Sorcerer busts out with nearly max rolls on a Chaos Bolt Crit. That was by far the highest damage roll anyone had made yet in the campaign. Against the mini-boss. Everyone cheered, as I described the goblin boss being turned to ash and his minions then had to roll for morale (and one failed). It was way more fun to do that than say "He seems a little hurt."
The REAL boss in that situation was the town Prefect, who, upon investigation of the goblin's loot and the discovery of a secret note, they learned had been hiring the goblins to kidnap farm children so as to scare the farmers off their land and buy it up cheaply for himself.
I never finalized anything until the session already started. Sure if they leveled up its fair to adjust. I'm talking more about making changes as they are about to walk in the room or the worst "cheat" in my mind, making changes while the fight is going on.
Its more about a philosophy rather than specific examples. I enjoy getting invested in the world along side of my players and try to define general rules for that world e.g No god like interventions during a fight.
But again... this is a question of scale. You are allowing god-like interventions of the design of the entire module, before the session starts, to change the level of everything in the entire dungeon to be appropriate tot he party, but not allowing a single intervention on one die roll. Why is one OK, but the other is not?
I dont know, it was what I decided before there was internet, barely any video games. I played the Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson Fighting Fantasy books. They designed the books to be a challenge as is. They weren't able to change it, the design was set, that was the interesting technical challenge for them - to create a fair and balanced adventure.
If I cheated on my dice rolls while playing in order to progress the story, then I cheated and my experience is hollow for it.
Regards to the DM and the adventure one pleasure is the creation and the technical challenge of the design. My players were all highly competitive people who want to be challenged, don't want anything handed out to them for free, otherwise they would feel their experience was hollow. Naturally players can be drastically different so I'm only talking about my type/crowd. If I did an adventure for kids it would be completely different.
That’s when I use the same technique of “hot fixing” to double or even triple that boss’s HP mid fight.
Nah... in that situation... they had all been doing like 5 damage a hit most of the time, level 2 and all... and the Sorcerer busts out with nearly max rolls on a Chaos Bolt Crit. That was by far the highest damage roll anyone had made yet in the campaign. Against the mini-boss. Everyone cheered, as I described the goblin boss being turned to ash and his minions then had to roll for morale (and one failed). It was way more fun to do that than say "He seems a little hurt."
The REAL boss in that situation was the town Prefect, who, upon investigation of the goblin's loot and the discovery of a secret note, they learned had been hiring the goblins to kidnap farm children so as to scare the farmers off their land and buy it up cheaply for himself.
I played the Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson Fighting Fantasy books. They designed the books to be a challenge as is. They weren't able to change it, the design was set, that was the interesting technical challenge for them - to create a fair and balanced adventure.
But that is a unique situation and is not what Colville was designing.
All the pre-written modules, including the pre-written adventures of today, make a wide array of assumptions that are not all true of any game group and in fact hardly any of them are true simultaneously of any group. I haven't read any of the 5e adventures but the older ones always instructed the DM to modify anything and everything in the module as necessary for the party that will actually run through the adventure. I remember several of them that said, pretty much point blank, if you try to run this module as written without modifying anything, expect a disaster. The writers told you up front, they can't know YOUR table -- only you do -- and therefore you not only can, but should, no, MUST, modify the adventure to suit your table.
I have said this many times. D&D is not an MMORPG, where the computer is the DM and the devs are the "module writers" and there can be literally no give and take because it has to be coded to be usable by 10,000 different players all around the world under all possible different combinations. But D&D isn't like that. Yes, the adventure "Curse of Strahd" had to be written by the WOTC guys to be as generically applicable as an MMORPG mission would be, but the computer doesn't run Curse of Strahd -- a human DM does. It is a poor DM who just runs it as written without taking the players' likes/dislikes/wants/needs and abilities into account.
And given that this is true -- and I would hold it is one of the fundamental truisms of RPGs that the DM is expected to tailor an adventure to suit the players at his or her table and the party going through the adventure -- then I see no conceptual difference between tailoring a whole adventure, and tailoring an encounter, or even tailoring a single die roll. Doing this is again not just the right of the GM -- it is his job.
Am I saying cheat all the time? Fudge all your rolls? Fudge even a small percentage of your rolls? No! I am saying do what is printed or planned when possible, and maintain verisimilitude for the players at all times. But, as DMs we need to use our judgment about when to overrule the rules, the dice, or anything else, to make the game session better for everyone.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
They will never play smarter - they just keep whacking with a stick, because that has always worked in the past, and they believe it will always work in the future.
This is the crux of it for me. I object to MC's recommendation just as much as OP, but for very different reasons. I have absolutely no problem with real-time adjustments to just about anything, but I am very big into rewarding smart play and my players are really into finding alternate approaches to encounters, whether I have created them beforehand or they surprise me with something. I have no doubt that they would likely pick up on the pattern as well if everything they fought was tuned to the "sweet spot" between challenge and survival no matter what they had done beforehand, and the game would be much less fun for it.
But as someone else said, the context of these videos are to provide advice to new DMs who may not be as confident in their encounter building. I think the concept of the dungeon not being set in stone ahead of time is a good one to teach, because it readies you for improvisation in reaction to the players' choices. For me that is less about presenting an equal challenge when they foil your original challenge and more about still being able to provide a session worth of fun content after one spell circumvents your whole adventure.
They will never play smarter - they just keep whacking with a stick, because that has always worked in the past, and they believe it will always work in the future.
This is the crux of it for me. I object to MC's recommendation just as much as OP, but for very different reasons. I have absolutely no problem with real-time adjustments to just about anything, but I am very big into rewarding smart play and my players are really into finding alternate approaches to encounters, whether I have created them beforehand or they surprise me with something. I have no doubt that they would likely pick up on the pattern as well if everything they fought was tuned to the "sweet spot" between challenge and survival no matter what they had done beforehand, and the game would be much less fun for it.
It doesn’t have to be that way though. My players are kinda terrified of combat. I try to maintain the balance between Epic and OSR. They know that nothing will be easy. And they come up with some of the craziest ways to overcome the challenges I present. Much like Matt Colville, I drop some of the most ridiculous stuff on them with no idea how they’re gonna overcome the challenge. But they always figure something out.
I have no doubt that they would likely pick up on the pattern as well if everything they fought was tuned to the "sweet spot" between challenge and survival no matter what they had done beforehand, and the game would be much less fun for it.
But nobody is saying that every encounter should be tuned to a sweet spot. In my examples I explicitly showed how I didn't do that.
We're saying that doing some editing on-the-fly is not "DMing wrong" -- it's in fact, doing DMing right. The goal is to make the session fun, the battles tense when appropriate, and so forth. Otherwise we run the risk of having battles that are either insanely hard, or boringly easy, and both are fun-killers.
I dont know, it was what I decided before there was internet, barely any video games. I played the Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson Fighting Fantasy books. They designed the books to be a challenge as is. They weren't able to change it, the design was set, that was the interesting technical challenge for them - to create a fair and balanced adventure.
If I cheated on my dice rolls while playing in order to progress the story, then I cheated and my experience is hollow for it.
Regards to the DM and the adventure one pleasure is the creation and the technical challenge of the design. My players were all highly competitive people who want to be challenged, don't want anything handed out to them for free, otherwise they would feel their experience was hollow. Naturally players can be drastically different so I'm only talking about my type/crowd. If I did an adventure for kids it would be completely different.
Well that’s a different story then.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
But that is a unique situation and is not what Colville was designing.
All the pre-written modules, including the pre-written adventures of today, make a wide array of assumptions that are not all true of any game group and in fact hardly any of them are true simultaneously of any group. I haven't read any of the 5e adventures but the older ones always instructed the DM to modify anything and everything in the module as necessary for the party that will actually run through the adventure. I remember several of them that said, pretty much point blank, if you try to run this module as written without modifying anything, expect a disaster. The writers told you up front, they can't know YOUR table -- only you do -- and therefore you not only can, but should, no, MUST, modify the adventure to suit your table.
I have said this many times. D&D is not an MMORPG, where the computer is the DM and the devs are the "module writers" and there can be literally no give and take because it has to be coded to be usable by 10,000 different players all around the world under all possible different combinations. But D&D isn't like that. Yes, the adventure "Curse of Strahd" had to be written by the WOTC guys to be as generically applicable as an MMORPG mission would be, but the computer doesn't run Curse of Strahd -- a human DM does. It is a poor DM who just runs it as written without taking the players' likes/dislikes/wants/needs and abilities into account.
And given that this is true -- and I would hold it is one of the fundamental truisms of RPGs that the DM is expected to tailor an adventure to suit the players at his or her table and the party going through the adventure -- then I see no conceptual difference between tailoring a whole adventure, and tailoring an encounter, or even tailoring a single die roll. Doing this is again not just the right of the GM -- it is his job.
Am I saying cheat all the time? Fudge all your rolls? Fudge even a small percentage of your rolls? No! I am saying do what is printed or planned when possible, and maintain verisimilitude for the players at all times. But, as DMs we need to use our judgment about when to overrule the rules, the dice, or anything else, to make the game session better for everyone.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
This is the crux of it for me. I object to MC's recommendation just as much as OP, but for very different reasons. I have absolutely no problem with real-time adjustments to just about anything, but I am very big into rewarding smart play and my players are really into finding alternate approaches to encounters, whether I have created them beforehand or they surprise me with something. I have no doubt that they would likely pick up on the pattern as well if everything they fought was tuned to the "sweet spot" between challenge and survival no matter what they had done beforehand, and the game would be much less fun for it.
But as someone else said, the context of these videos are to provide advice to new DMs who may not be as confident in their encounter building. I think the concept of the dungeon not being set in stone ahead of time is a good one to teach, because it readies you for improvisation in reaction to the players' choices. For me that is less about presenting an equal challenge when they foil your original challenge and more about still being able to provide a session worth of fun content after one spell circumvents your whole adventure.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
It doesn’t have to be that way though. My players are kinda terrified of combat. I try to maintain the balance between Epic and OSR. They know that nothing will be easy. And they come up with some of the craziest ways to overcome the challenges I present. Much like Matt Colville, I drop some of the most ridiculous stuff on them with no idea how they’re gonna overcome the challenge. But they always figure something out.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
But nobody is saying that every encounter should be tuned to a sweet spot. In my examples I explicitly showed how I didn't do that.
We're saying that doing some editing on-the-fly is not "DMing wrong" -- it's in fact, doing DMing right. The goal is to make the session fun, the battles tense when appropriate, and so forth. Otherwise we run the risk of having battles that are either insanely hard, or boringly easy, and both are fun-killers.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.