I plan to have my players for the end fight of a to have two choices they can make. The main premise (Quick Version) they find themselves in Tartarus (One Shot is Greek Inspired) and they have been led to free this persons (Gideon) family from prison and it turns out that his family (Along with many others) are having their life essence drained to keep the seal of Cronus the Titan imprisoned. I plan to have them be confront by Theseus who has come to stop Gideon from releasing the Titans as it would end in another war between the Titans and Gods.
Which then will hopefully lead my players to having the choice between siding with Gideon agaisnt the gods and siding with Theseus to save the gods. I'm kind of hoping that it will split the party into having people on both sides. But I am just wondering how best to make it work.
Both Gideon and Theseus have been made and both are CR8
I have 5 players at Level 6/7 (I haven't decided between the 2 levels yet.)
I don't know how to go about calculating the potential fight with other monsters/fighters depending on how they split it. I kind of want to work out all the potential splits before the day so they aren't waiting for me to try and figure it on the day.
So what would be the best way to work it out for example if it had these options for the split;
0v5 (I very much doubt this one will happen, but want to have it just incase)
1v4
2v3
I don't know whether because of having the 2 CR8 npc, one on each side do they counter each other out when calculating the rest of the potential fighters/monster involved.
And is that the with same with PC's, let's say they split 1v4, do they cancel eachother out and do I just figure it out as if it was just an encounter against 3 PC's?
in general for a one shot you don't really want to split the party because the fights have been balanced for the party and it will take too long running two parties rather than one so depending on whether or not there's a time limit I would factor this into your plans. Is there anywhere anyway to have the decision be roleplay with some show and tell on the part of the NPCs?
for running the fight the way you're planning I would use dnd beyond encounter builder and turn layers on and off. so start with one player, scale the fight, add another player and additional monsters to scale the fight again. this way you will have tiers of difficulty based on the monster CR of whether you have one player or more. do this on both side of the split and you'll effectively have 2 scaling fights. the only problem with this is action economy, so the fight may seem fair but too many attacks (for the monster) if there's only one player will favour the monsters.
The splitting of the party would only be right at the end for the final fight, to see which side of the fight they are on, which would then result in the end of the one shot, so they would never be fully split in different locations doing different things. It would just be before the final fight, they are given an ultimatum to which side they stand on for the battle. I don't even know if it will be split or not, they might all choose the same side.
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I plan to have my players for the end fight of a to have two choices they can make. The main premise (Quick Version) they find themselves in Tartarus (One Shot is Greek Inspired) and they have been led to free this persons (Gideon) family from prison and it turns out that his family (Along with many others) are having their life essence drained to keep the seal of Cronus the Titan imprisoned. I plan to have them be confront by Theseus who has come to stop Gideon from releasing the Titans as it would end in another war between the Titans and Gods.
Which then will hopefully lead my players to having the choice between siding with Gideon agaisnt the gods and siding with Theseus to save the gods. I'm kind of hoping that it will split the party into having people on both sides. But I am just wondering how best to make it work.
I don't know how to go about calculating the potential fight with other monsters/fighters depending on how they split it. I kind of want to work out all the potential splits before the day so they aren't waiting for me to try and figure it on the day.
So what would be the best way to work it out for example if it had these options for the split;
0v5 (I very much doubt this one will happen, but want to have it just incase)
1v4
2v3
I don't know whether because of having the 2 CR8 npc, one on each side do they counter each other out when calculating the rest of the potential fighters/monster involved.
And is that the with same with PC's, let's say they split 1v4, do they cancel eachother out and do I just figure it out as if it was just an encounter against 3 PC's?
Hope this makes sense
Thanks.
in general for a one shot you don't really want to split the party because the fights have been balanced for the party and it will take too long running two parties rather than one so depending on whether or not there's a time limit I would factor this into your plans. Is there anywhere anyway to have the decision be roleplay with some show and tell on the part of the NPCs?
for running the fight the way you're planning I would use dnd beyond encounter builder and turn layers on and off. so start with one player, scale the fight, add another player and additional monsters to scale the fight again. this way you will have tiers of difficulty based on the monster CR of whether you have one player or more. do this on both side of the split and you'll effectively have 2 scaling fights. the only problem with this is action economy, so the fight may seem fair but too many attacks (for the monster) if there's only one player will favour the monsters.
Thank you appreciate it.
The splitting of the party would only be right at the end for the final fight, to see which side of the fight they are on, which would then result in the end of the one shot, so they would never be fully split in different locations doing different things. It would just be before the final fight, they are given an ultimatum to which side they stand on for the battle. I don't even know if it will be split or not, they might all choose the same side.