So I read on here over and over that the trick to good combat encounters are sustained fights between long rests, wearing the characters down and making them run out of spell slots.
The problem with this is that players wise up, no matter how good they are they will learn to hold off the big ticket spells because something bigger is coming. So it becomes a game of how much can I throw at them before they use everything up.
I have found over years of running different systems that you can use this player behavior to your advantage. No matter the tactical advantage as a player we want to cast those big spells, or use those cool once a day abilities we enjoy it its why we are a squishy wizard or sorceror. We want to rage as a barbarian and if you haven’t done it for a while in game you will the first chance you get.
So sometimes I will let my players go days with just 1 maybe 2 encounters per role playing day, I run milestone so the XP doesn’t matter, what does matter is the players get into a habit, they get used to having a long rest and, they get bored of having another encounter where all they do is firebolt. Or don’t rage because, maybe, more combat will happen today.
So I let them get lulled into a false sense of security until, one day, they burn everything by encounter 2 expect me to say, you camp for the night only to have me say, roll initiative, and roll initiative and before they know it they are on encounter 5 and really wishing the wizard had held onto that fireball he cast at a bunch of weak goblins this morning just because the player hadn’t cast it on a while.
Anyone else actively use player expectations against them like this and catch them out?
I tend to let the game play out organically and let the dice decide the "random" encounters. I don't agree with the idea of intentionally guiding game play to trip them up.
I set the plot, drop hints and clues, set the scene and off to the races. Sometimes this means that the players go a couple of sessions without a challenging combat encounter because they are trying to track down the MacGuffin in a city and don't want to get hanged for murder in the streets. Other times, they spend an entire session fighting small encounters because they chose to take the "shortcut" through a swamp. I let them rest when they *feel* that they are safe, and of course the option to provide a watch is just that, optional. The dice don't care if they are awake or not or how many hours they've traveled that day. Also, my players have notoriously low dice rolls.
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“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
Just build the world, the encounters, and let the players do what they will. They will almost never do what you intend. Vary the encounters that they might get into between one (big showpiece fight outdoors) and eight (dungeon crawl). The only time you really have to be careful with it is when the PCs are in a dungeon where they can't rest. They'll know to keep their big guns for the boss there, though.
My players are currently engaged in an attack on a friendly town. They are 5 x level 8 characters and have so far run directly at the boss and beat him (combined CR for monsters in encounter was something like 51, although they legged it from at least 20 CR of surviving creatures), then immediately after (no rest, not even a moment to heal) engaged 3 Stone Giants (combined total CR21), and without so much as a short rest are keen to engage more enemies in the city. The combined CR of creatures in that encounter is something like 50. They held nothing back in the first encounter and are pretty tapped, but that's my players for you - heroes to the last. One of them even died and had to get Revivified fighting the giants.
I did not intend for them to attack the boss head on. Even a large amount of planning (5 battle maps, a battle sequence that changes depending on where they go...) failed to predict their suicidal (but oddly successful actions).
So what I'm really saying is, you can plan all you like, and you'll almost certainly get it wrong about what they choose to use.
It's funny, I have a totally different approach. I usually run three encounters, sometimes a few more, every adventuring day. The players know what to expect, but that's not a bad thing. (I'll even tell them sometimes, hey, this game's going to have more fights than usual, so plan for that.) Since all my fights tend to be fairly challenging, they still have to decide when to bring out the big guns. It's hard, but fair.
A lot of it comes down to table etiquette. There's an unwritten rule that my players won't back out to long rest or otherwise screw with the encounter program, and I keep the encounter program predictable and even. It works really well for our group.
I also personally just really dislike one-fight days, because it screws over Fighters and Warlocks, who have few to no once-per-day abilities and are built around consistency and short rests. Plus, if you want to keep it challenging, both sides need to be overpowered to the point where it feels like initiative decides the fight. But that's just my personal experience.
I wouldn't "lull players into a false sense of security" I believe the DM is a referee and to play Players vs the DM is not the best.
I would tell the players how many fights to expect that day but give them the knowledge their players would have. If they are sent to investigate a house said to be haunted before they enter they will know how big it is, if they see the bad guy go into a cave they may have no idea if it is a small cave he is using to hide in or the entrance to the evil cults base.
The party can back out to take a long rst but things will happen during that rest. Maybe reinforcements arrive, maybe the bad guys that remain leave to another hiding place, maybe they track the party down and attack while they try to take a rest. I think this provides realism and a real choice.
Like Naivara I feel for most fighters and Warlock of one fight days. I would add monks and rogues to that list. Some fighters like cavaliers and Echo Knights have enough long rest features to Rogues are a bit different where Fighters, Monks and Warlocks get key features back on a short rest most rogues don't have any limited resources at all, rests, short or long, are only needed to restore HP and avoid exhaustion. There are occasions where storywise there is only going to be one encounter in a day, but I don't agree with Naivara that resultsin overpowering ot the point where initiative decides the fight. Initiative decids the fight in battles that are expected to be over in a couple of rounds. If you have lots of realatively easy encounters in a day the party can sometimes use resources to make up for bad initiative but when you ramp up the difficulty becuase it is the only fight that day you don't so much ramp up the damage that the bad guys give out but increase their defenses, increase their AC, saving throws and HP maybe have legendary resistances, have the enemy scattered over a large area so they can't all be hit by a single fireball. Once the combat goes to 5 or more rounds initiative is a lot less important.
One measure I used to help the characters value their lives more was traps. I tried not to use instakill traps and added them around encounters where they'd make sense.
This usually kept the healer low on healing, the thief busy or damaged and the wizard on the constant look out for switches. The downside I was never ready for was how ingenious the party was with how little they had to work with.
Another thing I did was have the equivalent to a midgrade boss, a sub boss and what I considered the boss. Since the party was always free to explore where they want, they never knew which boss was the boss.
I also personally just really dislike one-fight days, because it screws over Fighters and Warlocks, who have few to no once-per-day abilities and are built around consistency and short rests. Plus, if you want to keep it challenging, both sides need to be overpowered to the point where it feels like initiative decides the fight. But that's just my personal experience.
The five-minute workday has been an issue in every edition of D&D (the edition that came closest to fixing it was 4e, but even there dailies were a big enough chunk of your power budget that it encouraged short days). You really need to make major system changes to eliminate that.
I also personally just really dislike one-fight days, because it screws over Fighters and Warlocks, who have few to no once-per-day abilities and are built around consistency and short rests. Plus, if you want to keep it challenging, both sides need to be overpowered to the point where it feels like initiative decides the fight. But that's just my personal experience.
The five-minute workday has been an issue in every edition of D&D (the edition that came closest to fixing it was 4e, but even there dailies were a big enough chunk of your power budget that it encouraged short days). You really need to make major system changes to eliminate that.
True! One thing that helps for me (besides the social contract) is to give the characters a reason to finish the whole adventure in a day. Maybe the tomb is magically sealed except on one specific night. Maybe the collector won't pay for the ancient crown if it's delivered late. Or maybe the dragon will attack the village if he's not dealt with soon.
It's not perfect, but it does the job pretty well!
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Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
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So I read on here over and over that the trick to good combat encounters are sustained fights between long rests, wearing the characters down and making them run out of spell slots.
The problem with this is that players wise up, no matter how good they are they will learn to hold off the big ticket spells because something bigger is coming. So it becomes a game of how much can I throw at them before they use everything up.
I have found over years of running different systems that you can use this player behavior to your advantage. No matter the tactical advantage as a player we want to cast those big spells, or use those cool once a day abilities we enjoy it its why we are a squishy wizard or sorceror. We want to rage as a barbarian and if you haven’t done it for a while in game you will the first chance you get.
So sometimes I will let my players go days with just 1 maybe 2 encounters per role playing day, I run milestone so the XP doesn’t matter, what does matter is the players get into a habit, they get used to having a long rest and, they get bored of having another encounter where all they do is firebolt. Or don’t rage because, maybe, more combat will happen today.
So I let them get lulled into a false sense of security until, one day, they burn everything by encounter 2 expect me to say, you camp for the night only to have me say, roll initiative, and roll initiative and before they know it they are on encounter 5 and really wishing the wizard had held onto that fireball he cast at a bunch of weak goblins this morning just because the player hadn’t cast it on a while.
Anyone else actively use player expectations against them like this and catch them out?
I tend to let the game play out organically and let the dice decide the "random" encounters. I don't agree with the idea of intentionally guiding game play to trip them up.
I set the plot, drop hints and clues, set the scene and off to the races. Sometimes this means that the players go a couple of sessions without a challenging combat encounter because they are trying to track down the MacGuffin in a city and don't want to get hanged for murder in the streets. Other times, they spend an entire session fighting small encounters because they chose to take the "shortcut" through a swamp. I let them rest when they *feel* that they are safe, and of course the option to provide a watch is just that, optional. The dice don't care if they are awake or not or how many hours they've traveled that day. Also, my players have notoriously low dice rolls.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
Just build the world, the encounters, and let the players do what they will. They will almost never do what you intend. Vary the encounters that they might get into between one (big showpiece fight outdoors) and eight (dungeon crawl). The only time you really have to be careful with it is when the PCs are in a dungeon where they can't rest. They'll know to keep their big guns for the boss there, though.
My players are currently engaged in an attack on a friendly town. They are 5 x level 8 characters and have so far run directly at the boss and beat him (combined CR for monsters in encounter was something like 51, although they legged it from at least 20 CR of surviving creatures), then immediately after (no rest, not even a moment to heal) engaged 3 Stone Giants (combined total CR21), and without so much as a short rest are keen to engage more enemies in the city. The combined CR of creatures in that encounter is something like 50. They held nothing back in the first encounter and are pretty tapped, but that's my players for you - heroes to the last. One of them even died and had to get Revivified fighting the giants.
I did not intend for them to attack the boss head on. Even a large amount of planning (5 battle maps, a battle sequence that changes depending on where they go...) failed to predict their suicidal (but oddly successful actions).
So what I'm really saying is, you can plan all you like, and you'll almost certainly get it wrong about what they choose to use.
It's funny, I have a totally different approach. I usually run three encounters, sometimes a few more, every adventuring day. The players know what to expect, but that's not a bad thing. (I'll even tell them sometimes, hey, this game's going to have more fights than usual, so plan for that.) Since all my fights tend to be fairly challenging, they still have to decide when to bring out the big guns. It's hard, but fair.
A lot of it comes down to table etiquette. There's an unwritten rule that my players won't back out to long rest or otherwise screw with the encounter program, and I keep the encounter program predictable and even. It works really well for our group.
I also personally just really dislike one-fight days, because it screws over Fighters and Warlocks, who have few to no once-per-day abilities and are built around consistency and short rests. Plus, if you want to keep it challenging, both sides need to be overpowered to the point where it feels like initiative decides the fight. But that's just my personal experience.
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
I wouldn't "lull players into a false sense of security" I believe the DM is a referee and to play Players vs the DM is not the best.
I would tell the players how many fights to expect that day but give them the knowledge their players would have. If they are sent to investigate a house said to be haunted before they enter they will know how big it is, if they see the bad guy go into a cave they may have no idea if it is a small cave he is using to hide in or the entrance to the evil cults base.
The party can back out to take a long rst but things will happen during that rest. Maybe reinforcements arrive, maybe the bad guys that remain leave to another hiding place, maybe they track the party down and attack while they try to take a rest. I think this provides realism and a real choice.
Like Naivara I feel for most fighters and Warlock of one fight days. I would add monks and rogues to that list. Some fighters like cavaliers and Echo Knights have enough long rest features to Rogues are a bit different where Fighters, Monks and Warlocks get key features back on a short rest most rogues don't have any limited resources at all, rests, short or long, are only needed to restore HP and avoid exhaustion. There are occasions where storywise there is only going to be one encounter in a day, but I don't agree with Naivara that resultsin overpowering ot the point where initiative decides the fight. Initiative decids the fight in battles that are expected to be over in a couple of rounds. If you have lots of realatively easy encounters in a day the party can sometimes use resources to make up for bad initiative but when you ramp up the difficulty becuase it is the only fight that day you don't so much ramp up the damage that the bad guys give out but increase their defenses, increase their AC, saving throws and HP maybe have legendary resistances, have the enemy scattered over a large area so they can't all be hit by a single fireball. Once the combat goes to 5 or more rounds initiative is a lot less important.
One measure I used to help the characters value their lives more was traps. I tried not to use instakill traps and added them around encounters where they'd make sense.
This usually kept the healer low on healing, the thief busy or damaged and the wizard on the constant look out for switches. The downside I was never ready for was how ingenious the party was with how little they had to work with.
Another thing I did was have the equivalent to a midgrade boss, a sub boss and what I considered the boss. Since the party was always free to explore where they want, they never knew which boss was the boss.
The five-minute workday has been an issue in every edition of D&D (the edition that came closest to fixing it was 4e, but even there dailies were a big enough chunk of your power budget that it encouraged short days). You really need to make major system changes to eliminate that.
True! One thing that helps for me (besides the social contract) is to give the characters a reason to finish the whole adventure in a day. Maybe the tomb is magically sealed except on one specific night. Maybe the collector won't pay for the ancient crown if it's delivered late. Or maybe the dragon will attack the village if he's not dealt with soon.
It's not perfect, but it does the job pretty well!
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club