How tough is too tough? Encounter design in 4e

As with the prior article, if you're playing in my RPGX game and would prefer not to have your illusion of immersion damaged, you might not want to read this.  You've been warned!

Recently, I managed my first kill as a DM.  Killing a player is certainly not a goal of mine as a DM, and I felt pretty horrible about it.  In play by post games, in particular, players spend hours crafting not only their character's mechanics, but also their backstories and relationships.  Play by post as a medium is extremely good for encouraging deep roleplaying, and I've been fortunate to have a group of players who enjoy doing just that.  Therefore, it is no small thing to kill off one of their creations.

DnD 4th edition has a reputation as a system in which player death is extremely difficult to achieve.  In fact, the lack of lethality in 4th edition is one of its most common criticisms.  But without intending to do so, I managed to kill off a PC in what was intended to be a pretty uneventful encounter.

In this case, my players were working their way through a small dungeon based on a mini-delve created by Benoit over at Roving Band of Misfits.  They came upon a trapped door.  Without even bothering to check for traps, our party's Skald opened the door, launching a combat as a series of constructs came to life and attacked the party.  The biggest of the constructs rolled high on his damage dice on charge attack against our party's squishy thief, which pushed him just past his negative bloody value.  In one punch, he went from bloodied to dead.

I was pretty sad about this.  Thanks to the player's wonderful efforts to flavor the thief, he had become one of my favorite characters in the game.  And while his death has allowed for some excellent roleplaying opportunities for other characters, I still would probably have rather preferred that it not happen.  The party ended up abandoning the dungeon before they could fully appreciate the story around it, I think it hurt the group's enthusiasm for the game a bit to see that character die in a meaningless sidequest.

In any case, I've been trying to decide if my encounter design is to blame for what happened.  The DM Kit recommends the following distribution of encounter levels during each level:

• 3 encounters at the party's level.
• 1 encounter at the party's level - 1
• 3 encounters at the party's level +1
• 1 encounter at the party's level +3

Prior to this, I'd given my 1st level party three encounters, which were pegged at level 2, level 4, and level 2, respectively.  The first encounter was pretty easy.  The second was very challenging but do-able, especially because the biggest threat ran away at the end of the combat.  The third was a little scary (due to a lurker), but ultimately was over quickly.

This encounter with the constructs was technically avoidable.  Players could have rolled a series of thievery checks to disable the trap system on the door, though it would take good rolls from their thief to do so.  It was also possible to turn off the constructs with a combination of successful arcana and thievery checks during the combat, and the constructs were also set to reset if the players exited the room the way that they came (they tried neither of those approaches).  Finally, it was the only real encounter I had planned for the entire dungeon, and that the characters were fresh from an extended rest with full resources.  Therefore, given all of this, I pegged it as a level 2 encounter: hopefully challenging, and a punctuation mark on the mini-delve, but very much within their scope.

I only had four monsters to oppose my party of six:

• 1 Thaalud Constructor (Elite Brute), de-leveled from level 5 to level 4 (350 XP).
• 3 Iron Defender (Soldier), level 3 (150 XP each, 450 XP total).
• Total XP budget: 800 XP (level 2 encounter cutoff is 750 XP for a party of six)

This seems pretty reasonable, even in retrospect.  If I made a mistake, it was probably in not de-leveling the Constructor enough.  Taking it down to level 3 would still allow it to be an imposing figure, but he'd have about 20 fewer HP (as an Elite), hit slightly less hard, and have slightly weaker defenses (which were already low--he's a brute).  And given that it was a sidequest, without any real bearing on the main campaign plot, I could have knocked off one of the iron defenders to get it into level 1 encounter territory.

In the end, though, even if I would have done these things, the constructor might still very well have killed the thief.  When you use elites, solos, or lurkers--enemy types designed to make attacks that do the damage equivalent of several rounds or opponents in a single strike--it's pretty easy to kill off a player without intending to do so.  In fact, the same thing almost happened in the prior encounter when I used a level 4 lurker against the party: a character was within 1 or 2 HP of her negative bloody value.  Those things hit hard!

Lessons Learned

It may well be true that 4th edition is less lethal than prior editions of Dungeons and Dragons.  But it certainly is still very possible to kill your players by accident!  When designing combat encounters in the future, I will probably be a bit less aggressive with encounter levels, and will pay more attention to not just the monster XP budget, but also the levels of the individual monsters in the encounter.

Setting a soft limit of party level +2 to the monster level seems like a good rule of thumb (even though I've seen +3 mentioned somewhere--which is what I did with the Constructor).  I'll also probably make plot-irrelevant sidequest encounters be built at the characters' level or lower.  If I'd done two iron defenders and a level 3 Thaalud Constructor, I'd still be at 600 XP (level 1 encounter for a party of 6), and my feeling is that the players would still have felt that it was a fitting challenge in that tomb.

That said, maybe what I did was actually pretty reasonable and I'm just feeling gun-shy!  Combat is supposed to feel scary, after all.  Monsters are dangerous and unpredictable tools for the DM.  The fact that their effectiveness is dictated on the randomness of dice rolls is part of what makes the game exciting to run: even the DM doesn't know how it's going to turn out!

DMing with Improvisation

Improvisation is a big topic around the online DM community.  It is, for example, a key message from Sly Flourish's latest book, the Lazy Dungeon Master, and is the heart of countless how-to articles on DMing.  Good DMing requires one to take what the players give you interactively to spin a story.  Otherwise, players start to feel railroaded, which can ruin the sense of immersion in a living, breathing world that is so important to making a game work.

I've been DMing a game of my own for the last 6 months or so at RPGCrossing, and while I've been having a great time, it's become increasingly clear how important improvisation is.  As an example, here's a synopsis of what I put together as the opening chapter of my game, which is set in the Nentir Vale.

....If you're one of my players, you might not want to read this.  Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, and all that. :)

My Anticipated Plan: River Rats Plague Lowtown Fallcrest

• Amara Azaer hires the PC's as adventurers to solve the problem of an extortion ring in Lowtown, Fallcrest (the default 4e starting town).
• PC's start poking around Lowtown near the Lower Quays, where a lot of the extortion has been happening.  Get ambushed by gang members, who are simply trying to rob them.
• A shifter who spies on them during the battle sneaks away, and PC's follow him to the Bluffs on the other side of lowtown where they have a minion-filled battle outside the River Rat's hideout.
• PC's find incriminating evidence in one of the buildings at the bluffs linking them to Kelson of the Lucky Gnome Taphouse.
• PC's confront Kelson at Lucky Gnome, have a boss fight, win the day, save the town, and move on to bigger and better things.

What Went Wrong: The PC's Go Off the Rails

After receiving the quest, the PC's decide to bait the thugs by posing as a rival gang at the Lucky Gnome Taphouse.

Are you kidding me?  The very first thing the PC's decide to do is go to the home of the Big Bad?  This was a blast.  Kelson, who was tending bar when the PC's showed up, made some great bluff rolls, and immediately began making plans to deal with the PC's once they arrived.

I also invented a new character, Arya, who was playing dice games (i.e. gambling) in the corner of the room.  She was based on an enemy I'd already planned to feature in the first fight, but she never had any real personality or background before there was a need for her to populate the bar.

Springboarding off of something that one of the NPC's said about the gang potentially having infiltrated the Fallcrest Guard, the PC's took steps to entice crooked guards to show up.  This included recruiting one of my PC's to spread word of a new gang operating in the area among the guard.

I hadn't thought this through when my NPC said it, but I was planning to throw a couple of guards into the final battle to justify that statement.  The PC's really latched onto it, though.  So, I instead opted to create a pair of crooked guards, which I named Horace and Jasper (Jasper was female, though), who promptly showed up at the bar and started harassing the PC's.

I was a little worried about whether it was too convenient that the players' plan would work so well.  But if nothing else, it seemed like a good way to get them out of the bar once the crooked guards left.  This actually worked brilliantly. The thief in the party immediately followed the guards to a safe house that I invented in Lowtown.  After he was subsequently captured, the rest of the party followed, and I had my ambush battle.  

I decided to try to lead the party back to the Lucky Gnome now, with Kelson heading off to the hideout near the bluffs to organize the gang's effort against this new thread.

Rather than head back to the Gnome, the party decided to send Jasper, who they'd captured, to entice her leader...who they had not yet identified as Kelson...to come to the safe house to parlay.

Little did the PC's know--though perhaps they should have guessed--but Kelson already knew what they were up to.  Therefore, rather than show up to have a conversation, Kelson showed up with the full strength of his gang behind him to wipe out the PC's.  This was a tough fight, but it ultimately resulted in Kelson (somewhat controversially...more on that some other time) fleeing once his gang was decimated.

I hadn't planned for the party to meet Kelson until they hit their third battle in the sequence, but the story demanded it.  I also hadn't planned for him to escape, really, but I wanted to get the group out to the bluffs to get access to an optional sidequest that I wanted to be available to them.

Of course, given that they'd already fought Kelson, I needed a new threat at the bluffs.  Therefore, as a means of linking them into the next bit of story, I grabbed an Iron Cicle Spy from the Threats to the Nentir Vale monster manual and placed her in the bluffs.  Unbeknownst to me when I started, it turns out that Kelson was actually in cahoots with the Iron Circle!  What a great segue, right?

Lessons learned

I spent a lot of time planning, write out descriptions, etc, before the game began...and ended up doing almost everything differently.  What began as a simple little sequence of three battles, with a loose story, became much more as we went.  New NPC's emerged out of necessity, and entire links between plot points developed out of thin air.  While there were some issues with execution here and there, on the whole it became a far more interesting experience than the thing that I'd originally planned.  This improvement was a direct result of the players' contributions to the plot, and the reactions required on my end to make it work.

So, for all of my planning, the most useful bits that I came up with in advance were simply who the main bad guys were, and what specifically they'd been up to until the moment the campaign began.  Everything else came down to playing my NPC's as they would behave, given their motivations and what they knew minute by minute.  Fortunately, in a play by post format, I, as the DM, have the time to get my thoughts together so that I can zag when my players zig.  Something like this would be a lot harder to pull off in real time at around a table!

Scanning Tokens for use in MapTool

The first adventure my group is likely to have upon arriving in Fallcrest is an encounter with the River Rats of the Lower Quays.  I have this all designed in Masterplan, but I'm building it in MapTool so I can run it with my group online.

Tonight's job: Scan in my Threats to the Nentir Vale tokens.  This was a pretty quick job.  I scanned at 300 dpi, and then applied a blur filter in Gimp to get rid of the pixelation that seems to come with scans of printed materials like this.

Just add heroes!

The result is very nice (the blur just undoes some needless sharpening that the scanner seems to add), and very easy to copy over into TokenTool!  Now that I have it ready, I can create tokens in MapTool quickly for anything in this second Monster Vault.  The result, when coupled with an export from Masterplan's fabulous tile-based map editor, is an awfully darn good looking encounter (right).

I need to playtest a few possible ways to model the Market Green Grifter's "play dead" power.  I could actually kill her in MapTool, but at this point I'm leaning toward just making her go unconscious for a round so that I don't break anything.  That way, MapTool should properly handle area spell damage and such that might affect her...  and heroes can still attack her if they can beat the insight check.  We'll see what I come up with.

As a side note, I absolutely adore Monster Vault: Threats to Nentir Vale.  Monster Vault was fine, but the availability of a specific setting allows this one to be far more specific and far more interesting.  The monsters are varied and each has interesting aspects to it: both stat blocks and story.  The villains are terrific.  And best of all, for those not playing in Nentir Vale, it's all pretty easy to plop the content down in anyone's home campaign setting.  Highly recommended!

DnD with kids: use of maptool

I haven't been very active of late.  There are a few reasons for this.  First, over Thanksgiving, I played a lot of DnD with "my group," which includes my daughter, sister-in-law, and her two children.  We had a great time, but learned a few things in the process:

1. It's virtually impossible to play more than one encounter at a time with 5- and 6-year olds.  And even then, if the encounter goes over 45 minutes, they're pretty much hopeless.

2. The math isn't a horrible barrier for 5- and 6-year olds.  But with the focus on die rolling and math, the roleplaying immersion is easily lost, because it takes everything they have to make it work.  This goes for me too--since I'm keeping track of the girls' HP in addition to the monsters, I'm involved in every move, and it's easy to forget to do things like roleplay the villain and have him taunt the players.

3. A level 5 encounter is waay too much for my party of level 1 players.  If you've played Twisted Halls, you know the final encounter: three level 3 soldier skeletons, 1 hulking zombie, and 1 necromancer.  The necromancer doesn't even get involved until one of the undead perish.  Even so, the party was pretty overmatched, with our slayer going down in the second round, and damage dealing far outstripping the healing abilities of the party.  And that's even with Smite Undead dispatching the zombie down the hallway for several rounds (pushed 6, can only move 4 squares).

I ended up having to fudge rolls like crazy to keep the party afloat.  Even so, everyone was bloodied by the end, and everyone had spent ther healing spells and second wind.

4. Not playing often makes me feel frantic to play whenever we do have a chance to play.  We ended up playing several times per day for three days in a row, which I think we starting to get old for everyone at the end of the day.

Solutions?

I don't have a solution for #3, aside from more slowing increasing the difficulty level than I had been doing.  But I may have a tentative solution to #1 and #2: Maptool.

Maptool is a package that allows you to conduct DnD games (or most other games) online.  This is why I looked at it in the first place, as half of the group lives two hours away and we only get together every few months.

Thanks to the impressive work of other Maptool users and developers, however, there are frameworks available for download that allow for varied levels of integration of 4e rules directly into the software.  Some essentially are designed to just help you keep track of each PC and NPC's stats, and leave it to the DM to impose damage, conditions, etc, as appropriate.  Others are more in depth and allow you to automate many aspects of DnD combat.

MapTool + Rumble + Masterplan is amazing.

The one I've been setting up is Rumble's 4e Framework, version 5.  While its character management isn't as nice as some other frameworks, (it only tracks weapons and implements, doesn't calculate AC or defenses, etc), it is pretty easy to use this framework to automate most aspects of combat:  attack/damage rolls, damage dealt, resistances, condition imposition and expiration, etc.  In fact, the only thing it doesn't do automatically are a) forced movement (the DM still has to move the monster), b) delayed condition changes, like sleep spells causing unconsciousness on the first failed saving throw, and c) prompting a player to make a saving throw off of its turn in response to a cleric power (though you can include text reminders to prompt a DM to do each of those events).  Everything else, for the most part, is done pretty easily with zero knowledge of scripting.

It does take some time to learn how the framework operates, and to get the characters and monsters into the software.  But when you do, the result is something that almost resembles a video game!  I think this will work very well for my group.  Going back to the problems above:

1) This should speed up combat dramatically.  What was once a minute long sequence of rolling, adding bonuses (kids take a while to do this), announcing the attack number, rolling damage, adding again, announcing the damage number is now three clicks: once to select your attack power, once to target, once to hit "ok" (assuming no modifiers are needed like CA, but even that's just another click away).  The faster the combat, the more focused everyone will be at the "table."

2) Less math.  There still will be some, and I'd like them to be aware of it.  They'll see the numbers, and we'll talk about damage modifiers now and then.  But at the same time, they'll have more fun if they can focus on the roleplaying, rather than just adding attack modifiers to dice rolls.  It also frees me up a lot.  I won't have to try to remember every status effect (even with colored hair band markers, that's hard to do) and everything else going on, which will make it easier for me to roleplay as well.

3) While this doesn't directly solve the problem of encounter difficulty catching me off guard, it will allow me to playtest challenging encounters on my own really easily.  I want to do the occasional level+3 encounter, but I want it to be possible!  With Rumble's framework all set up, DnD plays like a video game!

That said, I will have a hard time fudging attack/damage rolls using the software, so I'll have to have a back-up intervention scenario should I achieve a TPK...

4) We get to play outside of family gatherings.  By playing online, we can be less frantic about getting our gaming in when everyone gets together.  This should make family events less about DnD than this past Thanksgiving was.  I know I'll like that, because it'll let me care a lot less about whether we get to play when people get together.

Anyway, I'll have more on MapTool (and Masterplan, which I'm also using and loving) in the future.  But if you haven't checked it out, you should really do so.  I'm looking forward to giving it a whirl with actual players....once I get my monsters and maps all set up for our adventure! :)

Going without the DDI Character Builder

A little over a month ago, I spontaneously decided to subscribe to DnD Insider for a month to see what I was missing.  I was generally pretty happy with what I got for my money.  Dungeon magazine, in particular, as full of great ideas, and the monster editor was a fabulous resource as I started working on my first adventure.

Probably the most essential application on there, however, was the Character Builder.  While I enjoy the process of character building, as a new player I'm prone to making errors (e.g. I just discovered a few nights ago that shields give you a bonus to both AC and Dex).  Furthermore, the product that the character builder creates is very nice; the character sheets were far easier to use for my new/young players, and the power cards were terrific.  Furthermore, I loved how easy it was to roll up a character, paruse the various feats and powers, etc.  It reminded me a lot of the Neverwinter Nights character creation engine, in fact.

The problem with DDI is that it's expensive.  My wife is already bothered enough by my return to overt geekery over the past few months.  Spending $70/year on a subscription to DDI isn't something that is going to be an easy sell in my household.

So instead, as my subscription lapsed a week or so ago, I began looking around to see what else I could use to manage my characters.  After a fair bit of trial and error, here's what I came up with.

The Character Sheet

I wanted something that would do some of the basic, repetitive calculations for me.  The logical thing to do, therefore, was to build something in my old standby, Excel.  After spending about 15 minutes working on it, however, and realizing how much work it would take to get it formatted prettily, I decided to look around and see what people had already done. :)

There are some very complicated spreadsheets out there that try to essentially replicate the Character Builder in terms of scope (e.g. this one).  I wanted something more flexible, though, so that I could work up the characters myself and only rely on the sheet to do basic things like add my +1/2 level every time I leveled up.

I found this one by Rohin Joyce, which I just adore.  It does all the basic calculations for you, but leaves a lot of room for customization.  At this point, I'm using it with only small modifications to create my characters.  But then, I'm pulling data from it to create a kid-friendly character sheet that I put together myself.  Here's the result:

This represents my attempt to create a noob/kid friendly character sheet that, when used with power cards, has most of the stuff they will need to operate their characters.  It is very slimmed down.  You get defenses at the top left.  You get your basic attacks and whatnot right below that.  You get hit points right below that. The top-right has initiative, speed, and your passive senses.  And the bottom-right has all the skills and attribute modifiers (borrowing from the Essentials character sheets, I'm nesting the skills within the attributes). Importantly, as these are kids, there's a huge portrait area that can hold whatever picture my player wants (as long as I can find it on Google image search).

Obviously, I left out a lot of stuff.  I didn't even give them their attribute scores, for example--just the modifiers.  But as Mike Shea has pointed out (somewhere, sorry, I don't have a link), all that really matters is the modifier anyway!  Omitting attribute scores just saves newbie confusion.  I'm also omitting deities (which won't play a big role in my game, at least for now), action point trackers (I use tokens), feats, etc.  All of that stuff is on the other character sheet, which can be printed out and stapled beneath this one.

With the exception of the notes part, and the graphic, which will need to change for each character where it pulls its info, it's entirely automated.  Fill out Rohin's character sheet and all of this populates.  It's just more approachable for my players to use this in the game.  If someone is interested, I'll post it.  Just let me know.

What About the Power Cards?

A nice excel-based character sheet is great, but I really became infatuated with the power cards that the Character Builder generates.  My players responded very well to them in our last session, so I wanted to make sure that I still have something workable.  I originally planned to just make them in excel, but I ran across this thread about using a Magic the Gathering card editor, with an all-text template, as an alternative.  Here is a screenshot of the result:

I absolutely adore these.  I'm able to make cards that are bigger, cleaner, and easier to use than what the character builder generates.  Even cooler, I can use it to generate treasure cards in advance that I can hand to players as they uncover magic items.  Here's what I'm handing out over the rest of the Twisted Halls:

How cool is that?

What have you done to work around the DDI Character Builder?