TOPIC: Scaling Combat Encounters Difficulty with Minions

Picc wrote:
That said my main concern with minions would be the time constrains present in TD that 4th did not have to deal with. Dealing with minions in 4th was S L O W.

That's true. My DM would usually have the minions flee once all the main encounter monsters were defeated to avoid a few more rounds of mop up combat in the case where the main monsters died first.

I bring it up every time we get into debates about Monk/Ranger attack versus wizard spells. If a monk or ranger charges up and puts two viper strike fangs into the monster's belly, they should suffer the bulk of the retaliation. The wizard casting spells in the distance not so much.

So I'd love to see more bulk attacks against melee attackers, and other save attempts. For example a dragon might swing his tail, anybody who attacked melee makes a reflex save or takes 20 damage. Then a breath attack against all melee attackers too. One roll for each attack. There should be consequences for charging blindly at a dragon. The wizard will look like the smarter one.

Or for a particularly scary monster, each player wanting to get up close and do a melee attack needs to pass a will save. One roll covers the whole group. Anybody who fails doesn't attack that round but can try again next round or go ranged.

And if this happened with a lot of monsters (I'm not saying all, just a few each year) then the ranger and monk will have to worry much more about AC and saves. This will make them weaker relative to the wizard. It would also make a ranged ranger build attractive again.

How about monsters that nerf healing for a round unless the healer makes a Will save? A boss monster could have automatic Eldritch damage in response to certain attacks or maybe add more regeneration of HP on NM?
There could be several ways to toughen up the beasties on the higher difficulties without adding to the book keeping load of the DM.

All good ideas here. Additional thought:

Get rid of normal, hardcore and nightmare all together and go to a more granular numerical system. Make the party choose a difficulty level of, say between 1- 10 and come up with different monster AC, HP, etc. for each level. Then post recommended average player stats including spell damage/healing for each of the difficulity levels.

Kirk Bauer wrote: I bring it up every time we get into debates about Monk/Ranger attack versus wizard spells. If a monk or ranger charges up and puts two viper strike fangs into the monster's belly, they should suffer the bulk of the retaliation. The wizard casting spells in the distance not so much.

So I'd love to see more bulk attacks against melee attackers, and other save attempts. For example a dragon might swing his tail, anybody who attacked melee makes a reflex save or takes 20 damage. Then a breath attack against all melee attackers too. One roll for each attack. There should be consequences for charging blindly at a dragon. The wizard will look like the smarter one.

Or for a particularly scary monster, each player wanting to get up close and do a melee attack needs to pass a will save. One roll covers the whole group. Anybody who fails doesn't attack that round but can try again next round or go ranged.

And if this happened with a lot of monsters (I'm not saying all, just a few each year) then the ranger and monk will have to worry much more about AC and saves. This will make them weaker relative to the wizard. It would also make a ranged ranger build attractive again.

sizzle.af/i/1897423

Kirk Bauer wrote:
So I'd love to see more bulk attacks against melee attackers, and other save attempts. For example a dragon might swing his tail, anybody who attacked melee makes a reflex save or takes 20 damage. Then a breath attack against all melee attackers too. One roll for each attack. There should be consequences for charging blindly at a dragon. The wizard will look like the smarter one.

Or for a particularly scary monster, each player wanting to get up close and do a melee attack needs to pass a will save. One roll covers the whole group. Anybody who fails doesn't attack that round but can try again next round or go ranged.

This approach strikes me as very good as well. It avoids the problem of mainly impacting the most vulnerable characters (peril is opt in here).

www.truedungeon.com/forum?view=topic&catid=580&id=207251&start=24#207358

balthasar wrote: How about monsters that nerf healing for a round unless the healer makes a Will save?

A perfect special attack. What about a nasty, 1 per room monster may redirect attack made at it against a player (can you say dead player)?

Ed

Adding minions means the judges need to step up and be able to handle more than 3 rounds in 12 minutes.

Consider limiting the number of one shot items per player (only so many scrolls, only so many potions, only so many oils, etc. with a total of less than X) instead of having the warehouse available.

edwin wrote: Adding minions means the judges need to step up and be able to handle more than 3 rounds in 12 minutes.

Consider limiting the number of one shot items per player (only so many scrolls, only so many potions, only so many oils, etc. with a total of less than X) instead of having the warehouse available.

I'm not following you. Ideally DMs should be able to get a quick moving team through 3 rounds or more today.

Minions wouldn't change the speed of combat implemented properly - in fact they might speed it up as the DM wouldn't have to calculate damage on the pucks hitting the minion spot - as any amount of damage would kill one. For example, instead of having to calculate down from 700 HP on a Nightmare Beholder, maybe the DM would have to calculate down from 500 HP while also remembering if 1, 2, 3, or 4 minions have been hit so far.

I don't think limiting consumables is a good way to scale difficulty - as it disincents buying tokens, and would be a retroactive functionality change to tokens that people have collected already.

Understand now. Having the minions and big baddie on the same combat board would help to speed things up. Just cover up the minions once they are hit. Maybe a magnet type thingy similar to what people can place on car sides.

My experience at GHC was that judging varied widely and some rooms we were rushed to get 3 rounds in while others we had time to do 6 rounds when the party was split in half and still had time left over.

I dont like retroactive changes but it is hard to scale for everyone if you avoid this. You will always big token collectors that may be unchallenged. May best is to keep the tiers and a Grind.

I truly don't know why some folks hate 4th ed with a passion, but that is another debate and I don't want to derail your thread but my take on the Minion concept was this. It was a good idea as presented but they rushed it. The concept was it needed a dedicated attack to take it down, the practice was that AOE slaughtered them all. I found giving them all 10 hitpoints usually did the trick so that it took a couple AoE attacks to deal with them. Spacing with DnD can help avoid AoE attacks but Spacing in TD is awkward.

The flaw with the idea of having melee get engaged more than ranged is that it will inflate the value of ranged builds. Look at what happened with retribution damage. Retribution was a way to "punish" melee for charging in. They complained about the balance, then we made tokens to avoid the damage then we stopped using it entirely.
Bringing back retribution damage might help create some token choices and make it more relevant.


My take on this is a slightly different one I think. I don't necessarily think the monsters need a rescaling. Maybe an additional 4th difficulty level like Grind did for a mega challenge but really what the monsters need is more interest. Currently all we really care about is sliding the high numbers and cranking out damage. What if the hit location mattered more. Yes it makes the monster harder to DM because it has more rules but maybe we can make the hit location special "effect" easy. We've done this type of thing a bit historically, think back to all those encounters where you had to slid on a special spot, what if they all had some special spot that engendered some effect, even if it was a simple Easter egg like response.