Discussion: Making Combat Fun Again

Bronymous wrote:As a DM, I've found that challenging combat is difficult to run. If all bases are covered by the party, its near impossible to have them lose, or even be truly threatened, with out some grade A DM manure.

I think one of the main problems is that the base team size is too big for most enemies scenarios.

Well I've been running enemies out of the "balanced" monster manual. If the math is right then they should provide a challenge for what they're balanced against, but they aren't. Two reskinned Solo v 6 monsters WITH added made up stuff that by math makes them OP, and a group of 5 going in with disadvantages and prior injuries barely blinked at them. So maybe that's one place to start, get some new math and update these monsters to be more effective.

If you mean SilentBelle and tygerburningbright's Monster Compendiums, those are estimations as opposed to hard calculations. May even be worth arguing they're partially outdated. And really, it's not just an aspect of being willing to kill players. You gotta figure out how to mess with them. Figure out play styles then figure out how to mess with them.

As far as pets, there's some rather uneven things about them.

Yeah... 100% this game demands you build the monsters for the player's builds. But best not to make then lock down those builds... Or they'll just feel you being a dick to them out of a hate for their combat build.

Well, I think that requires a bit of give and take on both sides. I'm pretty up front about doing it in my campaigns and the players seem accepting of it.

I've discovered a strategy: Murder the healer. REALLY helps on the DM side of combat.

Best way to beat the healer? Murder the Tank.

Best way to beat the tank? Murder the.... oh hang on.

All you need to do to threaten the tank (and most static attacking builds) is to damage pips. It's the role with the most need for them that has the least ability to build them by itself, especially if you use AOE or multiple attackers.

Yeah, I decided my next boss is going to have a move that lets him drain pips from on enemy to use to fuel an attack against another. Or just flat out dominate them.

Crystalite wrote:Sooooo, I have heard from a number of people that the encounters under this combat system tend to be either too easy (Especially with a full party) or too hard (Although unconsciousness is rare, and death is unheard of. )

Now, maybe the system is partially to blame; good monsters are much harder to build than player characters. But that's not the salient point here. I'm no developer and I'm going to leave the development to them.

I am wondering what you think players and game masters can do to hit that magic number of not too challenging without being too easy.

I do have an opinion; however, it is mostly untested, and so I'm going to listen to other opinions of more experienced people first.

The problem is that the system currently suffers from several fundamental problems. There is literally *no* number for monster damage that is appropriately challenging for players, even if the builds were all balanced. This is because we made a huge developmental mistake early on that went unnoticed until several months ago, when we were combing through the system on a fundamental level for the rework. The original system was designed mostly by feel and guestimation in regards to numbers, since it was originally designed for my personal game and I have no issue designing and balancing monsters at the drop of a hat to get exactly the results I want. This led to a lot of fundamental issues, because the foundation was thrown together in less than a week with the reliance on a DM that was also majoring in Game Design to oversee things. In short, my bad and we're fixing this for the rework.

The core issue is that monster damage needs to simultaneously be set to two different numbers.

1) Monster damage needs to roughly equal players' ability to heal on a round-by-round basis. If healing outstrips monster damage, people can infinitely heal and never die. If damage outstrips healing, healing becomes pretty much useless. Players can commonly heal about 10 life per standard action (rounded for convenience and obviously leaving out traits/items). So, monster damage should be about 10 damage per round before factoring the other stuff in.

2) Monster damage needs to be equal to player life divided by the number of rounds you want the fight to last (if you want the players to be in risk of going unconscious). Let's say you want the fight to last about 5 rounds. Monsters should deal about 6 damage to each player each round then (since players start with 30 life, not factoring in items or traits).

See the issue? Monster damage has to simultaneously be two separate numbers. It has to simultaneously be 10 damage (pre traits/items) and 6 damage (pre traits/items). It can't be both. Not only will different parties be of vastly different power levels, different tactics in a battle (how much healing is used or not used) throws things off completely. In order to make things work, you have to modulate encounters on a round-by-round basis like the AI director in Left 4 Dead, basing difficulty and damage upon how the players are currently doing.

Of these two numbers, setting monster damage equal to the 2nd point (about 6 damage) is the more sensible - so people don't have to constantly heal. However, this plus the "heal-as-if-at-0-when-below-0" rule makes players effectively unkillable by any 'fair' means. Also, we have a third problem. Players can heal a LOT of life at once relative to their starting life. This means that monsters wanting to leave an impact need to deal so much damage they're likely to one-shot players or come close, leading to the complaints that combat is "too hard" even though the players are still winning. It feels unfair, and unfun, even though they're still pulling off victories.

The rework is fixing all of this. The natural fix is to increase player starting life to the point where monster damage fits to healing and gives monsters more room for variable damage amounts. The new system currently has players starting at 100 life (and able to heal about 23 life for a standard action). You could apply a quick patch to the current system by making it so that players start with 50 life instead of 30. That will let you set damage at 10, which will make things easier on you.

I'd also recommend embracing the new Fatal Damage system. With Fatal Damage, if your players go down they feel the pain. Players can't fall below 0 life, and 0 life is unconscious (and they no longer lose energy from falling unconscious), but when they DO take damage or lose life that would reduce them to below 0 - they fall to 0 and take the excess in Fatal Damage. So if you're at 10 life and an enemy deals 23 damage to you, you fall to 0 life and now have 13 fatal damage. If you gain 10 life later, you will be up and fighting again at 10 life, but will still have 13 fatal damage. When your fatal damage reaches 50 (in this format, where you start with 50 life) - you die. Fatal Damage *cannot be healed* by any means other than an extended rest. Until you take an 8 hour rest, you keep that fatal damage from fight to fight. You can also deal fatal damage out of combat too, at the DM's discretion. Because of the "full heal after a 5 minute rest" rule, it can be hard to make traps feel intimidating if they don't threaten instant death. However, if a scything blade trap deals 5 fatal damage (bypassing normal damage entirely), that's something much nastier.

These fixes won't solve all of combat, some of the problems with it can't be as easily patched without whole new movesets (which is what we're working on for the new system) but they should go a long way to addressing the most fundamental issues being explored in this thread.

I... like it. That can't be right.

Honestly, that's probably the only change I'm going to like, but getting a better grasp on HP/damage counts is definitely an improvement.

Yeah... Healing in the system is really godly in this game. With Miracle being the hands down most powerful move out of everything. And I gotta say, while the idea of using Fatal Damage is neat and I'd totally approve of it. There isn't much guidelines on how to tack it onto the game. And if it get's added wrong... It'll end up like the crappy sanity system add on that is somewhere on this forum that's really more like a self-esteam system (you crit-fail, and then your crit-fail range goes up by one... NOT any type of way to do sanity) So um... I mean I'd love to see what thoughts there are to how to change the HP to work with the the new fatal damage thing. Hell I'd also suggest some idea of non-combat fatal damage too... (cause I for one want to keep alive the combat/non-combat split even though you've found it more limiting, rebridging them is only going to lead to "you gotta build with X talents used like this or it's going to be a bad build" type of talks in my mind, but having it be an add-on optional thing that can work well with the system is most ideal in my mind. Or if you guys are so dead set on the bridged system being the standard, making a way to easily split combat and noncombat again would be nice.)

Sorry for the rambles, hopefully somebody will be able to use what I've said to do things or whatever.

Stairc -Dan Felder wrote:The rework is fixing all of this. The natural fix is to increase player starting life to the point where monster damage fits to healing and gives monsters more room for variable damage amounts. The new system currently has players starting at 100 life (and able to heal about 23 life for a standard action). You could apply a quick patch to the current system by making it so that players start with 50 life instead of 30. That will let you set damage at 10, which will make things easier on you.

While the stickied thread mentioned Fatal Damage (and I'm already using it in my campaigns) I don't remember 50 HP being mentioned. That said, I can put that to use for more breathing room.