Infinite Ideas: Building the Infinity Tower

We had a big fight last night! This was a level 5 group of 4 going up against a Wraith with a few extra hit points, some spell scrolls and some lair actions. I rated it at CR 6; I feel like it was a little short of a CR 7. During the stream break, there was a mention from Kat that she had recently been in another game that featured a fight with a lich. She felt that the fight was drastically overrated and that initiative and a lack of lair actions (the lich was outside its lair) led to an easier-than-expected fight. There was also some debate about how that fight was run; there's always the question of what the DM was shooting for. It could have been nerfed to make the CR more reasonable; apparently this was harder than reasonable for the party by CR alone. It also could have been DM error. I've definitely used monsters to less-than-optimal impact because I haven't read the stat block thoroughly. This fight was near-deadly for the party. Lair actions got used to limit the...

Encounter balance is hard. Designing encounters from the book as written is fine, but I often find myself underestimating what a party is capable of based on CRs alone. With that in mind, this week I used the tool at Kobold Fight Club ( kobold.club ) to build my encounters. I was really surprised by the results! 1. Low CR monsters can be very effective in a fight, especially in a larger group. 2. I haven't been doing XP for monsters right. My impression has always been that when you give XP, take the base XP of the monster by CR then multiply by the modifier to create a total for all the monsters, so if a Ghoul is worth 200 XP, 6 Ghouls are worth 2*200=400XP. But the adjusted rating is only used to calculate the Encounter Difficulty! For that encounter, the ghouls count as 400XP each of Challenge Rating, for a total of 6*400=2400XP. The same ghouls are still worth 200 XP each for XP reward. The total of the 6 Ghouls is 6*200XP=1200XP for the party. I have been doing this inco...

I had a lot of fun this session. I was in kind of a crummy mood earlier in the day and this was a great end to it! Thanks to everyone involved; players, T2T peeps, the chat and you, for reading this. Some weeks you have to play the game to find out what happens. I've been reading a lot of Fate Core and more collaborative, improvisational RPG books this week, with the result that my game prep went down to almost nothing. My rationale for this: We know what happened last time. The building action is pretty clear for the players. They are 'in action' against particular foes and meeting with known allies, so they are going where I expect or doing something totally different. I feel comfortable doing this. Given those things, I decided that I wouldn't stress the prep this week because I just wasn't feeling it. I knew what I thought would happen and what information I thought was necessary. My players surprised me, for sure. That's part of the fun of RPG games...

Adding a new player, even for one session, really changes play. Anyone who has been in that situation knows this to be true, but we had a super positive experience (in my opinion) with having an added player this week. Out of two new players we've onboarded during the course of the game, there have been two different but positive results, so I'm encouraged to write about that. First, I think that players should play characters that interest them. Each of our added players were very experienced with D&D and generally with RPGs. They created characters that they wanted to play. For the first, it gave us a few challenges and rewrites. We started with 'no lady dwarf beards' and ended with 'some lady dwarf beards', which was a lot of fun. For the second, the player asked about the party and actively made a character (that she wanted to play) that she felt fit what the party needed for balance. I appreciated this because it was a clear signal that the player w...

I love the moment where a group of characters start feeling like a team. When the big player conflict is about who has to accept an evil pact in order to achieve the goal, that's happening. This session was all about getting characters to make hard decisions. The realm of Dreysil, our current setting, is about transformations and choice. The session was all about the players getting a chance to experience that. For me, the idea of Tier 2 play is more than just harder combat; there's the need for increased risk and consequence in the story. So to keep this short, I really enjoyed and appreciated the fact that the players moved into a dark pact, fought over who would bear the burden, then ended the session trying to undo it. That's the note to finish on. Great teamwork!