Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 tws101 May 20, 2010 15:31:30	My players just finished E1 Deaths Reach and it was to easy. The party consists of 4 players Bug Bear Barbarian totaly minimaxed Minotaur Warrior totaly charger cheese minmaxed Gith Avenger the only character that is not minmaxed Gnome Bard also totaly minmaxed I feel like the Barbarian and Warrior just destroy everything.  The Warrior sometimes charges 4 or 5 times in one round and then makes a bunch of free melee basic attacks attacking up to 8 times or more.  While the barbarian easily hits for 80 to 120 consistently.  Simply put they wreck every encounter. We are starting Kingdom of Gould E2 and in the opening encounter I doubled the Monsters dmg stats.  If it has 2d8 +8 I did 4d8 + 16.  I actualy made them sweat and bloodied two of them.  The bard actualy used a heal for once in his life.  He had many heals left to use but I was just happy he had to heal. Should I continue to double all dmg for this campaign or will I end up doing a TPK?  Any advise from someone who ran E2 and E3 is welcome.
#2 sfurtwangler May 21, 2010 10:12:15	I have not run E2 or E3, but I will point out that increasing mosnter damage will probably help make the encounters feel more dangerous, but your fights will be very short. This might be a good thing, or might be a bad thing. The difference between one hit or a miss becomes a lot larger, since both sides are dishing out more damage than typical, but do not necessarily have the defenses or HP to be able to take increased damage for long. You've basically made both sides into "glass cannons". MOST people complain that fights last too long in 4E anyway, so you may not have a problem with this. If you do find it a problem (like if a series of bad rolls on teh PCs part leads to a TPK), you might try increasing monster HP instead. It will turn the fights back into a long drawn out slugfest, where odds are, the PCs will statisticly win if they play their cards right. All you've secretly done is add X% to the monster hitpoints to compensate for the PCs doing X% more damage than usual. They would still get to feel good about having big numbers, but the game will play out exactly the same as if they were unoptimizad standard characters. Personally, I like your solution better. I would rather have shorter more deadly fights with a real risk of failure, than long drawn out fights where the outcome is determined long before the fight actually wraps up.