Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 jadebrain Jun 10, 2012 14:49:24	I'm making my own pen n' paper RPG, and so far the reviews in playtesting have been good. The biggest area that needs improvement (and it does need a LOT of improvement), though, is the aspect of making the game "challenging," specifically when it comes to enemies in combat. The problem I've been having is that the enemies, in general, are too weak, mostly in terms of defense. Granted, I have intended for combat to be deadlier in terms of the damage to HP ratio, but a lot of the damage dealt to monsters has killed them in one hit, whereas the damage dealt to the players has not done much to threaten them or keep their healer too busy. What I need help with is designing monsters that will be a bit more challenging to the players. The obvious answer to the specific problems I've been having is adding more HP to the monsters, but what else can be done? Furthermore, what shoud I expect? Is it actually reasonable that a lightweight melee striker-type that appears in high numbers should have so little HP that it can be taken out in one hit? What about mages? How much damage should a huge elite enemy deal? Things like that.
#2 rampant Jun 12, 2012 1:48:08	Without knowing specifics it's hard to say. However as a general rule the more a monster is supposed to outnumber the party, the less hits it can take.
#3 jadebrain Jun 12, 2012 8:10:14	Without knowing specifics it's hard to say. However as a general rule the more a monster is supposed to outnumber the party, the less hits it can take.  Well, I was thinking that that made sense... As far as specifics are concerned, here's the gist of what happened. The first encounter the party had was against a bunch of Lesser Scythe Imps (lightweight multi-attacking melee striker, intended to appear in small mobs) and Doom Cultists (low-level spellcasters, dealing little damage, but can ignore the players' armor and are somewhat capable of debuffing). The two melee brutes in the party overkilled every enemy that they hit, while the archer in the party, who was quite a bit less optimized for damage, could kill a Doom Cultist in two shots, or a Scythe Imp in three. While the party suffered a significant amount of damage from a few Scythe Imps (the Doom Cultists' debuffs helped the damage output of the Scythe Imps a little), the party's healer managed to stay on top of things enough to keep everyone alive. In the second encounter, after the party gained a lot of experience from roleplaying, they had to split up as they were fighting on two fronts (they were on a boat, and some enemies had stowed away in the boat's storage room while the rest fought on the upper deck). The enemies they fought below were Scythe Imps (not lesser, as in the previous encounter); above, they fought a Lesser Dagon (basically a giant water demon; it was largely incapacitated damage-wise, as its tactic was to hold the boat in place with its mouth while the rest of the enemies boarded) and a Lesser Zombie Brute (think of a Tank from Left 4 Dead, but somewhat weaker). One of the party's melee brutes went down to enter the storage room (before the party suspected anything) and got several surprise attacks upon opening the door. He then called for the medic, who then rushed to the brute's aid, and the brute took out the Scythe Imps one by one while the medic healed him. The rest of the party, which included a mage who was severely incapacitated (suffering extreme penalties to all physical stats and a few others due to an odd critical failure when casting a spell, which caused her head and her tail to switch places, in addition to the other player characters knocking her out to prevent any more chaos), fought the Dagon, who, as I said, was using its mouth to hold the ship in place, and so could only use its weaker attacks. Admittedly, the melee brute who stayed up on the ship's upper deck critted the Dagon twice with a weapon that deals more damage than usual on a crit, so the Dagon went down easily, but the Dagon barely left a scratch on the party members it attacked while it was up. Eventually, the Zombie Brute managed to get on the ship, but by then the guys fighting the Scythe Imps were done, and so they came up, and the melee brute who fought the Scythe Imps took out about 3/4 of the Zombie Brute's HP, which killed it due to damage it had already received from the archer and the mage, the latter of which had woken up due to the ship jerking back when the Dagon first bit it. Right now I'm thinking that the best thing to do would be leave the Scythe Imps and Doom Cultists alone, but to increase the HP on the Zombie Brute and also increase the damage on the Lesser Dagon's secondary attacks.
#4 Slagger_the_Chuul Jun 12, 2012 9:18:06	For the more lightweight kind of enemies (like the scythe imps), a way to dodge or avoid attacks is a reasonable substitute for more hit points. The lesser zombie brute might need more hit points, but it really depends on how tough it was supposed to be on its own, keeping in mind that they didn't even have their mage in the fray.  If it was intended to be just a slightly tougher mook, that's okay, but it's obviously not too much of a challenge for this particular group. As for the lesser dagon's secondary attacks, you have to consider whether or not this is a standard method of attack for it.  If it's just at a disadvantage in this specific situation because it was holding the ship, pumping up its secondary attacks could make its full routine of attacks too powerful when it has its mouth free. But a lot of it depends on what you're designing each monster to do.  As far as damage goes, you can start by looking at the average damage and hit points of the player characters compared to the monsters and see how long it would take each one to kill the other in a straight slugging match (the more quickly a monster dies compared to its speed at killing the PCs, the easier it is to fight).  There's a fair bit of an art to it beyond that, however, since you'll want to account for the general effect of various tactics on that damage output.  For example, a creature that can fly usually has a significant advantage if its enemies are stuck on the ground, since it can control when (and if) it engages in melee.
#5 jadebrain Jun 26, 2012 11:37:17	Sorry for the lack of updates regarding whether or not your advice has worked, Slagger. It does seem like good advice; however, the party hasn't been in a combat situation since this thread began, given the fact that I've had to cancel a session due to players not showing up, and the one session we did have was a non-combat session. The next session will feature new enemies altogther, so it might be a little difficult to make changes based on what advice you've given me so far. What I will say is that the Scythe Imps are better at dodging and blocking than other similarly-levelled enemies, but at the same time, with this being a percentile system where defenses apply a minimum success rating (what you need to roll above) to attacks, the degree to which they are better is about the equivalent of a +1 to a defense in, say, DnD 4.0. Perhaps increasing their defenses is a good idea. As for your advice regarding the Lesser Dagon's full round of attacks, it's not quite the same as it is in DnD 3.x. In the game I'm designing, all creatures have three pools of different types of actions: Physical, Cognitive, and Move. Every ability that is used by anyone will almost always require the spending of actions from at least one of those pools. That is, if you want to attack multiple times, you need enough actions for multiple attacks. The Lesser Dagon, as it is currently designed, would be able to either bite once or use its tentacle whips twice per turn. The bite would do significantly more damage, but the tentacle whips would be able to spread the damage out.