Work (a project on a screaming-fast track) and family commitments (happy birthday, dear daughter!) have temporarily waylaid my plans to post the encounter with the forestkith as a module for you to download, but I should be able to post it sometime next week.

Anatomy of an Encounter, continued

Combat in Dungeons and Dragons is the elephant in the room. Some love it, some loathe it. The game rules are largely focused on resolving it, the rest of the game being left to a sort of “use your imagination“ explanation. Continuing the elephant analogy, you may be familiar with the story of the blind men surrounding an elephant being allowed to touch one part and then being asked to describe the creature. Having felt the trunk, one said, “the elephant is like a snake.” Having felt a leg, another said, “No, the elephant is like a tree.” A third, having felt the side of the elephant, said, “You are both wrong, the elephant is like a house.” Combat in D&D is all of these things.

Balancing Speed and Power

In my opinion, Fourth Edition D&D uses powers to shorthand role playing in combat. They have colorful names, and flavor text to describe the effects. Role-playing games are designed as cooperative storytelling activities. You, as a player or DM get to narrate episodes of heroism or tragedy, depending on your vision, or the roll of the dice. Over the history of D&D the mechanics of combat ballooned to encompass more tactical options and stylistic flavors, to the point that combat became an exercise in tedious die-rolling. Something was needed to quicken the pace, without losing the flavor. The powers in 4e were the designers‘ solution.

As in my previous post, I will be talking primarily to DMs, but players should be entertained as well. Part 1 outlined a pursuit of a group of goblinoids called “forestkith“. Their powers include an immobilizing shriek, entangling nets, and poison claws. Individually, their claws do little damage. Their tactics are to immobilize foes so that they can combine attacks via swarm for greater effect. Immobilizing player characters can be frustrating for players. It means you‘re limiting their options during combat, and you want to do this with great care. Combats where players have little or nothing to do on their turns become boring for them. One of the design tenets of 4e was to involve everyone as much as possible, so don‘t defeat that by overwhelming the party with effects that limit their options, especially enduring ones.

Based on their earlier observations, the players have probably gotten a sense of the shriek power, and the range of the nets the forestkith cast. Don‘t volunteer this information, but listen for opportunities in the players‘ questions to reveal these details. A successful Nature check might reveal that the shriek has a fear-based immobilizing effect. Likewise a successful Perception check might lead to the discovery that the nets are effectively a Reach 2 range weapon. These facts might be used by your players in order to enact safeguards to avoid the effects. Candles make handy ear plugs, and timing melee attacks to take advantage of the recharge on the forestkith net attack would be solid options. If, as a DM, you provide narrative hints about sounds and timing via your word choice, you can suggest options without pointing directly to solutions. Like the classic Choose Your Own Adventure books, giving players choices keeps them involved.

Sometimes when I know I‘m going to be using a particular rule (in this case, the Restrained condition), I‘ll copy the basic elements of the rule onto a 3x5 card and keep it with my monster stat-block cards. That way we don’t have to take precious combat time to look up the effects of being Restrained, or what it takes to escape.

As a DM you should look for opportunities to role-play the monsters you‘re controlling. Personalize the foe by telling players that specific monsters are targeting them. If you have an intelligent foe that speaks the same language, add some dialog to aid this immersion. The forestkith are fairly primitive, and will be outmatched by weapons, armor and spell effects. They are not unintelligent however. Have them target spell-casters with their shriek effect to disrupt spell casting. When there are no spaces available to attack the PCs, have them climb trees and hurl twigs, pinecones, and invective at them.

A lot of combatants means a potential for slow combat. Look for strategies to speed it up. For example, pre-roll attacks and have the rolls listed on a sheet of paper. Cross them off as you use them. In this encounter, I created a “swarm“ version of the forestkith, both to simulate the effect of great numbers of them, and to speed the flow of combat. Consider the number of players you have, and how significant the encounter is to your story. Not every encounter needs to be exactly matched to your party‘s level. An encounter may serve to lead to a harder encounter, or delay the party from achieving an objective.

What‘s the Point?

I‘ve used the magic word objective again. Every encounter should have one, and it should be clear to your players. In the original post I described a pair of captives the forestkith had taken. The followup encounter, the second of the three that make up the delve-type adventure I‘m describing, should include some element of risk to the captives. If they were freed in the initial encounter, you‘ll need to come up with a compelling reason for the PCs to pursue the forestkith. I‘ve chosen a bit of a mystery as a lure. Freeing one of the captives leads to the information that an attack against armed humans by forestkith is an unusual event. (Alternately, if none of the captives survived, you could find another way to convey the following information.) The forestkith would only attack if they felt a dire threat, or if some event had transformed their normally peaceful culture. In this case, one of the freed captives reveals that they understand forestkith jargon, and that the little creatures were obsessed with “feeding the Ogre King.” Forestkith lore tells of an Ogre King who rises from “beneath the roots of the King Oak“ once a generation. The forestkith must find “fresh meat and bones“ for the King to appease his spirit so that he returns to his slumbers beneath the King Oak.

A quick check of the surroundings reveals that a significant number of the local trees are, in fact, oak trees. Interestingly enough, if they are studied a bit, the PCs will note that they seem to be arranged in concentric rings in the normally random forest. As one proceeds from the outermost rings towards the center, the trees become progressively larger. The forestkith are fleeing towards the center of the rings.

So, the players have uncovered a potential threat! They have the choice of whether or not to pursue. In the third part of this discussion, I‘ll detail a Boss Fight, and I hope to post a module of the three encounters for you to run yourself.