Behind the Screen: Sweet Return to Service…

At long last, we finally had another session on Saturday night! Interestingly, Kanati and I had devised a partial plan for our intrepid bunch of adventurers before the long, long hiatus so it was just a matter of brushing up the plan and heading right into it. We made a few last-minute additions that really made the session excellent and partially solved our “these epic characters are too strong” problem.

The answer is more obvious than you might think!

This may seem elementary, however in our scramble to keep our plotlines straight I often got into the habit of glossing over the abilities of these high challenge rating creatures that we kept introducing. Unsurprisingly, this led to our player characters being able to trounce them with very little expenditure of resources, causing us a continual problem.

This week, however, we had enough time to actually look at the abilities for the creatures (in this case, Ancient Deathshriekers, woot!) and devise a battle plan that included fully exercising their skills. Now, the resulting chaos might not have been extremely fun (at one point it involved an entire sofa-full of players having to pit their insane player characters against one another) but it certainly used up their skills in the appropriate way.

The battle took most of the evening, when combined with our groups standard propensity to talk and goof off on the first night back from a long hiatus but I think it was a great exercise in us DMs learning what to do in the case of epic characters.

Use all those monster skills and your life will be much better (and your PCs characters will be much, much worse)!