Recently, during my paragon-tier campaign, player resistances have come into much greater effect than I expected. In running a battle of Fay Lingerers from the Monster Manual 2, it became clear that the PC’s extensive use of necrotic resistance gear made the battle nearly totally one-sided. These Fay Lingerers, you see, do nearly all necrotic damage and with PCs reducing every attack by 10 to 15 points, the bite of the Lingerers is almost nil.
Players receive resistances early on in 4th Edition, but only when they hit paragon does the amount of resistance really make a big difference. Races like the Deva can have resist radiant and necrotic of 10 to 15 without a single magic item. Everyone else can get a fair bit of resistances through items.
Today we will talk about this focused topic and discuss tips for keeping the threat high without negating the player’s desire to resist damage.
Mix Up Element Types
The easiest way to ensure the PC’s resistances don’t reduce overall damage too much is to mix up element types. If you’re planning on running a Demilich, add in a few fire archons to mix up the elements. You might even add a creature that has no clear damage type like an Iron Golem. While designing an encounter, consider the resistances of your party and add a mix of creatures with different elemental damage types to ensure high resistances won’t completely remove the damage done.
Stack Ongoing Damage
This was a tip given to me by the Internet’s Dave the Game. Some creatures, like our beloved Demilich, have attacks including 10 ongoing necrotic damage. Consider making these ongoing damage effects stack. Sure, your Deva Invoker may resist all of an ongoing 10 necrotic, but how about 20? Let it stack only twice or three times to ensure you don’t stack ongoing 40.
Add Environmentals
This is a trick you may use every so often but must be used sparingly. Various environmental effects may reduce resistances or add enough extra damage to negate much of the resistance. A dark alter, for example, might add +10 necrotic damage on any necrotic keyword attack. Another environmental, an Orb of Chaos perhaps, might actually do added damage to those that resist an element much like a Sorcerer’s power.
These environmentals have the bonus of adding in a possible skill challenge. That Orb of Chaos might be destroyed with the right knowledge of history, use of arcane energy, or intervention by the gods. Perhaps it can even be cracked with a well placed athletic smash.
You can’t use these environmentals all the time, but they’re worth adding in when you have a particularly nasty creature with lots of a specific element of damage. I’ve never run Orcus, but if I did, he’d definitely have some sort of anti-necrotic-resistance artifact hanging around his neck.
Cheat
As a final straw, you can cheat. Change the elemental type of an attack (The demilich’s Obsidian Eye might do psychic instead of necrotic damage). Add extra damage to monsters when you know they’ll be mostly resisted. Add an element type to a single attack such as the Demonic Flameskull’s fire/necrotic “Vile Consecration”. Cheating should only be done with great care and with a clear focused intent.
Above all, however, remember that resisting damage is one of the things players enjoy about their characters. Don’t steal it from them. Let them resist most of the attacks of a loathesome beast if it happens to work out that way. For normal encounters, players should feel powerful. For those particular boss battles, however, you may need to step in to ensure the threat stays high.
I like the advice, except the last bit confuses me. How is tweaking monsters cheating? To me, changing an attack from necrotic to psychic so that the players can battle a fun monsters in a way that’s challenging is no more cheating than changing a fire beetle into an ice beetle so that it makes sense in your arctic setting.
Suddenly doubling everyone’s damage halfway through the battle is a little iffy, but looking at the monsters beforehand and adjusting them to your party’s level of ability is just part of DMing. (Unless you’re the kind of DM who runs D&D more like a videogame, where beating the DM is the whole point. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just not very common any more.)
That last paragraph is an incredibly important point — players love that moment of “Hah! Only took two points of damage from that attack!” (or better, none at all.) Robbing them of that only works to up the drama of a combat if it’s done sparingly, and with clear explanations of why in-game to help maintain that suspension of disbelief.
And yeah, adding a second damage type to an attack is a very effective way of piercing certain PC defenses. This works especially well when you know that at least one person will continue to resist that attack — it ups the danger level for the newly vulnerable without making the party feel like you’re going out of your way to subvert their character choices and hard-earned improvements.
I ran into this exact issue on Saturday, and didn’t use my own trick, though I eventually just had some ineffectual vampire minions decided to flee. Another thing to consider is allowing the monsters to use some attacks just as normal damage… vampire minions only had a necrotic attack, but I don’t know why they couldn’t have just been using non-necrotic claws (even if they didn’t have one in their statblock.)
You got me thinking all day on this, Mike, mostly about that last paragraph (as mentioned above.) My thoughts (which mostly expanded on that last bit) can be found here: Negating Player Effort is a Bad Thing. Fairly self-explanatory title, but I’d welcome some feedback/dialog on the matter. I’m not exactly sure I’m getting my point across.
Does ongoing damage of the same type stack? If it does I’ve been getting it wrong for a while now!
I think that increasing damage of standard monsters to get around a players abilities, or stacking continuing damage is not the way to go. I think Saragon’s article is spot on about how you should not change the monsters and rules to negate a player’s powers, however that does not contribute to the issue at hand which is how to deal with players with tons of resistance.
While it is unfair for monsters or rules to change in response to a players abilities I think that the monster’s tactics should defiantly change in response to a players abilities.
As Mike described in his article having the monster interact with the environment is a great way for the monster to fight back against resistant PCs. Aid another can also help to allow monsters without a resistible to hit more often. The key is thinking what would a PC do.
If a PC had a special sword that only kicked out fire typed damage, and he was fighting against a fire resistant monster, what would he do. Well he would drop it and try something else. So the monster should be able to do the same.
For example, if a Vampire Spawn which only has one attack that does 5 necrotic damage is attacking a PC with Black Iron armor (resist Necrotic 5, Fire 5) it should realize fairly quickly it can do no damage to the PC (it has an Int of 10).
So something has to give, Dave mentioned he used non necrotic claws, however I think the whole point of typed damage is not to help the monster, but it is intentionally put there by the designer to allow the PC’s a chance to negate their effects. So I would not go with non necrotic claws because then all monsters best tactics would be to untype all of its attacks.
I think monsters need a way to get around this weakness and the way to do it is by the monster utilizing the environment, and not changing the inherent nature of the monster (I know there is no mechanical difference between the two approaches but I find having the solution coming from the environment is better for story)
So have the vampire try to pick up a club, throw rocks, etc. If it makes sense that they should be able to do it, let them, just remember that it should be worse that their standard attack. I would assume a -2 to hit and half the damage output would be fair. Also make the monsters spend actions to setup their advantages.
So allow a vampire spawn to pick up a chair and bash the PC over the head with it for 2 points of damage. Then have him waste a minor action to pick up a leg of that chair and use it as a club. From then on he attacks with a -2 and only does 2 damage.
Doing it that way still rewords the PC’s for having built up their character, but also adds memorable moments to your combats that highlight the characters strengths.
JesterOC
Baz Stevens : No it does not, which is why I don’t think it is right to change the rules on the players just because they have resist to that element.
The key is to make sure the DM has the tools to make a battle challenging when they need to. High resistances mixed with the wrong mix of monsters can turn a challenging battle into a pushover or worse, a total slog.
I don’t think its out of line to give solos and named elites a way to get around resistances when the story calls for it. Some auras or blasts are just more powerful, not in damage but in penetration.
Rather than stacking ongoing damage when PCs have resistance, why not slowly diminish resistance to that keyword type as they continue to expose themselves to it in that encounter? This could be done by warning the PCs each time they expose themselves to the aura (i.e. “You feel the first tingles of cold; it appears that the Lich’s aura is beginning to erode your resistance”) then have them mark their character sheet. For every tally mark accumulated (or three or five), their resistance is lowered by 1. Then, after the encounter is over (or they take a short rest) they can get all their resistance back. I believe this would be a lot less lethal and more fair to the players… and makes more sense.
This may be a bit late, but I feel like the situation you describe (boring combat in which monsters can’t hurt players) should be delt with just like any other boring combat: skip it. Or make the encounter not about fighting at all. Sure, the Vampire Spawn can’t really hurt the players… but they can distract them while Big Bad Vampire summons Vampirethulu. Or while he sacrifices Princess Blondeblueyed.
But really, I think the best way to deal with such a combat is to admit that, yes, the PCs dispatch the Vampires handily, and there is much jubilation, but that it is meaningless to play out such a one-sided battle. After a few of these, the PCs will turn to non-necrotic monsters (or abandon their anti-necrotic gear) just to get the dice rolling again. If they don’t it means they actually prefer one-sided conflicts, and there was no problem to begin with