making things harder

I guess my confusion is there are two different things being talked about here, and while I can see them as related, I don’t see them as interconnected:

Non-Renewable Resources
Non-renewable resources (I use this term to mean not automatically renewable in a day. If people are talking non-renewable over long periods: gold, gear, etc. that’s different) generally affect “how many fights” your character can partake in before they become unable to really take on another fight with hopes of survival. It’s at that point that the characters usually ‘rest’ to recover. In a lot of games these resources that control that are: “Hit Points”, “Magic Points”, “Spell Slots”, “Healing Surges”, or “Wounds”. Because these ‘run out’ it controls how many encounters characters can have in a day. In a four-hour event for most game systems, it’s not possible to get a ‘full rest’ and recover these, so you need to manage them throughout the event in order to make it to the end and succeed.

Arcanis really only has 2 of these: Fate Expenditure and Wounds. Fate Expenditure is probably the only one, since you can spend a maximum of your Fate Score (even if you have more) in an event, no matter how long it lasts in-game. Wounds are a non-renewable resource in Tiers I/II since there’s few (if any) ways to recover Wounds other than ‘rest’. This seems to be a design decision by the PCI team to not have artificial ‘limits’ on what the characters can do in an adventuring day. A group that doesn’t take a lot of wounds could theoretically do a lot of things in a day, since after most fights, they can heal back up.

in non-combat situations, there are a lot of

Challenging Combats
I heard people saying, because you start each ‘encounter’ at full Stamina, it’s not challenging. I think there are a lot of good ideas about how to challenge characters in an encounter. For my “Expert” character, some of the things that make for a challenging and enjoyable fight are having multiple goals. D&D 4e actually started doing some of this at one point. In a fight, there can be a number of things going on at once. The more of these that an encounter has, the more complex and more potentially more challenging it is.
1) Defeating creatures
2) Achieving a combat objective (retrieve an item, rescue an NPC, protect someone, make it through a tunnel, etc.)
3) Dealing with objects (disarm a trap, open a lock, search a book for information, etc.)
4) Survive the environment (flooding room, climbing up a mountain, underwater combat, etc.)

An encounter that’s just “defeat the creatures” is less challenging because all the party’s resources go to that one goal. In a group of 6-7 that can be formidable. By adding other elements, you start taking the party’s resources and splitting them.

Example: If, while the fight is going on, there’s a door that the party needs to get through to escape (They will be overwhelmed otherwise), then at least one character needs to be devoted to that. If at the same time, there’s a an important NPC that needs protecting, one character would likely be assigned to that. Finally, if this entire encounter takes place in a room that is slowly filling with poisonous smoke, then some resources must go to healing/delaying that and not to killing creatures. This makes the combat much more challenging and has a nice by-product of giving ‘non combat optimized’ characters things to do.

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My personal opinion is that we don’t need to mess much with the non-renewable resources. The game mechanics are set to allow in most cases starting each encounter with full resources. Some ‘back to back’ encounters aside (in BI’s or special situations), every encounter is ‘fresh’. I feel we should concentrate more on making encounters challenging by requiring out of the box thinking, multiple goals, and different situations.

I know Pedro’s talked about the Wound system. Most characters are likely going to have 2-3 Wounds. Taking a wound is a *bad thing* in the system because there are so few. If the system had been setup to have 4-5 Wounds on average, and they were easier to take (“Gritty Rules” always in place for instance), then they become more of those non-renewable resource.

John

I think it’s a disagreement on terms. I’ve PM’ed you.

Your example is a perfect example of what I’m talking about in terms of a “Challenging Encounter”. I think having a list of these available for Module Writers to pull from is a great idea. I think if you modify your original post or create a new one in the Chronicler’s area, that would be a great start.

A lot of systems have ‘snippets’ of ideas for this, and having some general ideas that authors can take forward into their adventures is smart. Here’s some ideas on the format and would welcome some feedback:

For each ‘challenge’ provide the following:

Encounter Type: Social, Combat, Discovery, Transport, etc.
Setting: City, Wilderness, Building, Underground, Ruins, etc. (Could be ‘general’) as well
Goal: Kill the bad guys, Convince someone, Locate object, Protect something
Obstacles/Hazards: Locked door, Enemy combatants, Darkness, Freezing temperatures, Trap to disarm (these take away characters, cause penalties, or otherwise stand in the way of success)
Limited Resources: Only X tries before setting off trap (limiting attempts), Only X torches to see while traveling, Only hold breath for X minutes (time limiting), Only achieve 1 of X objectives (objective limiting), etc.
Failure: What happens if the resource runs out or the obstacles are not overcome. Death? Delays? Bad guys get more powerful? Failed mission?
Description: Any short description or hints that help a GM work this type of challenge into their adventure.

So to use Josh’s example in this format if he were presenting this as a “Challenge”

Encounter Type: Combat
Setting: Any
Goal: Retrieve Hat
Obstacles/Hazards: 20 Big Bad Guys (combatants)
Limited Resources: Big Bad Guys are only hurt by Holy Hand Grenades. The Party has 10.
Failure: If the party doesn’t retrieve the hat, they earn the ire of Loshnek. If they use all the holy hand grenades before reaching the hat, they can’t hurt the bad guys and need new tactics.
Description: Loshnek needs his hat and asks the players to retrieve it. He warns there are a lot of BBG’s and they are only hurt by Holy Hand Grenades. he only has 10 to spare, so he tells the characters to use them wisely.

What do you think?

Have multiple encounters in the same scene if you are worried about resources. Push things to the other side of the curve if you are worried about direct challenge (raising defenses by 2-3)

I’ll be experimenting with some of these ideas while building the ArcaniCon events. Keep them coming, you guys have inspired some (hopefully) really fun and challenging situations.

I’ve created a thread in the Chronicle’s Quarter and moved Eric’s suggestion there

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=288

1) The whole Rallying Cry/Minions coming back is the whole ‘turning it into a grind’ issue which some people are wishing to avoid. As a GM, I love doing it because I’m evil, but it can often frustrate people to no end.

2) I dislike it, if for no other reason than it adds another layer of complexity to a situation. Leadership is already a fairly powerful talent (at least for Tier 1), and I do not see why it has to become MORE powerful.

My apologies if this has already be stated in some fashion, but right now I’m too lazy to read all of the other replies…

Why do we have to make things “harder”, at least mechanically? What ever happened to good old fashion puzzles or riddles within modules? I absolutely *loved* the floor puzzle in Visions. Yeah, okay, we “Delbert-ed” it in some ways, but the trial and error we went through, looking for patterns et al…FUN (in my rarely humble opinion).

I still remember my very first exposure to D&D: it was a solo adventure that was in the red box ‘Basic Set’ and contained a talking mouth painted on a wall. The riddle was “OTTFFSS; what is the next letter?”. If you got it right, you doubled your gold-on-hand, got it wrong and it laughed at you or halved your gold or something like that.

I’d like to see more instances of making players (myself included) THINK during the modules, rather than just beefing up the mobs, or forcing us to rely on expendables (unless they’re Elorii, they’re always expendable), or whatever… Right now it seems, to me, that we have two types of mods: hack’n’slash or investigations-on-rails. That’s a very wide net I’m casting and a lot of generalizing, I’ll admit, but neither REALLY requires us to do much thinking. Even in the investigations, as long as you hit the TN, pretty much everything is laid out for you.

You could still bury hints or clues within the mod, behind TNs or roleplay, if you wanted. You could even allow the expenditure of fate points if you wanted to force it.

Speaking of fate, I know this isn’t the proper place… U-Con: 4 judges, 5 modules, *3* fate points granted… And that’s why I’m against the fate point cap – I can ‘hold’ 9 on each of my 2 characters, I spent waaay more than I earned, despite doing cool stuff (I think) and keeping the GMs entertained. As far as I’m concerned, fate points are infinitely more valuable than any other ‘resource’ in the game.