Resistances -- a challenge

[Aurthur]

Howdy, folks.

I'm running a 4E game and having a little bit of a challenge dealing with some of my PC's resistances. One of the folks has the druid 'me and everyone adjacent to me gets 5 damage resistance' and our tank has a daily which does the same thing. It's somewhat trivializing encounters with multiple damage source dots, or horde encounters. I can obviously build around it...but am I correct in reading that someone with 10 damage resistance would take 0 damage if they had '5 poison ongoing' & '5 untyped ongoing' & '5 fire ongoing' (all at the same time)...and 0 damage from any minion which hits for less than 10?

Appreciate the help. I know I can 'house rule' or throw my own resistance mobs at them...this one has just presented some balance challenges.

[Gilphon]

What powers are we talking about here? The only druid power I could find that gives resist 10 to the entire party only works against fire and acid, which shouldn't be too hard to get around.

[masteraleph]

Howdy, folks.

I'm running a 4E game and having a little bit of a challenge dealing with some of my PC's resistances. One of the folks has the druid 'me and everyone adjacent to me gets 10 damage resistance' and our tank has a daily which does the same thing. It's somewhat trivializing encounters with multiple damage source dots, or horde encounters. I can obviously build around it...but am I correct in reading that someone with 10 damage resistance would take 0 damage if they had '5 poison ongoing' & '5 untyped ongoing' & '5 fire ongoing' (all at the same time)...and 0 damage from any minion which hits for less than 10?

Appreciate the help. I know I can 'house rule' or throw my own resistance mobs at them...this one has just presented some balance challenges.

When something seems utterly ridiculous, make sure to look over what they're using.

From your description, the Druid is probably using Dire Bear Stamina. Now, it is a Close Burst 5, but the only thing that's supposed to get that resistance is the Bear Animal Companion- not the PC or their allies. It's written as a Close Burst so that it has some range without provoking OAs, but the only target is the Bear Animal Companion.

I'm not sure what power the "tank" is using, but if it's anything other than the Cleric's Daily 1 Moment of Glory, there's a decent chance they're misreading it.

You are correct about what that resistance would do, but again, make sure that your party is doing things correctly before you start modifying things.

[obryn]

Enter the Crucible is the tank's ability, I am sure. I recognize it.

It's a Daily, and yeah, it can trivialize many sources of damage. I think it's fairly OP at Paragon, though it won't scale all that well through Epic.

[Aurthur]

What powers are we talking about here? The only druid power I could find that gives resist 10 to the entire party only works against fire and acid, which shouldn't be too hard to get around.

Sorry, Sentinel (not druid), skill is Of Oak and Stone (lvl 9 daily). 5 damage resistance, not 10.

Ah, yes, I had been hoping that these wouldn't scale...they definitely seem to be pretty powerful at the level they are. Thanks for the feedback.

[Yakk]

1/day for a healing surge, the fighter becomes immune to such tactics, and hard to kill otherwise.

Advice? When the fighter goes super-tanky, everything ignores the fighter. Just eat the immediate attack. Shift and charge if you are only adjacent to the fighter (shift triggers an immediate if marked, but the immediate does not end movement.)

(Do this if the foe is highly knowledgeable, or if they noticed their blows being soaked).

What book is "Of Oak and Stone" from?

[obryn]

Advice? When the fighter goes super-tanky, everything ignores the fighter. Just eat the immediate attack. Shift and charge if you are only adjacent to the fighter (shift triggers an immediate if marked, but the immediate does not end movement.)

Yes, this is my own go-to tactic when this power comes out to play.

[Beta Centauri]

First of all, bring this up with your players. There are ways to deal with this, but not all of them are ones that will keep the game happy for everyone. And if you make their strategy less effective, they'll just shift strategies so you have the same issue again. Trivializing encounters can be fun, but I have a feeling that your players do actually want a challenge, and would be open to helping find ways you can challenge them that they would still enjoy.

Second of all, try making encounters that aren't about damage.

The monsters have attacks they can make, sure, but they win not by killing the PCs, but by accomplishing some goal. The PCs can stop them by attacking them, sure, but can they do enough damage or impose enough conditions to prevent the actions they need to take to win?

The classic go to is a ritual. The main enemy is casting a ritual and will complete it in a few rounds. The other things in the room are designed merely to slow the PCs down. Resistant characters might be able to just eat enemy attacks and stand in their damaging zones, but resistance doesn't necessarily keep them from being grabbed or bull rushed off ledges, or whatever. Being resistant might make it safer to set up a big hit on the main enemy, but can they do it in time to stop the ritual? They can kill the enemy after the ritual, but then it's too late.

Too late for what? Well, that "ritual" can be anything including giving the enemies (maybe just the boss, maybe everyone) the permanent ability to ignore resistances. If the players want to rely on their resistance down the road, they have to stop the ritual. How long do they have? However much time the GM wants to give them. If the GM knows that the players could easily take out the enemy in two rounds, maybe he gives them two rounds. Maybe he gives them one, or only part of one.

The effect to avoid resistances could also be in the room with the boss. Killing him would be easy (maybe a grind, but easy), except for the eldritch machines arrayed around the room that are empowering him, the ones that will explode for 3d6 damage per tier (or whatever you want) if they're deactivated. They can fight through the machines' effects, or they can deactivate the machines.

Monsters can tell if they're damaging enemies. If they're having no effect, they should fall back. Let this be somewhat of a win for the PCs, since they probably did use some resources to make themselves invulnerable, but those enemies are still alive and are regrouping.

And don't worry about balance. The nice thing about the monsters having goals that don't require the deaths of the PCs is that the monsters can win and the characters are still alive. Balancing between "challenging" and "impossible" is only truly necessary when the only way for the PCs to fail is for them to be killed or captured. Maybe put multiple minor victory conditions in the encounter, too. Okay, the PCs are going to lose, but they can take out so-and-so and get the treasure he's got, or whatever, even if they don't have a full win.

Because the players can also have goals that don't require them to kill the enemies. If they're all about resistances, that's even probably a better way to go, since highly-defensive characters can really drag things out. Make the primary goal about just getting to a location or destroying an item or capturing an item, or whatever. Look to TV shows and movies for inspiration.

Good luck.

[Yakk]

Another approach to this is to start using "double monsters". It is a bit rude, but give me a second.

A double monster deals 2x damage per damage instance, and is worth 50% more XP (a monster with 2x damage and 2x HP is worth about 2x XP). You can have "double minions" as well (deal 2x damage, still have 1 HP).

This is a back-alley way to reward players for being overly defensive. Instead of boring, grinding combats, you turn the dial up on monster damage output. This, in effect, "aliases" their defensive boost into an offensive boost: the monsters they face will have less total HP than they did under the standard system.

A variant of this is "half monsters", who have 1/2 HP and the same damage output and are worth ~75% of the XP. (yes, two half monsters is worth the same XP as one double monster). As your players are playing resistance games, half monsters won't really fix your "problem" as much as double monsters do.

In both cases, you get significantly faster/higher per-round danger fights.

You can also do a "Slanted Monsters", where monsters do 1.5x damage and have half HP and are worth standard XP each. A shortcut for 1.5x damage is "monsters always deal max damage on damage dice", and a boost to non-dice fixed damage expressions (as most monsters deal half their damage as dice and half as static bonus).

Both "Half Monsters" and "Slanted Monsters" are difficult to work on minions, but "Double Monsters" work fine.

The downside to double monsters is that it is really directly nerfing your players' "I resist everything" build. On the other hand, it is rewarding it by halving monster HP, and generating faster combats, so...

[DragonBaneDM]

Since both powers in question are Dailies, have you thought about using longer adventuring days? Spreading the XP for the adventure around smaller fights throughout the day would make them feel like their resources are stretched a bit more.

Honestly whenever my party started learning how to optimize, our DM cranked up the encounter difficulty. Made things more life and death for us, and sometimes made us afraid enough to run for our lives, which all heroes seem to do in modern odysseys.

I think a mix between these tactics and Beta's and Yakk's advice could do a lot for you.

[Beta Centauri]

Honestly whenever my party started learning how to optimize, our DM cranked up the encounter difficulty. Made things more life and death for us, and sometimes made us afraid enough to run for our lives, which all heroes seem to do in modern odysseys.

I know there are people who get frustrated when they feel like they're on a treadmill: they get better, and the game gets harder, so the experience stays the same. But I think what you suggest is good, as long as the situation really is changing. And that's really what 4e mainly advocates: it's not that the kobolds just get better, its that now you're fighting orcs, then trolls, then giants, then titans, while the kobolds flee in terror. So, in this case, just go back to the book for tougher monsters (along with the other suggestions here). Now they don't just get to negate damage-over-time powers, they have to do it, or they're going to be in trouble.

[Gilphon]

Are there really that many monsters that struggle to break resist 5 that you're likely to run into when you have a L9 daily? Even minions should be able to do it at this point. I mean, yeah, ongoing damage, but even then I feel like monsters that can inflict ongoing 10 should be about to start outnumbering the ones that inflict ongoing 5.

[Aurthur]

I was mostly curious if the rulings worked in the way I described (which seems confirmed). I'm sure that as the monsters scale, this will be more apparent...and it's something I need to balance in the encounter creation. I had been messing with interesting encounter dynamics involving combination effects and that just didn't mesh well with these resistance effects. *shrug*

Thanks everyone for their feedback.

[Laserlight]

I know there are people who get frustrated when they feel like they're on a treadmill: they get better, and the game gets harder, so the experience stays the same. But I think what you suggest is good, as long as the situation really is changing. And that's really what 4e mainly advocates: it's not that the kobolds just get better, its that now you're fighting orcs, then trolls, then giants, then titans, while the kobolds flee in terror.

The game gets harder, but that doesn't mean every single encounter has to. Do throw in a "kobolds flee in terror" encounter, particularly if they had a session or two where the kobolds really hammered them.

[Tegu8788]

Also, no matter how high your resistance is, the attack still hits, and conditions still apply. Beta has some great ideas, but every now and again, a couple controllers make for challenging fight.

A different, fun encounter, includes a trap that drains healing surges. They will want to kill that fast.

Or perhaps build an encounter where they need that resistance. If they take X damage, they get knocked prone because the river is moving to fast and they get distracted. If proned, they start drowning. Without the resistance they basically get auto proned by any attack. Then have a MacGuffin in the middle of the river.

[Zaq]

First, make sure you're using modern damage expressions for the monsters. Monsters published before the MM3 don't do enough damage (and tend to have wonky defenses). Monsters published in the MM3 and later are much more consistent, and they tend to do more damage than their older counterparts. You mentioned a level 9 daily power, so the party is a minimum of level 9. At level 9, non-Brute monsters should be doing an average of 17 damage per turn, with modifiers if they're using encounter powers (+25-50%) or if they're Brutes (+25%). Resist 5 takes the edge off of that, but it's a far cry from negating it. If you're higher than level 9, the monsters should be doing even more damage than that. So it's entirely possible that you're just not doing the monsters right, and therefore the resistance is looking more effective than it really should be.

Second, as others have mentioned, you said that the party is burning dailies to get these effects. It's a good thing for a daily power to change the course of an encounter. That's what they're for. That's the goal of a daily. But dailies are also limited, and they can't be used in every encounter. If it feels like every encounter is being nerfed by dailies, you're not using enough encounters per day. If you feel like it's unrealistic to shove more encounters into a 24 hour window, consider moving to Legend's system of tracking Scenes rather than days. That way, let's say you're crossing a desert or sailing across an ocean. You aren't stuck with the two undesirable options of having the party constantly be under attack over and over in a 24 hour window (making the environment feel unnaturally crowded) or of having the party get to rest to full between every encounter (making the resource management part of the game feel trivial)—crossing the desert is one Scene, no matter how many 24 hour days it actually takes, and therefore you only get your daily resources once. (On the flip side, if you're running a tense chase scene through a dungeon or something, and that encompasses several encounters, that's also a Scene. Once you get safely out of it, you get your daily resources back for the journey home, even if you don't take an extended rest before getting back on the road. The Scene mechanic sometimes makes things easier on players, not only harder on them. But if used properly, it basically always makes things easier on the narrative.)

Finally, remember that characters in 4e aren't actually all that flexible, at least not once they're actually built. Your powers are your powers, and while that doesn't mean that every fight is going to look the same, if it seems like the characters are using the same tricks over and over, that's because those tricks are what their powers are. So if you consistently change the monsters to make sure that you're always (or even usually) negating the party's favorite tricks, don't be surprised if the players start chafing under that, because they can't just change their power load accordingly. (I guess maybe a Wizard can, but most PCs aren't Wizards.) Sure, not every trick should work every time, and the players shouldn't expect that they'll never be countered. But their tricks should work more often than not, and when you counter a player's primary tactics, you need to do it in such a way that the player isn't just left totally useless for the duration of the encounter, because that's just plain not fun. If the players have set up their tricks in such a way that resistance is a big part of their power load, they should be able to reap the benefits of that more often than not. They spent build resources on that, and every power they take that gives them resistance is a power that isn't giving them mobility, or increasing their offensive might, or letting them throw around nasty conditions. No one is saying that it should work perfectly every time, but it should work more often than not, and when it doesn't work, you still shouldn't shut the characters in question down entirely. Their powers are their powers, and they can't just randomly change them just because the GM is getting tired of the same stuff every encounter.

[Laserlight]

But their tricks should work more often than not, and when you counter a player's primary tactics, you need to do it in such a way that the player isn't just left totally useless for the duration of the encounter, because that's just plain not fun. If the players have set up their tricks in such a way that resistance is a big part of their power load, they should be able to reap the benefits of that more often than not.

Quoted because truth.

The GM's job is not to say "No, you can't"; it's to say "Yes, you can--if you want to risk it."