When encountering a hostile force, a group of PCs can:
First Thought: When you’re designing a scenario, just give a couple seconds of thought to how a group of NPCs might react to each stratagem. If something particularly clever occurs to you, jot it down and perhaps restructure the scenario to better support it.
Second Thought: When NPCs encounter a hostile force (i.e., the PCs) they can have the same reactions. Think about it.
“There’s a huge plot hole in Lord of the Rings! The eagles could have just flown the ring to Mordor and dropped it in the volcano! The whole movie/book could have been resolved in like 5 minutes!”
You’ve probably heard this hoary old chestnut before. It’s been circling around for decades. It’s got all the traits for a great little meme: It has the aura of cleverness and it attacks something popular.
It’s also complete bullshit.
(And it almost universally indicates that the person uttering it will have absolutely nothing of value to say about The Lord of the Rings.)
Basically, this “plot hole” boils down to two questions.
First: Is it actually a viable solution?
Second: Should it have been talked about at the Council of Elrond?
DOES IT WORK?
Most people treat this as if it were some sort of “slam dunk”. But there are several reasons why the Eagle Solution either definitely won’t work, probably won’t work, or may not work:
(1) There are no Eagles in Rivendell. Although movie-Gandalf has the ability to summon them with his skills as a butterfly whisperer, that’s not an ability he demonstrates in the books. So you’d have to go and get them and then bring them back (a journey almost as long as trekking to Mordor in the first place).
(2) Even then they might say “no”, in which case you’ve wasted a lot of time. (In fact, they would probably say no, as any perusal of their characterization in the novels would suggest.)
(3) On the one hand you’ve got the dangerous temptation of carrying the Ringbearer a couple hundred feet off the ground (splat); on the other hand you have very powerful creatures (on an order similar to Gandalf). Gandalf specifically warns against this mix of power-and-temptation multiple times throughout the novel.
(5) Bad Shit happens every time Sauron gets line-of-sight on Frodo. Flying the Ring into Mordor would automatically mean putting it in Sauron’s line-of-sight.
(6) You’ve also got Saruman’s crebain spies, which become more difficult to avoid if you’re flying.
(7) On top of all this, we have absolutely no idea what aerial defenses Sauron might have had before he was killed. Endless arguments can be had one way and the other about the effectiveness and/or location of the flying Nazgul or the efficacy in catching the Eagles, but for all we know the Eye could have blasted the Eagle straight out of the sky.
Quite a few variants of the “just have an Eagle do it” scenario will usually be proffered at this point in an effort to mitigate some or all of these problems with the plan. (Have the Eagle just carry Frodo. Blindfold the Eagle. Walk most of the way to Mordor and then just fly the last little jaunt. Et cetera.) But these efforts basically admit that there are inherent problems with this plan, which brings us to…
IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN DISCUSSED!
Here the claim is made that “every possible plan is discussed” at the Council of Elrond except for using the Eagles. Therefore, even if it isn’t viable, it’s a plot hole that it wasn’t included on the agenda.
But this argument is based on a false premise: That every possible plan was discussed at the Council of Elrond.
That’s not actually true. It feels true because Tolkien is, in fact, a very good storyteller. But the reality is that there are lots of plans that aren’t considered. For example, the Fellowship could instead head straight to the sea coast and sail to Gondor. This would have cut weeks off their travel time and avoided the threats of Saruman, the Misty Mountains, and Moria entirely.
My point here isn’t that “they should totally hit that ocean!” (There, are in fact, as many problems with that plan as there are with the Eagles plan, starting with Mordor-sponsored pirates and going on from there.) My point is that the Council of Rivendell wasn’t written to serve as an exhaustive checklist of every single option that could conceivably be taken. It would be a dreadfully boring scene if it was.
Rather, Tolkien includes a few such discussions in order to dramatically hit the beat of “we discussed other options”. (He also uses most of those bits to simultaneously establish other important bits of exposition.) But once that beat has been established, Tolkien moves on to the next dramatic beat.
People think they discussed every option because Tolkien makes you think that through effective storytelling. But there are lots of options that aren’t explicitly raised in the text itself, and there isn’t any particular reason why every single option should be encyclopedically rejected in the text.
THE FUNNY BIT AT THE END
With that being said, this is pretty funny:
But it’s as much a meaningful critique of Lord of the Rings as this is:
Bald Eagle photo by Keven Law. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic.
One potential mode of “old school” play is the idea that “everybody starts at 1st level”. Combined with each class having a separate experience chart table, individual experience awards, and open gaming tables it was pretty typical for adventuring parties to have a pretty wide variance in their levels. This, of course, isn’t “balanced“, so it’s come in for a good deal of scorn in the past couple of decades. Most groups today allow new characters to be rolled up using the party’s current level and keep everybody in lock-step through unified XP awards.
(My Ptolus group, however, has experienced a 1-3 level variance due to a variety of reasons. I have not found this be inherently traumatizing.)
Having played a megadungeon OD&D campaign for awhile now, however, I’ve found that there are a few mitigating factors in practice:
First, the open gaming table combined with super simple character creation results in everybody running a “stable” of characters. They can self-select whichever character is the best match for the current group or roll up an entirely new character depending on whatever is most appropriate.
Second, due to the lethality faced by 1st-level characters, players rolling up new characters want a couple higher level characters to accompany them. It greatly increases the odds of survival and the pace of advancement.
Third, it doesn’t actually take that long to “catch up”. For example, in the time it takes a 5th level fighter to reach 6th level, a 1st level fighter will reach 5th level. (And will catch up and become 6th level before the more experienced fighter reaches 7th.)
With all that being said, I’ve been giving some thought on how you can make the level gap more palatable.
In Eden Studio’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer roleplaying game, they compensate for the power difference between the Slayer and the Scooby Gang by giving the weaker characters additional drama points. Could this be adapted? Let’s say lower level characters get +1 inspiration points per difference in level? (So a 3rd level character adventuring with 6th level characters would get 3 inspiration points to spend per session.)
Inspiration points are a dissociated mechanic, obviously, but they could represent all sorts of things: It’s the guy who’s inspired to greater heights by Superman’s example. Or picks up a few tricks from sparring with D’Artagnan. Or gets an assist from Bruce Lee during the melee. But, basically, you’re rubbing shoulders with some elite dudes and some of it is wearing off.
Mechanically, we could simply use the existing action point mechanics for 3rd Edition. Alternatively we could continue taking our page from Buffy and allow for an inspiration point to be spent much more significantly:
Some of these look like they would exceed my “tolerance threshold” for D&D. Others wouldn’t. Your mileage will almost certainly vary.
A few years ago Monte Cook posted an essay on his website called “Ivory Tower Game Design“. It raises some very important points, but over the years I’m afraid I’ve come to find it deeply annoying because whenever somebody links to it or quotes from it, I can almost guarantee you that they’re about to completely misrepresent the essay’s entire point.
What Cook basically says in the essay is, “Instead of just giving people a big toolbox full of useful tools, we probably should have included more instructions on when those tools are useful and how they can be used to best effect.”
But the vast majority of people quoting the essay instead snip some variant of “we wanted to reward mastery of the game” out of context and then go ape-shit because D&D3 deliberately included “traps” for new players.
The methods of selective quoting vary, but they all basically look something like this:
“Toughness [is] not the best choice of feat.”
OMG! WHY WOULD THEY INCLUDE A SUCKY FEAT LIKE THAT?
There are two problems with this.
First, the full quote is actually, “Toughness, for example, has its uses, but in most cases it’s not the best choice of feat.” And then the essay goes on to further clarify its meaning: “To continue to use the simplistic example above, the Toughness feat could have been written to make it clear that it was for 1st-level elf wizards (where it is likely to give them a 100 percent increase in hit points). It’s also handy when you know you’re playing a one-shot session with 1st-level characters, like at a convention (you sure don’t want to take item creation feats in such an instance, for example).”
In other words, Toughness is a special purpose tool. When used properly, it’s a useful tool. When used improperly, it’s a wasted feat slot. The designers felt like people should be smart enough to figure that out for themselves, but the point of Cook’s essay is that it probably would have been better to include more usage guidelines.
Which ties into the second problem. The larger fallacy here is the belief that you can allow for meaningful choice in any kind of complex system without having some choices be inferior to other choices. This is something I discuss with more detail in “The Many Types of Balance“, but the short version is that in order to achieve this faux-ideal of “every single choice is just as good as every other choice, no matter what combination of choices you make” you need to severely limit either (a) the flexibility of character creation, (b) the scope of gameplay, or (c) both. As a goal, it’s not only without value, but it will significantly cripple your game design. It’s like demanding that a2-a3 and the King’s Gambit both be equally valid openings in Chess.
So the next time you see someone misquoting Cooks “Ivory Tower of Game Design”, do us all a favor and link them here. Maybe it’s not too late to nip this bit of false truth in the bud.
In “Revisiting Encounter Design“, I make the argument that 3rd Edition plays better if you use old school encounter design. To briefly sum up:
Using this encounter design results in faster combats (which means you accomplish more in a typical game session) and drastically reduces the likelihood of the 15 minute adventuring day.
This advice is not radically different from that provided in the 3.5 DMG, which suggests that encounters should be 30% with ELs lower than the party’s level, 50% with ELs equal to the party’s level, 15% with ELs 1-4 higher than the party’s level, and 5% with ELs 5+ above the party’s level. (Let’s call this the 30/50/15/5 ratio for easy reference.)
THE ANALYSIS
This 30/50/15/5 ratio was not atypical in early 3rd Edition modules. For example, here’s the EL breakdown of combat encounters in the first section of The Forge of Fury (designed for a group of 3rd to 5th level characters):
EL 1
EL 2 (x7)
EL 3 (x3)
EL 4 (x4)
EL 5 (x4)
EL 10
If we use an average party level of 4th, this ratio breaks down to: 55/20/20/5. Not an exact match, obviously, but definitely within the ballpark of having 80% of your encounters equal to your lower than the party’s level.
But as you look at modules published in the last 5-6 years, the misguided “common wisdom” of how to design encounters for 3rd Edition had taken hold. For example, here’s the encounter breakdown from part four of Paizo’s Curse of the Crimson Throne (designed for 10th level characters):
EL 8
EL 10
EL 11 (x2)
EL 12 (x2)
EL 13
EL 14 (x3)
That’s a ratio of 10/10/80/0. 80% of the encounters are now above the party’s average level instead of below it.
You can see the same design principles in Wizard’s modules. For example, here’s Fane of the Drow (designed for 4th level characters):
EL 3
EL 4 (x4)
EL 5 (x5)
EL 6 (x5)
EL 7 (x2)
Which is roughly 5/25/70/0.
Similarly, here’s the breakdown from “The Demon Council”, the last section of Expedition to the Demonweb Pits (for 11th level characters):
EL 10 (x2)
EL 11 (x3)
EL 12 (x10)
EL 13 (x4)
EL 14 (x2)
Which gives us a ratio of 10/15/75/0. (This one looks a little better if you assume that the PCs are supposed to level up to 12th halfway through this sequence.)
THE TIP
A couple weeks ago, as I looked over my recent usage of published 3rd Edition scenarios, I realized that I’ve been instinctively using modules published in the last 5-6 years when the PCs are 2-3 levels higher than the recommended level.
For example, when you apply this guideline to the modules used above you end up with:
Which definitely slants them back into the ballpark of what we’re looking for.
Reflecting on this also taught me something new: The tips in “Revisiting Encounter Design” are designed to widen the dynamic range of your encounters. Shifting the recommended level for these published modules made me realize that we’re also widening the dynamic range of our adventure design.
Fane of the Drow, for example, isn’t unachievable for 4th level characters. But it is a tough slog. And if you use “tough slog” as your baseline for normalcy, then you have nowhere to go: If your 4th level characters face anything tougher than this, their odds of dying horribly begin to skyrocket. Which means that if your 4th level characters “skip ahead” or take an unexpected shortcut, they could easily run headlong into a deathtrap.
But if Fane of the Drow is, instead, your expected baseline for 5th or 6th level characters, suddenly you’ve got room to breathe.
And where would having room to breathe become particularly important? Node-Based Scenario Design.
Revising your approach to encounter design allows you to be more fluid and dynamic in how you run and combine your encounters; it also allows you be more fluid and dynamic in how you run and combine your scenarios.
