At Will

The heroes have retrieved the last MacGuffin and are just about to enter the lair of the Final Boss. They’re nervous. They have no idea as to the extent of their enemy’s power . Only glimpses and rumors from town and the corpses of the villain’s many victims hint at what this wizard/warrior/monster/scoundrel might have in store for them. Little do they know, neither do you.

One thing I’ve learned from prepping for the finale of an adventure is that stating out and planning tactics for the villain can the most complex and time consuming aspects of the work. How do you ensure this fight stands out in your players minds as an appropriate climax?

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The goal of every DM is to make an encounter that leaps off the grid, gripping his/her players’ imaginations and being a topic of discussion years down the road.  4e makes encounter design much easier, but to get those memorable encounters, extra care must be taken. There are at least as many elements that can make a great encounter as there are DMs. One element remains constant through all of them:  Complexity.

Now, it doesn’t mean that your players have to solve differential equations every encounter.  When citing cmoplexity, I’m really citing that element of the encounter that makes it more than just laying blast templates and rolling for attack.  To capture your player’s mind, you have to put them into encounters more complex than using their abilities.  Added complexity creates “stretch”, how far players have to stretch beyond the normal range to beat the encounter.  Generate stretch and generate interest.  Generate interest and you stand a good shot at making a memorable encounter.

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Your turn comes up in the initiative and the enemy has just teleported to the other side of the chasm. You’ve got all your dailies, your action point, a +3 great sword, no ranged powers, and 5 squares of chasmic doom between you and your foe.

You want to do something awesome on your turn, but you can’t get within range of your target. Suddenly, you have a burst of inspiration and ask if you can cut down a nearby tree, use it as a makeshift bridge, burn your action point, and attack the enemy – all in the same turn.

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A perfect stlorm of professional and personal frustration resulted in an epic “eff-it-all” moment from yours truly…on twitter. Why twitter? I don’t know but before you knew I was ready to throw all my gaming work down the toilet. All the dissapointments, missed opportunities, aggravations that I’d been working through perfectly fine until that moment, just came pouring down…some people think it was just because of not being on a mailing list, but I’ll protest that I’m really not that shallow or thin-skinned. Needles, haystacks, etc…that’s what was going on but that is so over now.

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It’s down time. The players are sitting on a mountain of coins and the party wizard goes to work, casting rituals to outfit the party with exactly the magic items they need.

While this works well mechanically, it does reduce the “special feeling” associated with acquiring that excellent magic item. Call me old fashioned, but I like a game where finding a +1 anything is a big deal. It’s hard to get excited over a magic sword or an enchanted piece of armor if your party can produce them en-masse from a pile of gold.

Take away the do-it-yourself magical armory and you risk giving the party loot they never use. Maybe the fighter doesn’t want the movement penalty of that +2 suit of scale or maybe the rogue feels that sticking with short swords is, “more of his thing,” and foregoes the +1 flaming dagger you dropped in his lap.

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