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Court of Swords too challenging?

RollPlay®: Court of Swords
#1

After watching episode 22, and knowing how it all plays out, i’m wondering if its too hard in combination with Adams god tier rolls. If every encounter is deadly, and Adam almost always rolls high, there is not much incentive for the players to create any low AC characters ever. Just suicide to play as a wizard or anyone near 10 AC.

Feels kind of discouraging that we won’t be able to see these classes in play for more than a session before that Adam crit. Sure, if they played smart, rested after every fight, used cover, etc that might help, but with nothing but deadly encounters & a rolling god thats a moot point. The first 10 characters its funny, but if it just happens all the time, it sort of takes the fun out of it, and we never get stories finished up.

On the flip side, it could be by design to create a thrilling show where nothing is ever safe, even simple spiders.

However, its starting to become harder to become invested in any characters if they just get steamrolled every episode. At least thats how it slowly starting to feel. IS it just me? Can this be tweaked with random encounter ratings with some varience? Why bother using anyone below AC of 17?

Only ramble on, concerned for the future of this show. Should I not worry about character investment, and instead focus on the brutality of the show?

Food for thought…

#2

The boss encounter in the most recent episode was only Hard, not even Deadly.

2 Likes
#4

The key is to play to your strengths and not in to theirs. I’m not 100% sure how things actually worked out, but scouting ahead with Invisibility would have been rather useful. Warlock spells refresh in short rests so they can be used rather liberally. Standing in machine gun fire is not the way to go.

As crazy as it sounds Volnach could have sprung out his wings and fly to challenge the manticore in melee in the air. Ok, i don’t know how well the manticore can fly in a dungeon, but could have been nice Dragon Ball Z moment. Grabbing the spikes from air and tossing them back. If it would have started fighting with melee attacks they are a bit weaker than the ranged attacks. Maybe hit once and dodge with Ki? Knock the manticore prone in the air? :itmejpexcite:

The characters in the party were pretty under powered builds. Raziel didn’t seem to have any kind of AoE spell, Bergzeker isn’t the best possible build by a long shot (also his gear was literally gathering rust) and Persnidgetron was the embodiment of randomness in character build and bad rolls. Also no real healer lowers the potential a lot. Healing word to get people up as a bonus action is extremely powerful.

PS: The players of the show are learning. Not like they run in to spider traps all the time anymore. Things start to smell bull shit when Adam sends a Deadly encounter of flying snakes. :itmejpgmlol:

1 Like
#5

We haven’t seen meatballs yet.

Seriously, they have been nowhere but in a dungeon, so for the purpose of other challenges, combat seems to be the only thing they can do right now, and that usually leads to dangerous situations.

#6

The main issue I have with how challenging it is, is that it’s VERY boring to see really long fights with the same encounter difficulty where they have to expend most of their resources just to eek out the fight against unimportant NPCs relevant to the story. I get that the players are having fun (they must be), but as a viewer it gets predictable, to a point where I’m going to be unsurprising when a character does actual die because as was pointed out, they have under power builds, and don’t read guides for the absolute best race/spells/archetype for optimization, (which no one should expect them to.

#7

I can agree to some extent. I feel like the random encounters (that indeed are a big part of DnD) get in the way of the story in a big way when they are designed to be that hard but on the other hand that is also the point of the show, to be really hard and I think we all can say points in every fight or episode were PC (mostly JP and Max :slight_smile: ) have made mistakes that put them in a worse position to survive an encounter.

But the feeling that the PC’s aren’t OP as they usually become in DnD and that we get to know new PC’s from time to time is for me the strength of the show! But as I said, It would be fun to see less random encounters, I for one was not a fan of having an entire episode be dedicated to spiderfight and then mekfight in the same part of the map. Would have been more fun with a fight and then maybe some kind of “riddle” to get into an important door, but hey I don’t make my money playing rollplaying games so what do I know! :slight_smile:

#9

(Week 22 spoiler) [spoiler]1 HP final boss “challenging”, lol[/spoiler]

#10

@AdamKoebel Could the players have done something about [spoiler]Azure to have prevented her last action. I was very interested in her story and as you explained in your Office Hours episode about the love you have for your NPCs, I was curious if this was the destiny you had planned for her.[/spoiler]

#12

…in that post I said nothing about them not reading rules. I never even said the word “rule”.

#13

I haven’t watched the full Vod yet so I am not sure if you have already mentioned this but did you give the party extra XP for the Manticore since you buffed it?

#15

I love the show for how unforgiving and deadly it actually is and yes, it puts even greater emphasis on the players knowing/ using rules and features. I also agree that a good bit of min/maxing is necessary for characters to actually last a while.

#16

… no. No they’re not.

Rules are in the PHB, written by WotC, and for lack of a better term, require you to follow them
Guides are online, written by people who (99%, if not 100%) don’t work for WotC, and don’t require you to follow them to the letter, because they’re guides, not how you absolutely have to play your character or the game.

I get what you’re saying, but don’t put words in my mouth.

#17

I think the difficulty is fine. I see the campaign as a learning process for all the players where they get better and better for each new character they play as.
Compare the current arc to the first one. Huge difference in knowledge and tactics.

#20

I can agree with parts of OPs thought. I don’t like the idea of characters being steam rolled every episode. For example, Week 22 spoiler. [spoiler] JP’s character dying in the most recent episode and him proclaiming “I don’t care”. As someone who is invested in each character this took away any interest in his future characters. And this shows that he himself is not interested either.[/spoiler]

I do however think Adam should throw in hordes of low level enemies at them now and again, creatures who can be one shot just to reignite the wow factor of the PCs power for both the players and viewers as constant back and forth struggles with high HP mobs can be tedious after a while.

I think there is a fine line to run between COS being deadly encounters all the time and the audience feeling like they are all GM hacks and cheap shots to deliberately kill characters.

3 Likes
#22

Larges hoards of enemies dont work very well for DnD you have to HACK THE SYSTEM!! to try to deal with them.

How do you adjudicate the turns and actions of 30 goblins?

  • large numbers of rolls lead to large numbers of crits which gets silly
  • sitting in a chokepoint while you fight 1 goblin a time gets tiresome
  • encounter building math for challenge and xp breaks when the number of enemies gets really high and the xp you get ends up being really small for example 32 cr1 creatures is roughly the same difficulty as a single cr 20 creature.
#24

If we cant link it I’m sure someone will be ever so nice and tell us respectfully, calmly and without doing anything hasty

I think I found the wrong article:

#25

[QUOTE]The characters in the party were pretty under powered builds.[/QUOTE]it has been a recurring theme from the start of the campaign since gassy’s “melee only” rogue& Jp’s dex barbarian who didn’t rage in her fights until episode 2. Separately it’s fine and entertaining, in the same group it’s tpk material. The few decently rolled characters (including the totally random gnome one, who ended up surprisingly decent, i do that i end up with a 7 str/4dex halfling barbarian proficient in history and religion at best) can’t fix the lack of class synergy(lack of heal capable characters) of most groups involved(and i fell like the players will just charge to the next fight and not rest anyway). Do not get me wrong, It’s still a pretty entertaining show, but it constantly reinforce my “Never roll HP dice, always take average hp” and “POINT BUY builds ONLY, rolling attribute is for people that like to to play either over/under powered characters only” prejudices. Pretty well mastered game too.

Also yes mass combat and action economy is hard to balance.

#26

I really actually like when the boss behind the “dragon”/the evil army is some littlefinger like shit at fighting politician megalomaniac. It’s like the epitome of the genre trope. And It’s the trope i can never get enough of.

#27

By pure monster CR perhaps the encounter was only hard, but the environment construction and creature abilities made it significantly more difficult than that would indicate. The party makeup was 4 melee and 2 ranged, going up against (among other things) a ranged creature of CR equal to their level, with the creature hiding in a pitch black area they could not illuminate, with an impassable chasm between them and the creature, with a wide open area of no cover from which they could attack.

The encounter is certainly doable, but it is very technically difficult to fight effectively. The players aren’t top tier at the combat mechanics, especially since the party composition changes so frequently and different guests are coming in for the fourth slot. Encounters like this are going to be much harder than they would appear to be on paper.

#28

The sad problem I’m seeing currently is that JP originally pitched a feature of Court of Swords being “a focus on players understanding the mechanics” - and they really, really don’t, with the exception of perhaps Dan. Adam is still DMing for the original Court of Swords pitch but the players are seemingly not even trying to meet him half way.

I understand they’re busy people and can’t set aside an hour a week before the session to brush up on their characters, but it was part of the original Court of Swords pitch that it would be hard and that the players would work on knowing the game. So far we have one half. The campaign is as challenging as it needs to be, but the players aren’t as committed to being good as JP originally posited for the game.

I dunno - I still like the show a lot. But I do feel like it could be a lot more if characters were given time to grow, and I’d rather Adam didn’t tone down the lethality to make that happen. I’ll still watch either way - it’s by no means bad, not at all. Could be better, but so could literally everything and I for one am still entertained.

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