Patreon Devblog #8: Keeping Things Moving

This week was pretty light, design-wise—the first course of the Dungeon Master series is reaching completion, and so I spent more time editing videos than creating new content. Still, a few interesting topics came up in conversation and/or in-game, so let’s take a look at how I approached them!

Problem #1: How do I fix the ghoul encounter in Death House?

The Ghoulish Encounter in Curse of Strahd’s Death House dungeon is infamous for being a grindy, character-killing slog. Let’s take a closer look at why.

In the original module, there are two possible ways that the players can approach this encounter—from a northern corridor that ascends a five-foot staircase, and from an eastern corridor that snakes around an s-shaped bend.

In either case, the players arrive at a four-way intersection, with additional corridors heading south and west. As soon as one player steps into the middle of the intersection, four ghouls arise from the packed earth at the entrances to the west and south corridors, marching forward and attacking with their paralytic claws.

The first issue here is the choke point: because the intersection is only five feet across, the player that triggers the encounter becomes the only focus of the ghouls’ attacks. Moreover, because of the staircase and/or s-bend, only one, maybe two additional players can support the player who’s stuck in the center of the intersection—and even then, they can only help with ranged attacks, which are penalized by the partial cover (-2 to hit) of the player in the intersection themselves!

Ignoring the two ghouls that can’t reach the intersection (since they’re stuck behind the two ghouls closest to it), then, this basically becomes either (1) a single player against two ghouls, (2) two players against two ghouls, or (3) three players against two ghouls. Using the CR2.0 encounter builder, that’s going to consume 988% of that player’s maximum hit points, 247% of those two players’ maximum hit points, or 110% of those three players’ maximum hit points, respectively.

Things get even worse if, after one of the ghouls dies, the player at the center of the intersection keeps moving into the corridor where that ghoul came from, allowing the ghouls in the other corridor to move up and trap them while still attacking the other players in the party.

The original Death House Reloaded tried to solve this by having the ghouls start half-buried in the ground, requiring the ghouls to use an action to emerge and giving the players a free turn to attack them (or reposition) before the ghouls could fight back. The revised Reloaded guide basically kept this verbatim, and took the additional step of moving one of the ghouls into the center of the intersection, ensuring that the ghouls were now the ones being bottlenecked into a choke point, rather than the players.

But, after some playtesting, it became clear that giving the ghouls this kind of handicap still wasn’t sufficient. At its core, the architecture of the intersection ensures that any fight will severely limit the abilities of most of the players involved—ranged attackers will often lack line-of-sight and will suffer penalties to hit due to partial cover, and any melee attackers beyond the first will have no way to attack at all. Beyond balance concerns, that’s just not a fun encounter for most non-tactical players to play in.

(Yes, the party can just disengage and relocate away from the choke-point intersection. But in my experience, 80% of players—the ones whose concept of combat tactics goes no further than the four edges of their character sheet—will never think to do so, and grow more and more frustrated as a result.)

To solve this, I decided to move each of the ghouls to the end of each of the corridors, away from the center of the intersection. Now, the encounter triggers as soon as a player steps adjacent to an entrance to the intersection, ensuring that the party can easily force the ghouls through a choke point. From here, the ghouls trudge out one-by-one, slowly shuffling through the corridors to the location of the fight in order to preserve the original “march of the undead” concept.

While I haven’t tried this out yet, I think it’ll make for a much more robust and enjoyable encounter. In other words: this is why we playtest, people!

Problem #2: How do I fix players not knowing what to do on their turn in combat?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: You tell a player that their turn is next up. When the current turn ends, you turn to that player and ask them what they’d like to do. They spend the next five minutes inspecting the board, reviewing their character sheet, deliberating over their options, and double-checking the text of their abilities.

Slow play is endemic in D&D combat. While I’ve previously written about ways to make combat a faster and more cinematic experience, that doesn’t mean I’m immune to it in my own ways—and I encountered it in a big way at my last in-person session.

In case you don’t already know, this was a session for my ten-person campaign.

Specifically, ten beginners.

I’d already made things faster by implementing team-based initiative and adding an official tactician, which went a long way in keeping players involved at all times of initiative. At the same time, when Player A takes their turn quickly, and Player B on the same team has to spend ninety additional seconds looking up one of their abilities, things still grind to a halt—which gets all the more problematic when you’ve got eight other players waiting for their turns, and eight other players who aren’t going to double-check their own abilities until their own turns begin.

It’s a common suggestion to set a formal turn-timer, and to just skip players’ turns if they take more than ten seconds to start the action. But this was a group of beginners, and a group that’d just leveled up to level 2 and started using real character sheets for the first time—I couldn’t, in good conscience, start skipping them for taking too long to process a fairly complex game state!

But, I realized, I could do something else.

I could put them on hold.

Here’s what I told them.

“Okay, Player A—you take as long as you need to figure out what your ability does. In the meantime, we’ll move down to Player B/Monster C’s turn and keep combat moving. As soon as you’re ready to take your turn, let me know, and we’ll come back to you.”

And this generally worked pretty well! The players didn’t mind (they knew they were holding things up), and the fact that combat was still going on around them—e.g., monsters attacking them and their friends—incentivized to make their decisions quickly. They understood and appreciated that the flavor was, “You’re hesitating in the heat of battle, but you’ll come to a decision soon.” And this system kept the game moving, letting us get a combat encounter with four orcs, one orc eye of Gruumsh, and ten PCs who were still trying to wrangle the infinite mysteries of wildshape done in about an hour.

There was one hiccup—a player who was somewhat disappointed that, due to her delay, she wasn’t able to move into cover before an enemy monster moved adjacent to her, thereby setting up an opportunity attack if she tried to leave. I kept the damage that the monster had dealt (which it wouldn’t have been able to deal if she’d been able to retreat), but gave her a free Disengage action, since she should have been able to relocate if I hadn’t delayed her turn. She was, all things considered, relatively happy to take that.

Is this system potentially open to abuse in certain contexts? Probably. Do I trust my players enough to feel that they won’t do this? Absolutely.

And do I think that, next time, they’ll be a bit faster on the draw? I do!