At Last, Savage Encounters

Recently, a comment from Jack Headland reminded me that I hadn't ever posted the table for "savage" encounters from my encounter series, though I did show the silhouettes and make some kind of rambling nostalgic semi-related post about dinosaurs. This table is just for every kind of prehistoric beast and other outlandish creature you might find in a lost world or very hairy wilderness. Others in series can be found in this tag.

I've gone to percentiles along the top because they're more accessible and also fit well with the percentile system I've adopted to tell you which chart and row to use in the first place. Maybe I'll share that one later this week.

Boring Combat 4: How Boring Are High Levels?

And now to the alleged problem that started all these musings. Do high-level combats really degenerate into boring slog-fests, wading through morasses of hit dice to get to the kill?

Well, let's start out dividing high-level monsters into those who got there by virtue of their enormous size, and those who are a more reasonable size but super specially tough and magic.

Those latter creatures - vampires, beholders, liches, dragons, demons and so on - have loads of spells, powers, and attacks to justify their challenge. Fighting them should be harrowing, not boring. If it's boring, what are you still doing playing the same characters? Are the so tricked out that they make every saving throw, dodge every attack? After the beholder should there come the uber-beholder, in an ever-swelling progression of N+5 hit dice? Maybe in a computer game, or an RPG that needs to sell more and more game books to the power-mad adolescent mentality. But anyway, that's a different topic.

Now, you get the big, big monsters at risk for being boring in the mathematical sense, with lots of hit dice and not a lot of special gimmickry. Not sentient, so they don't come with cool stuff like allies or siege engines or tactical setups. Big lumpy things like ... er ... dinosaurs. And mammoths. Elephants, too. Whales?

Not the only way to add interest value.

You see the problem here - at high levels, you don't run into those creatures a lot. And when you do, it's likely to be outdoors. So running the combat, you'll realize that there's actually a lot going on when a thirty-foot long dinosaur rampages through a jungle forest or a rocky outcropping. It crashes into branches and trunks, sending them flying. It sends boulders rolling. It bites you at the front, stomps you if you get underfoot (and best believe it will be rolling into close combat range to do just that), and if you come around at the back there's a thrashing tail that sends you flying. They don't need fiery breath or magic spells - sheer size and momentum will do the trick.

Those aren't in the rules as written? So what! You're playing old school and it's your game. Later editions sure as hell try to build this kind of special excitement into every monster, calling them special attacks or feats or daily powers or whatever. You, too, at every level of challenge, should be thinking what makes this creature's fight different. A guy with a sword, even the most magical sword, shouldn't be able to bring a dinosaur down even after hacking at its left toe for ten minutes. Make them do something dramatic for the kill, use the climbing-on rules, run and jump into its open mouth. Treat the combat as a living riddle, not an exercise in subtraction, and your players will feel they're working for the kill - not just adding escalation factors.

Okay. My campaign begins again on Saturday (and then immediately goes on hiatus for three weeks as I gallivant about stateside.) I doubt any dinosaurs will come up, but you never know.

Making The Prehistoric Scene

I'm working on the sixth and final main wilderness encounter table for "savage" environments in the spirit of Lost World pulp tales. Naturally, it takes me back to the days when dinosaurs and Pleistocene megafauna were all I could think about, thanks to their three-dimensional embodiment as MPC toys ...

Origin of my horned gopher obsession.

and Aurora "Prehistoric Scenes" models.

Those were the two-fisted days when dinosaurs dragged tail and wouldn't be caught dead in feathers. The Aurora models already strained credibility with the prehistoric woman in a rawhide Mary Quant number menaced by a two-headed snake. On top of that, their bases fitted together to create a young-earth Flintstone monster zoo where saber-toothed tigers rubbed shoulders with Styracosaurus.

There were fourteen models and I owned eleven. Haven't thought about them in decades, but memories of the plastic parts and the jigsaw of the bases leapt forth from my memory with unseemly speed. Here's a nostalgia site with some much better paint jobs than I could manage ...

Anyway, for gaming purposes there only need to be 8 dinosaurs, right? For medieval sword-slingers who've stumbled on the Valley of the Lost the distinction between a Rhamphorhynchus and a Lambeosaurus doesn't bear mentioning.We don't need to pad things out the way Gary padded the Monster Manual and MM2. Add to the canon laid down in the 50's, Spielberg's own raptor-types for a low-to-mid-level challenge. The crested guys are more for random prey than any significant danger.

 (some silhouettes by Telecanter, others by me, others from the Phylopic archive.)