Natural 7

Mythic Monsters

Last week I came across Rotten Pulp's post about High-Impact Enemies in Mythic Bastionland. In this post, I'll offer some commentary on Rotten Pulp's ideas as well as my own suggestions for creating mythical encounters in Mythic Bastionland.

Here's why my commentary may be valuable:

If you'd like to read more of my thoughts about Mythic Bastionland, you can find them in these posts:

This is a very long post. Here is a quick table of contents:

From now on, Mythic Bastionland has been abbreviated to MB in this post.

Combat Summary

Your hit points are a combination of your Vigour and Guard. Guard is like a shield that refreshes each combat. Vigour is like the amount of blood left in your body. Damage is dealt to Guard first, then Vigour. If you take half or more of your current Vigour in a single attack, then you are Mortally Wounded, aka out of the fight.

On any given MB turn, you have a couple tactical choices:

When you attack something, you build a dice pool with your weapons. The highest number rolled in the pool is your damage, and any other die that rolled 4+ is a Gambit.

Gambits let you do something tactical. There are four Gambits you might use frequently:

If you have read my post on the Best Status Condition, you'll have an idea of how valuable Bolster is.

Feats are special powers that Knights can invoke. You have three of them:

Running away might mean moving before you attack, using the Move Gambit to move after you attack, surrendering, fleeing as a group, or attempting to parlay with your opponents. Ending a fight like this happens more often in Winter, and less often when you have good gear.

Chris' Perspective

Chris McDowall has written about balancing combat in MB before. In this post he talks about things like Quick-Decisive Combat, Gambit Stacking Stun-Locks, and Gambit Economy.

Quick-Decisive Combat

We want combat to be "fast and brutal". Sometimes we are so well-prepared that we crush all opposition. This can happen on both sides in MB.

Usually going first in initiative is a good way for your side to win a fight quickly. Since Knights (almost) always go first in combat, that means they can pile on damage immediately. If we have a good opening strategy, then we might win the fight right from the get go.

You can deal an enormous amount of damage on the first turn if everyone attacks the same target and uses all Gambits for Bolster. If a few people (or everyone) Smite too, then the chances that target gets a turn drop drastically.

Even adding a single Knight to a party of four can increase the threat-level of that group astronomically. One more person means at least one more dice and one more Feat.

Chris suggests a change to the initiative system: Uncertain Initiative that could solve the problem of turn 1 cataclysms wreaked by Knights. If Knights don't always go first, then they can't always knock an opponent out before the game begins.

Gambit Stacking Stun-Locks

When multiple people attack the same target, they roll a larger dice pool for damage. This is because 2+2=4, etc. With a larger dice pool your chance of getting Gambits increases. If the dice you roll can get 8+, then you get to perform Strong Gambits which automatically succeed.

Think about it like this: if I rolled 4d12 against a single target, then I'm likely to get at least one 8+ result. That means that target is getting Strong Impaired before they've even had a turn. That really sucks if they don't have more than one type of attack.

Over time, Knights might get Strong Gambits frequently against the same enemy. If they continuously use something like a Strong Impair, that enemy will rarely get to do their most efficient attack each round.

But, you say, what if my Knights are only rolling d6s in their damage pool (dual wielding Shortswords, for example), then they can't get Strong Gambits, right?

Correct.

However, someone rolling smaller dice can still get normal Gambits, and if they use their Feat to Focus for +1 Gambit, that could result in 3+ Gambits on a single target. If all the Gambits are used to Impair the target, then surely they will become Impaired eventually. Over time this can have a similar effect to sequential Strong Gambits.

Chris suggests a few changes to lessen the Stun-Lock trend:

These both help prevent Impairing the octopus 8 times, which is nice, but it also has an unfortunate side effect.

The more you discourage the usage of non-Bolster Gambits, the more players will want to use Bolster instead.

Bolster is already the best Gambit in the game, I don't think it needs to get any better than it already is.

A final suggestion from Chris is called Secondary Attacks. Some big enemies have backup attacks that can be used when their primary one is Impaired. You can consider giving a d8 slam to enemies you lack an alternative.

I like this suggestion. It's clean, it makes sense narratively, and still encourages players to Impair dangerous attacks.

Gambit Economy

If it hasn't already been made clear: more players = more Gambits. Your expected outcome gets better when you have more Knights, plain and simple.

MB, I believe, is best for 3-4 player groups. I have frequently played with (far) larger groups. The most people ever sitting at a table was like 10, and we had a total of 14 Knights played across those people. That's a ton of Gambits to be throwing around.

It's hard to find a good solution to having lots of players other than giving your sessions a player cap. Even then, you might still require some combat tweaking to get the right tone for your encounters.

This is addressed by Chris with all his other suggestions, but is further called out in Rotten Pulp's article.

Rotten Pulp's Perspective

First off, if you haven't read Rotten Pulp's article, you should probably do that first. It's well-written and there's some golden advice in there.

"In a mythical setting like this, you want some entities that feel seriously powerful, mythic threats that can single-handedly destroy an entire legion on their own. Sadly, some Myths that seem like they should deliver that feeling don't measure up."

In the article there are 3 house rule suggestions. I'll recount them, comment on them, then give my own suggestions and house rules. The intention of these house rules is to help you develop a wide range of threats that you can then foreshadow the powers of so that players can make informed decisions.

House Rule 1: Giant Creatures Count as Warbands

As noted, this is basically the Mausritter solution to fighting big monsters.

Warband-scale enemies can only be damaged by large-scale attacks. This means Knights can hurt them by either:

  1. Using Smite for AoE (and then risking a VIG Save), or
  2. Commanding a Warband of their own

Option 1 is fine, but not my preference. It sufficiently fits the theme of the game: Imagine a Knight stabbing his sword into the outstretched claw of a Dragon, but it can penalize a player for just trying to interact with the situation presented by the GM.

Think about it this way: if you get Fatigued and there are no Warbands available to command, you get stuck twiddling your thumbs while everyone else gets to play the game. I sure hope you don't die during that time either, seeing as you can't Deny while Fatigued.

This has happened to me before and it sucks. There wasn't anything else to do in the scene other than fight the big bad, and I couldn't do that because I had 0 VIG and auto-Fatigued when I attacked. Was it really a skill-issue?

So long as the fight is quick, I don't mind needing to Smite for damage.

Option 2 is great! I love commanding Warbands and it gives players a reason to go out and seek allies across the Realm. Likewise, knowing ahead of time lets players do some military planning about which siege weapons or warbands to bring.

Pro Tip: Seed rumors about special Warbands your players might get to recruit if they explore dangerous locations or interact with interesting NPCs. Going on a quest to recruit the Fallen Seekers of Calorel is incredibly epic.

House Rule 2: Desperate Gambits

Okay, this next part is actually quoted verbatim:

Against powerful enemies, you must pay an extra cost to use gambits other than Bolster or Move. Choose one:

  1. Sacrifice an item or ally,
  2. Lose points in a Virtue,
  3. A narrative consequence of similar weight

End quote.

Okay, here's a unique solution to the Gambit Stun-Lock. It keeps the possibility of hurling potentially necessary (Strong) Impairs on the big bad, and it allows you to add narrative weight to a combat scene.

Option 1 is good if you have a lot of items/allies you are willing to sacrifice. I don't know many people who have those though, so that's probably something to choose when you really need a Strong Impair to work.

Option 2 is great all the time. More ways for players to temporarily reduce their Virtues is perfect for MB, especially with how rare it is to reduce your Spirit. I would probably choose this option whenever I was in doubt of what to do.

In Rotten Pulp's article, their example suggests losing d8 VIG to try and Impair a Wyvern's jaws. Frankly, that's just not a worthwhile trade. You would risk putting yourself at 0 VIG just to prevent maybe taking VIG damage on the Wyvern's turn? I definitely don't think the cost should be that high.

If you want a hint of randomness, reduce the Virtue by a d2. If the player describes the action in really risky way, you can make it a d4.

My suggestion is to make the player lose 1 point in a Virtue of their choice each time. It'll feel cheap at first, but players will quickly realize the consequences of their actions.

Option 3 is generically useful. This allows players to stage epic narrative scenes in the middle of a climactic battle with the big bad. This might feel like you chose Option 1, but with more flexibility in the price you pay. I like it!

Oh, you rolled a Strong Gambit? How about you use that to Strong Stop the enemy by pinning both your hands and theirs with an iron spike?

Now, this doesn't necessarily encourage non-Bolster Gambits, but it isn't as discouraging as disallowing Gambit Stacking or making it so monsters get to Save against Strong Gambits.

This also works well with giving monsters Secondary Attacks because even if the Evil Knight is pinned to a wall he can still use an evil glare (d8, damages SPI on Wound) on the person who pinned him.

House Rule 3: Boosting Solo Enemy Stats

Some enemies really don't have enough Vigour and Guard to stay alive. It's true. Likewise, their damage output can sometimes feel meager in comparison to Knights.

The article provides some rules of thumb which I'll go over and some example statblocks for Minor, Moderate, and Major threat enemies. I recommend the example statblocks.

More Survivability!

Rotten Pulp suggests changing the Vigour based on how many players are at the table. This makes encounters flexible!

The suggested Vigour, Guard, and Armor based on how many turns you want the enemy to last:

These numbers seem reasonable. In a 4 player game, you would have 12, 16, and 20 VIG enemies. Their guard would range from 12-16, and they wouldn't even have maximum armor (4). High guard is a downward beat for players at first, but once they get used to the new typical, it's fine.

In the games I ran and played in, we usually had 6 players. That would make the minimum VIG 18, the maximum VIG 26, and the guard between 18 and 22. Now, if you aren't using these stats for basic enemies (your roadside bandits, for example), then it's all well and good. You could apply the stats over any big bad in the book and I think be fine. However, know that if you are applying these stats across multiple enemies in a single encounter, then you will be making the combat significantly harder. For many of the omens in the book, that challenge is unnecessary. Those are OK to be fast and maybe skewed in one side's favor depending on circumstance.

Virtues Beyond 19

No enemy in MB has 20 VIG (the highest is 19) and having any score that is 20+ means that enemy can never fail a Save using that Virtue until it is reduced. If the enemy has access to Feats, that makes them pretty unfair to fight against because they can always use a given Feat without consequence. If you want your players to hate your enemies, then this is OK.

I would use the 20+ Virtue & Feat trick exceedingly sparingly. It can create severe downward beats at a table when your players realize that their enemy can always Deny, or always Focuses for a Move Gambit.

In general though, I think high VIG like this is fine. Sure, the big bad will never fail a normal Gambit Save, but you didn't want that anyway so no big deal. The players will catch on quickly, especially if you tell them above table, and can save their resources for Bolsters and/or Strong Gambits instead.

The biggest warning I can give for people who want to increase the VIG or guard of their enemies is this: The more damage they need to take in order to die, the more your players will want to be capable of dealing that much damage as quickly as possible. Your players will look for new ways to kill enemies fast. If you are someone who creates additional magic items or specialized weapons or super-cool warbands for your players, be exceedingly careful about expected damage output.

More Damage!

Like health, Rotten pulp added some conversions for increasing damage based on player count. Here are their rules of thumb:

The first bullet point is interesting. My GM had a similar problem in our 18+ month campaign where, whenever they ran a challenging combat, they wouldn't be able to break through the chain of Denies that us Knights were able to hold up against brutal attacks.

When you match player count to damage dice, it means every single person would have to Deny in order to nullify the damage dealt. This will make those single-target Heavy attacks crunch when you use them, and heavily encourage the use of Impairs on those attacks.

Note on Distance: If you think about player positioning during combats, you may decide to rule that some players are out of range to Deny for a friend. Try to foreshadow this warning if you think it might come up: If you move away right now, you won't be able to protect Syr Wick; any attacks that target them will be out of your range to deflect.

The second bullet point addresses Gambit Stun-locking again, ensuring your main enemies have a secondary and tertiary attack option when the going gets tough. As I mentioned with Chris' original solution, this is GOOD.

Blast Attacks

You should avoid adding extra dice to blast attacks. Maybe 2 or 3 is okay for really big explosions, but having more than that is generally unreasonable.

When you hit multiple people with something like 6d10 blast, it sucks. Not only is it a downward beat to hear those words coming from your GM's mouth, but it's painful to even roll the dice on the table (whether or not you speed it up by having players roll damage against themselves). You just have a feeling that someone is going to die. That feeling should only be reserved for the most dire circumstances where players expect and perhaps even intend to die for their ideals.

Why is blast so different? Blast attacks suck up Denies. People are usually focused on Denying for themselves, and might even need outside help if the dice rolled well. If there aren't enough Denies to go around, then you might end up with more than one Knight Mortally Wounded (or even dead).

Intermediate Summary

We looked at Chris McDowall's thoughts on balancing encounters, keeping Quick-Decisive Combat as the intended goal. Then we looked at Rotten Pulp's house rules. The house rules included: Giant Creatures as Warbands, Gambits with a Cost, and Boosting Enemy Stats. Of those, my favorites were Gambits with a Cost to solve problems with Gambit Stun-Lock and Boosting Enemy Stats for the solo myth monsters that you want to leave a lasting impact on the table.

I don't recommend using these rules for non-solo monsters. Manipulating the stats too much could risk drawing away from the goal of Quick-Decisive Combat, which can make your encounters a slog rather than a success. Likewise, I mentioned the potential drawbacks of modifying the base stats or rules of MB.

My Perspective

Alright, let's move on to some new stuff, shall we?

As a preface, I believe that an easy encounter is one where Knights take little to no damage to their guard. A normal encounter might Wound one or two players, but probably won't severely hurt anybody. A hard encounter might Mortally Wound one or two players. I usually assume that unlucky circumstances will result in Knights dying - something like an ill-timed Winter omen can do the trick. The constant threat of omens is usually enough to build the tension I'm looking for in a session.

I also love the encounters in the book. Most are perfect for invoking the theme of a myth, which is my end goal. However, I do agree that with more players you can run into situations that feel too easy.

I'll evaluate the following ideas:

More Monsters

There are two ways to add more monsters to an encounter:

  1. Multiply the base amount by some value, maybe 1.5x or 2x
  2. Make the base enemy a Warband

The impact of option 1 is that you can match the player action economy better. You can fight 1 to 1 or 2 to 1 instead of whatever the base value was. This is a reasonable option when your players don't have great gear, but you're worried that their ability to Deny will nullify the threat of your monsters. Think of it like giving a solo enemy a blast attack: they can hit everyone for a little bit, making it so resources are constantly expended each round until one side gives. This has the same drawbacks as increasing a solo monster's stats, because you are increasing total damage that needs to be dealt in order for the enemies to relent.

On the other hand, option 2 is about the same as making a solo enemy a warband. Instead of six cultists, you are fighting a full warband of them. This is a concept that I'll elaborate on further when we look at Omen Expansion.

The benefit of these two options is that they are more useful for non-solo enemy encounters. Their drawbacks aren't much better or worse than their solo enemy equivalents. Each have their own space at the table.

Omen Expansion

You don't have to stick with exactly what's written in the book. This is your permission to take what you're given and build something new.

When my GM ran the Lich for us the first time (we played through that myth twice over the course of the campaign), the final omen led to the situation getting much, much worse. Not only did we have a big decree hanging over our heads, but the Lich had also set up a bone fortress up in the mountains with a bunch of skeletal warbands to defend him. We ended up sieging the fortress, then challenging the Lich and a risen Knight in his throne room. The siege isn't written in the book; our GM decided to increase the tension and threat level by making a decision about what happens next in the fiction.

When I ran the Inferno for my group of players, I knew that they would have an easy time if they just fought the Flaming Serpent alone (they had also raised a Warband to help them fight it). I made a decision about what would make the fight more challenging, more tense, and I had the Serpent call forth a couple Warbands of flaming lizards from a crack in the earth. My decision worked; the lizards added an extra level of detail that made it so the party didn't just focus on the serpent and I was able to add extra damage to help match the action economy of the group.

My friends gave me good feedback after the fight. They all enjoyed the appearance of the lizards. They said it added a bit of flare to what they already had learned about the Flaming Serpent, and it made the fight's outcome less certain.

If we look at Omen 4 from one of my custom myths, the Hammer, we read:

A dry canyon marked by soldier-shaped cracks and holes. Some stoneskin soldiers remain as guards, the rest are gone to war. They defend an obsidian shield (A1, d4, unbreakable).

How might we expand this to better suit our table? I think designing a site for the canyon and its caves could be a good start. Then, when the players seek the Hammer and encounter this omen, they'll be able to explore the canyon site and find stoneskin soldiers guarding various areas (who they will probably fight).

Eventually, they might find the obsidian shield in a protected vault after some clever navigation or brutal combat. This is a surefire way to drain Knight resources and likely inflict some Wounds over time. Once Wounded, Knights will start to think twice about how they interact with future encounters. Because you aren't throwing a gajillion enemies at the players at once, combat will still feel Quick-Decisive and you'll be able to slowly imply the threat of these stoneskin soldiers.

So, when you look at an omen, and think to yourself: "Man, I wish this was a bit more imposing," consider the ways that you can expand on the provided idea. You might add a siege battle, or some supplementary warbands, or an area to navigate in order to reach the omen's actual scene. There are lots of spark tables and random lists in MB for you to pull on to inspire ideas.

Complex Situations

Consider adding details to your encounters that make fights more dynamic. Things like strange terrain (hazardous or otherwise) and landmarks (monuments, dwellings, ruins) serve as great back-drops for players to defend or interact with during a fight.

Point-Crawl Fights

You can also expand these fights over a space larger than just "the dirt pile right here". Instead you can create a point-crawl encounter like this:

Now you can have Knights and Bandits moving between the road, monolith, and dirt pile as they chase down the bandits. Maybe a Push Gambit can send a bandit sprawling into the monolith, activating its strange Seer-like power to grant everyone nearby a vision of the next omen?

Using point-crawls in encounters has worked several times for me before. My players like getting to move between zones, and it helps quickly set the scene of a fight. Usually you don't need more than three zones, that's enough for a little bit of movement at the beginning of a fight, and a little bit of movement during the fight. I recommend adding a point-crawl to a fight that you want to last a little longer, and especially for siege battles.

Example point-crawl for a siege:

Secondary Goals

Other ways to make fights challenging is to add goals other than "kill those guys before they kill you". Lots of games have tables and suggestions for these types of goals, but here are some examples:

Just suggesting these ideas to the Knights can be enough to encourage some of them to interact with the situation in exciting ways. I've used these a few times to make an encounter more dynamic. For example, adding an NPC that the Knights want to protect to a situation means more Deny's will be saved for that NPC rather than for a player. Giving additional objectives helps even out the action economy as people spend their turns doing something other than wailing on the bad guys. I recommend using this for climactic moments near the end of a myth, perhaps in conjunction to an expanded omen.

Double Damage

It's as simple as that. If you're looking for increased lethality, you could consider just doubling all damage that the enemies deal. If you choose to implement this, I would tell you players beforehand and make sure they are on board. This would heavily skew the intended danger of the game from medium to Oh-My-Gosh-We-Are-So-Dead.

What are the implications of doubling damage? Well, enemy action economy matters a lot more, because any time they attack with something like a d8 or d10, they could risk killing a character outright. One question to ask is whether Impair becomes any better, or is Bolster still the best Gambit by far. Scarier enemies warrant the desire to kill them as fast as possible (so that you can apply the Dead condition, aka the Best Condition), so I guess Bolster doesn't get any worse. Impair on the other hand lets you reduce the damage you might take from something like a d8 to a d4. A d8 doubled could kill a player outright if it rolls a 6, 7, or an 8. A d4 doubled probably won't kill anyone, but it might Wound some people with a high roll.

Wounding with a d4 is kind of silly, and getting a high number feels really good if we just double all damage. Maybe a better option would be to double damage after you apply armor? Then d4's are pretty relaxed again (Knights have between 0 and 4 armor), making Impair pretty good, and even a d8 isn't as lethal. Rolling an 8, reducing it to something like 5 or 6, then doubling it would still be likely to Wound a Knight, but probably not kill in the first round. However, we're still in pretty lethal territory since long fights will consistently dish out quite a bit of damage.

Hmm, maybe we just apply the Horn Knight's ability to players all the time? That means all VIG damage is doubled. Dice are no longer super lethal all the time, and now they are lethal after someone's guard has been reduced to 0. Bolster is still great, Impair gets better as the fight goes long (but, then again, so is Bolster). This makes the game significantly more lethal and adds a shadow of death over every fight, but it doesn't seem like a great solution if you want to have fun.

Double damage encourages players to defeat their opponents as fast as possible, as if they didn't already have a good reason to do that. There isn't anything gained other than the aforementioned shadow of death. If you're looking to just dish out more damage over time with a solo enemy, I recommend using Rotten Pulp's house rule 3 to increase the dice pool by 1 per player instead. If you're looking to dish out more damage over time with multiple enemies, consider adding more enemies at the start of the fight or over time, whichever makes more narrative sense.

Final Thoughts

We looked at Chris', Rotten Pulp's, and My thoughts on how to balance combat for large/powerful groups of Knights in Mythic Bastionland. There are a lot of OK solutions, a few GOOD ones, and a few BAD ones. Rotten Pulp gave some great suggestions that I recommend: making Gambits cost something in risky situations and increasing the base stats of solo bad guys so they leave a lasting impact on an encounter. I gave a few more suggestions that are applicable outside of just solo encounters: add more monsters and expand on omens to build complex situations.

If you made it this far, thanks for sticking around! Have a great week, and I'll talk to ya next Saturday.

Things on my radar: