We Send Superheroes Now

Much has been said recently about the 'Tyranny of Fun' a perceived change in Dungeons & Dragons away from challenging and engaging players to simply giving them fun and making them cool. Y’see Dungeons & Dragons used to be all about the challenge, save or die effects, fiendish traps, confusing teleporters, it was up to the players (not the characters) to find a way around these obstacles to “Huge-Pile-of-Shiney-Stuff-#17”.

However over time we started to shift away from this simple ethos of survive and get rich. First came the power inflation, arguably an attempt at first to curb the raw killing power of Original Dungeons & Dragons, but ultimately a push in the direction of PCs as heroes rather than adventurers trying to survive. The challenges ended up being there to be overcome not through ingenuity but character skills and a d20 roll.

Arguably 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons pushes this further with characters able to heal themselves to a degree and all possessing a nigh on unlimited reserve of abilities for each encounter, turning heroes into superheroes capable of taking massive punishment and surviving. Gone are the save or die effects and most of the non-combat spells, D&D is now a game about kicking ass and doing cool things.

But is this good or is it bad?

By removing much of the challenge from the standard encounter 4th ed. is unlikely to see a party wiped out by a random encounter with wandering orcs, indeed from the carefully regimented encounter structure given in the Dungeon Master’s Guide it seems that most encounters will be road bumps along the way to the final encounter, simply serving to emphasise the characters as heroes. In this regard I don’t mind it. Sure most encounters can be broken in a few turns by my current (large and very co-ordinated) party and their super-powers; its fun and I don’t see that as being in some way counter-intuitive to the whole experience.

What I would say is that sometimes the encounters could use a little back-bone. Running ‘Keep on the Shadowfell’ with a decent sized group was relatively easy, but now with out +sized group even upping the numbers of monsters doesn’t help and I’ll now need to raise the levels on everything to keep it a challenge and perhaps this is where the Tyranny of Fun might have something. With their tough characters a well drilled group such as mine (despite their relative inexperience) characters are capable of felling much more powerful foes, meaning I need to introduce more potent enemies and traps to foil them; this causes monster inflation and I end up with a 4th level party who slay vampires when they’re bored; but if I don’t introduce more potent encounters then their boredom will increase.

This is my dilemma, I like 4th ed. in theory but sometimes it’s a little too easy, I can either start having them fight vampires or level up the goblins; and who wants to fight 7th level goblins?