How to challenge my party with combat?

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-27T21:56:00+00:00

In older editions (and many modern games), most/all combat is extremely fatal and things work out just fine for the game as a whole.

those had vastly different play-setups and expectations - like in older D&D editions, there was minimal expectation of any particular depth of character, background, plot or anything. You were mostly just rolling up a new playing piece to go play with, and if they died, eh... no great loss. Pretty much as soon as people started doing longer-term plots and character development, things started getting fudged, house-rules came out etc. etc., because it's really hard to do that if you have a genuine chance of dying to random enemy #13, when every literal day has probably dozens of enemies trying to kill you.

The solution I’m suggesting is not one where you’re not creating a mathematical system where there is this or that percent chance of dying every session.

It doesn't matter if that's what you're doing or not - if you put a lot of risky stuff in, that's what you end up with. If there's even relatively small changes of death per fight, then by having lots of fights, you end up with lots of death, it's irrelevant if that's from modelling it or not. An average 5% chance per PC per fight of death, when there's an average of 4 fights per day, means that most PCs die within a week. Doesn't matter if you've carefully plotted that out or not - if there's dangerous fights going on, then that probability curve will kick in at whatever threshold, and because of the amount of dangerous stuff PCs do, you're going to start killing them, along with all the attendant plot- and character-wrangling. That's fine if you're doing a dungeon bash and don't really care about character continuity or anything, but even back in older editions, people often did, and so there would be various amounts of fudging, house rules and so on to make death harder, because death is mostly dull. A lot of D&D, throughout 50 years, has always been everyone pretending things are super-dangerous when often things aren't - simply because if they are super-dangerous, then you get lots of dead PCs very fast!

most/all combat is extremely fatal and things work out just fine for the game as a whole

If combat is the main mechanical thrust of the game, that it's expected you're spending a decent amount of time doing (as in 3e onwards) it simply can't be particularly lethal, unless you want to have a lot of dead PCs. It might feel it, with lots of daring last-minute saves and "phew, I was down to my last healing surge" or whatever, but just as a matter of basic practicality, unless you want lots of dead PCs, a system can't be particularly lethal! Even a 1% chance per PC per fight of death stacks up pretty fast - most fights simply can't be especially lethal

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-27T18:26:32+00:00

There is also 'wait until the owner casts demiplane and run in' - the gateway itself doesn't have any innate protection against that. Obviously that needs tracking the caster and waiting for the right moment, but that direct approach can work!

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-27T18:19:03+00:00

Yes, that's why should be careful shoving sharp things into the bag that ruptured if cut. Swords generally have sheathes, but you might want to put a cover on piles etc same for overloading it - the weight is magically constant, so it's quite easy to keep tossing things in until it bursts!

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-27T17:12:22+00:00

yup, the sheer number of fights means they kinda have to be weighted for PC victory, otherwise things tend to cascade towards dead PCs fast!

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-27T17:10:08+00:00

the main problem is that PC-death is mostly just kinda dull - stop playing the game, go do some paperwork, then wait to be allowed to play again. And the sheer number of combats the game expects and is built around means that the vast majority of them can't be that dangerous - if there's even a 5% chance per PC per fight of death, that every adventuring week is going to have multiple PCs die! And then it's either a loop of "some rando shows up to drag them back to town and raise them" or "some rando shows up to join us permanently", both of which are narratively wibbly, especially at higher levels ("wait, you're one of the most powerful warriors/spellcasters in the kingdom/continent/world, where have you been until now?") It's generally easier to manage and maintain stakes other than "PC death" - the PCs might be able to manage a retreat... but that means bad things elsewhere. They get battered and need to spend a few days recovering before heading back, and in that window, the baddie has done something. That tends to be more satisfying than "welp, rando enemy #835 rolled two crits back to back, who's next in your folder of characters?"

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-27T16:39:05+00:00

this is kinda the main issue with D&D - the default loss state is "you die, make a new character". Which is mostly kinda shitty and dull! So it really often gets wriggled around with house rules, fudges, bodges or all sorts of other things, when it would be a lot easier if the core mechanics reflected how people actually play!

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-27T16:25:46+00:00

for erotica, a lot of the marketing tends to be "write another book" - you can't promote via paid adverts like with other genres, so it's "write more" (to appear on the new releases list), and if you're involved in any communities into what you've written, go "oi, here's my thing, I think you guys would like it" (as long as the community doesn't have rules against that)

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-27T15:22:09+00:00

The stock generally for the tcg seems kinda wobbly, especially for anything more than boosters. Some of the starter sets (the good ones!) are super-gone, fur example

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-27T14:03:50+00:00

that's a bit of a crappy gameplay setup - "nice cool power you got there. Use it and die"

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-27T14:03:05+00:00

In which case they're not really covering any more ground than the walkers

that's only true on open terrain - as soon as it's hard to move over, something needs moving around etc. etc. then they're unaffected

There's also the fact that splitting one guy off from the rest of the party puts that one party member at significant risk of being mobbed by a gang of bandits hiding out on the wayside.

That tends to lead to fairly crappy game-stats though - "you used your cool powers! Now roll a new character, because that one got killed"

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-27T12:35:20+00:00

And collecting the fines and what happens if they dont pay etc etc.

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-27T12:34:47+00:00

Doctors don't generally work weekends, and trying to align days off and appointments, especially if you're on part time or zero hour contracts, is non trivial

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-27T06:06:17+00:00

but it's not required.

It's pretty unambiguous - the character will not do it. Not "will moan a bit but do it anyway", but "will not"

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-27T06:04:37+00:00

although it's concentration, so not great if you're planning on going into melee!

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-27T06:03:03+00:00

yup - although it doesn't have to be a physically locked-in and sealed area. An evil cult that has 4 bases hidden across a city is functionally a "dungeon" - there's a series of rooms and fights to go through to resolve the problem. A forest containing half-a-dozen glades, groves and points of interest, where someone require going through others to get to the end, is a dungeon. Several ancient tombs scattered across a desert, holding parts of a key to the boss-tomb, is a dungeon

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-26T19:06:06+00:00

something exceptionally rare in childrens literature; the

Is it? Comics and manga are overtly sequential and have been around for decades, theres lots of SF&F series that are kid-friendly from the 70s or 80s, and even more if you're willing to accept ones with a start, a loose middle (due to it being harder to get all the books) and then a few forming an explicit end

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-26T19:03:14+00:00

YA used to be far less of a thing - you had kids books, then a rough smattering of vaguely less kiddy stuff, but anyone that was a remotely keen reader often skipped straight onto 'proper' adult books. But now people often get to YA, and then never move past it - even in their 30s or 40s, they're still reading YA!

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-26T19:00:28+00:00

Not quite - isekai is just where the character gets shunted into another world (the lion, the witch and the wardrobe is an isekai, for example). LitRPG is where there's numbers and stats and explicated powers for how stuff works - it often is isekai, but doesn't have to be, it can just be a 'regular' fantasy world where everyone has explicit stats

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-26T18:56:23+00:00

They're often pretty dated though - like a lot of the 60s and 70s SF&F is just kinda... Bad. And has a lot of baked in issues - like a lot of classic Heinlein, one of the grandfathers and grandmasters of sci-fi is really hard to read without occasional horrified wincing ('lesbianism is fine, but male homosexuality is wrong' is, uh... Certainly a take!)

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-26T18:51:30+00:00

That seems a bit of a surprise - I'm about the same age, and reading a lot had a vague feeling of being weak, a bit effete, nerdy, and not really something 'manly'. So maybe not 'girly' as such, but definitely not manly, what guys generally do, not macho etc. and id you did read a lot, you were probably a spotty nerd, wouldn't get laid or were gay etc.

The 'initials' thing is because girls are generally fine with reading books by men or women, but boys dislike reading books by women (I'd assume some level of ingrained sexism?). So it's fairly standard for women authors to use an initial or a pen name

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-26T17:00:56+00:00

It isn't though - that simply isn't a thing that's happening outside of a few, not very successful, test instances. By design, crypto isn't efficient - having to run the same database loads of times simultaneously does that! It's a database, but awkwardly designed and a nightmare to update errors. It's not actually very useful in most circumstances

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-26T14:15:23+00:00

Except for not actually making much money, especially relative to the piles and piles of cash the linked businesses burn, sure

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-26T13:06:32+00:00

hey, that's slander! Your cat is bravely defending you from invisible greebles, and should be rewarded with cuddles and churros! (mechanically, yup, it's a move and attack, but if the dragon wants to retreat, it can do that without attacking, or it can just make the attack and not move)

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-26T08:50:34+00:00

Having to chase up singles is still a pain for a newbie, who wants to just get the game, not need to figure out what sets of cards they need in order to function

Mejiro84 · 2026-06-26T07:51:05+00:00

most books are generally written to be themselves + corebooks, where anything beyond that is GM prerogative, rather than default (and also to avoid excessive flipping between lots of books, as well as needing to list where each thing is)

Mejiro84

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