He is also versatile, but his versatility is in range. Soveliss is also mobile and has higher survivability than Lidda. She doesn’t want to stay close to the enemies unless she has an ally to assist and protect her. She is short range, functioning at either melee range or a few squares for maximum effectiveness. She can dish out heavy damage as long as she’s free to decide how to engage the opponents, but if she gets pinned down or can’t act freely, she’s hamstrung. Lidda is mobile, but she only has moderate survivability. He’s extremely versatile and he functions as a firefighter, doing what needs to be done. He can also weaken the enemy and he has some capability to deal with the enemy with ranged attacks. He plays a support role, empowering members of the party. Jozan has reasonably high survivability as well, but he’s a weaker physical combatant. He wants to be near foes to bring his melee weapons to bear, he wants to take most of the hits, and he wants to control who the enemy has access to. Or various wizards.įor example, Ragnar has high survivability and is a powerful melee combatant who manages a zone of control very well. Just have a sense of the sorts of things various fighters can do. But it’s important not to be too specific about them. Having a Platonic Party (whether you name them or not) is vital to building good combat encounters, as you will see. They can be different levels, they function a little differently in different systems and editions, but they are just the idea of Adventurerness and Fighterness and Rogueness and so on. Ragnar, Jozan, Lidda, Mialee, and Soveliss represent my conceptual understanding of the “standard adventuring party.” They are the Platonic reality of D&D groups and each is a conceptual understanding of what a fighter, cleric, rogue, wizard, and ranger can do. Plus, they make great examples when you’re writing thousands of stupid words of DMing advice. I just gave them names because the “iconic character” idea was kind of neat and I wish 4E and 5E had done it. They aren’t real characters, they don’t have stats, and they don’t even need names. Ragnar, Jozan, Lidda, Mialee, and Soveliss are my Platonic Party. He’s on the list because I kind of hate Tordek, the iconic fighter. He was a cool soldier who saved a bunch of kids from a demon. Ragnar the Fighter, you might recognize from Dragon Warrior IV from the Nintendo Entertainment System. Basically, for each class, WotC created a specific character to use in art, examples, and other media. Jozan the Cleric, Lidda the Rogue, Mialee the Wizard, and Soveliss the Ranger are the iconic characters from D&D 3.5. So, let me introduce to you: Ragnar, Jozan, Lidda, Mialee, and Soveliss. We can talk about a specific chair (my awesome chair you wish you had) or we can talk about all chairs, the ideal chair, the Platonic chair. It is connected to all other chairs by it’s chairness. So, the fancy chair I’m sitting here in my dungeon office lab? It is just a specific thing that has the quality of “chairness,” whatever that might be. A thing was just a specific manifestation of the idea of a thing. Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, believed that there was a reality alongside our own where the pure, idealized concepts of things existed. At this point, I assume you either trust me or you don’t deserve my help. I’m not even going to insist that you trust me that this is relevant to combat building. So, let’s talk about Plato and Platonic Reality. But unlike the show, I am also very sweary. Frasier (the character) was a pompous jacka$% pretending he was better than everyone else, whereas I am a legitimate genius and actually am better than others. In many ways, I see myself as a younger, sexier, role-playing game oriented version of Frasier. Let’s get this over with so I can get rid of. But, let’s be clear, you are NOT welcome here. And we’re going to talk about how and why I do the things I do. So, I’m letting you into my alchemy lab and we’re going to build a couple of combat encounters. And there’s no real way to explain the alchemy without just letting you see how it’s done. Because understanding how the ingredients work is NOT alchemy.
I can tell you how to pick creatures and how to think about terrain and all that crap, but that only gets you part of the way there. But there’s only so much you can learn from theorcraft. This is where I toil, where I labor, where I create my perfect games.
I wanted to start by saying “Welcome to my Dungeon,” but I can’t.