One common dilemma for many a GM is when a particular player outstrips the others in terms of combat ability by a mile. This results in lop-sided combat where some player characters are struggling to survive, while one or two are pretty much sweeping the opposition with little trouble.
So how do you deal with this sort of imbalance? If a GM escalates the difficulty, the other player characters may die due to the overpowered opponents. If he maintains the difficulty, the optimized characters will destroy any sort of tension combat could ever provide, while the un-optimized player characters find themselves with little left to do.
It’s a thorny issue. On one hand, players who optimize have every right to reap the rewards of their work to hone their characters into a razors edge. On the other, non-optimizing players end up with unfair challenges when things escalate, facing higher risks.
My personal solution to this issue is to actually split the kind of challenges that the team meets. The more combat-able characters get challenges that are adequately scaled to their abilities. Meanwhile less combat optimized player deal with other taks that could affect the outcome of the battle without necessarily fighting head on.
How do you guys handle this situation? Or do you just write it off as a fact of life and let the fittest survive?
Like Legolas and Gimli after Legolas killed the elephant-thing without even breathing hard?
I dislike big monsters, so I tend to have a lot of small monsters. The players tend to realize how fit they are and either fight several of them alone or band together against one.
I try to set it up so that different aspects of combat challenge different characters. If the melee guy is overpowered, have the most dangerous threat by standing on a rooftop with flunkies surrounding all the stairways.
We once had a fight where – and I didn’t plan it this way, but wish I did – our usually underpowered cleric really got to shine. The party was climbing down into a subway tunnel when they were attacked. The fighter was standing at the base of the ladder, so the cleric couldn’t get down. He just clung to the ladder, and flung ranged attacks down on the enemies while everyone on the ground was getting slaughtered in melee. He wasn’t optimized for combat – he just wasn’t getting hit constantly like everyone else was that fight.
Good question. For me, I think this is an issue for the players to deal with. The whole idea of adventuring in a party is to do things as a team, where each member’s strengths get used in situations that fit. As long as there are non-combat challenges for the non-combat-optimized characters there should be something for them to shine at.
What I do during chargen however is check with each player and if I think a character is not likely to survive the adventure I’ll tell them to edit. In one Wushu forum the game’s developer noted that he usually pegs combat abilities at or near the maximum for all PCs then lets the players do what they want with the rest of their points.
Kill ‘em All!
… and always have a back-up plan / escape route.
I let players decide the way in which they engage with opposition and trouble. If they fight, then the dice fall as they may and characters thrive or fail to do so as they may. If they choose to not use combat, well, other risks that way.
Typically if some PC is very good at fighting, the mere threat of force is sufficient to have most opponents co-operate, at least for a while. Enemies running away is another common phenomenon.
I tend to try to scale things to what I view the capabilities as. Encounters / battles shouldn’t be one size fits all IMO. As long as a character has SOME strengths and plays to those strengths things can work out. The problems tend to come when a player tries to play against their strengths, like having the sneaky character try to take on the enemy bruiser head to head without some kind of equalizer set up…