So today is (likely) B's Game, meaning that there's been one episode of the same, a Chessenta game, and an Eberron Game since the last time I posted on tabletop. Also a session of mine. And yet, my thoughts on such are all that is scattered and lame. But.
A thing to which I wish to give more thought-- probably aided by intense scrutiny of the monster manuals-- is keeping controllers alive. In my last game, I wound up doubling an encounter because (though they had very good plot reasons to do so), the players pretty much alpha struck the Controller before she could do any of the cool things she could have done to wreck them. On the one hand, this is good-- do the players really need to know how awful the controller's stuff is? This being something that my players ran into in their very first encounter, when they let the Goblin Hexer hang out and do horrible things to them through its allies. Alpha striking necromancers = absolutely the right thing to do.
On the other hand, there's something... I dunno, weak? About the alpha strike being too easy to pull off. There's a balance there, or a right set of additional baddies that are just nasty enough to protect the Controller by drawing off aggro, without just rolling the party hard. As last weekend's LARP reminded me-- if the GM wants dead players, they can always have them. It's not that hard. What's hard is live PCs who feel like they were actually at risk of dying horribly.
Anyway, it's a lowby something to think about, but something I am thinking about RightNowThisMinute.
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I'd be interested to see an instant replay of the fight. I'm curious as to whether it's purely player tactics that changed how that went, or if room construction and positioning of the controller's allies made things work out that way.
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