Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 141 - Don’t Nerf Your PCs Part 1

Episode Date: September 11, 2022

Sometimes games can get out of balance and it can feel like the PCs have all of the advantages and that's probably because they do.  GMs may be tempted to take away or reduce the effectiveness of abilities or equipment used by the PCs but I'm here to tell you there's only one good reason to do so.   #DMTips #DnD #DungeonsandDragons #Pathfinder #RPG   Resources: The stupid sacred geometry feat:  https://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/general-feats/sacred-geometry/   Great discussion thread on the topic:  https://www.enworld.org/threads/how-do-you-feel-about-pc-abilities-being-nerfed-by-the-dm.687189/   And another one:  https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/dungeons-dragons-discussion/dungeon-masters-only/43641-how-do-you-nerf-a-player-while-still-making-them

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. GMs may be tempted to reduce the strength, usability, or frequency of a certain ability, feat, equipment, class feature, or anything the PCs have access to. Or maybe they've already been using them. This is what I'm going to call nerfing, and honestly, it shouldn't be necessary at all, except in most dire of circumstances. except in most dire of circumstances. DMs and players and people thinking about becoming one or the other.

Welcome to episode 141 of the Taking20 podcast. Don't nerf your PCs unless... This week's sponsor, mattresses. I've heard in Japan you can get a mattress that's been battered and deep fried. They're called Tempuropedic mattresses. I've heard in Japan you can get a mattress that's been battered and deep fried. They're called Tempuropedic mattresses. No, Tempuropedic are not our sponsor, but I will happily whore this entire section of my podcast out to, oh I don't know, Sleep Number if they want to send me one of their beds. That's the refreshing honesty you get with this podcast. I know I have a price and there it is. I'm a whore. Wait, what am I talking about today? If you haven't left a rating or review of the podcast,

I would so greatly appreciate it if you would take a few minutes and rate or review it wherever you found me. Spotify, YouTube, Google, Apple, Podbean, wherever. The more ratings and reviews I get, the more visible the podcast is on lists, and so the more visible it is, the more likely a new player or DM will find me, which is my dream. Bring more people into this hobby. Alright, before I get started, I want to reach out to my brethren who play Pathfinder 2E. Now, the vast majority of you have not been toxic asshats about the 1D&D announcement, and to those people, thank you. Honestly, some people like 5E, some like 1D&D announcement, and to those people, thank you. Honestly, some people like 5E, some like 1D&D, some like Pathfinder 1E or 2E or Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer, World of Darkness, Blades in the Dark. I've seen online announcements for Advanced D&D 2.0 campaigns that

are running. I will always say, play what you enjoy, and if someone likes something different, who cares? I may like chocolate ice cream while you like cookies and cream, or vanilla, mint, tea-flavored, double chocolate chip caramel ribbon chocolate chip cookie dough with chocolate chips in it. Whatever. It's no skin off my nose. But I have

seen a vocal minority of Pathfinder 2E players lately just absolutely beside themselves that some of 1D&D's features that have been released in the thin sliver of viewing that we get, they sound a lot like 2e's current features. Backgrounds affecting ability scores, for example, more feats for players to customize their characters, more playable races and ancestries that used to be monsters, like orc PCs, for example. Breaking up spell lists into arcane, divine, and primal,

and now you can even critically succeed or critically fail skill checks. There's even a rumor that when combat portion of the read-ahead will be released, it's going to be very similar to 2E's three-action economy. Oh, well, they just borrowed that from Pathfinder 2E. So? Do you know how much of D&D 3.5 was borrowed into Pathfinder 1E? Like 90% of it. You don't have a high horse to sit on. Good ideas are good ideas. And if Pathfinder 2E and 1D&D wind up being very similar, that's okay. I mean, what does it matter if ideas from one bleed over to the other? If

anything, that means it'll be less difficult, for example, for one D&D player to try Pathfinder 2E and vice versa. The tabletop RPG world is big enough for good ideas to spread between game systems and for the different systems to coexist in the landscape. Anyway, please forgive me. I'm a huge proponent of being civil to each other, and it's too easy to lose that civility on the relative anonymity of the internet. Now, on to the episode. Much of the work DMs do is largely invisible to the players. I mean, don't get me wrong, the players see a lot of what goes on behind the screen. We give voice to the rest of the world.

We hand out quests. We tell the PCs what they see and hear and experience. We adjudicate rules, and we play the NPCs in combat. of the world. We hand out quests. We tell the PCs what they see and hear and experience. We adjudicate rules and we play the NPCs in combat. We make dice rolls. We also gripe about doing all the work and we complain about always being DMs and we bitch about having to improv some NPC interaction because the players swerved when they should have zigged or whatever. You know, if you go to some of the DM subreddits and discussion boards and Discord servers, some DMs really can be a miserable bunch of bastards. Don't be a miserable DM. If you're not happy as a DM, write to me. Feedback at taking20podcast.com and let's start a conversation. Maybe I can help. Maybe it'll make a great topic for a future episode. Maybe this is

the fastest I've ever derailed at the beginning of an episode, but my point I'm getting to is that there's a lot of things GMs do that you don't see. Designing towns and dungeons and quests and adventures and NPCs. Writing descriptions. Coming up with cultures. Coming up with reasons for NPCs and monsters to be at a certain location and giving them motivations. Keeping combat moving, fluid and fun, tracking hit points, changes in initiative, keeping lists of shit behind the screen just in case we need it.

Hell, right now I'm making a random ship cargo table for my pirate campaign I'm DMing. It's two pages long right now and single spaced. Somebody please stop me. And of course, scaling and balancing the game, and that's the focus of today's episode. Keeping the adventure balanced is one heck of a challenge. You want it to be challenging, but winnable. Difficult, but fun. Scaling and balancing the game is a critical part of being a DM, but the good news is that DMs have a number of buttons and levers that we can use to try to keep the game balanced. The preferred set of tools that I would recommend is adjusting the adventure itself, like within combat for example. You can adjust your monsters to be more or less powerful by giving them templates from Pathfinder like Advanced,

Abomination, Fey Touched, Eldritch, or any of a hundred others. You can also give them class levels like Bugbear. Sure, that's going to be a fun fight, but a Bugbear Barbarian level three? No, this is going to get bloody. You can even give monsters and humanoids additional abilities and feats, equipment, and even lair actions in 5e. You can even modify the monsters wholesale. Wait, you can do that? Yes, yes, you can do that, and it's fun to do. Especially against veteran players. You see a pair of greenish-brown spindly creatures lurking in the back of the cave near the lava, gnawing on bones. And the player says,

Oh, these are trolls. I know exactly what these are. They can't regenerate if they receive fire or acid damage. So I cast Grease under their feet and push them into the lava. Fight's over. Time to search the room. Meanwhile, you as a DM. The creature stands up in the lava, its brown areas of skin beginning to glow a dull orange, and it screeches at you loudly. Player. What the f***? All you did is take a troll, give it regeneration while in touch with a heat source, and made it vulnerable to cold. Bang. a completely different fight. Honestly, whenever I have a few extra minutes while prepping a session, the first thing I do is look for monsters in an encounter and decide how I want to change them. Make one of the

skeletons intelligent and it begs for its life when combat starts. Give a couple of the closets a few more hit points and give them a vomit attack and the PCs fail a con save, maybe they're, I don't know, nauseated for one round. Put the lead-charging kobold on a, shit, I don't know, a warg, a bison, a dire, fey-touched, demonic werebear that can turn back into a kobold when the moon is full, I don't know, whatever. Come up with some weird changes, even if it's just equipment. Not every goblin has wheel of short sword or horse chopper or dog slicer.

Why couldn't one have a guise arm or a punching dagger or even a crossbow? You can always add or remove creatures to an encounter as well. The adventure says 15 pirates are here, but let's make that 20. No, 25. You all have earned it. You could always scale creatures up to their more powerful versions, like ghouls become ghasts or juvenile dragons become adult dragons, treants to elder treants, for example, or vice versa to scale them down. You can make creature equipment masterwork, or damaged, rusty, and less effective. You can make monsters have more or fewer hit points, raise or lower their armor class, raise or lower DCs of their abilities.

You can always use the minion rules, see episode 45 for more on that. You can change anything and everything about the creatures in the encounter, especially if you're running a pre-made adventure. Remember, those pre-made adventures are built for your standard four-person party, and a lot of us are DMing a lot more than four people. Besides creatures, you can also adjust the environment the fight takes place in. Those fire trolls from earlier? Fighting them on a road with no heat source? Yeah, easier fight. But same fight near a lava flow? Buckle up,

somebody's gonna die. Your dungeon master's guide or core rulebook will have a lot to say about this subject. Make the terrain dynamic, the floor unstable, or any other change to the location to adjust the difficulty for one side or the other or both. Ghosts will be harder to fight in an area with difficult terrain that doesn't affect them, but it does hamper the PCs. Undead may struggle to fight in an area that's been blessed or hallowed. So these are easy common levers that we all should get used to manipulating to change combat to make it easier or harder. And the good news is that outside of combat, we have similar levers. For example, you can adjust DCs for social encounters. You can change the DCs for traps so that they can spot them and even disarm them.

You can add and remove the number of encounters between short and long rests. That fight against the lizard folk patrol, it's probably pretty easy early on in the day when everybody has all their abilities and spells, but that same fight just before they go down for a long rest may push the PCs a lot more. There's nothing wrong with any of these powerful tools at your disposal, and I would encourage all of you to practice using them to adjust an adventure on the fly. Let's get to the heart of today's topic here 10 minutes in. Some DMs will decide they're going to balance an adventure by making changes to character builds or abilities after they've been in use for a period of time. GMs may be tempted to reduce the strength, usability, or frequency of a certain

ability, feat, equipment, class feature, or anything the PCs have access to. Or maybe they've already been using them. This is what I'm going to call nerfing, and honestly, it shouldn't be necessary at all, except in most dire of circumstances. Now let me tell you what nerfing isn't. Nerfing is not banning an ancestry, race, background, equipment, feat, spell, class, whatever, before the game ever starts. There are some things that may not fit the campaign style, the setting, or genre of the game. GMs, you have every right to say any parts of a character build or equipment not allowed in your game, or you can always house rule certain changes. One that I did way back in the D&D 3.5 days was to implement a magic psionic transparency.

Rules as written, detect magic or dispel magic did not work on anything psionic in nature, and I felt that made psionics overpowered. So I changed it such that any ability that affected magic also affected psionics and vice versa. But I discussed that change in my session zero with my party and told my players about it well before the adventure began. Another example is that one of my current DM friends despises summoners in a Pathfinder 2e setting. It's another creature that he has to keep track of

on the battlefield and having a summoner ruin some of the fun for him. He let us know, so I scrapped my summoner character concept. Remember, there is a social contract to tabletop RPGs. We're all here to have fun, not just you, and we all should conduct ourselves accordingly. Another common thing that's banned or frowned upon in fantasy settings is firearms. Some GMs don't want any gunpowder in their medieval fantasy, and that's okay. Heck, the first time I ever played a Pathfinder gunslinger,

I was just one-shotting anything within 60 feet. Goblins, skeletons, sturges. I approached the GM about changing my character, and when he asked me why, I said it felt out of balance and wrong for the campaign. The melee fighter wound up just standing by me and protecting me, and the healer kept support spells up for me like bless, and it felt like a one-person campaign. The last thing I wanted to do was to turn my friends into support characters for my glory. So instead of a firearm, we gave me a light crossbow instead, and suddenly the

campaign was a lot more fun, even with those same gunslinger rules. Everyone got involved and felt like heroes. Heck, I think that character even died a few sessions later in a sewer below the town. Drowned by an Otjug, or Otju, or Ot-tai-ug, or O-chu, or... However the hell you pronounce that trash-eating monster that lives in toxic, nasty water, communicates by scent, and can beat the shit out of a second-level character. Some DMs, for example, ban the Polar Master feat in 5e, because it gives you something like 7,314 free attacks every round. In Pathfinder 1e, I don't know a single GM that allowed the Sacred Geometry feat,

and I could rant for another 20 minutes about why that feat is the dumbest idea in the history of tabletop RPGs. But I'd just say go read it for yourself. I'll include a link in the description. I'll just sum it up by saying it conflated player and character knowledge by allowing a character to do something if a player was good at math. Now, if a GM says the Aarakocra or the Undead Ancestries are not allowed in the game, there's a reason. If the GM says that the paladin

or cavalier doesn't fit with an evil campaign, that's not nerfing. Nerfing is also not DM countering the strategies of the PCs, especially if they use the same strategy over and over and over again. Word gets around. I mean, if the creatures they're fighting are intelligent or long-lived, they know that the lumbering moron in full plate is likely easier to mind control than the smart and or wise spellcaster. They know the lightly armored person with a bow can be countered by staying in melee range. If you can get within sword range of the arcane caster, it will be harder for them to fireball the NPC team into oblivion. Every single class, and most every RPG that you can name,

has some sort of counter. If you can keep the rogue in a bright spotlight and not let them flank, they can't do their great sneak attack damage. Creatures with a high spell resistance are great counters to spellcasters, such as clerics and wizards and sorcerers. Creatures with a high armor class and or high damage output can be lethal to frontline fighters. So just because the DM plays a certain NPC or group of NPCs as smart and counters the party's tactics, that's not nerfing your PC. They are role-playing the capabilities and intelligence of your opponents in a way that makes sense for things that want to survive. I mean, if you're fighting a red dragon that's 400 years old, that dragon didn't live to 400 by being stupid.

More than likely, other groups of hale and hearty adventurers have come to try to end the dragon's life before. It is thought about what combat should be and what tactics they should use, especially in their own lair. They would have prepared just in case another group of do-gooders would try to artificially shorten its life. another group of do-gooders would try to artificially shorten its life. Okay, DMs, the campaign starts. One of the PCs is a lot more powerful and capable than you expected. The encounters aren't really challenging the PCs, and one of the characters has an incredible force of personality. It just breezes through social encounters. You intended for the shifting sands of the Seleusian desert to be a real threat to the characters, maybe forcing the party to make some difficult decisions, like which one they're going to eat first.

But the ranger just laughs off the survival checks and has been able to navigate the desert following the rules as written. You may decide that the right answer is to reduce the power of player feats or class abilities, but I'm telling you that in the vast majority of cases, you really shouldn't. You should adjust your campaign to right-size the difficulty level for this group of characters. Don't change the characters themselves. If PCs feel like they're too strong and having too easy of a time of it, there's a lot of potential reasons why. A lot of RPG players are smart, good researchers, and study the rules meticulously. Going as far back in this hobby as you want to go,

you'll find players who look at character building as kind of a puzzle. How can I make the right decisions to maximize my character's ability to do X or be the type of character that I want? I want them to be great at casting spells in battle, or I want all the monsters to attack me instead of the squishier characters behind me. I want to make a gnome version of Ironheart from the MCU. Players are going to dig through all available rules and books to make the character they want to be good at the table. And that's not just okay. That's fucking great.

You want your players that are committed to their characters because it tends to make them committed to the campaign. Well-designed characters will likely be more effective in the adventure, and that's not a problem at all. I mean, as a subset of good researchers, another reason characters can be so strong is that a lot of players tend to min-max their character design. There are a lot of websites out there that have min-maxed builds for you to make the best possible character choices at every level depending on what you want to do. Mounted Cavaliers, Healing Clerics, Damage Dealing Sorcerers,

there are builds out there that can help you maximize that capability. On some of these sites, every class build is proposed and critiqued and improved, and this continues as new material comes out for various RPGs. Players will sometimes follow those builds, and let's face it, very few of us DMs are going to be able to outwit a thousand players working together to make the strongest paladin build in the game. So players will use their own knowledge and even their pre-built ideas to make really, really strong characters, and that will naturally give PCs the advantage. Another reason strong characters exist is that most RPGs are built for the players to win. It's one of the great unspoken facts of, hell, 5e, Pathfinder, Blades in the Dark,

and so many other games that the players are supposed to win. There are some exceptions, maybe Call of Cthulhu. I mean, hell, every time I've played that game, most of my characters go insane, kill themselves, or get consumed by some unspeakable horror. I talked to my GM Tom Robinson about this. It has two adventures on Pathfinder Infinite, the Hive of Corruption and Cavern of Anguish. Go buy them. They're both amazing and fun, and I've run through both of them. I talked to him about this topic, and he pointed me towards a game system I'd never heard of called Shadow of the Demon Lord. I lost myself for a couple of hours digging through that game system, and wow, it does not like characters at all. That game system is punishing, so thank you, Tom, for the idea, and thank you for the two hours of reading, and I enjoyed every second of it. For most game systems, honestly, the characters should feel like big bad heroes.

They should feel like they're better than the average person in the world because, let's face it, they are. They have higher ability scores and class levels, and of course, they're the protagonists of the story. It's good for those characters to kick ass and feel like ass kickers. They should feel like they are pushed hard but come out on top in the end. God, that sounded so dirty, but I really didn't mean it to. They're supposed to find the whatchamacallit, kill the big bad, rescue the lost whomever. Remember, you are on the same side as the players. You just happen to roleplay the antagonist to the characters so the adventure can happen. So yes, if you ever sit down at my table, you'll hear a whole lot of, ah shucks, you beat the Minotaur Lord. Here, take this awesome

loot, including that one thing your character's been looking for for three levels, but curse you, I'll get you next time. I mean, I growl a lot, but I haven't killed a PC in months. Now my character's animal companions, on the other hand, I've killed so many of them that I'm on an ASPCA watch list, so many of them that I'm on an ASPCA watch list. Or whatever the equivalent is in Faerun or Galarian. GSPCA? Gaspesa? Fuck, I'm weird. Finally, if you take abilities away from characters, the player may feel hurt or betrayed. They may lose the fun that they're having at the table, because let's face it, it's fun as shit to feel like you're the chosen one, the badass, the most awesome fighter, scout, chronomancer, whatever on the planet. But Jeremy, one or more of my players have built powerful PCs that are just rolling through my encounters like they're tissue paper.

If you do have a situation like that, then here are three tips I would offer to my beloved DMs out there. One, change the monsters and environment before you ever consider taking away or limiting abilities the PCs have. Make monsters tougher. Add more combatants to the field. Make the environment less advantageous to the PCs or more advantageous to the monsters. 2. If there are races and ancestries and weapons and feats and classes and abilities that you don't want to be part of the game or you don't feel like it fits with the game world, you are certainly within your right to do that. And you shouldn't feel bad about removing those from the game,

but tell your players about it before the first session or during session zero. Tom, the GM I mentioned earlier, is going to be running me through the Bloodlord's adventure path in 2E. He has already recommended that we pick an undead ancestry or archetype and probably steer away from gunslinger. His quote about being undead was,

If your character starts the campaign alive, they probably won't be for long. Okay, message received. I'm probably going to play a ghoul barbarian with a taste for rage. And flesh, but mostly flesh. Three. Changing abilities, feats, spells, etc. that the PCs have should only be done as a last resort. And I can think of one time when you should do it. If that ability or feat or equipment or whatever

is negatively affecting the other player's fun, absolutely you should change it. You should have a conversation with the player, talk to them why you want to remove it from the campaign. Never do it just because the PC is too strong and you need to make them weaker to balance out the adventure. All you're doing is taking fun away from the players. Now, speaking of players,

I have a couple of tips for you on this episode as well. One, if the GM says they want to talk to you about possibly changing one of your abilities, go in with an open mind. Don't immediately clam up and say, nope, you can't change it. I've already picked it. I can't hear you. Have an open and honest conversation with the GM to find out how that ability is negatively affecting the game and maybe find a different choice. I mean, you may have found that perfect choice for the character, but listen to the DM and work in an alternate choice if you can. And two, if it's in the spirit of game balance,

or if your fun is taking away from the fun of others, listen to what your DM has to say and just be nice about it, alright? For those of you who have never sat behind the screen and run a game, yes, there's a lot of moving parts to keep the game balanced. You want the players to feel like their characters are being challenged and not have the game be so easy that the players get bored or so hard that the players feel like they're going to be ground under the weight of the universe being against them. To keep that balance, monster abilities can be scaled up or down. The environment can be made more or less advantageous to the PCs to make

the adventure easier or harder. your last choice should be to take tools away from the PCs by reducing their effectiveness or potency. Likely should only do it if that ability negatively affects the other player's fun. But by taking other steps to adjust your adventure behind the screen to keep it balanced, I'm willing to bet you and your players will have fun doing it. Hey, we have a coffee! ko-fi.com slash taking20podcast. This podcast survives solely on donations by listeners like you. 100 cents out of every donated dollar goes right back to the hosting fees, software, and hardware needed to keep this podcast going. Please consider donating so I don't have to consider whoring myself out to an advertiser. By the way, don't think to consider whoring myself out to an advertiser.

By the way, don't think for a second that we're done with this whole nerfing concept because, hey, I've got some more to say about it and I hope you tune in next week to hear it. But before I go, I once again want to thank this week's sponsor, Mattresses. Mattresses are... Damn it, I can't think of a mattress joke. I tell you what, just let me sleep on it. Damn it. I can't think of a mattress joke. I tell you what, just let me sleep on it. This has been episode 141, Don't Nerf Your PCs, unless my name is Jeremy Shelley,

and I hope that your next game is your best game.