Gent's GM Application

bladeandbow.boards.net/thread/4397/1-2-3-4-5?page=1&scrollTo=21720

Verdict: Fail

I will agree with NOTnpc here. Adding more creatures is generally a terrible way to add difficulty to an encounter for a variety of reasons. The biggest is that it's not very interesting as a player to slog through an encounter against 23 very weak enemies. This compound with that when you have 20 individual enemies the players are not playing most of the game, you're spending half the game moving your characters around and they're just waiting. Also, this is a game of random numbers, but if your're rolling 23 turns the chance of criticals is no longer a rare thing, which depending on the enemies can be really bad.

As far as other option, use few amounts of slightly more powerful enemies, or introduce other elements that make the encounter hard without changing the actual difficulty of the enemies. Terrain can be a good way to do this, difficult terrain can be a really good way to do this. Different elevations at lower levels can be a huge deal, less so at higher levels as people get ways to fly.

Also there were a few hiccups with system knowledge in there, in particular consistently not understanding fighting defensively and total defense. These are fairly basic thing from the combat game masters section in the books/srds, if you have time go read and refresh yourself on these.

Also, as NOTnpc said the story here was... very lax and non-engaging. This is fine after you pass your tests, but the tests are suppose to be you putting you best foot forward, have some non-combat encounters in there, at least try and get the players a little deeper engaged into the game then, "kill the goblins." Combat is not the only thing in these games, and we want to see that you as a gm are capable of running more then simple combats.