One of the things that makes combat spark important to me is its relevance to my game, and keeping me interested; my group has ranged from just interested in action to “I can has fight now pls?” Some fights have gone really well (the dream battle, that one time where I ditched initiative and focused entirely on visual spectacle), and others—well, haven’t. The most recent, and the one that got me onto my current hiatus, was such a bad case of that that after the opening I dropped the thing entirely, because it just wasn’t working.
So what went wrong?
The premise was simple: group vs. predatory rather sadistic shapeshifter created to push all sorts of buttons on one of the new PCs. The first goal, at least, he succeeded in quite admirably—when the PC was present, which presented its own set of problems due to the player acquiring a mess of last-minute scheduling complications. The rest… not so much. I’d used a few of the tricks I already knew; I only had one allied NPC present, his tactics were mostly of the hit and run persuasion. But I just couldn’t get a decent spark out of him.
Part of it, I think, was the mechanics. I’ve pointed out that combat spark requirements include a full knowledge of the character’s capabilities, so as to get through what the character’s doing quickly and spend a bit more time figuring out how to jazz it up without going overkill. To say that I didn’t have one was a massive understatement. My main reason for creating the guy was to cover a range of opponents I rarely used—which unfortunately meant ‘had never PC’d and thus wasn’t as good with the mechanics on’. I knew two or three abilities he had, one of which served entirely to give him a creepy entrance (to the character I was messing with, at any rate) and one of which I failed to execute correctly when he used it. The rest was hastily paging through the book trying to figure out what to have him do to pose a threat to the highly experienced group.
Moreover, he suffered in comparison to the prior opponents. That whole month, I think, was a chain of people suffering in comparison to the ones who came before them, as I was dropping in power and affability in the three social-oriented encounters with overpowered opponents that had come before this one and, since it was meant to be a combat encounter, was trying to balance “group can handle him” with “can take on the group and make it interesting”.
The setting was kind of generic snowy forest as well, further harming matters; for a good portion of what would have been the full conflict had the group not come up with an alternate way out, nobody was entirely sure where much of anyone was. Between the difficulty in figuring out who was where, and the sameness of the landscape, it was rather hard for anyone to get the idea for something particularly sparky.
Either way, I know for next time; it won’t happen again.
