Hello, fellow role players! This week, I want to talk a little bit about balancing encounters for dungeon crawls, or rather, not balancing them at all. This week’s post is going to be a little different, as I’ll be talking specifically about games like Dungeons & Dragons and its children, since I find narrative games have fewer problems with difficulty curves.

So if testing your players’ resolve sounds like fun, read on!

Story Time, Where-In I Play a Video Game

Several years ago, Bethesda released The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim; a sprawling, open-world RPG promising hundreds of hours of adventure. It was a phenomenal game, held back a bit by bugs and, I think, a boring difficulty curve. You see, Skyrim used the concept of dynamic balancing — based on your character’s level — to determine which foes you would face during your quest. The idea behind this seems sound; if the player is always encountering things around their level, then the game will feel fair, but the player won’t ever hit a wall and be unable to proceed. However, this idea can fall down pretty quickly, which I found out the very first time I played the game.

For those unfamiliar with the Skyrim, you play the Dragonborn; a prophesied hero who can understand and command the language of dragons. Over the course of the game, you visit various locations and grow your draconic vocabulary, which translates to powerful abilities you can use in the game. Since Skyrim is an open-world, there’s no set order in which you accomplish things, so even though the game is suggesting a direction, you can go off-script and just walk to the nearest mountain or cave or whatever. This is precisely what I did after I got out of the tutorial area — I made a hard left instead of following the given path, and quickly found myself high in the mountains at some kind of shrine, being attacked by a few wolves.

After dispatching the wolves, I approached the shrine and was given my first draconic word, hours before the game would actually allow me to use it. Cool! In one way, the emergent gameplay totally worked here; I explored a bit, and was rewarded. On the other hand, it was kind of an anti-climax, because I didn’t have to fight especially hard for what was obviously something special, and I couldn’t use the reward I had “earned.” The game was doing its job though — it had read my level (and some other criteria, no doubt), and put an “appropriate” challenge in my way. In the process, it had taken something special and made it mundane, or worse, boring.

“So what does this have to do with game mastering a pen-and-paper RPG?”, you might ask. Well, as our hobby has grown and evolved, encounter balance has become something many games prioritize, especially more complex games like Dungeons & Dragons or Legend of the Five Rings. These games have systems for determining what kind of challenge is appropriate for a group of adventurers of any given level.

Here’s the thing — those systems of kind of crap, and I think they can suck the fun out of your game. If your players know they can overcome every challenge they face, they aren’t incentivized to be clever, or diplomatic, or scared, which turns the game into a one-note murder-hobo parade. If that’s what you’re after, then by all means, proceed! But if you’re looking for something more interesting, I suggest you toss the idea of “encounter balance” out the window, and embrace the “unfairness” of the game.

Let me put on my Old Grognard Pants of Reminiscing +1, and we’ll continue.

Back in My Day

Full disclosure: I’m not really old enough to be a grognard. I started playing RPGs with D&D 2nd Edition, but I have been playing long enough to witness the rise of game balance as a priority. When I started gaming, D&D used a combination of hit-dice (the number of dice you rolled to generate an enemy’s hit points) and experience reward (the number of experience points you got for killing a creature) to communicate the challenge of any given enemy to the game master. When designing an encounter, you (the GM) were encouraged to look at these two numbers, along with whatever else might be relevant, and decide if the party could handle the challenge. The system was a little convoluted, and it was hard to design “fair” encounters which would challenge the players, but still give them a chance of success.

In third edition D&D, we got the Challenge Rating (CR), which was supposed to communicate how many encounters a party of X level could deal with before exhausting their resources.

A party of 5 players at level 9 should be able to face 5 challenges of rating 9 in a day.

All the game masters I knew (including myself) rejoiced. Finally, we would have a simple way to gauge the difficulty of our games. Except, it didn’t work like that, because D&D is a complex game, with multiple interlocking systems, filled with emergent gameplay possibilities. While the CR acted as a general guideline, it couldn’t account for how spells, character abilities, and synergies between creatures or character classes would affect an encounter. Sure, maybe a goblin shaman was a CR 1, but if he had access to Summon Monster, and just dropped an angry grizzly bear into the fight, all of that carefully crafted “balance” just went out the window.

This is a problem which has bedeviled the subsequent editions of D&D, and almost every other game which adopts a similar system. In the years since I started playing, I’ve come to realize that the old-school games had the right idea when it came to creating challenges.

No School Like the Old School

When it was first written, D&D didn’t care about balance one bit. If you want an example of that, just take a look at the classic Keep on the Borderlands adventure. This module is written for 1st level characters, and it features a hulking ogre right at the “front door” of the dungeon. If the party isn’t careful, their first foray into the Caves of Chaos will end very quickly and painfully.

Now of course, old-school games relished in the idea of killing characters. This was before the days of “story-focused” gaming, when the GM was more antagonistic towards the players, and each side was often actively attempting to “beat” the other. More-over, since life was so cheap, the “character” didn’t really emerge until they’d survived for a while. After all, who cares about the thief’s tragic backstory if he’s just going to get mauled by wolves the first time he leaves town.

While I don’t advocate going back to the “me vs them” mentality which often permeated the old adventures, I do think these older games have the right idea when it comes to balancing encounters. That is, to not balance them at all.

These days, we’ve got Old-School-Renaissance (OSR) games embracing these ideas, and flying in the face of systems like the challenge rating. Dungeon Crawl Classics, a game I adore, is one of these games. Other systems like Lamentation of the Flame Princess and Torchbearer do the same thing.

The first time I ran a Torchbearer session, I sent the party to the Keep on the Borderlands. They barely survived their encounter with the ogre, and for the rest of the adventure they were much more cautious and deliberate. They would sneak, and plan ambushes. If they thought an enemy was too tough, they’d try to negotiate with the creature. When things got too hot, they’d retreat to camp. This was the first time I’d been part of a dungeon crawl group who tried to think and plan their way through a dungeon, rather than just kicking in every door and murdering whatever was behind it. It was refreshing.

It All Comes Around

So how do we bring these lessons into a modern, complex game like D&D 5th edition? Easy — design every encounter to be deadly and difficult, and then warn the players. Tell them what you’re doing, and let them know that just because the system says an encounter is deadly, doesn’t mean it actually will be. Some of your encounters will be a breeze, and others will be a near (or actual) total-party-kill. If your players are on board, they’ll start to learn their limitations, and the group will be looking for ways to gain advantages or bypass threats which they think are too much for them.

Even better — when they get beat by a foe, they’ll remember, and if they survive, probably want to take revenge. Perfect! You’ve just created a memorable villain for them to revisit.

“But Kevin, how do I know if my encounter is technically hard?” I hear you ask. Lucky for you, the internet has you covered! For D&D 5e, there’s the amazing Kobold Fight Club. If you’re running an older version of D&D, or Pathfinder, check out donjon. If you’re playing something else, then I suggest you hit up Google. I’m sure there’s either a generator, or advice, somewhere out there!

If you’re worried about how this sort of encounter design plays out, be sure to checkout the RollPlay West Marches and Court of Swords videos. Both Adam Koebel and Steven Lumpkin favor dynamic instead of balanced encounters, and I think the results speak for themselves.

A Note About Rewards in D&D

Now, there is something to consider with D&D specifically; it wants players to kill everything. At it’s core, the system only rewards a character for killing a creature — monsters are essentially giant bags of experience to be emptied — and you’ll have to take that into account. There are ways around this; you can reward XP at milestones, or use some other means of determining experience. Or, you can play D&D with the core reward mechanic in place, and prepare the players by telling they might not level as quickly.

A Note On Character Balance

I’ve used the term “balance” a lot here, and I want to clarify I’m only speaking of encounter balance, not character balance. The first is the purview of the GM; designing challenges and encounters which the players engage with. The second is inherit to the design of the system; are the different character options all more-or-less equally optimal, and do they all scale in a way which maintains that equilibrium? Encounter balance is fairly easy to deal with (by not trying to deal with it at all). Character balance is harder, as any single change to a character option could have cause a butterfly effect with the rest of the game. This is why I tend to disallow so-called “splat books” in games where this could be an issue. I’m looking at you, Pathfinder.