Do You Think Encounters Should be Difficult?

[GMMichael]

In the 2+ years of my current campaign we haven't have a single death, though we have had plenty of knockouts and times when the players know that if they were a bit slower it could have been a TPK.

You're not trying hard enough

How dangerous your combats should be depends on player preference and expectations. If your players are big on the Lord of the Rings movies (not so much the books) and Final Fantasy, then they'll expect to roll straight through everything but boss encounters. If they're Game of Thrones fans and play lots of World of Warcraft player-versus-player, they probably understand that death is always right around the corner.

Since I don't see frequent resurrection as conducive to a good storyline or informative for good player expectations, I like my fights to be infrequent and potentially lethal.

 

[steenan]

When I ran a campaign using D&D 3e, most of the encounters were in quite narrow range of difficulty. The difference between a trivial fight and a TPK was small and balancing between these extremes was exhausting. I definitely don't plan on running this kind of game again.

Currently I run a campaign using Fate system, which means that there are no accidental deaths. This allows me to use a vary wide range of difficulties. Characters get defeated, knocked out, forced to run or surrender quite often and quite often they have overwhelming victories.
Removing character death from the table gives players freedom to take risks and express their characters even when it's tactically bad idea. It also gives me freedom to stat NPCs without much thinking about balance and to push really hard when it makes sense in the fiction.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

Encounters should be as difficult, in general, as the people playing enjoy them to be. So there is no singular objective correct answer.

If you have players saying encounters are too difficult, run easier encounters for them. If you have players saying encounters are too easy, run harder encounters for them. And if you aren't getting any complaints at all, enjoy that freedom and explore its edges until you find the line for that particular group.

But keep in mind that is isn't so much about wanting no risk if a person is complaining of too high difficulty; it could be that the player wouldn't mind that level of risk for failure if the consequence of failure were not "make a new character." They might not say "this is impossible!" if the stakes on the table are something like capture or set-backs toward their goals like having to find another way to complete a task, rather than to lose meaning for the character to die.

Or, to phrase my point differently; There is a good reason why casinos provide varying minimum bet options in their games of chance, rather than insisting anyone wanting to play has to go all-or-nothing.

 

[Blue]

I have been DMing my current campaign for over 6 years. In that time the PC's have managed to hit 9th level.

On a tangent: Woo, someone else who likes longer campaigns with reasonable progression for that length! The last two campaigns I ran were 5 and 7 years respectfully.

I tend to have encounters of widely varying difficulty, from encounters that represent little threat, to encounters that should be bypassed lest the party end up in way over their heads. I expect players to learn to recognize the signs of enormous challenge and only pursue that challenge when they have a real and pressing need.

Thank you - I had forgotten about the "and sometimes you need to run" category. In my current campaign that has almost always been dragons, though now that they are tougher they did force a dragon to retreat so it's nicely turning and showing how buff they are getting.


I don't like to kill PC's. I think dead PC's are bad for the game and usually a drag on the story, as they represent the death of in game knowledge (the new character hasn't in game experienced the story), a resulting loss of continuity, the death of story threads, and the failure to get a return on the investment in characterization. I also think it's not particularly fun for the players. I do not try to kill PC's, and I generally avoid flat 'save or die' stuff. But, I agree that there has to be some stakes up before achieving anything is fun. The only thing worse than killing PC's, is a game where the player's know that the PC's have perfect plot armor.[/QUOTE]

 

[Jhaelen]

It depends a bit on the game system used and the overall atmosphere of the campaign that you want to achieve. At one end of the spectrum you have systems like Call of Cthulhu, where players are expected to try to avoid any kind of conflict and combat against cosmic horrors has a high likelihood of resulting in death. At the other end you have cinematic systems like FFG's Star Wars, where the heroes are expected to succeed almost always and deafeat typically means nothing more than a temporary setback.

My personal preference is the way encounters were supposed to be planned in D&D 3e:
Most encounters are tough, but beatable; a few are easy and a few are not meant to be beatable (or at least not by straightforward combat).

D&D 4e took a slightly different approach: simple and over-powering encounters weren't resolved by tactical combat, but through a mix of role-playing and skill-challenges.
Only the tough, sufficiently epic set-piece encounters that were important to a story were actually played out.

 

[pemerton]

Currently I run a campaign using Fate system, which means that there are no accidental deaths. This allows me to use a vary wide range of difficulties. Characters get defeated, knocked out, forced to run or surrender quite often and quite often they have overwhelming victories.

I'm running four games at the moment: 30th level default 4e; 1st level 4e Dark Sun; Marvel Heroic RP with some X-Men and War Machine; and Burning Wheel.

The high level 4e game lets me design encounters basically as crazy as I like - PCs at that level are virtually unkillable, and the stakes are "high cosmic". The 1st level game, by contrast, involves squishy PCs (a rogue, a monk, a bard, a barbarian - plus a (non-squishy) battlemind) and I haven't pushed too hard so far.

It's pretty hard to kill PCs in MHRP, though not impossible, and Nighcrawler currently has d10 Mental trauma (an attempt to heal it only made it worse). But so far the PCs have only lost one encounter (which I ended with a 2d12 Doom Pool spend when Titanium Man was winning against War Machine).

BW is the most "gritty" of the four games (by quite a margin). The system is set up so that the PCs lose quite often. The main PC, a wizard, was captured at the end of a session a couple of months ago and (at the start of the next session) regained consciousness inside an iron maiden. After breaking his way out and then reaching a mutual accommodation with the death cultists who had captured him, he tried to read a mummy's aura with the result that he was inflicted with mummy rot. He then was able to meet a holy man who healed him, but the cathedral then turned into a a bit of a bloodbath: the PC's demon-possessed brother arrived on the scene, inflicting a near-fatal wound on the abbot; the PC then locked the brother down with successful grappling; but then another PC, sworn to kill the brother, turned up on the scene and knocked out the first PC; in the conflict between that second PC and the brother, the PC rolled poorly while the brother rolled well, inflicting a near-fatal wound on the PC; the first PC then regained consciousness, in time to see the brother try to call down a mighty spell to destroy the cathedral only to fail and inflict a mortal wound on himself as the spell was internalised. The PC's attempt to save his brother from death failed; but the other two severe wounds (on the holy man and the second PC) were staunched, though each then required months for recovery.

Next session will begin three months later. (The rest of the PCs, who didn't need to heal, will get the benefit of 3 months practice.)

Removing character death from the table gives players freedom to take risks and express their characters even when it's tactically bad idea. It also gives me freedom to stat NPCs without much thinking about balance and to push really hard when it makes sense in the fiction.

All the systems I'm running allow the GM to push hard (in 4e, this is first by building to guidelines, which are pretty reliable, and then pushing hard). BW does reqire a bit of thought about balance, but not too badly. MHRP is pretty relaxed about balance, because the dice pool system is more like a lot of re-rolls, rather than stacking big numbers.

I like it when players can take risk and express PCs even when it's tactically bad. In 4e, this works because mechanical tactics don't always correlate to "in fiction" tactics (eg some PCs get bonuses for being surrounded by bad guys rather than trying defeat-in-detail). In MHRP, tactics aren't really part of the system. In BW, tactics are important but so is earning "artha" (fate points etc), and the latter are conditioned on playing the PC rather than doing the "sensible" thing.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

For my part, I like a mixture of difficulties. Sometimes it’s great for the PCs to trounce their foes, to feel like powerful adventurers. Other times, the thrill and tension of barely defeating the monster by the skin of their teeth really feels like an accomplishment. But all-difficult, all the time can really grind away at the fun of a game. So I try to save the super-difficult encounters for when it really would mean something.

In other words, I love the Dark Souls series, but those could never be the only games I play.

Also, different players have different expectations for game difficulty. Finding the sweet-spot for the whole group can definitely be difficult.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

My preference for a difficult encounter is one that would lead to a TPK if you just try to Rambo through it, but is unlikely to kill anyone if you take the proper precautions (with some possible way of determining what those precautions would be). Smaug is a good example of a difficult encounter.

Not every encounter should be difficult, though. The PCs are usually the most awesome people around, so they should be able to Rambo through most fights without any trouble. The chance of dying against some random orcs should be effectively zero, but unlucky hits and attrition mean you're still better off avoiding unnecessary fights.

 

[Grogg of the North]

I'll add in that I like encounters to vary in difficulty. Being up against a tough monster can be fun. Especially if there are things you can work with besides your character sheet. Can I use the terrain to my advantage? What if I try to lure the monster here? Those are some of my favorite fights, when you have to think and be clever and face tanking is only going to lead to a TPK. And sometimes it's nice to just laugh at the bandit king and pound him into the dirt.

That said, I was in a campaign were pretty much every encounter was "OMG this thing is going to smear us across the floor! RUN!" Every encounter had us going nova just to try and survive. It was not a good fit for the group and none of the players having fun.

 

[was]

...IMO, it really depends upon the person. Some players are used to campaigns, or video games, where the use of tactics is not essential. They prefer just wade into the middle of a bunch of bad guys and slaughter everything (due to their uber-awesomeness).

...Others prefer more of a challenge, where intelligence and the use of solid tactics is essential to surviving the encounter.

...IME as a DM, I have found that it never hurts to give the players and encounter to mow through every once in a while. Like giving higher level characters an army of low-level dead to massacre a bit before the major encounter. I have found that an ego boost, once in a while, is helpful in motivating players before a tough fight.