[Playtest 2] "Encounter" Building

[I'm A Banana]

..and the encounters your players end up having will still be easy, average or tough

Aye, but they won't be planned that way.

There's X number of baddies in the thing. The PC's choose how they solve that problem, all at once, in four waves, or one by one, or whatever. I don't have to worry about the "right encounter balance," I just have to populate my adventuring day.

Honestly, what is it with GMs apparently wanting to be ignorant of the likely difficulty of the situations they present to the players? Nothing says you can't present scenarios of almost certain death (or of trivial cakewalkism) if you really want to - but why do some folk want to be surprised by that sort of thing? I don't get it.

For me, it's correlated to combat-as-war and player choice. Players have a choice of how to solve the problem in front of them, and what they do and how they do it is and should be up to them, not dictated by me. They can thus set up circumstances to be favorable (or make some bungles and wind up boned) and I only need to worry about role-playing the antagonists, not about precise fiddly number crunching for some sort of micro-level pseudobalance.

Encounters feel way too pre-planned, pre-packaged, nice, neat little things, but that's not how reality works, that's just how games work, so it's game balance intruding on my verisimilitude and saying "I'm more important than that!", and it's not, to me.

As long as you don't expect things to necessarily pan out according to your plan, I'd say you're golden using the daily amounts.

The thing is, the daily amounts give the players and me a LOT more flexibility than per-encounter tallying does. I don't have to kludge a steady drip of encounter scenes into the game. I can let the players take point, set up their own encounters, and go with whatever happens.

 

[Imaro]

..and the encounters your players end up having will still be easy, average or tough. Honestly, what is it with GMs apparently wanting to be ignorant of the likely difficulty of the situations they present to the players? Nothing says you can't present scenarios of almost certain death (or of trivial cakewalkism) if you really want to - but why do some folk want to be surprised by that sort of thing? I don't get it.

I think it's because in the same way wealth by level supposedly did for many groups... this sets the expectations for how the game "should" be played and what a player should expect coming into a 5e game.

Just as an example, in our current 4e game, the players who have read the books will often (in the middle of a battle) comment on the level of difficulty of the encounter or the level of opponents and its appropriatness to the party's current level. Those expectations (wrong or right) were set by what they read in the 4e books about encounter design.

 

[FireLance]

I think it's because in the same way wealth by level supposedly did for many groups... this sets the expectations for how the game "should" be played and what a player should expect coming into a 5e game.

Just as an example, in our current 4e game, the players who have read the books will often (in the middle of a battle) comment on the level of difficulty of the encounter or the level of opponents and its appropriatness to the party's current level. Those expectations (wrong or right) were set by what they read in the 4e books about encounter design.

It's an interesting philosophical point, though. Given that differences in game style and expectations can create problems at the table, wouldn't it be a good idea to have them laid out clearly before the start of a campaign?

In a game system with encounter guidelines, it is relatively easy for the DM to say something along the lines of: I run a more organic world, so you should not expect the monsters follow the guidelines for encounter difficulty.

On the other hand, if a game system has no encounter guidelines, what's a DM that wants to run a series of challenging but not overwhelming combats to do and say? I'll try not to make the fights too hard?

 

[Savage Wombat]

Maybe the solution is easier than we think.

If we re-define a "tough" encounter to mean, not "this encounter may be kind of dangerous, but you should probably win" to instead mean "this encounter has a reasonable chance of wiping the party" - and then set the system up to encourage encounter design to allow for running away or non-linear tactics - then you can have your encounter design and eat it too.

 

[CasvalRemDeikun]

I saw this and had hope that WotC realized how moronic and unbalanced the adventuring day was. It seems like they haven't. Hopefully they make a modular way of doing encounter-focused design.

 

[Imaro]

Maybe the solution is easier than we think.

If we re-define a "tough" encounter to mean, not "this encounter may be kind of dangerous, but you should probably win" to instead mean "this encounter has a reasonable chance of wiping the party" - and then set the system up to encourage encounter design to allow for running away or non-linear tactics - then you can have your encounter design and eat it too.

I think this would be a really good idea... even if you have to create another category atop tough that let's DM's and players know that there can be encounters that are not balanced for the PC's to directly assault them and win.

 

[Balesir]

Aye, but they won't be planned that way.

OK, so they'll be planned some other way - what's the big deal? You can plan them in whatever way you want regardless.

There's X number of baddies in the thing. The PC's choose how they solve that problem, all at once, in four waves, or one by one, or whatever. I don't have to worry about the "right encounter balance," I just have to populate my adventuring day.

So ignore the encounter guidelines, if you want everything to be totally arbitrary.

For me, it's correlated to combat-as-war and player choice. Players have a choice of how to solve the problem in front of them, and what they do and how they do it is and should be up to them, not dictated by me.

It sounds like we're really talking about "what the problem before the players is", rather than "how they solve the problem", but OK. If you want the players to frame each challenge, let them frame each challenge. You can even have them try to do it according to some sort of arbitrary guessing game about what you were thinking when you set up the scenario, if you like. What about having guidelines for individual scenario elements prevents you doing that? Do you feel you need some sort of authority figure to tell you it's OK to elide encounters together if the characters' actions justify it?

They can thus set up circumstances to be favorable (or make some bungles and wind up boned) and I only need to worry about role-playing the antagonists, not about precise fiddly number crunching for some sort of micro-level pseudobalance.

We were talking about planning and preparation a moment ago - are you suggesting you need to calculate encounter values on the fly during play, now? Because I don't see any need to do that, with or without encounter guidelines.

Encounters feel way too pre-planned, pre-packaged, nice, neat little things, but that's not how reality works, that's just how games work,

Damn! I knew I was missing something important - I thought we were playing a game...

Immersion and simulationism and all that stuff is fine and good in actual play; it's a perfectly valid approach. In design of mechanical systems and guidelines, however, it's dysfunctional. Why? Because what the systems must deal with in reality is a group of real players sat around a real table rolling real dice. If their heads are off in some alternate galaxy during play, that's fine, but if the designer is off in that galaxy designing the game then what you're going to get is a mess.

so it's game balance intruding on my verisimilitude and saying "I'm more important than that!", and it's not, to me.

So forget it, during play. If you want a multi-game-day adventure, you're going to hit the exact same problem with "adventure days", anyway. Just design taking the guidelines into account and then forget the divisions in play and react however you want to.

The thing is, the daily amounts give the players and me a LOT more flexibility than per-encounter tallying does. I don't have to kludge a steady drip of encounter scenes into the game. I can let the players take point, set up their own encounters, and go with whatever happens.

The players will never really be setting up their own encounters unless you actually give them the tools and the power to manipulate the design you have made; I would be amazed if, while playing D&D, you get anywhere near that. The encounters will be set up according to the arbitrary decisions you make as GM - based on your own head-model of how the world works - in response to the uninformed multiple guesses that your players come up with.

Just a suggestion: add up a reasonable "day's worth" of encounters and just put them into your scenario. Use 4 times an average encounter, maybe, as a starting point. Voila - adventuring day.

I think it's because in the same way wealth by level supposedly did for many groups... this sets the expectations for how the game "should" be played and what a player should expect coming into a 5e game.

Sounds like a problem with the group, to me. Any "good" DM should make clear that this doesn't happen yadda yadda - who am I kidding? We don't need "mechanical solutions" for the 5 minute adventuring day, but we need mechanics (or, rather, the absence of them) to stop some players expecting guidelines to be adhered to religiously?

Just as an example, in our current 4e game, the players who have read the books will often (in the middle of a battle) comment on the level of difficulty of the encounter or the level of opponents and its appropriatness to the party's current level. Those expectations (wrong or right) were set by what they read in the 4e books about encounter design.

So intimate that they have met two encounters at once because they screwed up. Or was the screw-up actually starting the adventure in the first place?

EDIT: one thing it strikes me forcibly 5e could do better at than previous editions - make crystal clear the difference between rules and guidelines. It can only do that if the rules are clear and unambiguous, of course, but I think that's the only really functional way to go, anyway. But, if the rules are clear and unambiguous, then it should be made clear that XP budgets and such are guidelines - i.e they are not mandatory.

 

[I'm A Banana]

In a game system with encounter guidelines, it is relatively easy for the DM to say something along the lines of: I run a more organic world, so you should not expect the monsters follow the guidelines for encounter difficulty.

On the other hand, if a game system has no encounter guidelines, what's a DM that wants to run a series of challenging but not overwhelming combats to do and say? I'll try not to make the fights too hard?

I think it's something of a false dichotomy.

The idea isn't to NOT have encounter guidelines. Encounter guidelines are fine. The issue occurs when those guidelines become the rules for how one must play the game.

A DM who doesn't want to pay attention to micro-level encounter issues is well within their rights to say that it is up to the PARTY to judge what they think they can handle, what they can flee from, and what they can stand and fight. The DM makes the fights the way she wants, and the party members figure out if they can deal with it by hitting it or if they have to do something else.

 

[Imaro]

Sounds like a problem with the group, to me. Any "good" DM should make clear that this doesn't happen yadda yadda - who am I kidding? We don't need "mechanical solutions" for the 5 minute adventuring day, but we need mechanics (or, rather, the absence of them) to stop some players expecting guidelines to be adhered to religiously?

EDIT: one thing it strikes me forcibly 5e could do better at than previous editions - make crystal clear the difference between rules and guidelines. It can only do that if the rules are clear and unambiguous, of course, but I think that's the only really functional way to go, anyway. But, if the rules are clear and unambiguous, then it should be made clear that XP budgets and such are guidelines - i.e they are not mandatory.

Sooo... is it a group problem or a presentation problem? Because first you seem to be trying to argue against what I'm saying... and then you come back and support it.

So intimate that they have met two encounters at once because they screwed up. Or was the screw-up actually starting the adventure in the first place?

Uhm... what??? I really have no idea what this means.

It's an interesting philosophical point, though. Given that differences in game style and expectations can create problems at the table, wouldn't it be a good idea to have them laid out clearly before the start of a campaign?

In a game system with encounter guidelines, it is relatively easy for the DM to say something along the lines of: I run a more organic world, so you should not expect the monsters follow the guidelines for encounter difficulty.

On the other hand, if a game system has no encounter guidelines, what's a DM that wants to run a series of challenging but not overwhelming combats to do and say? I'll try not to make the fights too hard?

Well besides Savage Wombat's suggestion... one suggestion I would have is... tell me what an easy, average and hard encounter are and how to design them... Make it crystal clear that the DM has the power to modify these in any way for a more organic campaign and don't tell me what makeup or percentage of these encounters "should" be in my adventure.

The percentage of easy, average and hard encounters is a playstyle issue not something to be quantified like a rule and the game is laying down assumptions that may or may not be true for every group... but is again taken as the "correct" way to run the game by some players when it is not a part of running the game "correctly" but of campaign considerations.

 

[Ratskinner]

It's an interesting philosophical point, though. Given that differences in game style and expectations can create problems at the table, wouldn't it be a good idea to have them laid out clearly before the start of a campaign?

Not always. At times too much discussion can lead to frustration, and exacerbate peoples' reaction to things. Kind of like a reverse placebo effect. They might have enjoyed it if you just hadn't told them it was there.

In a game system with encounter guidelines, it is relatively easy for the DM to say something along the lines of: I run a more organic world, so you should not expect the monsters follow the guidelines for encounter difficulty.

Followed by some fraction of the players griping about it, sure. The real problem is that guidelines have a terrible habit of becoming "word of the gods". The more numerical the guidelines, the worse that habit becomes. I have been accused of "cheating" and "not playing the game" when I've gone too far even within the limits of 4e encounter design specs.

On the other hand, if a game system has no encounter guidelines, what's a DM that wants to run a series of challenging but not overwhelming combats to do and say? I'll try not to make the fights too hard?

Short answer: "Yes, and in a good system, that's enough."

Long answer:
There's a lot of hidden assumptions there, primarily about the game system itself. 3\4e are (perhaps accidentally in 3e's case) designed with very tight tolerances. Going outside the boundaries of encounter guidelines can lead to un-fun results very quickly. The trick is....we're (well, WOTC is anyway) designing a new version of the game here. We don't need to do so in such a way that an encounter of level X (whatever that means) is only worth using between X-2 and X+2 levels. This is one area where, IMO, the best D&D is a little sloppy.

The second big assumption is that DMs are just about utter morons. I know you didn't say that, but honestly this aspect of DMing isn't that hard. I'm not sure how exactly we came to think it was, but I suspect it has to do with 3e and its presentation of encounter design. Perhaps it also has to do with the utter complication of later edition monsters and abilities.

I know that accidental TPKs or cakewalks can be an issue...but I don't recall them happening much in the 2e era. Sure they happened more (sorta) in 1e and BECMI, but I think that's partially because those games were designed to be "hard mode" while 2e changed its encounter advice to "story mode". 3e wanted to be "math/sim mode", but the CR system was so bad at its job that only the gods know that that ended up being. In response, 4e locked it down pretty tight and became "checkers++ mode".

The third problem I have is that such guidelines define play, perhaps too much. Whether they are intended to do so or not is irrelevant, they do. I believe that part of the development of a good DM is learning how these things interact and what to do about them. Having some good and bad encounters and some hard and easy encounters is part of that development process. For better or worse, the large part of the creative burden in D&D falls to the DM. New DMs, just like young artists, need to learn how to use their tools to set up the stories and environments they use to mutually entertain their friends. Strict/narrow encounter guidelines and a rules system that require them limit that development and the scope of the tool. Whether that's a 1e "hard mode" desire vs 4e "tactician" mode, or 2e "storyteller" mode vs. 3e "realistic" mode, is irrelevant.

I wish to also express that I make all these arguments solely within the context of a game that would call itself D&D and carry all the crusty old trappings of '60's wargames ....err, sacred cows....err, "shared culture" with it. There are plenty of story/indie games out there where "balance" isn't even an issue, because it has been designed right out of the system from the beginning. I love 'em, but I sincerely doubt that they would be accepted as D&D.