[Playtest 2] "Encounter" Building

[I'm A Banana]

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

Well, that's kind of the point of it -- they won't be planned at all.

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

Everything? No. It's useful to know how much the party is expected to be capable of achieving before they're dead.

Arbitrary? Also no. The encounters that happen aren't planned by the DM, but they might be cultivated by the players. I don't decide what fights they get into, they do.

It sounds like we're really talking about "what the problem before the players is",

That's defined at a level well outside of the encounter. Slay the dragon, get the McGuffin, escort the NPC, whatever.

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?

I am suggesting that I do not need to create "encounter values" at all.

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.

You can design mechanics in such a way that they do not break the shared suspension of disbelief, so that they are intuitive and transparent rather than obvious and glaring. See here, point #2 , for some clarification of why bald mechanical interference is a problem for me.

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.

Was doin' pretty OK before I DMed 4e and all of a sudden was required to define an encounter. And even there, though it was an up-hill struggle.

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.

I don't set up encounters. I set up adventures. I set up scenarios. I provide a world full of interesting things to interact with. The form that interaction takes isn't a decision I want to make, it's a choice I want to leave with my players.

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 see you read my first post in this thread.

 

[Ratskinner]

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 doubt it. Not because I doubt WOTC's skills as presentation or design, but because of human nature/psychology. There's a reason the term "rules lawyer" exists.

 

[Balesir]

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.

I think it is a "group problem", in the sense that clear communication of the assumptions, aims and tenets of the game would have solved the issue. On the other hand I am quite prepared to accede to additional explanation or clarity in the printed materials where some folk find there to be a problem, even if I don't persoanlly find that additional clarity necessary.

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

It means that if it hasn't ocurred to your players that they might run into the "contents" of two encounters at once through a series of unwise decisions, then they might just be a bit hard of understanding.

On the other hand, the "unwise decision" might have been playing this particular adventure in the first place...

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.

I think those guidelines would have been very useful to me as a beginning GM, so I think they should be there, to be honest.

That experienced GMs don't need to abide by them always should be a no-brainer, I think.

 

[Imaro]

I think it is a "group problem", in the sense that clear communication of the assumptions, aims and tenets of the game would have solved the issue. On the other hand I am quite prepared to accede to additional explanation or clarity in the printed materials where some folk find there to be a problem, even if I don't persoanlly find that additional clarity necessary.

So you agree with both...uhm, ok.

It means that if it hasn't ocurred to your players that they might run into the "contents" of two encounters at once through a series of unwise decisions, then they might just be a bit hard of understanding.

On the other hand, the "unwise decision" might have been playing this particular adventure in the first place...

I'm not even sure what these very specific assumptions have to do with my general point... it's like we're talking about two toally different things here... and you're on your own page.

I think those guidelines would have been very useful to me as a beginning GM, so I think they should be there, to be honest.

That experienced GMs don't need to abide by them always should be a no-brainer, I think.

I think they should be in the inevitable starter set... with the caveat that in the full game it is up to the DM. That way those who need that type of step by step guidance get it while those of us who don't need it, don't have to bother with the assumptions it places on our games.

EDIT: You would think it would be a no-brainer... and yet it doesn't pan out that way.

 

[Magil]

Is it just me that likes encounter design guidelines, but finds the current set rather unsatisfying?

Right now, I have no desire to DM this game because I feel that the guidelines for building encounters (and adventures, for that matter) are too vague. I liked 4E's tightly-designed monsters, which fit into a particular role or concept, and even had designated "roles" that helped me, as a DM, imagine how they fit into a given encounter. Without those design concepts, I feel lost. And I don't just mean the words "skirmisher" or "brute," I mean monsters that feel as though they fill a particular role in that encounter. Too many of the monsters in the current Bestiary appear to me to be too bland and uninteresting to feel this way. I don't know how to use them, because they're so dull.

There are a few that seem somewhat interesting, but I still can't seem to put together an encounter that I feel is fun and/or challenging to the players, just using the tools I've been given. I could make stuff up, sure, do it all the time actually, but isn't the system supposed to give me a little more help here? I just can't find a single thing inspiring about the level 1 kobold, while I loved the kobold quickblade.

 

[jrowland]

With 4E I have instituted my own "adventure building" framework. It is very contrived, but it works...for me anyway. I call it the "rule of three":

I assume 1 adventure has 3 chapters
each chapter has 3 "delves"
each delve has 3 encounters
for a total of 27 encounters.

Of those 27 encounters
1/3 will be "Heavy" Combat
1/3 will be skills (including RPing, actual skills, puzzles, exploration, etc)
1/3 will be "Mixed" (either skills + combat, or 2 easy combat/skill encounters, or avoidable combat/skills encounters)

I don't auto assign where and how these are to be encountered, but If I did, it might look like this for a 5th level "chapter":

Delve 1
3rd level combat
4th level avoidable combat
5th level skill

Delve 2
4th Level easy combat
5th level skill
6th level combat
4th level easy skill

Delve 3
5th level avoidable skill
6th level easy combat
6th level easy skill
7th level combat

level up, start next chapter

Delve 4
4th level skill
5th level avoidable combat
6th level combat

etc. etc. *notice the level of the encounters start easy and get progressively higher level, then reset after a level gain. It looks contrived on paper, but players rarely notice. I prefer "delves" for each sandbox location as well, so players might hit a delve 3 in the low level zone then go to the lower level delve 4 in a higher level zone, and not feel that each zone is too tightly focused in encounters)

In practice, I usually start with the BBEG/tough encounters and work backwards, so I can tie things together thematically and dropping in foreshadow elements.

YMMV

But I think you could do the same here with the playtest. Start with the adventure, figure out a few "scenes" or locations (ie delves), and populate them with combats, RP, skill tests, exploration, etc.

P.S. - "avoidable" encounters in my game either provide little or no rewards (they are easy to avoid but drain resources should you engage) or they provide a boon (healing, helpful magic, etc) but are harder to FIND or are out of the way.

 

[Balesir]

So you agree with both...uhm, ok.

Yes - for reasons you sum up very nicely in your final comment:

EDIT: You would think it would be a no-brainer... and yet it doesn't pan out that way.

Indeed so. Hence why some clarification might be helpful, even though we might think it would be unnecessary.

I'm not even sure what these very specific assumptions have to do with my general point... it's like we're talking about two toally different things here... and you're on your own page.

They don't relate to your general point; they relate to my comments originally addressed at a very specific example that you gave, so they relate to that example only.

I think they should be in the inevitable starter set... with the caveat that in the full game it is up to the DM. That way those who need that type of step by step guidance get it while those of us who don't need it, don't have to bother with the assumptions it places on our games.

I think it's rather too early to say what "sets" or books there might be, quite honestly, and I think such a schema would be useful even in the main rulebook. It tells me, if nothing else, what "default" the designers had in mind as they designed the system. Knowing what assumptions the designers are working on is always useful.

 

[Imaro]

They don't relate to your general point; they relate to my comments originally addressed at a very specific example that you gave, so they relate to that example only.

The example had nothing to do with them running into two encounters at the same time... again I'm not getting your point? Is it that I could always just lie and say it was two encounters...every time?

I think it's rather too early to say what "sets" or books there might be, quite honestly, and I think such a schema would be useful even in the main rulebook. It tells me, if nothing else, what "default" the designers had in mind as they designed the system. Knowing what assumptions the designers are working on is always useful.

Every WotC edition and partial edition has had a starter set, I think it's a way safer bet that there will be one than to bet there won't. As to where it should appear, we can just agree to disagree on that.

 

[Balesir]

The example had nothing to do with them running into two encounters at the same time... again I'm not getting your point? Is it that I could always just lie and say it was two encounters...every time?

No, there is no obligation on you to tell them when it was two encounters and when it wasn't - but they should realise that combining two encounters is a possibility before leaping to conclusions about whether a scenario is "unfair" or not.

If, on the other hand, you would be lying about it being two encounters every time, then the more pertinent question to ask might be "why the heck did we start this adventure?", or even "why the heck are we doing this at all?"

 

[Imaro]

No, there is no obligation on you to tell them when it was two encounters and when it wasn't - but they should realise that combining two encounters is a possibility before leaping to conclusions about whether a scenario is "unfair" or not.

If, on the other hand, you would be lying about it being two encounters every time, then the more pertinent question to ask might be "why the heck did we start this adventure?", or even "why the heck are we doing this at all?"

So you're not addressing the point that the book sets up expectations for encounters... you're giving me an example of why players shouldn't think this (even though we've established earlier that many still do) that doesn't really apply to the situation I presented and then claiming if the players think an encounter is beyond those expectations and question the DM on it... we should in fact ponder why we are playing through the adventure or playing D&D at all... This makes no sense.