Encounter balance in AD&D

[DM Howard]

Gygax-style AD&D (as presented in the rulebooks, and as discussed in the RPG magazines of the period) is based around dungeon exploration.

I certainly can't contend otherwise on this point!

So, let me concede this debate from a historical standpoint, where games were focused mostly on dungeoneering. I would like to widen the discussion, a tiny bit, to encompass the slightly more modern approach (say, 2E) of both world and dungeon encounters, so take the following with that in mind.

The GM builds the dungeon, but the players are the ones who (via their PCs) scout it out and choose which bits to try and assault, which bits to avoid, etc. If you look at Gygax's discussion of "Successful Adventures" on pp 107-9 of his PHB, you will see this very much in evidence. For instance,

Notice the emphasis on the players being the ones to set an objective, to choose which encounters to engage and which to avoid, etc. This is very different from (eg) the DL modules, or a more contemporary module like (eg) Speaker in Dreams, which assume that the players will proceed through a series of encounters chosen by the GM.

Right, the PCs choose what to take on. AD&D modules are full of encounters, monster or otherwise, that the party should really bypass or nullify in some way, but at the end of the day the DM is still the creator of the milleu (unless you are running a published module, and even then) and has ultimate authority over what encounters the party comes upon. I definitely understand your point, and concede that point, for the most part, if we are talking about running published modules.

This is why AD&D doesn't need encounter-building guidelines, other than the very basic idea that the 1st level of a dungeon should have mostly 1st level monsters on it.

I agree, but only because it is up to the party to decided what is too dangerous. Yes, of course, the DM shouldn't slap a dragon right in front of a 1st level party, but if they decide to wander into a dragon's hunting grounds then that is unfortunate for the characters.

AD&D does not assume that there will be encounters that the PCs can neither defeat nor evade. Ie that there will be hopeless situations in which the PCs find themselves. (At least in general - especially for low-level PCs this may sometimes happen through sheer misfortune, but it's not meant to be a ubiquitous feature of the game.)

I wouldn't argue that it is ubiquitous, but I think AD&D very much assumes the idea that if the party acts stupid, then that's to the detriment of their characters.

I don't think this is right. There are also enforced "social" encounters - eg the GM has a red dragon turn up to talk to a group of 1st level PCs. And there are enforced "escape" encounters - eg this is part of the first DL module, I think.

True, but I find those tend to be in service to the plot of the story or module than anything else.

The difference between these and the Gygaxian style is that the GM has deliberately placed the encounter to generate a certain sort of response from the players. (And you can see plenty of posters still advocating this approach in 5e threads.) Whereas in the Gygaxian style, if the encounter is a placed one - typically, a dungeon room occupant - then the players are expected to control their interaction with it (via scouting, planning etc); and if it is a random one then there are general reaction rules, evasion rules etc to make the outcome a combination of player choice and random chance rather than GM pre-determination.

I agree with the first sentence, I think those type of encounters have their place, even in AD&D, if it serves the story the DM is trying to tell, but there is certainly a fine line between that and railroading. I tend to think that the expectation, in the Gygaxian style, is the same be it a dungeon encounter or a wilderness encounter: solve the encounter. There can be many types of solutions.

 

[MerricB]

Encounter balance in AD&D is fascinating... it's there, and becomes more important as the style of adventure changes.

I'll look up your rules references.

Cheers!

 

[MerricB]

I was reading Appendix C and came across the following two sentences in the section on Underwater Encounters; both sentences occur on p 179, with fewer than 60 words in between them:

The numbers of monsters encountered are those shown in MONSTER MANUAL. . . .

Number of creatures encountered should be appropriate to the strength of the encountering party.​

What does this tell us about Gygaxian D&D?

The DMG was rushed, and needed more editing. This is unfortunately true.

Cheers!

 

[pemerton]

The DMG was rushed, and needed more editing.

Encounter balance in AD&D is fascinating... it's there, and becomes more important as the style of adventure changes.

Agreed on both points.

I take you to mean the first as a matter of historical report. My agreement is based simply on my experience as a reader/user: leaving aside actual incoherence (like the initiative rules), so many components of the game (such as encounters) have their rules scattered rather randomly throughout the book. (The frequency of dungeon wandering monster checks is not even stated, and has to be inferred from the description of "once per three turns" in cities as the standard frequency.)

On the second point, I've had a couple of recent conversations on these boards which have driven it home. I am coming to feel that, in D&D play, perhaps nothing is more fundamental than the answer to the question: who chooses the encounters, players or GM? Because classic D&D answers "the players" - by choosing which rooms to enter/raid; and by choosing when not to run from wandering monsters - it's approach to balancing is naturally quite different from what is typical in the modern game.

But I get a bit frustrated by people who are playing games in which the GM chooses the encounters, and yet make a big deal about the importance of "smart" or "cautious" players realising that some of them need to be avoided rather than confronted. This might be good or bad D&D (to me, without more context, it often seems rather railroad-y), but comparing it to player-driven dungeon exploration is (in my view) just wrong. The best I can make of it is that the GM is framing the players into a puzzle, where the consequence of the wrong choice (fighting when the GM intended the PCs to flee) is character death.

 

[chaochou]

I am coming to feel that, in D&D play, perhaps nothing is more fundamental than the answer to the question: who chooses the encounters, players or GM? Because classic D&D answers "the players" - by choosing which rooms to enter/raid; and by choosing when not to run from wandering monsters - it's approach to balancing is naturally quite different from what is typical in the modern game.

Interesting. But I'm not convinced that 'classic' D&D - certainly at lower levels - really equips a party to micro-manage encounters in the midst of a dungeon.

Light sources make hiding difficult, and virtually no-one can move stealthily. And by the time you've opened the door to see what's in the room you've already given yourself away.

So the idea of 'scouting' and 'picking and choosing' your encounters within the context of many dungeons is a nice idea, but can easily fall apart if the inhabitants can see and think. Even more so the moment a DM has the bright idea of running a dungeon more dynamically with denizens responding to noise or the sound of battle, patrolling, moving through locations, or having any sort of life beyond sitting in a room description waiting to be encountered and killed.

I see it as far more likely that the intention is that players have a broad macro choices between the goblin lair, the kobold den or the skeleton crypt and then make preparations to deal with what they guess they might find.

 

[MerricB]

In AD&D, there are actually detailed rules for escaping encounters. If you drop food or treasure, depending on the intelligence of the monsters, your chances of escaping are improved.

Then too, the DM can capture & ransom PCs. The slave keeping aspects of the early descriptions of D&D humanoids is mostly ignored these days.

Balance is still important. Thus the random encounter tables scale with level of dungeon, but I think it's easier to escape encounters than immediately apparent.

See also https://merricb.com/2015/05/25/running-away-lets-do-it/

Cheers!



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[pemerton]

In AD&D, there are actually detailed rules for escaping encounters.

Yes. That's one of the important differences between the "classic" and the modern game, and one of the mechanisms whereby the players rather than the GM manage what it is that the PCs encounter.

In the context of XP for gold, dropping treasure to avoid encounters is actually quite close to 13th Age's "suck up a campaign failure to escape an encounter" rule - but 40 years earlier.

Interesting. But I'm not convinced that 'classic' D&D - certainly at lower levels - really equips a party to micro-manage encounters in the midst of a dungeon.

I think at low levels it's certainly harder - but that's what all those detection spell and items are for.

Light sources make hiding difficult, and virtually no-one can move stealthily. And by the time you've opened the door to see what's in the room you've already given yourself away.

So the idea of 'scouting' and 'picking and choosing' your encounters within the context of many dungeons is a nice idea, but can easily fall apart if the inhabitants can see and think. Even more so the moment a DM has the bright idea of running a dungeon more dynamically with denizens responding to noise or the sound of battle, patrolling, moving through locations, or having any sort of life beyond sitting in a room description waiting to be encountered and killed.

I think the idea of the dungeon as dynamic, with inhabitants who do more than sit in their rooms waiting to be killed, is actually the beginning of the end of what I have called classic D&D. Because at that point there are, for practical purposes, no constraints on what the GM can do; and scouting out and planning objectives on the players' part has no guaranteed connection to what the PCs will actually find when they (say) return to the 5th level looking to loot the manticore room.

Another way to express what I think is the same point: D&D in its original form was unstable between the "wargaming" element and the "fantasy adventure story" element. A relatively early discussion that brings this out is Roger Musson's essays on dungeon design ("The Dungeon Architect") in early 80s White Dwarf, where you can see him struggling to reconcile the game as a player-driven dungeon-exploration game with the idea of a GM-authored backstory and dynamic, interactive NPCs and settings.

I think this instability is what leads to the railroading style that dominated from the mid-to-late 80s through to 3E, and then the more contemporary "Adventure Path" style which is (as best I can tell) a game in which the players decipher the adventure-author's puzzles and fight their way through the combats hoping not to get too unlucky. This is the sort of play in which Gygaxian wargaming language (liked "skilled play") is used to describe something quite different - roughly, guessing what the GM has in mind in terms of world-building/encounter motivation (given some degree of "living, breathing world") so as to work out whether the best move is to fight, or flee, or try and negotiate, etc.

A lot of the current threads on the 5e board remind me of a post you (chaochou) made at least a couple of years ago now, pointing out that time constraints in adventures are about pacing and drama-management on the GM side, rather than resource management on the player side, given that the players don't have access to the information about time constraints, and can't control it (eg from the players' point of view it is arbitrary whether or not the GM - as part of managing the living, breathing world - decides that the villains lose a day because they got hung over after a particularly indulgent evening at the Den of Iniquity). To me, this sort of game seems to have lost almost all the elements that a classic dungeon offered for the testing of wargaming, resource management and force deployment skill.

 

[chaochou]

In AD&D, there are actually detailed rules for escaping encounters. If you drop food or treasure, depending on the intelligence of the monsters, your chances of escaping are improved.

Yes there are! I wasn't really considering making something angry and then throwing your treasure at it after it starts tearing up your party as 'choosing your encounter' though

But if that was the idea, it's not something that really caught on in any games I saw or played in. But I'm happy to hear it could have been considered viable or an intrinsic part of dungeon exploration in other groups, in other towns.

I think the idea of the dungeon as dynamic, with inhabitants who do more than sit in their rooms waiting to be killed, is actually the beginning of the end of what I have called classic D&D.

Yes, that's probably a reasonable dividing line, although it was inevitable that it would be crossed. After all, people fighting make a lot of noise. Things dying from melee wounds make a lot of noise, except on the odd occasion when they are killed cleanly and quickly. It was always implausible - even as a 10-year-old - to have a huge battle and then find something 'in the next room' blithely unaware.

A lot of the current threads on the 5e board remind me of a post you (chaochou) made at least a couple of years ago now, pointing out that time constraints in adventures are about pacing and drama-management on the GM side, rather than resource management on the player side.

I can't even remember my own posts now! Ha. But yes, I remember the thread.

 

[pemerton]

I think the idea of the dungeon as dynamic, with inhabitants who do more than sit in their rooms waiting to be killed, is actually the beginning of the end of what I have called classic D&D.

Yes, that's probably a reasonable dividing line, although it was inevitable that it would be crossed. After all, people fighting make a lot of noise. Things dying from melee wounds make a lot of noise, except on the odd occasion when they are killed cleanly and quickly. It was always implausible - even as a 10-year-old - to have a huge battle and then find something 'in the next room' blithely unaware.

In the same spirit of pithiness that gave us all philosophy as a footnote to Plato, we could say that develpments in RPG design from c 1977 (C&S, Traveller) to c 2004 (DitV, followed soon after by BW revised) are attempts to reconcile a "living, breathing world" with some alternative to overwhelming GM force and discretion in shaping the of outcomes of gameplay.

 

[pemerton]

I wasn't really considering making something angry and then throwing your treasure at it after it starts tearing up your party as 'choosing your encounter' though

<snip>

implausible

This prompted another thought too.

The idea that hungry, vicious monsters will be distracted by dropping a few gold pieces (from a pouch that presumably contains more of them?) or some food has a fairy-tale quality to it.

But adventurers probing corridors with 10' poles like Advanced Squad Leader units doesn't.

This tension between realism/mundane modernism on the one hand, and fairy tale imagination on the other, is not confined to FRPGs. You can see it in Tolkien too, where the chapters on Lorien try to integrate the faerie queen idea with the conventions, tropes and trappings of a more-or-less naturalistic novel. Press too hard the question "What do the elves of Lorien actually eat, and where do they get it from?" and the whole thing falls over. (In passing: one impressive thing about BW is how it integrates the banalities of elven economic production into the elven skill songs, and so is able to venture into this territory without completely losing the fairy tale element.)

A lot of the recurring discussions among D&D players - about "realism", "living, breathing worlds", whether Tucker's kobolds are fair or GM bastardry, whether dragons should play more like Smaug or more like the Godfather - seem to me to have their origins in this basic tension.