D&D General Why Unbalanced Combat Encounters Can Enhance Your Dungeons & Dragons Experience

[iserith]

If you run the game with the "safeties off", as it were, it seems that a higher risk of PC death would follow, and now a DM is completely relying on their ability to gauge difficulty and account for extreme results, with their only safety net being DM fiat.

I'm not going to defend Challenge Rating or monster design; it's fundamentally flawed, and you don't have to look for very long to find monsters that are simply more powerful than others of their ilk within the same CR band. But even a primitive tool is better than no tool.

Why eyeball hanging a kitchen cabinet when a level or plumb is available?

For my part, I eyeball and measure. I know that the calculator might say a given encounter is Hard or Deadly - for those particular definitions listed in the DMG - but I also know the general capabilities of my players, so Deadly is probably no more than Hard and Hard is probably Medium. I adjust accordingly when I need to.

I would never expect any tool, ever, to be able to capture all the variability between tables and the complexity of how difficulty changes based on player decisions that cannot be predicted reliably. It's utopian thinking in my estimation to believe a system can really be much better than what we currently have. It's just too complicated.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

For my part, I eyeball and measure. I know that the calculator might say a given encounter is Hard or Deadly - for those particular definitions listed in the DMG - but I also know the general capabilities of my players, so Deadly is probably no more than Hard and Hard is probably Medium. I adjust accordingly when I need to.

I would never expect any tool, ever, to be able to capture all the variability between tables and the complexity of how difficulty changes based on player decisions that cannot be predicted reliably. It's utopian thinking in my estimation to believe a system can really be much better than what we currently have. It's just too complicated.

Let's try a different tack then.

What evidence do you have for the claim that this is purely utopian thinking? It seems warranted, if someone is going to say "X simply can't be done," that they should have evidence for why it can't be done. (Despite what some will tell you, you can totally prove a negative, it just usually takes a different approach than the one you'd use for proving a positive.)

 

[NotAYakk]

I move 10' and tap the ground with a pole. I summon creatures and send them ahead to scout. I mind control foes and use them as cannon fodder.

In "reality", effectively fighting a war is years of boredom followed by 10 second of absolute terror, then years more of boredom. The realistic response to a "the world is as it is" is to spend 95% of every session doing research and preparation, and the 5% of the session to be either a cakewalk combat or an utter disaster.

Every week.

Week in.

Week out.

You don't explore a dungeon. You redirect a river into it, drown the denizens, and sift through the remains. You don't fight in a party of 5 - you gather up dozens or hundreds, even if they are green, because numbers at orders of magnitude matter more than skill and preparation in 99/100 situations.

In "realistic" mode you are either playing a bunch of suicidal idiots, a horror situation of raw desperation where the alternatives are worse, or you are pretending to do something you aren't doing.

WW1's battles that lasted weeks horrified professional soldiers from previous eras. Soldiers used to do a bunch of marching and walking and then had a few short deadly battles, then went home. A D&D campaign is the trauma of WW1 without the situation that makes it at all rational to stay "at the front".

...

That being said, building a world that makes sense outside of the adventure is fun.

I like tracking organizations in "total CR" units. If the Knights of the Crown have a total CR of 3000, it gives me a world-building hook about how important they are. 200 CR 3 knights each with about 10 CR in retainers and guards leaves 400 CR dangling. 5 or so CR 6 super-knights and a CR 10-ish champion and 3 120 CR armies.

The lich king (CR 20) has 10000 zombies (2.5k CR), 1000 ghouls (1k CR), 500 ghasts (1k CR), 1 deathknight (17 CR), 1 vampire (CR 13), 20 vampire spawn (100 CR), and 100 wights (300 CR) for about 5000 total CR.

If the Knights of the Crown are the entire military force of a kingdom, then they'll be out matched by the Lich King's forces. If they are only a part of it, the Lich King has to seriously scale up to threaten the kingdom.

But having done this work, I can determine what the forces that the Knights of the Crown might send to deal with a problem, and similarly for the Lich King.

In turn this means when I rotate back to world building, the undead fortress will neither have a force that would make defending against it impossible, nor be trivial given how threatening it is.

Also, if a Knight of the Crown's personal guard is total CR 13, it gives me a good idea of what a PC party is impact world-wise. Also, if the players work out how impactful that is, I can drop hints about how dangerous something is using in-world context.

Like, imagine the PCs fight a Knight of the Crown and their guard at some point. Seeing a dozen knights and retainers slaughtered somewhere now sends a real message.

 

[Enrahim2]

That's a far cry in my view from taking the position that the "naturalistic view" or the passage in the PHB regarding dying and story are a "free pass to murder PCs" which is the comment where this tangent kicked off. The poster said that the PHB passage I quoted was "not a free pass to murder PCs." My response was that nobody has taken the position that it is in this thread.

Is it really? No, I don't think anyone intentionally murders their player's characters. But when you decided 3 sessions ago that an adult red dragon moved into this particular cave 100 years ago, and the party failed their dc10 history check at the library to discover that fact - who are we to blame you? After all the red dragon was just doing what red dragons do, you know..

 

[iserith]

Let's try a different tack then.

What evidence do you have for the claim that this is purely utopian thinking? It seems warranted, if someone is going to say "X simply can't be done," that they should have evidence for why it can't be done. (Despite what some will tell you, you can totally prove a negative, it just usually takes a different approach than the one you'd use for proving a positive.)

In my opinion, there are too many considerations involved to create an airtight system, including but not limited to, the players' decisions at the table which the designers can't possibly know. At best, we get something that's "close enough" which is what we have in my view.

 

[iserith]

Is it really? No, I don't think anyone intentionally murders their players. But when you decided 3 sessions ago that an adult red dragon moved into this particular cave 100 years ago, and the party failed their dc10 history check at the library to discover that fact - who are we to blame you? After all the red dragon was just doing what red dragons do, you know..

Sorry, but I'm not obligated to defend a position I do not take. You'll have to have that argument with the person who puts adult red dragons into a cave then fails to telegraph it to the players by gating it behind an ability check. That's not me.

 

[robus]

So where do you send new DMs is the CR system is bad, the main publisher (WOTC) just converts old adventures that aren't meant for the target audience with niche design goals, and the 2nd most popular 3PP (Paizo) makes hard mode optimized time crunches.

It’s not bad though, it errs on the side of easy which is great for new DMs.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

In my opinion, there are too many considerations involved to create an airtight system, including but not limited to, the players' decisions at the table which the designers can't possibly know. At best, we get something that's "close enough" which is what we have in my view.

No one is asking for an "airtight" system. We're saying it's still very flawed and could be improved without needing to make it "airtight" or "perfect" or any of these other impossible aspirations. You're saying it's impossible to improve it any further. Should I take this, then, as the extent of your evidence for this belief? Your previous suggestion had been to aim for discussion, so that's what I was hoping for, a discussion of why you believe it to be completely impossible to make any meaningful improvements.

It’s not bad though, it errs on the side of easy which is great for new DMs.

Except that it does not do that--not consistently, anyway. I have personally had to deal with multiple situations where something punched well above its CR, not below. (Or, at least, I assume such; this was with new-ish DMs who were, as far as I could tell, using stock DMG monsters.)

 

[Enrahim2]

Sorry, but I'm not obligated to defend a position I do not take. You'll have to have that argument with the person who puts adult red dragons into a cave then fails to telegraph it to the players by gating it behind an ability check. That's not me.

And this is the crux of the matter. You and likely everyone here are then not running naturalistic. You are putting in place safety guards against player character death that replaces balancing (while still relying on the same kind of thinking that "balancing" is based on). However while I suspect these safety guards might be so second nature to you that you hardly notice them, they are actually not that obvious to everyone.

 

[iserith]

No one is asking for an "airtight" system. We're saying it's still very flawed and could be improved without needing to make it "airtight" or "perfect" or any of these other impossible aspirations. You're saying it's impossible to improve it any further. Should I take this, then, as the extent of your evidence for this belief? Your previous suggestion had been to aim for discussion, so that's what I was hoping for, a discussion of why you believe it to be completely impossible to make any meaningful improvements.

As I've stated several times now, there are far too many variables to make it a very reliable tool. It's reliable enough, if a bit easy relative to experienced players as @robus mentioned. Considering how many monsters and combinations of different monsters a DM might use, plus terrain/situation, and player decisions, there's really no way the designers can account for all of that.

But if you want to try, go for it. I'll continue to use what we have since it's works just fine in my experience.