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

[Micah Sweet]

I don't know if it's a fix, but the way I'd do it is much how 3e did it. They cited their expectations. They said "we built the CR system based on four characters using the default array, who are playing a Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, and Wizard using the PHB rules, with wealth by level adhered to." All stop.

Now granted, even some PHB content could "rock the boat", as it were; magic item creation (even without entering the quagmire of custom item creation), Leadership, faulty assumptions about what spells players would use, and old busted spells that were put into the book because "the fans expected them".*

But by and large, if your 3e game ran into trouble, you could easily point to one of the above assumptions having been broken in some way (I'm not discounting player skill having an effect on the game, of course, but altering the base assumptions was something that happened way more often in my experience. Every group I ever played with had mixed tiers of player skill, but YMMV).

Now, what are 5e's assumptions? It can't be point-buy, because that's an "optional" method of creating characters (says so right in the PHB). No Feats (optional). No Magic Items (optional). Character classes? Uh, well, they keep telling us "play what you want", which rings about as true as when Blizzard told us "bring the player, not the class" in World of Warcraft raiding.

What the "baseline" is in 5e is murky, and it's violated by WotC in their own adventures! Just look at how many magic items are in them (heck, just look at Lost Mines of Phandelver!).

Now, having said all of that, I don't think just tossing out the encounter creation rules is a good idea. The fact that we don't understand WotC's monster creation rules fully (beyond that they balance for hit points vs. damage and don't really care about accuracy vs. defenses), because again, unlike 3e, where they literally said "this is how you should make/upgrade a monster", WotC just throws stuff out there without any real explanation of why a CR 5 has 15 Hit Dice, doesn't mean that we can say we know how to balance an encounter better than they can.

We can know our players and their characters, yes. But the problem I see with just deciding that CR and encounter building should be chucked out the window is that, if we reject these tools, that the game is supposedly balanced around, then we've also rejected that the game has any balance whatsoever. That each individual group of characters has to be judged on it's own merits, and it's impossible to run the game properly without years of experience as a DM.

To me, that would be a fail state for 5e as a game. So even knowing that the CR system has it's warts, I still use it as best I can. My players deserve to be treated fairly, and I can't in good conscience tell them an encounter is fair if I just tossed out enemies I assumed they could defeat, based on nothing more than "I guess"?

*(warning: tangent) I hate that WotC made this mistake not once, but twice. When they made 3e, they assumed players would be annoyed if classic spells weren't in the PHB. When those spells proved to be some of the most broken in the game, even by the end of it's production run, they removed them or altered them greatly for 4e. Which led to "this doesn't feel like D&D" backlash from people who, in my opinion, didn't really grasp why this was a good thing. And then for 5e, they brought almost everything back, and now a whole new generation of gamers is wondering wth is up with things like forcecage, simulacrum, gate, etc.. Heck, WotC even powered up some spells that didn't used to be problematic, and made them that way, like Leomund's Tiny Hut!

I suspect a lot of those people valued the game feeling more like D&D in their estimation than any benefits that may have come from not doing so. I know I did.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't know if it's a fix, but the way I'd do it is much how 3e did it. They cited their expectations. They said "we built the CR system based on four characters using the default array, who are playing a Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, and Wizard using the PHB rules, with wealth by level adhered to." All stop.

Now granted, even some PHB content could "rock the boat", as it were; magic item creation (even without entering the quagmire of custom item creation), Leadership, faulty assumptions about what spells players would use, and old busted spells that were put into the book because "the fans expected them".*

The problem is, 3e is fundamentally broken at its very core, conceptually. The absolute lowest substratum of the math is functional, in that "d20+mods" is the core of every WotC edition, but once you get higher than that and start looking at the conceptual components, they badly conflict with one another. Unified saving throws were supposed to make it easier to balance spells; they instead make spells incredibly broken because of how easy it is to jack them into the stratosphere (without violating any of your assumptions, I should note.) PrCs were supposed to be a fun, flavorful way to add some extra color and to reward creative characters; they instead became horrible mandatory hurdles in order to not fall behind and effectively punished every player who didn't meticulously plan their characters several levels in advance (if not all the way 1-20.) Skill points were supposed to be a fun, semi-naturalistic way of having characters grow and improve dynamically; instead, they punished creative players and anyone who liked melee types except Rogues (but especially Fighters, Barbarians, and Paladins), while generously rewarding players who planned their characters meticulously and especially full casters who didn't need any more power-ups. Feats were meant to be a huge deal, the major draw of playing a Fighter, something that could truly transform a character...and they ended up being mostly trash used to gatekeep powerful features, with a tiny handful of exceptions that were stupidly, amazingly broken. Iterative attacks were meant to be a simple and powerful way to let melee characters keep up as levels advanced; instead, they punished anyone who wanted to be mobile and enforced a dull and static playstyle on most characters unless they were spellcasters. Etc., etc.

3e is full of interesting ideas and wonderful aspirations and absolute garbage implementation. The only way to get an actual, functional game out of the rules is literally to burn it down to the bedrock d20 layer and rebuild the whole thing from scratch. There was no way the CR system could ever hope to be effective or functional, even if they hadn't gone for the "every monster is built exactly like a PC and thus runs a gamut from Beyond Garbage-Tier to Infinity-Plus-One Powerhouse."

I suspect a lot of those people valued the game feeling more like D&D in their estimation than any benefits that may have come from not doing so. I know I did.

Gotta love needing something to feel like what it literally is because of who made it and what it's labelled as, regardless of what damage that "feel" does to the actual process and experience of playing it.

Or, wait, no, "love" is the wrong word there, isn't it?

 

[Micah Sweet]

The problem is, 3e is fundamentally broken at its very core, conceptually. The absolute lowest substratum of the math is functional, in that "d20+mods" is the core of every WotC edition, but once you get higher than that and start looking at the conceptual components, they badly conflict with one another. Unified saving throws were supposed to make it easier to balance spells; they instead make spells incredibly broken because of how easy it is to jack them into the stratosphere (without violating any of your assumptions, I should note.) PrCs were supposed to be a fun, flavorful way to add some extra color and to reward creative characters; they instead became horrible mandatory hurdles in order to not fall behind and effectively punished every player who didn't meticulously plan their characters several levels in advance (if not all the way 1-20.) Skill points were supposed to be a fun, semi-naturalistic way of having characters grow and improve dynamically; instead, they punished creative players and anyone who liked melee types except Rogues (but especially Fighters, Barbarians, and Paladins), while generously rewarding players who planned their characters meticulously and especially full casters who didn't need any more power-ups. Feats were meant to be a huge deal, the major draw of playing a Fighter, something that could truly transform a character...and they ended up being mostly trash used to gatekeep powerful features, with a tiny handful of exceptions that were stupidly, amazingly broken. Iterative attacks were meant to be a simple and powerful way to let melee characters keep up as levels advanced; instead, they punished anyone who wanted to be mobile and enforced a dull and static playstyle on most characters unless they were spellcasters. Etc., etc.

3e is full of interesting ideas and wonderful aspirations and absolute garbage implementation. The only way to get an actual, functional game out of the rules is literally to burn it down to the bedrock d20 layer and rebuild the whole thing from scratch. There was no way the CR system could ever hope to be effective or functional, even if they hadn't gone for the "every monster is built exactly like a PC and thus runs a gamut from Beyond Garbage-Tier to Infinity-Plus-One Powerhouse."


Gotta love needing something to feel like what it literally is because of who made it and what it's labelled as, regardless of what damage that "feel" does to the actual process and experience of playing it.

Or, wait, no, "love" is the wrong word there, isn't it?

Something being D&D has little to do with who owns it and how it's labeled to me. Hasn't since the waning years of 2e. Doesn't mean 4e is a bad game, and I'm not knocking it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Something being D&D has little to do with who owns it and how it's labeled to me. Hasn't since the waning years of 2e. Doesn't mean 4e is a bad game, and I'm not knocking it.

Alright, but that's secondary to my core point: prioritizing the "feel" of play over making a game which actually functions well and achieves the goals for which it was designed is, IMO, a fool's errand. It is difficult to design games that work as intended. It is easy to alter perception of a game once you already have it well-designed. Simply re-framing an existing mechanic with different words or presentation can completely alter how players perceive it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Alright, but that's secondary to my core point: prioritizing the "feel" of play over making a game which actually functions well and achieves the goals for which it was designed is, IMO, a fool's errand. It is difficult to design games that work as intended. It is easy to alter perception of a game once you already have it well-designed. Simply re-framing an existing mechanic with different words or presentation can completely alter how players perceive it.

All I know is I bought a lot of material in previous editions and enjoyed it because it felt like D&D to me. Emotional reactions are just as important to success as efficient design, maybe more so. I'm not buying a game that doesn't evoke the feelings of fun I could have playing it. I'd rather play a game that isn't as well designed and adjust it to fit my style, if it has the right feel.

 

[Pedantic]

Not trying to weasel-word here, but...that depends on what you mean by "completely overhauling."

There are basically three ways to fix up the system. One is, as you say, to just reformat the system, begin anew.

The second is to painstakingly test each and every creature ever published, under a huge variety of contexts and circumstances, evaluate the performance in each, and then assign a score of some kind. Once you have collected enough things, that score can then be translated into a CR or XP budget or whatever metric you prefer. This is, as I think my description has implied, pretty much untenable for any actual product. Small-time outfits simply don't have the reach or manpower to do this kind of testing, and the big names like WotC and Paizo don't have the time to review the entire body of their work in this way when it would honestly most likely be less work to just rebuild the system from scratch. (Worth noting, though, this does actually seem to be what WotC did with 5e's initial books. As I said, I have been told by folks who were in the loop for 5e's private playtesting stuff, and apparently the vast majority of CRs in the book have been manually adjusted because the value they originally had--as assigned by the tools WotC tells DMs to use--was simply inaccurate.)

The third is to more or less try for something like 4e's "MM3 On A Business Card." That is, you can fit the math for creating 4e monsters (not for giving them fun actions or interesting tactics, just their basic math) onto just one side of a business card. It's called "MM3" because 4e switched from a more cautious, "higher HP+defenses and lower damage" math framework to a more aggressive "lower HP+defenses and higher damage" math framework with MM3, which was generally welcomed by most 4e players. Now, to be clear, this path is more difficult than I've made it sound; actually finding an effective formula which actually does work across a broad range of character levels is difficult, especially if you can't make major changes to the rules while you work on it. You may find your efforts wasted if the underlying system is sufficiently self-contradictory.

That last thing actually did happen with 3e/PF, for example; this is why Paizo eventually had to admit to its fans, "Yeah uh...we can't actually keep working on PF1e. It's fundamentally broken and we can't fix that without rebuilding the system." So...yeah, some of the time, the only solution is to start over. But the "find a formula" approach, if you can make it work, is your best bet for a method to fix up the problems, especially if you're allowed to make "small" changes (that is, altering individual mechanics or removing/rewriting individual bits and pieces like certain problematic spells or class features or the like.)

This is a good summary, but I would generally quibble that the @EzekielRaiden is overstating the difficulty and understating the benefit of the second approach, and underselling the downsides of unified progression created by the third. It's reasonable to start with aggressive same game testing of your monsters, build to a reasonable understanding of patterns of effectiveness (and/or to note precisely how they interact with specific PC capabilities) and then to turn that understanding into future rules and guidelines to follow in placing monsters into various CR tiers for future designs.

I think the point we would generally diverge is that I view the role of the CR system as evaluative, not design leading. You might note a gap in your list of monsters and shoot for more CR 4 undead, but I don't generally think you should be moving from CR 4 -> statlines.

 

[ad_hoc]

I don't know if it's a fix, but the way I'd do it is much how 3e did it. They cited their expectations. They said "we built the CR system based on four characters using the default array, who are playing a Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, and Wizard using the PHB rules, with wealth by level adhered to." All stop.

Now granted, even some PHB content could "rock the boat", as it were; magic item creation (even without entering the quagmire of custom item creation), Leadership, faulty assumptions about what spells players would use, and old busted spells that were put into the book because "the fans expected them".*

But by and large, if your 3e game ran into trouble, you could easily point to one of the above assumptions having been broken in some way (I'm not discounting player skill having an effect on the game, of course, but altering the base assumptions was something that happened way more often in my experience. Every group I ever played with had mixed tiers of player skill, but YMMV).

Now, what are 5e's assumptions? It can't be point-buy, because that's an "optional" method of creating characters (says so right in the PHB). No Feats (optional). No Magic Items (optional). Character classes? Uh, well, they keep telling us "play what you want", which rings about as true as when Blizzard told us "bring the player, not the class" in World of Warcraft raiding.

What the "baseline" is in 5e is murky, and it's violated by WotC in their own adventures! Just look at how many magic items are in them (heck, just look at Lost Mines of Phandelver!).

Now, having said all of that, I don't think just tossing out the encounter creation rules is a good idea. The fact that we don't understand WotC's monster creation rules fully (beyond that they balance for hit points vs. damage and don't really care about accuracy vs. defenses), because again, unlike 3e, where they literally said "this is how you should make/upgrade a monster", WotC just throws stuff out there without any real explanation of why a CR 5 has 15 Hit Dice, doesn't mean that we can say we know how to balance an encounter better than they can.

We can know our players and their characters, yes. But the problem I see with just deciding that CR and encounter building should be chucked out the window is that, if we reject these tools, that the game is supposedly balanced around, then we've also rejected that the game has any balance whatsoever. That each individual group of characters has to be judged on it's own merits, and it's impossible to run the game properly without years of experience as a DM.

To me, that would be a fail state for 5e as a game. So even knowing that the CR system has it's warts, I still use it as best I can. My players deserve to be treated fairly, and I can't in good conscience tell them an encounter is fair if I just tossed out enemies I assumed they could defeat, based on nothing more than "I guess"?

*(warning: tangent) I hate that WotC made this mistake not once, but twice. When they made 3e, they assumed players would be annoyed if classic spells weren't in the PHB. When those spells proved to be some of the most broken in the game, even by the end of it's production run, they removed them or altered them greatly for 4e. Which led to "this doesn't feel like D&D" backlash from people who, in my opinion, didn't really grasp why this was a good thing. And then for 5e, they brought almost everything back, and now a whole new generation of gamers is wondering wth is up with things like forcecage, simulacrum, gate, etc.. Heck, WotC even powered up some spells that didn't used to be problematic, and made them that way, like Leomund's Tiny Hut!

We can assume a good deal more than that.

Point buy is optional but standard array (along with rolling) is default.

The system assumes 3-5 PCs so we could just say 4.

Feats and multiclassing are optional rules so we assume no for those.

There is no wealth by level. Magic items are not assumed.

There are descriptions of what each of the difficulties means and they are much different than what people usually think they mean.

It works out pretty well overall.

 

[James Gasik]

The problem is, 3e is fundamentally broken at its very core, conceptually. The absolute lowest substratum of the math is functional, in that "d20+mods" is the core of every WotC edition, but once you get higher than that and start looking at the conceptual components, they badly conflict with one another. Unified saving throws were supposed to make it easier to balance spells; they instead make spells incredibly broken because of how easy it is to jack them into the stratosphere (without violating any of your assumptions, I should note.) PrCs were supposed to be a fun, flavorful way to add some extra color and to reward creative characters; they instead became horrible mandatory hurdles in order to not fall behind and effectively punished every player who didn't meticulously plan their characters several levels in advance (if not all the way 1-20.) Skill points were supposed to be a fun, semi-naturalistic way of having characters grow and improve dynamically; instead, they punished creative players and anyone who liked melee types except Rogues (but especially Fighters, Barbarians, and Paladins), while generously rewarding players who planned their characters meticulously and especially full casters who didn't need any more power-ups. Feats were meant to be a huge deal, the major draw of playing a Fighter, something that could truly transform a character...and they ended up being mostly trash used to gatekeep powerful features, with a tiny handful of exceptions that were stupidly, amazingly broken. Iterative attacks were meant to be a simple and powerful way to let melee characters keep up as levels advanced; instead, they punished anyone who wanted to be mobile and enforced a dull and static playstyle on most characters unless they were spellcasters. Etc., etc.

3e is full of interesting ideas and wonderful aspirations and absolute garbage implementation. The only way to get an actual, functional game out of the rules is literally to burn it down to the bedrock d20 layer and rebuild the whole thing from scratch. There was no way the CR system could ever hope to be effective or functional, even if they hadn't gone for the "every monster is built exactly like a PC and thus runs a gamut from Beyond Garbage-Tier to Infinity-Plus-One Powerhouse."


Gotta love needing something to feel like what it literally is because of who made it and what it's labelled as, regardless of what damage that "feel" does to the actual process and experience of playing it.

Or, wait, no, "love" is the wrong word there, isn't it?

I do want to interject and point out that the first Prestige Classes were DMG content and mostly terrible. I wasn't arguing that WotC didn't break their own game; I'm fully aware that they did. I was more commenting that we at least knew the base assumptions for 3e Challenge Rating. Where they failed was revising the game's power level and never saying "oh hey, this is how this effects CR" other than "so we printed a new Monster Manual with better monsters than the last one. Fix the old ones? Why would we do that?".

I mean they added Feat bloat, completely changed what Prestige Classes were for, and basically told players that if you weren't a full caster, you should build towards being one of these (and even full casters had options!), put errata behind a paywall (the Polymorph subschool), changed the assumptions behind magic item pricing (again, behind a paywall), and even started tinkering with resource allocation by printing 24 hour classes (Warlock, Dragonfire Adept), and Encounter based classes (Tome of Battle). As much as I loved playing 3.5, the way they handled it was irresponsible.

Transparency is important to understanding why rules exist, giving you more information about what's going to happen if you ignore or change those rules. WotC has shown that at times, but never seems willing to commit to it.

 

[James Gasik]

We can assume a good deal more than that.

Point buy is optional but standard array (along with rolling) is default.

The system assumes 3-5 PCs so we could just say 4.

Feats and multiclassing are optional rules so we assume no for those.

There is no wealth by level. Magic items are not assumed.

There are descriptions of what each of the difficulties means and they are much different than what people usually think they mean.

It works out pretty well overall.

There kind of is a Wealth assumption, since the DMG tells you how much money characters should get from encounters. (pages 133, 137-139). Someone else did the math here, but it comes out to:

Spoiler: Assumed Wealth

Level	PC Wealth upon reaching level
1	Starting Gear*
2	94g
3	188g
4	376g
5	658g
6	2930g
7	5404g
8	8610g
9	12,019g
10	16,563g
11	21,108g
12	30,161g
13	39,214g
14	57,320g
15	75,427g
16	102,586g
17	129,745g
18	214,204g
19	383,123g
20	552,042g
20+	805,420g

Now that's not really a big deal, since there's not a lot for people to do with that wealth that affects game balance, outside of maintaining a stockpile of healing potions to assure that nobody really needs to spend Hit Dice on anything, and making sure spellcasters can afford to cast powerful spells.

And again, Wizards instantly ignored some of these assumptions with their adventures, so I really don't know what they took into account, if anything.

 

[Neonchameleon]

The problem is, 3e is fundamentally broken at its very core, conceptually. The absolute lowest substratum of the math is functional, in that "d20+mods" is the core of every WotC edition, but once you get higher than that and start looking at the conceptual components, they badly conflict with one another. Unified saving throws were supposed to make it easier to balance spells; they instead make spells incredibly broken because of how easy it is to jack them into the stratosphere (without violating any of your assumptions, I should note.)

Even if you hadn't been able to pump saving throw DCs 3.5 spells would still have been broken because there were enough spells that you could always prepare to go in aimed at a low saving throw. (And don't get me started on the 3.0 -> 3.5 changes that made almost all conjuration spells ignore spell resistance while mostly already being good, making SR and even spell immunity very weak).

3e is full of interesting ideas and wonderful aspirations and absolute garbage implementation. The only way to get an actual, functional game out of the rules is literally to burn it down to the bedrock d20 layer and rebuild the whole thing from scratch. There was no way the CR system could ever hope to be effective or functional, even if they hadn't gone for the "every monster is built exactly like a PC and thus runs a gamut from Beyond Garbage-Tier to Infinity-Plus-One Powerhouse."

It's more functional than you think if you play it the way the 3.0 designers imagined. Such as clerics spend most of their spells on healing (and no one makes wands of cure light wounds) and wizards theirs on direct damage evocations.