Help me balance my old school encounters

[Celebrim]

What kind of guidance is there in judging challenges in these OSR games?

Almost none. DMs in the old days relied entirely on experience. If you don't have that experience, you'll need to work out the math for yourself - what is the AC of your PC's, what is the chance a Bugbear will hit that, how many hits can the party take before it starts to crumble, how much damage can the party unleash in that time?

XP calculations are also rely unreliable in BECMI/1e/2e. I made attempts to reform it back when I was DMing 1e, but its a daunting task.

So, for example 5 bugbears might be a pretty good encounter for a party of third level characters, if the party mostly had AC 3 or better and their were 6-8 party members. If you got two part members, and one of them is a mage with 9 AC - 5 bugbears (much less 8) is going to slaughter them.

As a player, the most important thing to do in old school was to get your AC up to the point that most monsters only hit you on a 20. Then you were golden, and very few things in the book were really even a challenge. Those you relied on having a high level mage to dispose of quickly before they could become a problem.

You're really on your own here.

 

[Celebrim]

IThe best technique is probably to start with "easy" encounters and ramp up the challenge until you have an idea of what your PCs can handle.

Best advice in the thread.

Taking the idea one further, in essence, this was precisely how old school achieved balance. Dungeon level 2 was harder than dungeon level 1, and dungeon level 3 was harder still. The party progressed until it was checked by difficulty and forced to explore elsewhere until its resources increased.

 

[fletch137]

That's the factor which kept my gaming group back in the day relying solely on pre-published adventures. And since we were 15, we assumed that any encounter we defeated was because we were awesome, and every one we couldn't beat was poorly designed.

Ultimately I'm hoping to translate some of my favorite BECMI, 2e and 3e adventures (thanks, Necromancer Games) and peppering them around my sandbox. I was hoping to get a head start on the process without having to wait for trial and error during my group's early adventures.

Are there any other thoughts on the suggestion of looking at the XP value of defeated monsters? Nothing so elegant as an XP Budget, but perhaps offering some guidance?

 

[Zardnaar]

I have been playing ACKs and in short you have to ad hoc it based on things like ability scores and equipment and magic items. Eer on the side of caution and AC is the main factor. Throw large groups of lower hit dice critters at them as they have trouble hitting. Also makes the martials feel better when they get to cleave lots in the ACKs system as I was running my ACKS players through the Tomb of Elemental Evil and they walked into a room of 23 baddies and cleared it out at level 5 or so.

The ACKs thief kind of sucks still so also be careful with traps. Tougher monsters are ok if they are by themselves as action economy will kill them. Save or die effects are also dicey like the bee sting that kills you on a flunked save. If you have been running some old school modules like B2, B5 etc your PCs may also be very well equipped with magic items especially if you have a 5 or 6 man party as ACKs PCs are a bit more powerful than BECMI ones with more healing available at lower levels so a smaller party can kill stuff at a much faster rate than pure BECMI due to cleave and proficiency rules.

ACKs is kind of fun though I quite liked it and we bought the players companion for it.