How challenging should encounters be?
The Crimson Binome
Hero
I picked 99%... but I'm not happy with the way it's described.
It's not that my PC is special, because she really isn't, but it would be phenomenally stupid to go into any sort of fight where you might lose. If there was only a 75% chance of winning, then no campaign would make it past the first day.
It's not that my PC is special, because she really isn't, but it would be phenomenally stupid to go into any sort of fight where you might lose. If there was only a 75% chance of winning, then no campaign would make it past the first day.
was
Adventurer
...Challenging encounters employ the basic risk vs. reward concept that rpg games are founded upon. It's why every DMG has a section detailing how to design encounters of varying difficulty levels to challenge pcs. Designing an encounter with a 99% chance of success is not one that does a good job in challenging pcs.
...IME, campaigns where you are guaranteed to win every encounter are quite boring and are quickly abandoned.
...IMO, encounters with no risk of failure carry no real rewards in defeating them.
......To quote the current DMG (p.81), "An encounter has one of three possible outcomes: the characters succeed, the characters partly succeed or the characters fail. The encounter needs to account for all three possibilities, and the encounter needs to have consequences so that the players feel like their successes and failures matter."
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The Crimson Binome
Hero
I didn't say there was no risk of failure. I just said that the chance of failure is substantially less than 25%. If you have a game where the PCs have a 25% chance of failure in every encounter, then you have a game where - on average - no party survives more than four encounters. Going by the suggested guidelines, you would suffer two TPKs every day, and nobody ever makes it to level 2.
In this case, "partial success" would be success with a cost - the party doesn't die, but they have to expend one or more spell slot or Hit Point. Most encounters would fall into that range. Each partial success increases the chance of failure over the course of the day.
Total failure means everyone in the party dies. If you're using some other metric for what counts as a failure, then it would be possible to maintain a failure rate higher than 1% and still have some sort of lasting campaign, but you should really define your strange conditions beforehand.
was
Adventurer
...Not strange at all, but maybe we're not communicating effectively. The whole poll is simply a question of how tough players like their encounters. Some like them very challenging, others do not.
...A 25% chance of failure per encounter is challenging. However, it's not a cumulative factor ensuring a failure every four encounters. Arguing that successive encounters weaken characters is beside the point, proper encounters are designed with that reduced condition in mind. Assuming that the successive encounters fall on the same day.
..Fleeing an encounter is also a failure. It's extremely limiting to state that death is the only option to define failing an encounter.
...If adventurers are guaranteed a 99% success rate in every encounter, a failure rate of 1% or lower, you effectively create encounters in which no pc can ever lose or die. Such campaigns do not last.
...IME, it's a good idea to find out how tough players like their encounters. Which is what I am trying to do, in a more general community sense, in this poll.
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The Crimson Binome
Hero
Even if you didn't get weaker as the day went on, a failure rate of 25% is still way too high. Even if you abstract the whole combat out to a single die roll - just roll 1d4, and on a roll of 1 the party loses - then that roll of 1 would still happen eventually. When it takes 8 encounters to gain a level, it's unlikely that anyone would get to level 5, and fully 25% of all parties would die in their first encounter.
Maybe it's a problem with the narrative, but it would seem contrived if those random skeletons decided to not kill you, or the hungry owlbear didn't eat you. That's D&D, though. In order for the game to continue, the PCs have to survive every fight, which generally means they have to win. If you don't know that you're going to win, then you shouldn't engage; if the encounter is forced, then you win by running away.
Maybe you're asking the wrong question. If you can't come up with hard rules for what even counts as success or failure, then maybe you should ask how hard the players should need to work for their win: can you win by charging forward? or do you need some reasonable tactics? or do you need a good plan and a lot of luck, because one or the other won't cut it?
delericho
Legend
75% chance of success (meaning a 25% chance of failure).
But it's extremely important to note that "fail" doesn't mean "die".
Edit: It's also worth noting that I'm less enamoured of the "I'll win unless I do something stupid" tag on the poll. IMO either bad luck or bad play should be enough to trigger failure. With average luck and average play, I'd peg them at 75% chance of success; with very good luck or very good play then it should be a gimme - and, indeed, they may not even face the encounter at all!
But it's extremely important to note that "fail" doesn't mean "die".
Edit: It's also worth noting that I'm less enamoured of the "I'll win unless I do something stupid" tag on the poll. IMO either bad luck or bad play should be enough to trigger failure. With average luck and average play, I'd peg them at 75% chance of success; with very good luck or very good play then it should be a gimme - and, indeed, they may not even face the encounter at all!
I voted "other" - challenge difficulty is, in essence, a question of adventure pacing. Some should be hard, others easy.
I think most of us will find that we succeed *way* more often than 50% of the time. Are your PCs dying or running away every other encounter? No? Then they have more than a 50% chance of success.
I think most of us will find that we succeed *way* more often than 50% of the time. Are your PCs dying or running away every other encounter? No? Then they have more than a 50% chance of success.
I think that's related to the point Saelorn's trying to make.
25% success rate would mean most of the adventure was a fail-fest. Either dying or running away. Certainly not advancing the ball to the end zone.
Further, any PC who looks at the oncoming encounter, smells that it only has a 25% chance of success, should be backing away. Humans aren't entirely great at estimating risk, but when the perceive the risk is high, they avoid it.
Now somebody might say "that's the point of sacking up and being heroic!" but really, that's playing stupid. A smart player is going to find a way to mitigate that risk to give them an advantage (and thus change the % of risk). If the players can't change that risk %, they aren't going to make it as adventurers.
Thus, what I believe Saelorn's angle was, his PC is going to try to setup the encounter so he has a 90% chance of success if he can. He's going to avoid or runaway from an encounter that he smells a low % of success.
Which points out that the chance of success includes some assumptions.
Many years ago, a friend of mine was developing a major adventure for his (2e) D&D game. I wasn't playing in the game, so he used me as a tester. I ran a party through the adventure, twice. First case was brute force - be stupid, don't investigate more than is required to get the next door open, see how long you survive. The second case I was to play it as smart as I could (it was assumed that I have one brain, and the real player group had many, and that my smart playing would be a lower-bound on what they would be a le to accomplish). As we might guess, my party survived much, much longer when I played smart.
So, upon which style of play is that % chance to succeed based? Smart or stupid play? An encounter that has a 50% survival chance with dumb play may be no risk at all to smart play!
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