How challenging should encounters be?

[steenan]

I think encounters in my games have success ratio somewhere in the 50-75% range. There is no fixed ratio I aim for - there is a mix of easier and harder ones.

The hard encounters are often set up in such a way that if the PCs behave in the obvious way, they will be beaten, unless they have a lot of luck. They have to change the rules, surprise the NPC and/or exploit their weakness to turn the tables.

In games I use death is not the default result of a lost combat. PCs are often forced to run away, taken prisoners or beaten and left for dead. Winning all encounters definitely wouldn't fit the playstyle we aim for.

 

[Balesir]

...A 25% chance of failure per encounter is challenging. However, it's not a cumulative factor ensuring a failure every four encounters.

Ensuring failure, no. It means about a 70% chance of at least one failure in four encounters, however. One "adventuring day" in three you get to not either die or run away. Sounds like a blast... but count me out.

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.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with weakening characters or reducing resources - it's just a consequence of the way stacking probabilities work.

..Fleeing an encounter is also a failure. It's extremely limiting to state that death is the only option to define failing an encounter.

So, what percentage will be "death"? One in three? One in four? That would make your 25% failure case a world where the average life expectancy of an adventurer is ~2-4 days (8-11 encounters), depending whether it's 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 failures = death. By "average life expectancy" I mean that each character has around a 50% chance to last this long.

...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.

Well, pretty obviously, campaigns where characters have an average life expectancy of under a week do not 'last', in the sense that it's a bit marginal to call them "campaigns" when the list of PCs is that unstable.

As for "never losing", this is incorrect, to put it politely. In a game (story arc, mission, adventure series, whatever you wish to call it) of 100 encounters, a 99% chance of success gives a ~37% chance of at least one failure. 99% is an exaggeratedly high figure to use, but even then to say it gives "no chance of failure" just flies in the face of probability theory.

...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.

Then here's some advice:

1) Make your agenda at least slightly less transparent. Your biased wording and selection of "success chance" points makes the view you want to push abundantly clear and your motives thus suspect.

2) Be clear about what you actually mean by your question. Poorly defined terms not only invalidate the answers you get (because nobody knows quite what question they are answering) but also make it look very weaselly when you start squirming about what the terms mean when challenged. It's far better to be clear about what you mean from the get-go.

3) Think in advance about what the options you are offering actually mean, and why they might be attractive. This links into (1), above, in the sense that you can only describe options neutrally if you first have some idea as to why such an option might be attractive to voters. If there's genuinely no way it could be attractive, as far as you can see, don't offer it as an option. The comments might show you that some folk do, indeed, like options outside your range - but the lack of a poll button means they might tell you why they do so (and thus educate you).

 

[Schmoe]

I enjoy knock-down, drag-em-out fights with tough odds of winning, somewhere between 50-75% odds. However, you can't make a living with those fights, because you just won't make any progress. Typical fights in a typical campaign should be much closer to 100%. There should only be a few encounters with higher challenge than that per adventure, otherwise very few groups will be able to actually finish the adventure.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Other - if I come away from an encounter having had fun and I enjoyed it, I don't care if it was challenging. No all encounters are about lose of life and death.

 

[Zhaleskra]

I don't want to breeze through a fight, I don't want to only hit on a natural high/low number, and I don't want it to take too long.

 

[Umbran]

...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.

That's not how statistics work. If there's a 99% chance of success, that probably effectively means that someone is almost certainly going to die at some point. Here's how:

You have a 99% chance of success. You normally breeze through encounters. You don't have to work hard. But, each time you do that, you roll the die. Eventually, you roll that 00. You have a failure. And, since you are no longer expecting it, when that failure comes you don't see it coming, you're overextended, you don't run, and someone gets pasted across the wall. Players with very high success rates will tend to get sloppy, and if you're sloppy on that one in a hundred, it won't end well for you.

Such campaigns do not last.

For you, maybe. I have played in long-running campaigns where it was *guaranteed* that nobody would die unless they chose to. As part of the game rules, death was off the table entirely, except by player choice. But the game ran for five and more years, and only stopped as people moved across the country.

Do not confuse your preference to what can actually happen in the world.

 

[Janx]

I think the whole matter of risk and failure is a complicated question.

Not everybody even recognizes failure as failure. There are some positive thinking folks who just don't see a loss as a loss.

Consider a PC fighter, entering a room guarded by a robot that just happens to have the exact same combat stats as the PC.

If the 2 just go at it trading blows, the fight is basically a 50/50 chance the PC dies or the robot dies.

If the player is smart and does something like flood the floor, so the robot short circuits and freezes, or suffers penalties, then the PC's chance of success is obviously higher (what a rational player would desire).

If the PC rolls poorly during the straight fight, I don't think there's a rational player who would not run away, rather than die (especially if the PC was higher level).

Is this retreat a failure? Not exactly. Sure there's no XP or gold reward. Yet. The PC can regroup, try something different. Come back later. Find a different way around.

Consider if this robot encounter could be entirely bypassed? How is it a failure to run away from the robot and find another way around, when an alternative path could have been to avoid contact with the robot in the first place. The outcome is relatively the same. Even lost hit points come back, so it's not really a big deal to get hurt and run away.

 

[Argyle King]

I believe that encounter difficulty should reflect what makes sense given the in-game story situation rather than a formula.

I also believe that tactics which make sense given the situation (as opposed to tactics which only make sense because of metagame assumptions built into a system) should be rewarded.

(I've found that a desire for both to be true as much as possible has guided me toward particular systems.)

 

[Balesir]

I believe that encounter difficulty should reflect what makes sense given the in-game story situation rather than a formula.

An in-game story that is created by you, the players (collectively or as a dictat by one - doesn't really make a difference). In making this story you have some criteria and guidelines, even if you don't consciously acknowledge what they are, for what is "acceptable" and what isn't. Thus, a "formula". The idea that "story" or "game reality" is somehow meted out by an independent force is frankly risible; the only agents present are the players (including the GM), so the source of anything in the game is - guess what - the players.

I also believe that tactics which make sense given the situation (as opposed to tactics which only make sense because of metagame assumptions built into a system) should be rewarded.

Oh, hey - do you have a source for what those "tactics which make sense" are? I would be agog to discover it if you do. So, I imagine, would all the world's military leaders, several generations of martial artists and every writer on military history who ever lived. Because I read a lot of stuff written about combat and tactics by such folk and I see no firm concensus upon this matter whatsoever.

Of course, you might alternatively be using what you imagine to be what makes sense - which is what many, many folk do in this situation. Which is just as "meta" as a set of game rules, when it comes down to it, but suffers from the enormous disadvantage that only you are privy to its rules. Which is even less suitable for roleplaying than a "metagamy" set of written rules is, since it implies that characters - even supposedly expert fighters - who have lived all their lives in the game world have no real evidence or information upon which to base their own mental model of how the world works...

 

[NewJeffCT]

I think the best encounters are the ones where the PCs go into them thinking they're all going to die/there's no way we can win - and, in the end, the PCs pull through by the skin of their teeth through a combination of good tactics and good rolling. I had a really big group before as DM and encounters took so long at higher levels that almost every encounter had to be critical to the story, so I had to throw one big encounter per session at them. I got to be really good at coming up with those "Oh My God, We're All Gonna Die!" encounters - i.e., after that Balor dies and explodes in the middle of the party, the lich that gated it in walks into the room, fully buffed and ready to rumble... and, it has a grudge against the party.