The "math" of RPGs

[der_kluge]

I was thinking about this today.... Excuse me while I wax philosophical.

On Saturday, I played in our usual Shadowdark game. The GM is good, the game is fun, but as usual, the combats are usually kind of easy. This seems to be a failing on the GM's part - I think he has a general tendency to just under-estimate what we're capable of. But I made a comment about this a while back to another player, who had known this GM longer, and he indicated that he wasn't sure the GM wanted to run bunches of monsters. He tends to stick to just one or two (in this case, it was three), because it can quickly get out of hand, and bog the game down.

That got me to thinking about how one designs RPG encounters, because that line between tedium, deadly, and boring can be razor thin, and finding just the right encounter that can both be fun and engaging without being a TPK seems impossibly hard.

Shadowdark doesn't seem to solve this any better than D&D does - the numbers are just smaller. High level monsters also tend to be much deadlier - especially in Shadowdark, where things could just easily kill someone outright, or at least turn things to stone, or do insta-kill damage (things like a mummy, for example).

So, I don't know, are there any RPGs that somehow manage to do this better? Is there a better way to design encounters to hit this sweet spot?

 

[SableWyvern]

In 40-odd years I have found there is one way, and one way only, to do this reliably -- get a feel for the game and your group and learn how to eyeball it. It helps if you run a game where having a fight that is "too easy" or "too hard" is actually an acceptable outcome. My players are unlikely to complain that fight is too easy, and they understand that if it turns out to be too hard it's on them to withdraw. This frees me to build encounters that simply make sense in the context of the world, and spend a lot less time worrying if they're too hard or too easy.

Admittedly, I haven't had much to do with more recent games where the game itself claims to have some hyper-accurate encounter balancing method.

 

[GMMichael]

So, I don't know, are there any RPGs that somehow manage to do this better? Is there a better way to design encounters to hit this sweet spot?

If there are, I'm not sure I'd want to play them. For the rules of a D&D-like to guarantee tough, but not deadly, encounters, characters would have to run on rails resembling 4th ed. D&D: all characters do the same stuff, they're just powers with different names.

Expecting regular tough-but-not-deadly encounters is like expecting an even tax balance. You're going to owe or get a refund. There's a theoretical sweet spot of $0, but you're not going to hit it.

So where's the fun and engaging non-TPK? It's in the hands of a skilled GM. It's recognizing that fighting to death is usually undesirable, that reinforcements are available, that victory isn't just another attack roll, or that a fudged roll isn't cheating.

 

[SableWyvern]

For the rules of a D&D-like to guarantee tough, but not deadly, encounters, characters would have to run on rails

Yeah, I think this is the crux of it for me. A lot of games want to put everything into a neat little box these days. That can work for a very focused game with a narrow concept and designed to be completed in a handful of sessions, but for a game with a wider scope and which is intended to allow for true tactical infinity (the latter of which is, IMO, what makes RPGs worth playing in the first place) you can't really quantify these things. The more versatility you allow, the more the table is left to make the game their own, the less meaningful any balancing system is going to be.

 

[Koloth]

Balance is tricky. At some point, the GM assumes the players will play their characters a certain way. When the players(it only takes one) do something unexpected, an encounter can suddenly get very easy or very deadly for the PCs.

If the GM designs an encounter to be deadly slowly with the idea that the PCs will figure that out and withdraw but instead the players go in with the idea that the PCs are supposed to win, the end result is probably a TPK.

Or as has been said before "No plan survives contact with the enemy."

I don't really think it is a game design problem.

BTW - One year and one year only, my state tax return was an even $0. It can happen but is definitely not the way to bet.

 

[overgeeked]

Near as I can tell there are two ways to balance the math of combat in RPGs.

D&D 4E had them both. You make the math so tight that characters are effectively interchangeable. For some this is great, for others its boring sameness.

The other way to balance the math is to ignore it and use things like clocks instead.

Then of course there’s the old-school “LOL, what’s balance?” approach.

 

[Retros_x]

Then of course there’s the old-school “LOL, what’s balance?” approach.

Thats my approach. Not just in OSR-games, but also in 5e. Balance is an illusion anyway in TTRPG. Chess is a nearly balanced game where all involved have exactly the same means (but one starts first which results in the one factor disrupting the perfect balance). A "balanced" TTRPG would go in the direction of a game like chess and unify/standardize making classes and characters (and enemies!) much more alike - which defeats the purpose and fun of an RPG imo. But without that approximation of character abilities you cannot mathematically balance the game you merely can give a rough estimate of the difficulty of a fight.

I build encounters based on the narrative and the story. If the heroes start combat with the orc warcamp the will fight the whole warcamp and not just 3 orcs, because that would be appropiate for their level. Is the combat way too easy? I shorten it and narrate how the heroes defeat the enemies or let the enemies give up or run away. Is the combat too hard? The players shorten it by running away. I remind them too that they can always run away or try to parley. But I also do some finetuning during combat especially lower or increase max HP on the fly or adjust action economy (enemies running away <-> reinforcements arrive).