The "math" of RPGs

[GMMichael]

Some analysis as to why this happens so much. It's because the d20 dice and relatively low rounds of combat. Cold or Hot dice can turn relatively easy encounters into tough ones.

I don't think that TPK/TEC (too easy combat) can both "happen so much" and do so in "low rounds of combat." Dice can look less than random over a small set of rolls. But if it's happening a lot, that's no longer a small set. My guess is human error starts creeping in at that range.

Say all the PC's miss and all the Enemies hit on the first turn.

This is definitely human error. If all characters have weapons ready and a target to hit in the first round, then the players have failed to use an interesting tactic and the GM has failed to provide anything other than a shooting range.

Interestingly enough I enjoy videogames much more that don't do scaled leveling too. I was really annoyed by the scaling in Bethesda games for example.

Yes, attacks from epic level bandits (in gold-embossed plate and emerald enamel no less) are pretty annoying. But it's a Bethesda game, so you can take your frustration out on the nearest guard force, until the only officials left are the jarl and his steward.

 

[FrogReaver]

I don't think that TPK/TEC (too easy combat) can both "happen so much" and do so in "low rounds of combat." Dice can look less than random over a small set of rolls. But if it's happening a lot, that's no longer a small set. My guess is human error starts creeping in at that range.

Each encounter would be an independent sample of a small set of rolls…

In short, increasing your number of samples make the phenomenon happen more, ie alot.

Moreover, to mitigate the chance of bad luck TPK occurring it means a significant number of combats are going to feel easy as the only lever the dm has to prevent it is overall encounter difficulty.

This is definitely human error. If all characters have weapons ready and a target to hit in the first round, then the players have failed to use an interesting tactic and the GM has failed to provide anything other than a shooting range.

Blame the players plan for them missing in the first round? Really? This could happen with any plan.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

This is definitely human error. If all characters have weapons ready and a target to hit in the first round, then the players have failed to use an interesting tactic and the GM has failed to provide anything other than a shooting range.

I disagree. Sometimes, in the first round, everyone does "their opening move" and sometimes the dice work against them. Monsters make all their saves, attacks miss etc...

I think saying "when that happens it's bad planning by a dm or bad playing by the players" is missing the point that was made.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I will agree with the posts that say that it's an art and requires knowing the game, the PCs, and the players.

And...it got me thinking about the most exciting combats are the ones that are on the knife edge, or maybe on the monster's side of the knife edge, and how to keep it there. I'm imagining a kind of rheostat in combat rules, with mechanics that make the losing party stronger. "Bloodied" condition, with concomitant powers, would be an example of that, but I'm wondering what else could be dreamed up.

(n.b.: Baldur's Gate III has a few magic items that kick in when HP are below certain % thresholds.)

 

[Basic Expert]

I don't know of any system that does wargame-esque set-piece encounters really well (in the sense that they are tactically complex, fun to play, and result in an exciting close-fought episode). That's because you're trying to use simulation rules to get a narrative result. You can get the feel of exciting battles in FATE, PbtA or other narrative games, but these usually ditch the tactical complexity for narrative massaging from the GM and players to make things exciting.

Shadowdark if very much in the OSR vein, which usually ping-pongs between "Just Try to Avoid as Much Attrition as You Can" Combat to "OMG, Run For Your Lives" Combat if the DM isn't careful. Parties tend to be larger with hirelings and henchmen to absorb losses when things go South.

It's pretty much up to the GM to make adjustments on the fly, or have subsystems in place, to emphasize dramatic set-piece encounters. That's because any Challenge Rating system cannot account for the sheer number of variables or potential randomness at play. That includes:
*Party composition vs. enemy composition
*Current party condition
*Ability and willingness of the party to nova
*The tactical situation (surprise or position)
*Environmental factors (advantageous or disadvantageous conditions)
*Additional party assets (magic items, hirelings, favors) or hindrances
*Player tactical acumen and skill vs. GM tactical acumen
*Hot or cold dice

Generally, if I want a tense, exciting encounter, I stat it on the difficult side but have a list of BREAKS I can give the party if it's going poorly (or BAD BREAKS for easy encounters). Breaks/Bad Breaks are just changes in the environment or tactical situation: a structure or tunnel collapses, cutting off reinforcements, a blow stuns a creature for a round, a monster's weakness is revealed, a vulnerable PC is overlooked or ignored, and so on.

I also RP enemies rather than simply use them as wargame pieces (i.e. in the most optimal manner). Enemy troops might waste time dithering before reacting, a big monster might roar and posture for a round, an enemy champion might pose magnificently after scoring a critical.

Some GMs might see this as ruining the "purity" of an honest combat, but I see it as the GM's job to determine what happens in an RPG. This isn't a tactical wargame after all. Dull gameplay is a choice.

 

[Blue]

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?

I'm going to give a correct answer, but it's probably not a useful one to you.

There are plenty of RPGs that do this -- because they have different goals than emulating a war game during combat.

Take Masks: A New Generation. It's a PbtA Teen Superteam game, going for a feel like Young Justice or Teen Titans where yes, fighting supervillains is part of it, but the friendships, rivalries, love triangles, and other drama is a big part of it.

You use the same Moves in combat as you do the rest of the time. If you can justify it in the fiction with your actions, Defend Someone works equally well protecting the civilians from a thrown bus as defending your BFF from trash talk from the Prom Queen.

Heck, there isn't even any direct analog of HPs. Instead there are five conditions: Afraid, Angry, Guilty, Hopeless, and Insecure. These get checked off as appropriate. Allowing a civilian to get hurt might make your PC feel guilty, or angry, or maybe one of the others, depending on how you'd react to the specific situation. When you get up the nerve to ask out your secret-identity crush and they turn you down, maybe that's insecure. Or a different one, again depending on who you are. Discovering who you are and who you want to be, when everyone has expectations about you, is a big theme of the coming-of-age game.

To sum up: the math issues are primarily for RPGs that want to treat combat as a descendant of war games, and there are plenty of RPGs that have "solved" the issue because the goal of combat-as-a-scene is different.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

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?

Define the "sweet spot", I suspect that a lot falls down right there. Is there one single sweet spot or would different tables and referees have a different view of what the sweet spot is.

As a D&D DM going back to 3.x (I ran games before that but never really started to thing deeply about encounters until I had issues with 3.5), I believe that 3 to 10 rounds are the boundaries of the sweet spot.
Less than 3 and initiative is over dominant, very often most of the monsters are killed without acting or worse the PC's are killed without acting.
3 to 4 rounds are enough for the monsters to seriously threaten one or more PCs and for the PCs to show off some cool powers.
6 rounds is good for a boss encounter but for a dynamic encounter, with minions, reinforcements, the boss and may be a boss final form that could last longer. It is important though to wrap it up quickly once the PCs have reached the victory is inevitable stage.

I have no idea if other share this opinion though.

 

[Blue]

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.

I gave another answer that I don';t think would be all that useful about RPGs solving it because the goal of their combat scenes not being a mini wargame. But I have another answer that I think may be more useful.

It's got a couple of parts, but they all go together.

1. Don't balance around attrition. D&D, every edition, has done this. 5e especially requires 4+ (2014!DMG recommeendation of 6-7) encounters per adventuring day. With that you can make them challenging, but you break the balance between the at-will classes and the long-rest-recovery classes like full casters. It's where the 15 (or 5) minute adventuring day comes from, and it is entirely true.

But you cannot plan a series of encounters for attrition, and also make each of them nailbiters, because when PCs have full HPs and spells it's hard to get it interesting with the default kill-or-be-killed stakes. Now, if there are other combat goals that can make it better, but few DMs I know do lots of different combat goals every single adventuring day.

Basically, attrition wears them down, making the last battles fun and tough, but it is hard to make those early encounters also in that point.

2. Swinginess is an issue. Lots of systems have a swingy mechanic, but sneakily tone it down because a combat is made up of lots of rolls so statistically it balances out. However, when you get to the point where there's a single encounter-defining roll, other rolls aren't going to offset it. An example could be a large battlefield control spell that ends up freezing the whole party -- or all of the remaining foes. Either way, the encounter just went to either easy or deadly because of the swinginess.

3. Allow retreating mechanically. D&D 5e, for example, it is notoriously hard to pull off an effective, full party retreat from an encounter the party is losing (until high levels where "A wizard did it" makes that it can be solved via magic.) This means that if an encounter is too much, either because of design or bad luck with swinginess, the party can't change the goal to survival, and instead it becomes deadly. 13th Age had a simple, rather gamist, mechanic for this: the party could always accept a campaign loss (something bad happens big picture) to successfully retreat, including with the unconcious or the dead. Now that's not to everyone's taste, but it made 'deadly' a whole lot more campaign friendly while also giving excellent opportunities for recurring baddies the party loves to hate.

4. Blurring the borders between challenging and deadly. Say a combat kills a PC, that's deadly, right? In a game like D&D 5e, after 5th level as long as the one who went down isn't the (only) PC with Revive, it's not deadly. As dead isn't a condition that has more effect on that character than being knocked out ofr the rest of the combat would have been. (It does have an affect on another character, in terms of a spell slot and component cost. Still less then the death of a PC.)

Basically, an RPG needs to expand the 'challenging' band of encounters, especially turning some 'deadly' back into challenging, make sure that attrition isn't part of the mechanics so a first combat can be as interesting as a sixth, cut down on swinginess for save-or-suck type of things (which need not be saves) for both PCs and (major) foes, and mechanically make retreat viable.

 

[Blue]

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.

May I suggest an alternative?

The GM still needs to be the one to find the "sweet spot" for their players and the party, but the system gives mechanics that support a GM doing this in ways to cut down the variance/swinginess that can lead to tedium or deadly, and/or to make the sweet spot larger.

 

[GMMichael]

The GM still needs to be the one to find the "sweet spot" for their players and the party, but the system gives mechanics that support a GM doing this in ways to cut down the variance/swinginess that can lead to tedium or deadly, and/or to make the sweet spot larger.

So, I'm probably going to look at this through the lens of the OP, in which . . .

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.

. . . der_kluge suggests that making fun and engaging encounters is impossibly hard. This hasn't been my experience, so I know that not all RPGs need to be providing mechanisms that counteract their own combat rules, i.e. making their RNGs less random. But sure, you can suggest it, and it might very well make a good game. (In fact, I think my game does something like this!)

It looked to me like you were suggesting an alternative to leaning on GM skill in the ways that I mentioned. I guess I could call my solutions the 3e way, given that I probably first learned about each in the D&D 3e DMG. Then there's the 4e way, since D&D 4 introduces the Bloodied mechanism to help the underdog, and seems to elevate martial powers and diminish magical powers until everything is on a level playing field, which might help to minimize surprises for the DM. If so, that brings me full circle to the beginning of my post; I'm not sure I'd want to play that, but it is another approach.