Unearthed Arcana Unearthed Arcana Presents Alternative Encounter Building Guidelines

WotC's Mike Mearls has posted the latest Unearthed Arcana, presenting an alternate set of encounter-building guidelines for D&D. "Though this approach uses the same basic math underlying the encounter system presented in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, it makes a few adjustments to how it presents that math to produce a more flexible system. These guidelines will be of interest to DMs who want to emphasize combat in their games, who want to ensure that a foe isn’t too deadly for a specific group of characters, and who want to understand the relationship between a character’s level and a monster’s challenge rating."

It's four pages, and includes various tables divided into a series of five steps - Assess the Characters, Encounter Size, Determine Numbers and Challenge Ratings, Select Monsters, and Add Complications. The latter step includes d8 monster personalities, d6 monster relationships, terrain, traps, and random events. Find it here.

At the D&D website:

 

[delericho]

It's not needless. Making DMing harder has arguably saved D&D, and thus the hobby, from self-destruction.

No, I'm actually sorta a little bit serious. 4e had useable encounter guidelines, running it was easy, I saw more new players stick with the game and become DMs (and transition to DMing faster and with greater success) then ever before while I was participating in the Encounters program. It was remarkable what a little simplification and systemization can do. But that didn't help D&D take off like 5e has, because it disrespected the games history by trying to be better, nor did it appeal to the fans deeply rooted in that history.

That's the fault in your argument. 4e did two things: it made the game easier to run and it "disrespected the game's history". Those two things are not inextricably bound together.

And only one of them is a good thing.

 

[Psikerlord#]

I like the monster personalities part, but otherwise these encounter guidelines are still pretty complex.

A better approach imo - is to use a formal Party Retreat rule (with a cost), in conjunction with an improvised Chases rule, which then frees the GM up to simply throw whatever makes sense at the party, safe in the knowledge the party can probably escape if need be.... which is what Low Fantasy Gaming does (free PDF in my sig).

 

[Dhaylen]

Solution to encounters - any level!

It is amazing the timing of Drunkens and Dragons latest video on youtube.
The video deals specifically with this, and gives a pretty good solution I plan on using.

The concept is pretty straight forward:3d's
- Damage
- Disruption
- Duration

* If your 'umberhulks' are too underpowered, double the damage of the next wave, and create story/description of an improved version coming out. (And be straight with the players that they are rocking it, and you need to step it up a notch.)

Hank goes into more detail - his style may start off a bit 'crazy' for some, (everyone here enjoys it), but skip to the points if you dont like it... it literally is amazing the timing of his video, as it came before this UA article - that appears to need to reference his video as well!

https://youtu.be/tfO1GWbA1MA

 

[dave2008]

Maybe parties of bumbling idiots are still threatened by whatever WOTC had in mind, but I should hope that their design goals for 5E were not "Lets market this game to idiots!" Because really, marketing to noobs is fine, but you expect noobs to get better, idiots don't.

I take issue with the bold part there. The assumption is that one is expected to improve play ("get better") in some manner that makes battles easier or less dangerous for the players. That is one way / style of play. However, it has never been a goal of the groups I have played with. The goal has always been to have fun and my groups simple have not enjoyed combat tactics. They get "better" by role playing and investigating, not careful coordination of spells and tactics. And I assure you we are not bumbling idiots and my group(s) quite simply have no interest in getting better in combat (other than through their characters advancement).

Now as DM I think the monsters are kinda weaksauce (at higher levels at least), but they have worked just fine for my group.

What I think would be great is an explanation on how to adjust the encounter guidelines based on different expectations of encounters per day. That I think would be interesting.

 

[Parmandur]

Well, two out of three of the most recent RPGs I read have encounter guildelines: FFG's Star Wars and Shadowrun 5e. Ars Magica doesn't.

To be honest, this discussion makes me sad. Apparently, 5e didn't benefit from the lessons learned in 3e and 4e. Ah, well, it's unlikely I'll take another look at D&D before 6e, anyway.

Alternative explanation: they did learn the lessons from 3E and 4E, and the super fuzzy guidelines are the result.

 

[pemerton]

4e did two things: it made the game easier to run and it "disrespected the game's history".

4e had really predictable cookie cutter encounters that any experienced party knew by rote.

You know what is totally not fun?
A perfectly balanced encounter.

You don't remember balanced encounters.

<snip>

The memorable encounters tend to be unbalanced. The ones where you just steamroll over an enemy without a sweat, giving the opponents a humiliating pinkbelly before finishing them off with a wedgie. Or the encounters where you think you're going to die two or three times and bad luck keeps making things that little bit crazy.

When things get unpredictable, when you beat the seemingly impossible odds, when the game doesn't go smooth... that's when the game becomes memorable. Those are the times you'll sit around and recollect.

A fair bit of biography here masquerading as universal.

Eg my 4e game - with the Rod of Seven Parts, the Eye of Vecna, the Sword of Kas, and an Orcus-slaying party that includes a dwarven cleric/fighter swapping between hammer and axe and an elven ranger-cleric with a demon-slaying bow - does not disrespect the game's history. That list of stuff is basically the roll call for D&D nostalgia!

Nor does my game, or other 4e games I've read about on these boards, involve "cookie-cutter" or "totally predictable" encounters.

And as for the memorabilit of encounters - whether or not they involved good luck or bad presumably has no connection to whether or not they were mechanically balanced (which is not a property that depends upon actual dice rolls during resolution). And I remember plenty of encounters that were mechanically balanced (as in, conformed to the explicit or implicity guidelines for building encounters). The maths of an encounter doesn't have very much to do with its predictability (at least in my experience).

I'm just curious as to how many RPGs exist (outside of D&D 3e-5e and their clones) that have encounter building systems (regardless of being strong or intuitive).

HARP has guidelines (based around comparing average combat bonuses).

Burning Wheel doesn't have encounter-buiding guidelines (it's not really an encounter-based system) but it has advice on NPC building which emphasises the need to manage degree of challenge, pacing, etc.

Robin Laws's HeroQuest revised has, as its core, a system for managing DC escalation or de-escalation based on consecutive party successes. (Like BW, HQrev is a bit different from typical D&D, in that it takes for granted that the PCs will fail from time to time and yet the game will go on without the GM needing to take some sort of emergency action.)

 

[The_Gneech]

In my experience, 5E fights run exactly like 3E/PF ones if you crank up the difficulty and put a bunch of terrain stuff in. (I can't address how they compare to 4E because I never played that beyond Keep on the Shadowfell, which I'm told is not representative.)

The main difference I've encountered is that characters are more inherently durable, rather than having the cleric running around healing people constantly. This may be contributing to a feel of "monsters hitting like kittens," because PCs aren't getting creamed as often– but if you look at the actual duration of the fight, it's not that different. It's just that the turns a player would be spending sitting out the fight and marking "-1 hp" until their number comes up on the cleric's "Now Serving" screen, they are instead up and still fighting, keeping the player engaged.

Speaking only for my own group, we much prefer the 5E model. Every once in a while I toss in a giant hour-long set-piece fight in the 3E/PF mode, and at the end of it we're always like, "Oh yeah, there's a reason we don't do those any more."

-The Gneech

 

[Sacrosanct]

I take issue with the bold part there. The assumption is that one is expected to improve play ("get better") in some manner that makes battles easier or less dangerous for the players. That is one way / style of play. However, it has never been a goal of the groups I have played with. The goal has always been to have fun and my groups simple have not enjoyed combat tactics. They get "better" by role playing and investigating, not careful coordination of spells and tactics. And I assure you we are not bumbling idiots and my group(s) quite simply have no interest in getting better in combat (other than through their characters advancement).
.

I agree with Dave here. Also, I take issue with [MENTION=93444]shidaku[/MENTION]'s implication that you're an idiot if you don't "get better at optimizing or rules mastery". A whole lot of players couldn't care less about optimizing or becoming better "tacticians". A lot of people like to role play, or a million other things. I'll also say some of the best players I've ever DM'd were brand new to the game and didn't have all the rules memorized.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I don't have the time or patience to assemble 6-8 encounters per "day" and frankly my players aren't interested in that sort of attrition-based gameplay. The implied assertion of your post (you're playing it wrong if you don't do what they say) only makes the situation worse. Games should be flexible. If the only way to get the mathematically expected outcome is to do one procedure one way then all we've done is make D&D less approachable by legitimizing badwrongfun.

The only one accusing others of badwrong fun is you, not him.

When things get unpredictable, when you beat the seemingly impossible odds, when the game doesn't go smooth... that's when the game becomes memorable. Those are the times you'll sit around and recollect.

So much this. In fact, this is pretty much my go-to response when I hear people talking about how they know how many resources they spend in every encounter because they know how every encounter, and how many encounters, will happen in a typical adventuring day. In fact, that was the argument someone made (I can't recall who) in the "is offense always better than defense argument". I basically said it's not, because unless you regenerate all of your resources after every encounter, you never know what you're going to face later in the adventure, and the counter argument was "anyone remotely skilled at D&D will be able to reliably predict these things."

Arguments of preferred playstyle aside, it does seem to be objectively true that players don't remember the average balanced encounters, but remember the really tough ones that they managed to overcome through luck, guile, or skill.

 

[The_Gneech]

Arguments of preferred playstyle aside, it does seem to be objectively true that players don't remember the average balanced encounters, but remember the really tough ones that they managed to overcome through luck, guile, or skill.

Alas, without the "normal" encounters, you have no baseline for the awesome ones to stick out from. XD

-The Gneech