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:

 

[Pauper]

But then, how did everyone manage to play D&D back in 1980 (+/-)? There were no "encounter guidelines" back then.

True, but I suspect there's something else going on that we all might remember -- say, that we all seemed to play through the Slavers series, and the G/D/Q series, and Keep on the Borderlands...

In short, there were a lot more published adventures back then, and whether we ran those straight or incorporated them into our own campaign worlds, those adventures taught us more about what worked and didn't work in challenging our players and their characters than any specific 'encounter guidelines'.

Let's also not forget that pre-3E adventures tended to run more toward the 'living site' model rather than the 'encounter' model for adventure design -- how many adventures do you remember running where a number of rooms had comments like 'if the bugbears in Area 4 hear the sound of combat in Area 2, they will move to reinforce their fellows in 3 rounds'. This kind of thing is virtually unheard of since the rise of the 'encounter' model in 3E design.

What's my point? My point is that anyone who can't figure out, learn, or otherwise "get it" (DM'ing) to write fun, exciting, and challenging adventures without the aid of mathematical formulas or a computer...er...well, maybe DM'ing isn't for them.

That's kind of a problem for the game, then. The designers of the game identified some time ago that the biggest factor limiting the growth of the game is the rate at which new DMs can be recruited and 'trained'; at some point, the number of players at the table gets to be too large to handle effectively, so someone needs to step up and become a new DM to allow the table to split into smaller, more manageable parties. But if the perception is that DMing is hard and takes a long time and lots of effort to get 'good' at it, then people aren't going to be all that willing to step up to DM. (And anybody who has tried recruiting new DMs for Adventurers League or Living Forgotten Realms can sympathize with this.)

Thus, the impetus for encounter-building guidelines, with the implicit promise that, if you crunch the numbers correctly, you'll come up with a challenging, not overwhelming encounter that your players will enjoy. That the encounter building guidelines are largely bogus** is not something a new DM is likely to figure out, and by the time the DM does figure it out, she'll be long-enough into her campaign that she'll probably just muddle through and find some other way to make it work rather than end her campaign and disappoint her players.

** - Of all the versions of D&D that had encounter-building guidelines, 4th edition's was the most useful, because the structure of the game's abilities was much more rigidly defined, and there was a much firmer 'floor' on character effectiveness based on those definitions. You might still need to make adjustments for a party of munchkins (though doubling or even tripling monster HP would usually get you over halfway toward success even there), but barring some weird synergistic combination of monster abilities, your encounters would very seldom go off the rails.

--
Pauper

 

[Sacrosanct]

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

-The Gneech

What is "normal"? For decades, encounters were built without balance in mind. At least not as the top priority of that encounter. They were designed for what fit that particular area and story of the adventure. A clan of goblins was a clan of goblins, regardless of party make up, #, or level. Since balance wasn't a focus, you had encounters that were easy, medium, and some that were flat out hard. The point is that you never knew. You also never knew when you were able to rest up. When you plan everything out and the players know that they will never face an encounter that they can't beat, and they knew when they will be able to rest, it sucks the good tension right out of the adventure.

 

[Sacrosanct]

True, but I suspect there's something else going on that we all might remember -- say, that we all seemed to play through the Slavers series, and the G/D/Q series, and Keep on the Borderlands...

In short, there were a lot more published adventures back then, and whether we ran those straight or incorporated them into our own campaign worlds, those adventures taught us more about what worked and didn't work in challenging our players and their characters than any specific 'encounter guidelines'.

Let's also not forget that pre-3E adventures tended to run more toward the 'living site' model rather than the 'encounter' model for adventure design -- how many adventures do you remember running where a number of rooms had comments like 'if the bugbears in Area 4 hear the sound of combat in Area 2, they will move to reinforce their fellows in 3 rounds'. This kind of thing is virtually unheard of since the rise of the 'encounter' model in 3E design.


Pauper

I think it's worth pointing out that in those modules, they were designed for "4-6 PCs of level 3-6." That right there tells you that there is a LARGE band of party power level. 4 level 3 PCs is much different than 6 level 6 PCs from a party power perspective. And that's not even taking into consideration hirelings and henchmen, which is something you don't see anymore since 3e. AD&D wasn't built for balance at all. It was very clear that you as the DM needed to know your players, and adjust as needed for your gaming table. Also, while there were a lot of adventures back then, we created them ourselves a lot more than what people do now. Nearly every DM had his or her own campaign world. I can't even count the number of adventures I created back in the day. Now? It seems everyone is using published material.

4e might be the pinnacle of balance, but balance brings predictability. And IMO, predictability breeds boredom. D&D didn't have rules for balanced encounters for decades, and it was the most popular time for the game, which shows that you really don't need those rules or guidelines period. What you do need, is a DM who is familiar with both the rules and their players if you want to create encounters that your gaming group will enjoy.

So my advice to anyone looking for help in creating encounters is to a) get really familiar with the mechanics and monsters, and b) get really familiar with how your players typically play, and then create encounters that feel right.

 

[Umbran]

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.

This was from a couple of pages back, but it bears a bit of focus.

Calling people idiots is NOT COOL. This is not acceptable behavior. Period.

I hope that's clear enough. Thanks for your time.

 

[3catcircus]

Maybe I'm just used to it, but my method generally works 75% of the time. All I do is add one or two HD or Character levels to each of the NPCS, depending upon how long I want the fight to take.

Examples (spoiler alert):

In Sons of Gruumsh, I made sure that Vhazror did most of his attacks while riding Dregthaug doing flyby attacks. This caused the overconfident still conscious PCs to flee dragging the unconscious ones with them, to regroup; they then figured out a different way than just charging in.

Of course sometimes they'll just get the drop on your monsters. In Mysteries of the Moonsea, they prized off the coffin lid in the false tomb of Vorbyx and were attacked by the troll skeleton. Unfortunately, I rolled low on its initiative. Three PCs (including a paladin smiting it) took it out before it's turn in the very first round of combat.

 

[Pauper]

I think it's worth pointing out that in those modules, they were designed for "4-6 PCs of level 3-6." That right there tells you that there is a LARGE band of party power level. 4 level 3 PCs is much different than 6 level 6 PCs from a party power perspective.

Let's not forget that the classes were 'balanced' in an asymmetrical fashion as well -- something I'd forgotten until I picked up the old Gold Box SSI games on gog.com not too long ago. You could have three characters with the exact same number of XP, but the magic-user would be level 4, the fighter level 5, and the thief level 6. So saying 'a party of characters from level 3 to 6' was simply a recognition that some parties did combine level 3 and level 6 characters, not that the adventure was set up to accommodate anything from a level 3 party to a level 6 party.

D&D didn't have rules for balanced encounters for decades, and it was the most popular time for the game, which shows that you really don't need those rules or guidelines period.

I'm going to disagree with you here -- yes, the game was very popular among its fanbase back in the day, but the fanbase wasn't that large. TSR sold 750,000 copies of the AD&D core books in 1984 (according to Wikipedia), and WotC estimates that roughly 5 million people are playing D&D regularly today. Given the much greater degree of public acceptance of D&D today, I'd argue that this is the 'golden age'. The increased number of players is absolutely connected to the perceived ease of DMing, supported by systems like the encounter-building system.

I still don't think the encounter-building system in 5e works, as presented in either the core books or the UA article. But I think it has enough of a feel of 'yeah, this doesn't seem too complicated' that it does what it's really intended to do -- get people behind the screen running games so that more people can play.

So my advice to anyone looking for help in creating encounters is to a) get really familiar with the mechanics and monsters, and b) get really familiar with how your players typically play, and then create encounters that feel right.

My advice is to let the players make memorable changes to your campaign world -- it's the best way to let them know that their actions really do have consequences. For instance, in my homebrew world, I once had a charlatan thief who decided he wanted to breed rust monsters and sell them to local kobold tribes as pets. Now, two generations later, the kobolds have their own kingdom and nobody wants to mess with them.

--
Pauper

 

[Jester David]

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

This will vary depending on the DM.
But I didn't really use "predictable" to describe, I used "fair" and "balanced". Which is something that spawned out of 3e: encounters have a budget and use 24% of your resources, and you have four per day. Which continued into 4e. Where you had encounters that you had a good chance of winning with decent tactical play. It worked well with the "kick in the door" playstyle.
And players got used to that. There's the assumption that the DM is playing fair, and that any encounter will be balanced for the players at their current level. Because those are "the rules".
Doubly so if the players participated in any sort of organized play or ran a published adventure.


You could see how this affected people by the playtest reports from early 5e, where they put people into the Keep on the Borderlands unmodified, and there were numerous TPKs from "unbalanced" encounters that weren't nearly as challenging in 1e, because players didn't assume a fair fight.


Now, again, this will vary depending on DM. Some DMs might never have read the encounter building rules for 3e or 4e, and continued to wing it like 2e and before. Others might have ignored the rules when it suited them. Others might have embraced the sandbox and had encounters that were far too hard because it made sense in the world.

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).

What are your most memorable encounters?
How many encounters are memorable because they were balanced and fair? Because they were textbook encounters right out of the book. And conversely, how many of them are memorable because of some other element: a set piece, some creative terrain, a unique mechanic, exceptional rolls, creative tactics, etc?


I postulate that what makes a fun, exciting, and memorable encounter has very, very little to do with the rules designed to make a balanced encounter. And very often, the best way to make a memorable incident in the game, is to ignore those rules.

 

[Jester David]

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).

The D&D-esque games (13th Age, Shadow of the Demon Lord) have encounter building rules. But most other non-D&D games in my collection (Vampire/ WoD, FATE, various flavours of Cortex, Icons, Shadows of Esteren, WOIN, Cypher, FFG Star Wars IIRC) really don't have encounter building rules per se. Encounter building rules are actually pretty uncommon once you get outside of the "D&D" sphere, even modern games.

 

[delericho]

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

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!

Note the quotation marks in my post - those were Tony Vargas' words, not mine. And the reason I used them is that, while I don't necessarily agree with that characterisation of 4e, it wasn't relevant to the point I was making.

(FWIW, I think it is undeniable that 4e changed a lot from what had gone before, even if only in presentation, and I further think that doing so was a significant factor in its relative failure. But whether those changes constitute 'disrespect'... I don't think I'd agree with that. But, as I said, it wasn't relevant to the point I was making, so I felt no need to argue that point.)

 

[Jer]

The D&D-esque games (13th Age, Shadow of the Demon Lord) have encounter building rules. But most other non-D&D games in my collection (Vampire/ WoD, FATE, various flavours of Cortex, Icons, Shadows of Esteren, WOIN, Cypher, FFG Star Wars IIRC) really don't have encounter building rules per se. Encounter building rules are actually pretty uncommon once you get outside of the "D&D" sphere, even modern games.

I suspect that this is largely due to the power curve on non-D&D games (or really, non-d20 family games). The power curve on most non-D&D games is fairly flat. Your Star Wars or WOD or Cortex or Icons characters generally stay within a certain bound of power and never leave it. Essentially most games have solved the "sweet spot" problem by having a much narrower band of power levels for characters to act in. (Even superhero games generally follow the pattern of setting a power level at character creation and then if your power level ramps up at all during play it does it fairly slowly).

You don't need fancy encounter building guidelines when the characters stay at roughly the same power level through the course of a campaign. The only reason D&D has ever needed any guidance at all on what to throw at the party is because when you first start playing throwing 6 orcs at a party of 4 characters might slaughter them, while a month later 6 orcs against the same party is going to be too easy. You don't get that in a Star Wars game - if 6 storm troopers are a challenge for a party when they first start playing, they're probably only a slightly smaller challenge a month later. And even a year later you might only need to add 1 or 2 more to keep the encounter interesting.

(Also, of course, the emphasis on combat in the D&D family of games probably has an impact here as well. Encounters need to be balanced to a large degree because players will play through so many of them in the course of a story. In games that are less combat heavy there's less of a need for balance because there's an assumption that the GM will adjust on the fly if it turns out that his/her assumptions about power level were off because the combat is filling a narrative need and a TPK rarely fulfills a narrative need outside of a Call of Cthulhu or similar scenario. Of course experienced DMs do that with D&D as well, but it's hard to impart experience in a rule book to people trying to learn the game from the book.)