D&D General Why Unbalanced Combat Encounters Can Enhance Your Dungeons & Dragons Experience

[DMrichard]

Many Dungeon Masters fret and worry about the balance of their combat encounters. I'm here to tell you there is no need to lose sleep or overprepare battles in Dungeons & Dragons, at least when it comes to ensuring they are mechanically sound and balanced. Simply balance your combat encounters and any encounter really on what makes sense in the context of the campaign.

However, suddenly swapping to this style of play isn't right. If you are the type of DM or GM who looks at challenge rating, experience budgets, average damage, and the exact action economy, let your players know you are switching to a new style of preparation when it comes to combat. It's cordial. It's kind. Players of DMs who prepare adventures in the heavily-balanced style usually know the encounter is beatable when it begins. When you begin to use what makes sense in the greater adventure or scenario and toss what is rules-as-written balanced, this may not always be true. The players may pit their characters against unbeatable foes that require more than what's clear to overcome. That's where the fun begins!

Let's explore this method of D&D prep together.

Full article link: Why Unbalanced Combat Encounters Can Enhance Your Dungeons & Dragons Experience

 

[Yora]

The game gets a lot more interesting when you don't know if every fight can be won. It makes you have to consider if you really want to fight a group of potential enemies and how you will escape if the fight goes poorly. It means sometimes having to let enemies get away with what they are doing and dealing with the consequences.

It creates a game where the choices of the players actually have consequences and matter.

 

[aco175]

I think most agree that every encounter should not be balanced for the party. Some are easy and others are hard. DMs might think this is based on the DMG where there is a budget and they have the easy, medium, hard, deadly system, but a lot of DMs would take it to mean that some encounters are a cakewalk and the PCs are so powerful they are hardly challenged and there are other encounters that they need to run from.

I can see that each table and DM needs to establish how encounters work in their games. Easing a group into a change can be made with wandering encounters and gossip from the town. If the villagers say there is a giant in the woods, then the players can expect to maybe fight it. If the players see the random encounter chart, they will see a giant listed and know they might be in over their head.

 

[cranberry]

I agree with this. People should learn to accept that the world of D&D is a dangerous place, and a lot of fights are going to be "unfair".

Many also have to accept that their PCs can die, despite having spent hours and dozen of pages creating a backstory.

A backstory should not be plot armor.

But this issue will never be fully resolved until WoTC reduces the numerous ways a PC can heal or be brought back from the dead.

IMHO, zero hp should equal death. Real death.

 

[Clint_L]

Completely agree with the OP, though it can be easy to get into a routine of making every fight fair, which trains your players to expect it. I sometimes remind players that not every battle is winnable or has to be fought and make sure to provide other options when possible, even for easy fights.

Sometimes they will wind up on missions where staying to fight it out is almost guaranteed death but I make sure those have an obvious ticking clock, like the Big Bad looming ever closer or environment damage that increases each round.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Simply balance your combat encounters and any encounter really on what makes sense in the context of the campaign.

That's what "balanced encounter" means, and has always meant.

The players may pit their characters against unbeatable foes that require more than what's clear to overcome. That's where the fun begins!

If you have absolutely no clue whatsoever how strong a combat is, how will you ever know what is "unbeatable" and what is "beatable"? And if you do have that knowledge, and use it to craft encounters that "[make] sense in the context of the campaign," you ARE making balanced encounters. Being balanced does not, and has not ever, meant "being perfectly in lockstep with the party and always guaranteed to be perfectly beatable with only minimal effort." This is a pernicious myth that encourages designers to make half-arsed structures (rules, tools, advice, etc.)

There is nothing whatsoever wrong with providing challenges that require solutions other than the most primitive, thought-free "charge!!!" at the enemy. That is, in fact, exactly what you should always do. Having a system which produces balanced combats makes it easier to do this, because you have a very good idea of what kinds of things will be required to make victory possible. You can thus reward wise player actions with objectively useful benefits, rather than throwing stuff at the wall and hoping it sticks. Even doing that does not guarantee a fight will go smoothly; high variability and large damage output, for example, can mean that even a couple mistakes swing things wildly in the other direction.

Your four rules should always happen before any encounter design--regardless of the system you use. These are, in fact, absolutely essential to making the best use of a well-designed, well-balanced ruleset. Failure to answer those four questions will lead to dull, pointless, repetitive fights regardless of whether those fights are balanced or not.

The game gets a lot more interesting when you don't know if every fight can be won.

Good balanced encounters do not tell you that. They tell you how dangerous a fight is likely to be unless mitigating circumstances apply. The two are not the same thing. The onus is on you as GM, and on the players, to alter the conditions when and how they are needed.

I think most agree that every encounter should not be balanced for the party. Some are easy and others are hard.

These two statements are contradictory. 4e D&D, the system everyone decries as being "too balanced" etc., explicitly instructed DMs to do this: make every encounter such that it fits in the context it appears, and provide a broad spectrum of challenges, some truly white-knuckle, some cakewalk, most challenging-but-doable. (Note: that last one is "most" only because if most fights are white-knuckle, people will lose interest in participating in fights at all both due to fatigue and due to constantly losing characters, while if everything is a cakewalk it gets dull really fast. Challenging-but-doable keeps things fresh while still having room for surprises, both good and bad.)

 

[MNblockhead]

Amen.

My favorite games are where there many of the threats are to be avoided, negotiated with, or run away from.

 

[MNblockhead]

Completely agree with the OP, though it can be easy to get into a routine of making every fight fair, which trains your players to expect it. I sometimes remind players that not every battle is winnable or has to be fought and make sure to provide other options when possible, even for easy fights.

Sometimes they will wind up on missions where staying to fight it out is almost guaranteed death but I make sure those have an obvious ticking clock, like the Big Bad looming ever closer or environment damage that increases each round.

Big fan of a session 0 funnel. Or have every player come to session zero with at least two backup characters. That alone can set the tone.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Big fan of a session 0 funnel. Or have every player come to session zero with at least two backup characters. That alone can set the tone.

While I am not personally a big fan of these (I'm...really not keen on "rock-bottom-zero to vaguely-kinda-sorta-heroic" play), I can 100% recognize that they are an EXCELLENT design choice. They deal elegantly with a serious design...oversight, shall we say, since it isn't a problem per se, only a problem in context, namely that OSR games expect you to churn through a large number of low-level characters before you get some that survive. That's a time sink a lot of players can't meet nowadays. The "funnel" rules turn what would otherwise be a burden into a genuine form of entertainment, at least for those into that sort of thing.

Run a funnel, get a handful of useful characters, go. Discards the lengthy time component while preserving the essence of the experience, even intensifying it.

 

[Clint_L]

Big fan of a session 0 funnel. Or have every player come to session zero with at least two backup characters. That alone can set the tone.

That's how we started my current home campaign. Four characters were dead by the end of the first game, and the survivors banded together.