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

DMrichard

Explorer
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
 

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Yora

Legend
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

Legend
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

Adventurer
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

Hero
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.
 

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

A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
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.
 

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.
 


Enrahim2

Adventurer
While I absolutely agree that this is a way to play I tend to find enjoyable, I have to emphasize that it come with a load of non-obvious consequences.

Maybe the most obvious is that the players must be prepared to lose. This philosophy will lead to stakes players really dont want to fail go the wrong way. While many like this, my impression is that most prefer movies with happy endings when they are looking for pure fun entertainment. If your players just want to chill, relax and have fun, you either should to make sure there are never any real stakes on the table - or make sure the combats are winnable when those stakes come up.

The second is that you as a DM need to be prepared to see the players lose. You need to accept the pain of seeing all the player characters fall one after the other as they heroically try to save their downed team mates in a fight you had been telegraphed as hard as you could was a no brainer run away scenario. You have to accept your bellowed npc they were escorting being left behind for death when the characters teleport away from the encounter you knew would just be a walkover for them.

Several classic D&D issues like overly caution, not really caring about their characters and 5 minute adventuring day is becoming exponentially more probable unless you are very carefull and proficient in managing your game.

In short - what you are opening up is a very different kind of game than the "villian of the week" game where the characters prevents some bad stuff from happening, and get the feel good ending. You are almost forced onto a grim sandbox. If this is what you and your players want, then it is great! But you shouldn't introduce it expecting the result to be just villain of the week with increased tension.
 
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Clint_L

Hero
Getting players to accept losing works if they learn to trust that the story arc will pay off in the long run. We don't want the hero to lose in the end...but we want to feel like they are about to, so that the eventual triumph feels that much more earned.

For the past few years I've been concentrating my story arcs into 5-10 game mini campaigns, and I plan on the players suffering a massive set-back near the climax, some situation where they have to choose between various bad options and fight and catch just to get out more or less intact, perhaps with some key information or an advantage the will pay off later, depending on the choices they make and their luck.

It works in setting up the final confrontation, and also gives players a chance to build their own character arcs through how they deal with adversity.
 

MNblockhead

A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
While I absolutely agree that this is the way to a game I tend to find enjoyable, I have to emphasize that it come with a load of non-obvious consequences.

Maybe the most obvious is that the players must be prepared to lose. This philosophy will lead to stakes players really dont want to fail go the wrong way. While many like this, my impression is that most prefer movies with happy endings when they are looking for pure fun entertainment. If your players just want to chill, relax and have fun, you either should to make sure there are never any real stakes on the table - or make sure the combats are winnable when those stakes come up.

The second is that you as a DM need to be prepared to see the players lose. You need to accept the pain of seeing all the player characters fall one after the other as they heroically try to save their downed team mates in a fight you had been telegraphed as hard as you could was a no brainer run away scenario. You have to accept your bellowed npc they were escorting being left behind for death when the characters teleport away from the encounter you knew would just be a walkover for them.

Several classic D&D issues like overly caution, not really caring about their characters and 5 minute adventuring day is becoming exponentially more probable unless you are very carefull and proficient in managing your game.

In short - what you are opening up is a very different kind of game than the "villian of the week" game where the characters prevents some bad stuff from happening, and get the feel good ending. You are almost forced onto a grim sandbox. If this is what you and your players want, then it is great! But you shouldn't introduce it expecting the result to be just villain of the week with increased tension.
Nobody loses when they create a good story. I find better stories emerge, at least with more open-world, sandboxy campaigns, when character death is on the table.

But I get your point. You need to be on the same page as your players. In my current campaign. We lean into it.

First, I asked if they wanted to play in a massive, sandboxy, very deadly mega-dungeon setting.

Second, the first session was a funnel of level-0 characters. Each player had 4 characters. The first encounter, and the only planned encounter in the 3+ year campaign was very deadly. They PCs were part of a large caravan, either paying "passengers/merchants" or those being paid to guard. It was carnage. Luckily there were lots of NPCs which helped most of the PCs survive due to a large number of targets.

Third, when we started the campaign, we were still playing in person. On the wall behind the DMs chair was a Obiturary list with lots of space for writing the names of the fallen and how they died.

Fourth, taking inspiration from The Glass Cannon Podcast's first campaign, I had a light-hearted adversarial DMing style in terms of comments I would make during combats, etc.

I don't have to telegraph encounters much, because expectations were set from the first session of play. It is up to the players to have their PCs to do the work to determine the level of threat an area or enemy may pose.

Yes, it resulted in a different style of campaign from my prior two 5e campaigns. But it is refreshing.

I don't believe that the players care less about their PCs. In fact, having characters that survive to high levels are more precious for having survived against the odds being stacked against them.

Yes, they have been a lot more careful, especially at low levels. The five-minute adventuring day really only seems to be a problem when you expect a certain number of combats per game or have a story-driven game that expects certain things to be accomplished in a given session. Combats are dangerous, draining experiences to be planned for and recuperated from. I don't see a problem with that. Whether they fight and retreat to safety to recuperate, or continue on, depends on where they are, who they are facing, and what their objectives are.

I find the fact that they can run into very deadly encounters greatly enhances the social and exploration pillars of play. Much more time is spent on planning, reconnaissance, gathering intel, research, creating networks, etc.

Turns out that the campaign has not turned out to be quite so deadly as advertised. With the 5e rules and veteran, strategic players, the PCs can prove quite resilient.

As they reached higher levels they can really enjoy being able to defeat enemies that were once quite terrifying. It creates a sense of accomplishment.
 

cbwjm

Legend
I've heard this is part of what makes a West marches campaign. Have a room in a 3rd level dungeon guarded by an iron golem. 3rd level PCs aren't going to be able to win, but maybe those 7th level PCs back in town might. Makes things a little more interesting having spaces like this, areas where players cannot win. I think it's quite an old school concept, seeing what you might fight and deciding to back away and avoid it.
 

Shiroiken

Legend
Usually the key to this is player expectations. During a teaching game of Lost Mines of Phandelver, one player convinced the group to take on the green dragon... at level 2. He used the 4E mentality of "they wouldn't put it in if we couldn't beat it" (his words), and the obvious TPK happened. The group was shocked, particularly the 4E player, but it helped set the expectations for them that character can, and will, die if they make bad decisions.

My group knows my DM style, and they're quite aware that the game world is no more fair than real life is. The key difference is that they also know that running away and negotiating are viable tactics, so fighting to the death isn't always a necessity. Conversely, they know I've included morale into the game, so sometimes the enemies will retreat/surrender, even if they could technically win the fight at the cost of several of their lives.
 


Campbell

Relaxed Intensity
I'm a big believer in properly tuning the difficulty of a challenge. I tend to favor knowing when a particular challenge will or will not be difficult to overcome. Then you can design in those encounters that are dicey and probably should be addressed in asymmetric ways. For me personally I prefer this stuff to be designed rather than through random happenstance.
 
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TheAlkaizer

Game Designer
It's not something I've really experienced before. Most of my experience is with 3e, 4e and 5e which aimed at balanced encounters. I like that approach, to aim for a challenging fight that the players know they can succeed at. But I also see the merit in the unbalanced approach, I've been wanting to try it for years. But I have to find the right players/game for it. I've been thinking about trying it with Cairn.
 


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