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

[Quartz]

IMHO, zero hp should equal death. Real death.

I'm a big fan of the "Has X's story finished?" style. D&D is, among other things, a collaborative storytelling game and many players are invested in their characters.

 

[cbwjm]

That sounds familiar.

Oh that was your post here on ENworld! I've read so many posts like that on Reddit, I often get mixed up on where I read them.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

Count me in the camp of creating encounters that are designed for the location they are in rather than for the level of the party. IMO, this creates a "living" world where some areas are super dangerous while others are the opposite and still others are “balanced”, though the latter is more by coincidence rather than any concerted effort on my part as DM. As the PCs level up and become more cohesive as a team, the super dangerous areas naturally become less of a threat to them. The important part, as has been said by others here, is that the party is able to receive at least some information freely (in the form of telegraphing) about the danger level of a particular location. And then perhaps more specific information can be gleaned through ability checks, if that’s something the PCs wish to pursue.

 

[Vaalingrade]

3.X Simulationists

Ah, simulationism. The cause of and the root of all of 3e's problems.

 

[Minigiant]

Ah, simulationism. The cause of and the root of all of 3e's problems.

The Simulationism actually wasn't the cause and root. It was the same thing that caused a problem in 5e in this thread and another recently recently popular thread, not having a clear image of what you are portraying when designing your mechanics.

For people who like Unbalanced Encounters, character creation of new interesting satisfying characters takes too long in case the PCs die.

For people who like Balanced Encounters, the monsters don't follow the rules for balanced combat as monster capability were designed freeform..

For people who like both, you run into both problems.

And for everyone, there is no official method nor guidance to telegraphing threat.

 

[Pedantic]

So it seems like we're having three different conversations simultaneously here and randomly mixing terms/arguments across all three of them. I feel like we're all kind of pushing more toward the extreme ends of each sliding scale than anyone probably actually wants to go as a result.

PCs should generally defeat most encounters without much struggle
vs.
PCs should generally struggle to defeat encounters
This axis appears to be invoked mostly by the emotional response a given person has to the term "balanced encounter." The term doesn't really mean anything in relationship to this scale, it's a design question what the preferred norm is here. 5e, for example, generally has fairly easy encounters when you use a CR that precisely matches the player levels but can be unexpected more difficult, or you could always opt to use a higher difficulty CR. How one handles this question is unrelated to having an effective CR system though, that just defines the parameters a GM is making encounter building decisions in.

Encounter difficulty should be clear to the DM upfront
vs.
Encounter difficulty should be opaque to both the DM/players
Should the DM know the expected outcome (and chance of survival/victory) when planning to put a given monster (say a red dragon) in a given place? I don't think anyone actually holds the second perspective outright and I'm not particularly sympathetic to anyone who claims to. Even without a system in place, it's not hard to see the difference between a dire rat and a dragon, and insisting one shouldn't is ridiculous. I think largely that this position is getting conflated with the next axis.

Encounters should be planned by the DM with regard to difficulty
vs.
Encounters should be planned by the DM without regard to difficulty.
This is the naturalistic vs. planned scenario/adventure design question. Should the DM consider the expected outcome (and chance of survival/victory) when planning to put a given monster (say a red dragon) in a given place? This is a more complicated and more interesting question than whether a system to evaluate encounter difficulty should exist at all.

I generally think players should have access to level appropriate problems they could solve, and ideally the world will have plenty of problems outside of their capability running around them at the same time. This is the axis that the initial article actually seemed to be talking about, though it also seemed to conflate including non-combat encounters inside combat scenarios as part of this, which is also an orthogonal issue (though often good encounter design).

The only place I think these three axes really overlap, is in questions of tone. Does the presence of a CR system somehow act on player expectations about encounter difficulty and/or encounter design? Generally, I don't think so, and even if it does, that's a discussion that should be explicit at any given table.

 

[MNblockhead]

I've been enjoying this thread, even if some of the posts border on getting a bit personal at times. I find my personal position is similar to @iserith . As a new DM (I DM'd in the 80s but didn't run TTRPGs again until 5e came out), I found the CR rules in the DMG to be useful to give a rough ball park estimate of encounter difficulty, but then quickly realized that with my players, who are very tactical and veteran players, that I would need to make an encounter at least deadly and usually rachet it it up as if for higher-level characters to make it sufficiently challenging.

At the same time, I agree with @EzekielRaiden in that the results can be very wonky. At higher levels, and with more experience under my belt, I just don't bother calculating CR. I design encounters based on what I know about my players and, well to be honest, on personal intuition.

I never played 4e, but a friend of mine who is a hard-core gamer that has played every edition since the 80s sung the praises of 4e's encounter building rules. It is just one source anecdotal evidence, but I trust his opinion on these things.

My question for those who have given this a lot more thought than I have is: "what is the fix?" CAN you create a better CR system that doesn't require completely overhauling the entire system?

 

[James Gasik]

I've been enjoying this thread, even if some of the posts border on getting a bit personal at times. I find my personal position is similar to @iserith . As a new DM (I DM'd in the 80s but didn't run TTRPGs again until 5e came out), I found the CR rules in the DMG to be useful to give a rough ball park estimate of encounter difficulty, but then quickly realized that with my players, who are very tactical and veteran players, that I would need to make an encounter at least deadly and usually rachet it it up as if for higher-level characters to make it sufficiently challenging.

At the same time, I agree with @EzekielRaiden in that the results can be very wonky. At higher levels, and with more experience under my belt, I just don't bother calculating CR. I design encounters based on what I know about my players and, well to be honest, on personal intuition.

I never played 4e, but a friend of mine who is a hard-core gamer that has played every edition since the 80s sung the praises of 4e's encounter building rules. It is just one source anecdotal evidence, but I trust his opinion on these things.

My question for those who have given this a lot more thought than I have is: "what is the fix?" CAN you create a better CR system that doesn't require completely overhauling the entire system?

I don't know if it's a fix, but the way I'd do it is much how 3e did it. They cited their expectations. They said "we built the CR system based on four characters using the default array, who are playing a Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, and Wizard using the PHB rules, with wealth by level adhered to." All stop.

Now granted, even some PHB content could "rock the boat", as it were; magic item creation (even without entering the quagmire of custom item creation), Leadership, faulty assumptions about what spells players would use, and old busted spells that were put into the book because "the fans expected them".*

But by and large, if your 3e game ran into trouble, you could easily point to one of the above assumptions having been broken in some way (I'm not discounting player skill having an effect on the game, of course, but altering the base assumptions was something that happened way more often in my experience. Every group I ever played with had mixed tiers of player skill, but YMMV).

Now, what are 5e's assumptions? It can't be point-buy, because that's an "optional" method of creating characters (says so right in the PHB). No Feats (optional). No Magic Items (optional). Character classes? Uh, well, they keep telling us "play what you want", which rings about as true as when Blizzard told us "bring the player, not the class" in World of Warcraft raiding.

What the "baseline" is in 5e is murky, and it's violated by WotC in their own adventures! Just look at how many magic items are in them (heck, just look at Lost Mines of Phandelver!).

Now, having said all of that, I don't think just tossing out the encounter creation rules is a good idea. The fact that we don't understand WotC's monster creation rules fully (beyond that they balance for hit points vs. damage and don't really care about accuracy vs. defenses), because again, unlike 3e, where they literally said "this is how you should make/upgrade a monster", WotC just throws stuff out there without any real explanation of why a CR 5 has 15 Hit Dice, doesn't mean that we can say we know how to balance an encounter better than they can.

We can know our players and their characters, yes. But the problem I see with just deciding that CR and encounter building should be chucked out the window is that, if we reject these tools, that the game is supposedly balanced around, then we've also rejected that the game has any balance whatsoever. That each individual group of characters has to be judged on it's own merits, and it's impossible to run the game properly without years of experience as a DM.

To me, that would be a fail state for 5e as a game. So even knowing that the CR system has it's warts, I still use it as best I can. My players deserve to be treated fairly, and I can't in good conscience tell them an encounter is fair if I just tossed out enemies I assumed they could defeat, based on nothing more than "I guess"?

*(warning: tangent) I hate that WotC made this mistake not once, but twice. When they made 3e, they assumed players would be annoyed if classic spells weren't in the PHB. When those spells proved to be some of the most broken in the game, even by the end of it's production run, they removed them or altered them greatly for 4e. Which led to "this doesn't feel like D&D" backlash from people who, in my opinion, didn't really grasp why this was a good thing. And then for 5e, they brought almost everything back, and now a whole new generation of gamers is wondering wth is up with things like forcecage, simulacrum, gate, etc.. Heck, WotC even powered up some spells that didn't used to be problematic, and made them that way, like Leomund's Tiny Hut!

 

[W'rkncacnter]

That post about giving factions a CR in the thousands and using that to diversify creatures was genius. What an amazingly interesting take on CR as a tool.

i didn't want to just comment about it out of the blue, but yeah, that post kinda blew my mind. probably one of the most creative uses of CR i've ever seen.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

My question for those who have given this a lot more thought than I have is: "what is the fix?" CAN you create a better CR system that doesn't require completely overhauling the entire system?

Not trying to weasel-word here, but...that depends on what you mean by "completely overhauling."

There are basically three ways to fix up the system. One is, as you say, to just reformat the system, begin anew.

The second is to painstakingly test each and every creature ever published, under a huge variety of contexts and circumstances, evaluate the performance in each, and then assign a score of some kind. Once you have collected enough things, that score can then be translated into a CR or XP budget or whatever metric you prefer. This is, as I think my description has implied, pretty much untenable for any actual product. Small-time outfits simply don't have the reach or manpower to do this kind of testing, and the big names like WotC and Paizo don't have the time to review the entire body of their work in this way when it would honestly most likely be less work to just rebuild the system from scratch. (Worth noting, though, this does actually seem to be what WotC did with 5e's initial books. As I said, I have been told by folks who were in the loop for 5e's private playtesting stuff, and apparently the vast majority of CRs in the book have been manually adjusted because the value they originally had--as assigned by the tools WotC tells DMs to use--was simply inaccurate.)

The third is to more or less try for something like 4e's "MM3 On A Business Card." That is, you can fit the math for creating 4e monsters (not for giving them fun actions or interesting tactics, just their basic math) onto just one side of a business card. It's called "MM3" because 4e switched from a more cautious, "higher HP+defenses and lower damage" math framework to a more aggressive "lower HP+defenses and higher damage" math framework with MM3, which was generally welcomed by most 4e players. Now, to be clear, this path is more difficult than I've made it sound; actually finding an effective formula which actually does work across a broad range of character levels is difficult, especially if you can't make major changes to the rules while you work on it. You may find your efforts wasted if the underlying system is sufficiently self-contradictory.

That last thing actually did happen with 3e/PF, for example; this is why Paizo eventually had to admit to its fans, "Yeah uh...we can't actually keep working on PF1e. It's fundamentally broken and we can't fix that without rebuilding the system." So...yeah, some of the time, the only solution is to start over. But the "find a formula" approach, if you can make it work, is your best bet for a method to fix up the problems, especially if you're allowed to make "small" changes (that is, altering individual mechanics or removing/rewriting individual bits and pieces like certain problematic spells or class features or the like.)