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

iserith

Magic Wordsmith
And this is the crux of the matter. You and likely everyone here are then not running naturalistic. You are putting in place safety guards against player character death that replaces balancing (while still relying on the same kind of thinking that "balancing" is based on). However while I suspect these safety guards might be so second nature to you that you hardly notice them, they are actually not that obvious to everyone.
As I stated in my very first post in the thread, the tool I use is telegraphing, which is employed for all challenges. Plus, we prepare for PCs getting in over their heads by having retreat/chase mechanics and are ready for PC death by having backup characters. As a result, I can be as "naturalistic" or as random or as "balanced" as I want.
 

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robus

Lowcountry Low Roller
Supporter
Except that it does not do that--not consistently, anyway. I have personally had to deal with multiple situations where something punched well above its CR, not below. (Or, at least, I assume such; this was with new-ish DMs who were, as far as I could tell, using stock DMG monsters.)
Well I'm speaking from experience as a new DM (I started with 5e and LMoP) running stock monsters in stock adventures. Things worked just fine until about level 15 where I just threw the book away and just had them encounter things that looked cool.
 


Well I'm speaking from experience as a new DM (I started with 5e and LMoP) running stock monsters in stock adventures. Things worked just fine until about level 15 where I just threw the book away and just had them encounter things that looked cool.
I had two separate groups deal with TPKs specifically because of this issue. Hence, why I consider the tools rather flawed.

Well I won't argue with WOTC being terrible
But WotC are the ones who created the CR system in the first place...? If their use of it is acceptable as a criticism, then why isn't the system itself worthy of criticism?
 

James Gasik

Pandion Knight
Supporter
I had two separate groups deal with TPKs specifically because of this issue. Hence, why I consider the tools rather flawed.


But WotC are the ones who created the CR system in the first place...? If their use of it is acceptable as a criticism, then why isn't the system itself worthy of criticism?
I think you meant misuse.
 

Micah Sweet

Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
I think we may be defining "balanced" differently?

To me, balanced means that the characters, as they are, have a good chance of defeating the threat without any other needed resources. When I populate an adventure with balanced challenges, some will be a little easy, some a little hard, some just right. It's basically Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

When I put in "unbalanced" encounters, it means I'm making choices based not on what the characters can face, but what would be natural or interesting for the adventure. A Hill Giant boss in a den of goblin thieves for a 1st - 3rd Level adventure is an unbalanced encounter. A vampire lording over a starting town is an unbalanced encounter.

To me, as long as I communicate the level of threat, an unbalanced encounter unlocks a lot of interesting gameplay! In my experience, the players have to rely on a broader range of gameplay skills and narrative possibilities.

This goes the other way, too. A population of kobolds living in a Level 8-10 dungeon is an unbalanced encounter. The characters could easily wipe them out, but because kobolds would be so easy to defeat, it actually invites other gameplay possibilities. Should we take over the tribe? Trick them? Intimidate them? Or just Fireball?
I agree with you, but I suspect what @EzekielRaiden and others are trying to say is that, official WotC adventures aside, many if not most DMs do design their encounters with an eye toward what should actually be there, naturalistically.
 

Micah Sweet

Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Then expand that somewhat further. In 4e terms, it sounds to me like you're considering only fights with an XP budget between level-1 and level+1, perhaps +/- 2 if you're feeling generous. Believe it or not, the 4e DMG--again, the book for the edition everyone decries as "too balanced"--explicitly tells you not to do this. For example, in the section Table Rules, it has a couple of paragraphs (p ) about "Metagame Thinking" (all emphasis in original):

Or these two paragraphs on page 30 (in the "Running the Game" chapter.) The first is part of a longer section about Character Death, and the second is part of the Fixing Your Mistakes section. All emphasis in original.

Or this section (p 56-57) from "Encounter Components," all emphasis in original.

...and here's the reference for page 104, which goes into much greater detail:


Notice, the description even allows for monsters more than eight levels above the party's level. It doesn't say, "never ever do this." It says, "Do this with care. The characters are very likely to die. The players should probably know what they're getting into, and have a clear shot at escape." So...do you believe 4e is a "balanced" game? If you do, then how can "balance" mean exclusively the "tiresome grind" that the book explicitly tells you not to use? The subsequent text basically says, "Make 10%-20% of your encounters Easy, 10%-20% of your encounters Hard, and the remaining 60%-80% Standard." A standard encounter is a solid challenge; if the party rolls very well and their enemies roll poorly, it might become a cakewalk, while if the reverse happens they may need to beat a hasty retreat. (I have done this multiple times in 4e play.) In 5e terms, "Hard" difficulty is probably closest to 4e "Standard," and "Deadly" is closest to 4e "Hard."


So, consider just calling it a "hard" encounter, without using the word "balance" in any form. What do you lose by changing that term? Do the descriptions I quoted above not permit for an encounter of this kind, even though 4e is the allegedly excessive "balance" edition?


Which is what the paragraphs above explicitly say, repeatedly. Mix up your encounters. Provide variation. Don't fall into a "stale" rhythm. Provide encounters where the party fights the same monster statblock, but seven levels later--so they can see how much they've grown. Throw unwinnable fights at them, if they know those fights are unwinnable or at least have a chance to survive if they're quick or clever or charismatic. Etc.


Again: Is any of that incompatible with the descriptions quoted above? (Do note, some of those solutions would involve re-factoring the challenge in a different way, e.g. if the party chooses to take over, trick, or intimidate the warren, that likely would be an impromptu skill challenge, with the DM making judgment calls about the difficulty of such a task.)

Because people talk a really big game about how 4e is this horrible, draconian nightmare of a system where you are forced to make everything in near-perfect lock-step with the characters. And then when you actually dig into their claims and show them the game text, every single thing they talk about is right there, explicit in the text, without need for interpretation.

So: Are the encounters you're talking about unbalanced? Or are they simply ones where you, the DM, know that they can't be solved by brute force? (or, in the case of the kobolds, that they could be trivially solved by brute force, but maybe the PCs are powerful enough now to find other, more interesting solutions.)
Why are you speaking so defensively about 4e here? Have their been any explicit "digs" about the system in this thread?
 

robus

Lowcountry Low Roller
Supporter
I had two separate groups deal with TPKs specifically because of this issue. Hence, why I consider the tools rather flawed.
Sure, but you were on the receiving end right? So who knows what might have been happening on the other side of the screen? Most of the discussion of 5e on this forum since I've been a member has been how hard it is to kill PCs. So I don't think your experience is the norm.
But WotC are the ones who created the CR system in the first place...? If their use of it is acceptable as a criticism, then why isn't the system itself worthy of criticism?
Despite their best efforts, not everything WOTC has done is terrible. :)
 

Minigiant

Legend
Supporter
Well I won't argue with WOTC being terrible :)

But WotC are the ones who created the CR system in the first place...? If their use of it is acceptable as a criticism, then why isn't the system itself worthy of criticism?

Well the issue isn't the CR system.

The issue is WOTC designers more or less ignored the CR system guidelines, created monster freeformed, eyeballed the CR of the freeform monsters in the whole MM.

So WOTC designers gauged l Monster Manual wrong. Therefore a lot of monsters cooulf not be telegraphed correctly. So if a bunch of professional designers can't eyeball it right, what make us think new DMs and adventure designers can?
 

Why are you speaking so defensively about 4e here? Have their been any explicit "digs" about the system in this thread?
It's not about defending 4e per se; it's about challenging this notion that "balance" is a dirty word. I use 4e as an example not to defend it, but because (as far as I can tell) everyone agrees that it was "balanced," whether you like or dislike that label. Hence, if people agree that it is "balanced," and yet it does the things being described in this thread as "unbalanced," that would clearly demonstrate that people are improperly using the terms.

If more people were familiar with 13th Age or Dungeon World, I would gladly use those, since those are also very well-balanced systems. But they aren't. 4e is the one everyone knows and everyone thinks is "balanced," whether they think that's a good thing or a bad thing.
 

iserith

Magic Wordsmith
It's not about defending 4e per se; it's about challenging this notion that "balance" is a dirty word. I use 4e as an example not to defend it, but because (as far as I can tell) everyone agrees that it was "balanced," whether you like or dislike that label. Hence, if people agree that it is "balanced," and yet it does the things being described in this thread as "unbalanced," that would clearly demonstrate that people are improperly using the terms.

If more people were familiar with 13th Age or Dungeon World, I would gladly use those, since those are also very well-balanced systems. But they aren't. 4e is the one everyone knows and everyone thinks is "balanced," whether they think that's a good thing or a bad thing.
And that encounter difficulty system in D&D 4e isn't all that great either. Which perhaps underscores how difficult it is to make a tool that is reliable in all cases, and why some DM adjustments will always be necessary. As with 5e, I always look at the budget to check myself because the tool is useful if not always reliable, and then make changes to fit my group.

I was playing in a D&D 4e game Sunday night and last night. Those encounters were appropriate for 1st- and 2nd-level characters. We stomped their guts out with just 4 PCs. Our group is tactically-minded with lots of RPG experience, so the DM is going to have to work on this. The encounter difficulty rules can't really account for our level of skill.
 


iserith

Magic Wordsmith
Sure, but you were on the receiving end right? So who knows what might have been happening on the other side of the screen? Most of the discussion of 5e on this forum since I've been a member has been how hard it is to kill PCs. So I don't think your experience is the norm.
As well, what player decisions impacted difficulty? Did they set up in a bad tactical position? Were they not working well as a team? Were they ground down from previous encounters? Did people hold back on fire against trolls to avoid being seen as "metagaming?" And on and on. This is a problem with multiple variables, but some want to just point at CR/encounter building rules as the culprit, then suggest that a previous version of the game they may prefer doesn't have these exact same problems! Sorry, no.
 

James Gasik

Pandion Knight
Supporter
Why are you speaking so defensively about 4e here? Have their been any explicit "digs" about the system in this thread?
You know us 4e fans, we're notoriously thin-skinned due to years of misinformation about the system. And how we were rewarded for our loyalty. We don't meant to start edition wars, but it's almost become a conditioned reflex to ROW ROW FIGHT THE POWER!

Therapy is expensive.
 

Because "unbalanced" should mean something. It should tell you something about the encounter. It shouldn't just be shorthand for "a hard fight" or "a fight that you can't brute force" or "a fight that actually requires cleverness." It should be a fight that is broken. Because that's what "unbalanced" means.

That's why people keep saying that you can make unbalanced fights in balanced systems, but you can't make balanced fights in unbalanced ones. You can't take assorted glass shards and just will them into being a tumbler. You can always break a tumbler if you have ones on hand.

Further, when people talk up "unbalanced" encounters, it is almost always at least in part to poo-poo "balanced" encounters. It is used very frequently to show how using "balanced" encounters is desperately dull, and tedious, and stuffy, and boring, and desperately dull, that there's this TOTALLY better way if you just destroy any notion of "balance."

But that's never what they mean, and it's incredibly frustrating. "Balance" has been twisted into this four-letter word, a boogeyman to flee from, the dreaded specter of awful boring games as opposed to the galmorous excitement of "unbalance." But that tells designers, "Do whatever-the-heck you want. It doesn't matter! The rules don't matter." And that gets us systems that are actually broken. Like, I dunno, the 5e CR system, which is often worse than just eyeballing answers! That gets us things where we don't actually have any idea what a "hard" encounter is or an "easy" encounter. It gets us systems where even a highly educated guess might as well be random for all the difference it makes. It gets us systems where DMs are given no tools, no advice, no structure, just "alright champ, have at it, you know best!"
No, that's what a broken fight means, not unbalanced.
 

And that encounter difficulty system in D&D 4e isn't all that great either.
Seriously? It's extremely effective at almost every level of play. You get weird stuff if, for example, you de-level a monster from Epic tier to low Heroic or vice-versa, but even there the issues are relatively minor in most cases. The weird exceptions were rare and notable, nothing like "[not] all that great either." Coupled with the extremely useful stuff like "MM3 on a business card," 4e's XP Budget rules actually work extremely well to tell you how challenging an encounter should be. Really effective player strategy can of course let them punch a couple levels above their actual party level, but that's a perfectly appropriate result--and, as the books themselves note, it's perfectly appropriate to use monsters even eight levels above party level.

Which perhaps underscores how difficult it is to make a tool that is reliable in all cases, and why some DM adjustments will always be necessary.
No one is asking for something that is reliable in ALL cases, why do you keep saying this?

For goodness' sake, this is the third time I've had to reject this idea from you, just stated in slightly different words. "Perfect," "airtight," "reliable in all cases"--these are just synonyms, each time setting up the strawman of "your position is simply 100% unattainable, stop trying." I have never, ever, NOT ONCE, suggested that something that works with ZERO application of DM judgment is required. I have, repeatedly, said that the system we have is lacking. It relies extremely heavily on DM judgment calls, to the point that numerous people in multiple places have explicitly described CR as hardly even a suggestion, let alone an actually useful tool. It's not just my experience as a player, nor just the reports I hear from others. It's numerous sources from diverse places and firsthand player experience from multiple campaigns (three, to be precise, two of which had the noted TPKs.)

As with 5e, I always look at the budget to check myself because the tool is useful if not always reliable, and then make changes to fit my group.
And I'm saying it's not always useful, and in fact can be inaccurate or even outright misleading. The fact that WotC's own encounters frequently violate the tool's answers is damning enough. Further, I've been told by folks who I had good reason to believe were pre-release playtesters that basically all CRs in the game are almost totally ad-hoc; the tools that are supposed to tell you the CR of a custom creature are wildly inaccurate and the result requires significant

I was playing in a D&D 4e game Sunday night and last night. Those encounters were appropriate for 1st- and 2nd-level characters. We stomped their guts out with just 4 PCs. Our group is tactically-minded with lots of RPG experience, so the DM is going to have to work on this. The encounter difficulty rules can't really account for our level of skill.
Yes, they can. I even quoted them! The rules explicitly say that, for a typical party, "standard" encounters run from level-2(ish) to level+3(ish). Sounds like you could handle fights at the upper end of that range.
 

iserith

Magic Wordsmith
Seriously? It's extremely effective at almost every level of play.
No it's not. I still run and play D&D 4e. It's about as effective as D&D 5e's in my experience which is to say it's reliable most of the time, but not all the time. I don't know if it's rose-colored glasses or what, but a lot of D&D 4e folks just will not see the flaws in their preferred game.

No one is asking for something that is reliable in ALL cases, why do you keep saying this?

For goodness' sake, this is the third time I've had to reject this idea from you, just stated in slightly different words. "Perfect," "airtight," "reliable in all cases"--these are just synonyms, each time setting up the strawman of "your position is simply 100% unattainable, stop trying." I have never, ever, NOT ONCE, suggested that something that works with ZERO application of DM judgment is required. I have, repeatedly, said that the system we have is lacking. It relies extremely heavily on DM judgment calls, to the point that numerous people in multiple places have explicitly described CR as hardly even a suggestion, let alone an actually useful tool. It's not just my experience as a player, nor just the reports I hear from others. It's numerous sources from diverse places and firsthand player experience from multiple campaigns (three, to be precise, two of which had the noted TPKs.)
My experience is that it's as reliable as D&D 4e, which tells me this is about as good as it's likely ever going to get, given the complexity of the variables at play.

Also, I see no issue with TPKs in and of themselves, whether that be due to "unbalanced" encounters or any other situation that still allowed for players to make reasonably informed decisions. If you don't want death to occur, just remove it as a possibility. Then you don't have to worry about the CR/encounter difficulty system at all, at least in this regard.

And I'm saying it's not always useful, and in fact can be inaccurate or even outright misleading. The fact that WotC's own encounters frequently violate the tool's answers is damning enough. Further, I've been told by folks who I had good reason to believe were pre-release playtesters that basically all CRs in the game are almost totally ad-hoc; the tools that are supposed to tell you the CR of a custom creature are wildly inaccurate and the result requires significant
I think a lot of people were just traumatized by pixies. Which, again, my players stomp into bits every time they are encountered. Only so much you can do with 1 hit point.

Yes, they can. I even quoted them! The rules explicitly say that, for a typical party, "standard" encounters run from level-2(ish) to level+3(ish). Sounds like you could handle fights at the upper end of that range.
And then some. Which means it can't really account reliably for our level of skill. It's about as good as D&D 5e in that regard and will require adjustment by the DM.

I think if someone wants to take a shot at creating a more reliable system, they should give it a shot. But I'd be willing to bet it isn't much better than what we already have.
 


Minigiant

Legend
Supporter
There seems to be a disconnect behind the theory of CR where a monster of ~CRx is a challenge of y for parties of level x and the practice of monsters having capability z or restriction a aren't really CRx like the game claims.
It's more of a clash of styles.

From what I've gleaned over interviews from the 5e seem to be in a sort of mixed generation. Like the marriage of OS Grognards and 3.X Simulationists.

They wanted to have guideline but think they and their friends are skilled enough to not follow any official guidelines. They wanted encounters to have a predictable measurement but wanted monsters to be unpredictable mold breakers. An organization where a monster built by feel and too powerful for the party could be dropped anywhere. And it isn't unexpected that the measurement system can't measure stuff that doesn't follow it.

That's why I keep saying that 5e was written for veteran D&D fans who grew up playing AD&D & 3.0. Such a combination would lean hard on the DM being a vet.
 

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