Overleveled
You know what’s fun? Being a bid damn hero who knocks the little peons flying. We’re talking Kratos swinging for the fences. The Rangers taking out whole squads of putties. Lu Bu going HAM on hapless Dynasty Warriors. When you’re living out that fantasy, you are a friggin’ presence on the battlefield. The enemy soldiers are so much chaff before you, and their narrative purpose is to set up your heroic badassitude.
But do you know what else is fun? Standing on the battlefield covered in wounds. You’ve barely eked out a victory. Your weapon is half-broken. Your blood mingles with the enemies’. A hair’s breadth less effort and you would have been the one lying dead in the dirt. We’re talking Rob Roy at the end of his duel. The planeside pummeling in Raiders. Neo’s narrow victory in the subway. When you’re living out this fantasy, you’re fighting against overwhelming odds. You’ve just managed to take on something that would have felled lesser heroes, and its narrative purpose is to set up your vulnerability and humanity.
Therefore you don’t have to worry when you’re creating combat encounters. You can either make it super easy or incredibly difficulty, and your players are going to feel heroic either way! Problem solved. Except of course…
Do you know what sucks? Playing as Superman fighting street-level thugs. What’s the point of having all that power if you’re just punching shoplifters to dust? It doesn’t feel worthy of you!
And do you know what else sucks? Working hard to level up and gain power, only to find every other enemy in the game just as powerful as you. How are you supposed to feel like a big damn hero when you’re constantly getting the crap kicked out of you?
Obviously, the easy answer to all of the above is “vary it up.” A healthy mix of easy fights and hard fights gives you a nice selection of experiences. But the real question I want to ask is this: How do you know when it’s time to go CR: Easy versus CR: Deadly? Do you wait until level up to let your PCs beat up formerly-difficult foes? Do you reserve those difficult encounters only for boss fights, or is it okay to put them into the wandering monster table? Is it a waste of time to toss minions at the party, or are you letting the wizard and her fireball feel valuable with all those mooks? Sound off in the comments with your own approach to the intersection of encounter difficulty and narrative oomph!
In normal play in my homebrew, I draw from a stack of pre-generated encounters that run from two levels below to two levels above the average party level. When I’m running a scripted story arc, how hard the encounter is depends on who it is. Generally, the average enemy is going to be low level chaff two to three levels below the party level. Mid-level management types will be within one level above or below the party. Named management (typical right hand men types) will be a couple levels above and the final BBEG will usually be well above the party and require forethought to be able to take out.
Should it be impossible to encounter a BBEG level threat without a proper narrative setup? Like… That kind of encounter is never going on the wandering monster tables?
I have some BBEG’s that are location specific, but not part of a scripted story arc. The groups usually hear about them long before they think about taking them on and if they decide they do, then research really pays off. Named, legendary dragons, evil rulers, liches who control a fair amount of countryside, all available to the players to go after.
And then…I’ve got a couple God Tier BBEGs that wander, so yes the party can run into them at 1st level. That said, they will NOT attack the party, but might interact with them. Since I don’t allow evil parties except for short term high level campaigns, most of the players don’t fall for their machinations though.
Mix it up. I mean, yeah, some fights are expected to be easy and should be… sometimes when you’re low on prep, it’s just fun to throw together a tavern brawl or stage an ambush by numerous but unskilled bandits, give the players a chance to show off.
But in general, it’s good to have variety… some fights that should go reasonably easily and quickly, some that will stretch them. I know a few GMs who are fond of using a “longest day” model… put the PCs under some time pressure that makes resting impossible or costly, then deplete their resources with short encounters before a few more climactic battles. That’s fun as a player, though not something you want to do too often… they’re memorable because they’re rare extremes.
Where are the quotations coming from in “longest day?” Is the trope somehow a reference?
Not specifically, though there is of course the old war movie of that name, which might have inspired it. But I quote it because it’s the term we use for such events… a marathon run of combat after combat after combat without rest, to the point where you’re charging from one to the next just to keep your rages and short-lived buffs from expiring.
Last time we did one, we had two major fights that left PCs on the ground, and a dozen smaller encounters, with maybe one short rest somewhere in the middle of that… by the end, the casters were down to cantrips, the barbarian was all out of rage, and my archer had been forced into melee due to lack of ammunition. But that was an epic couple of sessions.
I like both hardwon and easy victories. Hardwon because the stakes are high and hey! We made it! Easy ones because there’s less chance of getting curbstomped and killed while trying to save the world.
Mix it up by all means, but save the really hard fights for the boss and his or her inner circle. Don’t just spring a CR Are You Insane monster on a group every time they leave town. It’s annoying, it’s numbing and it’s unrealistic. Something that tough wouldn’t be lurking in the underbrush, it’d already have crowned itself king.
Have you encountered such a thing in your games? Did a GM actually spring something like that on you?
One of the tactics I’ll use when min/maxing the baddies is give ’em a solid AC, Initiative bonus, Attack values, respectable (or comparable) Damage bonuses, but skimp (or don’t boost) the hit points: the boss looks tough and gives as well as he gets, but it won’t be a protracted battle if the PCs can score a couple of well-placed hits. My other tactic is to give them a foe who’s a very scary bulletproof q-tip: he’s big, he’s bad, he’s nigh-unstoppable, and he’s a real threat to anyone but the party’s fighters. If the party wants a slugfest, I can let them smack away at a kryptonian pinata that can’t fight back enough to be a credible threat, but is still intimidating through his description, AC, and hp (and effect on the terrain, NPCs, and possibly PC casters) that if feels like a major victory when, like a felled redwood, it finally keels over.
I’m running a low-level campaign right now, and I’ve definitely come around to the very high AC, very low HP way of doing things. Look at any swordfight in the movies, and they’re trading parries and glancing blows back and forth for ages, with only a few (maybe only one) solid, wounding hits at the end to mark total defeat. The idea of whittling away at a giant pool of hit points, without having any noticeable effect on your enemy until the very end, is very specifically a D&D conceit.
BLEACH HAS ENTERED THE CHAT
Dragon Ball Z would also like to know your location…
I think we are talking about balance in this one, and I also think balance is easy… if you have an EXACTLY 4 person party plus a DM (at least when talking about most of the design of D&D and/or PF, but possibly other systems out there too).
Despite the fact that it is sometimes hard to find even two other players to play with you, and weirdly if you can find 4 you can often find more (my last two groups were 6 and 7 respectively… plus the DM), the balance of the game can be difficult to find even with the standardized group of 4 player characters and even more difficult with less or more.
An “easy” standard is to just add or subtract more foes to the mix. If a “typical” balance says that a group of enemies is equal to X times Y PCs, then if there are less or more players involved, do the maths (these games sure are full of maths!) and make the encounters more appropriate to their relative power dynamic.
Of course, easy is rarely easy when it comes to each player group. My own most current group took down an entire family of dragons at somewhere around the early “tween” levels. Two ancients and 3 adults, all breathing their ice breath on us (yes, they were white dragons, but the “least” of the dragon types is still a dragon!), and we had most of our party KOd at any given time, plus the loss of one member (our barbarian killed while my monk didn’t take a scratch!), but we still won the day and felt like “big damn heroes”.
But if you can find your own table balance, and that I think is the biggest key, discovering how to find the balance of encounters for your own individual group of players, then the next stage is more the question at hand, and I have personally found that after a big level up (every level up feels big), having an encounter or two that is roughly the same “difficulty” (CR if you will) as the previous encounters you have already fought at your previous level, tends to be enjoyable, as you prove just how powerful you really are now. After that a “medium” encounter to show that fights can still be tough, and the culmination in the big bad of the current arc that will properly test your strengths at your current level… and if you win, seems appropriate, since the challenge was just about hard enough, that you level up!
And the cycle begins again 🙂
Well said. Getting more mechanically complex gameplay just so you can tread water against the enemies tends to break the metaphor of XP. You’re tougher now! It ought to feel like you can take on more, not just stay dead even against the monsters.
Clearly, the answer is that it’s not the DM’s job to decide. Throw out all ranges of encounter difficulty, and it’s up to the players to decide what they feel capable of taking on. Are they low on resources, and want the goblins instead of the giant spiders? Sure! Have they just leveled up, and feel confident about taking on that white dragon? Oookaaay, if they really think so… 😉
Of course, that relies on the DM accommodating other solutions, besides raw combat. Trickery, stealth, RUN AWAY!, take a different route, negotiate, throw hirelings and other consumable resources into the meat grinder… a good DM should be open to it all. You might be surprised at the creative solutions players can come up with if only you let them. (Surely not you, esteemed Author, but y’know, maybe all those other readers.)
The mantra is, “the world exists on its own terms, and it’s the players’ choice how they interact with it.” Otherwise it’s an awful lot of responsibility on the DM, who already has to build an entire world, interpret the rules, keep players from fighting OOC, provide a game space, bring snacks… and you want to add combat balance on top of that too? In a system based on a wildly unpredictable d20 die, with totally unbalanced classes, and a vague suggestion of a CR system? Yeah right!
The players know what they can handle far better than I do – all I need to do is keep an open mind.
I think that “let the players choose” works in general, but not in specific. You have to have some way of broadcasting relative difficulty.
For example, players don’t know if they’re fighting a CR 1/2 giant spider or Shelob.
I’ve seen the solution work better in the megadungeon context, where going deeper is generally “more difficult” than hunting for encounters at the higher levels. It allows players to choose in a relative way without having to make all their Identify Monster checks. But even then, you have to populate those dungeons with a range of threats. And it seems odd to me to suggest that players will somehow choose what they encounter, especially in a dungeon context.
That’s true. It requires a setup and playstyle where the players can scout out targets in advance, study the lore, listen to rumors, etc, and then pick and choose their own battles, through retreating, parlaying, or finding alternate routes. The threats need to be telegraphed, and then there needs to be real ways to act on that information.
And I think a well-designed dungeon gives a lot of flexibility for choosing what you encounter. If you know there’s a dragon in room 23 that you don’t want to deal with, then looping and branching corridors should give you ample ways to get around it, at the cost of time and meeting other threats instead. That’s the point of jacquaying the dungeon. It doesn’t apply to random encounters with wandering monsters, of course, but running away is always an option, and there’s other ways to stack the deck.
‘Percussive Maintenance’ aka ‘Inertial Realignment’ is a valid maintenance technique.
Back in the days where IC’s and PCB’s were just coming into widespread use, and even before that with certain types of sockets/fittings and particularly tubes, turning a piece of equipment on heated it up, sometimes dramatically, and turing it off sagain allowed it to cool down, again sometimes dramatically depending on the ambient temperature. This heating and cooling expanded and contracted metal pins in their sockets and eventually they worked loose. Jarring the chassis often seated these components back into place, provided the inertial force acted in the proper direction. This is why sometimes a sharp rap on the top of the box worked and other times you needed to hit the side. When circuit boards came in the problem stayed and in some cases was amplified since a long card only needed to lift up on one end to bugger things up (technical term). On many A/C it solved a problem and the preferred tool for initial fault finding on the fire control system on the F-101 and the MK44 Torpedo was a rubber mallet.
So you’re saying I’m a technical genius?
It’s a scaling issue for me, sometimes I set things low to test stuff out and then increase it only bring it down at some point. I did make one group a face a very young dragon at level 4, it was not supposed to be a fight but when one player makes comments about geting a mount, well I thpught noble dragon might take offence and had it use it’s breath attack and even giving my players time to react, one figured out that he needs to F off or find out, the other 3, not so much and I was even being nice and used the avarage for damage as I knew it wouldn’t kill any of them. Then they ran off and I had the dragon smugly return to it’s hoard munching on the cow the group rudely interupted. I got complaints afterwards how I am just trying to kill her character.
On the next session they got to murder shit ton of goblins, granted the ammount I used was lots, but when you kill one with one or two good hits they weren’t real chalenge. after that some level appropriate foes for couple session then drop a vampire on them, they got two npcs to aid in the fight, and again accusations of trying to kill same character.
This is a useful example I think. Players are working with limited information. They don’t know the monster’s motivation, CR, or tactics. They only know that “my character almost died.” In that sense, the feeling of power is a subjective one.
I wonder if helping that character to feel like more of a badass with verbal description would help?
Oh they got badass moments, even against the Vampire Smite worked as intented. But when the player tries to get all the buffs to AC as possible and then curse as I roll high and hit with a rat but miss the next guy not much you can do about the fear of character death. In a way It makes me like systems where hiting is entirelly about your skill and armour is just damage reduction.
Yeah… I guess another way of saying it is “players are bad at math.” Remember the bell curve losses?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/bell-curve-losses
For the last couple of years I have been DM´ing a high level campaign in 5e. At which point CR kinda becomes even more meaningless than it already was. So I generally have to look at what my players can do and how strong they are, rather than use a formula. Through I usually use four philosophies to figure out CR.
A. Narrative CR. Basically what you see in a bunch of games and stories. First you have to go through a bunch of scrubs, before you get to the big bad guy. With some mini bosses and lieutenants along the way. This is generally what I use for the more “PLOT” heavy moments, such as when they are storming the villains lair. The focus here is to tire out my players and make them spend resources. With the goal being having the final fight be dramatic, but still be one the players should be able to win (That is, if they don´t waste their 8th level spell slots on fodder. Again). The danger here is generally concentrated at the end, with some spikes at certain points beforehand, such as fighting a sub-boss or specific dangerous obstacles (Mostly side-stuff)
B. The Grind. This is when I want my players to feel the damage and risk having to make hard decisions. This could be them going down through a dungeon with several dangerous beings in it, or it could be a war scenario where they have to deal with multiple waves of people. I do this when I want to press them to their utmost and underscore that things are dangerous and the stakes high. While the goals is not specifically to kill any of them, death is a real threat in those scenarios. The danger here is ever present, through there might be some calmer moments throughout it. Such as lesser waves, or rooms with low level threats.
C. “What makes sense”. This is what I use for generic threats. Attacking the Kings Castle is not going to be a balanced moment CR wise. The King is going to have powerful people protecting him, and they are going to do their best to make anyone coming at hims life hell. To make up an example. Basically, if part of my lore involves an Ancient Red Dragon lording over a mountain pass, demanding tribute from any who pass through, then it isn´t going to just suddenly turn into a young adult dragon just because the party decides to go slay a legendary beast. In the same way, if the party decides to go against the assassins guild, then they should be prepared to deal with assassins. Through if my players try to enter a fight in which they are clearly outmatched, I generally try to steer them away from it.
D. The “I have put you through hell, here have a moment to feel powerful and good about yourselves” moments. Basically when they have had a rough time dealing with enemies and combat, I like to throw some easier encounters at them. Basically have some enemies they can easily beat pick a fight, and let the party slaughter them. This is also fun in a war scenario, as it can give them a real sense of power to slaughter foes by the dozen. I like to reuse older foes that used to give them trouble for this, as a way of showing their progress. I also like to use the Minion Rule (The enemy have 1 HP, and if they succeed on a saving throw they survive, if they fail they die) sometimes, as it makes it much easier to keep track of hordes of foes that would die in one or two hits anyways.
Apart from that, I don´t tend to use wandering monsters or random encounters. I do see the fun of it, but I don´t tend to DM games where I think they would make much sense.
One big problem I do have, is that I have gotten so used to DM´ing for high level characters, that I sometimes tend to overtune encounters when I DM for lower level characters. Who have alot less HP and shenanigans the can use to even the fight.
The answer has to come down to solid storytelling, right? That is, the difficulty of the encounter should match the appropriate plot point. Jabba’s palace should be exciting, but it shouldn’t be as tough as fighting the Dark Lord of the Sith who happens to be your father.
So to answer your question… there is a whole genre of 70’s-style action movie music that I sometimes like to listen to. And if I happen to be in that mood, or I just happen to want my players to feel like badasses, I set the stage for it and play one of those tracks.
The results are, to date, unquestioned.
I’ve been “behind the screen” since 1988, started with the first D&D Red Box, and in all those decades I learned this inescapable truth : “The best crafted encounter/module/adventure never survives contact with the players.” (Yes, Art of War paraphrase).
So, off with the maths, CRs, carefully planned encounter, those things don’t work.
Players with level 1 characters faced with the Big Bright Neon Sign of “Innkeepers has a rat problem in his cellar” will ignore said sign, ask for rumours about what’s happening in the world, and will make a beeline straight to the lair of the Ancient Wyrm Red Dragon with enslaved Cultists.
In every single game, from one or two every day when I ran a club to one every week when I got a job, to conventions and Organized Play with Official Scenarios, with a couple of hundreds of differrent players over the past 35, NONE of the players I’ve “animated” a game followed more than a half-line of script.
I’ve read about “railroading” several times, but I genuinely never had to opportunity to use that : when I set down the first four traverses and the first rail, said rail gets bent into a pretzel in seconds.
So, in my humble opinion, the solution is that every encounter should make the player feel good and be enjoyable for every one involved, myself included.
Near death experiences can be fun, but those are mostly traumatic, for the characters and the players alike.
Steamrolling over underpowered chaff might make players feel good, but also frustrated.
And that’s not even talking about the Dice Gods being in a mood that day, like a 17th level 2nd Ed AD&D Warrior specced to the gills, min-maxed, with the best gear available in the setting AND a Major Artifact that could not over a 2 on a D20 for three sessions in a row and ended up nearly dead in an encouter against a pack of four 1/2 Hit Die dogs in a field (and that’s with the 2nd Ed rule that Warriors make a number of attacks per round equal to their level against opponents with less than 1 full Hit Die).
So I cheat, the dice make sounds behind the screen but I don’t really look at them, the opponents take hits but fall only when it’s Dramatically Appropriate, I keep track of my player’s characters health and ressources, and I reward creativity more than brute force and number crunching.
The player’s characters are the Protagonists (not always Heroes), so every little thing they do must feel impactful, even their failures.
In the above-mentioned bit about a group of four level 1 characters going hunting a Ancient Wyrm, I did not say “nope”, I followed the flow, describing increasingly haunting surroundings, untold devastation, waves after waves of increasingly horrifying opponents, brought them close to death several times with improvised helpers to get them back in shape afterwards if needed, did everything I could to make the feel like they had a heavy impact on the story (even if that was totally improvised and it wasn’t the story I had in mind at the start), thinking they would at some point realize they were in soooo far above their abities that they would stop, go back, and prepare more before resuming their hunt.
But NOPE, they were determined to at least see and “strike a true blow” against that infamous Ancient Wyrm that ruled several countries by fear of it’s attention alone.
So I let them.
When they finally reached said Ancient Wyrm and I began describing a menacing thing longer than two football fields with a wingspan that eclipse the sun, the proverbial ligthbuld of “whups, we goofed” came on over the heads of every player (that was after almost 20 sessions of increasingly gruelling encounters, they were around level 10 by then because of my own rule-of-thum of “max one level up every two sessions”), they tried to flee …
Zuldazar the Ancient (improvised name for that Ancient Wyrm from the first session) said in a measured tone that still shook the whole mountain range : “I’ve watched you battle my minions, overcome my traps, unravel my schemes from the very beginning. I let you come to me. I was quite a refreshing change to be hunted down by clueless blundering oafs instead of a whole nation, religion or army. As a thank you for the fun I’ve had, I’ll let you go THIS ONE TIME, but if you ever cross my path again, I won’t restrain my wrath anymore. Well done adventurers, you came farther than everyone else in the last millenium, but now BE GONE FROM MY SIGHT !”.
I’m still in contact with the players of that “improv campaign” from 10 years ago, I’ve told them since then that it was totally NOT planned and that I cheated at every encounter to make it harsh without thrashing them and that they were supposed to help the Innkeeper before discovering a dastardly plot by a priest of disease to spread a plague through waves of rats … and they STILL think it was the best thing ever, even knowing that everything was improvised, cheated, fudged and not supposed to happen.
Two of them even FRAMED THEIR CHARACTER SHEETS, for Freya’s Sake !
As a Game Master, you never really “master” anything, you go with the flow to create an enjoyable experience for every one where the players feel on top of the world, mechanics, CRs, encounters are not even in the equation.
The Protagonists and their impact come first, period.
GURPS doesn’t use levels, or CR, or any of that other stuff… so it can be harder and easier.
Harder for newbie GMs who aren’t used to the system, but easier for experienced GURPS GMs because there are no hard set limits, or really monster manuals, so it’s largely up to the GMs what is what “power level”. So if I have a group with a bunch of “pumped up” mooks (mooks who can take a few hits and deal out some good hits) and a Worthy, if the fight is going badly for the PCs and I don’t want that, the mooks can suddenly be ‘glass-cannons’ once they finally get hit, or the Worthy’s ‘potent attack’ can suddenly have a usage limit, or maybe they develop a sudden case of “Oh no! I left the burner on” and depart to leave the “mooks to finish you up” and the Players aren’t going to be any wiser.
I mean not my PCs. Thy’re pretty wise to my methods by now, but they appreciate it when we’re playing a “Big Damn Heroes” game, but if it’s a ‘scrabbling in the dirt and dying like dogs” game, then they occasionally get steamrolled back to rolling up new characters.
One trick that I have been using a lot lately is to have enemies, while all the same, have different stats. For instance, in one recent sessions the players where fighting a group of hobgoblins. Mind you, I gave them all enough levels to be a match for the group, most of the critters I use are about 2 levels or so behind the players. The difference is that the amount of HP’s they have varies. Anywhere from 1/4 to 1/2 what the normal maximum would be. Those guys tend to go down quickly, and it makes the players feel good when they can one-shot, or take something down with a few quick blows. But scattered in with that group would be a few that were at, say 3/4 to max HP’s. And also tended to have better equipment, a different look, or some other visual clue that they were a possible “problem.” So yeah, they are smacking down guys left and right, and then suddenly they are trading blows with some guy who is giving as good as he takes, and really feels like a challenge. All of them technically the same, but different enough that it doesn’t feel like the players steamrolled through the encounter, and sometimes with the vagaries of the dice, they got hurt bad enough, or were in enough danger to make it memorable.
There can also be memorable fights not by what they are facing, but with the tactics the enemy is using. For instance, the look on my players face when I said the Bad Guys formed a shield wall and had long spears, and behind them were some archers, and maybe a caster or two for that annoying counter-spell to use, so the fight doesn’t dissolve into “I cast Fireball.” The typical strategy of “we charge” goes right out the window when facing that many attacks of opportunity as they try to get close. I think I might have broken them the first time I pulled that, lol.