For a variety of reasons, I've always been a fan of 3d6 in order when generating ability scores for D&D characters. However, after spending an embarrassing amount of time generating characters at http://character.totalpartykill.ca/basic/ (Why is this SO MUCH FUN?!) some potential flaws have become apparent. Firstly, "hopeless" characters with no above-average scores and multiple way-below-average ones are a lot more common than you might think. Moldvay's suggestion of allowing players to discard such a character and roll a new is an acceptable patch, but is, to my mind, an inelegant solution at best.
Many people wouldn't consider the inverse of this, a character with no low scores and multiple very high ones, to be much of a problem. (I, on the other hand, have been sorely tempted to fudge scores downward if I roll an uber-character, because I find such characters profoundly uninteresting ...) Depending on the players and the group as a whole, it may not be, but in my groups, having one character with an 18 and a 16 and a couple 13s can easily make those who have a 14 in their prime requisite, a 7 or 8 in another score, and a bunch of 9s and 10s feel inadequate, especially if they're playing the same class as the super character. Imagine being the fighter with 14 Strength and 8 Dexterity on the same team as the guy with 18 Strength, 13 Dexterity, and 16 Constitution, and you might feel a twinge of resentment at being constantly upstaged.
One ubiquitous response to this has been to use methods that alter the distribution of ability scores -- typically toward the high end of the scale -- 4d6 drop lowest and other, even more extreme, dice-rolling schemes. What I'm looking at is something similar that will weight randomly-rolled scores toward the middle of the scale. The characters I find most appealing are the ones with abilities mostly in the average range, with one or two particular talents and weaknesses. That fighter above -- the St 14, Dx 8 guy -- would be a blast to play ... provided he doesn't have to work alongside a lot of people like that other guy who overshadow him in every way.
Anyway, to get to the actual point, I've been running some dice-rolling simulations on anydice.com, and the method that produces the most pleasing results to me is 2d6+3. Yes, I'm aware that doesn't allow the full official range of scores from 3 to 18, and I'm entirely OK with that. Let me show you why.
With 2d6+3, you'll get ability scores from 5 to 15, with an average of exactly 10 (compared to 10.5 for 3d6) with a smaller standard deviation. Extremes are a little less common, and the really extreme scores aren't possible to roll straight. A 13 score is a legitimate talent that only 16% of characters will have naturally. But wait, there's still the point-trading aspect of B/X to consider: You can increase an ability by 1 point, at the cost of lowering another by 2. By the book, you can only raise a prime requisite, and can't lower any score below 9, but we can expand that to allow raising or lowering of any score, but no score may be lowered below 6 (or raised above 18.) You want that +2 or +3 bonus? That kind of exceptional talent is reserved to those who work and sacrifice for it! You might be born with the potential to be amazingly strong, smart, charismatic or whatever (a 14 or 15 natural score) but developing it to that degree is a choice, one that requires trade-offs. This way, characters who are truly amazing in an ability are going to be relatively uncommon, and those with 16s or higher in more than one ability are exceedingly rare ... plus, they'll almost certainly be balanced with mediocrity in other areas.
As for the lower limit of 5 created by this method, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. A -1 ability score penalty is a relative common thing, but I'm fine with -2 being exceedingly rare and -3 being beneath the range of a typical adventurer. This also leaves a little room for playing around with ability score loss due to curses, permanent injuries, etc. if that sort of thing tickles your fancy.
Obviously, this scheme isn't for everyone, but if you like the idea of adventurers being superior to the common man in courage and determination more than raw ability, it might be worth a try.
Showing posts with label balance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label balance. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 30, 2019
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Gauging combat challenges
In the comments of a fairly recent post, I was asked to describe how I judge the challenge level of a combat encounter. Short answer is that I don't have any hard-and-fast formula, and more or less eyeball it. But of course that only evades the real question, which is what do I look at when eyeballing in order to make a judgment?
That said, I also don't want to create dungeons full of killer encounters or boring cake-walks. An adventure should include plenty of opportunities for winnable combats, as well as encounters that demand more discretion. Balance, to me, takes place at the level of the entire dungeon or scenario, not zoomed in to the individual encounter.
The amount of damage a group of creatures can do in a round is, I think, the most important consideration in judging their threat level. Two primary factors contribute to this: the damage potential of each attack, and the total number of attacks per round of the group.
I would weight the total number of attacks more heavily. A fight against four goblins is likely to be more deadly than a fight against a single ogre because the goblins get four chances to hit every round, while the ogre only gets one. Against a party of 1st level characters, the goblins could potentially kill four in a round, while the ogre can't finish more than a single one at a time, no matter how much damage it rolls.
Damage per attack I would judged based on how many attacks it would take to kill a typical PC. The more rounds the party can stand against it, the less dangerous it is to them. Can it kill a PC with a single attack? An attack that just hurts a character is a prompt to make a choice: withdraw or fight on. This is an important consideration because character death, if it happens, is more likely to be seen as a result of player choice. A one-hit kill is just a one-hit kill. If you want to give a 1st-level party a fighting chance to engage in combat without too much anxiety, make sure to have some monsters that do 1d3 or 1d4 damage around.
Hit Dice are the usual unit of Monster Toughness in old school games. Dungeon levels are supposed roughly to correspond to the average HD of the monsters found in them, and BECMI and Rules Cyclopedia D&D even have an encounter balancing formula which is based on Hit Dice. However, Hit Dice are a distant third in my estimation of monster threat level. What they are is a fairly good indication of how long a monster will last in combat, and thus how long it will get to keep making its attack and damage rolls against the PCs.
Hit Dice also affect the chances of successfully attacking, but only by about 5% per HD, which is a lot less than extra attacks do. A 1 HD creature needs to roll a 14 or better to hit AC 5, which translates to a 35% chance. A second attack increases the odds of getting at least one hit to 57.75%, better than having 4 extra Hit Dice!
Quite often, big HD correlate with big damage, but not always, so it's still a good idea to gauge them separately.
All else being equal, a single high HD monster with multiple attacks is usually more dangerous than a group of lesser creatures whose HD and attacks approximate it. Consider a pack of five 1 HD orcs with 1d8-damage weapons and a 5 HD owlbear with three 1d8 attacks. Each orc will take 5 or so points of damage to kill, and each one killed reduces their number of attacks by one. The owlbear gets its three attacks per round until it's dead.
Armor Class rates a little bit lower than Hit Dice in my Monster Threat Assessment. It too affects how long the monster remains alive and fighting, but unlike a big pile of hit points, which can only be whittled away, AC is bypassed by a good attack roll, and a d20 is a lot swingier than most dice you might roll for damage.
Special attacks are trickier to assess. For low-level parties, their effect is actually minimal. A failed save vs. poison might kill you, but so will a single good solid physical blow, and dead is dead. The odds of missing a save and getting hit in combat are only a little bit different. A save-or-suck power is similar to a low damage attack: it's a cue to rethink one's position, not instant Game Over.
Save-or-die and save-or-incapacitated powers become a big deal at mid levels, not because they become more absolutely dangerous, but because they're now a lot more dangerous relative to attacks that do hp damage. An orc with a sword and a medusa with a petrifying gaze can both take down a 1st level character in one round. Only the medusa is likely to be able to do the same to a 4th or 8th level character. The character's hp increases almost always greatly outstrip saving throw improvements, and while healing spells and potions are by now fairly common, spells that will reverse the effects of poison and petrification are still either out of reach or in short supply.
By high levels, saving throws have improved enough to make the success rate of save-or-die effects acceptably low, and the party probably has access to remedies, which makes them an inconvenience rather than a deadly peril.
Of course, the number of attacks principle also applies to special attacks. If a monster can direct its special attack form against multiple targets at once, or there are several of the monsters in the encounter, it magnifies the threat level in much the same way.
Lots of attacks > big damage per attack > high HD > high AC
Combinations of those factors are possible, naturally. So, lots of attacks + big damage per attack generally trumps big damage and high HD; big damage and high HD beats high HD and high AC, etc. What about lots of attacks and high AC vs. big damage and high HD? How do special powers change things? Use your own judgment. It's an art; not a science.
Putting It In Play
In practice, I try to balance a dungeon as a whole, with a lot of encounters that I think the party could handle without too much trouble, some that would be quite risky, and a few that would almost certainly be disastrous if handled with straight-up combat.
Remember that a good fight is one that costs the party some resources to win, not necessarily one in which the sides are evenly matched. To a wise adventuring party, evenly matched battles are to be scrupulously avoided except in the most dire need or the richest possibility of reward. Evenly matched means that both sides are likely to suffer losses, and either side could end up defeating the other. That might sound exciting, and it is sometimes, but an adventure is more than one fight. It's a war of attrition.
In a good dungeon, the PCs might be able to win any given fight, but they probably can't win them all, one after another, in a gauntlet match. Even winnable fights must often be avoided, in order to conserve resources for fights that are not merely winnable, but important and/or profitable. "Can we win this fight?" is an important question, but so is "What about the next one?"
1st level parties are the toughest to plan for because, with their low hit point totals, outcomes depend heavily on the very swingy d20 attack roll. 1st-level characters and 1 HD monsters can go from full strength to dead with a single attack. A seemingly even battle can become lopsided very quickly if one side has a run of lucky or unlucky rolls. Additionally, if the party includes a spell-caster, the outcome may hinge heavily on which spell he has ready and whether he still has it or has already used it.
If you want to design a dungeon for low-level characters in which direct combat will play a big part, encounters should be predominantly with numbers of monsters smaller than the PC party, with 1 HD or less, low damage potential, and poor ACs. A few encounters can be with even smaller numbers of creatures with 2-4 HD and better damage or AC. Anything bigger, tougher, or more numerous is a serious risk -- but don't let that discourage you from including a couple such encounters. It ain't all about chopping things up with swords, and part of the fun is knowing the difference.
As characters gain in levels and hit points, they generally survive longer, and overall, combat becomes less swingy. The more rounds they can go without dying, the more rolls are made, and the more rolls made, the more the cumulative result is pulled toward the average. Characters with a few levels under their belts can go toe-to-toe with monsters well above their weight class more successfully than low-level ones can because hit points increase a lot faster than damage potential. That doesn't necessarily mean they'll win, but an ill-chosen fight is less likely to wipe them out before they can even realize their mistake and run away.
Still, I think it's good to follow the rule of thumb that the majority of encounters should be ones that the party could handily best in combat, but will take a bite out of their resources. The more fights they pick, the more their resources and hit points get ground down, the closer they get to being that 1st-level party all over again, when life and death can hinge on a single misguided choice or bad roll of the dice...
Firstly, let me say that encounter balance, as fetishized in some recent editions, is abhorrent to me. Crafting every encounter to be "level appropriate" takes the fun out of the game, in my estimation. I don't like railroady scenarios with scripted highs and lows that require easy victories over mooks and dramatic nail-biting climaxes. And no encounter should be a mandatory combat - if the players can talk, bribe, sneak, or trick their way past something, the DM absolutely should not nullify that to force them into Exciting Combat!™
That said, I also don't want to create dungeons full of killer encounters or boring cake-walks. An adventure should include plenty of opportunities for winnable combats, as well as encounters that demand more discretion. Balance, to me, takes place at the level of the entire dungeon or scenario, not zoomed in to the individual encounter.
The amount of damage a group of creatures can do in a round is, I think, the most important consideration in judging their threat level. Two primary factors contribute to this: the damage potential of each attack, and the total number of attacks per round of the group.
I would weight the total number of attacks more heavily. A fight against four goblins is likely to be more deadly than a fight against a single ogre because the goblins get four chances to hit every round, while the ogre only gets one. Against a party of 1st level characters, the goblins could potentially kill four in a round, while the ogre can't finish more than a single one at a time, no matter how much damage it rolls.
Damage per attack I would judged based on how many attacks it would take to kill a typical PC. The more rounds the party can stand against it, the less dangerous it is to them. Can it kill a PC with a single attack? An attack that just hurts a character is a prompt to make a choice: withdraw or fight on. This is an important consideration because character death, if it happens, is more likely to be seen as a result of player choice. A one-hit kill is just a one-hit kill. If you want to give a 1st-level party a fighting chance to engage in combat without too much anxiety, make sure to have some monsters that do 1d3 or 1d4 damage around.
Hit Dice are the usual unit of Monster Toughness in old school games. Dungeon levels are supposed roughly to correspond to the average HD of the monsters found in them, and BECMI and Rules Cyclopedia D&D even have an encounter balancing formula which is based on Hit Dice. However, Hit Dice are a distant third in my estimation of monster threat level. What they are is a fairly good indication of how long a monster will last in combat, and thus how long it will get to keep making its attack and damage rolls against the PCs.
Hit Dice also affect the chances of successfully attacking, but only by about 5% per HD, which is a lot less than extra attacks do. A 1 HD creature needs to roll a 14 or better to hit AC 5, which translates to a 35% chance. A second attack increases the odds of getting at least one hit to 57.75%, better than having 4 extra Hit Dice!
Quite often, big HD correlate with big damage, but not always, so it's still a good idea to gauge them separately.
All else being equal, a single high HD monster with multiple attacks is usually more dangerous than a group of lesser creatures whose HD and attacks approximate it. Consider a pack of five 1 HD orcs with 1d8-damage weapons and a 5 HD owlbear with three 1d8 attacks. Each orc will take 5 or so points of damage to kill, and each one killed reduces their number of attacks by one. The owlbear gets its three attacks per round until it's dead.
Armor Class rates a little bit lower than Hit Dice in my Monster Threat Assessment. It too affects how long the monster remains alive and fighting, but unlike a big pile of hit points, which can only be whittled away, AC is bypassed by a good attack roll, and a d20 is a lot swingier than most dice you might roll for damage.
Special attacks are trickier to assess. For low-level parties, their effect is actually minimal. A failed save vs. poison might kill you, but so will a single good solid physical blow, and dead is dead. The odds of missing a save and getting hit in combat are only a little bit different. A save-or-suck power is similar to a low damage attack: it's a cue to rethink one's position, not instant Game Over.
Save-or-die and save-or-incapacitated powers become a big deal at mid levels, not because they become more absolutely dangerous, but because they're now a lot more dangerous relative to attacks that do hp damage. An orc with a sword and a medusa with a petrifying gaze can both take down a 1st level character in one round. Only the medusa is likely to be able to do the same to a 4th or 8th level character. The character's hp increases almost always greatly outstrip saving throw improvements, and while healing spells and potions are by now fairly common, spells that will reverse the effects of poison and petrification are still either out of reach or in short supply.
By high levels, saving throws have improved enough to make the success rate of save-or-die effects acceptably low, and the party probably has access to remedies, which makes them an inconvenience rather than a deadly peril.
Of course, the number of attacks principle also applies to special attacks. If a monster can direct its special attack form against multiple targets at once, or there are several of the monsters in the encounter, it magnifies the threat level in much the same way.
Lots of attacks > big damage per attack > high HD > high AC
Combinations of those factors are possible, naturally. So, lots of attacks + big damage per attack generally trumps big damage and high HD; big damage and high HD beats high HD and high AC, etc. What about lots of attacks and high AC vs. big damage and high HD? How do special powers change things? Use your own judgment. It's an art; not a science.
Putting It In Play
In practice, I try to balance a dungeon as a whole, with a lot of encounters that I think the party could handle without too much trouble, some that would be quite risky, and a few that would almost certainly be disastrous if handled with straight-up combat.
Remember that a good fight is one that costs the party some resources to win, not necessarily one in which the sides are evenly matched. To a wise adventuring party, evenly matched battles are to be scrupulously avoided except in the most dire need or the richest possibility of reward. Evenly matched means that both sides are likely to suffer losses, and either side could end up defeating the other. That might sound exciting, and it is sometimes, but an adventure is more than one fight. It's a war of attrition.
In a good dungeon, the PCs might be able to win any given fight, but they probably can't win them all, one after another, in a gauntlet match. Even winnable fights must often be avoided, in order to conserve resources for fights that are not merely winnable, but important and/or profitable. "Can we win this fight?" is an important question, but so is "What about the next one?"
1st level parties are the toughest to plan for because, with their low hit point totals, outcomes depend heavily on the very swingy d20 attack roll. 1st-level characters and 1 HD monsters can go from full strength to dead with a single attack. A seemingly even battle can become lopsided very quickly if one side has a run of lucky or unlucky rolls. Additionally, if the party includes a spell-caster, the outcome may hinge heavily on which spell he has ready and whether he still has it or has already used it.
If you want to design a dungeon for low-level characters in which direct combat will play a big part, encounters should be predominantly with numbers of monsters smaller than the PC party, with 1 HD or less, low damage potential, and poor ACs. A few encounters can be with even smaller numbers of creatures with 2-4 HD and better damage or AC. Anything bigger, tougher, or more numerous is a serious risk -- but don't let that discourage you from including a couple such encounters. It ain't all about chopping things up with swords, and part of the fun is knowing the difference.
As characters gain in levels and hit points, they generally survive longer, and overall, combat becomes less swingy. The more rounds they can go without dying, the more rolls are made, and the more rolls made, the more the cumulative result is pulled toward the average. Characters with a few levels under their belts can go toe-to-toe with monsters well above their weight class more successfully than low-level ones can because hit points increase a lot faster than damage potential. That doesn't necessarily mean they'll win, but an ill-chosen fight is less likely to wipe them out before they can even realize their mistake and run away.
Still, I think it's good to follow the rule of thumb that the majority of encounters should be ones that the party could handily best in combat, but will take a bite out of their resources. The more fights they pick, the more their resources and hit points get ground down, the closer they get to being that 1st-level party all over again, when life and death can hinge on a single misguided choice or bad roll of the dice...
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Unbalancing the party
A few posts ago, I expended a page of text pondering some of the costs of encounter and adventure "balance," which in my mind at least added up to a compelling case not to bother with it at all. Now, another venerable D&D trope that I think can (and probably should) be left by the wayside: the Balanced Adventuring Party.
The standard Balanced Adventuring Party consists of a fighter, a magic-user, a thief, and a cleric. If there are more than four characters, the extras are usually extra fighter or cleric types, and all are within a level or two of each other. I'm really not sure exactly how or when this idea got started. The monsters section of the Moldvay/Cook edition has entries for entire parties of a single class (Veterans, mediums, bandits, and acolytes, respectively.) The rules for generating NPC adventuring parties involve rolling dice to determine the number of members and the class and level of each. The name of the game, it seems, is randomness, not balance. There's no mention of balancing the party at all. If anything, it's openly thumbing its nose at balance.
To be fair, I also don't know of any rule set that officially enshrines the Balanced Adventuring Party as something to be striven for, but quite a few adventure modules explicitly suggest and encourage it in very strong terms. I'm definitely not knocking the general idea that a diverse assortment of talents can be a good thing, but it seems to me that there are a couple of artificial impositions on the game that push the notion of party balance from a potentially advantageous option to a sacred principle of adventuring.
The first of those things is the Balanced Adventure, especially those at the railroady end of the agency spectrum. The party is expected to overcome a specific series of scenes and encounters en route to a predetermined goal. Because there's little opportunity to circumvent or avoid encounters, or to go off in search of more appealing challenges, each encounter and the adventure as a whole must be balanced to provide challenges that are neither insurmountable nor boringly easy - a task that's considerably simpler if one assumes a certain ratio of competencies in the party. Different sorts of obstacles are included in the adventure to give each class something to do and a chance to shine - tough monsters for the fighters, locks and traps for the thief, barriers that can only be solved with magic for the magic-user, undead for the cleric, etc. Many, if not most, commercial adventure modules that I've read and/or run seem to be written with the Balanced Adventuring Party in mind, and deviating from that formula too far is likely to make things a lot harder on the party, the scenes tailored for absent classes becoming either impossible or much more taxing to the party's limited resources than expected, throwing the balance for the adventure's climax against them.
The other artificial imposition is niche protection, the idea that the usefulness of a class depends on its being able to do things that the other classes can't. One of the most oft-cited arguments for niche protection is that of the magic-user class allegedly stepping on the toes of the thief class with its Knock and Invisibility spells. (By the same token, of course, fighters must be arbitrarily barred from forcing or smashing locks if the thief's supposed bailiwick is to be preserved.) If the thief's lock-picking niche is to be protected, then it follows that a thief is an absolute necessity to any party that expects to find locked spaces that it wishes to access.
I've already dealt with encounter and adventure balance here. As for niche protection, I think it's an unnecessary convention based on the misconception that class defines what characters can do, instead of representing a style and set of methods for approaching challenges. A thief's skill is but one way to defeat a lock - often the most effective and advantageous way, but not the only one. Magic is a very convenient method of defeating many obstacles, but oftentimes a little old-fashioned wit or muscle power properly applied will serve as well.
Once we dispense with those two contrived bogeymen, there's no reason why a party that lacks one or more of the archetypal classes can't be a viable adventuring team.
A party of all fighters can solve problems with brute force and skill at arms. When the fighters face a challenge to which their strengths aren't ideally suited, they can improvise a solution or they can shrug and go off in search of something that suits them better. They are neither constrained by their class as to what obstacles they can try to overcome, nor bound to tackle challenges they feel ill-equipped to face. A party of magic-users might lean heavily on deceit, negotiating, and running away from monsters instead of physical combat, but they aren't barred from mixing it up whenever they like their odds. A party without a cleric has other means of healing themselves and dispatching undead monsters, and a group with no thief can still negotiate a warren of traps and locked doors if they choose.
The bottom line for me is that, like adventures and individual characters, adventuring parties are far more interesting and varied when freed from rigid formulas, when you let unexpected things occur. Players shouldn't feel obligated to play a particular class just because the group "needs" one or already has "enough" of another. Whether you end up with a Balanced Adventuring Party, or with six fighters, or with four magic-users, a thief, and a halfling, what's the problem? In fact, given the option, I'd rather run a game for one of the latter two parties.
I'm seriously trying to come up with some way to have my players roll up their next set of characters separately, without any knowledge of what the others have chosen to play, to see if that makes a difference in the composition of the party.
The standard Balanced Adventuring Party consists of a fighter, a magic-user, a thief, and a cleric. If there are more than four characters, the extras are usually extra fighter or cleric types, and all are within a level or two of each other. I'm really not sure exactly how or when this idea got started. The monsters section of the Moldvay/Cook edition has entries for entire parties of a single class (Veterans, mediums, bandits, and acolytes, respectively.) The rules for generating NPC adventuring parties involve rolling dice to determine the number of members and the class and level of each. The name of the game, it seems, is randomness, not balance. There's no mention of balancing the party at all. If anything, it's openly thumbing its nose at balance.
To be fair, I also don't know of any rule set that officially enshrines the Balanced Adventuring Party as something to be striven for, but quite a few adventure modules explicitly suggest and encourage it in very strong terms. I'm definitely not knocking the general idea that a diverse assortment of talents can be a good thing, but it seems to me that there are a couple of artificial impositions on the game that push the notion of party balance from a potentially advantageous option to a sacred principle of adventuring.
The first of those things is the Balanced Adventure, especially those at the railroady end of the agency spectrum. The party is expected to overcome a specific series of scenes and encounters en route to a predetermined goal. Because there's little opportunity to circumvent or avoid encounters, or to go off in search of more appealing challenges, each encounter and the adventure as a whole must be balanced to provide challenges that are neither insurmountable nor boringly easy - a task that's considerably simpler if one assumes a certain ratio of competencies in the party. Different sorts of obstacles are included in the adventure to give each class something to do and a chance to shine - tough monsters for the fighters, locks and traps for the thief, barriers that can only be solved with magic for the magic-user, undead for the cleric, etc. Many, if not most, commercial adventure modules that I've read and/or run seem to be written with the Balanced Adventuring Party in mind, and deviating from that formula too far is likely to make things a lot harder on the party, the scenes tailored for absent classes becoming either impossible or much more taxing to the party's limited resources than expected, throwing the balance for the adventure's climax against them.
The other artificial imposition is niche protection, the idea that the usefulness of a class depends on its being able to do things that the other classes can't. One of the most oft-cited arguments for niche protection is that of the magic-user class allegedly stepping on the toes of the thief class with its Knock and Invisibility spells. (By the same token, of course, fighters must be arbitrarily barred from forcing or smashing locks if the thief's supposed bailiwick is to be preserved.) If the thief's lock-picking niche is to be protected, then it follows that a thief is an absolute necessity to any party that expects to find locked spaces that it wishes to access.
I've already dealt with encounter and adventure balance here. As for niche protection, I think it's an unnecessary convention based on the misconception that class defines what characters can do, instead of representing a style and set of methods for approaching challenges. A thief's skill is but one way to defeat a lock - often the most effective and advantageous way, but not the only one. Magic is a very convenient method of defeating many obstacles, but oftentimes a little old-fashioned wit or muscle power properly applied will serve as well.
Once we dispense with those two contrived bogeymen, there's no reason why a party that lacks one or more of the archetypal classes can't be a viable adventuring team.
A party of all fighters can solve problems with brute force and skill at arms. When the fighters face a challenge to which their strengths aren't ideally suited, they can improvise a solution or they can shrug and go off in search of something that suits them better. They are neither constrained by their class as to what obstacles they can try to overcome, nor bound to tackle challenges they feel ill-equipped to face. A party of magic-users might lean heavily on deceit, negotiating, and running away from monsters instead of physical combat, but they aren't barred from mixing it up whenever they like their odds. A party without a cleric has other means of healing themselves and dispatching undead monsters, and a group with no thief can still negotiate a warren of traps and locked doors if they choose.
The bottom line for me is that, like adventures and individual characters, adventuring parties are far more interesting and varied when freed from rigid formulas, when you let unexpected things occur. Players shouldn't feel obligated to play a particular class just because the group "needs" one or already has "enough" of another. Whether you end up with a Balanced Adventuring Party, or with six fighters, or with four magic-users, a thief, and a halfling, what's the problem? In fact, given the option, I'd rather run a game for one of the latter two parties.
I'm seriously trying to come up with some way to have my players roll up their next set of characters separately, without any knowledge of what the others have chosen to play, to see if that makes a difference in the composition of the party.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
An unbalanced world
Recent editions of D&D, so I've read, have virtually made a fetish of balance. The word does have a certain warm fuzziness if you don't think too deeply about the implications. When I do, though, it's hard to imagine a greater travesty to inflict upon the game.
If you never face anything but "level appropriate" challenges, what's the point of leveling up at all? You're just on a level treadmill. Every time you become more powerful, your opponents match you exactly. The term "skill tax" was coined to describe a situation in which you have to improve a given skill just to stay even with an increasing challenge level. Well, isn't fetishizing the balanced encounter really just a level tax?
If you never have to run from a hill giant when you're second level, can you fully experience the sense of accomplishment when you defeat him at fifth level?
Is there not a certain feeling of triumph in biting off more than you can chew, retreating, and then returning later with bigger teeth to claim the victory that eluded you before?
Isn't it more suspenseful if that temple of evil has been there the whole time, leaving you to judge for yourself whether you're ready for it? Simply having it pop up when the DM deems you ready doesn't cultivate that same delicious sense of possibility mingled with dread.
If all the kobolds disappear just because your character gains a level, don't you miss out on the opportunity to revel in your newly acquired badassery? A one-sided victory every now and then can be fun.
On the other hand, if you're only allowed to face a "level appropriate" number of kobolds, you never get to experience that "Uh oh!" moment when you realize that in large numbers, they can be pretty damn scary.
How do you even attain balance without nullifying the wonderful wild card of zany and unexpected strategies that can turn a pitched battle into a rout or snatch victory from the jaws of certain defeat? Why would any DM want to deprive his or her players of that thrill?
If every encounter is balanced to be winnable by combat, where's the incentive to sneak, negotiate, and connive your way to your goals?
How do you separate the heroes from the cowards if there are no daunting odds against which to measure them?
How do you distinguish the cautious and prudent from the reckless and foolhardy if all risks come pre-managed?
Screw balance! The best campaigns are the ones that include a wide range of dangers and rewards that the party can face or avoid according to their own judgment. Let the players decide when to hold 'em, when to fold 'em, when to walk away, and when to run. That's a good 75% of the fun.
If you never face anything but "level appropriate" challenges, what's the point of leveling up at all? You're just on a level treadmill. Every time you become more powerful, your opponents match you exactly. The term "skill tax" was coined to describe a situation in which you have to improve a given skill just to stay even with an increasing challenge level. Well, isn't fetishizing the balanced encounter really just a level tax?
If you never have to run from a hill giant when you're second level, can you fully experience the sense of accomplishment when you defeat him at fifth level?
Is there not a certain feeling of triumph in biting off more than you can chew, retreating, and then returning later with bigger teeth to claim the victory that eluded you before?
Isn't it more suspenseful if that temple of evil has been there the whole time, leaving you to judge for yourself whether you're ready for it? Simply having it pop up when the DM deems you ready doesn't cultivate that same delicious sense of possibility mingled with dread.
If all the kobolds disappear just because your character gains a level, don't you miss out on the opportunity to revel in your newly acquired badassery? A one-sided victory every now and then can be fun.
On the other hand, if you're only allowed to face a "level appropriate" number of kobolds, you never get to experience that "Uh oh!" moment when you realize that in large numbers, they can be pretty damn scary.
How do you even attain balance without nullifying the wonderful wild card of zany and unexpected strategies that can turn a pitched battle into a rout or snatch victory from the jaws of certain defeat? Why would any DM want to deprive his or her players of that thrill?
If every encounter is balanced to be winnable by combat, where's the incentive to sneak, negotiate, and connive your way to your goals?
How do you separate the heroes from the cowards if there are no daunting odds against which to measure them?
How do you distinguish the cautious and prudent from the reckless and foolhardy if all risks come pre-managed?
Screw balance! The best campaigns are the ones that include a wide range of dangers and rewards that the party can face or avoid according to their own judgment. Let the players decide when to hold 'em, when to fold 'em, when to walk away, and when to run. That's a good 75% of the fun.
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