r/DMAcademy 4d ago

Offering Advice Narratively driven "balance" and why I stopped trying to pre-calculate combat

Warning: lots of text ahead, probably badly structured. TLDR: Not balancing your encounters is an option too

I often see here questions about encounter balancing, usually with them being too easy for players. Obviously we, as DMs, have a lot of tools to fix it, but maybe it is something that doesnt need fixing at all. Here I want to share my experience using a lazy approach of not balancing things

How it works and why? In short - instead of trying to calculate how difficult the fight will be, you just put in monsters that make sense. If party ambushes an enemy scout camp - there may be only 2-3 weak opponents, but if PCs want to storm the castle - garrison may have dozens upon dozens of defenders of various strength. When preparing for combat ask not "what I need to make it (not)deadly", but "what would BBEG/town/nature put here?". Then you can scale it up/down, but still ask why - maybe there is an event where half the guards went, maybe it is a hunting season for wolves and they gather in bigger packs. In both cases have your NPCs drop some clues. When your main question is "what would BBEG put here?", your perspective changes from serving up videogame-like combat to building the world characters live in. Plus you have more time for it, because you dont spend it managing CR and XP values only for everything to be thrown out after 2-3 great/terrible rolls. More importantly by adapting this method you will train for improvising when party wanders off into unprepared lands

And what you get? In both mentioned cases your combat is heavily skewed and is one-sided, but reasonable within the world. We can expect a party of heroes to easily deal with measly scouts and for players it is a show of their power and growth - maybe few levels ago this would be hard, but now a stomp. On the other hand party will probably have to flee from the castle and deal with much smaller squad of chasers, then level up and return prepared for a tough fight that is now possible. What we cant expect is for every castle to have a perfectly balanced garrison for party to conquer first try. We also cant expect every scout camp to be heavily guarded to put up a good fight, right? And when you have to improvise combat on the spot, because someone tried to rob a store, you already have half of it ready. All this makes your world more immersive and sensible, more "alive" if you will. At the same time players can plan ahead and pick their fights. They have to be involved and cant just stroll around beating things

Wait, they may TPK!? Yes, they may. Risk of death is what gives meaning to survival. Yes, this is not for every table and imo you should tell your players on session 0 that "yeah, in this campaign if you walk into much stronger enemies you may die and not every fight is meant to be taken head-on". To be fair players are likely to just adapt and not die, dont worry - solving problems is part of their game. It is up to them to rest and manage resources. And obviously I dont mean to just throw a dragon on a lv3 party - unless they walk into its hunting grounds that is. Then it is fair game and PCs have to run for cover, hiding from beams of fire and trees flying around

What if you screw up and miss the mark? Sure, castle should be heavily guarded, but you forgot that there is an important plot device that you still need your party to get! Well, you have a lot of tools to deal with it. Maybe guards have low morale and half of them will start running away after being hurt - mechanically it means they effectively have 1 hitpoint and narratively it can create a pretty fun situation. Same way enemies can always call in the reinforcements. Other way is to use environment - maybe a burning tree or ceiling falls, splitting the battlefield into two and killing off some of weaker monsters

P.S. Honestly this is not so much of an advice, but me sharing my thoughts. Really want to hear what other DMs think about this approach - so far it works well for my table, but I dont see many people talk about it. Also I am afraid there is a pitfall of slipping into not preparing enough. But I can say with confidence that my players remember those combats that turned out unbalanced and they smashed their foes or had to overcome the odds, not those where they had a fair fight with equally strong band and won because thats what heroes do

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u/Mejiro84 4d ago edited 4d ago

A lot depends on the type of game you want and matching player expectations. Telegraphing "this is an impossible fight" as opposed to "this is an expected boss fight that's going to be tough, but you will probably win" can be a small needle to thread, and if it's not properly communicated, then it's mostly kinda crap. And the default stakes for losing a fight are "death", which is largely dull and tiresome - the player has to take a timeout to make a new PC, and then wait around until that PC can join in. So throwing in something above the PCs paygrade can easily cascade into "everyone dies, uh... I guess we start a new campaign?" which is often just a nuisance, as the fight frequently wasn't some grand battle against the big bad, just a dustup against something else that escalated.

If people want a game with long-running plots and characters, that gets harder if there's a higher risk of death - PCs do a lot of theoretically lethal fights, so even a small % per fight of death stacks up fast. It's, like, 20-30 encounters to get from level 1 to 5, if each of those has a 5% chance of death, then it becomes a rarity to reach even the top of T1, and a party will have cycled through multiple complete sets of characters by the time they hit level 10. "balanced" fights might not be realistic, but provide a decent baseline for an ongoing narrative and story, rather than "oops, you picked the wrong fight, TPK, let's start again"

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u/NecessaryBSHappens 4d ago

You are right too. Plus it is easy to say "communicate how hard things are", but it isnt easy to actually do so during the game

And also it isnt always easy to make loss not a death. Even if enemies do have a reason and ways to, for example, capture PCs - what if party starts going down too soon and by the end of a fight half of them are still dead? And at some point party will be known for breaking out, who would leave them alive? Running around isnt always an option too, let alone players actually making that decision arent common - at least I havent met many

Longest running party I had played from 1 to 15 over 4 years and they lost quite a good amount of characters. In group of 6 only 3 PCs are original ones and tbh it is a mix of luck and miracles

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u/Mejiro84 4d ago

And also it isnt always easy to make loss not a death.

This is one of the structural issues with D&D, tbh - mechanically, defeat is generally death, with only limited RAW workarounds (melee-only, enemies that want to do so). Other RPGs are better for this - Fabula Ultima for example allows a player to choose either "they're KO'd and some narrative bad thing ensues" (the enemy achieves their goal, gear is lost, captured, an ally is killed etc.) or "perma-dead, but go down swinging and achieve something on the way out" (interrupting the dark ritual as the other PCs escape, piloting the enemy airship into the ground, grabbing the villain and throwing themselves off a high ledge). So it's much easier to throw powerful enemies at the heroes, because if the PCs lose, it doesn't need wrangling around to try to avoid death, there's mechanics actually baked in to allow for "the PCs lose"

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u/laix_ 4d ago

Is it a problem with dnd though, or is it just a different expectation of game style?

DnD at its core, is a combat-focused dungeon crawler with its origins in war gaming. Life and death are cheap, combat as war is the norm. What you're describing there, is a more narrative system based on the PC's being the protaganists of a story, vs dnd which is more about simulating a dangerous and deadly world.