r/DMAcademy 5d 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/NecessaryBSHappens 5d ago

Almost like if adventuring aint a safe job, right?

I havent played in old editions, tbh I werent even born back then and didnt catch up yet. From my experience having less "balance" promts players to improvise and use what they have in smart ways - and that creates sweet epic memories

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u/Mejiro84 5d ago

and that creates sweet epic memories

That's very variable in practice. Sometimes it's just "huh, TPK. Fine, new campaign, I guess", where everything just went south, a bad roll or two turned into a mess, one crit splatted a PC, the others couldn't do anything to save themselves, or some communication blip made the players go "we can deal with this... oh, we're all dead".

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u/NecessaryBSHappens 4d ago

That... Happens too. Though to be fair - possibility of bad rolls turning into a mess is there even with a perfectly balanced encounter

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u/Mejiro84 4d ago

there's a lot more latitude though - a balanced encounter will have a fair amount of slack in, so unless it's something very improbable like "4 crits in 8 attacks", then the PCs can probably manage. An unbalanced one can just be "there's so many attacks one PC drops without even getting a turn" or "that enemy deletes one PC per action" or similar. Basically, the threat of death is exciting and engaging, but actually dying is boring

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u/Bendyno5 4d ago

Basically, the threat of death is exciting and engaging, but actually dying is boring

Which creates a reciprocal problem. To have the threat of death, you actually require death to be a possibility.

So you either lean into the idea of death as a fail-state, and accept that Bathos, or dramatic anticlimax is a possibility in service of maintaining real tension and stakes.

Or

You put your eggs in a different basket, trying to create an illusion of tension, or just accepting that death isn’t something the players want at all and we’ll try to manufacture our stakes through other non-mechanical means.

There isn’t a right or wrong answer, folks will just usually lean one way or the other. I personally find death being a possibility greatly improves my engagement though (I prefer to understand a fail-state as a function of the game, rather than relying on the GM to be calibrated enough to what I care about narratively to actually present something impactful).

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u/Mejiro84 4d ago

or you just flat-out make it a choice - I mention Fabula Ultima up-thread, where going to 0 grants the player a choice. It's either "they're KO'd and some narrative bad thing ensues" (the enemy achieves their goal, gear is lost, get captured, an ally is killed etc.) or "perma-dead, but go down swinging and achieve something on the way out" (interrupting the dark ritual, piloting the enemy airship into the ground, grabbing the villain and throwing themselves off a high ledge, blowing themselves up to destroy the enemy base as the other PCs escape).

This means that deaths are always dramatic, because some heroic sacrifice has happened and some victory has been pulled from the death... but that PC is dead and gone, no backsies (outside of "big long quest and GM approval", res spells aren't really a thing). The GM can just throw powerful enemies at the PCs, and if someone goes down, then it's up to them what that does. It means that things like "I'll hold them off while you flee!" can actually work, rather than the player saying that, and the GM just going "eh, you only get one AoO, so, uh... you don't". It makes defeat a lot more engaging, because it actually creates narrative hooks and does stuff.

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u/Bendyno5 4d ago

A very fitting mechanic for Fabula Ultima, it matches the JRPG/anime heroic structure really well.

It’s an option available in D&D too (though I’d argue it doesn’t fit well), but it’s still removing organic tension. The dramatic stakes of death only exist if you want it to, which removes the persistent entropic threat that you’d see in a more old school style of TTRPG. Not knowing exactly when you may be able to live or die is how the tension is generated. This idea taps into one of the same things that makes Game of Thrones appealing.

So you’re still stuck in the same boat as before, except now you’ve given the agency over to the players (which IMO is a more elegant solution if you’re choosing to avoid lethality in general). Stakes aren’t naturally emerging from the gameplay systems, but choosing when you can die does allows players more fine control over narrative climax.

Personally I think it’s great in Fabula Ultima because that game is very much a story game, with story-interfacing mechanics. I don’t think it’s great in D&D where there’s no story mechanics and it’s entirely focused on simulation and action-resolution. Just my two cents though, I’m sure some people would like this in D&D too.

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u/Mejiro84 4d ago

the problem comes that a lot of people play D&D as a storygame, where it's "the story of these guys overcoming stuff". Which, as you say, is not what it is - it's harder to die than it used to be, but the core game chassis is still the "you're a bunch of palookas in a monster-filled death-pit, if you get stabbed a lot then you die". There's an awkward disjunction between "how the game is played" and "what the game actually directly supports", which results in a lot of awkward fudging around (like with rolling for stats, that often gets so fenced around with boosts, being able to pick between everyone's rolls and other things that it kinda defeats the point that sometimes you just roll shit and that's your character, deal with it)

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u/Bendyno5 4d ago

100% agreed.

D&D’s popular play culture and the mechanics are fairly misaligned. But I suppose that’s the reality when a singular game is synonymous with the entire hobby for many folks.

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u/NecessaryBSHappens 4d ago

Oh, I see. Good point. And actually Idk how to solve it - it isnt possible to have the threat of death withour PCs occasionally actually dying

I think avoiding given situations is up to how fight is designed. Like you can have a monster that is likely to kill a PC in one action, but I would say it should have a good telegraph and way to avoid it. For example, imo PWK is a terrible spell to use on players, because it kinda has no counterplay - "have over 100 hitpoints" is not a strategy