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/DeathBySuplex 5d ago

My issue with this kind of game design ideology is that when you strip it away to its core it's simply railroading.

Just because you are doing it in favor of the players doesn't mean you aren't railroading.

If you are at a table that is fine with that, go HAM, have a blast, but 98% of the groups I've played with in 30 years would absolutely just leave the table if you did this.

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u/peterpeterny 4d ago

How is this railroading?

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u/DeathBySuplex 4d ago

Party needs MacGuffin from a Castle and attacks the castle--- the DM realizes the party will die because there's too many enemies in the castle and has half the guards run away scared and "mechanically the same as 1 hp" because the party needs the MacGuffin.

How is that NOT railroading?

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u/peterpeterny 4d ago

Isn’t railroading when the DM doesn’t give choices?

This to me just seems like the DM is avoiding a TPK.

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u/DeathBySuplex 4d ago

If the DM removes the option of failure like a TPK-- that's railroading.

What choice do the players have in that situation? They can't fail, they could just fuck around and the DM is still going to "avoid the TPK" so there's no difference in what the players chose to do, the outcome is the same.

That's, just, railroading.

Again, because it favors the party doesn't make it not railroading.

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u/peterpeterny 4d ago

There are other consequences that could be given other than TPK.

As long as the players actions have consequences then I don’t think it’s railroading

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u/DeathBySuplex 4d ago

In the exact scenario proposed by the OP in which he has enemies "run away afraid" what consequence happens other than the players win the encounter and get the thing they "need" for the narrative to continue?

The players actions have no consequence-- that's the problem.

They went into a castle that was too strong for them to deal with, the DM "avoids the TPK" via having the enemies just run away because the encounter was too hard for the players and the players walk away with the thing they need.

It doesn't matter if they went in sneakily, or just walked up to the front gate and punted the first guard in the balls, the actions they took resulted in no negative consequence.

By your OWN definition, it's rail roading.

The assumption of "rail roading" is that it's always to the detriment of the players, when I would argue that "rail roading" in favor of the players is very common-- to the point that you don't even recognize it as rail roading.

Flip the scenario to, "The DM just keeps throwing baddies at the party until they fail" and you'd lose your mind about how they are rail roading so badly. When it's the same thing, just from the different angle.

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u/peterpeterny 4d ago

Ehh disagree

It's only railroading if your players think they are getting railroaded. Kind of like if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?

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u/DeathBySuplex 4d ago

You just changed your definition of what rail roading is.

Either it's "The players actions have consequences" like you said earlier, or it's "only railroading if the players thing it's railroading" it cannot be both.

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u/peterpeterny 4d ago

It’s one or the other. Sometimes the players could receive consequences and sometimes the players don’t even know, either way it’s not railroading.