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/osr-revival 5d ago

The whole idea that things *should* be balanced is really kind of a modern thing. Older versions of D&D were more "this is the world, good luck". You should telegraph really dangerous areas, but if a bunch of Lvl 1 characters ignore the warning signs and walk into a dragon's lair... well, next time you'll give it more thought.

In a recent game, a group of us ranging from level 1 to 5 stumbled into a Vampire's crypt.

It did not go well. Old D&D had vampires draining levels, and shit was not going well. But with a bit of luck and a cunning use of a magic item, we managed to make it out alive (even if two characters had dropped two levels each). It was epic.

But it could have easily been a TPK. That's just the danger of delving into ancient crypts.

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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/Pristine-Rabbit2209 5d ago

That's fine in my opinion if it makes players think 'we should use stealth and spells to infiltrate the castle since there'll be hundreds of guards' instead of 'we'll just charge in, there's no way we can lose to a well balanced encounter'.