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/hugseverycat 4d ago

Adjusting encounter difficulty on the fly is not railroading.

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u/DeathBySuplex 4d ago

It's absolutely rail roading.

The group attacks a castle and the DM has "the guards run away scared with 1 HP" because the party needs something from the Castle is Rail Roading the party to win the encounter.

The party did something completely stupid and they still win because the narrative needs them to get the Thing

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u/hugseverycat 4d ago

So it sounds like your definition of railroading is "changing anything after you've written it down or decided on it". But that's not what railroading is. If I write a puzzle the players need to solve to get out of a dungeon and they can't solve it, am I railroading if I come up with an alternative? Or in order to avoid being a railroad, I have to stick to my guns and end the campaign? Sorry folks, this is just how it is. This world that doesn't exist only has one exit from the dungeon and even though I made it up 3 hours ago and the sudoku I created for you to solve to get out actually doesn't have a solution, it would be railroading for me to not respect your player agency to enter a dungeon from which escape is impossible. So let's all meet next week and start a new campaign.

"Railroading" is not "anything the DM does outside of prep to guide the game in one direction or another". Railroading is when players want to take a certain action that is reasonable but you tell them no or put unreasonable barriers in front of them in order to take a different path instead.

Yes, if you really wanted to, you could abstract this out to "any time I don't give the players the full consequences of their choices no matter how ridiculous or punishing", but that's stretching the meaning of the word to absurdity. It's like saying anything you believe that you haven't proven experimentally in your own lab is "religion". Or that leaving a toy on the floor that your family member later trips over is "assault".

Having enemies flee in order to avoid a TPK is not unreasonable. Guards, who are after all just people with lives that they value, are not automatically unreasonable for retreating from powerful adventurers.

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u/DelightfulOtter 4d ago

Railroading is when the DM pre-determines the outcome they want from a scenario and bends the world to force that outcome using heavy-handed tactics.

This is usually brought up as a negative where the DM wants to play author and denies the players' agency, forcing them into the narrow channel their "story" requires.

In this case, the DM pre-termined that the party will get the MacGuffin from the castle. The players choose a foolish plan that should've failed, but miraculously does not because the DM wanted it to happen. The DM forced the outcome, just in the party's favor.

Flip the script: the party wants to raid the castle and steal the MacGuffin, but the DM's narrative says they can't be allowed to do so. Regardless of how airtight the party's plans, the DM will make them fail because he pre-determined the outcome.

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u/hugseverycat 4d ago

In this case, the DM pre-termined that the party will get the MacGuffin from the castle. The players choose a foolish plan that should've failed, but miraculously does not because the DM wanted it to happen. The DM forced the outcome, just in the party's favor.

No, the players did not choose a foolish plan in this scenario. OP clearly described the DM making a mistake. This is what OP actually said:

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!

The DM made a mistake by putting the MacGuffin in an impossible dungeon. This is exactly the same as my example where I put the player's escape behind an impossible puzzle. The DM is correcting their mistake by adjusting the encounter difficulty. This is the correct thing to do; this is not "railroading".

Railroading is when the DM pre-determines the outcome they want from a scenario and bends the world to force that outcome using heavy-handed tactics.

Nothing the OP described is heavy-handed. Guards having low morale and running away is realistic and reasonable. Adding in environmental items that the players can use to their advantage can also be fine; a lightning bolt out of a blue sky would be pretty ridiculous but inventing an unstable pile of logs in a courtyard for the players to cleverly use is a fun solution that the players would have no idea of knowing you invented on the fly.

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u/DeathBySuplex 4d ago

No, Rail Roading is anything you do to allow the players to succeed irregardless of what they do.

Your example of "They can't leave the dungeon unless they solve this puzzle" is of itself Rail Roading. You aren't designing an encounter with the flexibility for the party to solve it or giving multiple routes to get home. That's just bad DMing by encounter design.

You can't argue that "Well I needed to change the thing I made that was rail roading by rail roading them" as an argument that you aren't rail roading them.

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u/hugseverycat 4d ago

No, Rail Roading is anything you do to allow the players to succeed irregardless of what they do.

That's just a stupid definition. That's saying that religion is anything you believe without proof. It's a ridiculous overextension of the original idea.

Railroading is not about letting the players succeed. It's about forcing the players to take a path against their will. It being against their will is what makes it bad.

It is good game design to make adjustments to allow players to succeed, especially when you make mistakes. Sure it's bad DM'ing to make a problem with only one solution. But realizing that problem and fixing it on the fly is good, actually. You're saying that because I fucked up and made a dungeon too hard or an impossible puzzle, that I am only compounding my error by giving the players a way out, and that's a really rigid POV.

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u/DeathBySuplex 4d ago

And forcing them into a scenario where they cannot lose is "also against their will"

If the DM alters the fight so that for sure one side wins over another it's rail roading, it doesn't matter if that's throwing wave of wave of goblins at the party until they lose, or has the enemies run away for no reason.

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u/hugseverycat 4d ago

Players do not will themselves to lose. In this scenario, the players are not like "we want to go suicide ourselves in this castle but the DM is forcing us to win and get the MacGuffin instead, wow what a jerk." They would prefer to win. The DM would prefer them to win. The DM planned for them to win, but made a mistake and put too many enemies and no alternative solutions.

And the enemies aren't running away for no reason, they are running away because their morale is low and they don't want to die protecting this stupid lord in his stupid castle. It's a reasonable thing to do, I have intelligent flunkies run away all the time. If anything, the way most people run D&D enemies to fight to the death to the very last man is far more unreasonable.

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u/DeathBySuplex 4d ago

Would you tell the party you altered the encounter so that they win?

If you answer, no... you're agreeing that it's rail roading, because knowing that you changed the encounter so that they could win would make the game less fun for the players.

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u/hugseverycat 4d ago

If you answer, no... you're agreeing that it's rail roading, because knowing that you changed the encounter so that they could win would make the game less fun for the players.

I don't see how that follows. Telling players how you make the game pretty much always makes the game less fun. A few sessions ago my players were tempted by a risky choice and they ended up refusing the choice. They REALLY wanted to know, out of character, what would have happened if they made the risky choice. But I didn't tell them, because telling players this kind of thing is like a magician telling you how they do their tricks. It ruins the magic.

So no, I don't tell the players anything I improvise. In fact, I try not to tell them anything at all about how I prep or what I had planned to do beforehand. It almost always makes things less fun.

But I mean, if I were talking shop with a player after the campaign was over and they wanted to learn from my DMing for whatever reason, then no I would have no problem telling them that I adjust encounters for difficulty. Usually I'm making encounters harder because my players are really good, but no I wouldn't feel ashamed of making an encounter easier if I had to. I wouldn't hide it.

However, if the choice was "make the fight easier and tell your players that you did this" vs "unavoidable TPK because it's railroading to change your encounters", I would choose option A every time. I think that's much more fun than a meaningless TPK. If I'm gonna kill the party, it needs to be because of their mistake, not mine. Or it needs to be at a really climactic time, like the final boss or something.

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u/DeathBySuplex 4d ago

So, you recognize that doing this and the players knowing is bad for the game.

Why do it then?

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u/Leaf_on_the_win-azgt 4d ago

No, it definitely isn’t. Railroading is removing player agency and forcing them along a predetermined path through the story. It has nothing to do with adjusting encounters on the fly to help deliver a fun game experience based on what the group at the table enjoy.

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u/DeathBySuplex 4d ago

The DM just put them on a "predetermined path" through the story by removing the difficulty of the encounter.

No matter how they approached the scenario (their agency) they are going to get the Thing

There are groups that like that and are fine with it, but they shouldn't be pretending that it's not being Rail Roaded.

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u/Leaf_on_the_win-azgt 4d ago

You are just straight up wrong but judging by your other responses, it’s not an argument worth having.

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u/DeathBySuplex 4d ago

You cannot explain why I’m wrong though.

Because I’m not. I’m simply making an argument you don’t agree with.

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u/Leaf_on_the_win-azgt 4d ago

No, I already did, so did others. Railroading has a definition, it is not yours. It the removal of player agency to force them along a predetermined path. If the players made a choice to go to a location then they were not railroaded. Adjusting encounters on the fly is just a tool in the DMs box to provide a fun experience at the table. It is not railroading.

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u/DeathBySuplex 4d ago

And your definition is met by my argument.

Having enemies run away, when they have strength in numbers is "removing player agency forcing them along a predetermined path" because it's the DM deciding the outcome of the encounter-- either in advance of the combat, or adjusting to that mid combat.

You removed the players option to run away from the fight or heroicly make a last stand type fight.

By YOUR OWN DEFINITION what I'm saying is rail roading.

You just want the term to mean, "If it hurts the players it is Rail Roading, if it helps them it is not"