Now he had two goblin guards outside the tomb and goblins chanting, sacrificing the victim in the chamber below. He says that if the characters aren't stealthy the two guards will shut the doors and run downstairs. Otherwise it could easily go that the players sneak, surprise and total kill the two goblins before they can escape.
Now down below he said that regardless what happened upstairs the number of the goblins will be the same because in 5e if you had say 5 goblins v 4 characters and if an *extra* two goblins joined them it could easily turn into a TPK encounter. So he makes the number of goblins in the big fight the same, regardless e.g. 5.
As an old school 2e person I find that very ewww. To auto adjust the number fight so it is "just right" feels like I have "cheated". I like to create a dungeon or battle ahead of time and have the players directly affect it without omni god intervention. If they play very smart and "outsmart' my villains plans, then they get rewarded with an easier battle (and I pretend to be annoyed that they thwarted me). Part of this is for the players but also a part is my enjoyment at the challenge of making it not so hard everyone dies, but no so easy it is a push over.
Probably not alone, but on the smaller side. 5e has changed the concept of D&D, now the focus in on hte PCs and their characters and having and "epic" where these characters are Heroes in the world. While I don't think Matt Colville is wrong I also don't think he is fully right. Most likely this is a first dungeon for his PCs, so making it a possible TPK is not fun really in 5e. However, I'd keep listening to him because this is not how he runs all of his battles. He has an entire video on how he made things more difficult due to PC actions and that made for a very different outcome and also made for a bad session due to DM choices.
D&D is no longer the create a character and hope they make it to the end of the session. It is not have 4 character lined up so they can all die anymore. It is about creating an epic for the most part, where these characters are taken from low to high level, not facing challenges, and yes death possibly, but death is merely a state of being in D&D 5e.
Is that to say you can't play like you are describing? No. However now we focus on how the group wants to play. So if you want to play that way, you need to find players who agree with you.
Continuing the video he does create consequences if they didn't take out the guards (not extra numbers, but two coming up from behind) so its not as bad as I thought.
My old 2e games weren't that high a mortality rate after 3rd level, and everyones characters were very epic as time went along. There were a lot of deaths over time, but they had raise dead and resurrection rolls, and it was very rare that anyone failed them, though it did happen a couple of times over 4 years and they were petrified of making those rolls so did everything they could so get advantage in the big battles. And that strategic/tactical competitiveness was fun.
I mean, I get all that, but at first level... A goblin can do up to 8 damage - that is enough to drop a good portion of PCs if their health is low. So at first level it makes sense to not increase the number in the big fight, but have those two goblins show up later. According to the combat tracker 5 Goblins is already considered a "Deadly" Encounter, so 7 is really at TPK level. 7 shots a turn Vs 4 PCs that have like an average of 8 health each, is asking for at least 2 PCs to drop in the first turn. Again I get wanting things to be challenging and player actions have consequences, but in the first ever dungeon, a TPK is not going to be fun for most parties (unless they are on some Goblin Slayer high and want to reenact that.)
Right, but I wouldn't have 8 goblins, I would have a number that was a very close encounter, that they could handle and then if they managed to stealth take out two on their own - they get an easier fight for the main battle.
Whatever I decided would be etched in stone and if they steam roll because they are strategic experienced players, fantastic you win and I look forward to designing the next session with your skill and strength in mind. I just don't want to auto add or auto subtract from my world based on their actions, I want my world to be more real than that.
One thing to understand is, when the DM does those things behind the green curtain properly, the players have no idea it happneed. The world will seem real to them. The only person why knows a lever got pulled is the DM, but as long as the Players have no idea, then it will never impact their verisimilitude.
If it makes you go "ewww", you're not alone - but you are off the modern mainstream trend for D&D ( since about 3.0 or 3.5 ).
There is a decent sized community in the OSR games camp who play it "old school". I tend to like the philosophy behind the games ( see my signature below for their general philosophy ), but it requires Players who actually are willing to engage and think critically about the game, and not expect that just because a challenge exists, that whether or not they win isn't the question, it's how many resources they are going to lose winning: combat as sport vs. combat as war as the OSR community would say.
There's a smaller, but significant, group of DMs and Players who are willing to up the intensity, up the verisimilitude, and accept that it can up the lethality of games. If you're interested in this style, I'd look here for an intro.
Ironically, Matt Colville is probably close to the OSR camp than the 5e camp.
Personally, I love much of the OSR philosophy, but I'd still tone down the lethality
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I started D&Ding in the early ‘90s and have always adjusted encounter balance in ways similar to that. I could never understand why the other DMs always drove themselves nuts about encounter balance because I didn’t know that they didn’t do that stuff. These different styles are not new, just more common practice now.
Much like Mr. Colville, I believe my job as DM is to curate an experience for the players. I believe that I am more capable of achieving that goal by being more fluid in my approach. They still come up to me afterwords and talk about how tough a fight was. That’s because I can just as easily increase difficulty on the fly as well, so every fight can be a challenge if it suits the story. Do PCs still die? Sometimes, sure. But they always feel like badass pseudomedieval superheroes.
Neither approach is any more right or wrong, just personal preference based on experience. As long as everyone is having a good time and feels suitably challenged, then as far as I’m concerned the DM did it right.
One thing to understand is, when the DM does those things behind the green curtain properly, the players have no idea it happneed. The world will seem real to them. The only person why knows a lever got pulled is the DM, but as long as the Players have no idea, then it will never impact their verisimilitude.
I'm finding myself in the odd position of not completely agreeing with you, for a change :O
Although you are generally correct here - the Players will not, and should not see the DM adjustments behind the scenes - Players do pick up on general trends, even if unconsciously.
If the DM is constantly adjusting the combat to keep the Players challenged, but never threatened, they will notice that trend. They will come to think that if an encounter exists, it is winnable, and it won't be a real threat. They will - justifiably - believe that they can just whip out swords and beat any encounter down through brute force. They will expect the world to be on "easy mode". It absolutely impacts the verisimilitude of the world.
Some might say that's "epic" play, but how epic is shooting fish in a barrel? To me, it's more epic to be totally out-gunned, out-classed, and still pull it off through some clever gambit because you were smarter, more aware, more creative, and gutsier than your opposition. But that can't happen if your Players think everything is easy. They'll just wade in and try and use brute force. Then we get complaints about "my party is a bunch of murder hobos", peppered with the occasional "OMG, my Party is doomed!" threads on the forums ( the latter occurring when the DM doesn't keep the game on easy balanced mode, and the Party didn't get the memo ).
Don't get me wrong. Playing on the easy-I-can-defeat-anything-without-risk setting is a valid style of play - just like escapist pizza-and-beer-kicking-in-the-dungeon-and-kill-orcs is a valid kind of fun to have. But 5e - or maybe just most 5e tables - seems to be stuck on the one setting.
I like candy as much as the next person - but sometime I want a complex single malt instead. Pez != Talisker.
However - in this case - I agree completely that you shouldn't TPK a bunch of new Players on their first adventure :p It's a great way to turn people off the game :p
Edit: just to be clear, taking the balance guidelines away is not about killing Characters, or upping lethality of the game! It is about making the Players work smarter and more creatively for their victories, and being able to take a greater depth of pride in those victories. As a GM I still want the Party to win, but I want those victories to be well earned triumphs they can take genuine pride in overcoming.
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I don't think making an encounter challenging and "balanced" means that the encounter will be easy or risk free. An "easy" encounter can very quickly turn into a TPK with good/bad rolls. I think that is the really point of the DM; challenge the players and have fun.
But I disagree that "hot fixing" and encounter automatically makes it easy and "winnable" with no repercussions. To me is simply means, make sure 12 Goblins don't show up when the party is not even feasibly able to handle that. As Coville says in the video, making the Big bad encounter the number of PCs +1 goblins is a good formula for making the encounter challenging but not overtly death bringing, but still a rick of death or injury.
"Hot fixing" each and every time sends a message - or rather the complete lack of any challenges in the game that the Party cannot easily overcome, even if they're just murder-hobo'ing across the landscape, sends that message: every situation is winnable by using the simplest and most direct tactic, and fate is always on their side.
You might not say that, you might not even think you're communicating that, but if the Party is never allowed to get in over their head, it will never occur to them that they can get in over their heads, and they will never take steps to make sure that they're not getting it over their heads. They will never play smarter - they just keep whacking with a stick, because that has always worked in the past, and they believe it will always work in the future.
Taking away the possibility of failure, because you as a GM are constantly tweaking the encounters so the Party is never in danger of failing, takes away the meaning behind the victory.
I agree 100% that the purpose of the GM is to "challenge the players and have fun" - but are the Players really being challenged if they cannot fail, and you are - implicitly - communicating that to them?
Now - suddenly changing gears on your Party would be a disaster, I agree. Springing OSR style play on most 5e Players without some serious session 0 discussions would likewise be a horrible idea. Players need to be informed right up front if you were to adopt an OSR approach, and they would need to sign off on it. Some people want to play the game on easy mode all the time. Nothing wrong with that, all I'm saying is that there are other options.
But let's say you wanted to run a game like that, and all your Players knew that, and were all on board. You put those 12 goblins in the world. Yes - " the party is not even feasibly able to handle that". But it's on the Party to play smarter. They know the DM isn't balancing things, they know this is a super dangerous situation in which they can possibly die if they don't play smarter - so they play smarter. They need to scout out the situation to know what they're up against, not just charge in. They need to come up with creative solutions: besiege the goblin lair, smoke them out; divert the local stream into the cave and pick off the goblins withe bows and arrow as they flee the complex; dig pit traps around the mouth of the cave and smoke out the goblins to come blundering into the traps, etc.
You are also correct when you point out that an easy encounter at low levels can go south really fast, just on bad rolls, especially for a low-level Party. I'm not saying you kill the Party at that point; a TPK there is irresponsible GM'ing. But failing needs not be the same as dying - that's another Matt Coleville video on multiple fail states.
Players are humans. Humans are lazy. We tend to put in only as much effort as we need, in order to accomplish what we want ( especially in a recreational game ). If you never ask more of your Players, you will never get more from your Players. If you are constantly managing their risk levels for them, they will never learn to manage their own risk levels.
Personally, I believe Players are better than that. They don't need GMs to manage the world for them. So long as they understand that it's their responsibility, and they agree that's the kind of game they want to play, I think Players will step up to the challenge.
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I don't think making an encounter challenging and "balanced" means that the encounter will be easy or risk free. An "easy" encounter can very quickly turn into a TPK with good/bad rolls. I think that is the really point of the DM; challenge the players and have fun.
But I disagree that "hot fixing" and encounter automatically makes it easy and "winnable" with no repercussions. To me is simply means, make sure 12 Goblins don't show up when the party is not even feasibly able to handle that. As Coville says in the video, making the Big bad encounter the number of PCs +1 goblins is a good formula for making the encounter challenging but not overtly death bringing, but still a rick of death or injury.
You see my philosophy 25 years ago was to make the sessions "big fight" with the nasty villain and lots of backup was to make it close as possible. I would generally give them the opportunity to rest before it so they are on full power. I would estimate the damage per round on each side and total health pool and make the fight as close as possible (which usually meant giving the monsters the betters odds on paper). When it came to that fight the DM screen was tossed aside and my rolls were in the open. The players knew it was now serious, the big guns are out, the DM is impartial and it was fully up to them against whatever I designed. My face is serious and I look concerned for them, shaking my head unsure of their victory. Big spells tossed out, the mage in the back is attacked, they are like crap this is bad.
That suspense/danger was amazing and the world and their challenge was "real". On paper they lose but they somehow they always eeked out a win by using superior tactics or finding something on their character sheet that just made the difference. Sometimes people did die, which was terrifying that they had to make a Resurrection roll which lowered their constitution and made it more likely that death was permanent next time.
I never had a TPK over 4 years, if I did then it would be my failure not theirs. But to hot fix stuff, fake my rolls, change monsters health, just no. Not saying I never ever did it, I'm sure I did a couple of times in the early 1st-3rd levels, but if you have to do it more often, then the world is fake, you know it and the players will probably figure that out too.
Anyway sounds like DMs still do that play style, maybe I need to dig deeper into youtube/podcasts for less mainstream shows to find it. thanks for all your feedback.
One thing to understand is, when the DM does those things behind the green curtain properly, the players have no idea it happneed. The world will seem real to them. The only person why knows a lever got pulled is the DM, but as long as the Players have no idea, then it will never impact their verisimilitude.
I'm finding myself in the odd position of not completely agreeing with you, for a change :O
Although you are generally correct here - the Players will not, and should not see the DM adjustments behind the scenes - Players do pick up on general trends, even if unconsciously.
If the DM is constantly adjusting the combat to keep the Players challenged, but never threatened, they will notice that trend. They will come to think that if an encounter exists, it is winnable, and it won't be a real threat. They will - justifiably - believe that they can just whip out swords and beat any encounter down through brute force. They will expect the world to be on "easy mode". It absolutely impacts the verisimilitude of the world.
Some might say that's "epic" play, but how epic is shooting fish in a barrel? To me, it's more epic to be totally out-gunned, out-classed, and still pull it off through some clever gambit because you were smarter, more aware, more creative, and gutsier than your opposition. But that can't happen if your Players think everything is easy. They'll just wade in and try and use brute force. Then we get complaints about "my party is a bunch of murder hobos", peppered with the occasional "OMG, my Party is doomed!" threads on the forums ( the latter occurring when the DM doesn't keep the game on easy balanced mode, and the Party didn't get the memo ).
Don't get me wrong. Playing on the easy-I-can-defeat-anything-without-risk setting is a valid style of play - just like escapist pizza-and-beer-kicking-in-the-dungeon-and-kill-orcs is a valid kind of fun to have. But 5e - or maybe just most 5e tables - seems to be stuck on the one setting.
I like candy as much as the next person - but sometime I want a complex single malt instead. Pez != Talisker.
However - in this case - I agree completely that you shouldn't TPK a bunch of new Players on their first adventure :p It's a great way to turn people off the game :p
Edit: just to be clear, taking the balance guidelines away is not about killing Characters, or upping lethality of the game! It is about making the Players work smarter and more creatively for their victories, and being able to take a greater depth of pride in those victories. As a GM I still want the Party to win, but I want those victories to be well earned triumphs they can take genuine pride in overcoming.
Who says I do it every time? I do it when I need to fix an imbalance that I created as DM during encounter design. I am human, I do make mistakes. But this way I can fix them instead of the players having to live with my miscalculations.
Who says that the encounters I design are winnable? That’s not even remotely true.
I specifically am very careful of how and when I do it. My players have never once accused me of letting them play on “easy mode.” In fact one of them actually came up after a particularly grueling string of fights and said “You know, they don’t all have to be that hard.” Meaning that they thought it was a meat grinder dungeon. The last thing the thought was that anything was on easy mode. And they actively try to avoid combat when they can, because they know combat in any campaign I run will be very challenging and possibly unwinnable.
Like I said originally: “when the DM does those things behind the green curtain properly, the players have no idea it happened....” Trust me, my players are well aware that any combat could potentially kill their PCs. I sometimes start encounters by dropping a PC to unconscious on the first round just to put the party behind the 8 Ball. I have no qualms whatsoever about PC death at my table. After all, I didn’t kill the PC, the monsters did. And I warned them that PC death was on the table during session 0. But this way I can avoid a TPK.
I think as a DM it's your job to make sure that the world feels real -- key here is feels real, not "is" real. If it feels real to the players that 2 goblins went in and 5 goblins were in the next room, you've done your job. Nobody knows what was actually scripted, the encounter was tough but doable, the players had fun, and there were enough goblins in the room that it was believable that 2 new goblins had been added to an existing party of goblins based on who was in the room. I'm not really seeing what the problem is. Especially at 1st level. Especially for a new group of players and a new DM.
I am sure Colville would also have said, if you have a bigger party, there should be more than 5 total goblins in there, or else it would be too easy of a challenge. If you start the party at 3rd level, it should be orcs in there rather than goblins, and maybe more than 5.
I don't think the entire world, every encounter, has to be perfectly balanced for the level and size of the party. But... if you don't do that at all, then there is such a range of possible monsters and party abilities that you run the risk of a serious mismatch in difficulty on a regular basis.
For example, when my players started out, there were 3 possible places they could go, based on NPC information they got in session 1: A goblin mine to the north, where kidnappings were happening; a cemetery being disturbed by undead; and a tower recently taken over by orcs.
I expected them to hit the goblin mine first, because children had been taken, and they did not know what was happening to the kids, and I figured they would consider that to be the time pressure one. A cemetery full of undead can wait. But because the opening sequence involved a horde of zombies attacking the town, they decided the cemetery was more pressing, and went there first.
The original design of the goblin mine, and particularly the boss fight at the end, had assumed a party of 4 level 1s, and possibly an NPC druid helping. I had even made the druid level 2 so she could take a couple of hits and do some healing to make sure there wasn't a TPK in the goblin boss fight. Then they ended up being level 2 before they went into that dungeon. The boss fight would have been way too easy (it was a goblin boss and 2 lackeys, I think, originally). So I added some wolves to the fight to make it a little harder (just a couple, if I remember). And then it almost looked like they were going to go into that fight without the druid.. Probably didn't matter, they won fairly easily.
But my point is, I didn't just leave the fight super easy because 'that is how I had written it.' What was in the room was reasonable and realistic for that encounter, but I put enough in there to make it be challenging. (In retrospect I should have given the boss more h.p. -- he went down in 1 shot to a crit from the sorcerer's chaos bolt and literally did nothing.)
But again that is at low level. Just this past weekend, they got into a boss fight at the end of the session in an evil temple... Their first Legendary enemy (weak legendary -- could do 1 leg action per round) with a lot of h.p. and powerful enough to give them a decent fight on his own, but he had 6 (normal) skeleton minions protecting him and as a reaction, could reconstitute ones that got killed (only back to 1 h.p., but still). My design of this fight assumed the party at or near full power, but they went in after 3 other fights, a bunch of exploration, and no rest (long or short). This made the fight way tougher than I had expected, but I didn't pare it down. They walked in there knowing it was going to be a boss fight (or at least highly suspecting it) and chose not to rest (to save the kidnapped NPCs). They won anyway, but it was a near thing. And I didn't adjust it. I also didn't make the bad guy "act dumb" to help them out -- ask the players. He was giving them fits. And after they had done probably 30 or 40 pts of damage to him and I said, 'He's starting to look hurt,' they all said, "Starting to?!"
However, that was still a level 4 encounter, designed for them to go into that area at level 4. If they had ignored the NPC and skipped that area, and then come back to it at level 10, would I still have left it at level 4? No... because that would be boring and stupidly easy.
(Of course, if they had ignored the NPC, she and 5 others would have been used to summon evil stuff and be dead, and the world would have been in a lot worse shape, but we don't have to worry about that because they won.)
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Another thing to remember about that video is that it is aimed towards first time dm’s running their first game (or second, depending on how much progress was made) for first time players.
I have run that dungeon for a number of parties and have varied the number of creatures inside. While going off of any video or module, it’s important to keep in mind your players and their characters and adjust based off of that as well as the type of game you are running.
Overwhelming new players their first time playing is a good way to turn someone off to d&d.
(In retrospect I should have given the boss more h.p. -- he went down in 1 shot to a crit from the sorcerer's chaos bolt and literally did nothing.)
That’s when I use the same technique of “hot fixing” to double or even triple that boss’s HP mid fight. 😉
But then their mental calculator is like, look dude we got a bunch of ununsual crits, did a 500 damage and your ogre boss is still going with more hit points than a Balor.
The original design of the goblin mine, and particularly the boss fight at the end, had assumed a party of 4 level 1s, and possibly an NPC druid helping. I had even made the druid level 2 so she could take a couple of hits and do some healing to make sure there wasn't a TPK in the goblin boss fight. Then they ended up being level 2 before they went into that dungeon. The boss fight would have been way too easy (it was a goblin boss and 2 lackeys, I think, originally). So I added some wolves to the fight to make it a little harder (just a couple, if I remember). And then it almost looked like they were going to go into that fight without the druid.. Probably didn't matter, they won fairly easily.
But my point is, I didn't just leave the fight super easy because 'that is how I had written it.' What was in the room was reasonable and realistic for that encounter, but I put enough in there to make it be challenging. (In retrospect I should have given the boss more h.p. -- he went down in 1 shot to a crit from the sorcerer's chaos bolt and literally did nothing.)
I never finalized anything until the session already started. Sure if they leveled up its fair to adjust. I'm talking more about making changes as they are about to walk in the room or the worst "cheat" in my mind, making changes while the fight is going on.
Its more about a philosophy rather than specific examples. I enjoy getting invested in the world along side of my players and try to define general rules for that world e.g No god like interventions during a fight.
(In retrospect I should have given the boss more h.p. -- he went down in 1 shot to a crit from the sorcerer's chaos bolt and literally did nothing.)
That’s when I use the same technique of “hot fixing” to double or even triple that boss’s HP mid fight. 😉
But then their mental calculator is like, look dude we got a bunch of ununsual crits, did a 500 damage and your ogre boss is still going with more hit points than a Balor.
Please.
Um... no.
First of all, the situation in question was that the boss dropped to a single casting of a single spell on the first round of combat, not “a bunch of unusual crits...”
Second, how do the players know how many HP a Balor has in my world? I’ve dropped a 330HP Wyvern on a 3rd level party. And that was just their first encounter of the day, and they only got harder as the day wore on. A Balor in a campaign I run will have in excess of 600 HP, and possibly closer to 900.
I honestly wasn’t sure how they were gonna survive that Wyvern attack, but they did. And the Roper. And the 27 Skeletons, a Skeletal Minotaur, the suped-up Mummy, and the Bone Golem. And then they still had to fight the Thieves’ Guild at the end of the day too. And they did it all with 3 regular healing potions and no magic weapons. It tool some very good rolling and strategy on their end as well. Heck, I was actively trying to kill a character* that time and they still all survived.
*One of the players switched characters earlier that day and I was attempting to kill their old PC who I was running as a party NPC for narrative reasons. I was trying to kill that character off, and the party saved him. 🤷♂️
That’s when I use the same technique of “hot fixing” to double or even triple that boss’s HP mid fight.
Nah... in that situation... they had all been doing like 5 damage a hit most of the time, level 2 and all... and the Sorcerer busts out with nearly max rolls on a Chaos Bolt Crit. That was by far the highest damage roll anyone had made yet in the campaign. Against the mini-boss. Everyone cheered, as I described the goblin boss being turned to ash and his minions then had to roll for morale (and one failed). It was way more fun to do that than say "He seems a little hurt."
The REAL boss in that situation was the town Prefect, who, upon investigation of the goblin's loot and the discovery of a secret note, they learned had been hiring the goblins to kidnap farm children so as to scare the farmers off their land and buy it up cheaply for himself.
I never finalized anything until the session already started. Sure if they leveled up its fair to adjust. I'm talking more about making changes as they are about to walk in the room or the worst "cheat" in my mind, making changes while the fight is going on.
So wait... It's OK to make changes to the whole adventure the day before you play, but it's not OK to make changes to a single room the minute before the party walks in? That sounds rather arbitrary to me.
I mean if you are going to make the argument that the world is the world, the monsters are the monsters, and adjustments should not be made to account for party gains, losses, etc., then it seems to me this should apply all the time. Because the only difference between altering dungeon difficulty to account for the party's power level, and altering room difficulty within the dungeon for the same purpose, is scale.
What Colville, Sposta, and I, are all saying here, is that the point of a D&D encounter is to be challenging and fun (assuming that is the point -- sometimes it's easy but designed to wear the players down, as the first 3 encounters in my necropolis before the evil temple were designed to do -- although I still expected them to at least short rest before going in!).
Its more about a philosophy rather than specific examples. I enjoy getting invested in the world along side of my players and try to define general rules for that world e.g No god like interventions during a fight.
But again... this is a question of scale. You are allowing god-like interventions of the design of the entire module, before the session starts, to change the level of everything in the entire dungeon to be appropriate tot he party, but not allowing a single intervention on one die roll. Why is one OK, but the other is not?
I don't generally fudge die rolls, change boss difficulty on the fly, alter monster hp during a fight, or any of that either. But if I judged, as DM, that for the drama of the scene or the enjoyment of the session, doing so was necessary, then I would do it. Not only is it my right and authority as a DM to do it -- it is my responsibility to do it, as well. The goal is for everyone to enjoy themselves. A TPK in the first room of that dungeon would not have been fun -- Colville knows it -- so he provides advice on how to make sure the encounter is fun and believable to the players.
As DM, you can maybe convince your players that your world is real, but you can't really, truly, convince yourself of that. Because you know that everything is being custom-designed by you for the players to have fun. Whether you do that customization when writing the module or on the fly during the battle, it's still not "what would have really happened" because there IS no "what would really happen" -- there is only what you put into the world, arbitrarily, based on your own decisions about each and every thing in your world, from NPC names, to shop prices, to monster hp, to dungeon ecology, to encounter difficulty room by room, to die rolls.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
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So I am watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvQXGs8IVBM his Running Your First Dungeon, Running the Game #3
Now he had two goblin guards outside the tomb and goblins chanting, sacrificing the victim in the chamber below. He says that if the characters aren't stealthy the two guards will shut the doors and run downstairs. Otherwise it could easily go that the players sneak, surprise and total kill the two goblins before they can escape.
Now down below he said that regardless what happened upstairs the number of the goblins will be the same because in 5e if you had say 5 goblins v 4 characters and if an *extra* two goblins joined them it could easily turn into a TPK encounter. So he makes the number of goblins in the big fight the same, regardless e.g. 5.
As an old school 2e person I find that very ewww. To auto adjust the number fight so it is "just right" feels like I have "cheated". I like to create a dungeon or battle ahead of time and have the players directly affect it without omni god intervention. If they play very smart and "outsmart' my villains plans, then they get rewarded with an easier battle (and I pretend to be annoyed that they thwarted me). Part of this is for the players but also a part is my enjoyment at the challenge of making it not so hard everyone dies, but no so easy it is a push over.
Am I alone in this now in 2020.
Probably not alone, but on the smaller side. 5e has changed the concept of D&D, now the focus in on hte PCs and their characters and having and "epic" where these characters are Heroes in the world. While I don't think Matt Colville is wrong I also don't think he is fully right. Most likely this is a first dungeon for his PCs, so making it a possible TPK is not fun really in 5e. However, I'd keep listening to him because this is not how he runs all of his battles. He has an entire video on how he made things more difficult due to PC actions and that made for a very different outcome and also made for a bad session due to DM choices.
D&D is no longer the create a character and hope they make it to the end of the session. It is not have 4 character lined up so they can all die anymore. It is about creating an epic for the most part, where these characters are taken from low to high level, not facing challenges, and yes death possibly, but death is merely a state of being in D&D 5e.
Is that to say you can't play like you are describing? No. However now we focus on how the group wants to play. So if you want to play that way, you need to find players who agree with you.
Continuing the video he does create consequences if they didn't take out the guards (not extra numbers, but two coming up from behind) so its not as bad as I thought.
My old 2e games weren't that high a mortality rate after 3rd level, and everyones characters were very epic as time went along. There were a lot of deaths over time, but they had raise dead and resurrection rolls, and it was very rare that anyone failed them, though it did happen a couple of times over 4 years and they were petrified of making those rolls so did everything they could so get advantage in the big battles. And that strategic/tactical competitiveness was fun.
I mean, I get all that, but at first level... A goblin can do up to 8 damage - that is enough to drop a good portion of PCs if their health is low. So at first level it makes sense to not increase the number in the big fight, but have those two goblins show up later. According to the combat tracker 5 Goblins is already considered a "Deadly" Encounter, so 7 is really at TPK level. 7 shots a turn Vs 4 PCs that have like an average of 8 health each, is asking for at least 2 PCs to drop in the first turn. Again I get wanting things to be challenging and player actions have consequences, but in the first ever dungeon, a TPK is not going to be fun for most parties (unless they are on some Goblin Slayer high and want to reenact that.)
Right, but I wouldn't have 8 goblins, I would have a number that was a very close encounter, that they could handle and then if they managed to stealth take out two on their own - they get an easier fight for the main battle.
Whatever I decided would be etched in stone and if they steam roll because they are strategic experienced players, fantastic you win and I look forward to designing the next session with your skill and strength in mind. I just don't want to auto add or auto subtract from my world based on their actions, I want my world to be more real than that.
One thing to understand is, when the DM does those things behind the green curtain properly, the players have no idea it happneed. The world will seem real to them. The only person why knows a lever got pulled is the DM, but as long as the Players have no idea, then it will never impact their verisimilitude.
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If it makes you go "ewww", you're not alone - but you are off the modern mainstream trend for D&D ( since about 3.0 or 3.5 ).
There is a decent sized community in the OSR games camp who play it "old school". I tend to like the philosophy behind the games ( see my signature below for their general philosophy ), but it requires Players who actually are willing to engage and think critically about the game, and not expect that just because a challenge exists, that whether or not they win isn't the question, it's how many resources they are going to lose winning: combat as sport vs. combat as war as the OSR community would say.
There's a smaller, but significant, group of DMs and Players who are willing to up the intensity, up the verisimilitude, and accept that it can up the lethality of games. If you're interested in this style, I'd look here for an intro.
Ironically, Matt Colville is probably close to the OSR camp than the 5e camp.
Personally, I love much of the OSR philosophy, but I'd still tone down the lethality
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
I started D&Ding in the early ‘90s and have always adjusted encounter balance in ways similar to that. I could never understand why the other DMs always drove themselves nuts about encounter balance because I didn’t know that they didn’t do that stuff. These different styles are not new, just more common practice now.
Much like Mr. Colville, I believe my job as DM is to curate an experience for the players. I believe that I am more capable of achieving that goal by being more fluid in my approach. They still come up to me afterwords and talk about how tough a fight was. That’s because I can just as easily increase difficulty on the fly as well, so every fight can be a challenge if it suits the story. Do PCs still die? Sometimes, sure. But they always feel like badass pseudomedieval superheroes.
Neither approach is any more right or wrong, just personal preference based on experience. As long as everyone is having a good time and feels suitably challenged, then as far as I’m concerned the DM did it right.
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I'm finding myself in the odd position of not completely agreeing with you, for a change :O
Although you are generally correct here - the Players will not, and should not see the DM adjustments behind the scenes - Players do pick up on general trends, even if unconsciously.
If the DM is constantly adjusting the combat to keep the Players challenged, but never threatened, they will notice that trend. They will come to think that if an encounter exists, it is winnable, and it won't be a real threat. They will - justifiably - believe that they can just whip out swords and beat any encounter down through brute force. They will expect the world to be on "easy mode". It absolutely impacts the verisimilitude of the world.
Some might say that's "epic" play, but how epic is shooting fish in a barrel? To me, it's more epic to be totally out-gunned, out-classed, and still pull it off through some clever gambit because you were smarter, more aware, more creative, and gutsier than your opposition. But that can't happen if your Players think everything is easy. They'll just wade in and try and use brute force. Then we get complaints about "my party is a bunch of murder hobos", peppered with the occasional "OMG, my Party is doomed!" threads on the forums ( the latter occurring when the DM doesn't keep the game on easy balanced mode, and the Party didn't get the memo ).
Don't get me wrong. Playing on the easy-I-can-defeat-anything-without-risk setting is a valid style of play - just like escapist pizza-and-beer-kicking-in-the-dungeon-and-kill-orcs is a valid kind of fun to have. But 5e - or maybe just most 5e tables - seems to be stuck on the one setting.
I like candy as much as the next person - but sometime I want a complex single malt instead. Pez != Talisker.
However - in this case - I agree completely that you shouldn't TPK a bunch of new Players on their first adventure :p It's a great way to turn people off the game :p
Edit: just to be clear, taking the balance guidelines away is not about killing Characters, or upping lethality of the game! It is about making the Players work smarter and more creatively for their victories, and being able to take a greater depth of pride in those victories. As a GM I still want the Party to win, but I want those victories to be well earned triumphs they can take genuine pride in overcoming.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
I don't think making an encounter challenging and "balanced" means that the encounter will be easy or risk free. An "easy" encounter can very quickly turn into a TPK with good/bad rolls. I think that is the really point of the DM; challenge the players and have fun.
But I disagree that "hot fixing" and encounter automatically makes it easy and "winnable" with no repercussions. To me is simply means, make sure 12 Goblins don't show up when the party is not even feasibly able to handle that. As Coville says in the video, making the Big bad encounter the number of PCs +1 goblins is a good formula for making the encounter challenging but not overtly death bringing, but still a rick of death or injury.
"Hot fixing" each and every time sends a message - or rather the complete lack of any challenges in the game that the Party cannot easily overcome, even if they're just murder-hobo'ing across the landscape, sends that message: every situation is winnable by using the simplest and most direct tactic, and fate is always on their side.
You might not say that, you might not even think you're communicating that, but if the Party is never allowed to get in over their head, it will never occur to them that they can get in over their heads, and they will never take steps to make sure that they're not getting it over their heads. They will never play smarter - they just keep whacking with a stick, because that has always worked in the past, and they believe it will always work in the future.
Taking away the possibility of failure, because you as a GM are constantly tweaking the encounters so the Party is never in danger of failing, takes away the meaning behind the victory.
I agree 100% that the purpose of the GM is to "challenge the players and have fun" - but are the Players really being challenged if they cannot fail, and you are - implicitly - communicating that to them?
Now - suddenly changing gears on your Party would be a disaster, I agree. Springing OSR style play on most 5e Players without some serious session 0 discussions would likewise be a horrible idea. Players need to be informed right up front if you were to adopt an OSR approach, and they would need to sign off on it. Some people want to play the game on easy mode all the time. Nothing wrong with that, all I'm saying is that there are other options.
But let's say you wanted to run a game like that, and all your Players knew that, and were all on board. You put those 12 goblins in the world. Yes - " the party is not even feasibly able to handle that". But it's on the Party to play smarter. They know the DM isn't balancing things, they know this is a super dangerous situation in which they can possibly die if they don't play smarter - so they play smarter. They need to scout out the situation to know what they're up against, not just charge in. They need to come up with creative solutions: besiege the goblin lair, smoke them out; divert the local stream into the cave and pick off the goblins withe bows and arrow as they flee the complex; dig pit traps around the mouth of the cave and smoke out the goblins to come blundering into the traps, etc.
You are also correct when you point out that an easy encounter at low levels can go south really fast, just on bad rolls, especially for a low-level Party. I'm not saying you kill the Party at that point; a TPK there is irresponsible GM'ing. But failing needs not be the same as dying - that's another Matt Coleville video on multiple fail states.
Players are humans. Humans are lazy. We tend to put in only as much effort as we need, in order to accomplish what we want ( especially in a recreational game ). If you never ask more of your Players, you will never get more from your Players. If you are constantly managing their risk levels for them, they will never learn to manage their own risk levels.
Personally, I believe Players are better than that. They don't need GMs to manage the world for them. So long as they understand that it's their responsibility, and they agree that's the kind of game they want to play, I think Players will step up to the challenge.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
You see my philosophy 25 years ago was to make the sessions "big fight" with the nasty villain and lots of backup was to make it close as possible. I would generally give them the opportunity to rest before it so they are on full power. I would estimate the damage per round on each side and total health pool and make the fight as close as possible (which usually meant giving the monsters the betters odds on paper). When it came to that fight the DM screen was tossed aside and my rolls were in the open. The players knew it was now serious, the big guns are out, the DM is impartial and it was fully up to them against whatever I designed. My face is serious and I look concerned for them, shaking my head unsure of their victory. Big spells tossed out, the mage in the back is attacked, they are like crap this is bad.
That suspense/danger was amazing and the world and their challenge was "real". On paper they lose but they somehow they always eeked out a win by using superior tactics or finding something on their character sheet that just made the difference. Sometimes people did die, which was terrifying that they had to make a Resurrection roll which lowered their constitution and made it more likely that death was permanent next time.
I never had a TPK over 4 years, if I did then it would be my failure not theirs. But to hot fix stuff, fake my rolls, change monsters health, just no. Not saying I never ever did it, I'm sure I did a couple of times in the early 1st-3rd levels, but if you have to do it more often, then the world is fake, you know it and the players will probably figure that out too.
Anyway sounds like DMs still do that play style, maybe I need to dig deeper into youtube/podcasts for less mainstream shows to find it. thanks for all your feedback.
Who says I do it every time? I do it when I need to fix an imbalance that I created as DM during encounter design. I am human, I do make mistakes. But this way I can fix them instead of the players having to live with my miscalculations.
Who says that the encounters I design are winnable? That’s not even remotely true.
I specifically am very careful of how and when I do it. My players have never once accused me of letting them play on “easy mode.” In fact one of them actually came up after a particularly grueling string of fights and said “You know, they don’t all have to be that hard.” Meaning that they thought it was a meat grinder dungeon. The last thing the thought was that anything was on easy mode. And they actively try to avoid combat when they can, because they know combat in any campaign I run will be very challenging and possibly unwinnable.
Like I said originally: “when the DM does those things behind the green curtain properly, the players have no idea it happened....” Trust me, my players are well aware that any combat could potentially kill their PCs. I sometimes start encounters by dropping a PC to unconscious on the first round just to put the party behind the 8 Ball. I have no qualms whatsoever about PC death at my table. After all, I didn’t kill the PC, the monsters did. And I warned them that PC death was on the table during session 0. But this way I can avoid a TPK.
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I think as a DM it's your job to make sure that the world feels real -- key here is feels real, not "is" real. If it feels real to the players that 2 goblins went in and 5 goblins were in the next room, you've done your job. Nobody knows what was actually scripted, the encounter was tough but doable, the players had fun, and there were enough goblins in the room that it was believable that 2 new goblins had been added to an existing party of goblins based on who was in the room. I'm not really seeing what the problem is. Especially at 1st level. Especially for a new group of players and a new DM.
I am sure Colville would also have said, if you have a bigger party, there should be more than 5 total goblins in there, or else it would be too easy of a challenge. If you start the party at 3rd level, it should be orcs in there rather than goblins, and maybe more than 5.
I don't think the entire world, every encounter, has to be perfectly balanced for the level and size of the party. But... if you don't do that at all, then there is such a range of possible monsters and party abilities that you run the risk of a serious mismatch in difficulty on a regular basis.
For example, when my players started out, there were 3 possible places they could go, based on NPC information they got in session 1: A goblin mine to the north, where kidnappings were happening; a cemetery being disturbed by undead; and a tower recently taken over by orcs.
I expected them to hit the goblin mine first, because children had been taken, and they did not know what was happening to the kids, and I figured they would consider that to be the time pressure one. A cemetery full of undead can wait. But because the opening sequence involved a horde of zombies attacking the town, they decided the cemetery was more pressing, and went there first.
The original design of the goblin mine, and particularly the boss fight at the end, had assumed a party of 4 level 1s, and possibly an NPC druid helping. I had even made the druid level 2 so she could take a couple of hits and do some healing to make sure there wasn't a TPK in the goblin boss fight. Then they ended up being level 2 before they went into that dungeon. The boss fight would have been way too easy (it was a goblin boss and 2 lackeys, I think, originally). So I added some wolves to the fight to make it a little harder (just a couple, if I remember). And then it almost looked like they were going to go into that fight without the druid.. Probably didn't matter, they won fairly easily.
But my point is, I didn't just leave the fight super easy because 'that is how I had written it.' What was in the room was reasonable and realistic for that encounter, but I put enough in there to make it be challenging. (In retrospect I should have given the boss more h.p. -- he went down in 1 shot to a crit from the sorcerer's chaos bolt and literally did nothing.)
But again that is at low level. Just this past weekend, they got into a boss fight at the end of the session in an evil temple... Their first Legendary enemy (weak legendary -- could do 1 leg action per round) with a lot of h.p. and powerful enough to give them a decent fight on his own, but he had 6 (normal) skeleton minions protecting him and as a reaction, could reconstitute ones that got killed (only back to 1 h.p., but still). My design of this fight assumed the party at or near full power, but they went in after 3 other fights, a bunch of exploration, and no rest (long or short). This made the fight way tougher than I had expected, but I didn't pare it down. They walked in there knowing it was going to be a boss fight (or at least highly suspecting it) and chose not to rest (to save the kidnapped NPCs). They won anyway, but it was a near thing. And I didn't adjust it. I also didn't make the bad guy "act dumb" to help them out -- ask the players. He was giving them fits. And after they had done probably 30 or 40 pts of damage to him and I said, 'He's starting to look hurt,' they all said, "Starting to?!"
However, that was still a level 4 encounter, designed for them to go into that area at level 4. If they had ignored the NPC and skipped that area, and then come back to it at level 10, would I still have left it at level 4? No... because that would be boring and stupidly easy.
(Of course, if they had ignored the NPC, she and 5 others would have been used to summon evil stuff and be dead, and the world would have been in a lot worse shape, but we don't have to worry about that because they won.)
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
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That’s when I use the same technique of “hot fixing” to double or even triple that boss’s HP mid fight. 😉
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Another thing to remember about that video is that it is aimed towards first time dm’s running their first game (or second, depending on how much progress was made) for first time players.
I have run that dungeon for a number of parties and have varied the number of creatures inside. While going off of any video or module, it’s important to keep in mind your players and their characters and adjust based off of that as well as the type of game you are running.
Overwhelming new players their first time playing is a good way to turn someone off to d&d.
But then their mental calculator is like, look dude we got a bunch of ununsual crits, did a 500 damage and your ogre boss is still going with more hit points than a Balor.
Please.
I never finalized anything until the session already started. Sure if they leveled up its fair to adjust. I'm talking more about making changes as they are about to walk in the room or the worst "cheat" in my mind, making changes while the fight is going on.
Its more about a philosophy rather than specific examples. I enjoy getting invested in the world along side of my players and try to define general rules for that world e.g No god like interventions during a fight.
Um... no.
First of all, the situation in question was that the boss dropped to a single casting of a single spell on the first round of combat, not “a bunch of unusual crits...”
Second, how do the players know how many HP a Balor has in my world? I’ve dropped a 330HP Wyvern on a 3rd level party. And that was just their first encounter of the day, and they only got harder as the day wore on. A Balor in a campaign I run will have in excess of 600 HP, and possibly closer to 900.
I honestly wasn’t sure how they were gonna survive that Wyvern attack, but they did. And the Roper. And the 27 Skeletons, a Skeletal Minotaur, the suped-up Mummy, and the Bone Golem. And then they still had to fight the Thieves’ Guild at the end of the day too. And they did it all with 3 regular healing potions and no magic weapons. It tool some very good rolling and strategy on their end as well. Heck, I was actively trying to kill a character* that time and they still all survived.
*One of the players switched characters earlier that day and I was attempting to kill their old PC who I was running as a party NPC for narrative reasons. I was trying to kill that character off, and the party saved him. 🤷♂️
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Nah... in that situation... they had all been doing like 5 damage a hit most of the time, level 2 and all... and the Sorcerer busts out with nearly max rolls on a Chaos Bolt Crit. That was by far the highest damage roll anyone had made yet in the campaign. Against the mini-boss. Everyone cheered, as I described the goblin boss being turned to ash and his minions then had to roll for morale (and one failed). It was way more fun to do that than say "He seems a little hurt."
The REAL boss in that situation was the town Prefect, who, upon investigation of the goblin's loot and the discovery of a secret note, they learned had been hiring the goblins to kidnap farm children so as to scare the farmers off their land and buy it up cheaply for himself.
So wait... It's OK to make changes to the whole adventure the day before you play, but it's not OK to make changes to a single room the minute before the party walks in? That sounds rather arbitrary to me.
I mean if you are going to make the argument that the world is the world, the monsters are the monsters, and adjustments should not be made to account for party gains, losses, etc., then it seems to me this should apply all the time. Because the only difference between altering dungeon difficulty to account for the party's power level, and altering room difficulty within the dungeon for the same purpose, is scale.
What Colville, Sposta, and I, are all saying here, is that the point of a D&D encounter is to be challenging and fun (assuming that is the point -- sometimes it's easy but designed to wear the players down, as the first 3 encounters in my necropolis before the evil temple were designed to do -- although I still expected them to at least short rest before going in!).
But again... this is a question of scale. You are allowing god-like interventions of the design of the entire module, before the session starts, to change the level of everything in the entire dungeon to be appropriate tot he party, but not allowing a single intervention on one die roll. Why is one OK, but the other is not?
I don't generally fudge die rolls, change boss difficulty on the fly, alter monster hp during a fight, or any of that either. But if I judged, as DM, that for the drama of the scene or the enjoyment of the session, doing so was necessary, then I would do it. Not only is it my right and authority as a DM to do it -- it is my responsibility to do it, as well. The goal is for everyone to enjoy themselves. A TPK in the first room of that dungeon would not have been fun -- Colville knows it -- so he provides advice on how to make sure the encounter is fun and believable to the players.
As DM, you can maybe convince your players that your world is real, but you can't really, truly, convince yourself of that. Because you know that everything is being custom-designed by you for the players to have fun. Whether you do that customization when writing the module or on the fly during the battle, it's still not "what would have really happened" because there IS no "what would really happen" -- there is only what you put into the world, arbitrarily, based on your own decisions about each and every thing in your world, from NPC names, to shop prices, to monster hp, to dungeon ecology, to encounter difficulty room by room, to die rolls.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.