So I'm curious to what the majority does! I've noticed a trend on DnD communities where there is a split between combat encounter balance philosophies.
1. Adjust Combat for players: With this approach the DM believes that it is their job to ensure that each combat encounter is balanced to the particular party's skills and abilities. For example: if a party has a lot of low AC casters, the DM will throw in enemies with counterspell and antimage tactics to provide a challenge. OR if a party finds a particular combo of abilities/spells that are really effective to the point where combat is going really/too quickly, the DM will throw in counters to that strategy. another take on this strategy is the fact that the world "scales" with the party meaning that each combat encounter is doable by at least using appropriate strategy and with some creativity.
2. Let players adjust to combat: This strategy is more about making the world "make sense" rather than playing it "like a game" in this strategy, if the players find a combo that is destroying combat encounters, then thats how it goes. Combat encounters aren't designed by considering "what would challenge characters" but rather "what creatures are here" if this means the level 15 players run into a pack of regular wolves/bandits, or the level 2 party runs into an adult red dragon, so be it. That's what was there and its up to them to "figure it out" whether that's hiding and fleeing, or finding some other creative way of surviving (the stuff players can come up with can be astounding lol)
Now for my opinion (as if someone wanted it lol)
I personally tend to lean towards 2 when I DM. This is probably because I played in a campaign where 1 was SOOOOOOO exaggerated that we players stopped seeing the point of our spells/builds/decisions at all. The DM was so worried about "was it challenging" that he tried countering EVERYTHING we did. For example, our sorcerer used to be a master of debilitating enemies. we were a level 11 party that had been together since level 1 and thus, had a bunch of good teamwork strategies. The sorcerer's go to move was to cast hold-monster with twin spell and have the TWO rogues get those autocrit-sneak attacks. It was a solid strategy! The DM earlier had given us a "evil alligned" robe of the archmagi that the cleric used divine intervention (and succeeded) to remove the "evil alligned" and with another homebrew magic item THAT THE DM GAVE US, our sorcerer had a 22 spell DC so Hold Monster worked well. The DM's response to this was to from then on, exclusively choose monsters with paralysis immunity. he homebrew-scaled up monsters so that all the debuff and control spells that the sorcerer used to use were pointless to the point where the sorcerer pretty much exclusively used fireball from then on. MY character was a rogue who was a thief (not the subclass, but backstory) and thus invested a lot into being able to pick locks (expertise, high dex, and gloves of thievery) so MIRACULOUSLY all doors in the kingdom started having DC 25+ locks in order to "balance to the players"
So I will FULLY admit, I'm pretty heavily biased towards #2 but I also admit that it was probably due to my own personal experience. Which method do you guys use? and what are some positive experiences do you have with #1?
You need a 3rd option, create realistic encounters that fit the environment regardless of party make up.
I tend to make my encounters so they make sense to the story and the environment rather then thinking about party makeup, I might tweak the CR level based on what those monsters end up being but the characters are in the world and dealing with what they come across. The world is not tailoring encounters to them.
I am going with yes. I use both options one and two.
Sometimes my level 15 characters might run into a bad of five goblins, or maybe a giant. Same for my group of level 4 characters I am running. I don't think it would scale up or down based on character level, but their should be a reason. Why is the giant by himself walking in the woods? If I can't come up with a good reason I wouldn't so it.
As for option one I guess that happens when it's story driven. The players have made a archmage mad, he watches and studies them and sees that the sorcerer love to twin his hold person spells, and rogues slip out of hiding to stab the held creatures. Ok cool so he makes a plan to counter this strategy. It's not me and the dm, it's me as a archmage.
In fairness I will try and do my best to not meta game, and only try and think as the planner, not the all knowing dm. I also will make situations easier on players. I am a believer in giving the players some easy combat that make the players feel like they are heroic. Like a tv show, batman beats up all the thugs, but then fights the main guy and it's a much different fight.
You need a 3rd option, create realistic encounters that fit the environment regardless of party make up.
I tend to make my encounters so they make sense to the story and the environment rather then thinking about party makeup, I might tweak the CR level based on what those monsters end up being but the characters are in the world and dealing with what they come across. The world is not tailoring encounters to them.
In other words option 2, which you described in pretty much the same way as they put in the original post.
I build encounters without looking at the PCs. Sometimes that results in a fight taking 5 minutes for the PCs to win and sometimes that results in at least one PC being at single digit hit points at the end of the fight.
I don’t stress over it. The PCs are heroes, they should just bulldoze through some fights without breaking out in a sweat. And they should also take on challenges that are so difficult that the king’s guard runs the other way and refuses to face.
You need a 3rd option, create realistic encounters that fit the environment regardless of party make up.
I tend to make my encounters so they make sense to the story and the environment rather then thinking about party makeup, I might tweak the CR level based on what those monsters end up being but the characters are in the world and dealing with what they come across. The world is not tailoring encounters to them.
This is precisely what option 2 is about - the world exists as it is, the party have to adjust.
I create the world. I'm season zero I warn my players that there are things in this world that are far more powerful then they are. I also note that I will not stop them from going places.
That said I still, during a game, have plenty of npcs that will also warn the players or give them more info as so they can make that choice.
Option 1 is a problem when DMs are adversarial to their players. It's a problem when you balance encounters to "beat" players or make things challenging where players are good at, and at a certain point it really hurts immersion and storytelling if you are just trying to win mechanics instead of making encounters that require broader skillsets or allow other skills and features to shine as well.
Option 2 works better for the most part, but it becomes just as big a problem if the DM uses it to "gotcha" players. If your excuse for making a world where everything punishes your characters going off the rail is "Well, there's a dragon that you couldn't kill there, should have gone the one way I wanted you to go" then you have the same problem for a different reason.
I think it's more important to collaborate with your players to make a world that lives and challenges them, but also lets them use their skills and focuses in ways that let them *matter* in the world, just like your creatures and storytelling do, so that everyone on both sides of the screen can enjoy what happens.
I trend towards option #2 in your post with the caveat that I will, on occasion, adjust the challenge of the encounter to suit the tactics of the monsters and the amount of time that the party allows the monsters to operate unhindered once they are discovered as a threat to the world.
As a side note, option #2 in your post is not a choice in your poll. "Let(ting) players adjust to combat" is not synonymous with "make players adjust to the world". On the surface, this might seem like pedantry. The real difference between the two is allowing your players to have agency and to allow their choices to matter while the other is just adversarial and railroad-y.
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You do want to give them a challenge. If the players are wrecking every encounter they come to, then yeah, I'm going to make encounters harder. Easy fight after easy fight *is not fun*, and it is my job as a DM to help the players have fun.
I do, to a small degree, tailor things to the party, but usually in the opposite sense: I make a hard fight that I secretly know has a particular vulnerability to a player's particular set of skills. Simple example, the Wizard hasn't been getting much done recently. So I put in a fight of hordes of Kobolds with a scattering of some tankier things - the fighters suddenly discover that masses of sling shots with combat advantage are a real threat, damn, now what? And the Wizard gets to step up and Burning-Hands their way to glory.
I'd be very reluctant to do it the other way in an overt manner. You don't want people to think their abilities are useless. Instead... are you Holding two monsters and slaughtering them? Then I have more monsters. So you can be super cool and burn two down, but there's still a fun fight at the other end of it. Thank god we had the Hold-murder plan or we would have been overrun. High five everyone!
So I am tailoring the fight to "counter" an ability, but only in that I am adjusting the difficulty to allow for the players. I am allowing the cool move to be *necessary* to win, and reward the players for their clever move. The alternative is an encounter that is 1. boring because easy, and 2. unsatisfying because their cool move wasn't even really needed.
Similar thing if the party either all min-max optimise and wargame every fight, vs a party that builds role-play-style and some have low CON and don't dump CHR and STR and sometimes spend an action panicking. One party gets "harder" fights than the other, because at the end of the day they both end up *with the same difficulty*.
(Though I have to point out, you said: "The sorcerer's go to move was to cast hold-monster with twin spell and have the TWO rogues get those autocrit-sneak attacks. It was a solid strategy!" That is not at all how the Assassin's ability works. If the enemies are aware of their opponents, there is no longer surprise, and the Assassins don't get to auto-crit. If they did have surprise, they already had combat advantage).
As DM, it’s my job to present challenges to the party, and maintain verisimilitude. It’s the players’ job to figure out how they’re gonna overcome those challenges. (They stay outta my wheelhouse, and I don’t enter theirs.) I regularly design encounters that I have no real clue how they’re gonna deal with them. I figure, if they cannot succeed then they should realize it and come to the conclusion for themselves that the wiser course of action would be to retreat.
I go for a combination of realism and fun. If the party go wondering somewhere dangerous, the risks become higher that they will not survive - but I also avoid saying "you found an ancient dragon, it killed you" because, regardless of how realistic it is, it's not fun. There is an ancient dragon in the mountains, but an adventuring party of level 3's would not happen upon its lair - they would only find it if they said "we want to go find a dragon", which is a dumb idea for level 3's and so offers the reward of finding a dragon. If they are just wandering, they will find things which really test them, and have a real chance of killing them, but nothing which is basically impossible to deal with.
So yes, these woods may have all sorts of things wandering around, but I will also make more dangerous things just-so-happen to not come up. Or, in another way, make them come up only once the players are powerful enough to appreciate them instead of just running or dying. A single giant may be wandering the woods, but a hunting party of 4 giants on the backs of 4 giant horses chasing a purple worm isn't going to pop up at level 3, because it wouldn't be fun. Anyone who ran off into the wrong places in world of warcraft will attest that finding stuff that kills you instantly is boring, not fun!
Mostly I go for option 2, where the world is realistic and there is a real chance of death, but I also like to keep a real chance, however slim, of success.
My strategy is more to make encounters that are level-appropriate in their challenge, but do not consider the capabilities of the player characters.
I won't make a level 2 party fight an adult dragon. If they somehow get to meet one, it will very obviously not be a combat encounter. I also won't send CR 1/2 goblins to fight my level 10 party, because that will just be boring and a waste of time. If they do meet a gang of CR 1/2 goblins, they will try to negotiate, flee, or surrender.
However, I won't consider the party's strengths and weaknesses when making encounters. All I do is try to mix up the enemy's strengths and weaknesses such that in the large scope there will sometimes be harder and sometimes be easier encounters simply by chance, because sometimes the party's strategies will be very effective and sometimes not so much. I don't need to design for that, I just need to make sure I mix up the enemy types frequently and it will happen automatically.
In terms of combat and balancing? Alter the world*. Give them beatable fights, not trivial or unbeatable fights.
But for roleplay? The characters should make sense for the world. Artificers can't use a 22 caliber on Toril, Loxodon don't typically appear on Eberron, you can't be a dworf (Half-dwarf, half-orc) without a DM's permission, etc.
*Unless there is a major disparity between the power levels of individual players. Then you should intervene and talk to the players out of character.
This is one of those 'Yes, Both' and 'Sometimes Neither' question sets.
I'll see what the players are capable of, first, like do these guys work well together? Are they bought in? What do THEY want from the game?
When I was 15 I wanted DnD to be as hard as humanly possible for some strange reason. When I was 20 I wanted it to be intellectually challenging, at 30, I wanted recognition for my clever quips and engaging character builds, now that I'm older than that, I want it to be fun. As DM I want to create a game that my players enjoy, and if I have to kill them to do it, I'll totally do that. I want them to walk away from the table thinking "I can't wait to game again!" and so far that's a success. Maybe next week it'll change.
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So I'm curious to what the majority does! I've noticed a trend on DnD communities where there is a split between combat encounter balance philosophies.
1. Adjust Combat for players: With this approach the DM believes that it is their job to ensure that each combat encounter is balanced to the particular party's skills and abilities. For example: if a party has a lot of low AC casters, the DM will throw in enemies with counterspell and antimage tactics to provide a challenge. OR if a party finds a particular combo of abilities/spells that are really effective to the point where combat is going really/too quickly, the DM will throw in counters to that strategy.
another take on this strategy is the fact that the world "scales" with the party meaning that each combat encounter is doable by at least using appropriate strategy and with some creativity.
2. Let players adjust to combat: This strategy is more about making the world "make sense" rather than playing it "like a game" in this strategy, if the players find a combo that is destroying combat encounters, then thats how it goes. Combat encounters aren't designed by considering "what would challenge characters" but rather "what creatures are here" if this means the level 15 players run into a pack of regular wolves/bandits, or the level 2 party runs into an adult red dragon, so be it. That's what was there and its up to them to "figure it out" whether that's hiding and fleeing, or finding some other creative way of surviving (the stuff players can come up with can be astounding lol)
Now for my opinion (as if someone wanted it lol)
I personally tend to lean towards 2 when I DM. This is probably because I played in a campaign where 1 was SOOOOOOO exaggerated that we players stopped seeing the point of our spells/builds/decisions at all. The DM was so worried about "was it challenging" that he tried countering EVERYTHING we did. For example, our sorcerer used to be a master of debilitating enemies. we were a level 11 party that had been together since level 1 and thus, had a bunch of good teamwork strategies. The sorcerer's go to move was to cast hold-monster with twin spell and have the TWO rogues get those autocrit-sneak attacks. It was a solid strategy! The DM earlier had given us a "evil alligned" robe of the archmagi that the cleric used divine intervention (and succeeded) to remove the "evil alligned" and with another homebrew magic item THAT THE DM GAVE US, our sorcerer had a 22 spell DC so Hold Monster worked well. The DM's response to this was to from then on, exclusively choose monsters with paralysis immunity. he homebrew-scaled up monsters so that all the debuff and control spells that the sorcerer used to use were pointless to the point where the sorcerer pretty much exclusively used fireball from then on.
MY character was a rogue who was a thief (not the subclass, but backstory) and thus invested a lot into being able to pick locks (expertise, high dex, and gloves of thievery) so MIRACULOUSLY all doors in the kingdom started having DC 25+ locks in order to "balance to the players"
So I will FULLY admit, I'm pretty heavily biased towards #2 but I also admit that it was probably due to my own personal experience. Which method do you guys use? and what are some positive experiences do you have with #1?
You need a 3rd option, create realistic encounters that fit the environment regardless of party make up.
I tend to make my encounters so they make sense to the story and the environment rather then thinking about party makeup, I might tweak the CR level based on what those monsters end up being but the characters are in the world and dealing with what they come across. The world is not tailoring encounters to them.
I am going with yes. I use both options one and two.
Sometimes my level 15 characters might run into a bad of five goblins, or maybe a giant. Same for my group of level 4 characters I am running. I don't think it would scale up or down based on character level, but their should be a reason. Why is the giant by himself walking in the woods? If I can't come up with a good reason I wouldn't so it.
As for option one I guess that happens when it's story driven. The players have made a archmage mad, he watches and studies them and sees that the sorcerer love to twin his hold person spells, and rogues slip out of hiding to stab the held creatures. Ok cool so he makes a plan to counter this strategy. It's not me and the dm, it's me as a archmage.
In fairness I will try and do my best to not meta game, and only try and think as the planner, not the all knowing dm. I also will make situations easier on players. I am a believer in giving the players some easy combat that make the players feel like they are heroic. Like a tv show, batman beats up all the thugs, but then fights the main guy and it's a much different fight.
In other words option 2, which you described in pretty much the same way as they put in the original post.
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I build encounters without looking at the PCs. Sometimes that results in a fight taking 5 minutes for the PCs to win and sometimes that results in at least one PC being at single digit hit points at the end of the fight.
I don’t stress over it. The PCs are heroes, they should just bulldoze through some fights without breaking out in a sweat. And they should also take on challenges that are so difficult that the king’s guard runs the other way and refuses to face.
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I don't have a preference, so I'll occasionally switch up my vote to achieve balance.
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This is precisely what option 2 is about - the world exists as it is, the party have to adjust.
I create the world. I'm season zero I warn my players that there are things in this world that are far more powerful then they are. I also note that I will not stop them from going places.
That said I still, during a game, have plenty of npcs that will also warn the players or give them more info as so they can make that choice.
Option 1 is a problem when DMs are adversarial to their players. It's a problem when you balance encounters to "beat" players or make things challenging where players are good at, and at a certain point it really hurts immersion and storytelling if you are just trying to win mechanics instead of making encounters that require broader skillsets or allow other skills and features to shine as well.
Option 2 works better for the most part, but it becomes just as big a problem if the DM uses it to "gotcha" players. If your excuse for making a world where everything punishes your characters going off the rail is "Well, there's a dragon that you couldn't kill there, should have gone the one way I wanted you to go" then you have the same problem for a different reason.
I think it's more important to collaborate with your players to make a world that lives and challenges them, but also lets them use their skills and focuses in ways that let them *matter* in the world, just like your creatures and storytelling do, so that everyone on both sides of the screen can enjoy what happens.
I trend towards option #2 in your post with the caveat that I will, on occasion, adjust the challenge of the encounter to suit the tactics of the monsters and the amount of time that the party allows the monsters to operate unhindered once they are discovered as a threat to the world.
As a side note, option #2 in your post is not a choice in your poll. "Let(ting) players adjust to combat" is not synonymous with "make players adjust to the world". On the surface, this might seem like pedantry. The real difference between the two is allowing your players to have agency and to allow their choices to matter while the other is just adversarial and railroad-y.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
Neither.
You do want to give them a challenge. If the players are wrecking every encounter they come to, then yeah, I'm going to make encounters harder. Easy fight after easy fight *is not fun*, and it is my job as a DM to help the players have fun.
I do, to a small degree, tailor things to the party, but usually in the opposite sense: I make a hard fight that I secretly know has a particular vulnerability to a player's particular set of skills. Simple example, the Wizard hasn't been getting much done recently. So I put in a fight of hordes of Kobolds with a scattering of some tankier things - the fighters suddenly discover that masses of sling shots with combat advantage are a real threat, damn, now what? And the Wizard gets to step up and Burning-Hands their way to glory.
I'd be very reluctant to do it the other way in an overt manner. You don't want people to think their abilities are useless. Instead... are you Holding two monsters and slaughtering them? Then I have more monsters. So you can be super cool and burn two down, but there's still a fun fight at the other end of it. Thank god we had the Hold-murder plan or we would have been overrun. High five everyone!
So I am tailoring the fight to "counter" an ability, but only in that I am adjusting the difficulty to allow for the players. I am allowing the cool move to be *necessary* to win, and reward the players for their clever move. The alternative is an encounter that is 1. boring because easy, and 2. unsatisfying because their cool move wasn't even really needed.
Similar thing if the party either all min-max optimise and wargame every fight, vs a party that builds role-play-style and some have low CON and don't dump CHR and STR and sometimes spend an action panicking. One party gets "harder" fights than the other, because at the end of the day they both end up *with the same difficulty*.
(Though I have to point out, you said: "The sorcerer's go to move was to cast hold-monster with twin spell and have the TWO rogues get those autocrit-sneak attacks. It was a solid strategy!" That is not at all how the Assassin's ability works. If the enemies are aware of their opponents, there is no longer surprise, and the Assassins don't get to auto-crit. If they did have surprise, they already had combat advantage).
As DM, it’s my job to present challenges to the party, and maintain verisimilitude. It’s the players’ job to figure out how they’re gonna overcome those challenges. (They stay outta my wheelhouse, and I don’t enter theirs.) I regularly design encounters that I have no real clue how they’re gonna deal with them. I figure, if they cannot succeed then they should realize it and come to the conclusion for themselves that the wiser course of action would be to retreat.
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I go for a combination of realism and fun. If the party go wondering somewhere dangerous, the risks become higher that they will not survive - but I also avoid saying "you found an ancient dragon, it killed you" because, regardless of how realistic it is, it's not fun. There is an ancient dragon in the mountains, but an adventuring party of level 3's would not happen upon its lair - they would only find it if they said "we want to go find a dragon", which is a dumb idea for level 3's and so offers the reward of finding a dragon. If they are just wandering, they will find things which really test them, and have a real chance of killing them, but nothing which is basically impossible to deal with.
So yes, these woods may have all sorts of things wandering around, but I will also make more dangerous things just-so-happen to not come up. Or, in another way, make them come up only once the players are powerful enough to appreciate them instead of just running or dying. A single giant may be wandering the woods, but a hunting party of 4 giants on the backs of 4 giant horses chasing a purple worm isn't going to pop up at level 3, because it wouldn't be fun. Anyone who ran off into the wrong places in world of warcraft will attest that finding stuff that kills you instantly is boring, not fun!
Mostly I go for option 2, where the world is realistic and there is a real chance of death, but I also like to keep a real chance, however slim, of success.
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My strategy is more to make encounters that are level-appropriate in their challenge, but do not consider the capabilities of the player characters.
I won't make a level 2 party fight an adult dragon. If they somehow get to meet one, it will very obviously not be a combat encounter. I also won't send CR 1/2 goblins to fight my level 10 party, because that will just be boring and a waste of time. If they do meet a gang of CR 1/2 goblins, they will try to negotiate, flee, or surrender.
However, I won't consider the party's strengths and weaknesses when making encounters. All I do is try to mix up the enemy's strengths and weaknesses such that in the large scope there will sometimes be harder and sometimes be easier encounters simply by chance, because sometimes the party's strategies will be very effective and sometimes not so much. I don't need to design for that, I just need to make sure I mix up the enemy types frequently and it will happen automatically.
In terms of combat and balancing? Alter the world*. Give them beatable fights, not trivial or unbeatable fights.
But for roleplay? The characters should make sense for the world. Artificers can't use a 22 caliber on Toril, Loxodon don't typically appear on Eberron, you can't be a dworf (Half-dwarf, half-orc) without a DM's permission, etc.
*Unless there is a major disparity between the power levels of individual players. Then you should intervene and talk to the players out of character.
This is one of those 'Yes, Both' and 'Sometimes Neither' question sets.
I'll see what the players are capable of, first, like do these guys work well together? Are they bought in? What do THEY want from the game?
When I was 15 I wanted DnD to be as hard as humanly possible for some strange reason. When I was 20 I wanted it to be intellectually challenging, at 30, I wanted recognition for my clever quips and engaging character builds, now that I'm older than that, I want it to be fun. As DM I want to create a game that my players enjoy, and if I have to kill them to do it, I'll totally do that. I want them to walk away from the table thinking "I can't wait to game again!" and so far that's a success. Maybe next week it'll change.