I've never been too concerned with "encounter balance" as in most editions the guidance and numbers given for it are terrible. In my experience 4E did a pretty decent job at providing something useful but that's the only one I liked. I haven't been worrying about it much with the current game but now I feel like the group is verging on having too easy of a time with a lot of the dungeon and then suddenly ending up in a life and death struggle when they hit a certain area or combination of inhabitants.
I'm running Temple of Elemental Evil but the characters are from Tales of the Valiant. So the old school encounter setups are somewhat offset by them having old school numbers in the party and then being characters in a post-5E system and having much greater individual power than an AD&D character, slightly balanced out by using late/post-5E monsters with more interesting capabilities as the opposition most of the time. I mean, in the end they will most likely win but I do want them to work for it.
Given the way my players are flattening a lot of the opposition now I am paying more attention to how the various CR's in an area add up and I intend to do some tweaking for some of them - mainly the big temples as they should be some epic, memorable, fights and they should involve some actual elementals which are surprisingly sparse in some areas. Between the various monster books, some allegedly solid encounter guidelines, a big dungeon map, and the 3D printer, I can drop all kinds of elemental evil on them. But ...
What is "balance" when it comes to a dungeon-crawling D&D game? Is there a solid way to define that? How about ...
- 0 characters drop = easy encounter
- 1 character drops = challenging encounter
- 2+ characters drop = hard encounter?
I mean words and descriptors get tossed around with this stuff without any real definition but the focus on systems like this is on math. ToV's system is this for 5th to 10th levels, which is where we will be living for most of this game:
- Half of total PC levels in the party is your "Benchmark"
(so this is 15-20 for me depending on who shows up) - Add up total monster CR in an encounter:
- Total > Benchmark = "difficult or dangerous" encounter
- Total < Benchmark= "Less challenging" battle
(So going by this a total CR of 10 would be easy, 15 would be average, and 20 would be challenging)
- Maximum single monster CR = average party level x 1.5
- Minimum monster CR = 1/2
Now to be fair they do mention adjusting these to better fit your own party and there is a handy chart with average level in the left-hand column going from 1-20 and the top row covering number of PCs from 3-7 and then the cross reference gives you the Challenging Benchmark.
As far as adjusting for my game I decided to count them as one level higher due to magic items in the party and figured I would start with a 6 character party as my target. That means my Min CR is 1 and my Max CR is 9 and my Benchmark is 18. To try this out I threw two Young Green Dragons at them on the return trip from Verbobonc as that made some kind of sense for the region. That's two CR 8 critters for a 16 total. We only had 5 characters for that session which made the Benchmark CR 15 so we were right there.
The party knew something was up as they heard traffic on the road had dwindled over the past week. They spotted something up in the air as they traveled and made for the ruined keep that marks the halfway point between Hommlet and the city. They determined that it was a dragon about the time they reached the keep and that's when the second dragon stepped out from behind a tower.
The fight lasted 5 rounds which is probably fine. The fighter charged one, caught the breath weapon, then caught it again when the other one landed nearby and that was it for him - down. The wizard hit them with a Slow spell and that really reduced the melee output as it means even if they have multiattack - they do - they can only make one attack per round so instead of a claw/claw/bite they get a claw or a bite. I think the first one dropped round 3 or early round 4 and the second one was attempting to flee on round 5 when it got fireballed by the wizard (wand) and blew its save.
Going by their method and my own method mentioned up there I'd say this was in the "challenging" ballpark. One character down, most of the party damaged in some way, they had to use at least one potent spell followed by a powerful wand ... sounds like "challenging" is a good description.
The party mix in this case was fighter, cleric, ranger, wizard, mechanist. Typically we would have a bard and/or a paladin in there too but not this time. I have seen discussion online that having a second healer in the party really amps up the difficulty in challenging them and I do concur with that - between a full cleric, a paladin who can heal here and there, and a bard that can give out the option to use healing surges during combat they do tend to be very resilient. I will watch the specific party mix to see if I notice any patterns developing.
I will say I do find this kind of thing fairly tedious. I lean much more towards the "natural world" kind of approach where asking around, looking for rumors, and doing research will tell you what kinds of things live in an area and then knowing that some of those are extremely dangerous will guide your decisions. The world is the world and your characters are living in it - it doesn't level up or down with them.
If I were to take this way too seriously and actively recalculate each possible encounter every session for the number of players I had it would rapidly drain significant fun from the run. So I won't ever be doing that. These things may work alright as guidelines but don't take them too seriously. All of the math presumes that each creature has been given a CR that accurately reflects the danger they pose to a party. Given the variation one could have in a typical group I think that's optimistic at best and misleading much of the time. If everyone in the party has fire resistance then that red dragon is somewhat less threatening than if no one does. There are ranges give for things like damage output and hit points at each CR but having lived with these kinds of frameworks for 25-ish years now I remain skeptical. That said I will give it a chance, keep trying it out, and see what I find.
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| This did not go well for our greatsword guy |
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