Monsters, Challenge Ratings, and Encounter Balance in RPGs

 

It's a quirk of the modern RPG scene that there is so much concern over "Balance". It really falls into two areas - 1) Character Balance and 2) Encounter Balance. It's almost an obsession in some corners of the internet and while bouncing back and forth between various Supers RPG and running a D&D style campaign I thought it was worth discussing here. We did Characters yesterday so let's talk about Encounters.

Thinking back to the beginning early D&D didn't really care about encounter balance - the most we saw there was making sure a given dungeon level had monsters that matched that level which meant that it should be appropriate for characters of that level. Other early RPGs really didn't address much beyond this either. Runequest, Gamma World, Traveller, and Star Trek were all pretty light here. The idea mostly was "well, here is the setting, here are some potential opposing forces, drop your characters in and see what happens." There was also an assumption that your players knew to run when things got too hot and that might even require some extra effort like throwing out rations to distract pursuing monsters or having the chief engineer make some warp drive engineering roles to push the ship above it's normal maximum.

Later we get to D&D 3E and we first start to see encounter balance as a concept introducing challenge rating and encounter level as part of the game. I don't think this is a bad idea but I think it's doomed to  disappointment much of the time as one tries to codify a certain mix of hostile capabilities versus a generic player character power level. 

This is from the 3.5 DMG. Find the encounter level you want on the lefthand side, then decide how many creatures you want in the encounter moving to the right and it will show the CR you need to aim for to create a balanced encounter. Theoretically anyway.  

This is the Troll statblock from the 3.5 MM. Now trolls aren't particularly complex most of the time - though in this edition you could give them class levels and that could get weird fast. The only complication here is their regeneration - it's ignored by Fire and Acid. This version was a little more complicated but later editions have it so that taking any fire damage in a round shuts off the Trolls regeneration for that round - period. So if your party has a bunch of fire or acid type attacks then the troll's regen effectively does not exist. Challenge rating is affected by special defenses so the reason this guy is a "5" is at least partly because of that. Maybe if you ignore his regen he should only be a "4", maybe even a "3" which immediately wrecks the math, especially if you have a group of them. Considering in later editions wizards get fire bolt as a standard attack power, clerics get sacred flame, and flaming oil isn't hard to come by you can imagine this is not a particularly difficult thing to overcome. It's come up a lot in my current campaign and so I discount the rating for trolls a bit as they are effectively just like an ogre for the most part. Even one character landing a fire attack that round means all of the other characters normal attacks "stick" - just like any other monster. This is the kind of thing you have to do as a DM to keep these numbers relevant. 

I mean, he shouldn't be happy about this ...

This also ignores things like terrain, light conditions, weather, etc. There's a big difference between encountering something in a set of 10' wide corridors vs. out in the open country.

So taking these kinds of systems on faith is a mistake - if you really care about this stuff. I'd say 4E D&D did the best job with its math but even then I had to eyeball a fair amount of things. I did love the process of determining what kind of area this was, what kinds of encounters would be present, using the numbers to build an encounter and then tuning it up for my party - it was a great way to organize setting up a ruined city waiting to be plundered. 

Ultimate balance ...

But once you go outside of the D&D-O-Sphere there just isn't much like this approach. For point based systems (mostly supers for me) you could use the points but mostly you just use the power caps (active point limits/power levels) as a guideline. There's no larger framework though for calculating numbers for multiple opponents vs. party size. A few examples:

•    Looking at some superhero games there just isn't much math. 
• Icons is great talking about creating adventures and campaigns but doesn't burn any pages discussing encounter math.
• The Sentinel Comics RPG covers a lot of this as well and does talk about timing and challenges - the Green-Yellow-Red thing is important here - but it doesn't get into "enemy math" either.
• The M&M main book doesn't talk about numbers at all - it discusses encounters as part of an adventure or how they fit into a villainous plot. The Gamemaster Guide though, actually has a few paragraphs on balancing encounters and actually does mention power levels - every 2 PL increase means they are roughly twice as powerful so a PL12 villain is a good fight for two PL10 heroes. That's as far as the math goes.
• The Marvel Multiversal game is one of the newer entries and while it does have a page and a half on balancing encounters the only number advice in the entire section is to put your players up against opponents of the same tier - of which there are six. 
• Beyond strict superhero games entries like Savage Worlds have no real encounter guidelines. The only notes are that some creatures are wild cards but the game doesn't stick ratings on it's monsters beyond that.
• Star Wars!
• FFG Star Wars mentions that when using multiple opponents they should be a die or 2 lower on their abilities. That's about it.
• d20 Star Wars, Saga Edition specifically here assigns a challenge level number to every monster/npc entry in the game and this is used to determine both encounter balance and XP awards. Not terribly surprising with it being heavily 3E/4E based.
• d6 Star Wars - 2E Revised and Expanded in this case - has no time for encounter balance. The designing adventures section talks about pacing, different types of encounters, and "making it Star Wars" but does not put any numbers on opponents or award XP based on that kind of things. 
• The Trinity Continuum system has no encounter guidelines either. There are levels of threat as in minor-major-colossal, etc. and there are caps on their dice pools for each given level but there is no corresponding link to what level of character experience is an even match for that. There is a fair amount of material about adventure or story design but it's largely math-free.

I hope those are mostly minions ...

The one thing that many of these systems do is provide a two to three-tiered framework for opposition with normal opponents, minions or mooks, and then maybe some kind of master level opponent that is stronger than normal and possibly designed to take on multiple PC's. Mooks, almost universally, are designed as massed opponents that drop out of a fight with a single hit.  That can give a different flavor to a combat encounter and saves the GM a lot of work. Bosses tend to get extra actions or some kind of fate points to help them mitigate bad rolls or to guarantee success. Saving the complexity for the medium to boss level encounters helps a lot in running a game while letting the players feel like they are accomplishing something. 

Not a minion!

So this emphasis on encounter balance and the numbers associated with tracking and measuring that is pretty much a D&D thing. Other games don't worry about it much if at all. The only game that definitely has one on this list is the version of Star Wars published by the D&D people. Why don't more RPG's use this kind of approach? I will close with a paragraph from the M&M 3E Deluxe Gamemaster's Guide that I think sums up my feelings on it really well:

Character Balance in RPGs

 

It's a quirk of the modern RPG scene that there is so much concern over "Balance". It really falls into two areas - 1) Character Balance and 2) Encounter Balance. It's almost an obsession in some corners of the internet and while bouncing back and forth between various Supers RPG and running a D&D style campaign I thought it was worth discussing here so let's do Characters today and Encounters tomorrow.

Character Balance shows up in a couple of places and in a couple of ways.

First up I see a ton of discussion around this with D&D 5E-style games. Playtest classes for upcoming expansions, new classes for new games like Tales of the Valiant ... as soon as something comes out there will be immediate numerical breakdowns of damage per round and similar CharOp metrics at different levels and given certain feat or weapon choices and honestly these days it's just tiresome most of the time. It's not as important as you might think.

 This kind of thing mainly got going during D&D 3E and became it's own mini-industry for some people while completely ignoring the RP part of the RPG. This became especially evident in mid to late 3E when "experts" were recommending ridiculous combinations of classes and prestige classes as the "optimal" choice that were never going to happen in any real game with an actual DM trying run even a semi-coherent campaign. They were only even slightly likely to be achievable via one of the Adventurer's League type games where there was no central DM and no need to play out how your human fighter/cleric/ranger managed to join and train with the elves' arcane archers. You still see a degree of this even now with some of the multiclassing recommendations that get posted as the optimal build for today's games. Again, what DM is going to just let that happen in an ongoing campaign?

It also tends to ignore the non-combat abilities of a character and class and that's a huge miss in my opinion - it's not just about combat! We do other things too! At least 5E made some effort to categorize three areas of the game with combat, exploration, and socialization within the rules. Whether they succeeded is something people like to debate but they at least put it in the book and hopefully 5.5 is doing an even better job. If you are playing in an ongoing campaign, with a steady group of other players, in a setting that is supposed to be a "real" fantasy world with some internal logic, then DPR and other number-crunched metrics are one of the least important things to worry about. Because once in the game who cares which character does more damage by a few points here or there? Why does that matter? You're not competing with the rest of the internet and you aren't really competing with your own party members - you're supposed to be on the same side most of the time when a fight breaks out. Are you happy with what your character can do in a fight? Are you happy with what they can do outside of a fight? If so then you probably made a good choice - regardless of what the various forums, Discord channels, and social media groups say. 

Point-based games are kind of built around this concept - the points are mainly for the PCs. The DM doesn't have to use them at all. If all  the PCs are using the same points totals then they are all equal on some level within the game system. That said this type of game, even more than D&D style games, need DM supervision to reign in extreme character choices. Things like active point limits in Hero and power level limits in M&M help, but there are still ways to break things - with the great freedom that point-based games give you comes the need to work within the framework of the specific campaign. Not everything needs to be optimized. Not everything needs to be a variable power pool or a multipower or put in an array. With this type of game if one character does more damage than another that should be the result of deliberate choices on the part of those players and there is nothing wrong with that. 

If this stuff matters in your group it can be discussed in the good old session zero - "I really want to play a tank this time" or "I want to play a sneaky DPS guy" - I think most people get what this means now. My group still discusses classes and races (if applicable) when we start a new game and possible roles within the group if it's a less-structured game like Savage Worlds but it's done in a very open way and we don't really have anyone that thinks there can be only one of a type or class within the party or that wants to compare DPR numbers. They will find combos and they will absolutely break classes but it's not a competitive thing because they don't care who is the "best" most of the time. That said the cleric and the paladin in my current game trying to top each other's armor class has been pretty entertaining. 

Then of course there are games that absolutely do not care about balance between different classes or character types. Old school D&D doesn't care much at all, certainly not math-wise. Traveller doesn't care - one character might have 4 levels of "Bureaucracy" and "Pistol-0" if they're lucky while another may have Combat Rifleman - 5 and Cutlass - 3. Both are viable because combat isn't the only thing in the game - personal combat is only one of several options for combat - and it's a big universe with a lot of things to do. Getting your guns onto that  planet with law level 9 is going to take some Bureaucracy skill - probably some Bribery skill as well.

Really any game where random rolls are a major feature of character creation has an inherent lack of concern for character balance. If I end up with an 18 strength and you end up with an 8 we are headed in different directions with D&D combat. D&D, Traveller, Villains & Vigilantes, Cyberpunk, Gamma World, Runequest - all of these have random character generation, many beyond just determining ability scores, and yet we played them all, sometimes for years, and no one argued about this.

The game most openly, brazenly even,  unconcerned with balanced characters in my opinion is original recipe Rifts. Random stat generation then your race/class choice dictates everything else and on no level are they balanced. In a game where you could play a Glitter Boy, a more general robot or power armor pilot, a juicer, a wizard, or a dragon hatchling I have seen people choose to play the Rogue Scientist - sort of a post-apocalyptic Indiana Jones who's signature feature is that they get a lot of skills. No special combat abilities, no extra luck, no magic, no power armor, and the same standard equipment options everyone else gets. 

People make choices in these games, even when given obviously more powerful options, to play the things they want to play, the things that call out to them. My take on the "truth" of character balance is that as much as it's a feature of online discussion and debate it really doesn't matter all that much in actual play in an ongoing campaign. Sure, people will optimize or power game some things sometimes but they tend to do it with character types they are already interested in beyond whatever the numbers say. The prospect of living with the same character for months or years brings perspective that goes beyond the numbers.

The First Five RPGs I Played

I was thinking this could be a fun exercise for anyone who has made a hobby of RPG's, recent or not. For me it's not recent but it's good to revisit the classics occasionally, right? All the talk of new editions of things has me looking back a bit so here we go:

The book cover, not the box, because we used the book a whole lot more than the box

1. I started with Holmes Basic D&D, and over the next year or three moved into AD&D and Moldvay Basic and then Expert. I'm lumping them all into one item because that's how we played it. This is where it all started with hand-drawn character sheets on notebook paper and maps on graph paper with boardgame pawns or coins on pieces of paper to show locations for some fights. So many things we consider "essential" now from miniatures and Chessex mats to laptops, tablets, and the internet were either not a factor back then or didn't exist! Sometimes it's good to remember you don't actually need most of this stuff - just a game and some friends ... and probably some dice.
   
   
   

   

   Such a distinctive look with these

   
   
2. The next RPG I became aware of, bought, and ran was Traveller, the old 3-books-in-a-box edition. I had a friend at school that talked about it constantly an so I started looking at it in the local mall hobby shop and and ended up getting it. It's hard to express how much this expanded my horizons with a very different method of character generation, a skill system, no levels, ship construction, solar system generation ... it was incredibly eye-opening coming to it with D&D being my only other experience.
   
   
   

   

   Maybe the first big Elmore cover?

   
   
3. Following closely on my Traveller expansion was Star Frontiers which was a pretty big deal at the time but has mostly vanished into the mists of history these days. Sure, I still have my stuff and there are fans out there even now, but I don't think a lot of players coming in from the 90's on even know it existed. It had a very different approach from Traveller with a sort-of class system but still using skills but they were percentiles not a straight number like Traveller ... it was sci-fi but a different flavor of sci-fi. 
• The coolest thing about it was probably the poster maps and counters that came in the box that were used for a lot of other games for years in lieu of miniatures - including Traveller.
• The worst thing about it was the complete lack of spaceship rules. That was a terrible decision. I'm sure they thought it made sense at the time but I think it really hurt the game in the long run.
  
  

  

  I still love this cover.

  
  
4. The fourth RPG for me was Champions - I loved Champions. So eye-opening in so many ways. My first experience with point-build systems. My first superhero game. My first time to realize that we could do anything with these rules. I suspect a lot of us independently discovered the concept of running a fantasy game using Champions, running a  science fiction game using it, and as Champions II and Champions III came out it only made that more possible with rules for creating vehicles and then creating bases. It was the anything system! And it still is ...
   
   
   

   

   Loved that 1st edition ruined city cover art but this is where I started

   
   
5. The fifth RPG I dove into was Gamma World. My first post-apocalyptic setting with a system that was very much like D&D but with random powers and weird races mixed in. Growing up as cold war kids this kind of game really spoke to some of us, as did the realization that here was a game where you could have superpowers and modern to futuristic weapons with no alignment and no rules or responsibilities to limit how your character could act. Would you play a hero, even without rules? Would you be a warlord or a despot or a bandit? Or would you just be a simple man trying to make your way in the universe? Here the rules weren't really the big deal - it was the setting and all of the possibilities it enabled. 
• Also one of the few RPGs where I have used nuclear weapons, definitely the first of those, and that's something that sticks with you.

As a follow-on to these I believe my 6th would have been Boot Hill, rules-wise more of a miniatures game than what we would call an RPG today but we played it like an RPG for sure. The highest and best use of this game was to send your characters into a D&D module using the rules in the DMG and we loved that.

I mean it's not a Larry Elmore painting but that's still a pretty evocative cover

My 7th would have been the Star Trek RPG from FASA. So much here to love when the Trek universe was much smaller and less complicated and the only real setting switch was "are we using the animated series stuff?" which the FASA trek game did by default. Character generation was a little like Traveler but used percentiles for skills and the system used action points to resolve combat actions. Plus there was so much lore in one place! A super cool ship combat system with charts to run the main kinds of ships we knew about at that time! Deckplans! There was so much good stuff in this game! I'm sure to modern eyes it would look dated and limiting but it was just amazing and it was very playable. 

Iconic. What more needed to be said here?

On a final note I see posts online - a lot of them lately - where people are opining on the golden age of RPG's we live in and what an exciting time it is and then go on to cite six different flavors of D&D that either just came out or are about o come out this year and just wax on about how great it is. I don't want to rain on someone's joy and sure, I like my D&D variants too, but ... come on. Those 7 games I noted above all came out roughly 77-83 and they could not be more different and they were all popular at the time to some degree and there were a bunch of other games at the time that I was aware of but not playing. Out of those 7 three of them have dropped out pretty completely (Star Frontiers, Gamma World, and Boot Hill - notably all old TSR games) but the other 4 still have a current version in print today. Sure, some are very different, particularly the Trek game, but you could pick up an old campaign without a ton of effort for any of those. 

I also wonder, given some of the things I see (like the above) do people think that D&D and RPGs are a new thing? Do they get how long we've been doing this or how many different games have been published in all kinds of genres over the decades? Rifts, Shadowrun, and Vampire brought in the new wave of the 90's and those games were all wildly innovative on some level and decidedly not D&D and they're all over 30 years old at this point. For the early 2000's we had Savage Worlds and Cortex and FATE - what's the 2020 version of all of these? Maybe the Apocalypse World-based games? I get that your first game outside of D&D can be a huge experience especially given how dominant 5th Edition has been but a lot of the new doesn't really seem all that new if you've been exploring this hobby for a while. What's the big eye-opener for the new generation of players?

The 90's gave us this gem too - let's not forget that.

All of these games had a heavy influence on me very early on so I wanted to put them out there and acknowledge them and anyone who worked on them - you've given me a lifetime of entertainment with these. Thank you.

Enough rambling here. We can start looking forward again next time.