I would estimate that 100% or more of the encounter design articles I’ve read focus on making the encounters more challenging, more difficult, and more punishing. These creatures create a deadly synergy, this terrain will hamper the characters’ movement, that power will make your players weep uncontrollably, rendering their character sheets unreadable. Given the astounding capabilities of today’s characters and the brilliant tactical acumen of today’s players, this is entirely understandable. It’s become harder to drive that splinter of uncertainty, of worry, of–dare I say it–fear into the hearts of players, so DMs really do need new and exciting ways of marching in the terror.
Challenges are good things. It feels absolutely wonderful to overcome them. In a one-shot game I played several lifetimes ago, we four players ran high-level characters against the best the DM could bring. During the battle map set up, each of the players claimed one of the big baddies, a strategy that made an epic kind of sense at the time, right up until our “split up and get slaughtered” approach nearly led us all to a very messy end.
Our party was greater than the sum of its parts, and we staged a fighting withdrawal to a central location, stood back-to-back, and engaged in one of the longest, most desperate battles I’ve ever experienced. When the final enemy fell, another player looked over at me and said, “Man, I can just about feel my broadsword drop out of my hand and clang on the floor.” We were exhausted but exhilarated.
Let’s set aside the competitive DM vs. Player dynamic that can creep into games, which is usually characterized by DM phrases like, “the players killed MY monsters,” or, “the players overcame MY traps,” as though the DM had raised those monsters up from little fanged babies or had fitted the poisoned spikes into place at the bottom of the 50′ pit. No, let’s assume perfect objectivity and even-handedness here.
It is the DM’s role to build opponents and obstacles that result in that “clanging broadsword” moment. The DM wants to heighten the stress and fear, to push the players to the absolute edge, to bring them to the point where they don’t think they can go any further but somehow do. This is when all the daily and encounter powers are gone, when every last consumable and healing surge has been used, when every eye at the table is fixed on every rolled die, and the successes greeted with a visceral, gutteral YES! and the failures met with a thin and papery no.
In a recent game that I ran, this was my goal. I wanted to juice the drama and lay down some serious risk to the characters, who had shown themselves to be efficient and dangerous. Also, I had examined the remaining encounters, and decided that it would be great if they could level before reaching the big, climactic boss battle, marching in with a brand new set of abilities. As a player, I’ve always felt a minor twinge of disappointment when I leveled after the boss, meaning there would probably be some delay between GETTING the powers and USING the powers.
My first encounter went off exactly as I had hoped. This was a tactical affair, with bursty, blasty controllers, long range artillery, and great big bruisers up front marking and slamming and shaking off blows. It was extremely difficult, level plus 4, and the math worked exactly right. Characters fell, were healed, fell again, and were healed again. Dailies burned bright. Second winds flew. Action points all around. The players were wrung out, but they triumphed, and they took some weary comfort from that.
Right up until the next encounter, when it all started over again.
You see, when I was sitting in my room, working out the battles, it all seemed so easy, so clean, so antiseptic. The party needed so many thousand experience points, so I divided that amount by the number of encounters remaining, spent my budget to buy the monsters, and then we’ll all roll initiative. Somewhere in all that preparation, I forgot about evaluating for fun. If every battle is a screaming adrenaline surge and the only thing the characters ever get to be are bloodied victims who are barely holding on with their fingernails, where’s the joy in that?
Throughout the design, I’d been focusing on hard encounters (level plus 2-4) or, reluctantly, standard encounters (level plus 1). Easy encounters? Don’t make me laugh! Those are level minus 1-2, which seemed absurd and stupid and way TOO easy. I wondered, why would they even have easy encounters? This was around the time that my inner DM got the better of my inner player.
I’ll tell you why they have easy encounters, and it’s exactly the same reason they created minions. As a player, it’s awful fun to be the conquering hero. It’s awful fun to dominate the opponents. It’s awful, freaky, crazy fun to blow away three or six or nine guys in one sweet strike, and then sneer at the quaking corporal-in-charge and growl, “You’re next.”
If I possessed a functioning cluster of brain cells, I would have realized this immediately, and built the adventure accordingly. I would have added in the low XP encounters as freebies, not counting on them to reach my leveling goal, or I would have let go of the leveling requirement altogether, letting things just happen as they happened.
Of course, if leveling was so important to me, I could have just leveled the characters right before the boss battle, regardless of some arbitrary accumulation of points. “Hey, good job on the game thus far, make all your characters level X.” Unfortunately, that always feels cheap to me, as both player and DM. It carries the rank odor of something unearned. I may be alone in this feeling (probably am!), but it’s built into my gaming DNA. I want to feel like I won the hit points, the powers, the die rolls, rather than have them handed to me.
Unfortunately, I can’t report a happy resolution in my game. After the betrayal of the second hard encounter, the players rebelled, and rightly so. I had thrust them onto the treadmill, and stretching out ahead of them, they saw a repeating grind of nearly impossible fights, misery without end.
I tried to explain my rationale, but they weren’t hearing it, and they filed away in a cloud of irritation and unhappiness. I’m not sure that the game has permanently ended on this dreary note, but I do feel like I’ve done damage to the fragile trust between us. The only thing I can do now is take it all to heart and remember these lessons going forward.
Interesting post, Dixon. I drove my players pretty hard during our last session – 3 hard fights, followed by a medium fight with some tough terrain. It was fun, but towards the end, it started to feel like the grind. Maybe I’ll take your advice and just run lighter combat encounters this week, maybe leading to a tougher boss encounter. Might be refreshing.
Man, if your players are that harsh… that’s ridiculous. It’s a game. You made a mistake that made it a grind. So what. Smile, shrug, say “oh well, shit happens” and go to the next game. If they’re going to file away with clouds and bitching, maybe you need new players who are more forgiving and willing to just have a game, rather than come and be entertained by the monkey DM. It has to work for you as well.
I can relate. Having to come up with an encounter on the fly, I made it an easy one (it was appropriate for the situation). The players got all tactical and cautious, planned out their ambush, and then to their surprise, proceeded to decimate the enemies in two rounds. Afterward, they agreed that it was a good encounter, because it made sense that the opponents were easy, and they got to obliterate them.
-Tourq
.-= Tourq´s last blog ..Corvin, the Cave Bear – Steal this Background =-.
I’ve been reading The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell. There is an excellent section in it about interest curves. Basically, you want to hook everyone with the first encounter/trick/sight, then back off just a little – but slowing building on each successive “high” until you come to the climax of the series. Having a well thought-out interest curve keeps things from becoming monotonous and/or feeling like they were slapped together haphazardly.
I highly suggest DM’s giving at that section of the book a read, even if the rest of it doesn’t interest you.
Really well written, first paragraph especially.
Definitely agree on the value of those easy encounters. The players need some opportunities where they can just kick ass and look awesome, to be reminded that they are still heroes. This requires the DM to forgo the “well I want the fight to be challenging and exciting” bit, which can be really hard to do. One of my DMs in particular is bad about it, and so a lot of the time it feels like the characters really miss their moments to shine as their efforts are blocked and negated in order to make the challenge difficult. The fights end up being interesting in their own right, but sometimes you really just wish that nova attack you set up after waiting for an entire adventure would actually down the villain, rather than having the villain use a “I survive against a PC attack” ability to negate your efforts.
That’s kind of rambling, but in general: +1 for having some cakewalk encounters to let the PCs be awesome! 🙂 They don’t take long (cause they’re easy), and they are totally worth it.
I like to do the occasional gaming session where everything seems like a breeze for the characters. Easy encounters, nice rewards, grateful npcs. It leads to grateful players – they feel like heroes and stars.
I find it makes my players accept an entire session of harshness later, without it ever feeling like a grind.
Also, I agree that studying drama curves and story telling techniques is a great idea for DMs everywhere. Even those who run strict encounter based campaigns.
.-= Rasmus´s last blog ..Researching the Enemy =-.
Hope your game stays on track, I thought like this for a while too but we all learn are lesson.
.-= dwashba´s last blog ..Terror Tuesday #8 =-.
This is one of the reasons I don’t do DnD anymore. Oh look, here’s another combat scene set to push us into single digits on our HP meters. Just like the last one, and the next one. No fighting retreats, no sneaking around the main force or gutting the sentries. No strategy or planning required. Just kill it, loot it and advance to the next level.
It’s cool to see you learn really fundamental DMing lessons here Dixon and sharing.
XPs are not worth the trouble UNLESS a majority of players are motivated by them at your table. It’s one of those “you just gotta have those” elements that D&D has had for ever. And now that you no longer can lose XP, ever, for whatever reasons, you need to ask yourself if you really need them.
I jettisoned them, leveling by Fiat, where it made sense in terms of story and in terms of excitement.
OR, keep the XPs, but divide (or multiply) the amount gained by fights and make up for the gained/lost XPs with Skill Challenges, quest and other types of story rewards.
For instance, why not make a 1st level major quest be worth 4000 XP for a party ( making every one 200 XP short of leveling) AND make killing the actual boss a Minor quest worth 1000 XP AND have enough secondary XPs sources to have the party level to 2 before the Boss if they played their cards right.
Thus, you detach the game’s engine from the ‘defeat stuff’ to level.
Also… you may want to re-explore the meaning of ‘defeat to gain XP’
Damn… maybe I should have made a blog response to your post instead of blabbering here. 🙂
.-= ChattyDM´s last blog ..Lost Badgers and Kid Guards =-.
I agree totally with the rhythm of encounter design you talk about here. It’s a fantastic point and a hard thing to learn. Jason also hits on something important. The players need to feel like their choices matter. One battle might not only be easy, but fighting it might make another battle easier.
I also agree with Chatty–XP in D&D can be counterproductive with regard to player motivation. For instance, giving fewer XP if a party chooses a peaceful approach to defeat an encounter is a poor choice.
I’ve done away with XP in my game except as an encounter-building tool. I’m considering an incremental approach to advancement so those players who care can still tell how they’re advancing.
Thanks for posting. However, with all the focus on xp, treasure parcels and other *crap*, I think you’re just making a rod for your own back. If you spend hours working out appropriate xp, parcels yada yada, what *effect* does the player see in the end.
….”you open the chest and you get xyz”. You’re basically wasting your time as a DM. The “payback” you get for spending hours doing what are essentially “accounting chores” is almost nill. This is one reason why the published WOTC adventures are so lame, they spend so long working out all that accounting garbage that does not make the module any fun. As a DM the focus of you time I would suggest is best spent on NPC characters, story, background, culture, exiting (but not impossible) combats with lots of props, pits ledges etc. Skill challenges, handouts, visual aids etc. All these will give a great player experience, the fact that you spent 1 hour working out the xp and treasure parcels for the encounter is frankly a snooze fest as far as most players are concerned.
By all means make the boss encounter hard, but there’s plenty of trash to take out along the way. In addition as Chris says, you should reward the same xp if people manage to bluff their way out anyway. Also nearly all the player base is still on heroic level, it takes so long to level, whats the harm in handing out a dollop of xp here in there. If you players get cocky then throw one of your Nietzsche encounters at them:P
This is so well written! The same thing happened to my group, except the players didn’t quit (yours will be back too, you’ll see.)
I used to put a big emphasis on XP gained, because I’m used to RPG videogames, where XP is practically the defining element. But yeah, XP is not as important in D&D. Now I usually just give a level for every 2 sessions or so. Players are more motivated by treasure, storyline, and abilities than by XP.
Likewise, I’ve never had PCs complain about an encounter being too easy. 4e, especially, is built around lots of easy encounters.
You might say, what if the encounters are too easy? Well, send in reinforcements. Increasing the difficulty of an encounter mid-stream is almost always awesome. It keeps the players on their toes and shows them you’re not screwing around. You’re kicking it up a notch. A grell descends from the ceiling! Bam!
If you make an encounter too hard, there is little you can do to make it easier. What, did the dragon just get a heartattack? Did all the monsters just get a vulnerability to cold? Essentially, you are killing off your monsters. Killing monsters is the PC’s job. Naturally they’re going to feel miffed you are taking their job. Making encounters easier is lame.
Added to all of this is the fact that high level encounters take a loooong time. Many creatures, low levels, lots of terrain, and lots of traps is the way to go for 4e encounters. Also, it helps if either the PCs or the monsters are trying to get somewhere in addition to fighting.
As long as you have some cool lore to show off during battle, and a special ability or two (or a cool terrain feature) then it shouldn’t matter that your encounters are a little on the easy side.
Cool article. In my game, grind is the ultimate enemy. Two combat encounters is the max I will allow in a single night. Those are usually accompanied by a skill challenge or a home-brew puzzle. The players love choices, so I typically write out two or three chapters in advance and let the players determine the order in which they’ll take on their challenges.
The two-encounters only rule is also quite useful in creating cliffhangers (one of which actually left the players hanging from the edge of a cliff) and other narrative devices. Regardless of the experience totals of the monsters they fight, players receive 550 experience points at levels 1-3, 950 at levels 4-6, etc. That way I spend less time on the math and more time on the narrative and branching storylines.
Well golly, I hadn’t expected quite so many responses for what is, essentially, a vanity piece. Of course, all of the articles I write are vanity pieces, since all things, in all shapes, forms, and sizes, are about me, me, me. But enough about me…
@ALL: Unless something dramatic happens, my game ended that night. Dammit. If I had it to do all over again, I’d probably make the same mistakes. But I’d also take a few minutes after the game screaming at the players and burning bridges. That’s always fun. Something else that I keep having to relearn is… maybe I’m just meant to be a player. Just between us, maybe I’m not that good a DM. Hey, a man’s got to know his limitations, and I get the most giggles when I’m on the lee side of the screen.
@pworthen: Please tell me about your results from the easy encounters, and if you’re feeling particularly bold, ask your players too. Just make sure to do it afterwards. I don’t recommend saying at the start of the game, “Hey everyone, the second battle tonight consists of four minions. What do you think of that?”
@Anonymous Coward: Hey, I’m the first to shout from the rooftops, “DMing is all about work without reward!” Whenever I play, I make a point of thanking the DM, somewhat slavishly, taking it right up to the point that I start getting annoying. DMing really sucks, unless you’re really good at it. Then (I’m assuming) it only kind of sucks.
@Tourq: See, that’s what I call a happy ending. You didn’t slam them down, you let the chips fall where they did, and as far as I can tell, you let the players shine. Good for them, and several gem-encrusted kudos to you!
@kingworks: This is brilliant, hook with the first encounter, then ease off, then a little more, then ease off, etc. This is exactly what I’m talking about. Give the players some breathers, and as you (and the book) say, keep the interest up.
@Noumenon: Thank you very much. I fussed over that first paragraph endlessly.
@highbulp: Kick ass and look awesome, exactly! I hear exactly what you’re saying about the DMs who forget that this is a game for the players, that the DMs are, in every sense of the word, servicing the players. Well, at least their egos. And it’s a great point about the easy encounters taking less time.
@Rasmus: Yes, heroes and stars. If the game really is supposed to be based on fantasy fiction, who wouldn’t want to be the centerstage superstars? I’m not playing the game to be Man#3, I’m playing it to be almighty and epic. I’m playing it not only for the surge of the moment, but for the excellent story that I can tell in the years to come.
@dwashba: Sadly, I don’t have happy news to report about my game, but I can come away with a valuable lesson. *sniff*
@Jason: It’s a fair point, but only when assessed to me and my tendencies. I’ve played in several D&D games that were in fully realized, wonderfully populated worlds, heavy on the roleplaying, with only occasional battles. I love these, just as I love my “broadsword clanging” moment games. I think with a more skilled DM, you can get the perfectly blended mix where it doesn’t feel like you’re just slogging through the Dungeon Delve book.
@ChattyDM: Never let it be said that I’m not willing to admit to being a colossal dope. And you are dead-on right about XPs. I guess it’s just another one of those golden calves in my gaming life that I have to be willing to let go. Just… gotta… pry… off… my… fingers… Approaching it as a great big quest XP dump is the purest of smartiness.
@Chris Sims: Yes, that’s another excellent point. Success in this battle should have a definite effect on the next battle (or event or encounter or whatever). These shouldn’t be little vacuum packed combat nodules. Oh, and I absolutely agree that winning a battle does not mean removing all of the enemies hit points. In a rare example of lucidity, that’s something I’ve applied for some time: if the party tricks or intimidates or woos the monsters into surrender, that goes down as a win in my book, and they get full XP for it. And yes, full speed ahead on keeping XP as an encounter building tool.
@Hugh Walters: I think you nailed it with the term “accounting.” I did have a tendency to create games entirely inside my left brain, figuring out all the facts and figures, making sure all the numbers worked out correctly, and then running it and being disappointed when it seemed so bland. I’ve played in games where the interactions were fluid, the battles were thrilling, and the rewards were, well, rewarding, and then glimpsed over the DM screen on the way out and saw a single lined piece of paper back there with a single non sequitur scribbled on it, like “Mayonnaise.” I’d wonder, a little stupefied, “How did he create all that fun without hours and hours of prep?”
@Capt_Poco: Thanks for the compliment and the well wishes, but sadly, methinks the game is over. You’re dead-on right about the video game mentality which had crept into my design, but I’m pretty sure I approached it that way in the beginning (1980-something, man I’m old), even before there was such the video game mathematics. As I mentioned about, I live and breathe fantasy, but I tend toward facts and figures during creation. And that’s a great point about scaling a battle up instead of down. Players always know when you (and by you, I mean I) hamstring a deadly monster, when it suddenly gets all weak and dying, and they really, really don’t appreciate it.
@Froggy: The two-encounter rule is a good one, and it’s pretty smart to keep the doors open inside the game to give the players free will. That’s another thing I can have a problem with, mostly because I make the mistake of imagining how the encounter should progress, and get a little disappointed when the players (as they sometimes / always do) wander off my script. I love the idea for cliffhangers, and also the distribution of XP. As you said, less math but still extremely fair to the players.
.-= Dixon Trimline´s last blog ..Full-Spectrum Thoughts: The Traitors Among Us =-.