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It’s 3:30 in the morning.
I mention this to you because I want you to understand and appreciate how much I think about D&D and game design. My newborn son is almost 3 months old, I have more work at my day job and in freelancing than I could shake several sticks at…and here I am, unable to sleep because I have to say something to you.
For the underwhelming love of fantasy deities, STOP spending time making hard encounters. I listen to many frustrated GMs who spin me this tale (tell me if it sounds familiar):
“I spent five hours building this encounter and the players tore through it in 2 rounds. The players weren’t challenged at all, and I feel like a failure for not being able to challenge them! It was supposed to be a tough fight!”
I’ve heard this, and I’ve been there. What I’m up early this morning to say though is that when we’re feeling like this, we as GMs are looking at our jobs from the wrong viewpoint. We are also misunderstanding combat to a degree.
Running a game is a perverse business. On one hand, it’s a candy store; look, sunshine and saccharine! The other hand is a punch in the mouth; why were you taking my candy? If you give players too much candy, the whole enterprise goes rotten as you turn each PC into a candyman Fonzerelli, riding through your dungeon on a Gingerbread bike going “Aaaaaaaay!” If PCs get everything they want whenever they want, the game no longer compels anyone to play it.
But how much face-punching can you get away with? You can string face-punching out a little longer than you can candy-giving, but in the end, no one really wants to be on the receiving end of Manny Pacquio each session without a chance to even hit back. Too much face-punching also makes the game less compelling.
I think all decent GMs for any game system knows the formula RPGs; put out some candy (or the opportunity to grab it), punch some faces along the way. If players don’t get candy, there are no incentives to get punched in the face. If PCs don’t get punched in the face, they don’t appreciate the candy.
Combat isn’t a punch in the face in D&D. It’s candy. Fighting is a reward, because that’s how the game is designed. Part of what D&D has always been about is the thrill of overcoming monsters and getting stuff. It is open in other areas so is open to creative hacking to do other stuff, but every edition of D&D includes copious rules for killing stuff. It is the reward even though monsters are trying to take you out, because the monsters trying to take you out is part of the thrill of the fight. The more the monsters come at me, the more exciting it is, and the more awesome I feel for overcoming it.
If combat isn’t a punch in the face, what is? When the bad guy gets away…that’s a punch in face. When he steals a sacred artifact, when we fail to protect the townspeople, when the tyrant’s army wins a key battle, when an adventurer sacrifices himself to protect the world — these are punches in the face. When we finally get a chance to put our hands on the villain or his minions, we can best describe that as a catharsis.
Imagine you could punch out someone critical in the country’s financial woes. There are a lot of bad consequences flowing from that, but can’t you imagine that it might feel good right before they put the cuffs on? The central conceit of fantasy adventure is that violence works. Violence rarely fixes anything in real life, but works about a dozen times every level in D&D. At the end of the day, we get to hit something and good comes of it.
So, back to the hard encounter. Do you ever notice that 9 times out of 10 in your hard encounter, the players are having a good time? That the only person feeling like crap about the whole thing is you? You tried to build a fight that would make the characters feel fear or intimidate them, and they ran you over. That in turn left you feeling a bit abused. You spent so much time on it! It wa supposed to be hard!
Listen, if you want a hard encounter, do this: Let every monster stun as a minor action, no hit roll required. Or hey, triple the damage each monster deals. Infinite hit points? I guarantee that using one of those ideas will push your PCs right to the brink….oh, but you are trying to make it “hard but fun”, right? Or “hard but balanced”? You want an encounter that drops characters but won’t necessarily cause a TPK?
I’m not saying that it’s not possible to do that; I’m saying it’s not really worth your time. In games as we talk about them, there is a perfect balance to strike every time between monster threat and player satisfaction. In games as they are played, people go on hot streaks with dice. People go on cold streaks. People discover crazy power synergies. DMs forget auras and players abuse solos. A few good dice rolls turn a mildly challenging encounter into a very challenging encounter or a very challenging encounter into a TPK.
Players are going to whale on encounters, and that’s ok! The game is actually designed in just that way. As a DM, you can make the combat interesting for yourself by upselling the player and monster actions through narration. You can make the combat awesome by adding different twists that aren’t combatants. Interesting terrain and unusual parameters for the fight are great. You can work towards unconventional consequences to your fights. Spend your time making your fights compelling. I’ve run a lot of fights where players have mostly had their way, but because of cool environment or cool parameters (or both), still ended up being memorable.
“But Gamefiend, the BBEG is supposed to be super tough!”
No, the BBEG is supposed to be super INTERESTING. He threatens and cajoles; he schemes and plots against the PCs; the PC foil the BBEG sometimes, but sometimes he foils them. When they face off for the final time, all sorts of crazy stuff should be going on. Maybe after they navigate the chaos, they take the BBEG down in a round or two, but they will remember all that chaos.
Work to make your fights interesting instead of challenging, and your sanity will increase. Maybe not much, but hey you’re a DM, so you were a little crazy already.
Similar Posts:
- 4e and the Art of the Limit Break, part 1
- The Speed of Choice: the Real Reason your 4e Fights are so Damn Slow.
- Is it a Fight or a Skill Challenge?
A Jack of All Trades ,or if you prefer, an extreme example of multi-classing, Gamefiend, a.k.a Quinn Murphy has been discussing, playing and designing games straight out of the womb. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of this site in addition to being an aspiring game designer. As you would assume, he is a huge fan of 4e.
By day he is a technologist.
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Great thoughts as always mate.
To create an encounter that is truly hard and not fun requires the DM to act like a dick, and we don’t want to break Wheatons Law…
Looking at the recent tough encounters, Neverwinter Games Day encounter 2 was way too tough, and I certainly didn’t enjoy it when my character died. Lair Assault on the other hand, is going to be very hard, with ways of dealing with characters built to beat it. The main difference is that one was meant as an introduction and showcase, the other has been advertised as super tough…
…for me, even more important is the notion that the challenge could be so random for something like Neverwinter GD. What if the whole party was super-awesome? What if your dice had been better? You might not have died at all. There are so many party configs that not even people with tons of resources at their disposal can balance for every party.
And agreed, Lair Assault is noteworthy because it plays up the adversarial nature of the GM/PC relationship.
I hope you can sleep now.
You’re right. I’ve been through it myself, try to make it too challenging and the PC’s might not make it to your next cool part of the story. Make it too easy and the fight finishes too quickly. But then wasn’t I complaining about combat in 4e taking too long recently? Hmm, what do I want. A good story.
So recently I’ve been concentrating less on difficulty and more on interestingness and I’ve been tending to now only make really hard encounters when it would serve the story better if the PC’s leg it. It was been working well.
At the same time I’ve heard stories of people getting bored in other games butting their heads up against the same encounter for 7 hours (retreating and healing and going back in) and eventually beating it to get to the next bit of the story. I can do that on my computer.
Couldn’t agree more! Occasionally my players breeze through an encounter and it doesn’t annoy me as it proves that they are the big damn heroes they are supposed to be.
I only ever have one aim when designing encounters and that is to make it fun. Occasionally that does mean doing things I know might make the encounter harder, but that is always secondary to the interesting and fun aspects I strive for.
I have accidentally made a fight much harder than I thought it would be – resulting in the death of a PC (but the player is much happier with his new character so that worked out) – but that wasn’t intentional and they could have always retreated.
Very enjoyable post, gamefiend. More please!
I totally agree with you here, Quinn. Personally, I *love* it when my PCs totally demolish an encounter that I expect to be challenging, as it allows me to showcase how cool they have become and gives me leave to experiment further. As long as it’s not so easy that it becomes boring, we’re all having a great time, and that’s the only thing that matters.
The only point I’ll disagree with is the assertion that dying to save the world is a punch in the face. A heroic, satisfying and *meaningful* death is candy of the highest order. For a story-driven player, anyway.
D&D, at least originally (not sure about 4e because I’ve never played it), was in a large part a game of resource management. It was structured so that the players controlled the pace and therefor how hard most encounters were. The same encounter would be a cakewalk if the party was completely rested, healed, with a full stock of consumables, prepared and ready, and a TPK if they were running on fumes, having exhausted most of their spells and charges or were surprised and unprepared… but it was usually the players who were in charge of balancing risk by deciding whether to press on or hole up/retreat and rest. Even when the DM designed an area to make it difficult to come at the biggest and baddest creature without running a gauntlet of lesser foes and traps, clever and cautious parties could and would scout and work around that using things like invisibility, pass wall, rope trick, teleport, potions of etherealness or just stealth and cunning distractions. And if the players looked at the set-up and decided that they didn’t like the odds, they could just go off and do something else, coming back to it later if they felt like they’d come up with an approach or just leveled up and stood a better chance.
It wasn’t until GMs tried to arrange adventures into prefab story-lines, with certain encounters at certain times as set “beats” in the story, with the expectation that the players would follow the story and do everything in one go (often enforced by some kind of timer, e.g. if the party doesn’t stop the ceremony by midnight blah, blah, blah, to prevent them from inserting their own rest stops) that deciding how close to defeat the individual counter should try push the party became an issue.
And as you point out, the latter is really hard, maybe too hard to be worth doing.
Upon reading this article, I was sincerely tempted to stand up on my work desk and scream, “Testify, brother!”. I resisted the urge because I’ve already gotten two warnings about this. Man, this is a beautiful piece of writing, right to the heart of the matter. I celebrate your total lack of sleep, if this is the result.
Great article. 1 question…
You wrote: “If combat isn’t a punch in the face, what is? When the bad guy gets away…that’s a punch in face. When he steals a sacred artifact, when we fail to protect the townspeople, when the tyrant’s army wins a key battle, when an adventurer sacrifices himself to protect the world — these are punches in the face. When we finally get a chance to put our hands on the villain or his minions, we can best describe that as a catharsis.”
How do you make this happen in D&D?
Usually all of the above occurs when you lose a fight. But making hard encounters is hard (let alone making encounters the players may lose). When D&D 4E characters can kill Orcus in a few blinks of a player character’s eye, the above happening seems rare with an experienced group.
The bad guy getting away creating drama and tension for when you meet again doesn’t seem to be what D&D is about. I’ve seen plenty of frustrated DMs wanting D&D to be about this, unable to make it happen in a fair mechanical way, and start railroading to make it happen. I don’t think D&D is about story, in a traditionally dramatic sense.
If your goal is to reward the players (candy), but the reward can be spoiled if it’s too easy, too much, or too little… one of the DM’s major jobs is pacing those rewards. Obstacles (punching) are traditionally one way to do it. In many games, those obstacles are fights with dire consequences.
BUT in D&D the fights themselves are the reward (and the consequences tend to be played down)! The obstacles are the reward! Punching is candy!
If combat isn’t a punch in the face, what is?
Tempering difficulty in D&D isn’t worth it. It’s too unpredictable. Too much work. Too frustrating for the DM.
You suggest that failure is a punch in the face. But failure is rare and tied to difficulty. You mention, that the villain getting away is a punch in the face… creating tension… making the reward of eventually fighting the villain that much more rewarding. But in D&D that’s often tied to failure (someone getting away) which leads us back to the core problem.
I could see using skill challenges to determine if the main villain escapes before the fight even starts. The bad guys attack the town. You show up. The villain runs away while their army pillages. Play a skill challenge to see if you can keep the villain from getting away before the fight starts. If you win, the villain becomes a target in the fight. Otherwise they are safe. You could even do this in the middle of combat. The main villain flees when too many of their allies become bloodied, if you want to stop them, succeed at a skill challenge. What’s great about a skill challenge, they are much harder to succeed at than combat and you can have a mixed success… a success with compromise… the main villain gets away but you scar them and can follow their blood trail back to their home base.
The other punch in the face or obstacle to keep players away from their reward (combat) that I’ve found to be extremely successful… this is going to sound weird… is roleplaying (or rather non-combat talking in character). Combat hungry players will foam at the mouth if you delay gratification with the villain simply introducing themselves in a friendly manner in an environment where combat would be questionable (say over dinner at a treaty meeting).
Beautiful article.
I agree that writing interesting encounters is the way to go. Not all encounters need to be interesting and you can have simple fights. In fact, you should have simple fights to make the interesting encounters stand out.
One issue is once you’ve made a memorable and interesting encounter, it becomes harder to make an encounter more interesting and memorable. It is hard to beat up your own success.
On the topic of the BBEG get his punches in what I do is have him do his evil by proxy or while the party is away. That way you don’t have to worry about the party ruining the punches by saving the eay every time.
For example the party could ride to the rescue of a city whom they have intel will be attacked by the BBEG but when they arrive nothing has happened. Turns out he attacked another city on the otherside of the kingdom.
While it may be a suckerpunch and someone might call it unfair that they didn’t have a chance to know the truth, I see it as a great tactic on the part of the BBEG.
They get a punch and it make the whole deal of mowing through his minions on the way to his stronghold as they might be avenging someones hometown.
Love the article. Those are the types of games I want to play.
With all due respect, Gamefiend, I still believe challenging AND engaging at the same time are possible.
I’m always trying to craft encounters like that when I DM, most specially for adventure or tier of play capstones.
I think what happens is, in 4e especially, there’s a lot of factors that aren’t specifically measured but do impact the difficulty of an encounter.
For example, if you don’t measure the impact of environmental effects when creating an encounter with some sort of XP value, then it’s hard to understand or predict an encounter’s true difficulty.
The second major thing that makes measuring true encounter challenge level is resource management in 4e – it’s unique to this edition. Player characters get lots of powers back and have tons of healing options. So it’s a major shift from prior editions and years and years of DMing for different sorts of characters with very different available resources.
Definitely agreed with Kilsek. A great resource with tips on how to engage and challenge your players is the 3rd episode of the Fourthcore Podcast, Challengology. You don’t have to be playing Fourthcore, or even 4E, or even D&D to benefit from listening to this episode. You can despise Fourthcore and still learn something, I bet.
The episode can be found here: http://slamdancr.com/wp/2011/04/fourthcore-podcast-03-challengology/
Absolutely agreed. The thing with making hard encounters is that unless you really really go overboard, you can’t ~count~ on an encounter being difficult. Or easy, for that matter. The dice don’t allow any real kind of certainty. You or the players might roll really well or really badly and skew the difficulty in one direction or another that wasn’t anticipated or designed. So sometimes players will gut a difficult challenge without breaking a sweat or get their asses kicked by an encounter which should have been fairly straight forward.
But making an encounter interesting? That’s something that you as the DM have a lot more control over. You get to plan the narrative, the monsters/NPCs involved and their behavior, you get to plan the environment, you get to control the circumstances in which the encounter takes place. And because you have that control, it’s a much better place to focus your efforts. Not to say that you shouldn’t ~try~ to design encounters with a particular difficulty in mind, but it can be more rewarding to both you as a DM as well as the players to make a fight fun first and easy/difficult second.
Thanks for the comments all!
If I’m not replying to you specifically, please note that I am nodding my head in approval at the comment
@roger well, dying for a good cause is a punch and candy. The loss of a character is painful, but the worthiness of the sacrifice is rewarding.
@Dixon preach it!
@ashardalon tension isn’t created by failure alone, or even as a major part. Tensions is creating primarily by creating opportunities for failure or success, and making stakes that the parties care for. I like where you’re going with you exploration of the subject, though.
@eric you can do “interesting” as I see 1 of 2 ways: you can design it that way or you can run it that way. design is obviously adding something unusual and different in the encounter itself. running an interesting encounter is all about getting players into the narrative of the encounter. Engaging players in a unique way is something you can do every battle (and IMO, something you should do ). A non-comprehensive list of things I’ve done: making enemy death an issue (are you a murderer? Do you actually kill it when you drop it?), prompting flashbacks, letting players try to convert minions to their cause, creating interesting backstories and effects for powers, etc.
All these I consider stuff you can do at “run-time” and don’t have to cook into your encounter design.
@kilsek I’m not saying that it’s impossible to make something challenging , I’m saying it’s an endeavor that is really not in your control. One factor you’ve left out is dice. What does an encounter look like if the monsters lead out with three critical hits in the first round? What about if the players lead out with that? My last encounter I ran this week, I only rolled two hits against my players ( I was rolling abysmally — the PCs defenses aren’t abnormally high) The encounter was several elites and we were short a player so the group was down to three. Because I rolled poorly, my gameplan never got going and the players ran over the creatures.
But iit was still a fun and interesting encounter! On of the players used a tome of evil magic to attack, awakening angry spirits that will come into play later. The avenger use abjure undead for the first time in the game, and we got a very interesting visual of what it did. There was more, but the overall thought is that though it was not challenging to them (and really should have been), I can’t control the dice without cheating and that is the hugest variable to challenge.