Problem

One thing I seem to have challenges with when DMing a d20 RPG (in this case Pathfinder) is balancing an encounter or series of encounters around a well optimized group.

For example, my current party consists of a swashbuckler, a rouge, a magus (black blade and hexcrafter), a mystic theurge, and a vivisectionist alchemist. All level 9. The first thing you notice about this party is the amount of melee in the group. Which means if they can get up to their opponent in melee range, they can deal in excess of 200 damage in a round to a single target. Not many monsters in the CR 9 to 12 range can handle that sheer amount of damage.

Some interesting peculiarities about my party to consider in designing encounters.

  • The mystic theurge has every spell known to man, elf, dwarf, orc, gnome, and halfling
  • The magus has an interesting blend of archetypes and spell choices. This means he can bad touch something so bad, the player gives me a fully filled out piece of loose leaf paper with all of the bad stuff he does to his opponent. Whatever he touches with this ability is essentially rendered harmless for the rest of the encounters
  • The rogue and alchemist both deal sneak attack damage in melee range.
  • The swashbuckler is also mainly precision damage, and is built quite defensively due to class features and feats. His armour class (AC) is quickly approaching the 30s

Solutions

Below are a first few things I’ve seen and tried to help balance out encounters in order to make the fights feel more even.

Bigger Baddies

Now the first thought for creating a fun and challenging encounter is to throw a bigger baddie at them. If you see your party clobbering a young dragon, why not throw an adult one at them? In my experience, this is not a particularly effective strategy. Giving your party a single target to attack, with no other concerns gives them free reign to smash their target into oblivion.

There are some ways you can play around with this idea though. For example, you can have an enemy that is hyper defensive. Make them difficult to hit and/or damage through a high AC and resistances such as damage reduction(DR) or resistances. The downside to this strategy, is it can make encounters a slog as an opponent such as this tends to be lighter on the hits. So it can turn into a drawn out battle where the party chisels down the enemy’s health bit by bit with no danger or consequence.

The root problem to having a single big bad comes down to action economy. Action economy can be summed up as the amount and effectiveness a side in a fight has in a given round. In our case, we have 5 weaker characters, each with a move action and a standard action versus an opponent who has one standard and one move action total. Even if the enemy hit like a truck and knocked out a player a round, that monster still has four other enemies to take care of. Not to mention that those actions are tied to different bodies with unique abilities that can be used tactically and in unison. The one enemy will be quickly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things happening to them.

MOAR BADDIES

If scaling your bad guys up doesn’t work. Why not try scaling them out? I had to slip in some software terms in here somewhere :)

Adding more bad guys can be a good way to make your encounters more interesting and challenging for your players. Adding more bodies to a fight means you can even out action economy. Where more bad guys can be detrimental is when your party spends the entire fight mowing down mooks, each in single hit as each of them is really too weak to handle the raw damage output of the party.

Obviously this is a bit of an exaggeration, but the rule of ninjas does apply. If you’re an action hero and you are fighting one ninja. Expect him to be a badass and something to challenge or even beat the hero. If your hero is fighting a league of ninjas, then expect him to mow through them like a lawnmower.

Homogeneous Groups of Bad Guys Are Boring

There is no reason why you can’t vary the bad guys in an encounter. Mix in a bunch of mooks with a big beefcake. The mooks will act as fodder while the big one gets in position to deal damage to an unsuspecting squishie.

Including a spellcaster of some sort, especially as your party reaches higher levels, increases the variety of things you can do in an encounter greatly. They can buff allies, debuff enemies, provide utility, and even …

Use the Environment

This is something I am incredibly guilty of failing to do, and something I feel myself and my party really take for granted in our games. Part of what can make encounters interesting is where they are set. Part of what makes great fight scenes interesting is where they are set. The first fight between Luke and Vader wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting had they duked it out in the middle of the frozen tundra of Hoth.

You are the DM. You are the god of your world. You determine where the fights happen and what the scenery looks like. Use that to your advantage.

Let’s say your party is in an encounter where they are assaulting a castle and have broken into the castle walls. Around them is a courtyard, a parapet, some siege engines, etc. Instead of framing it as an open area, perhaps add in some barrels of oil, caltrop, and other hazards. Put your archers on top of the parapet where they can use the high ground against the party below. If the party tries to climb the stairs to the parapet, perhaps the guard captain spills oil on the stairwell to buy the men time to dispatch the invaders. Spellcasters are great for this as they can alter the battlefield quite effectively and after the encounter has started. Causing the party to reconsider its plans. Using the environment around you makes the world feel all that much more realistic, and it goes both ways. This leads us to my next suggestion…

Your Baddies Aren’t Idiots…Usually

This is a common trap DMs can fall into. Usually this can happen when there is a lot going on during a session. A simple, and common encounter usually entails rushing your baddies into the party meat grinder and being pulverized for loot without much thought. This an interesting encounter does not (usually) make. Most enemies a party fights have an intelligence score of at least 10. This means they are at least somewhat intelligent.

Unless they are drunk, stupid, or super powerful you shouldn’t throw your enemies at the party blindly. This can be challenging as a DM, but it is much more rewarding to you, and interesting for your party if they see their enemies working together to thwart them.

Some examples of enemies using their brains(tactics) are:

  • Have your bad guys work together. ** Isolate or focus fragile party members, putting them on the defensive. ** Have your melee characters form a wall or phalanx to protect the mages/rangers so they can blast the party uninhibited. ** Make use of multiple rogue-like characters to flank players and maximize their sneak attacks. ** Use different together in dangerous combinations.
  • Have your enemies retreat and disengage if the fight isn’t going their way. Not every evil grunt wants to die for the cause. He ain’t paid enough to deal with that shit.
  • Using spells and abilities to alter the environment. ** Druids can entangle, making it difficult for the party to reach you. ** Wizards and sorcerers can blow stuff up, collapsing rooves, and floors. Causing cave in or otherwise separating the party. ** Melee characters can use combat maneuvers to hinder the party. Have a fighter that deals truckloads of damage with a 2H axe? It would be shame if he were to drop it on the ground.
  • In general, have your baddies play to their strengths and take advantage of the party’s weaknesses.

This is one of the best ways you can spice up your encounters and make them feel alive, by having enemies that act as if they’re alive.

I personally find this challenging, especially while juggling everything else you’re doing as a DM. One trick I’ve been using is to try to write down a rough script of how the encounter will go down assuming the enemies have their way and try to answer at least a few of the following questions:

  • What tactics do they favour?
  • What is their positioning in the room?
  • Do they know the party is coming and do they know the tactics the party normally uses?
  • How will they react to a group of armed murder hobos barging into their base/home?
  • Will and what is their threshold for retreat?

And finally…

Not All Combat Encounters Should Be A Do or Die Challenge

I repeat. Not all encounters need to be a final destination boss battle.

This one took me almost a year to grasp. Why have an encounter if it’s not going to be a life and death challenge the players? Simple. Encounters don’t have to exist in a vacuum.

Let me explain. At the beginning of a day, all characters have a certain number of cool points to use during that day. Think of a cool point as spells, health, or other limited use resources/abilities during the day. During each encounter, each player has to make a decision as to whether they should use cool points then, or save it for a more critical moment down the line. For example:

You are a cleric. Your party is about to engage a group of fire elementals on they way to stop the evil wizard from burning down an orphanage. You know this wizard is a pyromaniac and likely has more fiery minions and a plethora of combustible casts available. At the same time, your party took quite a beating from the last group they encountered and you have a decision to make. You can use a casting of protection from energy (fire) to help reduce the amount of damage your party takes from these elementals now, allowing your group to have potentially more health to deal with the boss later, or should you save your protection spell, and expend your last two uses of channel energy after this fight to save your protection spell from a potential fireball or some other nasty burn spell down the line.

The player has options here. They can use a protection spell and save their party some damage now, or hope they aren’t too bruised up and potentially expend the last bit of healing they have (outside of cure spells). This choice can have consequences on the battle to come. If the party has taken a lot of damage from these elementals in the past, the cleric may cast the protection spell now to absorb it. However, the consequence to that action is potentially taking more damage from a fireball or similar spell later.

You can think of encounters as a series of choices the party has to make. Each encounter should be difficult enough that the party has to make a decision as to whether they want to conserver resources at the risk of taking damage (thus expending points anyway), or by spending some of their cool points to expedite the encounter at the cost of not having those points down the road.

In my experience, I’ve seen a fresh party take on an encounter that was 5 levels above with relative ease. I’ve also seen parties where after a long day of fighting and with next to no cool points left, barely survive an encounter with monsters that would have been fodder earlier in the day.

Use this to your advantage. Whittle down your party over the course of the day. Deny them opportunities to rest. The less resources they have at their disposal, the more creative they will have to be with what they have.

Analyzing One of My Encounters

Because my party is so melee focused, I’ve been trying to design my encounters lately around ranged combat. A recent example includes a fight with a Drow bard and some of her cronies acting as the last barrier to a wizard boss.

This encounter included:

  • A level 10 bard, focusing on maximizing archery.
  • 6 drow fighters (mooks), some set up for ranged and some melee.
  • 3 babau demons (one retreated from a previous encounter).
  • 1 invisible assassin waiting to assassinate the theurge.

Tactics

Babau and a couple of the fighters were up front set up to gunk up combat while the bard boosted stats and along with the remaining drow pelted arrows into the party while they were tied up in combat.

What Worked

The babau demons worked surprisingly well against the party for a few reasons:

  • They have DR 10/good meaning they turned out to be much tankier than anyone (including me) expected.
  • They have a decent health pool.
  • They can see invisibility. Up to this point, my party was making use of invisibility sphere, sticking greater invisibility on the rogue and having a sneak attack party.

The archer dealt a lot of damage and really provided a good challenge for the party. Because she was situated in the far back with a longbow, she could pick off the party while in relative safety all the while buffing her allies. It wasn’t until the front lines were sorted out more that the magus could fly up to her and debuff her to oblivion.

Assassin added an extra layer to the combat when he decided to show up, causing the PCs to have to break rank to deal with him or else the theurge was going to pop. While the actual attempt at assassination failed, the damage and sudden “oh shit” moment when he showed up had a good effect on the party that I really enjoyed.

What Didn’t Work

The babau. For two reasons:

  1. They were almost too tanky. The fight went on for over an hour due to how little damage they were taking.
  2. I didn’t use them to their full effectiveness(flanking and sneak attack). Which was probably for the best. Considering two characters dropped in the fight.

The main concern I had with the fight was the length of it. This was the precursor to the boss fight and I almost felt like it was an overall more difficult encounter than the final boss (illusion wizard). By the time the group got to the final boss room, both my players and myself were exhausted from the previous fight. Which really hurt the overall feel for the encounter.

What I Would Have Changed

I would have dialed down the babau. I think having one or two in the room was good to soak up hits, but 3 of them slowed the entire thing to a crawl. I also would have reduced the number of mooks down to 4 or 5 just so the party had an easier chance of getting to the bard.

Finally, I should have toned down the archer bard. She was almost the same level as the final wizard, and when she hit with her arrows she dealt MASSIVE damage. In both of these regards, she should have been toned down enough so that the encounter was difficult, but not life-or-death.

Conclusion

Understanding the dials you can turn to tweak your encounters is important as a DM to make the gameplay experience more rewarding for both you and a party. I get genuinely discouraged when my party walks into a room and just ROFLSTOMPS my carefully built bad guy without so much as a bat of the eyelashes.

In this post I discussed some ways to tweak encounters to make them more interesting and challenging for your parties. These were:

  • Making your baddies bigger (usually not used alone).
  • Adding in more baddies to balance action economy.
  • Varying enemy composition.
  • Using the environment to your advantage.
  • Playing your bad guys intelligently.
  • Realizing that stringing encounters together can make subsequent ones more challenging.

I also discussed briefly one of the encounters I ran for my group recently.

The list of tips I provided above is by no means exhaustive. There are tons of resources available on designing and implementing encounters for DnD and the like. There’s are merely observations I’ve made while being both a player and a DM, and areas I know where I can improve on my encounter design.