A conversation came up the other day on Twitter about how DM’s treat the world around their PC’s, in as far as the level of threats that surround them. Is every enemy that appears, and every area the PC’s discover at the player’s level? I was fairly surprised at the different responses that came about, and how different DM’s and players see this issue.
As a DM, the world I create around the players does not exist in a reality crafted around the level of the players. In my opinion, this would be a cheap way to populate the world, and it would break the illusion that the players live in a breathing world that isn’t crafted just for them, but rather for everyone in the campaign world. The in-universe PC’s aren’t living in some sort of “Truman Show” reality where the world exists for them, so (in my opinion) the world has to reflect that.
Let me backtrack a bit. This whole thing started because in my basic red box Skype game, I threw a couple of ghouls at the party. This party is 1st level, and in original D&D, ghouls are nasty critters. In fact, I probably could have killed the whole party, but I pulled my punches a bit, and only killed one. Everyone else stayed paralyzed until their paralyzed time ran out.
Now, my players in that game are all 4e players as well. Some are old-schoolers that knew ghouls were nasty, but some come from the “4e monster school”. What does that mean? Well, in 4e there can be a bunch of different levels of the same monster. Take the ghoul, there are ghouls of the following levels in 4e: 5,13, 16, 18 and 23. Now, in 4e ghouls no longer paralyze you, they immobilize you (save ends). It’s a little bit different, but the overall idea is the same. But where am I going with this? I’m thinking that most newer players of 4e are used to the idea that if they face an encounter, chances are that the encounter is perfectly balanced for them, and they should stay and fight. While players of older editions may look at a ghoul and decide to bolt out of there if their characters are of low level.
I remember when I played 2nd edition D&D, you’d run at the sight of a Beholder if you were too low level. No discussion. Now in 4e, the possibility exists that the Beholder you are facing is more or less within range of any PC level, so the only question the PC’s face is whether or not the DM balanced the encounter correctly. I am of the belief that most 4e players assume this to be the case.
So the question you face as a DM is the following: Do you place possible encounters or areas in your game world that may lead to the players facing higher level threats which may kill them, or do you grow the threats in the world as the pc’s grow? Personally, I may not play “gotcha”with my PC’s and place monsters that they can’t beat in all the areas that they explore, but I will certainly place the “Here there be Dragons” signs and foreshadow that they may not want to go there. If they do, they’ve been warned. How do you all play it?
By the way, this topic was part of a blog carnival of sorts, in which these other fine bloggers had something to say. Some are players in the aforementioned skype game and experienced this first hand.
The original article that led to this topic was this one, over at Thadeous’s blog:
And these were the responses:
1. Phelanar’s Den by WolfSamurai
2. The Daily Encounter by Obsidiancrane
3. Dkarr
4. Adam Dray
6. Init or what ? by DeadOrcs
7. Game Crafters Guild by Brian Engard.
www. Newbie DM .com 
Grant Marthinsen
June 23, 2010
I play it like this- I i want to place the PC’s in an encounter they can’t win, I start off with an encounter 2 levels above theirs. Then, about halfway through, another group of, (or single depending) of monsters enters the fray. All of my players are from the 4e school, but they have learned that i will throw things at them they cant defeat. They also use knowledge checks to learn its name, which one of them will often recognize. The worst is when the ranger Wizard makes his Arcana check and says- “This encounter was hard before you threw in the Boneyeard! how are we supposed to win NOW?” Hes the one that has almost brought about the TPK’s- he doesnt like to run away.
deadorcs
June 23, 2010
I think one of my issues as a DM is that my players assume the world around them IS tailored to them. If they struggled through exploration only to find an encounter that they couldn’t defeat, their response would be, “why did you just waste our time?”
Even as a player myself, it gets a bit frustrating if every lead you uncover only brings you to a giant nasty that you can’t defeat (assuming there are no other story elements in play or problem solving mechanics to deploy).
I just think a DM has to be careful to weigh the two methods and tailor the result to what his players enjoy.
thadeousc
June 23, 2010
I think to make overpowered situations work in 4e the DM should never shy away from being the inner voice of the players and let them know when they might be over their heads. To quote my game from last Monday
Me: “you hear the sound of multiple foot steps, more than 10 less than 50”
Player: “This is one of those times when running would be a good idea huh?”
Me: “You character does get that feeling”
Player: “Hey guys I think it’s time to get the heck out of here”
You only waste your players time if you either let them think it’s balanced the whole time or lead them to believe it. There is nothing that says you can’t drop hints or straight up tell them that it’s time to go.
GuiguiBob
June 23, 2010
Since I run a more cinematic games rather than realism, I go for winnable encounters but I plan in case they fail it as I would plan if they failed a skill challenge
I try to vary the difficulty. it’s always fun to have an easier battle after levelling up to test those shiny new abilities. If I was to send them aginst an unwinnable encounter I would probably go with the 4e way of giving them one or two early pointers and have some idea if they stay and slug it. That way you don’t lose PCs central to the story but you still give them failure. In a way failure doesn’t have to be their character death. Your BBEG can kill some of their family or get them in a slave camp or something else BBEG do.
I guess the idea is that death isn’t the only form a setback should take ( espescially since they can use rasie dead or bring in a new PC of equal lvl)
Sersa V
June 23, 2010
I’ve done both. In the interest of disclosure, me and my players grew up on 3.5 and currently all play 4E (though we dabble in AD&D/S&W).
My current 4E campaign is structured as the ‘traditional’ mega-dungeon (10-level castle), with the threats on each level scaled to its depth. The players have opportunities to move to dungeon levels higher than their current level – sometimes vastly so – and thus the increased risk of an overpowering encounter is there, should they be so enticed by the reward and choose to venture deeper.
Alternatively, I’ve run games where things were scaled by the book, because nobody really cared about ‘realism’ and just wanted an excuse to swing imaginary swords and cast imaginary spells and equally-imaginary monsters.
Great post as always; thought-provoking. 🙂
lurkinggherkin
June 23, 2010
I wrote a post on this a while back as part of my ‘Asymmetry in Roleplay’ series.
http://www.covengaming.org/wordpress/?p=115
Basically, I’m with you on this. Perfectly balanced encounters all the way = broken immersion. But some people don’t ‘get’ immersion….
Another thing is that if you don’t kick the party’s arse once in a while, they develop an insufferable sense of entitlement and disrespect for the world you’ve created, and think that your role is just to provide an endless stream of targets for them to inevitably take down and loot. At the same time, it’s not good for them to feel that you’ve deliberately placed them in a no-win situation. The answer is to have powerful enemies that they can, with the application of a little caution and intelligence, avoid fighting. Then they have no-one to blame but themselves if they just swagger in there and expect to breeze it.
Jeff Hollingsworth
June 23, 2010
Here’s my thoughts… the game world IS tailored to them. If it isn’t, then the players are playing FOR the DM, not WITH the DM. I say that because DnD isn’t a game designed around DM wish fulfillment, it’s about wish fulfillment for the entire group. I’ve played 4e and 3.5 with more experience with 3.5 and I have to admit when I fight a battle that was almost completely impossible to win, I feel like I wasted my evening other than the fun time I had hanging out with my friends.
If there’s not story reason to be had for a Beholder to be sitting in the king’s dungeon waiting for you to make a wrong decision, or if the party fights Drow at 1st level simply because the DM thinks Drow are awesome and doesn’t want to wait to reveal them until the party is powerful enough, it doesn’t make sense for a co-operative gaming experience. This is not to say there aren’t times when the party should run. All out of daily powers (4e) or ran through spells and power points (3.5)? Run! You knew you had the get the Scepter of Kill That Thing to kill That Thing and you met him? Run! But Ancient Red Dragon in the Tavern’s Attic Because It’s Cool… is not cool.
Ismael_DM
June 23, 2010
In general I scale the world with the adventurers.
That being said, I love throwing in the occasional encounter that the players are not equipped to fight. Case-in-point I had an encounter where the PCs needed to obtain an object from a dais which was guarded by undead. Once the object was removed the undead were unending (sarcophagi would spawn more and more). The undead were not particularly difficult and could be killed by the PCs but not before more were spawned.
I had three ways, in my mind, for the encounter to play out: TPK, the character’s retreat with the object, the character’s are able to disable/destroy the sarcophagi (very hard). PCs, being what they are, wiped up 1/2 a wave of undead before the next came. The PCs picked up on the situation quickly and did in fact disable a few sarcophagi before they were forced to flee. The character’s got full XP for the encounter and later came back with a full contingent of clergy of Ilmater to halt the undead. [Turns out the makers of the trap skimped, it wasn’t unending it was only several hundred.]
lurkinggherkin
June 23, 2010
Case in point to illustrate my above post; I recently ran an adventure where the party were trying to sneak in to a mad alchemists laboratory and rescue an important prisoner. They’d been warned of dreadful horrors lurking in the dungeons beneath his mansion. They started by sneaking in via the sewers (which were swarming with giant maggots, that had fed up on alchemical waste from the labs). Their initial approach was very stealthy, taking pains to prevent any of the alchemist’s gnoll minions from raising the alarm. Then they started getting over-confident and reckless and reverted to just charging at everything. The alarm was raised and an alchemical golem emerged from a storage chamber and started blasting away with acid globs. They had nothing that could touch it; it killed a party member and the others escaped by the skin of their teeth. All completely preventable if they’d used a little more smarts.
Mad Brew
June 23, 2010
Like you, I take the WorldBuilder’s approach, as I call it. The world, as a whole, doesn’t (though some NPCs or reoccurring villains do) scale with the PCs. If the cave near the Endless Swamp is full of lowly Kobolds at PC level 1, then (unless there’s a story/reason behind it) it will remain full of the same peons at level 20. Same for more powerful creatures.
I try to make things make sense in the context that it could be a real, live world. One that exists with or without the PCs, yet one that the PCs can indelibly leave their mark upon.
However, the plot hooks I throw at players definitely scale with their level. There may be “undefeatable” monsters near the path, but none they must encounter to progress along the current storyline. However, I still try to have rumors/news of events that occur outside the PCs level of influence, but those are clearly tagged with “bigger than you can handle now” labels.
I think it’s important that GMs define their style in the beginning, and let players know that not everything they encounter is meant to be fought. Friction and discontent at a game table occurs from not meeting expectations. Therefore, I would say a GM shouldn’t switch from the 4e Monster School mode of play to the WorldBuilder mode of play without notifying their group first.
DMSamuel
June 23, 2010
Okay, as a member of this blog carnival, I call the next post rights. I will have it posted on rpgmusings.com within 24hours.
newbiedm
June 23, 2010
I can’t say I’m too surprised at the differences of opinion on this topic. It really comes down to DMing styles and player expectations.
Great comments all around guys!
Brian Engard
June 23, 2010
As I mentioned in my post in this blog carnival, I tailor the world for the PCs, but that doesn’t mean that all the fights are winnable as straight-up fights. What this means is that, sometimes I put a monster in their way that’s too hard for them. But if I do so, I try to be clear with them (without just coming out and saying it, of course) that the point of this encounter is not to simply kill this monster (which they likely can’t yet). I give them an alternative goal, and the monster simply becomes incredibly dangerous and tense window dressing for an encounter that’s really about something else entirely.
I also want to chime in about monsters of high levels living in the world by saying simply this: levels are an abstraction. Nobody in the world knows what level a beholder should be; they just know that it’s an incredibly powerful creature that only the bravest and most capable adventurers would dare go up against. If your players want to go off and fight that beholder in the cave over there–you know, the one you warned them about and tried to tell them, subtly, not to fight–and you have the opportunity to design the encounter, then ask yourself this question: do I want a TPK here, just to teach my players a lesson? If they answer is yes, then fine. It’s not what I would do, personally, but to each their own. If you don’t want to derail your game to teach your players a lesson, then make the encounter winnable. It doesn’t need to be easy, and it should be scary. But maybe the players will have to discover some trick of the environment before they really have a fighting chance, but at least give them that fighting chance.
Failing that, give them an out. Allow them to fight the thing, allow them to see that they’re out-gunned, and show them how they can escape with their hides. Maybe there’s some cost associated with this escape: they have to sacrifice a beloved NPC or mount or pet or piece of gear.
My point is: use too-powerful monsters in the world if you want, to add verisimilitude. Tell the players about them, and tell them they’re not quite powerful enough to fight them yet. But do so at your own risk. Levels are a game construct, and mean nothing within the narrative. Without breaking immersion, how do you tell your players that they’re simply not high enough level yet? How do they know? They may decide, after a series of decisive wins, that they’re feeling powerful enough to take that dragon or beholder or on. You’ve warned them, but they want to anyway. The thing to remember is that this is just as much their game as it is yours, and if they’re telling you what’s interesting and fun for them, it’s your responsibility as a DM to pick up their cues and make it fun for everyone, even if they wind up taking a thumping. Because really, a TPK isn’t much fun for anyone.
Johnnii
June 23, 2010
I prefer to use the “Solo-elite-standard-minion” scaling.
That is, a monster might be a Standard at a certain level. If the PCs encounter that monster at too early levels, I level him down and bump him to an elite instead. Or if the PCs are too high level for it to be a threat, I raise the level and convert it to a minion. For an elite in this way, I convert it to a Solo. This gives it a higher level of threat, both in mechanics and narrative sense, without it having unhittable defenses that just makes the fight boring.
WHassinger
June 23, 2010
I came up against this when I modified the “Rescue at Rivenroar” adventure. I changed the undead into their own faction in the game world and needed to make their boss something to be feared. Rather than have them engage in a fight that they couldn’t win, I made a chase scene using a Skill Challenge with escalating difficulties as they tried to get the prisoners out, dodge angry ghost things, and generally get the hell out of the dungeon. I wasn’t pass/fail either, but rather once they were over the “fail” limit they would start getting seriously injured with the distinct possibility of death (mostly for the NPCs) if they did a lot of failing. It worked well and made the big bad far more impressive than an actual fight would have at that stage.
Dean
June 23, 2010
One problem with throwing encounters of significantly different level from the PCs is that it still takes a substantial amount of time before the encounter is resolved. This is due to the fact that the major differences between levels of monsters is mostly to-hit bonuses and defenses. Damage and effects generally don’t scale as much.
If the PCs are significantly higher than their opponents, those monsters will find it very difficult to be hit…and while the PCs certainly will hit more often (especially for PCs with lower attack bonuses), they won’t do more damage (though they will get their effects off). However, it still will take quite a bit of time to grind through the hp.
Conversely, with significantly higher level monsters (I’m looking at you Kalarel), even though the monsters will be hitting more, it still will be quite awhile before they can really grind through the PC’s hp…and the PCs will find it frustrating when they can’t really do much to the monsters.
In earlier editions, when there is a significant difference in power, the combats were over very quickly…but in 4e that’s not so much the case.
Dean
June 23, 2010
As a follow up, I have put a massively more powerful creature in the PC’s face…but it wanted to talk. But I warned the players…”This monster will treat you as a minion…with all the characteristics you’ve come to associate with them”.
Bercilak
June 23, 2010
Before we can have this debate adequately, we have to decide the role that player knowledge plays in a game. The players of an OSR game (assuming they played those games before they were “OS”) know that a ghoul is quite dangerous for a 1st-level PC. But does the character know that? When I first started playing AD&D, the buildup of knowledge was one of the signs of a good player. But in more recent editions, that focus more on the character than on the player (i.e. compare a 1e puzzle with a 4e skill challenge puzzle), the shift is to character knowledge. So 4e has knowledge checks that help a PC determine how tough an encounter is.
So, I guess my question is (to echo Mr. Engard earlier), how do you let the players know that they might fight ghouls (beholders, dragons, drow, etc.)? Or do you just toss the monsters at them and see if they are smart enough to run when the first PCs go down?
Behemoth0089
June 23, 2010
Well, I was thinking about that a couple weeks ago, but in the other way, the characters facing monsters of lower level than them, and its really a troublesome stuff. First of all, its completely true when you said that use balanced encounters all the time take realistic stuff away and builds a world like the one in the Truman Show, so I think players should face monsters (as well as traps an hazards that other intelligent creatures left on purpose) of higher levels as well as lower, because the world is just big enough (I mean, PCs couldn’t kill all the goblins in the world when they reach lvl 30!) and its “alive”. But I think its easy to solve this, at least is what I do. If PCs increase lvl, they become famous in certain areas, so people will call them for more dangerous tasks because they already handled that now ‘minor’ danger, so why calling them again for the same thing, if there’re more adventurers in the world seeking for some fame and glorious?
So, what I would do is use some of that high and low lvl monsters as wandering monsters in random encounters, like when traveling in a desert or a forest. That way, you can handle the “reality” in a coherent way with the character’s lvl
DM Samuel
June 23, 2010
Posted the next entry in this little blog carnival we have going on. You can find it here:
http://www.rpgmusings.com/2010/06/blog-carnival-overpowered-sandboxes-and-just-right-rails/
Cheers,
DMSamuel
Thunderforge
June 23, 2010
The game is about fun first and foremost. I always keep that in mind. It’s no fun to always have unbeatable encounters, but it’s also no fun to know that you’ll win no matter what you do. There must be some danger.
Perfectly balanced encounters every single encounter is just plain boring. That’s not to say I’ll send Orcus against level ones (at least without pulling some deus ex machina to save them), but there has to be some fight every now and then in which they will have a difficult time to defeat. Otherwise, players get overconfident and worse, get bored and quit having a good time. I’ve seen this on both the DM’s side and the Player’s side. If you’re automatically going to win every encounter, why bother playing?
thadeousc
June 24, 2010
Bercilak I want to stress that this isn’t about debate. I sincerely doubt there will be many minds changed. I started this to bring my views to light and to get others to do the same so I could understand why they disagree with my original statement.
Charisma
June 24, 2010
Are there any supplements/modules/adventures out there that have very high-level encounters written out, just in case the PCs are stupid enough to try them? I haven’t seen any. This is why, I think, everyone assumes encounters can be won. I’d like to see an encounter written in a module that is explicitly above the capabilities of the PCs – you know, just in case the PCs try it.
Behemoth0089
June 25, 2010
@Charisma Well, actually you can do that if you own the Dungeon Delve book, am I wrong?