Building Bhakashal - "Balanced" Encounters and Scaling the Game

One of the things I get the most pushback about when I discuss TTRPGS is the idea of NOT scaling the encounters to the party. 

Boilerplate disclaimer - I am not suggesting that my way of playing is “better”, “best” or that other ways of playing are “worst”, or “wrong”. This is not a normative post but a descriptive one. 

And of course, it isn’t strictly true that encounters in our game are not scaled. I don’t send first level parties up against ancient red dragons, so there is clearly SOME SENSE of level appropriateness to the game. However, this fit is LOOSE, and it is helpful to dive in a bit and discuss this looseness of fit to see how this actually works at the table.

The key observation here is that I don’t generally create encounters with the party in mind. I create an environment, a situation, a set of factional relationships, an encounter or element, but I do not look at the characters and use their stats and information to guide what I put into the encounter. 

To be clear, this is 100% antithetical to current approaches towards D&D and related games. You are expected to weave the PC’s backstories and goals into the adventure, to ensure that “everyone has a chance to shine” in the session, to “advance the story”, to “hit story beats” and ensure that the “challenge” of the encounter is calibrated to the PCs. I do none of these things when I put together encounters or parts of the setting.

To address the first question that is no doubt in the minds of many, do I have a lot of TPK’s? And the answer is, no, I do not. Do my players fail more often than they succeed? Again, no. Do my players complain about the fairness of the game given that I don’t scale encounters to the party? Also no.

So there is clearly something up. I don’t use any “CR” calculations, I don’t scale encounters to the party, I don’t even have the party’s abilities in mind when I create the encounters. So how does this all work?

1. Focus on the Group - First off, the focus needs to shift. Stop thinking about this as “how do I, as the ref, scale my encounters for the party to be fair and fun”, and replace it with, “How can I fairly signal to the party the threat level of what they are encountering so they can make the decision about whether or not to take the risk and engage”. It’s a very different kind of question to ask. The “job” of the ref is to create the game world and have it respond to the players, not to calibrate the game world to the PCs. The job of selecting which challenges to engage with, and how to engage with them, is ENTIRELY up to the players. 

2. Game versus Storytelling - It is helpful to think of D&D as a GAME, not a “shared storytelling experience”, and the point of a GAME is not to tailor the difficulty to the players, but to enable the players to engage with the game, whatever level of difficulty is chosen.

3. Provide Options - Another way to shift the thinking about this is to start asking another question, “Have I provided a rich and varied enough game world that my players have a range of options, of differing degrees of difficulty, to choose from?” One of the reasons “balance” matters in TTRPGs is that there is an expectation that the players will choose to play whatever is put in front of them. If you don’t have a choice then it’s a bit churlish for the ref to create an encounter they know you can’t handle and you can’t avoid as “that’s what we are playing tonight.”

4. Shared Responsibility - Groups that play in this sort of game will fairly quickly learn that it is THEIR responsibility to gauge the difficulty of encounters and then decide whether to engage, parlay, flee, etc. The party decides if the adventure is too difficult, the party decides if it is time to cut losses, the party decides if they have what they need to win. Not the ref. This sort of shift in perspective is hard for many people as they are attached to the idea that the ref has a responsibility to guide the game to achieve a particular kind of “story”. For me this is exactly the problem, the ref isn’t responsible for your good time or for creating any kind of story, fun is a GROUP responsibility, and the player’s part of that relationship is to decide how to engage the game world in any given encounter.

5. Focus on Combat - Cultivating this approach will cut down SIGNIFICANTLY on your party’s tendency to KILL ANYTHING THAT MOVES. One of my after school D&D players once captured this sentiment perfectly when he said, “Why shouldn’t I kill that guard, what’s the worst that could happen, he’s only a zero level guard”. When the party expects that all challenges will be manageable they tend to drift towards just taking out anyone that gets in their way. Why wouldn’t they? They know that the encounter is beatable, so slaying enemies is simpler than trying to negotiate or create an alliance. Take away the net of “balance encounters” and watch how fast your players will change their tune. Sure, that guard is very likely beatable, but there are going to be plenty of cases when that isn’t true. Removing “balance” from encounters was one of the most important steps in removing needless combat from my game. 

6. Accepting Failure - Failures or “setbacks” are often considered to be a problem with game design, as, the argument goes, players do not enjoy a game where they fail, the fun is in the rousing successes. I think this is both short sighted and fundamentally flawed. Part of what makes the successes sweet is precisely that the road to get there was hard. 

7. Game Mechanics - Another reason for excessive focus on “challenge ratings” and encounter balance is the nature of the game mechanical rewards for adventuring, e.g. experience points. If you tie experience (XP) to defeating monsters, then defeating monsters becomes the focus of the game, and “challenge rating” becomes important as it has an impact on whether or not  you can secure that loot. 1e AD&D solved this particular problem by disconnecting XP from monsters. Yes, slaying a monster gets you XP, but by far the most significant contributor to XP is loot. So it becomes both feasible and recommended to AVOID combat where possible and look for clever solutions to get to that loot. In a situation like this, it’s not about the ref calibrating the encounter to the party, it’s about the party weighing the risks and rewards of trying to circumvent the monsters to get to the loot. 

8. Surprise! - One of the most pernicious impacts of scaling encounters is the inevitable sameness it produces. If you know that encounters are going to be scaled to the party, it becomes much easier to guess what you will be encountering. Low level groups fight endless hordes of low level mooks, mooks+wizard or mooks+ evil priest becomes the template. Nothing wrong with either, but removing the “balance” restrictions frees up space for novelty.

9. Ease of Play - When you have a “challenge rating/ encounter difficulty is on the ref” mindset, encounters become a maze of estimations and calibrations in order to ensure that the encounter is indeed, “balanced” for the party. It puts FAR TOO MUCH weight on the ref to ensure that things turn out “properly”. Once you abandon this idea, then you let the encounters run as they may, and let the players decide how to address any concerns that come up.

10. Risk and Reward - Another benefit of losing the focus on encounter balance is that you will start to see a change in the kind of encounters the party has. Sometimes they will have a cake-walk, other times a reasonable challenge, and sometimes they will get their asses handed to them. The excitement that this will inject into your campaign might just shock you. When the players AND the ref are not sure how the encounter will go, whether the players will be challenged or not, the game takes on a new level of engagement. When you can’t predict, the excitement comes back to the process. And some sessions they will KICK ASS, and get some much needed confidence. In other sessions they will have their asses kicked, and it will remind them to be wary. What makes this all work is that you can’t predict what will happen. If they are ALWAYS getting their asses kicked it isn’t fun, if they always dominate it isn’t fun either. Removing the shackles of “balanced encounters” will free your fun.

An Example

As with most things, examples help to show how this is supposed to work. Here is one from my Tuesday night after school D&D game.

My Tuesday group rolled up new 1st level PCs last week after wrapping up a one year campaign with their last characters. All of them but one decided that they wanted to run druids, the last one decided on an illusionist. Now, I have expanded the druid spell list considerably for my game, but the basics remain the same, 1-8 HP at first level, two weapons, light armor only, bad “to hit” and “saving throw” numbers at 1st, etc. 

Normally the first order of business is to get the PCs set up with a patron, but the lads decided they wanted to “free form” adventure for a bit before being tied down to a particular patron. So they went to the local tavern for food, drink and people watching. 

Now, as a ref in a sandbox campaign, this is all good. They don’t have to engage with the hooks I provide, and I was ready to give them a patron, but that can wait. So they went to the Black Boar tavern and had some food and drink and listened to the locals discuss local things. 

At this point I rolled on the rumor table, and the following came up, 

“...a day worker harvesting Brogah blossoms was found dead in the fields of House Hyin, she was torn to pieces...” 

So that was the bit the party heard. They asked a few questions of the locals who were talking about this (they were all day laborers and were lamenting that the employer wasn’t going to investigate what happened), and then they decided to go to the Brogah fields at night and see what they could find. 

Now, just to be clear, the rumor table entry is exactly as it is quoted above. It says nothing about what killed the laborer. That’s left to the ref to improvise when and if the encounter happens. If I was concerned with encounter balance I would have looked for some appropriate 1st level monster to engage with. Instead, I went to the random encounter tables and rolled on them, with the expectation that whatever I rolled had to meet a few criteria, it had to be small enough to be able to enter the fields repeatedly without being noticed, it had to be deadly enough to slay someone without significant difficulty, it had to have claws or teeth, it had to be fairly aggressive and violent, it had to prey on humanoids and it had to have some degree of stealth. Anything that fit these requirements would work.

So I rolled and got “three wererats”, and that was the encounter.

Now, as any D&D player will tell you, three wererats is a TPK territory encounter for four first level PCs. The threat of lycanthropy, the resistance to non-magical weapons, 4 HD, most first level parties would be destroyed by three wererats, particularly if surprise is involved (and they surprise on a 1-4). So the “balanced encounter ref” would drop this result and re-roll it rather than running an “imbalanced” encounter.

Not this guy.

So the party went to the fields and started to poke around at night. As it happens they were surprised by the wererats, and all three descended on the party. Three to hit rolls, one was successful, and did 3hp of damage, not enough to kill the PC, but enough to reduce them to 2 hp. 

Then we rolled for initiative. The party was lucky, and attacked first, discovering that their non-magical weapons were ineffective against the wererats. 

That produced howls of fear from the players. How were they going to defeat three monsters that are immune to non-magical weapons when none of them had magical weapons? 

Not my problem.

They decided to wade into an encounter without knowing what they would be fighting, and in this case it was something that is hard to defeat. Now their job was to triage this situation and figure out how to survive. 

That’s what makes it exciting, they know there is no safety net, no fudging, no “ref saves  your ass”, it’s ALL ON THEM and they are DEEP IN IT. This is the beating heart of exciting old school play. 

So they got creative. 

They fled in different directions, risking attacks of opportunity against each of them, two of those hit and did enough damage that the PCs had 1, 3 and 4 HP left, with one of them at full HP with 6. Still, they got their distance. 

Then two of them tried for entangle spells, as they were in a field, one didn’t cast fast enough, but the other did, and snagged all four of the wererats. One made it’s save and was slowed 50%, the rest failed and were entangled. They considered setting the plants on fire to burn the wererats, but decided against it as they might set the entire crop on fire, that wasn’t the goal.

If this were a “scaled” encounter, they would just attack whatever they found as they expected to be able to win, because they know I don’t scale encounters, they also don’t know if they will be able to win using any one particular method. So they consider that setting the plants on fire might burn the whole crop to the ground, as fire might be the only solution they have. In short, they have to THINK about what they do as success is not guaranteed.  

Now, at this point they could have bolted, the entangle spell would have slowed or held the wererats long enough for them to flee and find the city watch, or just flee the area to avoid the wererats. 

Nahhh. They wanted to defeat the wererats and gain the repute (and loot!) that came with it. Then one of the players realized that the Shillelagh spell makes a club or staff into a +1 weapon, so they could damage the wererats. Honestly I had forgotten about the spell, so it was a surprise to me as well. One of the PCs also had a net, after some quick debate they decided he would throw it on two of the wererats, cast Shillelagh on a staff and a club, end the entangle spell then attack the wererats as they emerged. 

It was a crazy plan, if either of the wererats who left the entangle hit one of the PCs it would likely be instant death at their HP totals. They knew it too, but this was the only way forward at this point.

Devil take the hindmost and all that.

So the entangle was dropped and two of the wererats came forward to attack. The Shillelagh wielding druids stepped up and initiative was rolled. The party won, and two Shillelaghs were swung, tagging both wererats solidly.  Fortunately the next two wererat attacks missed. The next round found two more hits with the now-magical clubs, both doing damage. 

Round three happens, one of the freed wererats tags a PC for 5 HP damage, reducing him to 1 hp. The Shillelagh’s swing and another hit, and one of the wererats falls, bloody, to the ground.

Now the morale rules from 1e kick in, the wererats are taking hits and giving few, two of their group are caught up in a net, one was down and the other was being beaten quite effectively with a magical club. Morale was rolled, the wererats failed, and when they emerged from the net they fled. The last wererat was now outnumbered and they managed to subdue it without killing it. 

It was seat of the pants all the way, and they had no idea what to do when it started. On paper it was a TPK in the making, and to survive it they had to get smart and take risks. What I find particularly fascinating about all of this is that:

1. They LOVED this encounter

2. They almost died

3. They had to be creative to succeed

4. This encounter never would have happened if I “balanced” encounters in the game.

Of course, a few bad rolls or strategic mistakes and this all could have went south into TPK territory. But, honestly, that would have just made for a terrific story, “hey, remember that time we all rolled up druids and were SHREDDED by wererats? Good times man.”

It’s not a gaming style for everyone, that’s important to realize. But note how it made things immensely easier for the referee. I just had to run the wererats, there was no need to delicately balance anything, or fudge results on the fly. They KNEW they could meet things well beyond their pay grade, and that’s exactly what happened. They took RISKS, and they garnered REWARDS. This was NOT a balanced encounter, but it was an exciting, tactically challenging and rewarding one to run and experience. And the players had a righteous sense of achievement, they met a foe that was more powerful than they were, and they defeated that foe fair and square. You can’t buy that sense of accomplishment, they KNOW I don’t scale encounters, so if they win at my table the win it THEIRS, not MINE.

So the next time you contemplate “balance”, or hear about someone who had to constantly “tweak” dice rolls and stats to make an encounter “survivable” remember that there is another way. Set up encounters and let the PLAYERS decide if they are up to the challenge or not.