Let’s talk about encounter balance.

A common misconception is that the challenge rating system in D&D is meant to guarantee specific encounter outcomes: The CR = X, therefore the encounter will end with precisely Y resources depleted.

This isn’t really true. Furthermore, I would argue that it’s not possible for any challenge rating system to accomplish this (unless you so thoroughly constrain player choice as to choke out the creative heart of an RPG), because a challenge rating system is inherently limited in the systemic knowledge it can have about a specific encounter.

Factors beyond the scope of 5^th Edition’s challenge rating system, for example, include:

• Players’ tactical skills
• Variance in character builds
• Environment
• Encounter distance
• Stat block synergy (in both PCs and opponents)
• Equipment
• Random dice rolls

(I frequently get static on listing random dice rolls here: “But probability!” Yes, probability exists. But, first, the number of dice rolls in a single fight are often too few for probability to become truly relevant — for the results to conform to the expected value — except over multiple encounters. And, second, the entire point of random dice rolls is to have random outcomes. QED.)

Does this mean that the challenge rating system is pointless?

Not at all. The function of the challenge rating system is to help the DM identify monsters and build encounters that are in the right ballpark. Our first hot take today is that the challenge rating system is actually pretty effective at doing that. And, furthermore, that’s all it needs to do and, arguably, all that it should do.

Despite this, DMs are constantly lured by the siren call of hyper-precision: If we could just account for every single variable, we could guarantee specific outcomes! We wouldn’t even need the players at all! Their choices wouldn’t matter!

(That, by the way, is why this is not actually a desirable goal, even if it was achievable.)

There are several reasons for this.

Partly, it’s the allure of false precision: If we have a Challenge Rating Table, then the designers need to put numbers on the table. And no matter how many times they use words like “maybe” or “might” or “roughly” in describing the function of that table, this can create the expectation that hitting that precise number is important. (In reality, the difference between a 1,600 XP and 1,700 XP encounter is essentially nonexistent.)

The labels applied to different encounter levels also seem prone to misinterpretation. I find this varies depending on the methodology used for the label. In the case of 5^th Edition D&D, the designers have generally chosen a label which describes the worst case scenario. For example, a “Deadly” encounter doesn’t mean “this encounter is likely to result in a TPK.” It actually means that there’s a risk you’ll see at least one PC making death saving throws. (You can think of the possible outcomes of an encounter as being mapped to a bell curve: The outcome of an 8^th-level encounter might, in actual practice, be the average result of anything from a 4^th-level encounter to a 12^th-level encounter. The 5^th Edition label is generally describing a result somewhere a little off to the right side of the bell curve.)

But the final factor is linear campaigns.

THE PROBLEM WITH LINEAR CAMPAIGNS

I’m occasionally accused of hating linear campaigns. This is not the case. I dislike predetermined plots, but that’s not the same thing. I’ve actually talked in the past about how to design linear campaigns, and in So You Want To Be a Game Master I actually have several chapters and adventure recipes for creating linear scenarios.

(A linear scenario is also not the same thing as a railroad. It’s accurate to say that I loathe railroads, and everything I talk about here is probably ten times more true if you’re railroading your players.)

There are, however, consequences for using a linear structure. (Just as there is for using any structure.) This is particularly true if you only use linear structures, which can be the unfortunate case for many DMs who don’t have alternative scenario structures in their repertoire.

A linear scenario inherently means that you, as the DM, are preparing a specific sequence of experiences/scenes/encounters/whatever you want to call them. The players will experience A, then they will experience B, then they will experience C, and so forth.

A consequence of this style of prep, therefore, is that the DM is solely responsible for what the PCs will be doing. This creates an enormous pressure on the DM, because you’d better get it right: You’d better get the spotlight balance right and make sure that every single PC has an equal chance to shine, because otherwise you’re making it difficult or impossible for one of the players to participate. And you’d better get the combat balance right, because forcing the players into fights they can’t win is a dick move.

So the DM will, naturally, spend more effort carefully crafting each encounter to make sure it works. Ironically, the more specific their prep becomes for each situation, the more weight is placed on their shoulders to make sure they get it right. This can quickly decay into a vicious cycle, with the DM pouring more and more effort into every single encounter in order to meet ever-rising expectations. The result is often My Precious Encounters™, in which every encounter is lovingly crafted, carefully balanced, painstakingly pre-constructed, and utterly indispensable (because you’ve spent so much time “perfecting” it).

… and then the challenge rating system isn’t hyper-precise and the players mop up the whole thing with a couple of quick spells?!

This is an outrage!

I guess we’ll just need to lock down more choices, get out the shackles, and try even harder next time guarantee the encounter works exactly as we predetermined it should.

NON-LINEAR BALANCE

Some of you reading this may be thinking, “Okay… but what’s the alternative?”

And when I say that the alternative is non-linear scenarios, your gut reaction is likely to be, “You mean design even more encounters? And the players might not even encounter some of them? I can’t do that! Do you know how much work I put into these encounters?!”

In truth, however, non-linear design is a completely different paradigm: The players are now able, to at least some extent, choose the experiences they’re going to have. And because the players now have responsibility for what they do and how they do it, that weight is lifted from the DM’s shoulders.

Looking at just the issue of combat balance, for example, if the PCs run into an encounter in a linear adventure that they can’t defeat, that’s a disaster! They can’t move forward unless they defeat the encounter, and they can’t defeat it, so they’re completely stuck. It’s as if they lived on an island and the only bridge to the mainland was closed for construction.

In a non-linear scenario or campaign, on the other hand, if the PCs run into an encounter they can’t defeat (or which they just think they can’t defeat or which doesn’t look fun to them), then they can just change direction and find a route around that encounter. Or, alternatively, go and do something else until they level up, gain magic items, make allies, or otherwise become powerful enough to take out the challenge that was previously thwarting them.

You can see an analogous set of paradigms in video game RPGs: Some will allow players to grind XP, allowing them to dial in the mechanical difficulty they’re comfortable dealing with at their level of skill. Other CRPGs will level up the world around the PCs or limit the total amount of XP they can earn. The former games can appeal to a broader range of skill levels and the designers have a lot more leeway or flexibility in how they design the challenges in the game. The latter games have a lot less flexibility, and players can end up completely stuck (due to lack of skill, a mistake in their character build, disability, or any number of factors).

LINEAR BALANCE WITH MILESTONES

Okay, but you want to run a linear adventure. Maybe that’s the best structure for the campaign you’ve got planned. Maybe you’ve picked up a published adventure that uses a linear structure and it’s just not working: It’s too easy or it’s too hard, and you want it just right.

Fortunately, there’s an incredibly powerful tool you can use for balancing linear campaigns: Milestone leveling.

The trick is that you just need to ditch the idea of hardcoding the level ups to specific beats in the campaign. Instead, after each scenario, do an assessment of how your encounter balance is working in actual practice:

Are the players cruising through stuff? Increase the difficulty of encounters. If you’ve been designing 6th-level encounters, bump them up to 7^th-level encounters. (You can also change the balance of Easy/Medium/Hard/Deadly encounters you’re using, or do half-step bumps in XP budgets between levels.)

Are the players feeling challenged? You’re in the sweet spot. You can hold in that sweet spot for X sessions, with the number X being adjusted to your personal taste. Then you can start increasing the difficulty by steps again until…

Are things getting really tough for the PCs? Level them up (without immediately shifting encounter difficulty) and then assess.

One thing to be aware of is that this doesn’t work great for 1^st-level characters, which are very fragile (and kind of need special treatment when it comes to encounter building in general).

Another thing to keep in mind is that you need to miss very low and for a very long time for “too easy” to ruin your campaign; you only have to miss once for “too hard” to TPK the group. So, when in doubt, you’re generally better off aiming low and then adjusting up.

You’ll also likely discover that sometimes PCs will level up, feel like they’re in the sweet spot, and then suddenly everything gets easier and they’re cruising through encounters that are too easy. What’s likely happened is that the players have figured out how their new abilities work (and, importantly, work together), allowing them to perfect their tactics.

You can see the opposite effect happen if the PCs have been fighting one type of monsters for awhile, but then the campaign shifts and they’re suddenly fighting completely different monsters. Experienced difficulty may momentarily spike until they get a feel for the new creatures.

It’s also not a bad idea to check in with the players periodically and see how they’re feeling about the difficulty level in the campaign. They won’t always be right, but neither will you, so comparing notes can help you find the sweet spot for your group.

“Hey! Isn’t that actually Level Advancement Without XP?” Sorry, folks. The ship sailed on this one back in 2014 when every single official adventure started referring to “you pick events in the campaign when the characters level up” as milestone XP. “Milestone” is just too convenient a term for the form of level advancement best suited to these linear adventures. If you have any complaints about this, please address them to Wizards of the Coast.

LINEAR BALANCE WITHOUT MILESTONES

“But I don’t want to use milestone XP! I want to give XP for combat!”

… you just want to make things difficult, don’t you?

That’s okay. Once you understand the principles described above, you can accomplish the same effect with combat/challenge-based XP, it will just be a little more obfuscated.

Specifically, with XP awards, the PCs will be gaining levels at a certain pace. If they’re cruising through encounters, you just need to increase the difficulty of the encounters they’re facing at a faster pace than the pace they’re leveling at. (So in the time they’ve gone from 6^th to 7^th level with everything feeling too easy, the encounters you’re building will have gone from 6^th level to 8^th level or maybe even 9^th level. Or, conversely, if the encounters have been too tough for them, you might hold the encounter design at 6^th level even though they’ve leveled up to 7^th.)

In other words, it’s the same process of dialing in: It’s just made slightly more complicated by the PCs being a moving target.

OTHER FAQs

“Doesn’t this mean that my 7^th-level PCs could end up facing, I dunno, 11^th-level encounters?”

Quite possibly. Or your specific group of 7^th-level PCs might be better served by 5^th-level encounters. If it makes you feel better, even by-the-book 11^th-level Medium encounters are actually easier than 7^th-level Deadly encounters, so you’ve probably already been doing this.

More importantly, these are just arbitrary numbers. The important thing is that you and your players are having fun: If your players are really good at tactical planning or they’ve managed to get their hands on an unexpectedly powerful magical artifact, that can easily mean that they’re capable of punching above their by-the-book weight-class.

And you know what? That sounds fun to me!

“I’m running a published adventure. How do I ‘increase the difficulty’? Do I need to rebuild the encounters?”

Instead of adjusting encounter difficulty, just skip the next milestone level suggested by the scenario. You can see a similar technique in Random D&D Tip: Adjusting Encounters by Party Size.

“Couldn’t I use these same principles when designing non-linear scenarios or campaigns?”

Absolutely!

For scenarios, you’re generally targeting a certain difficulty in your encounter design regardless of whether it’s a linear or non-linear scenario. This technique is about dialing in what your current target should be in the challenge rating system, so it works just as well either way.

For a non-linear campaigns, you want to avoid the potential pitfall of leveling up the campaign world. So if you’ve got a structure like a megadungeon or hexcrawl, where the players can already dial in their preferred difficulty level, this technique probably isn’t going to be particularly useful. But it can find application in some node-based campaigns and freeform sandboxes.

FURTHER READING
Revisiting Encounter Design
The Many Types of Balance
Fetishizing Balance
The Death of the Wandering Monster
Adversary Rosters

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People have a problem with traps: They’re boring.

Not only are they boring when they’re triggered — with the DM arbitrarily telling you to make a saving throw at the penalty of suffering some minor amount of damage — they engender boring play by encouraging players to turtle up and methodically, laboriously, and excruciatingly examine every square inch of the dungeon in torrid bouts of pace-murdering paranoia.

And if you feel this way, you’re in illustrious company. Here’s Gary Gygax giving some of the worst GMing advice you’ll hopefully ever read (Dungeon Master’s Guide, 1979):

Assume your players are continually wasting time (thus making the so-called adventure drag out into a boring session of dice rolling and delay) if they are checking endlessly for traps and listening at every door. If this persists, despite the obvious displeasure you express, the requirement that helmets be doffed and mail coifs removed to listen at a door, and then be carefully replaced, the warnings about ear seekers, and frequent checks for wandering monsters (q.v.), then you will have to take more direct part in things. Mocking their over-cautious behavior as near cowardice, rolling huge handfuls of dice and then telling them the results are negative, and statements to the effect that: “You detect nothing, and nothing has detected YOU so far—” might suffice. If the problem should continue, then rooms full of silent monsters will turn the tide, but that is the stuff of later adventures.

Uh… yeah. Do literally none of that.  But you can feel Gygax’s palpable frustration with the style of play his own killer dungeons had created boiling off the page.

Despite this, traps are a staple of Dungeons & Dragons. They date back to the earliest days of the hobby and they remain a prominent part of the game’s culture and its adventures. In fact, if you go back to the ‘70s and ‘80s you’ll find that traps weren’t just tolerated, they were gleefully celebrated.

Is that because people were clueless back then? They were just fooling themselves into thinking they liked traps?

No, in fact. It turns out that traps used to be different.

We’ll start by looking at how they were different, and then we’ll talk about why that’s important.

QUICK HISTORICAL SURVEY

If you look all the way back to the original edition of D&D in 1974, there are three things to note:

1. Thieves didn’t exist yet, and there were no skills (or other checks) that could be used to find or disable traps.
2. Traps did not automatically trigger. Instead, they triggered on a roll of 1 or 2 on a d6. (In other words, any time someone walked down a hallway with a trap in it, there was only a 1 in 3 chance the trap would actually go off.)
3. Carefully searching an area for a trap took 1 turn. This was a substantial systemic cost, because the DM made a wandering monster check (with a 1 in 6 chance) every single turn.

In Supplement 1: Greyhawk (1975), the thief class was added. There was now a skill check that could be made to find and disable traps.

AD&D (1977-79) dropped the 1 in 3 chance of a trap triggering. This mechanic was still commonly found in published modules of the era, however, and, therefore, remained part of the meme-sphere for a time. However, as play moved away from open table megadungeons and DMs increasingly ran disposable dungeons designed for a single traverse, the 1 in 3 chance meant that some traps would never be encountered. The idea of PCs not seeing every single scrap of material in a scenario became a sort of heresy, and this mechanic phased out.

The use of wandering monster checks also became deprecated. First by significantly reducing the frequency of checks and, later, often eliminating the wandering monster check entirely. This eliminated the system costs associated with searching anywhere and everywhere.

Over the course of 2^nd Edition, modules slowly standardized trap stat blocks. 3^rd Edition then incorporated these into the DMG (actually presenting the most extensive resource of pre-built traps seen in a core rulebook up to that point). Whereas previously the presentation of traps had been organic and narrative, it was now largely formalized into a check-or-damage mechanical format.

3^rd Edition also substantially reduced the amount of time required to search an area for traps from 1 turn (10 minutes) to, generally, 1 round.

Jumping to 5^th Edition, we discover both the worst advice and some good advice for running traps jammed together on the same page.

The worst advice is the mechanical structure: Passive Wisdom (Perception) checks determine whether anyone notices the trap. If they do, an Intelligence (Investigation) allows the character to figure out how to disable it. And then a Dexterity (Thieves’ Tools) check determines whether they can actually disable it.

In other words, by 5^th Edition the mechanical resolution of a trap has devolved into an entirely automatic sequence of mechanical interactions which the players neither initiate nor make meaningful choices during.

No wonder people think traps are boring! You could do this with ANY element of the game and it would be boring! Imagine if every social interaction was resolved with a passive Charisma check to initiate the conversation, a Wisdom (Insight) check to determine what you should say to them, and a Charisma (Persuasion) check to see if you say it successfully.

Both the fiction and the mechanics have atrophied, and the fiction-mechanics cycle has broken down.

The good advice is this bit:

Foiling traps can be a little more complicated. Consider a trapped treasure chest. If the chest is opened without first pulling on the two handles set in it sides, a mechanism inside fires a hail of poison needles toward anyone in front of it. After inspecting the chest and making a few checks, the characters are still unsure if it’s trapped. Rather than simply open the chest, they prop a shield in front of it and push the chest open at a distance with an iron rod. In this case, the trap still triggers, but the hail of needles fires harmlessly into the shield.

Why is this good advice? And what does it mean to actually put this advice into practice?

HOW TRAPS WORK

Let’s briefly sum up how traps used to work:

1. There was a cost associated with initiating a search, so players had to make deliberate and specific choices about when and where to look for traps.
2. The 1 in 3 mechanic made the outcome of even identical traps less predictable: It wasn’t always the guy in front who triggered the trap. Sometimes it would be the last person in line. Or maybe the trap would go off in the middle of the group. Or you might walk past it safely on your way into the dungeon only to trigger it as you were desperately trying to run back out again. Completely different dynamics (and experiences) in each case.
3. There were no mechanics, so players had to creatively interact with a trap in order to both find and deal with it. And, on the flip-side, this also forced DMs to creatively define the nature of the trap beyond skill check DCs.

Let’s start with the cost. If you want to avoid every expedition being slowed to a snail’s crawl by paranoia (or players simply feeling resentful that they have to choose between having fun and avoiding an intermittent damage tax), then there needs to be a cost associated with searching so that the players have to strategically decide when it’s worthwhile to pay that cost. In other words, the cost forces the players to make meaningful (and interesting) choices.

This cost will usually take the form of time: Time wasted searching for traps makes you vulnerable to other threats. Wandering monster checks are one way of modeling an environment filled with active threats that can find the PCs. Adversary rosters are another. Any form of time limit can be effective, however, as long as the searching chews up meaningful chunks of that time.

Alternatively, recognize that there is no cost in the current situation and, therefore, no reason for the PCs to not laboriously search every inch and be as safe as possible. This usually means that no meaningful choices are being made during these searches, which is what The Art of Pacing describes as empty time. You want to skip past that empty time and get to the next meaningful choice. I recommend using Let It Ride techniques here.

Note: This may not always be the right call. If the players are having fun making those meticulous decisions, then they ARE meaningful choices and it’s OK to live in that moment. Similarly, these choices can also be used to effect. I’ve run horror scenarios, for example, where the fact that the PCs have been reduced to terrified paranoia is 100% the desired emotional space, and cutting past those moments of paranoia wouldn’t be the right call. The thing you’re trying to avoid here is boredom.

Next let’s talk about the trigger uncertainty. I don’t think it’s universally true that traps should have unreliable triggers, but it’s a concept that’s worth playing around with if you haven’t tried it. There’s a lot of fun stuff to be discovered in play here. To a large extent, you can just graft the old 1 in 3 mechanic back in. (Or use slightly different odds, like a coin-flip.) Alternatively, you might have a trap trigger 100% of the time, but randomly determine which party member or rank in the marching order it afflicts.

Finally, there’s creative engagement with the players. This is vital. If all you can do with a trap is make a skill check to Search for it, make a skill check to Disable it, and/or make a saving throw to avoid taking damage from it, then the trap will be boring. The players have to be able to creatively engage with traps the same way they can creatively engage other aspects of the game world.

However, achieving this does NOT require you to simply throw out the mechanics.

PLAYER EXPERTISE

In The Art of Rulings, I actually use a trapped chest to demonstrate the fundamental principles of making a ruling in an RPG because properly adjudicating a trap is an almost perfect example of how a GM can use the mechanics of an RPG effectively. To briefly review:

• Passive observation is automatically triggered.
• Player expertise activates character expertise.
• Player expertise can trump character expertise.

If we look at 5^th Edition’s mechanical method for traps, it exists entirely in the first two categories: Traps are detected through passive Wisdom (Perception) checks that do not require a declaration from the players (i.e., passive observation is automatically triggered). Analyzing the trap and then disabling it presumably require player declarations, but the rote formulation is the most basic example of player expertise activating character expertise. It requires no meaningful decision-making on their part: You detect a trap, you say you’re analyzing it, and then you say you’re disabling it.

To make traps more interesting, what we want to do is push that entire interaction up the hierarchy: Instead of starting with passive observation and ending with shallow declarations of player expertise, we want to start with the players making meaningful choices and end by opening the door to players creatively figuring out how to trump the basic skill check.

Start by requiring player expertise to search for traps. You can use 5^th Edition’s rules for passive checks if you want (I’m not a fan), but it should still require the players to say, “I’m going to check for traps.” As we’ve discussed, of course, there has to be a cost to this declaration for it to be meaningful. Otherwise it’s just a rote catechism of dungeoncrawling (make sure you say it or the DM will getcha!). What you want is for the characters to be making broad strategic choices about when and where and why they’re choosing to search (and, conversely, when and why and where they choose NOT to search).

In order for this to be effective, the placement of traps has to make sense. As the 3^rd Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide says:

The solution is to place traps only when appropriate. Characters and creatures put traps on tombs and vaults to keep out intruders, but traps can be annoying and inappropriate in well-traveled areas. An intelligent creature is never going to build a trap that it might fall victim to itself.

If the placement of traps is random or capricious, there’s nothing for the players to base their decisions on. The result will be either frustration or resignation.

As a rule of thumb, you’ll know you’ve gotten the balance right if the players start actively trying to collect intel on traps. (They might question prisoners, check blueprints, cast auguries, etc.) If they’re doing that, then they both value those strategic decisions AND have faith in the logic and consistency of the game world.

Design Note: You can also explore – possibly at the prompting of your players – resolution options somewhere between not searching and detailed searching. An old school example is tapping a ten foot pole in front of you while walking down a dungeon corridor. This standard operating procedure probably doesn’t reduce the party’s speed, but still has a chance of prematurely triggering a trap before someone walks into it. This synced well with the old 1 in 3 chance of triggering a trap: The GM could simply add such a check for the pole-tapping (or perhaps a 1 in 6 chance to reflect that the pole was less likely than a full-grown person to effect certain triggers).

The method thus had a significantly reduced cost (in gold and encumbrance costs for the pole itself, plus a penalty to stealth tests from the tap-tap-tapping), but a similarly reduced efficiency in terms of actually detecting the trap.

If the players are expressing a desire for some sort of “extra caution, but not so extra that we have to pay the normal cost for a detailed search,” ask them what that looks like. Maybe they’ll come up with pole-tapping. Maybe they’ll come up with something completely different! Then see if there’s a way you can model that with a minor cost and/or minor benefit.

Another option is Matryoshka search techniques coupled to passive observation. Rather than saying “you found a trap,” you can instead use 3^rd Edition-style Spot checks or 5^th Edition-style passive Perception checks to incorporate details into your description of the dungeon which, if investigated in more detail, would reveal the trap. (For example, you might mention the line of decorative holes running down the length of the hall… which turn out to be the firing tubes for an arrow trap.)

PLAYER CREATIVITY

When it comes to the trap itself, the description of the trap should not be limited to a mechanical effect. Understand how the trap works and communicate that to the players (either in response to their search efforts or when the trap is triggered). It is these details which allow the players to engage the trap creatively – to “get their Indiana Jones on.” This is what begins to move a trap away from being a rote mechanical interaction and turns it into an interesting and interactive experience.

There’s no hard-and-fast rule for this, but if the PCs start doing stuff like scavenging the tension ropes that reset a spike trap in order to tie up a kobold prisoner or draining the alchemist’s fire through the nozzles of a flame trap to pour down the arrow holes of another, then you’ve nailed it.

You’ll also start seeing the PCs thinking about ways to bypass the trap, often in ways that also bypass the mechanical resolution of disabling the trap. (This is where player expertise trumps character expertise!) For example, they might use chalk to outline a pit trap so that everyone can walk safely around it. Or put a board in front of the arrow holes in the wall. Alternatively, some of these solutions might simply shift the mechanical resolution: Placing a board across a pit, for example, might require Dexterity (Acrobatics) checks for everyone to walk across instead of Dexterity (Thieves’ Tools) to disable.

And if the PCs do disable the trap, I recommend asking them how they actually do it. (Or, at the very least, describe it specifically when narrating resolution.) When they disable the pit trap do they wedge it open? Do they nail a board over the top of it? Do they wedge it with spikes so that it can support their weight one at a time? The difference will matter if they end up getting chased back down that hall by ogres!

Getting this type of specificity can sometimes be challenging with magical traps. Check out Random GM Tips: Disarming Magical Traps for some thoughts on how you can make these more interesting than just saying, “It’s magic!”

Go to Part 2: Advanced Techniques

Sometimes you want to use your weapon or your martial arts skill to do something more than just lethally incapacitate a target. For example, maybe you want to knock the White Witch’s wand out of her hands. Or shoot a fleeing nobleman in the leg to slow them down.

1. Define the effect you want to achieve with your called shot.
2. The DM determines a penalty which will be applied to your attack roll (usually -2 or -4).
3. If your attack roll is successful, you deal damage normally and the target must make an appropriate saving throw (DC 5 + the margin of success on your attack roll) or suffer the desired effect.

GUIDELINES

Here’s some guidance for DMs making rulings with these rules.

STUFF YOU SHOULD VETO: This system is not designed to bypass the normal rules for combat.

I want to shoot them in the head! The effect you’re looking to achieve here is killing the target. We have a specialized set of rules designed just for that: It’s called “making a normal attack.”

I want to gouge out their eyes and permanently blind them! Like killing the target, permanent maiming in D&D doesn’t happen until you run out of hit points (and usually not even then). You can kick sand in their face or give them a cut that causes blood to run down into their eyes and temporarily blind them, but this system isn’t about inflicting permanent damage or disfigurement.

I want to paralyze them so that they can’t take any actions! This is probably too strong. You might make an exception if the PC is taking advantage of some specific environmental factor (e.g., making them fall backwards into a vat filled with sticky ethereal goo); this shouldn’t be something that characters can just automatically do without special equipment or a special ability.

Similarly, anything that would normally be handled by the Grapple mechanics should be handled through the Grapple mechanics.

EFFECT MECHANICS: There are a number of conditions which are appropriate for a called shot effect — Blinded, Deafened, Frightened, Prone, Restrained. Other effects could include the target being disarmed, distracted, or having their speed reduced. Lots of stuff can be mechanically modeled by giving the target disadvantage or another character advantage against the target.

THE PENALTY: In determining the size of the penalty, think about whether the desired effect is mild (-2) or significant (-4). Anything that requires the target to spend an action to remove the effect should probably be considered significant.

Circumstances can also affect the penalty. For example, trying to blind a beholder is probably a lot more difficult than blinding a cyclops. Alternatively, give the target advantage on their saving throw if appropriate.

DURATION: How long should the effect last for? As mentioned above, avoid permanent effects. If in doubt, go with 1d4 rounds or until the target takes an action to resolve the problem.

DESIGN NOTES

Why let the attacker deal damage normally AND create the effect? The goal of this system is to make combat more interesting by encouraging players to think outside of the “I hit it with my sword / I hit it with my sword again” box. By allowing them to both do damage and do something interesting, you eliminate the action cost penalty where players avoid doing interesting things because their best option is always to deal as much damage as possible and end the combat as quickly as possible.

Why a penalty? Because otherwise PCs would need to make called shots on every single attack. Which, if the goal is to make combat more interesting, might seem like a great idea. In practice, however, thinking up the called shot when circumstances don’t call for one or where you’re not inspired by a cool idea becomes a mechanical chore. And chores are boring.

Why not use disadvantage on the attack instead of a penalty? Whenever a character had disadvantage from another source, they would be mechanically incentivized to make a called shot every single time… which leads us back to the same problem above, only it’s more ridiculous. (“We’re fighting in the dark? Guess I should be making exclusively called shots to the knee.”) The problems associated with hard-coded advantage/disadvantage are discussed more in Untested 5^th Edition: Situational Advantage.

What about the existing mechanics for Shoving (PHB, p. 195) or Disarm (DMG, p. 271)? You can still use those mechanics in concert with called shots. Taking the Disarm action, for example, should make it more likely that you successfully disarm your target, but the cost is that you’re focusing your whole action on that.

I also generally recommend that DMs look at the “Contests in Combat” sidebar on p. 195 of the PHB and spend more time empowering and encouraging players to come up with cool uses for contests; which is more or less the same philosophy as this called shot system but with the PC spending their full action to accomplish the desired effect. I suspect that using these called shot rules will, ironically, ALSO result in the players forgoing their attack more often to focus on a contest. (Once you get players thinking outside of the box, they tend to continue thinking outside of the box.)

What about the Battle Master? The Battle Master’s Disarming Attack ability is mechanically similar to a called shot, but completely superior (pun intended): They suffer no penalty to their attack roll AND can add their superiority die to the attack’s damage roll. The DC of the target’s saving throw is calculated differently, but should generally be higher than a generic called shot with a disarm effect.

(I actually dropped the DC for called shots from DC 8 + margin of success to DC 5 + margin of success to help make sure the Battle Master’s mechanical edge was well protected here. Playing around with that value to make sure that called shots feel worthwhile, but without becoming more likely to succeed than the Battle Master’s maneuvers is probably the key thing to watch out for from a playtest standpoint. In a pinch, get the called shot DC right and then just give the Battle Master the option of using that DC if it would be better than their flat DC.)

“Most of the campaigns I’ve really enjoyed have been in systems I didn’t like.”

“A great GM can take any RPG and run a good game.”

“I just want a system that gets out of the way when I’m playing.”

What I think these players are discovering is that most RPG systems don’t actually carry a lot of weight, and are largely indistinguishable from each other in terms of the type of weight they carry.

In theory, as we’ve discussed, there’s really nothing an RPG system can do for you that you can’t do without it. There’s no reason that we can’t all sit around a table, talk about what our characters do, and, without any mechanics at all, produce the sort of improvised radio drama which any RPG basically boils down to.

The function of any RPG, therefore, is to provide mechanical structures that will support and enhance specific types of play. (Support takes the form of neutral resolution, efficiency, replicability, consistency, etc.) If you look at the earliest RPGs this can be really clear, because those games were more modular. Since the early ’80s, however, RPGs pretty much all feature some form of universal resolution mechanic, which gives the illusion that all activities are mechanically supported. But in reality, that “support” only provides the most basic function of neutral resolution, while leaving all the meaningful heavy lifting to the GM and the players.

To understand what I mean by that, consider a game which says: “Here are a half dozen fighting-related skills (Melee Weapons, Brawling, Shooting, Dodging, Parrying, Armor Use) and here are some rules for making skill checks.”

If you got into a fight in that game, how would you resolve it?

We’ve all been conditioned to expect a combat system in our RPGs. But what if your RPG didn’t have a combat system? It would be up to the GM and the players to figure out how to use those skills to resolve the fight. They’d be left with the heavy lifting.

And when it comes to the vast majority of RPGs, that’s largely what you have: Skill resolution and a combat system. (Science fiction games tend to pick up a couple of additional systems for hacking, starship combat, and the like. Horror games often have some form of Sanity/Terror mechanic derived from Call of Cthulhu.)

So when it comes to anything other than combat — heists, mercantile trading, exploration, investigation, con artistry, etc. — most RPGs leave you to do the heavy lifting again: Here are some skills. Figure it out.

Furthermore, from a utilitarian point of view, these resolution+combat systems are all largely interchangeable in terms of the gameplay they’re supporting. They’re all carrying the same weight, and they’re leaving the same things (everything else) on your shoulders. Which is not to say that there aren’t meaningful differences, it’s just that they’re the equivalent of changing the decor in your house, not rearranging the floorplan: What dice do you like using? What skill list do you prefer for a particular type of game? How much detail do you like in your skill resolution and/or combat? And so forth.

SYSTEM MATTERS

What I’m saying is that system matters. But when it comes to mainstream RPGs, this truth is obfuscated because their systems all matter in exactly the same way. And this is problematic because it has created a blindspot; and that blindspot is resulting in bad game design. It’s making RPGs less accessible to new players and more difficult for existing players.

I’ve asked you to ponder the hypothetical scenario of taking your favorite RPG and removing the combat system from it. Now let’s consider the example of a structure which actually HAS been ripped out of game… although you may not have noticed that it happened.

From page 8 to page 12 of The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, Arneson & Gygax spelled out a very specific procedure for running dungeons in the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons. It boils down to:

1. You can move a distance based on your speed and encumbrance per turn.

2. Non-movement activities also take up a turn or some fraction of a turn. For example:

• ESPing takes 1/4 turn.
• Searching a 10′ section of wall takes 1 turn. (Secret passages found 2 in 6 by men, dwarves, or hobbits; 4 in 6 by elves.

3. 1 turn in 6 must be spent resting. If a flight/pursuit has taken place, you must rest for 2 turns.

4. Wandering Monsters: 1 in 6 chance each turn. (Tables provided.)

5. Monsters: When encountered, roll 2d6 to determine reaction (2-5 negative, 6-8 uncertain, 9-12 positive).

• Sighted: 2d4 x 10 feet.
• Surprise: 2 in 6 chance. 25% chance that character drops a held item. Sighted at 1d3 x 10 feet instead.
• Avoiding: If lead of 90 feet established, monster will stop pursuing. If PCs turn a corner, 2 in 6 chance they keep pursuing. If PCs go through secret door, 1 in 6 chance they keep pursuing. Burning oil deters many monsters from pursuing. Dropping edible items has a chance of distracting intelligent (10%), semi-intelligent (50%), or non-intelligent (90%) monsters so they stop pursuing. Dropping treasure also has a chance of distracting intelligent pursuers (90%), semi-intelligent (50%), or non-intelligent (10%) monsters.

6. Other activities:

• Doors must be forced open (2 in 6 chance; 1 in 6 for lighter characters). Up to three characters can force a door simultaneously, but forcing a door means you can’t immediately react to what’s on the other side. Doors automatically shut. You can wedge doors open with spikes, but there’s a 2 in 6 chance the wedge will slip while you’re gone.
• Traps are sprung 2 in 6.
• Listening at doors gives you a 1 in 6 (humans) or 2 in 6 (elves, dwarves, hobbits) of detecting sound. Undead do not make sound.

I’ve said this before, but if you’ve never actually run a classic megadungeon using this procedure — and I mean strictly observing this procedure — then I strongly encourage you to do so for a couple of sessions. I’m not saying you’ll necessarily love it (everyone has different tastes), but it’s a mind-opening experience that will teach you a lot about the importance of game structures and why system matters.

The other interesting thing here is that Arneson & Gygax pair this very specific procedure with very specific guidance on exactly what the DM is supposed to prep when creating a dungeon on pages 3 thru 8 of the same pamphlet. (These two things are conjoined: They can tell you exactly what to prep because they’re also telling you exactly how to use it.) Take these two things plus a combat system for dealing with hostile monster and, if you’re a first time GM, you can follow these instructions and run a successful game. It’s a simple, step-by-step guide.

“Now wait a minute,” you might be saying. “You said this procedure had been ripped out of D&D. What are you talking about? There’s still dungeon crawling in D&D!”

… but is there?

THE SLOW LOSS OF STRUCTURE

Many of the rules I describe above have passed down from one edition to the next and can still be found, in one form or another, in the game as it exists today. But if you actually sit down and look at the progression of Dungeon Master’s Guides, you’ll discover that starting with 2nd Edition the actual procedure began to wither away and eventually vanished entirely with 4th Edition.

The guidance on how to prep a dungeon has proven to have a little more endurance, but it, too, has atrophied. The 5th Edition core rulebooks, for just one example, don’t actually tell you how to key a dungeon map. (And although they have several example maps, none of them actually feature a key.)

One of the nifty things about a strong, robust scenario structure like dungeon crawling is that with a fairly mild amount of fiddling you can move it from one system to another. This is partly because most RPGs are built on the model of D&D, but it’s also because scenario structures in RPGs tend to be closely rooted to the fictional state of the game world.

This is, in fact, why you probably didn’t notice that 5th Edition D&D doesn’t actually have dungeon crawling in it any more: You’re familiar with the structure of dungeon crawling, and you unconsciously transferred it to the new edition the same way that you’ve most likely transferred it to other games lacking a dungeon crawling structure in the past. In fact, I’m willing to guess that removing dungeon crawling from 5th Edition was not, in fact, a conscious decision on the part of the designers: They learned how to run a dungeoncrawl decades ago and, like you, have been unconsciously transferring that structure from one game to another ever since.

Where this becomes a problem, however, are all the new players who don’t know how to run a dungeoncrawl.

Most people enter the hobby through D&D. And D&D used to reliably teach every new DM two very important procedures:

1. How to run a dungeon crawl

2. How to run combat

And using just those two procedures (easily genericizing the dungeon crawling procedure to handle any form of location-crawl), a GM can get a lot of mileage. In fact, I would argue that most of the RPG industry is built on just these two structures, and that most GMs really only know how to use these two structures plus railroading.

So what happens when D&D stops teaching new DMs how to run a dungeoncrawl?

It means that GMs are now reliant entirely on railroading and combat.

And that’s not good for the hobby.

THE BLINDSPOT

If you need another example of what this looks like in practice, check out The Lost Mine of Phandelver, the scenario that comes with the D&D 5th Edition Starter Set.  It’s a fascinating look at how this really is a blindspot for the 5th Edition designers, because The Lost Mine of Phandelver includes a lot of GM advice. They tell you that the GM needs to:

• Referee
• Narrate
• Play the monsters

They give lots of solid, basic advice like:

• When in doubt, make it up
• It’s not a competition
• It’s a shared story
• Be consistent
• Make sure everyone is involved
• Be fair
• Pay attention

There’s a detailed guide on how to make rulings. They tell you how to set up an adventure hook.

Then the adventure starts and they tell you:

• This is boxed text, you should read it.
• Here is a list of specific things you should do; including getting a marching order so that you know where they’re positioned when the goblins ambush them.
• When the goblins ambush them, they give the DM a step-by-step guide for how combat should start and what they should be doing while running the combat.
• They lay out several specific ways that the PCs can track the goblins back to their lair, and walk the DM through resolving each of them.

And then you get to the goblins’ lair and…  nothing.

I mean, they do an absolutely fantastic job presenting the dungeon:

• General Features
• What the Goblins Know (always love this)
• Keyed map
• And, of course, the key entries themselves describing each room

But the step-by-step instructions for how you’re actually supposed to use this material? It simply… stops. The designers clearly expect, almost certainly without actually consciously thinking about it, that how you run a dungeon is so obvious that even people who need to be explicitly told that they should read the boxed text out loud don’t need to be told how to run a dungeon.

And because they believe it’s obvious, they don’t include it in the game.  And because they don’t include it in the game, new DMs don’t learn it. And, as a result, it stops being obvious.

(To be perfectly clear here: I’m not saying that you need the exact structure for dungeon crawling found in OD&D. That would be silly. But the core, fundamental structure of a location-crawl is not only an essential component for D&D; it’s really fundamental to virtually ALL roleplaying games.)

THE BLINDSPOT PARADOX

Paradoxically, this blindspot not only strips structure from RPGs by removing those structures; it also strips structure from RPGs by blindly forcing structures.

It is very common for a table of RPG players to have a sort of preconceived concept of what functions an RPG is supposed to be fulfilling, and when they encounter a new system they frequently just default back to the sort of “meta-RPG” they never really stop playing. This is encouraged by the fact that the RPG hobby is permeated by the same meme that rules are disposable, with statements like:

• “You should just fudge the results!”
• “Ignore the rules if you need to!”

A widespread culture of kitbashing, of course, is not inherently problematic. It’s a rich and important tradition in the RPG hobby. But it does get a little weird when people start radically houseruling a system before they’ve even played it… often to make it look just like every other RPG they’ve played. (For example, I had a discussion with a guy who said he didn’t enjoy playing Numenera: Before play he’d decided he didn’t like the point spend mechanic for resolving skill checks; didn’t like XP spends for effect; and didn’t like GM intrusions so he didn’t use any of those mechanics. He also radically revamped how the central Effort mechanic works in the game. Nothing inherently wrong with doing any of that, but he never actually played Numenera.)

As a game designer, I actually find it incredibly difficult to get meaningful playtest feedback from RPG players because, by and large, none of them are actually playing the game.

And these memes get even weirder when you encounter them in game designers themselves: People who are ostensibly designing robust rules for other people to use, but in whom the response to “just fudge around it” has become so ingrained that they do it while playtesting their own games instead of recognizing mechanical failures and structural shortcomings and figuring out how to fix them.

EXCEPTIONS TO THE BLINDSPOT

To circle all the way back around here: System Matters. But due to the longstanding blindspot when it comes to game structures and scenario structures in RPGs, we’ve stunted the growth of RPGs. Most of our RPGs are basically the same game, and they shouldn’t be. The RPG medium should be as rich and varied in the games it supports as, for example, the board game industry is. Instead, we have the equivalent of an industry where every board game plays just like Settlers of Catan.

Now there are exceptions to this blindspot when it comes to scenario structures. Partly influenced by storytelling games (which often feature very rigid scenario structures), we’ve been seeing an increasing number of RPGs beginning to incorporate at least partial scenario structures.

Blades in the Dark, for example, has a crew system that supports developing a criminal gang over time. Ars Magica does something similar for a covenant of wizards. Reign provides a generic cap system for managing player-run organizations in competition with other organizations.

Technoir features a plot-mapping scenario structure that’s tied into character creation and noir-driven mechanics.

For Infinity I designed the Psywar system to provide support for complex social challenges (con artistry, social investigation, etc.).

You can also, of course, visit some of the game structures I’ve explored here on the Alexandrian: Party Planning, Tactical Hacking, Urbancrawls. The ongoing Scenario Structure Challenge series will continue to explore these ideas.

Go to Game Structures