While writing my essay on “Revisiting Encounter Design”, I kept drifting towards a related topic: The fetishization of balance that appeared in 3rd Edition’s fandom.

“What’s wrong with balance?” you may ask.

Nothing. In fact, there are lots of perfectly valid reasons to seek balance. However, if you fetishize the pursuit of balance in a way that needlessly limits your flexibility, then you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

THE IRON MAN PRINCIPLE

Let’s back up for a second: The designers of 3rd Edition wanted to provide DMs with some basic guidelines about what challenges would be appropriate for PCs of a given level. In order to do that, they first had to make some baseline assumptions about what the power levels of the PCs would be at each level. And in order to do that, they had to understand the Iron Man Principle.

The Iron Man Principle is simple. As long as:

(A) There are magic items which are useful (particularly in combat); and
(B) The PCs can have those items; and
(C) The designers care about game balance at all; then
(D) There will need to be guidelines for how many items the PCs should have.

Because there is a difference between what Tony Stark can do and what Iron Man can do.

A lot of people get frustrated by the Iron Man Principle. You’ll hear them say things like, “All the classes should be equally powerful with or without equipment!” or “I should be able to run a low-magic campaign without changing anything else!” Sorry, folks, but it just doesn’t work that way. If you take two perfectly balanced twin brothers, tell them to fight, and then stick one of them in the Iron Man suit… well, that guy’s gonna win.

A COUPLE OF BIG MYTHS

Myth #1: Older editions didn’t feature as many magic items.

Myth #2: In 3rd Edition, PCs level up much faster than in older editions.

A couple years ago, Quasqueton at ENWorld posted a detailed analysis of the classic modules from the 1st Edition era. His conclusions shocked many people: If you played through those classic adventures by-the-book, you would level up at pretty much the same pace and you would have roughly the same number of magic items.

There is a slight caveat with Myth #2, however. In older editions of the game, XP was rewarded for treasure. For every 1 gp of treasure a character got, they were also supposed to receive 1 XP. The vast majority of groups, however, considered this to be a “stupid” rule and didn’t play with it. The result was that almost everybody remembers advancement in previous editions being slower than in 3rd Edition (and those memories are quite accurate… insofar as they weren’t actually playing by the rules).

(I’m going to take a tangent for a moment here and defend the GP = XP guideline. Experience points are, fundamentally, an abstraction that exists almost entirely in the metagame. This is often misunderstood, which is why you’ll hear people saying things like “you shouldn’t get better at jumping because you killed some orcs”. But the reality is that the rewarding of XP — whether it’s for overcoming combat challenges, surviving traps, achieving story goals, or exceptional roleplaying — is ultimately a dissociated mechanic. In the case of classic D&D campaigns, treasure wasn’t just laying around. You gained treasure by exploring dangerous dungeons, surviving traps, and solving puzzles. Rewarding XP for treasure was a proxy reward: It wasn’t about rewarding someone for picking up a gold piece, it was about rewarding them for the effort it took to get that gold piece. But I digress…)

So what the designers of 3rd Edition basically did was simple: They looked at the older editions of the game, broke down the expected style of play (as represented in the classic modules), and then hard-coded those values into things like the Wealth By Level table.

Now, your personal experience with previous editions may have varied quite a bit from what 3rd Edition hard-coded into its expectations. That’s because pretty much everybody extensively house ruled the older editions in order to cater them to their personal tastes and (in some cases) just to make them playable at all.

THE FALSE FASCISM

With 3rd Edition, however, a kind of false fascism arose. It looked like this: Older editions were easier to house rule. Why? Because in the new edition if you make a change you’ll screw-up the game balance!

There is an iota of truth here: The previous versions of the game were so badly balanced that the entire concept of “game balance” was pretty much a joke. Anyone trying to convince you that dual-class characters were balanced compared to multiclass characters, for example, should be taken immediatey to a detox center.

So it wasn’t that the extensive house ruling of AD&D wasn’t changing the balance of the game… it’s just that the “balance” of the game was already so screwed up that nobody could tell the difference if you screwed it up a little more. (And it was pretty easy to make it a little better without a lot of effort.)

But the fact that the designers of 3rd Edition actually did a lot of work to improve the balance of the game doesn’t mean that house ruling had suddenly become impossible. For me, the firmer foundation of 3rd Edition made it a lot easier to tweak just the stuff I wanted to tweak to achieve whatever effect I was aiming for. But, for other people, the firm foundation became a kind of golden handcuffs — discouraging them from tweaking the game to match their personal tastes, while leaving them feeling trapped.

CHALLENGE RATING OCD

Let’s see if I can explain this as concisely as possible. The designers of 3rd Edition:

(1) Set certain expectations regarding the capability of an average party of level X.

(2) Used those expectations to create a rough ballpark determination of what type of challenges a party with average character level X could face.

(3) Classified encounters using a challenge rating and encounter level of X, where X equals the average character level of a typical party that would find that encounter challenging.

For me, this seems pretty clear-cut. The CR/EL system is not a cure-all. It doesn’t allow the DM to turn off their brain. But it does provide a pretty useful tool for quickly narrowing in on the particular range of encounters that would be appropriate for a given party.

But some people just don’t seem to get it.  And this is where the fetishization of balance takes hold, causing people to respond in one of two ways:

First, there are those who bash the CR/EL system because it isn’t a cure-all. They argue that because it’s possible to create a party of characters who are either less powerful or more powerful than the expected standard, the CR/EL system is useless.

Second, there are those who feel that any deviation from the expected power levels for group X is a sin. If a party of level X isn’t capable of taking on challenges of EL X, then somebody has screwed up. It’s simply not acceptable for the party not to have a meat-shield; or for the rogue to take Knowledge (nobility) instead of Disable Device; or for the arcanist to specialize in non-combat spells; or for a 15th level character not to have a cloak of resistance.

MOVING PAST THE FETISH

Here’s one way in which we can move past this fetishization of balance:

(1) Understand that the CR/EL system measures capability along an expected baseline.

(2) Understand that, if you deviate from that expected baseline, the CR/EL system will become increasingly less useful.

(3) Don’t worry about it.

Seriously. The CR/EL system has a lot of nice utility, but there’s no reason to let that utility needlessly handcuff you.

For example, I frequently hear people complain about how “difficult” it is to run a 3rd Edition campaign without giving the PCs the magical items the designers assumed they would have. This just isn’t true. If you want less magical equipment, just do it. This means that you’ll have to use less powerful monsters to challenge the party, but that’s hardly the end of the world.

As another example, there was a recent thread at the Giant in the Playground forums in which a DM was fretting because one of his players had chosen to play a plain-vanilla fighter from the core rulebooks instead of pursuing the more tweaked out options from some of the supplements. In a similar discussion a few years back, a different DM was worried because the fighter in his party was making sub-optimal feat selections (including Skill Focus).

And, once again, the solution is simple: Just do it. If the relative weakness of the meat-shield is reducing the party’s ability to handle combat encounters, use easier foes. If the concern is one of the player not being happy because their character isn’t performing well compared to the other PCs, then you can talk about letting them redesign the character. But the truth is even that problem is less likely to arise in 3rd Edition because of the niche protection afforded by the design of the game.

(Short version, which I discuss in greater length in the “Death of the Wandering Monster” essay: Fighters can perform consistently and constantly across many encounters. Wizards, on the other hand, get larger bangs than the fighter — but can’t use them as often. The fighter will only feel out-performed by the wizard if (a) the player of the fighter would prefer to be playing like a wizard or (b) the overall style of play in the group is favoring the wizard instead of the fighter. But those will become issues regardless of the overall optimization of the fighter or wizard.)

One of the great things about 3rd Edition is the broad range of power levels it’s capable of handling — from low-powered commoners at 1st level all the way to insanely high-powered demigods at 20th level. (This is something I also talk about in “D&D: Calibrating Your Expectations“.) One of the nice things about this range of power levels is that it gives you all the tools you need to easily customize your campaign based on the actual (and not expected) power of the party.

If you were somehow mandated to use only CR 5 creatures when building an encounter for 5th level characters, then the fetishization of balance might have some point to it. But if the PCs are under-powered for 5th level (because you’ve limited their magic items; because their equipment has been stolen from them; because their characters haven’t been optimized for combat; because there is a non-standard mix of classes in the group), then you can simply use less powerful foes. And if the PCs are over-powered for 5th level (because the PCs managed to loot more treasure than you expected; because they have higher than normal ability scores; because the players are just really good at the game), then you can simply use more powerful foes.

(And it should be noted that, even though I talk about monsters and foes a lot, this advice applies equally to other aspects of the system as well — skill checks, environmental hazards, traps, and so forth.)

In the final analysis, of course, there’s nothing wrong with playing straight by-the-book D&D, either. The standard party compositions, typical combat optimization, expected wealth and equipment, and the usual focus and pace of dungeon-crawling activities have made the game beloved by millions, after all.

But, on the flip-side, there’s no need to be stitching up arbitrary straitjackets for yourself when the game has plenty of flexibility to cater to your needs.

One of the first reviews I ever received for a book I had written was for the mini-adventure The Dragon’s Wish, which was published by Fantasy Flight Games during the early D20 boom. The reviewer hated it. He had several reasons for doing so, but his biggest problem was that he felt that the encounters weren’t balanced: The adventure was designed for 9th level characters, but I had them encountering, among other things, a primitive tribe of kobolds (low CR) and a pair of extremely powerful stone golems (high CR).

Now, The Dragon’s Wish was one of my first published works and it was hardly perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But there were two main reactions that I had to the review.

First, I was frustrated because the reviewer had clearly failed to understand what the adventure was about. He had approached it as some sort of hack ‘n slash affair, but the module wasn’t designed with combat in mind. At the beginning of The Dragon’s Wish, the PCs are asked by a dying dragon to take his heart to the ancient draconic burial grounds in the Valley of the Dragons. The rest of the adventure is a travelogue allowing the PCs to see various facets of draconic mythology. The stone golems aren’t meant to be fought: They were powerful gatekeepers who allow the PCs to enter the valley when their task is made known. The kobolds are a primitve tribe who venerate the dragons without truly understanding them. And so forth.

Second, I realized that something fundamental had shifted in the common perception of what constituted proper encounter design in D&D.

Back in the halcyon, nostalgia-tinged days of 1st Edition, nobody would have blinked twice at the idea of including low-level encounters in high-level adventures. For example, in the Bloodstone modules (the original H-series designed for levels 15 thru 100), the designers had no problem including combat encounters with common orcs.

In fact, this was an attitude that persisted more or less all the way through the latter days of 2nd Edition. The Apocalypse Stone was a high-level adventure published to provide a campaign-ending scenario so that groups could reboot fresh with 3rd Edition. But if you flip through it, you discover quite a few encounters that are virtually identical to the types of encounters found in low- or mid-level modules. (There’s harder stuff too, of course.)

MISREADING 3rd EDITION

So what happened in 3rd Edition?

As far as I can tell, everybody misread the rulebook. Here’s what the 3rd Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide had to say about “Encounters and Challenge Ratings” (pg. 100):

A monster’s Challenge Rating (CR) tells you the level of the party for which the monster is a good challenge. A monster of CR 5 is an appropriate challenge for four 5th-level characters. If the characters are higher level than the monster, they get fewer XP because the monster should be easier to defeat. Likewise, if the party level [….] is lower than the monster’s Challenge Rating, the PCs get a greater reward.

And a little later it answered the question “What’s Challenging?” (pg. 101):

Since every game session probably includes many encounters, you don’t want to make every encounter one that taxes the PCs to their limits. They would have to stop the adventure and rest for an extensive period after every fight, and that slows down the game. An encounter with an Encounter Level (EL) equal to the PCs’ level is one that should expend about 20% of their resources — hit points, spells, magic item uses, etc. This means, on average, that after about four encounters of the party’s level the PCs need to rest, heal, and regain their spells. A fifth encounter would probably wipe them out.

And, at that point, everybody apparently stopped reading. Because this was what seeped into the collective wisdom of the gaming community: Every encounter should have an EL equal to the party’s level and the party should have four encounters per day.

I literally can’t understand how this happened, because the very next paragraph read:

The PCs should be able to take on many more encounters lower than their level but fewer encounters with Encounter Levels higher than their party level. As a general rule, if the EL is two lower than the party’s level, the PCs should be able to take on twice as many encounters before having to stop and rest. Two levels below that, and the number of encounters they can cope with doubles again, and so on.

And if that wasn’t clear enough in saying that the PCs should be facing a wide variety of ELs, the very next page had a chart on it that said 30% of the encounters in an adventure should have an EL lower than the PCs’ level; 50% should have an EL equal to the PCs’ level; 15% should have an EL 1 to 4 higher than the PCs’ level; and 5% should have an EL 5+ higher than the PCs’ level.

But all of that was ignored and the completely erroneous “common wisdom” of “four encounters per day with an EL equal to the party’s level” became the meme of the land.

By the time The Forge of Fury was released as part of the original Adventure Path in late 2000, the meme had already taken hold. The Forge of Fury — an adventure for 3rd to 5th level characters — included, as one of its encounters, a CR 10 roper. You’ll note that this encounter follows the guidelines printed in the DMG precisely. It didn’t matter. The fanboys howled from one side of the Internet to the other about this horrible and unbalanced encounter. And why were they howling? Because encounters should always have an EL equal to the average level of the PCs.

WotC never made that “mistake” again.

REAPING WHAT YOU SOW

The most virulent form of the meme was rarely followed in its strictest form. But the general meme of “an encounter should almost always have an EL equal to the party’s level” sunk pretty deeply into the collective consciousness.

But there are consequences for designing encounters like that:

(1) The average resolution time for any combat encounter increases (because a more challenging opponent takes longer to overcome).

(2) The PCs are more likely to suffer grievous injury during any one encounter, which means they’re more likely to adopt cautious styles of gameplay. This leads to the 15-minute adventuring day becoming more common, along with all the problems that creates.

(3) These factors result in fewer encounters during each game session, which means that it becomes much more difficult and/or tedious to run the classic mega-dungeons and other combat-oriented styles of play.

(4) The utility of any given monster is significantly reduced because the range of levels in which you can build “appropriate” encounters using the creature is narrowed.

I used to play D&D with my friends during lunch hour, and in these short sessions we would still routinely get through 3 or 4 combat encounters. But with 3rd Edition people were routinely reporting relatively simple encounters taking hours to resolve.

A lot of people blame the system for that. But, in my experience, it’s all about the encounter design.

DESIGNING BETTER ENCOUNTERS

When I looked at the design of classic modules from the ’70s and ’80s, I discovered that most of the encounters in those modules would actually equate to an EL at least 2-5 levels lower than the party. And when I duplicated that encounter design in 3rd Edition, combat predictably speeded up.

With that in mind, here are my tips for designing encounters:

(1) Design most encounters around an EL 2 to 4 lower than the party’s level.

(2) Don’t be afraid of large mobs (10+ creatures) with a total EL equal to the PCs’ level. The common design wisdom is that these creatures are “too easy” for the PCs. This is true if you’re thinking in terms of the “common wisdom” that sprang up around misreading the DMG, but in practice these types of encounters work just fine if you’re looking for fast encounters and lots of them.

(3) Encounters with an EL equal to the PCs’ level should be used sparingly. They should be thought of as “major encounters” — the memorable set pieces of the adventure. It actually won’t take very long before the expectations of your players’ have been re-aligned and these encounters leave them thinking, “Wow! That was a tough encounter!”

(4) And that means you get even more bang for your buck when you roll out the very rare EL+2 or EL+4 encounter.

Basically what you’re doing is creating a wider dynamic range for your encounter design.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

FLEXIBLE DESIGN: I like to design large complexes of opponents who will interact with each other and react, as a group, to the presence of the PCs. And this works a lot better if I can take two encounters and add them together without ending up with something that will completely devastate the party. If the PCs are level 5 and the goblin warband is only EL 3, then it become much easier to have the goblins call on a second warband to reinforce them: If the PCs prevent the reinforcements from showing up, they have two standard encounters. If they don’t, then they have one harder encounter.

EXPERIENCE POINTS: The designers of 3rd Edition increased the pace at which XP was accumulated and levels were gained. I understand and even support the reasons behind this change, but I personally found the result to be simply too fast for my taste. For example, I tend to run long 8-12 hour sessions, and the pace of 3rd Edition experience usually meant that the PCs were leveling up once per session. This meant that the power level of the campaign shifted very rapidly (making it difficult to tell coherent stories). It also meant that the players never really had a chance to get comfortable with their characters (they had barely learned one set of abilities before being given new ones).

I now play with halved XP rewards and have had good results with that. But, really, that’s just a matter of personal taste.

However, with that being said, using the encounter design recommended here, you’ll find that your players will be overcoming many more combat encounters in the course of an average session. And even though the EL of each encounter will be lower, this will still generally result in accelerating the already accelerated pace of XP accrual. Whether you’ll need to adjust the XP award accordingly will depend on your personal tastes.

A PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT: If your group has already grown accustomed to the “typical” design of 3rd Edition encounters, it may take some time before your expectations have adjusted to the new system. The typical encounter will feel easier to you… and that’s okay. It is easier.

But you should also be aware that some of the secondary effects will also take awhile to sink in for your players. If you’ve been playing with “typical” 3rd Edition encounters, then your players have probably learned to take a very cautious approach — every encounter has been potentially deadly and, therefore, every encounter has been carefully analyzed and handled.

So for the first couple of sessions, for example, you may only see a slight increase in the pace of gameplay. But once your players internalize the change and loosen up, you’ll see that pace increase again.

Pay attention to your own expectations, too: You might find yourself getting a little frustrated with the fact that your villains are missing the PCs more than they’re hitting them. There’s a sense that a lot of us develop that says “if hit points aren’t being lost, then nothing happened”. This isn’t actually true. And, in fact, if the PCs aren’t losing hit points the more stuff will happen.

DIFFERENT TOOLS FOR DIFFERENT JOBS: The exact balance of combat encounters you choose will depend largely on the type of adventure you’re designing. For example, if you’re designing an intrigue-laced adventure in which the only combat encounter is likely to be the big show-down at the end… well, that single encounter should probably be a doozy. If you want to encourage a loose, rapid-fire style of play with the players feeling like major heroes… well, crank up the number of low-EL encounters.

If there’s one message to take away from this essay it’s that variety is the spice of encounter design. By extending the dynamic range of encounters, you’re expanding the variety of the encounters you can (and should) design.

While putting together the compiled version of the Playtesting 4th Edition essay, I realized it probably made sense to compile the essays I wrote on Dissociated Mechanics, too. So I went ahead and did that.

As a reminder, these essays were originally written in May of this year, before the 4th Edition rulebooks were released. My general analysis, it turned out, was pretty much right on the money, even if there are a few individual mechanics which aren’t precisely the way they were previewed or the way I assumed in the final product.

And, of course, my general conclusion vis-a-vis dissociated mechanics (they’re bad and they’re antithetical to roleplaying) remain as valid as they ever were.

The complete set of Playtesting 4th Edition posts have been compiled into a single essay for easy reference and linkage. This pretty much constitutes my definitive statement on the system. I have a couple more sessions of Keep on the Shadowfell to play through with one of my groups and, if anything of note comes up during those sessions, I may post a coda of some sort.

But both of my gaming groups have decided to return to 3rd Edition and stay there. And, at this point, I don’t anticipate that I will ever be returning to 4th Edition. The game is, in the final analysis, not only poorly designed, but designed specifically with a philosophy which is antithetical to my roleplaying.

Other people may find enough interest in the game to spend the time necessary to fix the fundamental design flaws, but I don’t see any reason to waste my time with it.

(Oh, look! WotC just changed the DCs for skill checks again. I’m so glad they took such great pride in fixing the math with 4th Edition…. and fixing it… and fixing it… and fixing it… They’re like the Energizer Bunny of math fixing.)

COLLECTED EDITION OF AN ESSAY BY JUSTIN ALEXANDER

It seems crazy to say this, but I’ve been talking about Keep on the Shadowfell since May. That’s a lot of time to dedicate to a single adventure. But, of course, a lot of this time has also been spent reading, analyzing, playing, and talking about the 4th Edition ruleset.

This essay is going to be about my playtesting of 4th Edition. Understanding these comments may require a little bit of context, however. So let’s start with that.

When 4th Edition was first announced in August 2007, I posted some Thoughts on 4th Edition. These primarily consisted of three points: (1) What WotC says about a new edition and what a new edition actually does are frequently two completely different things. (2) The design ethos being espoused at WotC did not fill me with confidence. (3) I wasn’t going to draw any conclusions until I actually had the rules in my hands.

In May of this year I wrote a series of essays on Dissociated Mechanics. These essays were written before 4th Edition was released, but provided a detailed dissection and analysis of what I still believe to be a serious flaw in the design ethos at WotC.

After the rulebooks were released, I revisited the subject of Skill Challenges. I was over-hasty in my reading of certain rules, but also far too forgiving in others (check the comment thread attached to that post).

If you’ve looked through some of this material, it will be clear that I had some serious reservations about 4th Edition. But I was also determined to approach the new system with an open mind. Ultimately you can talk a game to death, but it lives or dies in the playtest.

My initial intention was to take Keep on the Shadowfell and use the Quick Start Rules to play 4th Edition right out of the box — just as the designers intended it. I had high expectations that, with Mike Mearls and Bruce Cordell writing it, I would be able to just pick up the adventure and run it. Unfortunately, my first impressions of the module left me fairly disenchanted, and the 12-part series of remix essays should give some idea of the amount of work I had to put into the module before I felt comfortable running it.

Eventually, however, I was ready to go. And I have now run two separate playtests of the module: One for a group of experienced D&D players (my regular group) and another for a group of newbies (some of whom had never played an RPG before).

So let’s talk about my first reactions to playing 4th Edition.

QUICK LINKS

Combat
Running Combat
Characters
The Nova Cycle
Dissociated Mechanics
Skill Challenges
Gutting Non-Combat
Balance and Prep
D&D is Dead, Long Live 4th Edition

(more…)