In my previous post I examined encounters in order to understand a little more about them. My objective was to answer these two questions:
- How should I run a fast paced and engaging combat with at least twelve entities in the initiative order.
- How should I go about balancing combat encounters so they contain an element of risk that I can easily calibrate.
I gained a pretty good qualitative understanding of encounter design last week and thank you to those who contributed your own ideas, they were really helpful when it came time to crystallise my thoughts for this post.
So if we assume as a starting point that we've chosen a collection of story and setting appropriate antagonists for a given combat encounter and devised an evocative description of the encounter to draw the players in; what should be done to ensure that the combat runs smoothly and that the level of risk is appropriate?
During the most recent session of my Pathfinder campaign I looked at the behaviour of my players to try and identify sources of pacing issues. In doing so I realized that combat always seems fast paced to me as I'm involved in everyone's turn while the players each get to engage in short bursts of activity followed by a period of waiting for their turn. During this period of waiting some players lose focus on the game as their attention - and sometimes their whole body - wanders to other things. The game then has to pause as they catch up to what has happened while they were away.
Another significant source of delay is players not being being able to read their character sheets, either because they used computer aided character creation (discussed here) design and can't find what they're looking for or they lack some understanding of the rules of the game and don't know what they should be trying to find. This is sometimes worsened as the magic users roll out a variety of buffs that apply different bonuses to the player characters.
In short, some of my players are becoming disengaged while they await the next action of their character and this leads to some of the pacing issues that I encounter. If, as a group, we work towards more descriptive actions I think that engagement will increase and pacing will become less of an issue. Also, as the Game Master I should be doing more to ensure that the players grasp the overall story of the campaign and the place of this encounter within it. If they're engaged they'll be ready for their turn, hopefully they'll take the time to collate their buffs into one modifier and things will move along more quickly.
When it comes to the issue of balancing the mechanics behind the encounter my starting point is the advice found in the Pathfinder Core Rulebook. The book recommends using the average party level (APL) as a starting point for establishing the challenge rating (CR) of the encounter, this can then be modified from -1 to +3 depending upon how difficult the encounter should be, because I have a large group I should also add one to the CR to reflect this. Once the CR has been determined I can refer to a table to see how many experience points I have to spend on creatures.
In my experience this advice seems to break down with a party size greater than six as if I follow these directions I end up with encounters that I perceive as being consistently too easy.
I've tried a few different approaches to constructing encounters this way:
- Concentrating all the XP in a single powerful creature. If this results in an encounter with a creature with an individual CR more than about APL+1 there is the downside that player characters can be slain with very little warning and the creature, while powerful, often doesn't have enough hit points to survive longer than two or three rounds.
- Large numbers of weak opponents. This results in slightly longer but quite dull combats as the creatures are largely unable to successfully attack the player characters and the CR of the encounter in no way reflects the ease with which the party are able to overcome the encounter.
- Opponents with special abilities. This is probably the most successful approach as it forces the player characters to alter their tactics to cope with the unexpected, but it is difficult to find a range of appropriate antagonists with special abilities to keep this approach functional.
In general I've been operating on the premise that the party can handle
encounters of up to APL+4 without too much trouble and
for more challenging encounters I start pushing the CR of the most powerful
creature to average party level +2 or +3. I do have to be careful with this approach that I spread damage around to avoid frequent player character death.
Perry S. sent me a link to a post he has made discussing different ways to approach encounter creation which I have found to be very helpful. In the future I'm going to try using different tactics against the players such as screening my big hitters with minions to give them a few more rounds of use and forcing ranged encounter possibly with terrain or multiple ranks of opponents.
Hopefully this kind of approach will allow me to get a bit more mileage
out of my XP budget.
The final components of encounter design are experience and treasure.
Recently I've been scaling experience rewards based on the perceived difficulty
of the encounter as it seems that most of my encounters are on the easy side
and I don't want to speed up the levelling process as this will progressively increase the difficulty of balancing encounters.
As for treasure, I try to make the treasure appropriate to the opponent
but this tends to mean that the treasure reward of a given encounter will be
lower than it should be. In order to counteract this tendency and avoid consistently short changing the party, I keep track of how much treasure I should be awarding and top it up with quest
rewards so that on average the amount of treasure being given out is correct.
