Encounter Building: Part 2

In my previous post I examined encounters in order to understand a little more about them. My objective was to answer these two questions:

1. How should I run a fast paced and engaging combat with at least twelve entities in the initiative order.
2. 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.

Encounter building: Part 1

Recently I've been thinking a lot about some of the challenges I face when creating encounters, especially combat encounters, for my pathfinder campaign, my party is reasonably powerful with nine players running level eight characters (plus one animal companion and an eidolon), and consequently they can easily deal with challenge rating 12 encounters as long as no individual opponent is more powerful than challenge rating 9 or so.  If individual opponents get too powerful player characters can start dying with very little warning.

My main issues are:

1. Running a fast paced and engaging combat with at least twelve entities in the initiative order.
2. Balancing the combats so they contain an element of risk that I can easily calibrate.

As I began to engage with the process of seriously thinking about these challenges I found myself deconstructing the notion of encounters to see if the root of my issues perhaps lies with some misunderstanding on my part of what an encounter should be. This led me to realise that game masters have quite a bit to think about before we start adding mechanics to encounters. Thus I suspect that there might be a lot of thinking to do before I can start getting close to grappling with my two key questions.

So what is an encounter?

In meta game terms it seems to be some instance, I'm going to call it a scene, that prompts a dialogue between the game master and the players as opposed to game master exposition. In less meta terms, an encounter occurs when the player characters interact with the game world and the outcome is uncertain. An encounter will not necessarily invoke the mechanics of the game although many times it will.

To illustrate, imagine a situation where the game master describes a marketplace including some history about the site and activities that routinely occur there - this is game master exposition. In addition if one or more party members were to visit a weapon smith in the marketplace and purchase some goods - this isn't an encounter as there is no uncertainty as to the outcome.

In contrast, if the players characters spoke to Stanislaw the Baker, a stall holder in the marketplace, who told them about how Sozakc the Bugbear was finally captured and executed right over there, 'you can still see the blood stains on the cobbles' and the cleric of the party then asked what happened to Sozakc's axe (the demon possessed one) - the players have engaged with the scene and learnt something about the game world that has furthered their quest, this is an encounter.

Note that no game mechanics were invoked in this example but they could have been if a player wanted to make a sense motive on Stanilaw's statement for instance.

Why then do we break up the narrative structure of role playing games into encounters?

If we think about other storytelling media we find that they also consist of a series of scenes following encounters between the story's protagonists and their environment. The main reason would seem to be that there are lots of things that happen between encounters that aren't necessarily very interesting or that contribute much to the story at hand. While it might be interesting to role play walking from the marketplace to the keep from time to time, but if nothing is going to happen that would distinguish this from any other walk between arbitrary locations there is not a lot of point to doing it every time.

Adopting a 'role play everything that happens' approach would also generate a ton of work for the game master, and without discrete scenes to work on where would you start?

What role do encounters serve?

Encounters are important elements for driving the story forward, and without the story there isn't much to motivate role play. A well thought out encounter creates conflict between the player characters and the world around them as well as potentially between player characters (maybe even between a player and their character?).

Encounters can also serve an important role in world building, the little details that go into encounters can create the illusion that the world the player characters inhabit is alive, and help to make the story meaningful to both the players and their characters.

When encounters engage the mechanics of the game system they create opportunities to roll dice and exploit the abilities of the player characters and even when they don't, they provide role playing opportunities.

Another aspect of encounters bringing game mechanics into play is reward.  Without encounters there is no treasure and no experience points, and these are what empower the characters to face more dangerous foes in the future.

This week I unpacked encounters to try and understand them better and help to answer the two questions if began the post with

1. How to run a fast paced and engaging combat with at least twelve entities in the initiative order.
2. How to balance the combats so they contain an element of risk that I can easily calibrate.

While I think I've gained some insight into encounters I don't have any answers to my questions but over the coming days I will continue to work towards them and hopefully by next post I will have a some satisfactory solutions. If you have any insights of your own feel free to leave them in the comments.