Should you design your encounters? Or let the dice fall as they may?

I was planning for my Rime of the Frostmaiden game the other day, and the players were perilously close to wandering into an adventure where they wind up confronting (and probably fighting, given the way the book is written) and CR 5 enemy. The party is made up of three level 2 characters. If they were to fight against this enemy, they would almost certainly die. I know this because I have fought against the exact same stat block before. There were four of us at level 4 and we got stomped. Ok, we were pretty low on resources and the enemy had some minions, but still, there is no way my party can take on this enemy at this time.

So I planned around it. I basically walled off part of the adventure with magic, so players can only access it at a later date when they are high enough level to take it on. There is still a way to complete the objective set (against a CR 3 monster that will also be a challenge for them, but one I think they can win), but this way they won’t be led by the nose into a TPK.

This is not going to be another Rime of the Frostmaiden blog-a-long. I wanted to address a point which has come up on twitter a bit recently, and which I alluded to last time. Should you plan combat encounters for your party? Or should you just run the dungeon/encounter as written in the book, or as decided by an encounter table, and leave it up to the players to decide whether to stand or to fight?

There is a school of thought that essentially says, let the players get in over their head. Run the encounter as written, roll on the random table, and if they die, well, they die. The world is dangerous. The players have to make the decision to run or to fight. If it’s clear that the world is being adjusted to suit the power level of the party, then this breaks immersion and makes the game feel less real.

I think there is merit to this argument. I think DnD is at its best when the players feel under threat. I think the world should feel dangerous, and running away from an encounter is a perfectly valid resolution to a fight. I think there is a risk that players start to feel that they have plot armour, and that everything they encounter is beatable, which can break the tension. Sometimes confronting players with a massive creature, or mob of creatures that they could never hope to defeat helps to remind them that the world is bigger and scarier than they are, and this helps to raise the tension and make the game feel more real.

Equally, as players get high level, it’s fun to remind them of how powerful they really are, by letting them crush a pretty easy encounter. Maybe even one that gave them some trouble a few levels ago. This makes players feel like they’re making tangible progress. The people and things they’re interacting with don’t have to level up with them.

But let’s be real here. When is combat in DnD at it’s best? The ideal resolution to a dramatic final boss fight is that the last conscious player character finishes the boss. It’s dramatic. It’s tense. It’s exciting. It’s also really hard to pull off as a DM. You not only have to balance your encounter well, you also have to design the day’s adventuring well so, especially at higher level, and you have to get lucky with your dice rolls, as the above scenario could also easily end in a TPK, if that dramatic final blow misses and the boss downs the character with their next turn.

Why would you take some of the elements you can control away? You can, as the DM, choose what the players fight and when they fight them. Sure, you should let players influence that, but you still have a lot of control over how an adventure plays out. You can work to make sure that the dramatic final battle is as dramatic as possible.

I think this point of view stems pretty clearly from the idea that DnD is primarily a story-telling medium, in which you, the DM, craft a story with the player character as the protagonists and, to a lesser or greater extent, co-creators of the story. I’ve written before about how I see players much more as co-creators in the story, but this doesn’t have to be the case for a story-oriented campaign. It wasn’t in my first campaign, for example.

This means that it is inevitable that encounters will be designed around the players. The fights they get into will be part of the story. They should help to further some element of the story, such as show players something about how the world works, work to further theirs or the enemies goal, or represent the dramatic defeat of a particular faction. This is why I don’t really like random encounters. They often feel like combat for the sake of combat, that interrupts the flow of the story, without really adding anything to the narrative.

I think the other side of the argument sees DnD as more of a series of challenges to be defeated. A dungeon represents a hostile environment, and the point of the game is to defeat the dungeon, which is run by the DM. This means that the encounters should be run as written, and it is up to the players to make good choices about when to progress through the dungeon, how to allocate resources, whether to explore further at risk of coming across more monsters that sap their resources further.

This is a perfectly valid way of playing. I think it is probably in fact closer to how DnD is designed to be played, or at least how early DnD was design to be played, although I’m not sure how many people did, or indeed still do play it this way. I think without an overarching storyline linking dungeons together, or explaining why the characters are in the dungeon, this style of play would be pretty boring and unsatisfying, but that’s just my opinion. People are, of course, free to play however they like.

I think there might be another, less satisfying reason why people advocate for not bothering with encounter design. This might just be me being cynical, but I think it might be to do with the fact that designing encounters in DnD 5e is actually really hard. It is a well acknowledged fact that the CR system for 5e really doesn’t work, so it’s very hard to know when you pick up a stat block whether this monster will actually challenge your players, or whether they will walk all over it. Maybe some people have given up on encounter design because it doesn’t work, so have moved more to a ‘let the dice decide’ random table approach. Or maybe I’m being cynical.

The point is that 5e doesn’t really give DMs the tools to effectively create balanced, interesting encounters, so it becomes something of a dark art, involving guess work, experience, gut feel and a decent slice of hope. I certainly haven’t really got the hang of it yet, and frequently underestimate just how much damage players can do in a short space of time.

I also think part of the issue is that the monsters available for players to fight are not designed in a systematic way. I would like, as a DM, to be able to design a fight with a mid-level spell-caster and a handful of lower-level bodyguards, but even finding stat blocks for generic enemies like that is not easy, and when I do find them, I don’t really have a good idea of how to adjust them up or down to suit my party level, or the number of players in my party.

This seems like the kind of thing the DMG and Monster Manual should include. To do this, you need a good understanding of the different roles an enemy might have, what kind of HP, AC, damage outputs and spell slots different enemy roles might have at what levels, and how much of the above collectively is reasonable for different level players. The DMG just does not do this kind of forensic exercise, which I’m given to believe that previous editions of the game at least attempted.

I’d love to do it myself, as I think the exercise would make me a better DM, but that kind of rigorous approach requires quite a lot of time and effort. I’ll add it to the ever-growing list of things I would like to do with the time I don’t have!