Unforgiving
One of the things that I wonder about when I’m developing encounters, either for the game I work on or for a D&D session, is how hard I can make things before my players start throwing things at me. People enjoy walking through things, but after a while it just gets boring. The fights that people remember are the ones where they had everything possible thrown at them, and still managed to prevail. I’ve got videos of myself and a friend killing bosses by ourselves in an instance (and I still watch them from time to time). I don’t have any videos of me walking through a bunch of low-level mobs, because it’s just not really as fun. So when I’m designing encounters, I’m usually aiming to be as unforgiving as possible.
Now, don’t get me wrong. My goal is not to murder everyone who plays the game or tries to beat the encounter. I’m a bit more severe when I’m designing things for my game, simply because if they mess up and all die, they can simply come back in a few minutes, hours, or days and try again. The penalty there is just that they lost some time. If I kill everyone in a pen & paper game, usually it means I have to scramble to come up with an excuse for the enemies not to murder them all viciously, or simply that the campaign is over…and the people I game with would more likely want to simply move on to another campaign or game, rather than continuing after I murdered them all. That might be because I simply haven’t woven a compelling enough story yet, or it might just be my group – either way, it’s a lot less forgiving if EVERYONE dies. Kill one or two people? Can make the fight a lot more memorable that way. We still tell stories about the Invoker who brought back our idiotic Dwarf Fighter with a ridiculous crit and a cajoling look.
However, what I have learned when designing things for my game is that I need to sit down, make a list of basically everything awful this mob could do to players, and give it all of that and then make it 10% worse. This could just be an issue with the game I work on, but most of the time, I find that if you don’t give the players a good chance to get totally destroyed in seconds, they’ll usually blow right through it. Additionally, AoE damage and things that make players move around are key – players who can sit there for an entire fight and simply push buttons until the big thing falls down are usually bored. That’s not to say that you can’t have a good fight where that happens, but they should be rare, and they should be racing against something. Patchwerk in Naxxramus, in World of Warcraft, is a good example of a fight that was done pretty well where you just sat there – you had a pretty short amount of time to kill him before he just destroyed your tank, and he hit a good number of people around him for ridiculous amounts of damage every 1.5 seconds. Your healers had to be absolutely on-the-ball in order to keep people alive through his hateful strikes, and your ranged DPS simply had to ensure that they could do enough damage to bring the guy down before he got super-pissed and destroyed you all. However, if you do this anything more frequently than sparingly, then things get boring – make players run around to interact with podiums, or make them run around to avoid damaging spells or traps. Or make them shift their focus fairly regularly to killing adds – things like this allow you to be truly evil, and make for fun encounters when players are trying to beat it.
D&D is an entirely different animal. Healing is a lot more scarce, so if you hit a guy for 80% of his health in a single shot, then you’re going to be seriously hampering the party’s ability to complete the encounter. Spreading out a lot of damage is actually a great way to ensure that the encounter gets tense – in my last session, the party fought a mob that, on the first round of combat, gave everyone an effect that would deal 5 damage to allies who were next to them whenever they started their turn. The party I’m facing is very melee-heavy, and my mob stayed in a corner and didn’t move much, so they had to all cram into a corner and try and ensure that they weren’t going to be blasting each other every turn. The NPC made this a lot harder for them by constantly shuffling them around and having them attack each other – the players actually did more damage to each other through that attack than the NPC did to them. Most of that was simply the damage values I was using – the NPC didn’t have enough damaging abilities himself, and the players were unable to roll low against each other.
In the future, if I was going to run a similar encounter, I’d have the mob move players over to an ally and make a basic melee attack roll – if it succeeds, then the target is dazed until the end of their next turn. It’s a powerful hampering ability, but it doesn’t mean that players are going to be destroying each other. And then I can give the NPC a few more damaging abilities to make up for the loss of damage – more blasts or bursts would have been good, and maybe something that gives players a penalty to saving throws so they’re hit by the aura damage more often…and maybe changing the aura damage so it does damage to the player if they’re alone, and then less damage to their allies if they are nearby – either 6 damage to the player, or 6 damage, spread out evenly amongst nearby allies. It’s a few fiddly changes like that that would make the encounter a lot less “Oh god why did the fighter just do 80% of my health in damage with that attack” and more “If we don’t kill this guy quickly, we are going to get brutalized oh dear god.”
These are things I’ve learned by pounding through a lot of encounters in games, but I’m by no means an expert in encounter design yet. I’d be curious to see what people think about my basic thoughts, which are:
- Fights should rarely be won simply by standing around and outdamaging the enemy – while okay, sparingly, you should force your players to react to more than just damage.
- The more mobile you force your players to be, the more you can get away with, up to a point – if you’re making everyone run around like an idiot for 30 seconds where they can’t cast healing spells, don’t have that be the same thirty seconds you blast them with unavoidable AoE damage.
- Adds in fights are great, but they need to be more than just distractions. Make them force the players to deal with them, either by giving them massive damage bonuses or CC abilities of some form.
- Avoid situations where you need specific characters or abilities to succeed, outside of the norm – designing an encounter to require 4 tanks is great, in theory, but kinda blows chunks when you can only bring 8 people to the party. If it’s a series of encounters where they ALL require 4 tanks, then that’s a different animal, but don’t have the third fight out of seven require radically different makeups than the rest of them.
I’m sure there’s more, but I feel like those are the key ones. There’s a whole separate thought pattern around encounter timers that I’ll get into another time, but I’m curious to see what everyone else thinks. There’s a chance I’m simply way off-base, and that you can’t really make a list that works for every system, but I’d be interested to see if there are a few guidelines I can write up to pass around to anyone who is developing encounters.
