Encounter Balancing

[The Evil Moose]

Can someone explain to me how exactly balancing encounter in 3.5 works? As in how many level x numbers should be put against x number of players at x level. I.E. how would you balance an encounter for a party of 1 person at level 1? It's something that I've always been wondering about but I haven't seen any clear description for it in the books.

[Quiddle]

d20 srd has a encounter calculator (http://www.d20srd.org/extras/d20encountercalculator/), is that what you wanted?

[holywhippet]

Part of it is resource usage which depends on the number of encounters per day. If the party is going to run into three monster groups in a day you want them to be able to complete each battle using at most 1/3 of the spells/powers/whatever they have per fight. If they they leave a fight mostly dead, you've possibly overdone it a bit.

[Epsilon Rose]

A caveat, CRs don't always accurately predict the difficulty of an encounter. You player's optimization and skill also play a major roll. I've had players get stoned walled by a relatively low CR encounter, despite them all having t4+ classes, mainly because a few of them were new players and most of them weren't attacking efficiently.

[Kennisiou]

Also, CR isn't always an accurate representation of how tough a monster is. Cockatrice and Basilisk, for example, are CR 2 and 5 respectively, but both have serious save-or-suck effects that parties don't have easy ways to reverse until around level 10 or so (an easy fix is to make effects like this temporary instead of permanent at early levels or give them some sort of specific cheap way to deal with it ex a cockatrice is terrorizing a countryside and while there's a powerful cleric who is willing to lend his aid nearby, his vow of poverty allows him only to heal the party, not to directly aid in the killing of the creature).

[lsfreak]

Do keep in mind, though, that CR is very very rough. Dragons, for example, are absolutely under-CR'ed, so even if your knocks through 3 CR-appropriate encounters right in a row without breaking a sweat, throwing three well-build/well-played dragons in a row is pretty much a guaranteed TPK. On the other end, single "brute"-type enemies going up against 4 PCs is often a pushover because of the advantage of actions the PCs have.

It also depends on a lot on how your players optimize. If they don't much, CR likely does a decent job of showing you about what they should take on. On the other hand, intelligent, creative, well-optimized characters will probably require the DM to custom-make every encounter (just pulling high-CR encounters is either going to be beaten easily, or likely to cause a death or two, with no in-between).

Basically the rules are only good as a rough guide; encounter balancing really requires a combination of a decent amount of system mastery and a lot of practice.

[Novawurmson]

I'd strongly recommend looking this over (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nx-o8VAjhUwh3nnfzDQT-JA5eFLnN_BZJiBitGjBMDg/edit) even though a lot of the language refers to Pathfinder - the basic information remains the same.

[3WhiteFox3]

I'd strongly recommend looking this over (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nx-o8VAjhUwh3nnfzDQT-JA5eFLnN_BZJiBitGjBMDg/edit) even though a lot of the language refers to Pathfinder - the basic information remains the same.

It also carries quite a few key concepts over from 3.5, so it's not Pathfinder exclusive by any means.

But yeah, CR is only a guideline, and in many cases not a very good one. There are a lot of factors that go into that. Some monsters are/seem intentionally misplaced (Dragons and Drow come up often). The CR system is so generalized that it can't take tactical ability or optimization into account for either side; even the layout of a room can drastically alter the outcome of a fight, let alone clever planning and tactics.

Many monsters are designed as overbearing if you don't have the tools to deal with them, but are a cakewalk if you do (DR at low-levels, Rust monsters, Outsiders, Vampires, Werewolves, Hydras, etc...). Another problem is that a equivalent CR to party level ratio encounter isn't supposed to be a challenge, rather it's only supposed to be a speed-bump, taking away a portion of the party's daily resources.

Templates can mess things up, especially at low-levels, because many templates give you a linear power increase, so as the monster's power gets stronger, the less potent the template. A first level Vampire Human Wizard gets the tools to become a terror against a first level party. By contrast, the same character at 20th level is too busy with 9th level spells to really care about the minor benefits he has. HD increases can mess with CR, as can adding non-associated class levels. Another issue is that many monsters can be even more terrifying if they have preparation against the party.

There's even more issues than that (many of which are explained in detail in the above link) but those are many of the basic ones. Essentially, CR is a guideline that shifts very easily and often without intent. Many TPKs happen simply because the GM takes the CR system as gospel, and conversely, some supposedly challenging fights can be bulldozed over if the party can counter/out-action the monster.

[The Evil Moose]

Thanks a ton for the help so far everybody. How exactly do you design encounters for a single player? At higher levels I'd imagine it wouldn't be too difficult but for low levels when he could potentially be killed before even getting a chance to retreat it seems like misjudging the strength of a monster when designing the encounter could be very very bad.

[TuggyNE]

Thanks a ton for the help so far everybody. How exactly do you design encounters for a single player? At higher levels I'd imagine it wouldn't be too difficult but for low levels when he could potentially be killed before even getting a chance to retreat it seems like misjudging the strength of a monster when designing the encounter could be very very bad.

One suggestion I've heard is to give a solo player NPC allies/minions, to even out the action economy a bit.

[Qc Storm]

One suggestion I've heard is to give a solo player NPC allies/minions, to even out the action economy a bit.

Perhaps a druid with 1-2 animal companions, or another class with Leadership.

[Epsilon Rose]

One suggestion I've heard is to give a solo player NPC allies/minions, to even out the action economy a bit.


Perhaps a druid with 1-2 animal companions, or another class with Leadership.



I suppose you could also just let him build and play multiple characters. That said, I wonder what how it would effect the balance of you forced him to play with just the one character, but let him take multiple turns (not necessarily consecutively).

[lsfreak]

Multiple actions is a possibility, but I don't tend to like using things like that for verisimilitude reasons. I could buy a unique monster, for example, having multiple actions in a round (as a way of balancing out the action advantage against a 4-person party), but it becomes a lot more weird when you have a PC in a cross-campaign world and he gets more or less actions basically depending on the story.

For a solo campaign starting from 1st level, I would expect that most encounters are non-combat. If combat breaks out, it means something went very wrong; when a fight breaks out, it's usually using non-lethal damage. In real life, barring mob mentalities, mental disorders, mind-affecting substances, or serious training, people tend to be very reluctant to get into hand-to-hand fights because they're dangerous, and in a low-level solo campaign I'd play that up. Getting allies may also be a thing, where NPCs align themselves with the solo PC temporarily or on-again, off-again depending on their own goals and desires.

Really, though, if I were DMing a solo campaign, I think I'd prefer it start at slightly higher levels. If it's crucial to me to get the person's ENTIRE story in the campaign, then the first few levels are likely to be spent fleshing out how they got their training, such as a paladin's training and adventures while an initiate in a militaristic order, or someone's time while assigned to the garrison of a border fort after joining the military dealing with raids and such, rather than the PC acting completely on their own.

[holywhippet]

If you have time there is one simple trick to working out if an encounter is too hard or not and that is to run it by yourself beforehand. Play both sides of the encounter by yourself and see how it ends up.