After something of a pause in my output here (University coursework and Christmas having trumped game blogging on my priority list for a while), I’m back again for some more musings.

OK, so we’ve talked about the asymmetric party.  Let’s consider the issue of asymmetric encounters.

An asymmetric encounter is one where the party are faced with a challenge that is trivially easy for them, or else so difficult they have little or no hope of success.  However, the more recent versions of D&D have sought to promote the idea that parties of characters should be presented with a series of encounters that are carefully balanced for their level - give or take a little.

For me, this jars with my sense of realism and immersion in a similar way to the idea of always running parties that are a perfectly balanced mix of characters all of the same level of ability.  To an extent, in the same way that we might argue there are in-game reasons why someone assembling a party would take pains to get the right people for the job, we might also argue that those people will actively avoid running into more trouble than they can handle, or wasting their time on trivial fluff.  And yet, if you spend a week travelling through a wilderness when you are 1st level and run into a few wolves, why is it that when you travel through the same wilderness a while later when you are 5th level you keep running into trolls, and then a bit later still, again in the same wilderness when you’re 8th level - you just happen to run into a behir.

I guess there are two ways you might respond to this:

  • The anthropic pinciple.  In an infinite multiverse, some party somewhere will just happen to be fortunate enough to enjoy a career of ideally balanced encounters.  Luckily, that party is you.  If it weren’t you, then obviously you wouldn’t have had those encounters, but you did, so obviously you are that party, so quit complaining.
  • Encounters that are unbalanced are not fun or (shudder) cool.  My game is all about fun, cool encounters.  This is fantasy, right?  What does realism have to do with that?  I’m a narrativist, not a simulationist.  My 8th level characters would find wolves a bit boring to deal with, so - bring on the behir and naturalism be damned.

For me, with my desire for a balanced mix of simulationist grit and narrative enjoyment, the anthropic principle will only stretch so far.  For me, a good story is an emergent thing that is born of a party-centric constructed narrative (”What challenges would the party like to face and what rewards would they like to get for completing them”) which is set in a simulationist, ‘built’ world that allows for the possibility that sometimes, Shit May Happen.  Reactions to this vary, but this approach hasn’t lost me many players so far, and they keep turning up for more, so I guess it’s working OK.

So, yes, sometimes in my campaign the characters may end up fleeing from a situation that they can’t handle.  Death is always a possibility, and the players know it.  And - note well - if I’m playing a GMPC in the party, they are no more immune than any other character, and yes I have on one occasion killed my own character (purely accidentally, not as a staged display of my impartiality…..).

But what about the other end of the spectrum - when the party runs into hostile creatures that pose them virtually no threat whatsoever?  Well, I do like to throw these in occasionally, to add to the sense of realism and flavour.  Running into a few bugbears is part of the scene setting in a wilderness trek, and they don’t have to immediately realise they are bugbears, either - the encounter can be introduced by saying that someone spots some movement nearby, build up the tension a little and then let them feel relief that it isn’t actually a behir after all but something they can handle quite easily.

Sometimes the party will have the means to simply avoid the encounter altogether.  Other times, they will get stuck in and revel in the ease with which they deal with their opposition.  Reactions vary from player to player - some feel that these encounters are a waste of time and not worth running.  Others don’t mind them.  What I will say is that I don’t insist on running every single trivial encounter a party might have - some I will simply describe, saying ‘you encounter nothing worse than a few goblins and wolves along the way which pose no threat to seasoned adventurers like yourselves’.  Nevertheless, just throwing the odd one in once in a while as a set-piece encounter is a nice exercise.

The interesting thing I’ve found, in fact, is that characters/players tend to be more generous to their adversaries the more heavily they outclass them.  Whereas at lower levels they will fight the evil hobgoblins to the death and take no prisoners, when the hobgoblins pose them virtually no threat at all they almost feel a bit guilty about killing them and are more likely to try to end the combat by non-violent means and then send them on their way (maybe even healing the injured ones to show there’s no hard feelings).  I guess when you’ve faced undead horrors and abominations from the Abyss hobgoblins seem just too human to slaughter without mercy.