D&D 5E Encounter Balance holds back 5E

[ECMO3]

When viewed through this lens, the only true balance you can hope for is a soft balance wherein no one feels particularly outshined by another player at the table. Whether 5E has achieved this soft balance is debatable; many argue that this isn't true from 9th level on, 11th or 13th level on, and some more extreme opinions even posit after 5th level (or 1st).

I think this is a false premise. At every table, in every game, one player outshines all the other players in any given session. IMO there has never been a session played in any RAW version of D&D where all players contributed equally. The drivers of this are not class, subclass or level. The primary drivers are the in game choices, dice and adventure design in that order.

1. Choices. A player who makes good choices will contribute more. A player who makes bad choices (whether logically smart or not) will get bad results - the fragile Sorcerer who smartly backs up away from the Orcs at the door and an Ogre comes through a secret passage and kills him. Or an example from play tonight - we knew we need a light shined on a door to open a secret passage and my Wizard figured "what about one of these lit candles on the floor" and when she picked it up Mummys jumped up out of the Sarcophogi and nearly killed one of the PCs in a fight that was "easy". This is before you even consider the stupid choices (or on the other side brilliant choices). Choices drive this more than anything else.

2. An 8 Charisma Barbarian WILL outshine my 18 Charisma Bard in Charisma checks with expertise with good rolls by the former and bad rolls by the latter. Not can outshine, but will outshine.

3. Someone who built a PC to excel at the exploration pillar will probably be outshined when a session is entirely focused on social interactions with a little bit of combat. The things above it on this table (choices, dice) could change that, but rarely will.

Those are the three biggest things that affect one player outshining the others at the table. While mechanics, class design can and do favor or bias the to the benefit of certain classes, the root cause of one player outshining the other at the table are not these things. They are the things listed above are and they are in that order.

More ripple effects come from this. Play culture begins to turn away from creatively using what's at hand to find ways around or over massive challenges to instead using raw mechanics in optimal ways to win against enemies that were designed to be won against. Having encounters where your party is meant to feel powerful is not a bad thing; however, when every encounter is balanced along these lines, it means that players are rarely forced to think outside the box for overcoming challenges.

This is a great point.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

encounter balance, defined as having a rigid system

Then the definition is already a problem.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The Living Doll is okay

Yeah, it's possible I modified that a little into the evil glove puppet Mister Puncho. Probably should have upped it's CR a little!

Since I don't make much use of CR in creating encounters, I tend not to bother trying to recalculate it when I make tweaks (which is pretty much always).

It could have gone very differently though. If I remember correctly the fighter was ahead of Mr Puncho in the initiative, and could have taken it out, but chose to target one of it's carrionette minions instead. It was fairly obvious through the preceding dialogue that Mr Puncho was the boss.

his sort of extreme swing-y-ness I think I don't really want from a game that focuses on combat as much as D&D

Swingyness doesn't bother me. But that was the only fight in a 3 hour session. D&D only focuses on combat as much as you want it to.

CRs do sometimes help give a warning that an otherwise innocuous-seeming enemy has some kind of fairly outrageous ability though!

I think the old stars based system was better, since it separated out raw combat power from potentially game-changing special abilities.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I think this is a false premise. At every table, in every game, one player outshines all the other players in any given session. IMO there has never been a session played in any RAW version of D&D where all players contributed equally. The drivers of this are not class, subclass or level. The primary drivers are the in game choices, dice and adventure design in that order.

I would put self-confidence ahead of all of those.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think this is a false premise. At every table, in every game, one player outshines all the other players in any given session. IMO there has never been a session played in any RAW version of D&D where all players contributed equally. The drivers of this are not class, subclass or level. The primary drivers are the in game choices, dice and adventure design in that order.

Does this not imply that so-called "spotlight" balance is fundamentally a fool's errand, a waste of time, and that designers should instead focus on what things they can address mechanically instead?

I think the old stars based system was better, since it separated out raw combat power from potentially game-changing special abilities.

Not sure what the "stars based" system was (I legit misread this as "star wars" at first!), but that's exactly what 13A does as well. Many monsters, particularly those with significant reputations (e.g. dragons, "soul flensers" that totally aren't mindflayers, banshees, etc.), have "nastier specials" options which are dangerous additions that go beyond the baseline stats and do something...well, nastier than usual. These come with appropriate cautionary advice, but the whole reason they're there is to be used at least some of the time. Despite the fact that 13A is one of those terribad badwrongfun games that actually cares about providing well-balanced encounter design tools.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Not sure what the "stars based" system was

It's been a long time, but if I remember correctly the 1st edition Monster Manual (or it might have been Basic) gave a monster level equal to it hit dice plus 0-3 stars indicating the strength of its special abilities.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

D&D only focuses on combat as much as you want it to.

I mean, sure, and you can have a CoC adventure where the Mythos doesn't appear and the PCs just go around doing 1920s stuff or w/e (I actually did consider running CoC 1990s without the Mythos once recently, but more as a prank than anything else), but D&D 5E wants to have a lot of combat in the way a Ferrari wants to be driven with some pace through twisting roads, not used on a suburban school run. 6-8 "medium" encounters per day to be precise and sure some of those might not be combat but they'd be intended to waste as many resources as combat, so be pretty intensive.

I think the old stars based system was better, since it separated out raw combat power from potentially game-changing special abilities.

That probably was yes. I think what would be better still, and sadly I suspect it's too late for WotC to adopt this, would be a system where the important abilities a monster had, had some kind of keywording or colour-coding in the MM so that they "stuck out". I'm not too smug to admit I've scanned monsters before in probably every edition of D&D and failed to pick up on something major in pretty much every edition! Sometimes I've even read monsters thoroughly and not realized how important some ability was. There's that web article series that highlights this sort of thing, I forget the name, and whilst I think sometimes the suggestions go a bit far, it is very good at showing up the actual uses - but it's not something I'd look at for every encounter, only ones I wanted to be memorable.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

6-8 "medium" encounters per day to be precise

Just like WotC, I've never payed any attention to that nonsense.

some kind of keywording or colour-coding

Interesting idea. Something that could be done now that wasn't possible in ye olden days.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Just like WotC, I've never payed any attention to that nonsense.

WotC actually does pay attention to that, for better or worse - a lot of their adventures are constructed with a backbone which adheres fairly closely to the guidelines. Some aren't, of course. Or attempt to be, but mess it up.

Certainly you've got to be kidding if you don't think pretty much every WotC adventure (aside from a very arguable handful of mini-adventures in Candlekeep/Radiant) is not focused squarely on combat, combat, combat.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

At every table, in every game, one player outshines all the other players in any given session. IMO there has never been a session played in any RAW version of D&D where all players contributed equally.

This is definitely false, if you use a reasonable definition of "outshines".

If you want to be "technically correct, the best kind of correct", and you micro-measured every "contribution" from players, I'm sure you could be like "Ah yes, all four players contributed close to 25%, but actually Throknar's player contributed 27.2% so clearly they didn't contribute equally! < steeples fingers and smiles with complete smugness >", but that just makes you a Simpsons/Futurama character. Or me on a bad day

If we use "outshines" as, say, a normal human (rather than a comedy character) would use "outshines", which would mean significantly and unavoidably more of a contribution, then that's just obviously and trivially false. There are plenty of games, played every day, where, if you had to say who "contributed most" you'd have to stop and think pretty hard about it, and if you asked three different observers (not players) of the same game, you'd three different answers. Sure, there are some where that won't happen, too - especially if most of the party got downed and one guy was "clutch", but the idea that "outshining" in any reasonable sense is happening every day at every table is laughable. Like thinking of CoC recently, which we've been playing, I could not reliably say who "contributed most" to any given session, and I suspect that whoever I did list, others in the group would think it was someone else.

Even purely mechanically, very often in 5E it's very close. For a while in 2018 I tracked DPR and kills of the party, and I was really surprised at how close it was overall. If you factor in more stuff, it's only going to get closer. It's not like 3E where it was genuinely routine to see one or two PCs (almost always casters if L6 or above) completely dominate most sessions.