I realize I don't want balanced encounters.  I've written about it before, kind of groping towards this thought.  Alot of my posts have been abput this issue.  What crystallized it was a line from William Goldmans intro to his abrigement of the Princess Bride.  He says by the time the actors and director are in a room doing a reading the success or failure of the movie is decided.  

Sun Tsu says if you win a hundred battles you will lose the war.  

Balanced encounters come out of a war game background (I think I wasn't there at the beginning).  But they are very different from a literary background.  Jane, from Firefly says "I'll kill a man in a fair fight, or to avoid a fair fight." Written hero's mostly have that attitude.  

Balanced encounters come down to the dice, a few other things, choice of spells, a bit of positioning but a lot of dice.  Any commander who lets the battle be decided on the battle field is eventully going to lose.  

I am playing Chatholul Mystery on the Orient express.  I keep trying to avoid dice becuase a couple bad rolls in a row can kill me.  In some encounters one bad roll can kill me.  Its a canned adventure so I can't avoid the dice, its literally a rail road.

In my game last week my players got womped.  They approached a ruin they knew was inhabited as if it was empty.  (They could see the garden half planted, they correctly identified the territorial makings of a large Minatuar) After ransaking the witches rooms they stepped out the door and go hit in the face with magic fire and a spiked chain.  3 rounds 3 downed heros.  They wake hanging upside down grom a tree, escape, run, and decide to go back in the middle of the night.  I wasn't expecting that.  The spell caster wasn't either.  They know where the traps are, they know right where he sleeps.  They creep in and kill him.  

One roll one dead wizard.  


Two encounters decided before initiative was rolled.  I was very happy about that.  My players had a great time.  

Any way these are a bunch of rough thoughts in favor of unbalance.

Quote from: Headless;1028918Any way these are a bunch of rough thoughts in favor of unbalance.

Sounds good. It will be interesting to see if this thread can stay on target. People tend to drag a bunch of baggage with them into conversations like this.

The biggest thing that I can add is that unbalance is best facilitated by allowing solid PC run-away options.

QuoteIn my game last week my players got womped.  They approached a ruin they knew was inhabited as if it was empty.

While that's remarkably foolish, that seems like something that would get them in trouble regardless of the balance of the encounter. Deliberately being careless is, well, being careless. The only time you'd ever want that is some kind of blow-off-steam kick-in-the-door session.

When people say "balanced encounter," they don't actually mean an encounter where each side has an equal chance of winning at the beginning (e.g. a war game). They mean an encounter where if the party plays smart, they are pretty much guaranteed to win.

My experience with 4e (both sides of the screen) is that this eventually gets very boring and creates a culture where players feel they have been treated unfairly if a battle goes south. So yeah, I prefer imbalanced "encounters;" this creates a culture where a big component of the game is estimating whether or not you have the overwhelming force needed for a decisive victory, or whether you can use terrain/tactics/preparation to provide the force multipliers you need (e.g. in 5e, parking the fighter in a narrow corridor and using Dodge every round as the ranged party members annihilate the enemy), or whether you just need to run. It adds much more depth to the game.

Quote from: Headless;1028918Balanced encounters come out of a war game background (I think I wasn't there at the beginning).  But they are very different from a literary background.  Jane, from Firefly says "I'll kill a man in a fair fight, or to avoid a fair fight." Written hero's mostly have that attitude.

I'd say they come from abstract games (Chess, Checkers) and sports and challenge duels. Some wargames have some balanced options, but pretty much any historical wargame that has much accuracy to it will try to model the actual situation to some degree, and those are almost never balanced. If balance or fairness is wanted, the player-centric victory conditions and/or scoring can be adjusted, or an artificial situation can be chosen.

Quote from: Headless;1028918Balanced encounters come down to the dice, a few other things, choice of spells, a bit of positioning but a lot of dice.  Any commander who lets the battle be decided on the battle field is eventully going to lose.

Eh. Depends on how tactical and abstract your game system is. I tend to focus on games that are about choices about how you engage a battle (or other situations), where those choices and situation details matter at least as much as stats and dice, and if you have even odds to die in a situation, you may want to consider avoiding such a battle. Best when you can engage in battle in interesting ways and also have some options to react to how the battle is going to respond to defeats (other than getting wiped out). If there's not much interesting to do in combat but roll to see if you win or not, that's not very interesting to me. If there are few options to react to bad outcomes in other ways but win with little setback or be wiped out, then what's possible is less interesting and also the stakes are raised and expectations can get dysfunctional as either there are always victories little/no negative consequences/cost, or total defeat. (Also why I like little/no healing magic, almost no return from death, lasting/crippling injuries, equipment damage, magic that uses significant resources, uncertain combat results, etc.)

Quote from: Headless;1028918I am playing Chatholul Mystery on the Orient express.  I keep trying to avoid dice becuase a couple bad rolls in a row can kill me.  In some encounters one bad roll can kill me.  Its a canned adventure so I can't avoid the dice, its literally a rail road.

How many options do you have for mitigating your chances?

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1028920The biggest thing that I can add is that unbalance is best facilitated by allowing solid PC run-away options.

Yes, running away, doing recon and assessment and possibly not engaging in the first place, doing things to improve the conditions of fighting (maneuvering, fortifying, splitting enemy forces, deceptions, picking time & place, getting help, etc), negotiation, etc.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1028924When people say "balanced encounter," they don't actually mean an encounter where each side has an equal chance of winning at the beginning (e.g. a war game). They mean an encounter where if the party plays smart, they are pretty much guaranteed to win.

My experience with 4e (both sides of the screen) is that this eventually gets very boring and creates a culture where players feel they have been treated unfairly if a battle goes south. So yeah, I prefer imbalanced "encounters;" this creates a culture where a big component of the game is estimating whether or not you have the overwhelming force needed for a decisive victory, or whether you can use terrain/tactics/preparation to provide the force multipliers you need (e.g. in 5e, parking the fighter in a narrow corridor and using Dodge every round as the ranged party members annihilate the enemy), or whether you just need to run. It adds much more depth to the game.

Yes, exactly. Seems to me that when a game (and/or GM and/or the players' lack of thinking of options) doesn't offer many options for tactics or other ways to gain an advantage other than spells & abilities, it creates a bind for designers and GMs and players with expectations that the thing to do is go in and fight. "Oh you find you're fighting someone stronger than you... so you die." as opposed to giving the players a chance to find out the enemy capabilities before it's too late and do things about it during combat (or to avoid/escape combat) that have other outcomes than just getting killed.

Quote from: Headless;1028918I realize I don't want balanced encounters.

Quote from: Headless;1028918I am playing Chatholul Mystery on the Orient express. I keep trying to avoid dice becuase a couple bad rolls in a row can kill me. In some encounters one bad roll can kill me. Its a canned adventure so I can't avoid the dice, its literally a rail road.

In my game last week my players got womped.  They approached a ruin they knew was inhabited as if it was empty.  (They could see the garden half planted, they correctly identified the territorial makings of a large Minatuar) After ransaking the witches rooms they stepped out the door and go hit in the face with magic fire and a spiked chain.  3 rounds 3 downed heros.  They wake hanging upside down grom a tree, escape, run, and decide to go back in the middle of the night.  I wasn't expecting that.  The spell caster wasn't either.  They know where the traps are, they know right where he sleeps.  They creep in and kill him.  

One roll one dead wizard.  

Two encounters decided before initiative was rolled.  I was very happy about that.  My players had a great time.

It sounds to me like you are in favor of balanced encounters - but you want the balance to include reconnaissance, maneuvering, etc. - rather than just straight combat. In other words, you want it so that if the players make the right choices, they get a positive outcome. That means that in some sense, the game is fair.

As an alternative, some games simply aren't very fair - either by being highly random, or even by being perverse (especially for horror games or humor games). The players make the smartest decisions they can with the information they have available, and they still get screwed over. So, say, I have improvised Paranoia games - not running a module or otherwise forcing the plot. However, life simply isn't fair for the troubleshooters, and they get screwed over in the end - even when they make good decisions. That can be fun sometimes, but it sounds like it's not what you're looking for.

Does that sound like a fair characterization?

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1028920The biggest thing that I can add is that unbalance is best facilitated by allowing solid PC run-away options.

I agree. I prefer a range of randomised encounters, including those that are far and away more powerful than the party and could easily TPK them. However I also want a formal escape/flee mechanic in place - a transparent one - so that everyone at the table knows the rough odds of successfully escaping, should the party get in over their heads (by accident or otherwise).

Generally speaking, if a game has only balanced encounters, I find them increasingly contrived.

Quote from: Psikerlord;1028976However I also want a formal escape/flee mechanic in place - a transparent one - so that everyone at the table knows the rough odds of successfully escaping, should the party get in over their heads (by accident or otherwise)

This idea fascinates me. Do you (or anyone else) have any examples of this kind of mechanic?

In general, I hate the idea of balance in roleplaying games. It reeks of people who think about playing but don't play often.

It just seems nonsensical to me inasmuch as with a GM, there can't be balance of any kind.

I'm not so much concerned with balanced or unbalanced encounters, as I am with having interesting encounters.

Quote from: joewolz;1028977This idea fascinates me. Do you (or anyone else) have any examples of this kind of mechanic?

Savage Worlds has a chase system.  It's two pages long and involves skills checks and cards.  It's an interesting mini-game with a very cinematic feel.  I'm tempted to call it overly complicated but we only used it once and maybe it would get easier with more experience.

Having unbalanced encountered is an invaluable tool in a story tellers pocket. Not only is it great for story telling and creating that tension in the players, but it always seems to work as the perfect team cohesiveness building situation.

When the exchanges tend to be too easy, players can just breeze through it, do a few dice rolls, and never really get into character. That is a huge problem, especially when the GM refuses to let players die, but that is another post altogether. Once this no longer works (usually they realize this once the character dies), the players have to actually engage the game fully, consider every option, and work through it as a team. The difficulty and calculations pull so much of the players attention, next thing they know, they are completely immersed in the game.

This also refers to difficult puzzles and role playing situations.

Quote from: joewolz;1028977This idea fascinates me. Do you (or anyone else) have any examples of this kind of mechanic?

Low Fantasy Gaming RPG (in my sig) has a formal Party Retreat rule, and improv chase table. But I believe older DnD variants had flight rules too, with chances for monsters to stop pursuing if treasure was dropped, or food, that sort of thing. Older dnd also of course had the reaction table which meant most encounters started off non-violently (assuming a neutral meeting to begin with). So that also went a long way to not needing to worry about "balanced" fights; the party had to start the fight to get into one. The retreat rule, and reaction table, both disappeared in later dnd versions (for the worse, imo).

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1028924When people say "balanced encounter," they don't actually mean an encounter where each side has an equal chance of winning at the beginning (e.g. a war game). They mean an encounter where if the party plays smart, they are pretty much guaranteed to win.

My experience with 4e (both sides of the screen) is that this eventually gets very boring and creates a culture where players feel they have been treated unfairly if a battle goes south. So yeah, I prefer imbalanced "encounters;" this creates a culture where a big component of the game is estimating whether or not you have the overwhelming force needed for a decisive victory, or whether you can use terrain/tactics/preparation to provide the force multipliers you need (e.g. in 5e, parking the fighter in a narrow corridor and using Dodge every round as the ranged party members annihilate the enemy), or whether you just need to run. It adds much more depth to the game.

I prefer the latter, but the problem that comes out of it is people become paranoid of doing anything and end up going around in circles planning forever to try and find the perfect solution. The game grinds to a halt.

No one knows what 'balanced' means?  It means not overwhelming the party with a zero chance of success.  It means giving the players an 'out', whether it means beating the enemies or getting the hell outta dodge.  Balance is about maintaining a Challenge to Fun ratio that engages your friends at the table.

Balance is about making everyone feel 'useful'.  Whether it be one person coming up with the plan, another delivering the one lines, the other smashing heads via dice rolls, whatever.  Balance is when everyone feels they've had fun.  Even when they get utterly crushed, because they made a choice.  But that they got to make that choice.  It's a, no pun intended, balancing act.  The GM needs to weigh all the factors and then make the play.

Balance is NOT sameness as what every single time someone brings this word up everyone seems to assume.  Sameness is not Balance, sameness is dull, it's boring, it's a flat line.  Please don't try that fallacy, it makes people who know what it means roll their eyes.

What is balance?

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1028999Balance is about making everyone feel 'useful'.

Well that's not it for sure. It's no one's job to make a tabletop RPG balanced. If players would just role-play, feeling useful or not wouldn't be an issue during a session.