The Myth of Balance

I logged in to Substack to write this issue and found a draft with nothing but the title, “The Myth of Balance”. I have no memory of starting to write that. Probably, though, it was to do with the idea that you can meaningfully measure how a 5th Edition D&D encounter is going to go using Challenge Ratings, which is clearly a myth, and which has been on my mind lately. I touched on this in the last issue, and I’m going to take my own apparent suggestion and expand on it here.

Throwing Irregular Shapes is a newsletter about games, mostly D&D, and gaming culture, if you wanted to be fancy about it. It’s written by Drew Shiel, who has other more serious newsletters as well; this one is pure hobby. You probably know people who would like it.

For once, I have a mathematically solid look at this, because I have two points to compare. The 5th level party in Utterbaum are currently dealing with a lot of undead. A few sessions back, they had to take on a flameskull, an amped-up version of the Basic Rules one, hitting about CR 8. There are two players in this game, who have their own player characters (a tiefling Profane Soul Blood Hunter and a half-elf Life Domain Cleric), and who run an extra NPC each for the combat bits (twin aasimar Oath of the Watcher Paladins). Their usual group includes an NPC Blood Hunter, Ranger, and Wizard. On this occasion, they also had along a moderately powerful NPC Life Domain Cleric. However, for part tactical and part narrative reasons, they didn’t want to use Turn Undead on the flameskull or its four ghoul minions. This encounter was rated “hard”.

In the event, the fight was pretty even. The party weren’t in danger, per se, but they were definitely challenged in places, and what eventually saved them was the Blood Hunter’s ability to lock down the flameskull (an amplified Blood Curse of Binding).

The following session, they went back to a similar location, without the NPC Cleric, and with an NPC Wizard/Monk along; this latter character with no spells that cause hit point damage, because he’s bearing a very persistent curse - a step down in power from the cleric. They were facing not one but two of the flameskulls, and eleven ghouls. The Encounter Builder in D&D Beyond was giving this ratings up past “deadly”, and I checked it against a third party application to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, which I wasn’t. They romped through it. Turn Undead on the first round, and thereafter it was just a matter of the Blood Hunter binding down the skulls (whose very poor Strength modifier meant they didn’t have much chance of resisting), focusing fire, and down they went. The ghouls were practically an afterthought.

Earlier on in my experience of 5th Edition, I was a bit taken aback by the power of Turn Undead. There are plenty of things in this edition of the game that will swing power levels and difficulty around (which is part of the charm of it after 4th Edition’s dull precision), but the ability to make undead just run away until you want to deal with them is an impressive example. I’ve since come to the conclusion that there’s a clear solution to this: don’t use encounters that are 100% undead unless they’re intended to be whomped by the cleric. Or, in a more recent narrative bit of the same game, unless there are hundreds of undead, and the numbers are overwhelming.

The point, however, is that the monster CR is an even rougher guideline than I thought it was. Undead, in the presence of a cleric, are a minor nuisance unless they’re powerful enough to resist the turn. Anything relying on mobility is kinda done for when the Blood Hunter binds it. Fiends get turned by the Oath of the Watcher paladins. And I’m sure there are a bunch more such examples from classes and subclasses I haven’t had as PCs or closely involved NPCs yet. This makes encounter building really interesting; I’m not just looking for enough numeric building blocks to make a “medium” or “hard” encounter for the 5th level party, but instead I’m picking and choosing from a palette of available creatures with subtle differences.

I could use turn-resistant undead, for example; they get advantage on the saving throws. Undead with high wisdom saves stand a better chance, too. Undead that enter the fight after the the first lot have been turned ensure that the cleric either spends another round turning, or they get to participate in the fun. If there’s a third wave, it’s likely the cleric is out of turning capability. Undead with ranged attacks, which are more than 30 feet away, won’t be affected at all; they’re just plain out of range. A combination of undead and other types of creatures means that there are some to take on the party while the dead things are fleeing, and a tactically able non-undead creature can ping its own allies with a little bit of damage to break the turn. All of the same things apply to the fiends turned by the Oath of the Watcher Paladins. And the Blood Hunter’s binding - much like the Monk’s stunning strike - is best balanced by encounters in which the boss monster isn’t vastly more powerful than its allies, so that pinning it down is valuable but not overwhelming.

There’s going to be even more of this as the player characters in both campaigns increase in level, too - as they arrive into the low teen levels, there are going to be all sorts of synergies and interactions I’m not foreseeing. Interestingly, what I’m seeing online seems to indicate that there’s a lot more play happening at lower levels than higher. While the official Wizards of the Coast material covers a fairly even range of levels, the homebrew and DM’s Guild material I’m aware of seems to concentrate a lot more in the lower end. For myself, I love the idea of high-level play; I’ll be interested to see how it works out in practice. I can certainly see that the number of combat encounters will have to decrease, though, for the simple reason that putting together interesting but not-instantly-lethal ones will take more time.

There’s already some of that cutting in; the amount of page-flipping, PDF-scanning, and sometimes just plain invention I need to do for encounters for the the 5th level parties is already markedly different to that up to 4th. There are other step-changes ahead at 11th and 17th level, and it’s interesting to note that Critical Role’s second campaign recently wound up at level 16, rather than keep rolling through the powers of the 17+ range.

3rd Edition had the Epic Level Handbook, which I have to admit was one of my favourite rulebooks of all time. The higher-level spells in particular were catnip for me. But 3E’s maths allowed for that, I think, rather more than 5E’s “bounded accuracy” concept, which effectively sets maximums for armour class and the numbers added to a d20 roll. Player characters, according to this, should have immense difficulty getting their AC over 21, and the circumstances under which you’re adding more than 20 to a d20 roll are extraordinarily rare. I’ve seen some accounts saying that in the most exceptional of circumstances, the maximum possible in the game is +27. This means that the 17+ levels are not so much about the numbers going up as the effects going sideways, and there’s (probably) only so much of that you can do.

At the same time, progress slows dramatically, in terms of levels-per-session, at 5th level. In both campaigns, it took about 14-16 sessions (my notes are divided into episodes, some of which take more than one session to run, so I’m unclear on the exact numbers) to get to 5th level, and it looks like it’ll take maybe 8 sessions then just to get to 6th. So it’ll be a while before we get to the serious sideways stuff.

Over in Heliomar, we’re in a brief period where there are no games for about three weeks, due to lots of stuff going on, people being away, and so forth. I’m taking advantage of this to work up personalised rumours and bits of information for each player. Some of these are to feed future plotlines, and some are to provide information to the party about current events. And a few are what might be termed side quests; things that an individual character or the whole party might opt to follow up on, but which won’t suffer from being ignored. I send them as direct messages on Discord, that being the medium that everyone is on.

Player reactions to these things are interesting. Some people give a full reaction there and then, ask further questions, really go into depth on it, and put it in the player-written wiki as soon as they have a grasp on it. The other end of that spectrum is no response at all, with most people falling somewhere in-between.

I’ve also put some time into developing little bits of the Empire from which the characters came to Heliomar, and into looking at the ancient gods of Heliomar and making sure that I, at least, have some concept of their structures and interrelations. There are interesting questions to be asked here about whether those gods are still around, and what happened to them in the more-than-ten-thousand years that the continent was empty of intelligent life. The last session involved a hint at a creature the player group could encounter, which might be a surviving intelligence from when Heliomar was last inhabited. It’s a powerful form of undead, though, which may make it less likely to be conversational. They have encountered one such creature before, but it was a celestial that they freed from some form of captivity, and which pretty much immediately took off into the sky. I’ve developed some aspects of the backstory here, and left others deliberately blank so far.

Alright. I have some work to do, and some more game writing to follow up on, not to mention I have some encounter building for future sessions in each campaign, so I’m going to hit “Publish” on this. Have good games!

Drew.