In Defense of Unbalanced Encounters

I'm not enough of a game historian ("historical ludologist"?) to know when the trend started, but at some point players, GMs, and game designers got it in their heads that "balance" was the be-all-end-all of encounter design. It's why players scoff at tribes of kobolds, bemoan "quadratic wizards," and cry foul when you throw a full-grown dragon at a party of second-levels. It's why GMs consult table after table to figure out exactly how many gnolls their party can handle.

And it's really fucking stupid. Because it's boring.

There are a bunch of reasons why balancing every encounter makes for a boring game. First, it makes combat predictable. The players know that, barring ridiculously bad luck on the dice, they will survive every encounter so long as they don't act insanely reckless. Second, it forces the caster classes to blow their daily spells right out the gate. That's spike damage, my friends, you're supposed to save it for when it's really necessary. Third, it makes combat looong.

In a perfect world, you'd be able to get through a decent mini-adventure (or a good chapter of a longer adventure) in a 3-4 hour session. Let's say (optimistically, in my experience) that half of that time is taken up by roleplaying, bookkeeping, and problem-solving. That leaves only maybe 2 hours for combat. How long do your combats take?

A "balanced" combat against a party with decently sophisticated players easily takes an hour or more. So that means you have time for one balanced encounter. That's just fine! It just means that your other encounters will need to be unbalanced.

What do I mean by "unbalanced"?

The first way to make an unbalanced encounter is to bring in easy-to-kill NPCs. The four goblins in the tavern's kitchen. The nest of dire rats in the basement of the inn. The trio of skeleton guards at the mouth of the dungeon. These are all easy-to-pummel "tomato cans" you can throw at your PCs to break up the flow of the adventure. They make the PCs feel powerful ("Awesome, we beat them without getting hit!"), and they let the combat classes shine because the wizards won't want to waste any daily spells. It's the combat version of giving the party a locked door with a DC 10. It gives you the feeling that you're actually good at something, rather than slogging your way through an interminable skirmish with mid-tier enemies.

It also gives heft to the hard-fought win against the balanced encounter with the minotaur or the pair of leech-demons--or whatever. Where your barbarian was wading through kelp zombies before, now she has to trigger her RAAAGE to stand toe-to-toe with the Exalted Lich. It feels powerful, like your limited-use abilities really matter.

And that leads us to the other side of the unbalanced coin, the encounters that are virtually unwinnable. Say it with me: "Running away is A-OKAY!" Well, not really. You don't want to run away from everything, because that's for cowards. But every great hero (or party of heroes) runs away when it becomes obvious that they can't win. "Better part of valor" and all that. In the same way that an easy encounter makes the players feel big, an impossible one makes them feel small. You need a deft hand here, however, because there are some potential pitfalls.

The first is that the players, having been trained to think of encounters as "balanced," will stand and fight, taking it on faith that the GM wouldn't give them an "unbeatable" foe. Therefore, it's on the GM to make it clear, with statements like "IT IS OBVIOUS THAT THIS DEMON IS BEYOND YOUR ABILITIES TO DEFEAT," that a blow-for-blow battle is a recipe for a total party kill. This isn't railroading or metagaming. This is something that heroes face all the time, and they often know when it's going down. Hell, Gandalf straight-up tells the Fellowship to hoof it when he realizes there's a balrog on the way.

The second is that the solution shouldn't be as simple as "we run away." Turn it into a chase. Or allow them to sneak, trick, or fast-talk their way past the enemy, assuming such a thing is thematically appropriate. Pro-tip: it usually is.

Finally, you can always make the villain's victory condition something other than "killing the PCs." I'm a firm believer in applying the "fail forward" mechanic to every facet of RPGing, and that includes TPKs. Maybe the guards are *supposed* to beat the adventurers--duh, that's how they get to the dungeon. Or maybe the foe is only defeated through the sacrifice of one of the PCs, and the players now have a new mission: resurrecting or rescuing their lost compatriot. Turn the team's "failure" into a plot point or an adventure seed.

Anyone else have ideas on how to "mix up" your PCs' encounters? Anyone have experience with this way of doing things, either as a player or a GM?

Crown of the Lich King Session 2: Sleeping Dragons

Continuing right on with my backlogged after-action reports from the front lines of 13th Age OP: "Sleeping Dragons."

When we last left our stalwart adventurers, they had found the body of Jont the half-orc treasure hunter. On that body, of course, was the map to the Necropolis. A quick aside: this made no damn sense to me. I mean, was it just tattoo? Then why was this the only copy? Surely he had a written copy that the tattooist (or wizard or whatever) had used to make the tattoo in the first place? How did he make that?

Anyway, the heroes realize (somehow) that you need a compass made of dragon's teeth to use the map. This isn't explained. I recognize that a lot of 13th Age is "whatever you or your players come up with," but it would be nice to have a sort of worst case scenario option for when the players are giving you blank stares and you're not sure why the module writer wrote what he wrote. In our game, the "map" was written in a sort of code, and the dragon tooth device was more of a translator. Sure. Moving on.

The adventurers knew that they could probably find some dragon teeth, or at least someone who knew where to find dragon teeth, in Shadowport. You can buy damn near anything in Shadowport! The party went to a (literally) underground tavern for dwarf rogues in the Copper District, where the streets are actually paved with copper coins from around the world. Neat.

After sweet-talking a few of the locals, the party discovered that a retailer of strange alchemical ingredients named Shez-a-kah operated a shop in a subterranean market frequented by drow. The dwarves in the party were not happy. Long story short, the halfling sorcerer (with demonic heritage and an imp familiar) hit it off with ol' Shez (who also happened to be demonic) and played her in a game of chess. Natural 20! Checkmate in six, lady!

Shez told the party about a group of white dragons that lived atop Gorogan's Maw, a glacial mountain shaped like a demon's face. She secured them passage on a ship, which brought them south. During their voyage, the party put down a mutiny by basically taking the captain out themselves and assuming control of the vessel. The halfling sorcerer (Timm) once again rose to the challenge and became the ship's pilot. So Timm became Cap'n Timm.

Once on Gorogan's Maw, clever play allowed the party to avoid combat with the young white dragons--mostly because Telleryn, the wood elf wizard who was obsessed with animals realized they were too young to have sufficiently magic teeth. So far, the party hadn't rolled initiative. This would change very shortly.

In the next scene, the party came upon a large tribe of kobolds, worshippers of the white dragon, outside of a frozen cavern. I should point out here that a couple of players could not make it to this particular session, so we'd been running a skeleton crew of three PCs: Telleryn, Timm, and Briar Thorn. Briar Thorn was a human archer type who'd been trapped inside a cloak of thorns by an evil wizard. Notice there is no healer or meat shield here. Anywho, when they came upon the kobolds, Cap'n Timm had the bright idea to bluff his way into the dragon's cave by telling the kobolds outside of it that he'd been sent by the white dragon. Who lives inside the cave. And hadn't left. It was a strange lie.

Tangent: some d20 systems have trained a lot of players to be very unimaginative. The exchange that played out several times goes something like this: The talky character with a high CHA tries to bluff their way through a guard and instead of explaining what the lie is, they just say "I'm going to try to talk my way past him," roll the die, and then ask me what they get to add to it. This is problematic for many reasons. First, if the player rolled high, then they're gonna be pissed when you tell them "that won't work, because your lie makes no sense." Second, there is no roleplaying there!

Another tangent: I've embargoed the "we're on the list" trick, along with the "we have this thing for a guy" gambit. I'm not sure why, but this is THE go-to scam for getting past guards. It's unimaginative, and there's no reason it should work. They're professional guards. They know who's on the list. A big party of people who are obviously adventurers? No WAY that guard is buying your bull. Of course, there are exceptions. If you've done your homework and you know to bring the delivery to the side entrance at such and such a time because THAT guard is new. And you forge the Lich King's seal, and you beat up some bad guys so you can dress in their clothes. That might work. But this "I'm a friend of the Diabolist" ain't gonna work.

Anyway, back to Cap'n Timm trying to talk his way past the kobolds. It did not go very well. The kobolds knew immediately that he was an impostor, there to hurt their beloved white dragon. Everyone roll initiative!

The kobolds rolled very well. The heroes did not. All 27 (or however many--there were a lot) converge on Timm, as Briar and Telleryn are still hidden. I fudged the numbers just to keep Timm alive for a round. Now if I were smart, I would have just had them all attack and then carry Tim's unconscious body into the cavern so that Briar and Telleryn could rescue him. I was not that smart.

Telleryn and Briar come out and reveal themselves. Fight fight fight. The kobolds trounce the heroes. Briar's down. Timm is technically dead (like, dead dead). Telleryn has literally one HP left. To prevent a TPK from a bunch of kobolds (KOBOLDS!) I invoke Telleryn's One Unique Thing, which is "Strange Luck." The idea being that when things look their bleakest, something bizarrely (un)lucky happens to save Telleryn's life--but it's like a karma deficit that comes back to bite in the future. Cool, that's enough for one of the kobold's attacks to miss, hit the ground, and crack the ice ledge Timm and Telleryn are on. The fall in an avalanche as the kobolds carry Briar inside the cavern as a gift to their white dragon lord.

Briar awoke frozen in a block of ice, only her head sticking out, finding herself in the lair of the white dragon (it was getting late, so I just made it one dragon instead of the four or whatever the adventure called for). Telleryn and Timm sneaked their way into the cave. Telleryn, who was kind of a high fantasy James Audubon, appealed to the white dragon's vanity by asking to draw him. This distracted him long enough for Briar to work her way free and for Timm to sleight of hand some teeth from a dragon skeleton in the corner. Then Timm and Briar just left. Telleryn hilariously grabbed his books and ran away, which meant the white dragon figured out very quickly that he was now alone in the cave.

He (the dragon's name was Exmin, which I Kaiser Soze'd from the comics on the walls of the shop we play in) flew out and hunted the party as it ran down the mountainside. Timm used his sorcery to trigger another avalanche, and the party used the chaos to escape.



I also ran this session at Strategicon. It was the second of three four-hour sessions, and the table was packed. The party didn't do as well with the chess game this time, but they didn't have to fight Shez, either. They made it to Gorogan's Maw via the city of Horizon, where they interviewed interns from the Archmage's university to find a guide/patron for their trip to the Maw. They chose a young half-elf wizard who wanted to find the white dragon graveyard.

My favorite development of probably the whole day of gaming was when the party, finding some animated skeletons on the trip up the mountain face, followed them into a deep crevasse where the corpse of a necromancer still lay. The necromancer, of course, had been dropped into the crevasse by one of the players as part of his backstory--a wood elf ranger who was on the lam from the Elf Queen's peeps because he hadn't brought the necromancer to justice the right way. One of the characters, playing a sorcerer, put on the necromancer's helmet. That helmet allowed him to control dead things. When the party later fought the baby dragons, he resurrected them as skeletal dracoliches that did his bidding. It was super metal.

Towards the end of the session, a younger player's brother and dad joined in as the rogue and the barbarian. Fun times--the whole oversized party (I think that made it 8 PCs, plus the wizard NPC who just spammed magic missile) took on the white dragon and his kobold minions. There were dracoliches and all kinds of nonsense. The rogue shadow-walked and sliced off the white dragon's head all anime-style.

Pretty sweet.

Crown of the Lich King, Session 1: Into Roachdale

The first session of CotLK involves the party traveling to a dungeon to rescue or find a half-orc treasure hunter with a map to the Necropolis, where the crown is being kept. Okay, sure. Because it's the first session, you can start the adventure as far along as you want and the players won't know the difference. I essentially ran this adventure three (really, 2.5) separate times. I'll deal with the "half" one a little later. The first time I ran this session out of the module was at a retreat for a game company. I had three heroes: Jaspyr the Dragonborn Sorcerer (who was the last of a line of dragons with breath that turned things into glass), Andros the Half-elf Fighter (who could see different wavelengths of light), and Nargot the Dwarf Cleric (one of the only dwarves who hated dirt, darkness, and being underground).

The party began on the outskirts of Roachdale. The dungeon entrance was in a keep at the top of the hill, surrounded by a moat of chittering insects. The party made it through using Jaspyr's "glass breath." It quickly became obvious that Jaspyr was going to try to use this glass breath for everything. But that's okay. It's a pretty cool gimmick. I believe they failed one of the checks, but all that meant was that Jaspyr lost a recovery. No biggie.

Once at the keep, the party was met by two demonic guards. They initially tried bluffing their way in with a crude dragon statue they fashioned by sculpting some squashed bugs into the general shape and then using glass breath on it (see what I mean?) It didn't work, and combat commenced. The demons were dealt with handily, however, and then party descended into the dungeon.

This was the first montage. I probably did a lackluster job of explaining the concept, but the players got it, and came up with a few obstacles. Honestly, they weren't that creative. Not necessarily their fault, but it was something that happened a few times later. A dead-end with water streaming down it. A pit of spikes. A door with something in Elvish that Jaspyr tried to make easier to read by using his glass breath on it(?)

Eventually, the party made it to the Boss Room, where the treasure hunter had been caged. There was also a tinkerer character one of the players had mentioned earlier ("An alchemist friend of mine went missing in this same dungeon!"), and they set about freeing both of the captives as a rock approached. Technically, the treasure hunter was supposed to have been dead, but one of the players declared that he was alive, so I went with it.

The fight with the rock was pretty good. He kept failing his disengage check because of the fighter's "-2 to disengage checks" feature, which made Andros's player feel quite useful. No one died, but everyone had fun.

The second time I ran this session was at Strategicon. This was more in the vein of a demo, so everyone played pre-gens with their own One Unique Things. I don't particularly remember any of them, except two PCs (a wizard and a sorcerer) were brothers. That was kind of neat. This was also when I instituted another House Rule, this time concerning mooks: rather than roll every attack, I had whole groups attacks with one roll--if it hit, I multiplied the damage by the number of books. It sped things up for everyone.

One notable thing about both games was that everyone ALWAYS tried to parley with the demons guarding the entrance to the keep, and they ALWAYS failed. I think this was because they were still thinking in a Pathfinder/D&D mode, where all you have to say is "I'll bluff my way in" and then roll, rather than coming up with an ACTUAL bluff. Their lies were just totally unconvincing "we're on the list" type things. Not that it mattered--the demons weren't particularly deadly.

The "half" version of this session that I ran was with my normal gaming group--or, rather, three members of it: Ecco the Dark Elf/High Elf Hybrid Rogue (the only hybrid of the sort), Karama the Human Barbarian (with a living wolf coat), and Duke (the dog familiar of Tom, Human Ranger and sole survivor of the "Great Gyre"). The reason I call it a half is because I used the frame of the module (and the monster stats) to get more familiar with the system, but scuttled the overarching story to continue my regular group's adventures. Tom, Duke's owner, had died in a previous session, and his soul was trapped in the Chaos Dimension because the Diabolist had claim to it (Duke had actually died in ANOTHER session, and Tom had sold his soul to get him back). The High Druid granted Duke, Ecco, and Karama passage to the Chaos Dimension to retrieve Tom's soul.

The first thing we learned upon entering the CD was that if you thought it could happen, it could happen. To cross a lake of acid blood, Ecco stretched some butterfly wings to human size and flew Duke across. When they fought the demon guards at the entrance to the dungeon, Ecco stole the *will to fight* from one of them, and he became a docile guide into the bowels of the dungeon.

During the montage, the party came up with the idea of riding a cruise ship made out of bones, on which a bunch of skeletons in weird hats and bell bottoms had a dinner party. In order to gain safe passage, the party had to choose the appropriate utensils to eat a pile of offal with, or risk being thrown overboard into another acid lake filled with crocoliches. Good stuff.

Eventually, they made their way to the vrock's room, where they found Tom's soul and were rescued by a giant spider sent by the High Druid. Tom and Duke were united as two minds in one body (Firestorm-style), and could transform between dog and human form. Tom became the champion of the High Druid and received armor made of seashells and a storm-summoning trident made of coral. Storms and pirates and stuff--it's sort of Tom's thing. Ecco got to keep the giant spider. He named him Cutiepuss.

Initial Thoughts on 13th Age

Oh, wow. So I've got a backlog of updates for this blog concerning the "The Crown of the Lich King," the first 13th Age Organized Play adventure. Over the course of the last six weeks, I've run every session, some more than once. Our weekly game is at Melrose Music and Comics in Los Angeles, but I also ran a session with my regular gaming group at a friend's house, a session at a weekend retreat for a video game company, and three sessions at Gateway Strategicon.

Overall, I found 13th Age very easy to run as a GM, and the feedback I got on the sessions, both from the players directly and through others (e.g., the organizers of Strategicon), was almost universally positive. Before I get into more specific comments about the game in the "after-action reports," I figured I'd run down some general pros and cons of 13th Age as a system:

PROS:

- The system requires very little prep. Monster stats are compact and easy to "re-skin." You don't need to prepare overly detailed maps, NPCs, or traps. A related "pro" of 13th Age is the loss of the grid system, now replaced with "engaged, near, far, very far." Tactical without the minutiae: I like it.

- The Escalation Die. Easily the best new mechanic I've seen this year. There are some minor aspects to it that involve triggering certain attacks and whatnot, but the real key is that it gives an ever-growing bonus to the PCs over the course of a battle. This means that monsters appear unbeatable at first, but if the heroes can hold out for 3 rounds or so, the bad guys start dropping like a ton of bricks. Very cinematic. Very exciting for the players.

- Backgrounds. I hate traditional d20 skill systems. They're reductive, boring, and unimaginative. Backgrounds define your character organically and incentivize imaginative play. Hooray for backgrounds.

- The classes are simplified, but still feel iconic and "true." They're also distinct from each other, because of the features and talents. Special mention to the Rogue's Momentum abilities and the Fighter's flexible attack. Good stuff that forces you to pay attention. Another good thing: the classes are balanced in and out of combat.

- Montages. Montages give every character a chance to shine, which is nice. But they also take some of the pressure off of the GM (because the players are coming up with obstacles), and they help cram in more events without getting bogged down in mechanics (because there are none). It's elegant and efficient, and gives the GM another opportunity to reward imagination.

- Unique Things. It's so simple, but it works so well. YOU ARE DIFFERENT. YOU ARE SPECIAL. "OUTs" are also great for generating story hooks, and they're related to another aspect of 13th Age that works well: all adventurers are influential agents in this world. That feels good, especially at lower levels.

- Icons (and Icon Relationships). There is no intricate, unnecessary litany of pantheons, eras, events, or places in 13th Age. The Icons offer just enough to make the world feel epic without making it all seem overwhelming and "inside baseball." Very good for pulling people in who aren't comfortable reading a 300-page tome of world lore before designing their character.

- Less bookkeeping. Money doesn't really matter. Ammo doesn't really matter. WHAT weapon you have doesn't matter. You have whatever gear you'd probably have. Let's just get on with adventuring, right? It's all flavor anyway.

- Power limits. One reason money doesn't matter is because you can't buy magic items with it, and your total magic items are limited by level. Perfect. No incentive to stockpiling.

CONS:

- There is sometimes a lack of choice. 13th Age is not alone in this, but it's more obvious when so much of the game is freewheeling and improvisational. If you build a fighter, for instance, you just move into your preferred range and attack. Sometimes (not often) you can choose between two different flexible attacks, but even that's merely reactive. Whenever a player's turn begins with "well, I guess all I can really do is…" that game isn't fun for them at that moment.

- Missing classes. The High Druid is an Icon, yet there is no Druid class. How does that make sense? I get that it's coming (along with the Monk) in the first expansion book, but there is no Monk Icon, is there?

- Missing rules. Again, I recognize the need for simplicity, but there are no rules for *poisons* in the core book. Do you know how many Rogues have asked me where the poison rules are? Same thing with mounted and vehicular combat.

- GM attention strain. So there's very little bookkeeping from scene to scene, but within a scene you have to pay attention to a LOT as a GM. Stronger monsters deal ongoing damage (that stacks and requires saves at the end of different turns), you have to up the escalation die every turn, there are death saves, attacks that trigger off of other conditions or certain natural rolls, etc. etc. It can be exhausting, and I've honestly never run a combat without forgetting some huge element that I had to hand wave in the end for balance.

- It puts a lot of pressure on the players. Not all players are super-clever or imaginative, and the game can grind to a halt if you say "let's have a montage" and are met with blank stares. Part of this is bad habits the players have picked up from other games, but sometimes everyone is just tapped out--and then it falls to the GM to scramble. Not cool.

- Relationship Dice. In improv, "pimping out" a partner means doing something that puts them on the spot. Rolling relationship dice does that to GMs every single session. It's bad enough when four people roll 6s for four different Icons--or they all roll 6s for the same one, and you need to come up with four different hooks for the same character. But 5s complicate things further, because you need a positive AND a negative hook. And you need to generate them on the fly! That's hard, no matter how long you've been doing this.

Overall, I love 13th Age, and it's my new go-to system for players who want a fantasy game. It combines the best parts of Pathfinder and D&D with some design philosophy from collaborative indie games, forming a nice amalgam of the two that's recognizable without adhering to too much of the detritus that's accumulated in that sub-genre of gaming. That being said, I HAVE tweaked the game with a few house rules that make it easier to run or more dynamic for the players.

HOUSE RULES

- Hero Points. Whenever a player does something really cool, funny, interesting, or whatever, I give them a Hero Point, which is really just an extra mini d6. They can roll it whenever they roll a d20 and add the result to their check (this "uses it up"), or they can trade it in to re-roll damage. They can also trade it in to "make something true" in the game world. I also give everyone who shows up to the session one for being on time, and I give one to whoever's my initiative monkey for the session. It incentivizes helping out and staying engaged, while also allowing players to reassert control when the dice are being mean.

- Roll relationship dice at the end. I haven't done this yet, but I'm instituting it at the next session. Basically, I want some time as a GM to build these hooks in, rather than scrambling before we even start the adventure. I also want an incentive to show up every week. If you didn't show up last week, there's less chance of your Icon showing up this week.

There are more pros, cons, and house rules, but that's all I can remember for now. I'll list some more as I go through the sessions themselves. Big thanks to Pelgrane Press for putting out this game, Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet for designing it, Melrose Music and Comics for giving me space to run it, and all my players for playing it.

Welcome to the Tales of the 13th Age

Hi Everyone,

This is going to be the place where I, Captain Werewolf, chronicle the Tales of the 13th Age Organized Play from Los Angeles, CA, starting in August 2013. Enjoy!

-Capt. Phileas J. Werewolf