Dungeon construction: balancing difficulty and treasure?

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by sjmdw45

The thing is though that Dungeon Fantasy has nothing on verisimilitude either.

Suspension of disbelief is unfortunately subjective and probably difficult make rules for.

If it said "Draugr usually come in groups of 1-6" I could shrug and go with that. But instead it just has combat stats for Draugr and nothing at all about number appearing OR difficulty rating, so unless I calculate the expected damage of six Draugr myself I have no clue whether they belong on the first level of the dungeon or the 7th.

Well, I know how many guys it makes sense to have been buried there, which is what matters more to me.

Edit: I guess even if it did say they come in groups of 1-6 I'd still have to figure out which dungeon level to stick them on.

I also know where they were buried. Which yeah, doesn't really help you, but it is the answer to how I do it.

For example, I already know from Lanchester's Laws that six Draugr have up to thirty-six times the combat power of a single Draug. (Six times the durability and six times the damage output per unit of durability.)

Numbers in DFRPG may matter even more than that. There's really never any point where a foe becomes completely ineffective, like with D&D levels, so being significantly outnumbered even by substantially weaker opponents can be a TPK.

Because of this it is actually pretty difficult to err on the side of "too easy", because any fight is potentially dangerous. So if you start out with what you are sure isn't that difficult (and it makes sense given the circumstances) you'll probably be fine.

Against AoEs like D&D Fireball they're "merely" six times as powerful (no increase in durability) but GURPS tends to have weak AoEs and DF seems to follow suit (Song of Humiliation is an exception, but it has side effects).

Although e.g. Create Fire can be effective, especially against fodder.

What I don't know is the baseline: 36 times as powerful as WHAT.

Here's were the specific advice from Balancing Encounters may be useful. Average damage vs. DR is a useful metric here, as is Attack Skill versus Defenses.

Maybe I'll have to just math out each encounter in the dungeon before I run it, but surely I can't be the first person to try to build an old-school ascending-difficulty dungeon using Dungeon Fantasy rules, can I?

I think Peter Dell'Orto's Felltower does some of this.

However it can't be as cleanly defined as in D&D, because there isn't a quantized step-function of power level, but a relatively flat gradient. A dozen basic goblins might destroy a 500 point party in the right ambush, and a party of 125 point PCs might kill a dragon if they're smart about it. Presumably this is a feature for doing it in GURPS.

I'm going to be attempting something similar soon (but more DF-adjacent megadungeon campaign than DF proper) and while my design is putting relatively tougher threats both deeper and farther away than where the PCs are likely to start, it's not so quantitatively delineated. Really it is just narrative logic, because the really bad things have more important things to do than harass some random explorers in the mostly empty ruin they never cared about on the surface.

There's a logical inverse relationship between the relative danger of a threat and proximity to civilization. Either the threat prevents settlement or settlement eliminates the threat. So the things that actually threaten civilization must be found, under nominal conditions, far away from it.

I 100% agree (easy fights are boring), but this is also a bit of a straw man as applied to my purposes. I fully expect my friends to be bored with easy fights too and to keep going deeper until they start feeling challenged.

The stated goal of D&D's CR system is exactly this though. The idealized average encounter is supposed to deplete n% of resources. The GM is required to include mostly average encounters with specific limits easier or harder ones. This is intended to rubber-band the game and make it so players can predictably expect that the things they do are always "level-appropriate". Which is fine if that's what you want, although not my preference. It's also not a natural fit for GURPS or DFRPG.

And yet, that requires some sort of "smooth" difficulty curve to exist in the first place! In OD&D terms, if the first time you enter a dungeon, there's a single zombie in one room, then THREE VAMPIRES in the next room, both on level 1, there's no way you're going to feel ready to descend to level 2 even if you survive the vampires.

If instead, things have an understandable reason for being as they are, the players can make plans based on in-game intelligence rather than metagame rules.

Originally Posted by JulianLW

Exploits 85: "matching encounters to the party is art, not science; there’s no mathematical formula."

It does go on to give some more specific things to consider, though.

And "It's a Threat!" is Dungeon Fantasy and not DFRPG, right?

It's completely compatible.

Mainly though I was pointing out that if you are only interested in Dungeon Fantasy content the Collected is a much better deal than buying all those non-DF Pyramids.

[mburr0003]

Originally Posted by JulianLW

And "It's a Threat!" is Dungeon Fantasy and not DFRPG, right?

There is fundamentally no difference between the two.

[JulianLW]

Originally Posted by mburr0003

There is fundamentally no difference between the two.

Sure, but this is the DFRPG board and not the GURPS board. Also, that Christopher Rice article - though it's probably an extremely accurate way to size up the competition - doesn't it depend a lot on "Under the Hood" -type stuff?

I was trying to come up with a way to eyeball it, which is what the OP asked for. Seriously: the calculations in that article seem like they might take a little while.... Though they do have precalculated numbers for a lot of the monsters, right? But you'd have to make a calculation for every member of the party... It all seems to me to be pretty far afield from the design philosophy of DFRPG, if not necessarily DF.

I'm a big Christopher Rice fan and all, but IIRC, that article is one of the ones that I think a lot of folks would look at and be like: GURPS math!

Anyway, my two cents. I still think (Damage x Speed x Attacks) + (DR x 5) will probably give you pretty good results for most encounters, if exceptions are made for monsters with really unusual traits.

[sir_pudding]

Yeah for some monster traits you may need point costs to get CER.

[Kalzazz]

I just wing and prayer it. Give monsters enough damage they can hurt if they hit, enough attacks or deceptive they might actually hit, rock and roll

Most monsters you can just assume everything will be okay, toss them at the party have fun. Some of them (say an orc or a giant rat) are obvious chumps, use lots.
Some like draugr are not chumps. Don't use lots.

How did you balance fights running non DFRPG GURPS? The same methods apply. Start with the PCs 'okay Bob has N DR, we need some way around, and has M active defense' and go

[sjmdw45]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Well, I know how many guys it makes sense to have been buried there, which is what matters more to me... I also know where they were buried. Which yeah, doesn't really help you, but it is the answer to how I do it.

I don't even know that much--did I miss something obvious in the Draug entry of DF, or are you drawing upon knowledge from Wikipedia or elsewhere? Vikings being buried alone, and being buried in groups of 1-6, are both plausible based on what little I know of Viking culture/what little context DF: Monsters includes (AFB/IIRC).

Because of this it is actually pretty difficult to err on the side of "too easy", because any fight is potentially dangerous. So if you start out with what you are sure isn't that difficult (and it makes sense given the circumstances) you'll probably be fine.

Okay, worth noting. Thanks.

Although e.g. Create Fire can be effective, especially against fodder.

It's not very effective against intelligent foes with missile weapons though. (I suppose that's equally true of most D&D-branded games too. Fireball is only good against enemies in Fireball Formation.)

There's a logical inverse relationship between the relative danger of a threat and proximity to civilization. Either the threat prevents settlement or settlement eliminates the threat. So the things that actually threaten civilization must be found, under nominal conditions, far away from it.

...If instead, things have an understandable reason for being as they are, the players can make plans based on in-game intelligence rather than metagame rules.

Agreed, and when I run non-dungeoncrawley, non-hack-and-slash games that's a good approach. I happen not to be doing that this time but it's a perfectly good approach to fantasy adventuring.

The stated goal of D&D's CR system is exactly this though. The idealized average encounter is supposed to deplete n% of resources. The GM is required to include mostly average encounters with specific limits easier or harder ones. This is intended to rubber-band the game and make it so players can predictably expect that the things they do are always "level-appropriate". Which is fine if that's what you want, although not my preference. It's also not a natural fit for GURPS or DFRPG.

It's not a natural fit for any of the D&D editions I'm familiar with either (BECMI/AD&D2e/5E), and 5E is the only one of those which even has a concept of CR, and even in 5E there are no specific "n%" resource depletion goals although it's a common Internet misconception that there are. I don't want to talk a lot about D&D though because my whole goal is to do a dungeon crawl from a fresh angle using DFRPG and playing to DFRPG's strengths.

[sjmdw45]

Originally Posted by Kalzazz

Most monsters you can just assume everything will be okay, toss them at the party have fun. Some of them (say an orc or a giant rat) are obvious chumps, use lots.
Some like draugr are not chumps. Don't use lots.

How did you balance fights running non DFRPG GURPS? The same methods apply. Start with the PCs 'okay Bob has N DR, we need some way around, and has M active defense' and go

With non-DFRPG GURPS (many years ago) I just used whatever I felt was realistic for the scenario: a celebrity might have two bodyguards, whereas a Russian mafia don expecting trouble might have a battalion of troops protecting him.

That isn't an appropriate approach for the type of Roguelike hack-and-slash adventure(s?) I'm intending to run for my friends in the near future though, and AFAICT Dungeon Fantasy doesn't have enough info to make that approach viable anyway. (How big is an ice weasel pack?)

I like the results Julian got with his method, might use it (with Lanchester's Laws for quantity scaling). I'm planning to run myself through a practice dungeon this weekend just to test things out in advance.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by JulianLW

I was trying to come up with a way to eyeball it, which is what the OP asked for. Seriously: the calculations in that article seem like they might take a little while.... Though they do have precalculated numbers for a lot of the monsters, right? But you'd have to make a calculation for every member of the party... It all seems to me to be pretty far afield from the design philosophy of DFRPG, if not necessarily DF.

The reality is, encounter balancing is hard, and GURPS makes it harder because it doesn't have a 'standard party' to balance against, and GURPS combat is extremely swingy, so even against a hypothetically balanced set of enemies both a TPK and the PCs emerging completely unscathed are decently likely outcomes.

[JulianLW]

Originally Posted by Anthony

The reality is, encounter balancing is hard, and GURPS makes it harder because it doesn't have a 'standard party' to balance against, and GURPS combat is extremely swingy, so even against a hypothetically balanced set of enemies both a TPK and the PCs emerging completely unscathed are decently likely outcomes.

Yep. It occurs to me that the kind of GM who's wrestling with encounter balance might just want to give every PC one level of Hard to Kill at the start of session 1 for showing up to play. That might be the single best way of balancing encounters for a dungeon crawl in GURPS.

[Stormcrow]

Sooner or later How to Be a GURPS GM: Combat Encounters will be generally released, and then there will be an official supplement, written by Kromm, about how to set up and balance combat encounters. It's not as simple as a single index number, but it's not full of math like the Pyramid article. It's one of my favorite GURPS supplements, and I don't even tend to run games with a lot of combat in them.