09-07-2022, 12:24 AM | #21 | |
Join Date: Apr 2019
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Re: Dungeon construction: balancing difficulty and treasure?
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Its one of the things that makes this board difficult, because you have to try and answer questions without the reference of GURPS, when most of the time the best answer is 'over there'. |
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09-07-2022, 01:20 AM | #22 |
Join Date: Oct 2020
Location: Madrid, Spain
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Re: Dungeon construction: balancing difficulty and treasure?
Just my two pences here, but I think PC vs NPC is not the main thing to look upon as it is the enviroment and circumstances in the encounter. That will be the main issue.
If the baddies are ambushing (or terrain hinders the heroes) they have to be weaker than the PC for the first blow advantage does mean a lot. HT must be low and DR should not be high. Anyway, stalkers like moving fast donīt they? Numbers is the other big thing. I make a raw 1.5 ratio for a harsh encounter and 2 for the PCs to know they better flee. 0.75 ratio for newies. Once the fight is on and everybody is locked with the swords it is a 50% for me; specially when crit chances are more or less the same for all parties involved. So my advice is to tune the fighting scene better than looking for fighters balancing. |
09-07-2022, 08:54 AM | #23 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ronkonkoma, NY
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Re: Dungeon construction: balancing difficulty and treasure?
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And those examples don't go into anything that the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game doesn't also cover. The announcement I linked to also points out that the book is "almost rules-free advice" and further says: "While the examples come from GURPS, the concepts are portable to any RPG." So yes, strictly speaking it's a GURPS supplement. But it is absolutely compatible and relevant to the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game, and I think it will be a good answer to the (let's face it) droves of players who ask this very same question. Last edited by Stormcrow; 09-07-2022 at 08:57 AM. |
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09-07-2022, 10:22 AM | #24 |
Join Date: Dec 2009
Location: Saint Paul, MN
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Re: Dungeon construction: balancing difficulty and treasure?
@Rasputin's blog has a post with links to a massive list of DF monsters, including CER ratings. This is broader than DFRPG, but sources are listed so you can filter the list to whatever books you are using. Sorting by CER might give you a way of roughly ranking monsters by "level." You might also enjoy some of the other data he has added, such as number appearing, treasure information, and other old-school sorts of things. His rationale for various decisions is detailed in the blog.
When I first started running DFRPG, I also struggled a bit with figuring out how tough a given monster would be. Ultimately, I came to focus primarily on damage output and DR as my first check. Is it likely to one-shot a PC? Are the PCs able to get through its DR? Does it have any special abilities that might make it more dangerous or vulnerable than these numbers suggest? |
09-07-2022, 12:22 PM | #25 | |
Join Date: Jan 2008
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Re: Dungeon construction: balancing difficulty and treasure?
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Consider my problem resolved. Last edited by sjmdw45; 09-09-2022 at 08:53 AM. |
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09-10-2022, 09:34 PM | #26 | ||
Join Date: Jun 2022
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Re: Dungeon construction: balancing difficulty and treasure?
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09-11-2022, 09:54 AM | #27 | |
Join Date: Jan 2008
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Re: Dungeon construction: balancing difficulty and treasure?
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250 point starting PCs look plenty powerful already. Last edited by sjmdw45; 09-11-2022 at 09:58 AM. |
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09-11-2022, 11:30 AM | #28 | |
Join Date: Apr 2019
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Re: Dungeon construction: balancing difficulty and treasure?
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09-11-2022, 11:56 AM | #29 |
Join Date: Jan 2008
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Re: Dungeon construction: balancing difficulty and treasure?
Nope, not worried about that at all. The thing I was trying to avoid is the unsatisfying experience of (for example) having level 3 of a dungeon be easier than level 1 due to inexperienced GM choices about which monsters and how many.
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09-12-2022, 01:21 PM | #30 | |||
Join Date: Jun 2022
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Re: Dungeon construction: balancing difficulty and treasure?
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i tend to remove Bless from the PC spells lists for this very reason, making it a "mission reward" feels far more 'balanced' to me. Sidenote, I strongly recommend thinking about exactly how Bless will 'perform' it's protections in advance, and I flavor the protection based on the deity or power issuing the Blessing... and some deities/powers won't protect from some damage sources, Frex a God of Volcano (Fiery Destruction) Blessing does not stop an unexpected firetrap from burning PCs or if they fall into lava or from fireballs. However it will 'happily' go off and protect from water, cold, lack of air, etc... anything that isn't destruction from heat or fire, because destroying with heat and fire are that Deity's thing. But that's me. Quote:
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Personally I hate 'rubberbanding', "Oh you're level 10 now so all enemies are increased in difficulty to meet your new power expectations". /snore Let the PCs steamroll some foes and be brick walled by others. Build the 'dungeon' organically and let the game just flow. If you find the PCs are facerolling everything, then start slightly bumping stuff up until the game is running how your group likes it. In case you still haven't grasped a set of easy tools: Calculate minimum, average, and maximum damage for their foes. Average damage is easy if you just add minimum and maximum and then divide by 2. 90% of hits will be 'average' damage. Then look at skill, this is 'harder' to prefigure, but really skill 10-12 will be roughly 50% hits in 'melee', but ranged combatants will need to have higher skills or vastly greater numbers. Magic with it's resistances is more swingy, a single Save or Die spell can instantly ruin a PCs day, or not even slow them down. I've watched Blinded PCs get lucky and just mow down enemies in melee (especially grappler PCs, blindness is barely even a speed bump), and watched high HT PCs flub and get Petrifried. It happens. Calculate the minimum, maximum, and average damage of the PCs. The easiest way is to take the pregens, unless your Players have already made characters and you aren't playing an "old skool paper mans" campaign. Look at how fast doing average damage at a "standard percentage" of hits will kill either side (on a flat featureless plane with no retreats or tactical trickery). Then do the really hard part and think about what tactical shenanigans your Players will get up to, and what level of tactical tricks you want to employ with the foes. There are other considerations, but those are the quick things. I don't have it more refined than that because... well... after 30 years of running GURPS I kinda do all that in my head on the fly and then fudge things to make encounters interesting or fun. |
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