Dungeon construction: balancing difficulty and treasure?

[bocephus]

Originally Posted by 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.

This is the up and down of this board. That book will surely not be a DFRPG supplement.

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'.

[Juan]

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 don´t 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.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by bocephus

This is the up and down of this board. That book will surely not be a DFRPG supplement.

"Much of the advice in How to Be a GURPS GM: Combat Encounters is applicable to combat in any roleplaying game. Its examples are from GURPS, however – primarily the GURPS Basic Set."

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.

[Dalin]

@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?

[sjmdw45]

Originally Posted by Dalin

@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?

THANK YOU!!! Rasputin's list has exactly the information I am looking for: the number appearing, treasure, and CER columns are exactly what I needed.

Consider my problem resolved.

[mburr0003]

Originally Posted by sjmdw45

That isn't an appropriate approach for the type of Roguelike hack-and-slash adventure(s?)

Of course it is. Again, this isn't D&D, no matter how much Sean Punch went to pains to try to make it look like it.

Originally Posted by JulianLW

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.

I Prefer 1 free level of Luck over Hard to Kill +2, sure it has greater applications, but most smart Players will save it for those "save my butt" rolls, and when it comes up, that it's now gone is usually the "ten minutes too late" warning indicator that that fleeing needed to be implemented several turns ago... or that they need to dig down deep and push for the win.

[sjmdw45]

I Prefer 1 free level of Luck over Hard to Kill +2...

I'm not giving out any free advantages but yes, Luck is vital for negating crits, although the party is also going to have a cleric with Bless, which is a good substitute. (Hard To Kill doesn't protect against things like paralysis and dismemberment anyway.)

250 point starting PCs look plenty powerful already.

[JulianLW]

Originally Posted by sjmdw45

I'm not giving out any free advantages but yes, Luck is vital for negating crits, although the party is also going to have a cleric with Bless, which is a good substitute. (Hard To Kill doesn't protect against things like paralysis and dismemberment anyway.)

250 point starting PCs look plenty powerful already.

Well, 1 level of Hard to Kill is 2 points, not 15. If you're worried you're going to massacre a party on their first go, this would be a good one-time reward for showing up to session 1.

[sjmdw45]

Originally Posted by JulianLW

Well, 1 level of Hard to Kill is 2 points, not 15. If you're worried you're going to massacre a party on their first go, this would be a good one-time reward for showing up to session 1.

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.

[mburr0003]

Originally Posted by sjmdw45

I'm not giving out any free advantages but yes, Luck is vital for negating crits, although the party is also going to have a cleric with Bless, which is a good substitute. (Hard To Kill doesn't protect against things like paralysis and dismemberment anyway.)

Bless is an incredible power-up. Expect every PC to refuse to enter a dungeon until the Cleric has Blessed everyone (except themselves - which is something to be wary of, the Cleric is not Bleessed - unless your party has 2 Clerics).

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.

250 point starting PCs look plenty powerful already.

They are and they aren't. "Action economy" still bites them hard (being outnumbered by weaker enemies still drags PCs under, not to mention equal or more powerful foes), poor tactics can still kill decisively, and single crit hits can swing combat hard and fast.

Originally Posted by sjmdw45

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.

That happens... and honestly sometimes letting the PCs rofflestomp enemies is fun.

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.