May09
on May 9, 2016
Balancing the Books
There is a budget for an adventuring day: an expected number of encounters and a challenge for each encounter, with a projected amount of experience that can be earned between long rests. Of course, a Dungeon Master can freely choose to go “over budget”, as they have the freedom to bend the rules. But if this was not the case…
When you think about it, going over budget in an encounter or in an adventuring day is a form of fudging. The DM is altering the assumed rules for their own benefit, making the game more challenging for the players. But that form of playing fast-and-loose with the rules gets a lot less attention that tweaking dice rolls.
Didn’t Sword Coast Legends try to implement something akin to what this comic is joking about? Only it got enough backlash that they enabled a DM to turn it off and I imagine 99% of them did.
I’ve always been against the “budget”, as even in real life it may happen that you spend day after day confronting the ordinary, uncannily solving regular problems as they show up. Then, all of a sudden, the big bad boulder comes rolling down the hill towards you, and you have to dodge it quick or be splattered.
So, as a DM I use to throw occasional kobold packs against middle-to-high level adventuring parties, or have a big nasty giant harass the low level ones. As useless and game-disrupting as it may seem, it is how the DM uses the monsters to give any encounter the real thrill. Like having said kobolds hold lit torches on a narrow ledge, right over a tar pit in which the adventurers just end up, or making the giant force the party to look for his stray “pet” and bring it back to him… after taming it of course.
I really cant’s see why low level characters should encounter only minor threats, while goblins and skeletons seem to disappear from the path of higher level ones.
Budget? Which world has such a thing? None of mine and none I ever played in :-)