What do you think of combat-focused games with encounter-building budget guidelines and the "dragons should be better" phenomenon?Some combat-focused games have encounter-building budget guidelines. Each monster has a "point cost" (specifics depend on the game). The GM adds up and references these "point costs" to roughly assess how easy or hard the fight will be.I have noticed that some games like to have dragons break those guidelines. For example, in D&D 3.5, dragons are infamously under-CRed. A fight with a dragon of CR X is, more likely than not, going to be significantly more difficult than a combat with some other monster of CR X.I have fought the various dragons of Draw Steel. I can safely say that they very much go above and beyond their listed "point costs." For example, I have found that the level 2 solo thorn dragon, brawling down on the ground without ever using its breath or flight, is a significantly more dangerous enemy ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JyrnHfZ1pUTCW4GJMtB-agThnhNjtaw9Dc39tJAqx5M/edit ) than the level 4 solo ashen hoarder or the level 4 solo manticore. (The upcoming adventure of Draw Steel, Dark Heart of the Wood, is currently set to culminate in a battle against a thorn dragon... under an open sky, in a vast map, with the PCs starting at least 20+ squares away from the dragon horizontally and at least 12+ squares vertically below.)13th Age 2e gives dragons significantly better numbers than other monsters of the same "point cost". The bestiary even says:>Freaking tough: We might have gotten the math "wrong" with these guys. Like we said, dragons have reason to believe they are the heroes. Remind the players that we didn’t even try to balance dragons, and their adventurers have the option to retreat.Justifications for this I see include "Dragons should intentionally break guidelines, because dragons are cool" and "PCs are supposed to fight a dragon super-duper prepared, and should never just randomly encounter one."
>>97091880>What do you think of combat-focused games with encounter-building budget guidelines and the "dragons should be better" phenomenon?It's based. Git gud or get got.
>>97091880CR is a general guideline.Personally, I loathe it's use because it frequently snowballs into just spamming mooks to fit cohesive enemy types in a thematic adventure with character progression taking place during that adventure making battles take way too long. You CAN use this kind of system if mob rules for fodder enemies are baked into the ruleset as opposed to just transitioning to optional mob rules half way through the game which is thematically and mechanically jarring.As an example, you got a goblin problem in an adventure. It's ALL about goblins. Halfway through your party is all level 5 despite starting at level 1. You would think some other kind of creature or enemy would be showing up, but it's goblins all the way down, in order to make the encounters make sense from a CR standpoint, now you are fighting 40 of the fucking thing in a massive arena. That's just bullshit that will drag on way too long. These are stick and rock using goblins, it's not going to make sense for them to roll up in some kind of weird ass goblin tank that just so happens to have the same stats as a young CR appropriate dragon.The best way to handle this problem? Your characters only advance at the end of a given adventure. Whether they kill one enemy or a thousand, it doesn't affect advancement at all. In fact, this simple approach to advancement offers you the rare opportunity of not only having appropriate encounters all the way through but to ALSO make those encounters as lethal as possible because the players get fuck all benefit from them and stand to lose a lot from them making your monsters seems a lot more threatening.
>>97091892To me, it feels like essentially pranking GMs and their players to have a much tougher fight than expected, simply because "Well, obviously, dragons should be cool and scary, right?">>97091921One of Draw Steel's starter adventures, The Delian Tomb, has PCs advance from level 1 to 2 and encounter goblins from start to finish. I have never, ever seen or heard of an adventure wherein characters fight nothing but plain old goblins from level 1 to level 5, all throughout.What do you think of the "deliberately making dragons tougher than their 'point cost'" phenomenon, though?
>>97091880>For example, in D&D 3.5, dragons are infamously under-CRed. A fight with a dragon of CR X is, more likely than not, going to be significantly more difficult than a combat with some other monster of CR X.good.
>>97091970Dragons SHOULD be tough fights, so it just makes sense.
>>97091880It makes more sense when a particular CR band encompasses a range of values, with a dragon of whichever CR merely being the upper range of that band. So if for instance a CR 5 enemy has 40-60 HP, the dragon will have 60. Something has to serve as a cap, and dragons are a good choice for that.Just breaking CR entirely doesn't really make any sense, because it's always possible to throw fights at the players that go beyond the average CR anyway. Simply tell the DM that if they want to make a dragon feel dangerous and important, they should pick out a dragon that is X CR higher than the party's level.Lord knows they devote enough pages to dragons that a sidebar explaining to the GM how the game works would be a relative footnote.>>97091921>>97091970>As an example, you got a goblin problem in an adventure. It's ALL about goblins.>These are stick and rock using goblins>Halfway through your party is all level 5 despite starting at level 1.This sounds more like the issue is that you designed a 10 level adventure around fighting one specific type of creature but didn't consider how you'd add any variety to it. Throwing 40 goblins at your players for 10 levels and then complaining that your players got bored fighting 40 goblins over and over is a pretty self-imposed problem.
>>97092014We could do that by assigning more accurate point costs to dragons and advising GMs to field them as tough fights, right? Why do we need to trick GMs by undercosting dragons?
>>97091880I'd rather leave it to the cell-by-cell random generation procedure I create, opening up possibilities for enemy and environmental combinations I may not have thought of before.
>>97091880Largely depends on the goal of the points costing/CR system. Most ttrpgs aren't really wargames so the challenges aren't balanced in the sense of an even fight, they're designed around however many of those the party is suppose to be able to successfully defeat or win or whatever without it being too easy so everyone can feel good about themselves and get to the next story segment or whatever. If the measurement is a general guide as oppose to a well tested and mathed out measure then you likely still have some wiggleroom to make it work and the effects of the battle being quite difficult compared to others is as intended, its the high end of a range. Overall though, combat focused games with challenge ratings are trash and people need to either man up and do more free form kreigspiel combat as are accepting the consequences of it, or play a wargame. Designing a ttrpg as an analogue jrpg is lame as fuck.
>>97092048So that the GMs are taught that they can't rely on just banging stupid made up numbers together to create fun combat encounters and have to actually think about things, Edna.
>>97091880>game has specific guideline for calculating combat encounter strenght>but game purposely break this guideline for meta reasonsThat's an hallmark of a fecal rulesystem right there, either you give me the fucking tool or not, it's up to me to decide if using the shit. It's beyond me how this could be even acceptable by anyone.
