This is part of my ongoing series about tech I’d like to see more of in TTRPGs.
If they come, you gotta build it
I don’t enjoy encounter design.
Let me rephrase. I love designing encounters. I love looking at what nasty abilities and combinations I can throw at my players. I love taking a nasty little archer and tucking them away behind some beefy, grapply boys. I love taking two different enemies (and never more than 4, for complexity’s sake) and letting them meld together in heinous ways, building devastating combos. I love combining auras with passive abilities, or forced movement with traps and zones. I love all of that!
What I don’t love is math.
Many games have static encounter design. You get a pool of points (often dictated by level, number of players, and complex formula, or worst of all, a challenge rating). I’m not going to argue about whether players should encounter things that aren’t scaled for them. That’s theory of play, and a topic that I cannot possibly add anything novel to.
I’m here to steal from Doom.
And probably not the one you’re thinking of.
Doom do do do DOOOOOM
In 1993, Doom was released. In 2016, DOOM was released. And then, in 2016, DOOM was released.
DOOM (the board game) was based off of Descent1. Descent is a dungeon crawler board game where one player controls a bunch of goblins, while the rest get to be plucky heroes with magic powers. The formula was refined for 2014’s Star Wars: Imperial Assault, and perfected with DOOM in 20162.
The games play very similarly, except for weather you are throwing magic spells, zzzzrrrrming through enemies with a lightsaber, or violently stepping onto and through them with your chainsaw. In each, the “1” player in the N-vs-1 formula spends their turn summoning up mobs of enemies to thwart the players.
Except sometimes they don’t.
Each round, the adversary gets a number of points to spend. How many points depends on the mission (and of course, the game). On a typical turn in DOOM, the solo player might have a chance to bring in 6 green (easy) demons, 2 yellow (medium) demons, or 1 red demon.
They could, of course, mix and match, bringing in a yellow and and two greens.
Or, they could summon nothing at all. The players get a free round to walk through the level unobstructed. If they are clever and the mission short, they might even get a whiff of victory.
And then the demons come.
And when they come, they come. The demons pour in like a torrent, washing over them. We had one red demon before? Now we have TWO! We had six greens? Handle 12! The streets are so full of demons that… well, realistically, the players will just stomp over all of them with chainsaws. 12 weaklings isn’t the greatest defense against a squad of space marines.
But the player has options. They can choose how and when to deploy their monsters, and they can adjust that strategy on the fly. A slow steady drip? A single, giant monster? Or just numbers, a big wet distraction until the big guys come in.
This could be you!
In Cyberrats: Rise of the Briny Bastards, we introduced Lieutenants, three titular Briny Bastards who show up to a mission, summon their cohort, and make players’ lives difficult.
And we did this with point pools. Each round, the Manager is given points based on the number of players, and they can spend those however they choose. A bunch of extremely flammable kelpies just to eat up those Operatives’ precious actions (this is known as a distraction), OR have some patience and bring out a Greatwhite to gobble up a player and disappear into a whirlpool, never to be seen again3.
Call Willy and Charles, things are getting fudgey
Risk of Rain (and many other games) uses a director system to decide how much punishment your character can take. If you are dealing 10 damage / second, it gives you a small number of weak enemies. If you are dealing 20,000 damage / second, it will flood you with strong enemies.
The director makes the same kinds of choices we are discussing here: it can choose a bunch of small enemies, or bosses. At later stages, it will just shrug and give you all sorts of bosses all at once, whee!
What I’m getting at is this: if you’re already summoning in new enemies each round, and your players are scything through everything you through at them, it’s easy to ramp up the difficulty and give yourself an extra point or two.
If you’re the kind of GM (or the kind of game designer who wants to appeal to the kind of GM) who wants to ensure characters’ safety, this can go the other way, too: it’s far easier (read: less immersion-breaking) to summon fewer enemies than it is to have the existing enemies just wander off and not attack4.
Speak plainly, man!
What’s the big idea, put plainly?
Plans are worthless, planning is everything.
- Many games today move encounter design to before the encounter begins, tying the GM’s hands into a stale plan they made ages ago.
Adapt, evolve, and adapt (again)
- GMs who have points they can spend can change their strategies on the fly, while maintaining balance
(Tom Waits voice): What’s he building in there?
- Spending points allows for dynamic fights, and holding on to points creates a feeling of suspense that cannot be rivaled.
Hey, I’m cheating here!
- It’s not just strategies you can change: if you want more (or fewer) enemies, it’s easier to do this kind of sleight-of-hand before the monsters even crawl out of their caves.
What do you want from me??
If you find yourself designing a game with a formula for matching monsters to players based on difficulty, experience levels, or anything else… ask yourself if you need to, or if you can just assign point values and let the GM go wild.
Final note: avoiding anal paral
Analysis paralysis, which for some unfortunate reason I’ve decided to abbreviate as “anal paral” is when a player freezes due to having too many options, in the same way that it’s easier to pick what to eat from the taco truck than the Cheesecake factory.
Don’t give your GM every available monster at all times! With Briny Bastards, each Cohort consists of 3 enemies5. Doom assigns one to two enemies to each color at the start of the mission (here yellow means “Cacodemon”). If you want maximum flexibility and a big bestiary, you can sort all enemies into categories and let the GM build their own little loadout ahead of time, but just be careful not to get too granular with these categories, or you’ll end up back where we started, designing the entire fight before you ever see how the players react!
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Okay, yes, it was also based off of DOOM, the video game. ↩
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This is a slightly controversial statement; many people consider Imp Ass to be the superior game. ↩
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RotBB predates Marvel Rivals by several months. ↩
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Many games have attack rolls, and some GMs like to just narrate misses. Other games (like Cyberrats) assume the monsters always hit! Fewer monsters means fewer lies. ↩
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Technically one of them has 5, but that’s only if you ignore the eggs long enough for them to hatch, and really that’s on you! Responsible players and pest control agents should only ever see three. ↩