Dragna's Blog: Balancing for Different Parties

It’s genuinely difficult to balance encounters for parties of different levels. It’s even harder to balance encounters for parties of different tiers - or different sizes.

In Re-Reloaded, Argynvostholt is a location that the players might conceivably visit at levels four (during Vallaki downtime in Act II), five (on a free day after killing Izek and before the Wizard of Wines), or six (after the Wizard of Wines). 

To make matters worse, completing the Wizard of Wines also unlocks the players’ ability to recruit Ezmerelda d’Avenir - a CR 8 NPC! as their foretold ally. Even ignoring the “CR 8” bit, having a single extra warm body on the team makes a huge difference, as CR2.0 and quadratic encounter design tell us. The players even pick up Ireena as well upon beginning the Wizard of Wines - there’s a huge amount of variability here.

There are three main combat encounters in Argynvostholt Reloaded. The first, the nine giant spiders in the ballroom, is intentionally pretty easy (more bark than bite) and a bit of a puzzle, so we don’t need to worry about balance too much there. The third, Vladimir Horngaard himself, is more of an optional enemy that the players will only fight if they fuck up; in addition, because his oathbind ability allows parties to fail forward after TPKing to him, there’s not really need to worry about balancing him so long as some party, somewhere reasonably could.

That leaves the second encounter - the phantom warriors in the trapped hallway on the second floor. This one, however, is genuinely important to make challenging - we want the players to be (1) scared of fighting Vlad when they find him (because they’ve already fought and been exhausted by his underlings), and (2) cognizant of the tragedy of such a powerful fighting force losing itself to madness and hatred. If the phantom warriors are too weak, you lose both, and it winds up being just a roadbump without much impact on the players’ choices later in the arc.

But how do we balance this for parties of different levels? Let’s take a look at the initial setup - seven CR 3 phantom warriors as per RAW - and run it through CR2.0:

• Five 4th-level PCs: impossible encounter (793% of total HP spent)
  
• Five 5th-level PCs: impossible (262% of total HP spent)
  
• Five 6th-level PCs plus Ireena (post-WoW, pre-Abbey): devastating (181% of total HP spent)
  
• Five 6th-level PCs plus Ez (post-Abbey): brutal (72% of total HP spent)
  

First off - the only party that isn't likely to TPK is the Ez group; everyone else dies horribly. Second, note the massive jump in party strength that comes when we (1) go from 4th to 5th-level, and (2) add CR 8 Ez as an ally. (This will continue to be annoyingly important later)

[Editor’s Note: I’ve since removed Ez’s ability to cast lightning bolt, which singlehandedly reduces her from CR 8 to CR 4. She still has an outsized impact on balancing, though not as much as before.]

So a mandatory encounter with seven CR 3 phantom warriors isn’t reasonable. But note the implication - right now, the party with Ez only spends 72% HP, which is just barely enough to make them feel like they’re making an effort. If you make the encounter accessible to the low-level parties, it becomes a cakewalk for the high-level ones, totally undercutting the themes we want to convey.

But how do we address this? A few people on the Discord server suggested providing different encounter balancing depending on the players’ level, which I rejected out of hand. That would solve the problem, yes, but it’d be an inelegant, kludged solution. It’d be cheating, not game design. Good game design is robust and resilient, not a game of smoke and mirrors. No; if I was going to balance this encounter, I was going to do it for everybody simultaneously.

Perhaps some kind of fear effect? The spirits, after all, just want the players gone, not dead. Give the phantom warriors some sort of ability that forces players to run away - an inverted turn undead. 

The problem would, of course, be that you’d need it to uniquely hit low-level players, but not high-level players. You can’t really do it just via setting the DC high or low. I briefly pondered different ways we could uniquely target low-level PCs, and settled on “like a cleric’s destroy undead ability, it only works on players 5th-level or below.”

Yeugh. More arbitrary DM cheating. Inelegant and clunky. More importantly, it wasn’t even diegetic (i.e., having narrative support in the game world) - there’s no such thing as “5th level” in-world; it’s just an abstraction we use OOC to describe certain types of creatures (i.e., player characters with a certain number of experience points). Nope.

(I briefly considered addressing this by having the fear effect only trigger when a player is KO’d - which would likely only trigger for the low-level parties - but that just took all the danger out of the encounter and made no sense. The players are taking real injuries from this fight. Why should the last blow let them run away instead of finishing the job?)

So I took a step back and tried to view the scenario through a diegetic lens. When we’re comparing a 4th-level party and a 6th-level party with Ez, what is the difference between these two parties? The 6th-level party might have more powerful spells (e.g., fly), but not reliably - many parties won’t even have a player capable of taking such spells. So class-specific differences were out.

Higher stats? Higher saving throws? High spell save DCs? No, no, no. All of these affect probability, yes, but they wouldn’t impact the actual outcome in any binary way (i.e., “this outcome WILL happen if you’re X level; otherwise, this other outcome will happen).

What about tying it to some kind of artifact that players could only get in a later quest - say, Stolen Gem/Wizard of Wines? The issue with that was that such an artifact could only make the players’ lives easier, not harder, which was the opposite of what I was trying to do (i.e., give the 6th-level party a tougher fight).

And then I started trying to think about the players themselves. Going from 4th to 5th level, and then going from “no Ez” to “yes Ez,” is such a sea change. What, qualitatively, is different about the players after they’ve undergone these changes?

And then I realized: a high-level party with a companion is more cocky.

More confident. Arrogant, even. More secure in their ability to get things done. Less willing to denigrate themselves in order to take the “easy” way out. Which meant that there had to be a release valve that could allow any party to avoid or weaken the phantom warriors - but one which would be so denigrating, inconvenient, and time-consuming to complete that a confident party would always decide to skip it. 

Given that the phantom warriors are attacking the players because they think they’re Strahd’s soldiers, my mind immediately went to the lost battlefield north of Berez - the place where the Order made its last stand in the war against Strahd. I pictured a mass grave, buried in the earth, and players spending hours on their knees in the mud and muck sifting through skulls and bones in a desperate attempt to find some piece of preserved paraphernalia bearing the Order’s symbol.

So that would be the choice that Sir Godfrey offers them: play a game of “ghostbusters” if you feel up to it, or go dig up some dead soldiers’ armor if you don’t. (Interestingly, this plays into my recent workshop on tension and my forthcoming workshop on agency: the “alternative goal” of obtaining the armor defuses the undesirable dramatic question of “can the players fight off the phantom warriors?”, and the option to pursue a stealth/deception route instead of a combat route offers meaningful choice, and therefore agency.)

Now, would any self-respecting player want to go for a dig? Probably not! But a 4th-level party is hardly “self-respecting” compared to a higher-leveled one.

Significantly, even if an underleveled/underpowered party refused Sir Godfrey’s generous offer, initiated the encounter with the phantom warriors, and started losing, they’d always be able to back off, retreat, and dig up the armor before shamefacedly trying to sneak past instead. 

And if they stubbornly chose to fight to the death instead, despite having an easier alternative within arm’s reach?

Well. Don’t say I didn’t warn ‘em.