Good Evening Dungeon Masters, I’m Baron
de Ropp. Figuring out how to balance encounters is
like riding a bike. It requires lots of falling and scraped elbows
at first, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes a thoughtless exercise. Unfortunately, the 5th edition Dungeon Master's
Guide uses concepts of challenge rating and the xp budget to teach encounter balance,
which is like learning to ride a bike without training wheels. These concepts require lots of time and arithmetic,
whereas training wheels would provide canned examples of what good encounters look like
for the freshman dungeon master. It might be surprising to learn, therefore,
that the first edition of AD&D, released in 1977, which didn’t even have the concept
of challenge rating, provided level-appropriate encounters as an available solution. When Gary Gygax, Zeb Cook, and Steve Winter
wrote the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, they created a series of tables with suggested
encounters to stock dungeons on a per level basis. Unfortunately, however, the way D&D has been
played over the years has changed, and so these tables don’t make much sense to a
modern gamer without context and explanation. D&D used to be focused largely on delving
into a dungeon complex to extract treasure, but nowadays players generally focus on much
more narrative issues, and so typical dungeons aren’t anywhere near as deep or complex
as their 100 room, 6 level deep forebears. Of course, that doesn’t mean there aren't
any lessons to be learned from those older edition encounter tables. Based on the three author’s gaming experience,
these AD&D writers compiled a list of encounters appropriate for each dungeon level. To reflect on the definition of the word,
"encounter" for a moment, an encounter, 30 years ago, was a group of monsters which were
all narratively connected, but might not be interacted with exactly at the same time. As an example of what this means, Mathew Colville’s
video walkthrough on how to make your first adventure, which I'll link to at the end of
this video, follows this old school encounter definition. In Colville’s adventure, there are a few
goblins patrolling the area around the dungeon, two goblins guarding the front entrance, a
few more goblins in the first room of the dungeon, and finally three or four more in
the final boss room. One dungeon and its surrounding area contains
a single encounter of a dozen goblins. In essence, a single encounter in this old
school Gygaxian understanding describes how many monsters should be interacted with before
it’s reasonable for characters to take a long rest. The monsters will likely not be piled on top
of one another in the same room, but they would all be in a location where they could
interact with each other with relative ease. Take,for example, this first level recommended
encounter of 2d6+3 bandits. Obviously throwing ten or so bandits at a
first level party would likely result in total party kill, but this absolutely is an appropriate
amount of bandits for a first level encounter, understood through this AD&D philosophy. To iterate, imagine an adventure where a local
merchant’s cash box has been stolen by bandits that live in an old hunting lodge near a ruined
watchtower. From those ten bandits, you could have a man
in the watchtower, two or three more hunting deer and collecting firewood, four or five
gamblers in the lodge all playing cards together, and the bandit leader, asleep in an adjacent
room. All these bandits are in close enough proximity
to alert each other to danger, but not cause immediate threat to the players at exactly
the same time. If the player characters are spotted by the
tower lookout, who blares his signal horn in response, the other bandits might fan out
into the woods to look for the party. But, it will be at least a few rounds of initiative
before the party is discovered, and even more rounds before the rest of the bandits converge
on the party members. Similarly, disrupting the bandit’s game
of cards in the lodge, assuming the party can sneak past the watchtower lookout, might
be able to awaken the bandit leader in the next room. But, it will take the bandit leader a turn
or two to join the fray, and will take even longer for the other bandits who are out hunting
deer or in the watchtower, no matter how loudly the card playing bandits signal the party’s
presence. To iterate, the players will likely have to
contend with all the bandits before they can risk taking a long rest, but that doesn’t
mean they have to encounter all ten bandits, all at the same time. Some of the alerted bandits might even come
upon the party a few minutes later, while the players feel safe and are picking over
the first round of dead bodies for loot. The first edition AD&D encounter tables were
specifically designed for a world without death saves, where first level wizards cast
just a single spell a day, and are regrettably filled with monsters that didn’t make their
way to the 5th edition Basic Rules, So…. I made new tables for you to use! At a link in the description, you’ll find
a supplement of tables you can use to stock your dungeons and adventure locations with
an appropriate amount of monsters for each character level. Once you run adventures using these tables
for a few months, you’ll start to develop a sixth sense for how powerful these monsters
are, how powerful your player's characters are, and what you can really throw at them. You'll find some of the encounters are a bit
tough, some are a bit weak, and that's by design. Regardless, none of the encounters are so
strong that players shouldn't at least be able to engage, assess they are outgunned,
and safely run away. With a bit of experience, you’ll seldom
need to check monster challenge ratings or the XP budget again! Thanks for watching this quick video today. I’m still recovering from the flu, but hopefully
this supplement will help you get your head around appropriate balanced yet engaging combats. If you’d like to help me make more content
like this in the future, please consider supporting me on patreon or becoming a channel member. Thanks for watching, dungeon masters, and
until next time. Good night.
