How the Heck do You Balance Combat for your RPG campaign?

 

This is the fourth campaign I've ever run, and I think I finally figured out the secret to balanced combat -- you balance it during gameplay.

The Dragon AGE rpg core rulebook has advice for making adversaries tougher (adding extra health and giving them more focuses and ability points). In practice I've found these guidelines pretty useless (sorry Green Ronin) unless you are wanting to use adversary stats for quick-building NPCs. Then actually, they are great.

When it comes to combat, there's only a few factors that matter:

• Enemy hp, defense & armor - how long can it last against the party?
• Enemy attack & damage - how much can it hurt the party?

These are really the only factors a GM needs to keep in mind for designing an enemy for combat. If you want an enemy to last longer against the PCs, then you can up it's health (how many rounds it will last), defense (how hard it is to hit), and armor rating (how much damage it soaks - at least in the AGE system). If you want the party to be challenged by their ability to survive an encounter, then you increase an enemy's attack bonus (how often it succeeds in hitting the party) and the amount of damage it does (how hard it hits).

And as a little secret, you don't even need to increase ability stats to make those other increases make sense. That one 1d6 attack? It's now 2d6. How does that work? Doesn't matter. It now hits harder. Who's looking at these stats? Not your players. You don't need to justify to them why the enemy is tougher. If someone brings up monster stats in the rulebook, just say you made a harder version, which you are allowed to do.

Okay, but how much health should an enemy have? And how hard should it hit? It's best to consider previous combats the party has gone through. Judge how easy or difficult it was for them before and adjust monster stats up or down for new battles accordingly. It's also helpful to have a copy of your player's character sheets. If you know the defense of your PCs, then you know what stats your enemies need to get past that defense. If you know their hit point total, then you can calculate how much damage they can survive.

However, you can do all kinds of number fiddling on paper and then have it all fall apart when you get to the table. Your enemy that was supposed to be scary, completely fell flat.

This is what I mean about balancing during gameplay. The bad guy went down sooner than you wanted? Give him 40 more hit points to last a couple more rounds.

Didn't get stunts like you wanted? Your rolls are behind the Gm screen. No one can see them but you. That's what the GM screen is for! No one can say you didn't roll stunts (or crits, in other systems). So make those stunts go off, regardless of your roll, when you want an enemy to hit a little harder.

The point of "fudging" your rolls behind the GM screen isn't to screw over the players. It's so you can make a fight dynamic, interesting, challenging, and fun. If your PCs are steamrolling over a fight that is supposed to be hard, it's time to fudge some stats/rolls. If your PCs are having difficultly in a fight that wasn't supposed to be hard, then make some fudge in their favor. Have your enemy miss a couple times. Have the enemy die before their health actually falls to zero. Or just subtract a few numbers from the damage they inflict.

Again, this isn't to cheat. As the GM, your job is to facilitate the story and make it fun for your players. Being completely steamrolled one way or the other (by the players or enemies) in many cases (unless that's actually what your players want), isn't fun. So get inventive, tell the story, and make it fun.

My latest session, I had a enemy that ended up getting stuck in a room on it's own because the only door was blocked by the arrangement of the party and other enemies. It couldn't reach the PCs to attack them. BUT it had a scream effect that was supposed to go off as a stunt. I just triggered it as an attack. Does that fit the rules? No. But it made the fight interesting and gave the enemy something to do. The scream has the effect of being terrifying, so the party had to roll saves or lose their major action. It wasn't a crippling deterrent against the monsters they were already fighting (there wasn't enough room in the hallway for them to all get to the target anyway), and it made them scared of the monster they had yet to encounter. Once the party actually got in the room, I switched tactics in the name of fairness and focused on dealing damage through normal attacks. I did however fudge a stunt at the end for the enemy to do some extra damage before it died in the name of dramatic exit. Sometimes I fudge stuff so when players deal a particularly epic blow and the enemy still has a few hit points, I just let it die so the player can feel epic too.

The adventure ended with a challenging fight that made some players concerned about their hit points and earned them a decent amount of xp. If I'd gone specifically by the stats as written, the combat would have been very different.

It should be noted that fudging roles as a GM is a debated topic. Not everyone agrees. But I will add, that on the flip side, NOT fudging roles can add tension and fun as well. Is an enemy about to land a devastating blow? Announce such to the table and roll in front of the GM screen. If the enemy doesn't roll well, the players were still anxious about the possibility of it happening and now get to breathe a sigh of relief. The battle still ends up being dynamic, just using different mechanics.

So, how do you balance combat? You can adjust some stats before the session to make an enemy tougher and hit harder. But mostly, you do it on the fly as you play. As GM you are the story teller, and combat is as much of the story as anything else.