My group and I are 12 sessions in to my first campaign as a Pathfinder GM and I finally feel like I’m hitting my groove.
One of the most difficult things for me to pick up has been designing effective fighting encounters that are appropriately challenging to the party. Well, about 3 sessions ago I finally feel like I nailed it!
There was a fight that has story import and required tactical thinking, teamwork and no small amount of good rolls to see the party through – and the group are still talking about that fight now.
In this post I’ll summarise some of the things I’ve learned and difficulties I had, with links to more in-depth articles on each topic.
Note: I’m far from an expert at this, I’ve just reached a point where I (think I) can design one effective encounter, but I’d guess the things I’ve struggled with aren’t unique to me, and the this summary pulls together a bunch of ideas I’ve since read elsewhere on the internet.
Challenge Rating
The concept of Challenge Rating (CR) is simple, but I misunderstood it at first – I was looking at creatures in the Bestiary and translating the listed CR into a literal encounter CR. If I wanted to create a CR3 encounter I might take a CR 3 monster, a CR 2 and a CR 1 monster or six CR 1/2 monsters – oops!
Encounters should be designed to a target CR, which gives an experience point (XP) budget that you can use to ‘purchase’ challenges to include in the encounter. For example; a CR 3 encounter gives a budget of 800XP and a CR 1/2 opponent is worth 100XP, therefore by using six CR 1/2 creatures to populate (what I thought was) a CR 3 encounter I was under budget by 200XP – no wonder it wasn’t a challenge!
Action Economy
I’d seen the term Action Economy used a few times when discussing encounter balance on various forums and internet communities, but what does it mean?
Action Economy refers to the idea that during a Pathfinder fighting each side has a set amount of actions it can take (move, standard, swift, etc.), and whichever side can take more actions has an intrinsic advantage. For example a party of 4 will always have an advantage against a single enemy because the party can take 4 times as many actions in each turn. See Alexander Augunas’ article on Action Economics for more detail on this concept.
For my party of five, including a Summoner with his Eidolon, they would have six times as many actions as a single opponent. The Pathfinder Core Rulebook suggests that a parties APL is increased by one for a party of six, and I think APL+1 is a much more realistic base CR for my front heavy group (2 x Barbarians, Paladin, Summoner and Cleric).
System Assumptions
Two other pieces of information I read, for which I unfortunately don’t have any citable sources, are:
- The CR table in the Core Rulebook assumes the party is a balanced party (fighter, cleric, wizard and rogue) of four.
- CR of enemies assumes characters built with a 15-point spend that will collaborate, or 20-point spend with no cohesion or collaboration – as might be found in the Pathfinder Society organised play.
This anecdotal information certainly fits my experience and helps me to understand why some of the Challenging encounters I had prepared were a push-over for the party. It further reinforces the notion above that I should be adding one to the APL of the party members to determine their APL for encounter design.
Boss Fights
With the notions of CR and Action Economy better understood the last piece I wanted to figure out was how to design a boss fight, that is an encounter where a single big bad might challenge the party.
Fortunately I came across this post on designing solo encounters which makes recommendations about how to decrease the parties action economy advantage and, perhaps more importantly, increase the boss’ defence abilities so that they last longer against a party with a much more favourable action economy.
Best laid plans
When I design fighting encounters for my group now I keep the following in mind:
- Don’t be afraid to include non-average (APL) encounters, particularly as most of my groups sessions are relatively short at 3 hours.
- Use battlefield control techniques to keep fights more interesting and challenging; items (i.e. tanglefoot bags), spells (i.e. sleep and command) and other techniques might tip the battle in the creatures’ favour.
- Be prepared to make adjustments mid-encounter, i.e. if a fight is too easy, apply the Advanced Template to the creatures to easily toughen them up.
Finally, a matter of taste
One piece of advice I saw over and over whilst reading up on this topic was to fudge things in the NPCs favour – whether that be increasing a monsters hit points so they don’t die as quickly, rolling dice behind a screen and ignoring rolls which make the encounter too easy or other tricks.
Personally I’m not a fan of such techniques. My group has always been very open and I almost always roll my dice in front of the players for all to see.
As suggested above, I’m not opposed to bumping the statistics of an enemy mid-fight to make the encounter more challenging but what I really wanted to learn when reading up on this topic was how to design challenging encounters for my party. Fudging rolls isn’t going to help me feel better prepared!
References
My understanding of the concepts here was greatly enhanced by a discussion I started with the Pathfinder community on Reddit.
The following articles helped me understand the concepts above much better: