New Post // D&D Balance – PC’s power vs. Enemy Strength

The age old question. How do I balance my homebrew campaign. I don’t want my whole party to not struggle through a single encounter. I don’t want them to be able to just use the same cantrips and basic weapon attacks on everything and still win. On the other end though, I don’t want to wipe the party where it felt like they had no chance. Especially when there could be new players playing who may not feel motivated to build a new character until they get more play time. How do you balance characters feeling powerful while, at the same time, feeling like the world is dangerous and caution should be used?

I’d like to make a parallel from D&D to Metal Gear Solid. Now i know, not all D&D players are also gamers. However, I am, and so this is how my mind thinks of balance. Metal Gear Solid allows it’s players to choose the difficulty of the mission they are about to go on. The levels range from easy, all they way up to extreme. Now this is not anything new. What does this have to do with anything? Metal Gear Solid is a stealth game. The joy of the game comes from being tactical and using all items and even the environment, to your advantage. However, on easy difficulty, you don’t have to use all that is given to you. On the easiest difficulty, You can pretty much use the same tactic for EVERY situation. This brings an interesting point when it comes to difficulty. Difficulty and balance is not just about making things harder, but about forcing the player to use everything in their arsenal to overcome said challenge. If the difficulty in your campaign is too easy, your characters aren’t going to need to use the spells they have spent hours deciding on. They aren’t going to need to need to use the potions that the alchemy shop is selling. They aren’t going to need to go to that dungeon to get the new powerful item because what they have is working perfectly well.

So how do we force the characters to use everything they have for maximum tactical immersion? We make challenges more difficult than we would naturally think. Now some GM’s may have the natural inclination to wipe the party on session 1. I’m not talking to you guys/girls. Y’all are just fine where you are at. I’m talking to the rest of us who can often be to afraid of killing the party, that we always keep the overall challenge pretty easy. This is our wake up call. We aren’t just making the game easy. We are eliminating so many things from our campaign that the party will never need to use because the difficulty doesn’t require it.

Make your next encounter difficult. Make the enemy have actions that REQUIRE the party to discuss what they need to do to overcome the challenge. This is where the enjoyment of combat and puzzle solving lies. Make a dragon that won’t land unless you take out it’s wings. Make a group of zombies that will continue coming back to life unless they are burned. These will be difficult for the party, but don’t underestimate them. Once they realize the challenge, they will adapt. You can then make new and more creative challenges that push the party to their limits and in this, be inspired to keep pushing.