GM's Tip of the Week

I got Andi to write this one, because he’s rather better at balancing encounters than I am. Onward, to encounter design!

Balancing encounters. It’s a problem every GM has faced at some point; how to set up things so that the party is challenged without being hopelessly overwhelmed, or just breezing through. My approach is to start with the demonstrated proclivities of a group – some will lean towards combat, other towards attempting to negotiate, or stealth, or other means of problem-solving – and at least attempt to skew my design to accommodate.
Once I’ve figured out roughly what the encounter is going to be, setting the difficulty is at least somewhat easier. Most systems have a way to gauge combat difficulty (Challenge Rating and Encounter Level in Pathfinder, for example), although adapting it to your players takes a bit of practice. For my own games, I find that an encounter level roughly matching the party level tends to be relatively easy, whereas one 3 or 4 levels higher is about the limit of what can be handled. For non-combat encounters, adjusting the skill check difficulty for difficulty is usually the easiest thing to accomplish. Of course, some checks quite simply are impossible; no amount of diplomacy is going to convince a loyal prison guard to let a bunch of criminals go. He might give them preferential treatment, but they remain criminals, and he remains their guard.

Realistically, the best advice I can give here is to work with your players, and don’t be afraid to experiment. After all, if everyone is having fun, who cares if you do it ‘right’?