Aetrimonde

I’ve shown off enough enemies, and discussed how they scale in difficulty, that I think today is a great time to share some of the guidance that the GM Handbook has for building encounters.

The Encounter Metric

Every enemy has an Encounter Value (EV) that represents how difficult they are to defeat, based on their tier and type. The PCs also have an EV, based on their levels, and you can judge roughly how difficult an encounter will be by comparing the total EV of the enemies (and hazards and traps and so on) in an encounter to the total EV of the PCs. Depending on how these two totals compare, an encounter will fall into four rough levels of difficulty:

• An encounter where the enemies have around two-thirds the EV of the PCs is an easy encounter. An easy encounter still presents a little bit of a challenge, but it is not something that the PCs will have to really plan out their tactics in.
• An encounter where the enemies have around the same EV as the PCs is a normal encounter. You can expect a normal encounter to do enough damage to the PCs that they use up an average of one resurgence each, either during the encounter or when patching themselves up afterward. Because PCs regain a resurgence with every encounter they triumph over, they should, on average, lose no net resurgences from a normal encounter. Of course, depending on how they play, the damage might be distributed unevenly, so that one character comes out ahead and one is badly wounded…but them’s the breaks. A normal encounter is unlikely to cause character death, even if the PCs use poor tactics or have some poor rolls.
• An encounter where the enemies have around one-and-one-half times the EV of the PCs is a hard encounter. A hard encounter will likely see all the PCs taking enough damage to cause a net loss of resurgences even after their triumph; there can be a risk of character death, but it is minor unless the PCs both roll badly and use bad tactics.
• An encounter where the enemies have around twice or more the EV of the PCs is a climactic encounter, best reserved for the end of a long adventure when the PCs come face to face with the villain. A challenging encounter will almost certainly require the party to take a long rest afterwards, because they will use up a lot of resurgences, consumables, and other resources even if they use good tactics. And, there is a very real risk of character death regardless of how they play.

As an example, a party of five level-6 PCs each have an EV of 160, making the party’s total EV 800. So encounters for this party would be:

• Easy at around 550 EV.
• Normal at around 800 EV.
• Hard at around 1200 EV.
• Climactic at around 1600 EV.

In addition to telling you how difficult an encounter will be, EV also helps to design encounters from scratch. You can start by deciding how challenging you want the encounter to be and calculating an appropriate EV total for your PCs and that level of difficulty: this is called the encounter metric. Then, just pick appropriate enemies whose EV sums up to roughly your encounter metric.

Picking Enemies

You can absolutely fill out an encounter budget by picking enemies, if not at random, then with just a cursory glance at their EV. But, you can improve the quality of your encounters by taking a few other things into consideration:

Story Considerations

Aetrimonde is first and foremost a roleplaying game, and that means that the story you’re telling should be a factor in the encounters you build for it. If the villain of an adventure is an evil industrialist plotting to take over the world with his army of mechanical soldiers, then at least some of the fights during the adventure should probably include mechanical soldiers as enemies, and there are some other kinds of enemies that you should probably avoid, like nature-loving elves and traditionalist dwarves.

This is not to say that every encounter during an adventure has to revolve around the adventure’s main plot. There are lots of ways to work in an encounter featuring unrelated enemies:

• A villain could have groups of soldiers that he has hired, tricked, threatened, or mind-controlled into fighting for him, and who are therefore different from the rest of his forces.
• There could be a secondary antagonist group that is allied with your main villain, but includes different kinds of enemies.
• A secondary antagonist could also be opposed to both the main villain and the party, and become involved in the adventure because they’re trying to take advantage of the PCs’ actions to achieve their own goals.
• Mindless and unintelligent creatures, like zombies, constructs, and animals, could be included as enemies in an adventure that doesn’t revolve around them because they are territorial, out of control, or just in the way of the PCs.
• Traditional dungeon-delving adventures can include a wide variety of enemies whose only relation to each other is that they were brought into the dungeon by its builder. They might be there to guard it, they might be prisoners who’ve broken loose, or they might be the builder’s experiments, for example.

If there’s a particular enemy that you want to use (because it has interesting mechanics, for example), and you just can’t find a way to work it into the story, then it’s time to exert your DM’s prerogative and re-flavor it so that it seems like a different kind of creature that would fit in better. This might involve:

• Changing a creature’s name, type and description to something more appropriate for the adventure. (Example: Renaming a Zombie Walker to Brainwashed Muscle, and making it a Mortal Humanoid.)
• Giving a creature different weapons and armor to suit a different culture, and adjusting its stats accordingly. (Example: Giving an Elf Archer a rifle and renaming it a Dark Elf Gunman.)
• Adjusting the names, descriptions, and damage types of a creature’s powers to resemble a different kind of enemy. (Example: Changing a Fire Elemental’s powers to deal both fire and entropic damage, and renaming it a Hellfire Spirit.)
• Outright replacing some of a creature’s powers with ones more appropriate to a different kind of creature. (Example: Replacing an Elf Blademaster’s Deadly Grace power with the Dwarven Stubbornness power and renaming it a Dwarf Blademaster.)

Tier Considerations

Aetrimonde is designed to make it possible for low-level enemies to still challenge powerful characters in sufficient numbers, and for low-level characters to handle powerful enemies in small numbers, but there are limits to this.

Especially weak enemies (more than 2 tiers below the party) will have a much harder time hitting with attacks, and will almost always be hit by the PCs’ attacks. Fighting such weak enemies can make the PCs feel powerful, but fights with numerous weak enemies tend to take a long time just due to the number of creatures there are with turns to track and dice to roll, and it can get tedious quickly.

Especially powerful enemies (more than 2 tiers above the party) similarly have a much easier time hitting with attacks, and will be hit less often by the PCs’ attacks. Fighting such powerful enemies can also become boring, not because they don’t pose a challenge, but because PCs that roll badly, or just don’t have a good set of powers for fighting a particular enemy, may spend several turns trying and failing to contribute to the fight.

In general, avoid designing encounters exclusively using enemies more than 2 tiers away from the PCs. Instead, mix them in with enemies that are closer to the PCs’ tier. It usually works best to combine especially weak enemies with other enemies that are at or slightly above the PCs’ tier, and especially strong enemies with other enemies that are at or slightly below the PCs’ tier. (Combining especially strong and especially weak enemies just gets you the worst of both worlds.)

Role Considerations

The second thing to take into account when picking enemies for an encounter is their roles, and what that means for how an encounter with them may play out.

Firstly, an encounter should generally not consist entirely of the same kind of enemy, or even of enemies with the same role:

• Assassins, Brutes, and Shooters all deal high damage. Encounters with many enemies of these roles tend to be high-intensity, with PCs taking a lot of damage in a short time, which increases the odds of character death.
• Controllers can be frustrating to deal with, because they prevent players from using their characters in the way that they want to.
• Leaders are force-multipliers who make other enemies more dangerous. Often, multiple Leaders stack dangerously, creating one (or several) incredibly powerful enemies that can overwhelm the PCs. This is especially the case when combining Leaders with other enemies more than 2 tiers above the party.
• Protectors are also force-multipliers, but they make other enemies more resilient. Multiple Protectors can turn an encounter into a slog, where neither the PCs nor the enemies can make much headway. Like with Leaders, it’s especially bad when combining Protectors with enemies more than 2 tiers above the PCs.
• Soldiers have great defenses, making them difficult to bring down. An encounter with lots of Soldiers will be a slog like one with lots of Protectors.

Secondly, some enemy roles will perform differently against certain kinds of PC. It can be fun to throw a challenge at the PCs every once in a while that they have trouble dealing with, but there is a fine line between a challenge and an unpleasant slog of a battle where nothing they can do works well. Keep an eye on the PCs in your party, and if a lot of them fall into the same niche, use certain enemy roles with caution:

• Melee-focused PCs can have trouble dealing with Shooters (because Shooters can attack from a long ways away) and Skirmishers (because Skirmishers have ways to avoid being tied down in melee).
• Ranged-focused PCs can have trouble dealing with Brutes and Soldiers, both of which like to get up close where it’s difficult to use ranged powers.
  • Especially pay attention to Soldiers’ defenses: if a majority of your PCs use attacks vs. one particular defense, avoid using Soldiers who have excellent values in that defense. Otherwise, encounters may become a slog.
• Also pay attention to Controllers’ attacks, and avoid using Controllers whose attacks target a defense most of your PCs have low values in. If the party is consistently subject to nasty conditions, the fight becomes not just a slog, but unfun.

Finally, the two “special” roles of Afflictor and Summoner should always be used sparingly:

• It is decidedly unfun for PCs to be constantly dealing with injury, poison, and curses. Use Afflictors in only one, perhaps two, encounters per adventure.
• Summoners increase the number of enemies in the encounter, sometimes drastically. To prevent this becoming a drain on your own concentration, use only one or two Summoners in any encounter.

EV Adjustments

Finally, there are circumstances where it’s appropriate to adjust some enemies’ EV up or down (by 20-40%, usually) to account for other facets of an encounter:

• Adjust Assassin EV up if the encounter provides especially good ways for the Assassin to set up (e.g. darkness, heavy concealment, etc.) and down if the Assassin has no good way to set up (e.g. bright light everywhere, no cover, etc.).
• Adjust Brute EV up if it starts the encounter very close to the PCs, or the encounter is in tight quarters where the PCs can not escape easily; adjust down if it starts very far from the PCs.
• Adjust Shooter EV up if it starts the encounter with the PCs at the very edge of its attack range, or it has terrain making it hard to effectively attack it (e.g. a wall with arrow slits); adjust down if it starts very close to the PCs.
• Adjust Skirmisher EV up if the encounter provides terrain that especially favors the Skirmisher (e.g. lots of cliffs for a Skirmisher with a climb speed) and down if the encounter is in tight quarters where the Skirmisher cannot move easily.

Up Next

With all of these considerations in mind, keep an eye out for my next post on encounter design, where I’ll be building an encounter using some of these lovely undead I’ve been showing off!