Easy Encounter Building (Patreon)

Wouldn’t it be great to have encounter-building guidelines that you could basically keep in your head? That’s my goal for the MCDM RPG. It ain’t easy. There’s a lot of things to consider: number of heroes, number of enemies, the heroes’ levels, the enemies’ levels, the number of allies the heroes have, and so much more. But we don’t shy away from complicated challenges here at MCDM. We freaking love them.

It’s James again! I’m showing you the current state of our encounter-building guidelines that I cooked up for the latest iteration of the game, which our contract testers are getting today. In fact, if you’re part of the MCDM Discord server, you might be able to join one of their tests and play the latest iteration. While you’re in Discord, don’t forget to link your Patreon account to Discord, so you can join the #mcdm_rpg-patrons channel and chat about the game with other patrons.

I’m not showing off ALL the guidelines and advice that will come with this section of the book because the game’s not done! There’s more to write. We’re still discovering things about the game that give us ideas about what to add in this section. The game should and will come with loads of advice for Directors, but there’s no sense in writing that advice for a game that is still in a state of fairly major flux. Better to focus on the fluxing and let the advice come after things have settled a bit. Otherwise, I’ll most certainly write pages of advice that gets thrown out because it applies to parts of the system we’ve cut or revised.

If you’re familiar with the Flee, Mortals! encounter-building guidelines, then you’ll see some familiar language and ideas in here. We break encounter-building down into three steps.

Step 1: Choose Encounter Difficulty

First determine how difficult an encounter you want to create based on the following guidelines.

Trivial: Easier than Easy

Trivial encounters are no challenge at all for the heroes. They’re guaranteed to survive the battle, and their Stamina will mostly, if not entirely, remain intact. Think 10th-level heroes taking on a small band of typical kobolds. There’s no way it ends well for the kobolds. These encounters can be fun to occasionally throw into your game, but for many groups, the novelty disappears quickly. Too many trivial encounters can feel like a waste of time.

At the Director’s discretion, these encounters don’t earn the heroes any Victories.

Easy Encounters

Unless the heroes have already depleted most of their Stamina and Recoveries, easy encounters won’t threaten their lives. Easy encounters are great for adventures that want to give the heroes a lot of battles between respites or for when you want the heroes to feel like superheroes while still solving a problem that feels like it’s within their paygrade.

Standard Encounters

Standard encounters are the most common for many adventuring groups. These battles deplete some Stamina and Recoveries, especially from melee-focused heroes. While character death is uncommon in standard encounters, it isn’t impossible, especially if a player makes a poor tactical choice or just finds the dice are against them.

Hard Encounters

Hard encounters are typically climactic encounters with bosses and their minions—or anything else that puts the characters’ lives in peril. Hard encounters are winnable, but the characters need to play smart to survive.

A hard encounter is worth 2 Victories.

Extreme Encounters

Extreme encounters are ones where the characters will likely not survive if they try to fight to the bitter end. Such encounters rarely or never appear in most campaigns— though if the characters are 8th-level or higher, they can typically survive (or come back to life after) such encounters.

If the heroes overcome an extreme encounter, they should be awarded at least 2 Victories.

Step 2: Determine EDS

Add up the levels of all the heroes. Include retainers and other allies who aren’t heroes in this calculation. The total number equals your group’s encounter difficulty standard or EDS. If you’re planning a game for four 1st-level heroes, your EDS is 4.

For every 3 Victories the heroes have, increase the EDS by 1. If a party of four 1st-level heroes has earned 4 Victories, your EDS is 5. If the heroes have a different number of Victories (a rarity in most games), make this calculation using the average number of Victories.

Step 3: Determine and Spend Budget

Use the Encounter Budget Points table to determine how many budget points you have to spend on your encounter, then spend them to buy hostile creatures in your encounter.

Creatures who aren’t minions, leaders, or solos cost 1 point per the creature’s level.

Minions cost 1/5th point per level. Another way to think of this is that five minions costs 1 point per level.

Leaders cost 2 points per level.

Solos cost 5 points per level.

If your encounter includes more than twice as many foes as there are heroes and their allies, then its difficulty increases one step (from easy to standard for instance). Five minions count as one creature for this calculation. Leaders count as two creatures. Solos count as five.

Some creatures who fit into the budget are too strong for the heroes to handle. These monsters deal a lot of damage and create effects that are difficult to overcome for heroes of a certain level. Your encounter risks becoming extreme if you use creatures who are three or more levels higher than the heroes’ average level.

Since minions and creatures with a level lower than 1 use fractions, it’s possible to come within less than 1 of your budget as you spend it. In these cases, round down to determine if you hit your budget.

The table above will get much longer and have rows far beyond 10, but this is all we currently need for the level we’re testing.

What I Like

Those three steps are the basic guidelines for encounter-building. I wanted the very basics of this system to be easy to memorize. First, we made EDS fairly straightforward to calculate. Just add up the levels of all the heroes and account for Victories.

Once you have your EDS, you can look at the table to build your encounter budget, but I bet most of you noticed that the low-end budget for a standard encounter equals the EDS. The high-end budget for a hard encounter is always double the EDS, and the low-end budget for an easy encounter is always half your EDS (rounded up). That means if I just add up the level of the heroes and account for Victories to get your EDS and you have a pretty good idea of what numbers will make an easy, standard, or hard encounter without looking at the table.

Spending your encounter budget is also pretty easy! Just subtract a creature’s levels from the budget when you add them to an encounter, and remember that five minions count as one creature, a solo counts as five creatures, and a leader counts as two.

Another way to think about this system is that a standard encounter is one monster of the heroes’ level per hero in the party. That’s how the math works out. With that as a guideline in your noggin, you can finetune the difficulty up and down on the fly without looking at the table or doing a lot of math. But the table is there for you and the math is fairly easy if you need it! If this sticks, that table is the kind of thing that might go on the back of a Director’s screen. We’ll have to see what else is worthy of that prime real estate before we make the call though.

Now, the big question is, “Will this work?” Well, we’re still calibrating the difficulty of monsters. How much Stamina they should have based on their level, what their damage output should be, and the overall strength of the effects they create is something we’re figuring out now. But I can say that I think these encounter-building guidelines can help us get there. If we know we want four 1st-level heroes to take on four 1st-level monsters in a standard encounter, then that gives us a good jumping off point to start testing the strength of these things.

I gotta keep working on the latest rules. Until next time!

—James