Balancing Encounters in D&D

This game covers a scenario our group I had that had a very weighted and difficult fight.

We are level 7, 7 and 8 (lvl 8 player was levelled at the end of a game while the rest didn't), so collectively we are getting pretty strong.

The concept of the encounter was very interesting, with our party going to investigate alleged illegal magical good being smuggled into the city. A stealth mission with no backup - we asked for some extra resources but this was denied on the pretence that the law enforcement arriving may prompt the criminals to hide all the resources - makes sense.

On arrival our party done the usual trouble shooting, and eventually was caught sneaking into the building. This is where things changed quickly. A red robed mage appeared with 8 other mages, and after several rounds of combat, a huge undead monster appeared who obtained magical abilities.

So far, the whole sequence is really cool, and while slightly unbelievable given the strictness of casting in the city (and how accessible undead monsters and illegal items were from the front door of the storage warehouse), the fight had a well executed build up.

This is where the fight took a turn - and while I don't disagree with the general balance of the fight - there were 2 or 3 decisions made in the creation of the encounter that made it poorly designed for 3 people. Not to mention this encounter was mandatory, and failure to perform would likely mean arrest and imprisonment.

Where the issue started was by round 2 of combat the other 2 members of my party failed a very high DC saving throw, and on their failure were both paralysed. The DC with 17 or 18 if I remember correctly, and my character has a -3 modifier on their INT - very fun to RP, but very bad in situations like these!

So why was this a problem and badly designed? It was an encounter with 10 powerful enemies (9 mages and 1 large monster) who all had stunning abilities. I was foruntate with saving throws so never succumbed, and as a totem warrior of the bear barbarian, I can tank hits. Sometimes bad rolls can destroy your party, but from the get-go, this mandatory encounter was designed to stun everyone in the party.

This was the only issue with the encounter in my opinion (and the most destructive). A real shame for what would have been a really interesting and exciting life-or-death encounter otherwise.

So what is my take aways from this?

Its important when running games to play close attention to encounters. Balancing can very hard to do sometimes, especially with a higher level party (trust me, I have a 8 player group of regulars at level 9 - its very hard!), but designing (almost) auto-stunning from every NPC might sound cool in concept, but doesn't translate well to players.

There may be reason to have many avenues for the DM to have the abilities to stun players from multiple enemies, but the most important thing to making this work is to make it work narratively. 

We spoke to the DM after (which we normally do) who was regretful of the hastily put together fight. Surprisingly as it was super interesting, the DM did a great job! But he affirmed the fight was rushed. Everyone makes mistakes, but what we learned as a group was to make sure to focus on the narrative details that surround a fight. Don't be afraid to throw something deadly to players,, but make sure that the one deadly creature isn't supported by 4x your group is backup that can stun or sleep your entire group of players. 

If you make this mistake, all hope isn't lost! I've had combat encounters that were FAR too difficult for players (Trolls vs level 1 players - oh no). However, while I don't like fluffing rolls or changing parameters mid fight, I communicate the threat to my players more and more as the fight goes on. When this happened and the first player went down, I made sure to emphasis the deadly situation they were in and that continuing would be likely devastating. While its didn't;'t fix my poorly designed combat with the trolls and lvl 1 players, it made the weakest players get out of bounds and hide. This was enough for players the hide and save the downed party members. While this was a plaster on the problem, I learned a lot. Ultimately, a narrative approach to battle design can accidentally add more flavour to the mechanics in your work - such as the political movements, the in-fighting of gangs or the world events that inform your pre-written or home brew games.

TLDR: My thoughts on difficult fights is to focus not on how to take the party down, but what toools are at your disposal to narratively boost your fights. This way you will design 'realistic' encounters and not fill your encounters up with artificial padding (and sometimes over-pad it). This will also add more flavour to your world, and your players will forget about the 'game' and more on the 'story'.

Thanks for reading - do you have any fights you have ran or played that was unfarily weighted? How did this turn out, or how did you think on your feet? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

-J