Encounter Building - eskerthebreton/thrum GitHub Wiki

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Basic Enemies

The Basic Enemies page provides some base combat stat blocks that can be used on their own to represent generic or unaligned combatants, or they can be used as a base to which additional abilities can be added.

Factions and Faction Traits

Each Faction has a Faction Trait (listed in Faction Traits) that can be added to any Basic Enemy to tweak its feel. Many of these traits provide a benefit when other members of the faction are present in the fight as well, though some of the more individualist factions have less synergy-oriented traits.

The Factions will also eventually have some faction-specific stat blocks to represent more powerful or idiosyncratic members. These will likely be added after some initial playtesting has occurred using only Basic Enemies with or without Faction Traits, as many aspects of the system will likely need to be tweaked and rebalanced.

Some Faction Traits will naturally synergize with particular archetypes and may offer little to others. This is by design -- the factions have differing motivations, strengths and weaknesses that lend them to particular fighting styles. Although the ranks of a faction will typically include combatants that diverge from the protoypical member, the biggest threats in a particular faction should tend to be those that lean in to its style.

Encounter Balancing and Enemy Tier

Combat encounters can vary in difficulty based on the number and types of enemies involved, and based on how the enemies' abilities interact with each other, with the terrain on the combat map, etc. Certain statistics and abilities in each enemy stat block include reference to the Tier, which provides a mechanism to increase the power level of an enemy to represent more formidable foes in the narrative and to provide a suitable challenge to higher level PCs. Unlike PC Combat Abilities which are upgraded individually, an enemy has a single Tier value for their whole stat block affects all elements that reference Tier.

The base archetypes without any Faction Traits have Tier 0 and are intended to be somewhat weaker than a typical Level 1 PC. A party of Level 1 PCs should be reasonably challenged but not overwhelmed when they are outnumbered by Tier 0 enemies at a ratio of about 3 enemies per 2 PCs (round down, so a party of 3 PCs can be matched against 4 enemies, 4 PCs against 6, 5 against 7). For every 4 levels of the party above 1st, increase the Tier of the enemies by 1, so Tier 1 enemies should match up against a Level 5 party similarly to Tier 0 enemies against a Level 1 party, etc.

For parties above Level 1, you can use the following rough point system:

• Tally 24 points per character, and add an additional 3 points per character for each level above 1st:
  • With 3 PCs use 9 points per level above 1st
  • With 4 PCs, add 12 points per level above 1st
  • For 5 PCs, add 15 points per level above 1st
• Tally 16 points per enemy, and add an additional 8 points per enemy per tier of the enemy

If these two point totals are roughly equal then the encounter should be challenging but not overwhelming for an average party, provided the ratio of enemies to PCs doesn't stray too far away from 3 to 2 (in general, hesitate to go below 1 or above 2 enemies per PC).

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