Tuesday 24 May 2011

Balancing encounters in T&T



First of all, go and check out this post by the almighty Kopfy and then come back. Read it? Good. This is a really great post containing some advice that is pretty rare in Tunnels and Trolls: how to balance combat encounters. Kopfy does a really good job explaining how this can be achieved and his method has inspired me to create an easy reference matrix for GMs to use when writing adventures for parties of certain levels.

Like Kopfy says, you have to figure out the maximum potential combat adds a character can have and match it with the maximum damage of a monster.


lvl 1
28 adds x no. players =  max damage
lvl 2
68 adds x no. players = max damage
lvl 3
108 add x no. players = max damage

This is easy enough. All you have to do is +40 adds for each new level to get your max player adds.

Below are some monster ratings and their maximum potential damage. This gives you a guide as to what monsters you can throw at a party of a certain level.
MR  MAX DAM
10 17
20 28
30 39
40 50
50 61
60 72
70 83
80 94
90 105
100 116
For example, say you're writing an adventure for 4 second-level PCs. Using the above formula you know that  you have 272 to spend on monsters. So you could throw in a Goblin Priest MR  20, a Blue Wolf MR 40, an Orc Clubber MR 50, a Goblin Skeleton MR 10 and an Ogre Knight MR 100.

Now, this isn't perfect. You will still have to tweak it slightly once you have all your monster ratings. Above, if all were joined as one MR it would be 220, which is 23d6 + 110, so you perhaps should check the PCs' max HPT and see if it needs to be a dice lower.

Kopfy's right in saying that T&T writers really need to start balancing encounters better, so I hope this helps a little. If you have any better ideas leave me a comment and share it with everyone.

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