How Lords of Brackas does Monster Challenge Rating.
I’ve been plodding around in internet circles for awhile now, and some mechanics get a bad rap. The mechanic leads to degenerate play, or it brutalizes what ought to be well supported playstyles, or leads the GM astray, etc. Since I’ve begun my design/research/design journey, I’ve found some of these to be deserved, some undeserved, and some passed over by any ostensibly critical eye.
As I’ve been designing a roleplaying game, I’ve found one such mechanic to be mocked and ridiculed from the strangest angles; challenge ratings. Challenge ratings are rough approximations of the difficulty a given monster poses in combat. There are some systems which thoughtfully apply this to traps, social encounters, and exploration-based achievements, but they’re overwhelmingly applied to combat. More often than not, the designers do a poor job of it. Challenge rating is ballparked by designers thinking about how much the rough math of the game (who has what bonuses at a given level, players succeed at actions roughly 65% of the time, etc) interacts with players and how they typically act in combat.
This painstaking process results in CR values which, when plugged into a formula provided by the designers, tells you how deadly a given encounter can be. Lots of people (very stupidly) interpret CR as therefore being prescriptive with regards to what monsters a DM should deploy against their players. This is at best a misinterpretation, and I’m aware of very few people who balance their encounters for (all else being equal) a 1-1 match in power. No one does it, if for no other reason it’s a colossal amount of work for no payoff.
For most GMs, CR tells you what the XP value of a given monster is. That’s all. Well, maybe not, because when GMs are just looking for rough approximations of how difficult a given encounter is, CR throws you way off.
A few of my players in the 5e West Marches game I ran this past winter/spring were investigating an elven temple, which was producing wraiths for a variety of reasons not relevant to this essay. I like including plants with or adjacent to any given encounter with elves, so busted out a shambling mound (CR 5) and corpse flower (CR 7) to attack the players if they ventured in a specific area. They did (to my delight), and the combat began! There was just one problem; the shambling mound was a way more effective monster than its counterpart, despite the corpse flower having legendary actions and the ability to summon minions of its own. This wasn’t just a function of circumstance; the shambling mound has a +2 to hit on the corpse flower. Despite the CF having more attacks and hitting like an absolute truck, it wasn’t able to scratch my players most of the time.
I understand why the designers placed it at CR 7. It has an aura feature that can diminish the party’s competence, provided some of them don’t immediately succeed on their save against it, which renders them immune for 24 hours. It has minions it can summon, and while they’re just zombies, the undead can soak up an extra attack or two. This would be a waste of actions, but the corpse flower has legendary actions, meaning it can utilize its minions without completely ruining its action economy.
So on first glance, the CR is justified. There’s a problem, though. Because the players can’t usually trade blows on a 1-1 basis with monsters, players tend to prioritize bumping their armor class and hitpoints, as well as items or features that provide bonuses to saving throws. In combat, players make use of features imposing mechanical penalties on their enemies, such that the monster is more likely to miss a given attack or is circumstantially unable to target a player character effectively to begin with. In other words, players have a tendency to stack the deck in their favor once they understand how the game plays. That’s fine, we should expect that as designers.
We should expect that as designers.
5e’s monsters are assigned a CR as if they’re doing it in one pass. There’s no real thought put into “alright, but what about once the players know what they’re doing?” Should a CR 7 creature miss its shots against a level 5 or 6 party? Of course not, that’s absurd. The issue with this CR stuff is it doesn’t provide reliable information for the most basic elements of the challenge they’re supposed to pose. How many hits can this creature take? If I can answer that question, I can get a rough estimate of how many times my players need to smack it for it to go down, which tells me how many rounds before it goes down. What’s this creature’s minimum bonus to hit? If I can answer that question, I know how likely the monster is to hit players before modifiers.
What if we designed CR from the ground up with these questions in mind? None of the extra trimmings factor into it. Just “How many hits can it take” and “what’s its bonus to hit?” We can still tack extra stuff onto the monsters, but when the GM is looking down the monsters by CR list, all they see is the two most important questions answered with regards to combat. “Can this guy deal damage with a basic attack”, and “How long can this guy last in a fight?”
Enter Lords of Brackas, my current TRPG project.
First thing’s first, we simplified hitpoints. If you surpass a certain amount of damage, you score a “hit”. It’s a threshold, so your players can still be goblins fawning over the shiny polyhedrals making click-clack sounds. But we’re not doing the “well which of the 20 monsters on the board has 36 hitpoints instead of 39 hitpoints?” It’s just a tick mark. You can (and should) have the players take care of it. Just a little slip of paper on or near the base of the mini (if you’re using a tactical map) will do, dash, done. Flick of the wrist. That’s how long it takes to resolve a player’s successful attack on your end as a GM.
How many hits can a creature take, you ask? Easy! It’s an amount equal to their CR. First question answered! We mentioned thresholds a second ago, may as well explain that a bit. In order to score a hit against the creature, you need to deal a certain amount of damage which surpasses the threshold. This is always an integer of 5.
CR 1-4: Threshold of 5
CR 5-9: Threshold of 10
CR 10-14: Threshold of 15
CR 15-19: Threshold of 20
CR 20-24: Threshold of 25
Part of the reason I developed the simplified “hits” system was to make combat go faster. Less math, more swords! No need to look down at the sheet more than once or twice, let’s keep things punchy. Additionally, this system of hitpoints is truly universal. 3rd party supplements don’t have to rewrite HP scaling for combat encounters, they can just scale up in a very practical fashion what the game already does.
Let’s switch over then to the second question I mentioned earlier; what’s the creature’s minimum bonus to hit? Well, we go to the CR table again. It’s easy! It’s equal to the monster’s CR. If I say as a baseline the monster will never have a bonus to hit lower than its CR, the GM can calculate the minimum chance to hit based on their individual players at their table.
But while we’re on the subject, we’re taking a pretty proactive approach to CR, aren’t we? Instead of ball-parking and making guesstimates that don’t really have any use to the GM, we’re saying “the moment we set this creature’s CR, we already know x number of things about it.” So why not do more? We’re turning CR into an actual mechanic, something that matters outside edge case summoning spells. Lords of Brackas assumes players have two actions at any given time. They can’t take more than one of the same action on a given turn (splitting them into a morale check and a spell, for instance) until they pick up specific features allowing them to do so, but that’s not the case for our monsters! One of the most annoying aspects of running higher level monsters in 5e is the disparate action economy. Sorry, your dragon spends their action on casting a spell or using their breath weapon. That’s all, and then your 5 or so players precede to spend an hour beating on it before it goes again. Cool. Lots of monsters get multiattack, but that’s never used for the coolest things the monster can do. Not so in LOB, we want our monsters to do cool stuff. How do we decide how many actions a creature gets? Why, with challenge rating again.
CR 1-4: One action
CR 5-9: Two actions
CR 10-14: Three actions
CR 15-19: Four actions
CR 20-24: Five actions
It’s also a nice way of telegraphing information to the players in a subtle fashion. “This guy has fewer actions than you, not as dangerous. This guy has as many actions as you, he’s probably competent. This guy has more actions than you, be careful. This guy has twice as many actions as you, you’re in even more danger. This guy has more than twice as many actions as you, you’re boned.” Of course, we’re packing things into the system such that a given group of CR 1-4 monsters are always going to be a threat, because LOB is more about exploration than combat. But we’re not going too in depth on the actual design of said monsters.
There’s one last thing we can do with CR (that we right about here), and it’s actually a second order function of the prescriptive CR system we’ve developed here today. Legendary actions were created to make particular creatures more threatening by giving them access to actions not taken on their turn. I wanted to make this option available to LOB creatures as well. You might think a CR 20 dragon who already has five actions might not need legendary actions. You might think that’s overkill, if you’re a little bitch. But the point of this legendary action system isn’t for specific powerful monsters; it’s turning any creature into something more threatening than it was before. How do you adjudicate legendary actions? It’s simple, they just count as another creature as far as the XP of the encounter is concerned. How do you determine the additional XP? Simple again! Each legendary action counts as a creature worth XP equal to the number of actions the legendary creature has. For example, the aforementioned legendary dragon has 5 actions. If we give him a legendary action or reaction, it counts as a CR 5 creature insofar as the encounter is concerned. A legendary action counts as a creature of CR equal to the number of actions the legendary creature has.
I think that’s all we’ll write about today, next time I’ll do HP on the player side of things. As a final note, I’ve mentioned once or twice I intend Lords of Brackas to have a focus on exploration. If that’s the case, why spend so much time on developing an in-depth combat system with a healthy mix of strategic and tactical support? Two reasons. First, the combat engine can’t be accidentally clunky. I need to pay careful attention to a few core concepts and make sure the whole damn night doesn’t get flushed down the drain every time a fight with more than 10 people breaks out. That doesn’t mean I need to micromanage everything, and then risk the whole thing coming apart whenever some idiot GM who thinks they’re a game designer tinkers with it. No, I just need to put a few safety systems the GM or players can demand be used when it looks like a fight with a horde of zombies breaks out. “Looks like you guys stacked the deck in your favor enough to win, but we’re not gonna spend all night figuring out by how much. We’ll use the Quick Fight rules.”
The game will expand far beyond players and whatever group of monsters are standing between them and loot at any given moment. I wouldn’t make resolving what happens between them take the whole night unless I wanted to cross out the big scale. This is what leads to the misconception that the presence of tactical gameplay strikes out strategic gameplay; not so. I went in-depth on that subject in an earlier article, so I won’t address the debate of tactical vs strategic gameplay. What I will say is combats which take all night to resolve push out strategic gameplay by necessity, whether those combats are tactics-heavy or not.
The second reason feeds into the first; lethality. I find myself tired of the hitpoint inflation induced by modern games. Players and monsters have low hitpoints, but eventually players learn how to game the system (as they can and should). Their low hitpoints fail to matter as much! The GM and players engage in an arms race of hitpoints, until they stop playing that game. The designers themselves get wrapped up in this self-destructive spiral as well, as more supplements for encounters and adventures are released! It’s all nonsense. We’re making a mechanic out of what hitpoints are supposed to represent, and doing away with the middleman. No more worrying about “well my paladin can stack these 15 dice with this spell slot and with the salve the ranger gave him he’ll do 100 damage and-” nope, he deals a hit.
With that in mind, I can start stacking features which are more lethal in the other direction! All creatures are much more reliable in terms of how many rounds they’ll last in a fight, and it takes far less time to track their damage. It’s hard to keep combat threatening if everything goes down in a round, and now we have a hard-stop mechanic in place. At least, when it comes to the monsters and players starting out on equal footing. Thje’ll still be able to mop certain encounters through surprise and guile, which means they’ll naturally stray away from direct confrontations, and become extra scared at the prospect of getting surprised themselves.
Just as I planned. Player character hitpoint mechanics coming in soon, maybe next week.