#balancing a fight in which party can choose who to side with

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

jade kindle
#

Good day people!

Let me thank you in advance for opening the post and, if you do so, for going through it. I really appreciate it ❤️

  • context
    I will dming a one shot that is intended to be a short story to glue together two segments of a campaign. The objective is to get the party from point A to point B and level them up. I really would like to take the opportunity to make something special for them so my idea was to offer something of a sandbox where they might end up in a situation that challenges them with a choice which is not straightforward for their characters (they are still fairly new to the game, as I am, so I think it might be fun for everyone to explore this side of the game). The encounter I came up with will force the players to side with one of two npc/monster groups that will eventually end up fighting each other. I wouldn't even be surprised if not all players decide to side with the same npcs.

  • the question
    Do you have any experience with balancing such an encounter? I do not intend to make it a difficult fight for them, it is essential that no player is at risk of death. But at the same time I'd love to avoid it being a trivial fight. As I see it, the best way is to make it a fair fight between the two groups of npcs/monsters, but how would the reference for combat rating be for the players? should they be able to almost fight both groups at the same time, or on the contrary should the CR of a single group be closer to what suggested for the whole party?

  • additional info
    just to give the specific case, the party is composed of 3 lvl3 players, ranger warlock and cleric. What I was thinking about for the two npc groups is

  1. two very low level necromancers, that can basically just spawn skeletons,
  2. a low level cleric with a bunch of lesser elementals
  • tldr
    I'd like an encounter where a party of 3 lvl3 chooses a side for a fight between two groups of npcs/monsters. How do I balance the two groups with respect to the party?
somber sierra
#

If you want to encourage them to choose a side, rather than just defeating both sides themselves, you can't make it a fair fight in a party vs one side situation. You'll have to set it up so that winning without an ally would be considerably more difficult, and then make each side have something that would help even the playing field. The monsters/NPCs should be pretty evenly matched though.

jade kindle
#

Ok I see, so first thing to do is to make sure that the party realizes they have to pick a side in order to take part in the fight. It is then necessary to make sure each group is not strong enough to make the actions of the party uninfluential.
Can I ask what you mean exactly with "make each side have something that would help even the playing field"? I am not sure I understand

somber sierra
#

Well, so for instance let's say Monster A is weak against acid but deals cold damage, Monster B is weak against cold damage but does acid damage, and the party only has fire damage. It's a simplistic scenario, but just for the sake of argument, by allying with Monster A, the party now has reliable cold damage to bring to bear against Monster B. Without allying with Monster A, perhaps Monster B is too challenging.

jade kindle
#

Aha this is definitely something that can help out and that I overlooked, thanks! I just have to make sure the players can reason about this before the fight, they have very little experience with basically any monster

somber sierra
#

Well if they aren't going straight in to fight any of the monsters, they could take time and learn about them, talk to them, etc.

#

And if they're monsters that are commonly encountered in the world, you can always say that the average adventurer knows something about them. For less common monsters, you could come up with a d6 rumors table with several true entries, a couple partially true entries, and one false entry pertaining to each.

#

Then roll on the tables for each player and that's what they've heard about that kind of monster.

jade kindle
#

sounds good, I'll go in this direction