"Level Scaling" and D&D

I believe it was in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion that I first became aware of the notion of level-scaling. With a big, open world (Cyrodil, in the case of Oblivion, the central kingdom of the Tamriellic Empire) they wanted people to feel free to explore and do things in their own chosen order, and so they created a system where you could do everything at level 1, but as you got more powerful, you'd face tougher monsters.

It sort of worked. Oblivion, I think, now stands as a lesser dip between the cult-favorite Morrowind and the massive blockbuster that was Skyrim, but the game was mostly pretty decent. The problem, however, was that the game felt much harder as you leveled up unless you very carefully optimized your build. The fact that you could choose not to level up simply by never sleeping meant that there was a fairly optimal way of playing in which you simply let your skills level up but never actually took new character levels. It was also somewhat jarring when the bandits on the road near the capital were tougher than the horrifying daedra you'd killed in your first Oblivion gate.

Skyrim did this better and more smoothly, and they also implemented a few systems where going to a new location would kind of "lock" it where it was, level-wise, meaning if you wanted to go somewhere that was a bit easier to, say, farm up some materials or skill up your weapons, you could. I think some of the smoothing out of skills, like getting rid of item durability, also helped with this, meaning you could really focus on combat-helpful abilities.

This got me thinking, though: we sort of scale things in D&D as well.

Now, obviously, different DMs have different styles, but I generally feel compelled to make sure the monsters my party encounters are at a difficult level where they can win, but also where the whole combat won't be done in a single round thanks to a Wizard's fireball (or an Artificer's, given that the campaign I'm running has the latter but not the former - and they're an Artillerist.)

There are two reasons why level scaling is attractive in D&D.

The first is that combat takes a big chunk of time to run, regardless of how difficult the fight is. It might seem realistic that the town guard - literally using the Guard or Soldier stat blocks - might come to respond to some chaos the party is causing and not realizing that those level 15 players could turn them into a pile of ash with a simple gesture. But for your players, getting all set up, rolling initiative, and feeling out your strategies for the fight can feel like a big waste of time if nothing is going to be a threat to them. Yes, this can be a great opportunity for diplomacy to defuse the conflict, but if the party happens not to choose that option, the DM is going to have to have stat blocks and HP tracking ready to go if things do go down.

Having bigger threats is a little more ambiguous. I'll confess that I think I coddle my players a little. I've never actually killed a PC in about 4 years of DMing. I do think you owe it to your players to telegraph the arrival of some monster they're not equipped to handle - just having a group of level 5 players get roasted by an ancient red dragon that comes out of the blue isn't really fun. But if you tell them that there's an ancient red dragon in that cave over there, you can send a message to them that says "you should not go there right now, but you might consider coming back when you're much more powerful." Given that you can't (generally) just reload your last save (though resurrection magic can help with this) the stakes are a little higher if the players decide to be reckless.

A DM needs to train their players a bit, too. I think my somewhat obsessive adherence to encounter scaling has made a lot of my players feel that every threat can be dealt with immediately and directly. I'm trying to unteach them that with my current adventure - there's a heavily-fortified Simic laboratory that they know is secretly part of a plot to aid the Phyrexians in invading Ravnica, but the defenses are far too powerful for them to have a reasonable chance of getting in until they can deal with certain elements of the lab's defenses.

The balance, of course, is to let the players come up with creative solutions while still maintaining the adventure's integrity (the players initially wanted to sneak in through the sewers, but I had it built out in the water of "Zonot Two" to ensure that they couldn't just sneak in immediately.

I do think there's something to be said for a totally unscaled world - the authenticity that random bandits on the road aren't necessarily going to be archmages and assassins just because your party can face such threats.

But running a game of D&D is all about balancing the narrative, the setting, and its challenge as a game.