D&D and a World Not Designed for Players

 Ok, this title might be a bit more inflammatory than I mean it to be, but I had the following thought:

I spend a lot of time as a dungeon master tuning whatever monsters or hostile NPCs my players come across to be balanced for them to fight. And while I enjoy building encounters, it's also a lot of prep work that generally has to account for how many players show up and what level they're at.

So this thought suggested to me a new idea (and maybe it's not a "new" idea, but one that hadn't really occurred to me before): namely, to build a world that is not balanced around my particular party.

Consider, for example, that the party finds themselves in some valley ruled over by a dangerous monster - a lich, for example. The party is only level 4 or so, meaning they'll need to get a lot stronger before they have a chance at facing down this big villain.

Normally, the way I'd run such an adventure would be to have a lot of side-quests and things for the party to discover that are balanced for wherever they're at in the current moment. Maybe they save a village from a rampaging flesh golem with a few skeletons or zombies backing it up at level 4, and then they fight their way into the fort commanded by the lich's vampire lieutenant, facing him as a kind of miniboss once they're around level 9 or 10.

In my DM tendencies, I'd tend to give them branching pathways, but still more or less guide them to this overall arc. I'd strongly discourage players from trying to get into the lich's lair early on, making it clear that they're not ready for it.

But I'm sort of tempted to try a different way - to not worry about scaling the encounters at all and just letting the players feel they've got to do some scouting and exploration before they commit to a full-on attack. And there's risk, as the level 5 rogue with a +10 to Stealth is certainly pretty sneaky, but not the kind of reliably invisible assassin she'll be at level 11, never rolling below a 23 thanks to Reliable Talent and her +13 bonus.

This cuts both ways, though, as well. Some brutal knight - a low-level enforcer who lords over a village under the lich's thumb would be a significant challenge if the party finds him at level 1 or 2, but if they encounter him after they've already wiped out the vampire mid-point boss, he'll be a total joke.

This doesn't mean the world needs to be static. The actions of the party could provoke a response on the part of the lich. Maybe the lich moves troops around to better protect key interests - doubling the guards at a keep or a town would mean twice as many enemies to fight for the party if they want to attack.

It could also allow the players to be very strategic, perhaps feinting as if they were going to attack one place and draw the attention of guards from some other place.

The key to DMing such an adventure would be restraint - letting the dice determine how things go. It can be very tempting to have the villains anticipate every move on the part of the players, to ensure that there are challenges around every corner, but at the same time, it can be very rewarding for your players if they truly can outthink and out-maneuver the bad guy.

This post started as a vague idea about DMing, but I'm now getting excited about it as the model for a future campaign.

So, here are a couple ideas of how I think you could run it:

First off, have a map with clear key locations - these don't need to all be towns or forts, but they should be points of interest where stuff can happen.

Avoid plot coupons - if you've played a Zelda game, you'll recognize that most of them have you go from dungeon to dungeon, collecting some group of magical objects that let you progress through the game - usually with a set of three or so early on and then a larger set that gets you to the final boss. However, we're not going to have magical barriers that require you to do things in a certain order here - the final dungeon is there to explore from the start, it's just a question of whether you stand any chance of actually getting to it and through it alive.

Next, I'd recommend taking your villain (and possibly your villain's main lieutenants) and working out their resources - how much gold do they have, how many spell components, and most importantly, how many minions. As the players hit their assets, resources get depleted. Now, the villains might be able to summon in more minions (perhaps conjuring them from other planes) but this will cost them in other resources.

Just because the players are higher level doesn't mean that the villain can suddenly just bring in better-equipped and more experience troops. Your lich bad guy (it doesn't have to be a lich, but it could be) will have to weigh whether they want to spend the gold on hiring a ton of mercenary Veterans or hire ten times as many fresh or undisciplined Guards and Thugs. Likewise, even a lich is going to be able to cast Animate Dead, getting Skeletons and Zombies, a lot more frequently than Create Undead for tougher Ghouls and Ghasts.

So if I were to run this sort of campaign, I'd track the villain's resources over the course of the campaign - the party could choose whether to wear the big bad down over time and thus grow more powerful via experience, but also risk the bad guy taking measures like hiring assassins to kill them - though again, it's something that would be a risk for the villain, as if the assassin failed, it would mean a lot of lost resources, as CR 9 creatures don't come cheap.

I realize this more or less just means running something like a hardcover adventure, and this means a lot of up-front planning. But I think the key would be to play fair as best as you can, forcing the villain to play with what they've got, but also making it clear to the players that there are no guardrails, and if they make reckless decisions, they might pay a steep price.