Thoughts from today’s D&D session. I’ve observed from running and playing the game that there’s a sweet spot in encounter balance. Enemy level/HP is important, but the number of enemies seems to have more of an impact. If I throw 1 wildly overpowered enemy at my players, they’ll simply surround it and beat it to death in a couple rounds of combat. Conversely, if I send in a large number of underpowered minions, they stand a reasonable chance of wiping the party or at least severely inconveniencing them.
With the eventual goal of implementing multiplayer into SRPG, I’ve been paying attention to what makes multi-combatant encounters fun or interesting. Cannon fodder (where the players can mow down multiple enemies per round) can be fun (if there’s a reasonable challenge), bullet sponge encounters or overpowered enemies tend to be tedious. Additionally, real-world logic dictates that a large number of enemies will easily overpower a small number of heroes. This is validated by D&D, in which a dozen skeletons will pose a significant challenge to a few heroes who could trivially defeat 2-3 skeletons.
More broadly, the fun factor is related to player agency. If the players make significant mistakes, overstep their bounds and all die, they’ll probably accept the loss. If the odds felt overwhelming (they never had a chance), they’ll be frustrated and dissatisfied. It matters that the choices made by the players have a direct relationship with the outcomes of the game.