I would really like to see what a reasoning model with access to player character information, resources available in the location, and the monster manual could do. One of the hardest things as a DM, in my experience, is creating a balanced encounter without fudging. This has always made it hard for me to justify presenting a truly deadly encounter which I feel has lowered the stakes of the game. It seems like it should be possible to create a system that knows the strengths/weaknesses of a party and that could create a challenging but not overwhelming encounter most of the time.
Balance is hard mostly because the possible results are too binary. Either you win or you're dead. Stakes are so high that you tend to err on the safe but boring or you risk TPK.
Not only is this boring (it gives players less opportunities for making high-stakes decisions during the fight) - it also makes it harder on GMs to balance encounters.
If you let players and enemies decide to flee or negotiate at any point - the encounters can be much more deadly without turning into TPKs. Players now have more decisions to make on each round (and they can debate during the fight if they should run or not - which is a potential for great roleplaying moment).
And when they decide to run - a successful retreat is an interesting tactical challenge by itself allowing players to use abilities and combos that they seldom need during traditional fight.
One of my favorite moment of roleplay was when our barbarian was arguing with our curious druid whether to check out a very sketchy haunted manor. Eventually they went in and there was a huge battle, druid (against the rest of the team) poured blood into a well and a demon appeared. Half the party started running, other half was fighting with the demon minions, the demon started bargaining with the druid for his soul, barbarian started to run but after 2 turns turned back and tried to fight the demon while the rest of the party also went back and disabled druid to save him.
Eventually the party escaped from the manor (killing the demon was out of the question, it was obviously too powerful).
Our DM was always telling us he never balances the encounters - it's on us to escape in time :) And there were MANY dead PCs. Some players were on their 3rd character by the end of 1.5 year campaign.
Resurecting a dead PC was a major plot point - we had a noble lady from one of the most important NPC noble houses in our party, and she died. We tried resurecting her, but one of the players had to sacrifice something (we rolled d100 and only that player managed over 95, to persuade the god to resurect the character he had to promise to become a priest of that god - and he did multiclassed because of this). The god was basically Loki, and he tricked us - the player character was ressurected as undead :)
>Balance is hard mostly because the possible results are too binary. Either you win or you're dead. Stakes are so high that you tend to err on the safe but boring or you risk TPK.
Fairly solved problem outside of DND tbh.
I don't think so, you can do this well in D&D, and you can do it badly in narration-focused RPGs with mechanics allowing for various degrees of success. It's more about DM ability to let the party "fail forward" than about any particular system.
Yes it's easy to fall into the traditional boring "here's 5 orcs, now fight to death" trap, but it's more about the D&D culture than about the system itself.
D&D wasn't my first system (it wasn't popular in Poland - we mostly played WFRP) and I certainly did fall into that trap a lot early on.
In my experience DND has a very thin edge where the good experience exists. Outside of that its quite variable.
I cant comment on Warhams but other RPG's I have played dont really care about encounter difficulty. And I am not even talking about narrative only stuff. But even savage worlds I can go and find 10 wild cards or 20 wild cards or come up with almost any Ace, and its just a matter of player approach as to whether the encounter is difficult or simply deadly. To really create a TPK situation you would need to design enemies specifically to do that.
I'm confident the first games trying to have an AI as game master are being built, if not demonstrated already.
And I'm also confident that they will not make for good games because the players will find and exploit loopholes. I think LLMs in (video) games are here and here to stay, but they will only be actually beneficial to a game if they are tightly restricted and limited in scope. (no having your ingame partner write your code for you)
Maybe it'd be useful the other way around: as a DM, let an AI play the PCs to test out your campaigns and dungeons. I wonder how good it would be at finding the weak/missing points that players do, and whether it would give you an idea whether the challenges are too hard or easy.
This is one of the good potential use cases for current gen AI; simulating a scenario again and again and seeing what effect various changes will have on the average outcome... Probably needs an API for having LLMs play with online table top simulating websites or so, I have no idea about any of the sites for online TTRPGs though and their terms of use...
> One of the hardest things as a DM, in my experience, is creating a balanced encounter without fudging
Only in D&D where you have so many variables in every direction it's practically impossible.
An easy encounter becomes hard if the players decide to be miserly with their abilities and items.
And a hard one will be easy if someone decides to go all out and use That Item to one-shot the encounter.
> One of the hardest things as a DM, in my experience, is creating a balanced encounter without fudging
Just fudge. I know it might seem dishonest, but I think I fudge at least a little bit in probably 80% of my encounters. The most important thing isn't accuracy from the DM's perspective, it's fun and accuracy from the players' perspective. Unless the players catch wind of the fudging, it literally only has upsides:
- You waste less prep time fine-tuning stat blocks and can spend more time on the interesting and material aspects of prep, like designing NPCs, dungeons, etc.
- It makes the combat encounters more interesting, because encounters that would be super one-sided in either direction are instead close and nail-biting
- It allows you to end a boring encounter quicker or prolong unexpectedly interesting encounters
- You can create cool moments where a monster fails an attack at a crucial moment or succeeds when the odds are stacked against them
...etc. I think well-executed fudging is a complete win-win situation, as long as your players don't find out.
Agreed. There's a reason a DM rolls behind a screen.
Additionally I always setup encounters with a possible exploit/vulnerability that keenly observant players might notice which will significantly reduce the difficulty of the encounter. If they fail to figure it out, the encounter is far more challenging but still well within the player's capabilities.